On this issue of private labour in chapter one and what is or isn’t etc
Perhaps it might be useful to dip into the first version of chapter one?
Marx 1867 (Capital)
The Commodity
This is an English translation by Albert Dragstedt of the first chapter of the first German edition of Capital.
Modern editions of Capital have a first chapter based on the second or subsequent editions.
Source: Albert Dragstedt, Value: Studies By Karl Marx, New Park Publications, London, 1976, pp. 7-40.
Transcribed: by Steve Palmer.
Now as far as concerns the amount of value, we note that the private labours which are plied independently of one another (but because they are members of the primordial division of labour are dependent upon one another) on all sides are constantly reduced to their socially proportional measure by the fact that in the accidental and perpetually shifting exchange relationships of their products the labour-time which is socially necessary for their production forcibly obtrudes itself as a regulating natural-law, just as the law of gravity does, for example, when the house falls down on one’s head. The determination of the amount of value by the labour-time is consequently the mystery lurking under the apparent motions of the relative commodity-values….
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/commodity.htm
What is he saying here?????????
Is private labour associated with, or a category of some, “primordial division of labour”?
Can capitalism and wage labour be part of a primordial division of labour?
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Re general linguistics (not my bag at all), contents and form, and sets and subsets etc.
I think you start with a category or set like ‘wine’.
And, in English, when one sub-divide it into sub-sets one normally attaches a qualitative word in front of it thus;
Red wine
And
White wine
And thus Red wine and white wine become mutually exclusive and ‘contradictory forms’ of each other?
Although in Latin Linnaean taxonomy the qulaifying statement comes after.
Eg Homo as the genus of a species Homo sapiens; homo being a genus and a class of things which have common characteristics and which can be divided into subordinate kinds.
From that and just following normal and standard procedures of classification; one should expect that private labour and wage labour are mutually exclusive sub categories of labour?
So actually we could speculate about adding certain other sub categories of labour, depending on the classification procedure you are using I suppose.
Eg communist labour and slave labour?
If private labour was essentially artisan (self employment) as opposed to wage labour.
I think at least, ‘artisan’ commodity production would be consistent with primordial division of labour?
That is if you believe artisan, and dare I say it simple commodity production, preceded capitalist production.
Would I lose all credibility if I said "how natural something is"....