ANTHRO 3AC Study Guide - Final Guide: The Surplus, Making Money, Ideal Type
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• the way production is organized n a society, the method of
producing the necessities of life.
o Relations of Production
• all of the social relationships people are forced to enter to make
a living
• i.e. to produce what they need to live and to reproduce for
themselves
• E.g. Relationship between the workers/proletariat and the
bourgeoisie (who own the products)
o Forces of Production
• Forces are those things needed to create things: labor power
(the ability of humans to do labour) and means (the tools by
which humans do the labour)
• This breaks down to labor, tools and raw material
11.
Human Labor in the Abstract
o Abstracted means undifferentiated, abstracted from useful forms
o Human labor in the abstract considers how much a commodity is
worth
o This is determined by the average amount of time/labor it takes to
produce an item (for all the producers in the society) rather than
how much time/labour an individual producer used to make it.
o The Labor of all individuals placed into consideration of the price
o Labor is therefore translated into numbers.
o According to Marx, this system only works if people are connected
through networks exchange
o The opposite of the abstract is the concrete
o Human labor in concrete is actual physical labor that goes into
production
o Marx attributes value to human labour in the abstract
