Believe it or not, there once was a time when human beings did not spend the great majority of their time and energy trading their labor power in order to earn a wage. There once was a time when life after young adolescence was not almost entirely oriented around getting a “job”, nor did “job” even exist as a conceptual or economic category. There was a time when you didn’t have to try and decide between 29 different flavors of Pop-Tarts. In saying this, I’m not making a normative claim about capitalism and I’m not advocating for anything in particular. I’m merely trying to make the point that capitalism is historically specific, but the fundamental structures of modern society are often mistakenly conceived to be innate, historical universals. Marx expressed the radical social and economic transformation of capitalism in part as a transition in the primary form of human labor from concrete labor to abstract labor.

Concrete labor is specific human activity that is directed towards producing objects with particular use values. Imagine an early, pre-industrial, pre-agricultural hunter-gatherer spending a nice afternoon sharpening rocks and collecting wood to make some arrows. This individual is expending energy to produce something for a particular use, say to go hunting for mammoths. The product of this labor is seen more as an end in itself; the arrows are valuable primarily in the sense that they will be instrumentally useful to its creator, not in the sense that they will be exchanged for monetary value in an open market. The hunter-gatherer has a personal relationship to the products of this concrete labor, and the specific peculiarities and characteristics of these arrows and the efforts that went into their production are essential qualities of these labor products.

Now imagine a factory worker as part of an assembly line manufacturing dishwashers. This laborer is producing goods in order for them to be sold for money in a commercial economy, and hence this commodity is valuable primarily in the sense that it has an exchange value. The producers of these goods have an almost entirely impersonal relationship to the products of their labor. They typically have no intention of using these goods, and the specific characteristics of the laborer and his efforts are not defining characteristics of the commodity (how would you describe your relationship to the manufacturer(s) of your dishwasher, assuming it wasn’t actually designed by robotics?). Nearly everything about the relationship to labor has become abstract because of the way in which the products of labor are now valued primarily as commodities to be exchanged in a marketplace, wherein the specific products of almost all the incredibly diverse forms of human labor, from dishwashers to arrows, from music to machine learning software, are now transformed and homogenized into an abstract, quantitative value.

It is not the case that Marx claims all labor has become abstract, or that the products of labor no longer have use value. Modern commodities like our Pop-Tarts have use value — they provide a delicious, well-balanced breakfast, or as Kellogg claims, they are “the filling, frosting, and sprinkles that dazzle our taste buds and make us dance with delight”. Also, some pre-capitalist goods were traded and so they have some exchange value as well. Throughout history, many forms of human labor involved some combination of concrete labor and abstract labor, and therefore produced some combination of use value and exchange value. However, only in modern industrial capitalism do we start to see abstract labor becoming fully realized to the extent that it becomes the primary form of labor and begins to re-structure our relationship to work, society, and the natural environment, as well as our own identities. Consequently, the primacy of abstract labor produces commodities whose value is derived primarily by exchange value, as they are globally traded and mass manufactured.