Is "dead labor" machines? And why does it create no value?

[Jacob Cliff]

And as another question, what did marx mean by eliminating the division of labor? Is the division of labor not necessary for society to function?

[Creative Destruction]

Is "dead labor" machines? And why does it create no value?

Dead labor is any capital used for production. It produces no value because without living labor to run it, it does not produce. Even if you were to perfectly automate a production line, there would still be some worker looking over the process -- that is the worker that is creating and preserving value in a commodity.


And as another question, what did marx mean by eliminating the division of labor? Is the division of labor not necessary for society to function?

There are two kinds of division of labor: manufacture and social. Manufacturing division of labor is a division that arises out of necessity on the shop floor, a "necessary evil" in capitalist society, which also alienates labor, in order to keep commodity production as efficient as possible. Social division of labor, which is the idea that only certain people can do certain things, and it is used to control society. He uses the example of the family in Capital, Chapter 15, and also how we've separated agricultural labor from industrial labor, thus creating the schism between "town and country."

For Marx, since socialism seeks to do away with alienation and oppressive social control, it should be necessary to do away with these forms of labor division. In an era of socialism where things are still in the process of being automated, the manufacturing division of labor is one of the "birth stamps of capitalism" that would exist, until we got to a point where it wasn't useful anymore. Humans generally aren't into hardcore specialization, so doing away with the division of labor would help people seek what ever pursuits they desire. People will still have their specialties ("For making boots, I defer to the bootmaker") but they wouldn't be tied to that, as if it was their only work role. The social division of labor would be done away with, hopefully, with some immediacy; for example, Marx calls for the industrialization of agriculture in the Communist Manifesto, as an immediate task of revolutionaries.

[RedMaterialist]

And as another question, what did marx mean by eliminating the division of labor? Is the division of labor not necessary for society to function?

Yeah. It's dead labor. A machine can't create anything. It's a dead thing. Only a human being can create value. A human can use the machine to transmit value. A machine can transmit value, say, from crude oil into gasoline; along the way new value is created by the human by, for instance, bringing together the various chemicals, electricity, etc. which refines the crude oil.

I think mainly meant the division of labor between physical and mental labor. It's not necessary for a commodity producing society. Native Americans had division of labor but no class stratified division of labor.

[Anglo-Saxon Philistine]

Keep in mind the labour theory of value is a description of how commodity production happens in capitalism. And, well, it is an empirical fact that exchange value (the quantity whose money-equivalent is the number around which prices fluctuate) only includes the average socially-useful human labour needed to produce a given commodity. (It's easy to see why: a lot of processes transform one object into another, but out of these processes, human labour is the only one humans can directly control.) The formation of sedimentary rocks takes a lot of time - on the order of a million years if I'm not mistaken. That doesn't mean you can pick up a rock and expect to be paid for millions of years of natural processes.

As for the division of labour, the social division of labour (not the shop-floor division of labour, as rednoise points out) was necessary in previous stages of human development, but at this point, human material culture and the forces of production have advanced to the stage where the overwhelming majority of tasks can be done by anyone, including administrative, oversight etc. tasks, and the division of labour is retarding the development of the productive forces (for example, by concentrating decision-making power in individual members of the bourgeoisie, leading to the anarchy of the market etc.).

[Comrade #138672]

"Dead labor" is constant capital, i.e., embodied labor in raw materials, machines, tools, etc. Indeed, it does not create value on its own, but by its productive consumption in the production process, its value is transferred to the commodities being produced.

This is why W = c + L.

[rylasasin]

Dead Labor is when Capitalists raise the dead through necromancy or infect cities with zombie plagues and turn them into zombies and then make them work at their factories...



... bad joke aside, Dead Labor is Labor that has already gone through the production process and can't be adjusted by the capitalist in question.

For example: You have a capitalist that owns a computer-making business. To do this, he hires some workers to build the computers, and order the parts needed to construct them (A motherboard, hard drive, CPU, GPU, RAM, Case, Etc). However, before that happens, these parts need to be made by someone else. When they are bought by the Computer-making capitalist, The labor that went into those parts is dead labor. The capitalist cannot exploit that labor, it is already done and finished labor. He can only exploit his own labor force.

[The Garbage Disposal Unit]

Dead labor is any capital used for production. It produces no value because without living labor to run it, it does not produce. Even if you were to perfectly automate a production line, there would still be some worker looking over the process -- that is the worker that is creating and preserving value in a commodity.

Also!
Though the automated production line itself may not produce value, an individual capitalist with a fully automated production line may still realize value in that there is labour "congealed" in the machines in their production by living labour (and similarly, their is labour invested in living labour itself - training, feeding, housing, etc.). It is (partially) on this basis that the amount of labour in industries that employ a handful of specialists are able to realize more value than, for example, a large grocery store that employes more people for more hours.

[Lowtech]

As I understand it, dead labor is the term for labor embodied in a reusable thing, be it a tool or material that required labor in it's production. In that sense there is labor embodied in everything as nothing occurs without the labor and natural resources required to realize it.

Its interesting that you'd pair dead labor and division of labor in your question. Division of labor in a social sense, especially in the observation of capitalism, should not be confused with a "practical" division of tasks. Division of labor today is an expression of exclusivity, profitability and social stratification.

Whereas, most of what a doctor does is diagnosis, we could have a smartphone like device with sensors in every home in the world performing the task of diagnosis. Yet the exclusivity of only doctors providing this service increases their income. An example showing Capitalism as economics designed in reverse to allow the few to gather as much value as possible, no matter the social cost.

Profitability means keeping wages low (wage slavery) and creating meanial jobs where profitability increases with volume of positions. All jobs in capitalism are menial to a degree as one must be paid less than the value of ones labor for it to be profitable.

Social stratification is reflected in jobs based on who has access to education and the kinds of education that leads to the highest paying jobs.

In contrast, communism won't have jobs, instead there will be skill sets. The skill sets required to sustain a civilization. At one time, the majority of jobs were in argriculture. It is simply practical that the most jobs be in areas of highest priority. In a profit oriented economy, we have jobs designed for profitability which only benefits the few, whereas in a human oriented economy, skill sets are designed to better distribute the workload and ensure all does their fairshare and no one is able to economically subjugate others via the concept of capital. Whereas capital doesn't exist until one denies others a needed resource inorder to contract them to work in exchange for that resource.