system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
In Marx’s writings, what is the distinction between concrete labor and abstract labor? Why is this is important for his larger critique of the commodity form?

What do you think?
gpt
Concrete labor is what goes on in the act of producing things. Qua concrete, it is always labor of a particular kind - harvesting, hammering, driving, data-entering, etc., and it is measured by the actual amount of time that passes during the labor process. 

The most plausible interpretation of the concept of abstract labor is that it is, as the name suggests, an *abstraction* from the concrete character of various types of labor which is accomplished in the exchange relation. In an exchange society, money sets all commodities (in various proportions) potentially equal to each other. So, e.g. one pack of cigarettes = $20 = a copy of *Das Kapital.* In setting various commodities, which are products of heterogeneous labors (e.g. cigarette-rolling and book-binding), equal to each other, the exchange relation practically abstracts from the concrete, particular character of the labor that went into the production of these commodities.

Okay, but this seems a little strange - why talk about it? What's the point? Well, at least one of the things Marx wants to draw attention to here is a particular feature of capitalist society. In capitalist society, people do not consciously, collectively decide how the whole of society's labor should be allocated. Instead, private firms carry out their concrete labors, and it is only by having their products purchased on the market that this labor can be *retroactively validated* as part of the whole social labor. If the products do not find buyers, this labor will have been "socially irrelevant" so to speak. So, what Marx wants to draw attention to is that a society of generalized commodity exchange engenders a sort of contradiction between the concrete and the abstract: we have concrete private labor which, through exchange, is able to count as abstract social labor.

Ultimately, these considerations play a very broad role in Marx's thought. For example, he suggests in places that the political form of the abstract equality of persons derives from this abstract equality of labors in the exchange relation. How exactly that works is a little too much to get into here.