Tag Archives: socially necessary labor

À la recherche du socially necessary labour temps perdu How many Trained Marxists™ know there is no “socially necessary labour time” in the Grundrisse? I didn’t. When researching the provenance of the term, I was surprised to discover that it was present in neither the Grundrisse nor Marx’s Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy. The latter book had a lot of approximations, though, and a pithy disclaimer about what Marx meant — and didn’t...

Socially Necessary Labour Time: outline of a review I have excerpted all the passages in Capital and Theories of Surplus Value in which Marx explicitly discusses the concept of socially necessary labour time by name and will go through them in manageable chunks. My first pass through the excerpts suggests to me that 13 segments would be a reasonable division of the material. Subsequent segments will superficially examine a few of the many Marxists...