In the accumulation process, qualitative changes—productivity change, concentration, and centralization—result in a change in the quantitative distribution (composition) of total production. At this point, the law of value becomes the law of the social division of labor. Shifts in supply and demand result in deviations of exchange value from value, resulting in profitability deviating systematically across branches of industry.
This deviation, which manifests itself in profit differentials, is reduced by the movement of capital between industries. In this process by which workers are shifted between industries, concrete labor, rendered abstract through the exchange of the products of their labor, becomes abstract directly. The shift of labor between branches of industry by capital separates in practice particular concrete labor carried out in the labor process from the worker himself or herself. There increasingly comes to be no relationship between the particular knowledge or skill of the worker and the work he or she carries out. With the mobility of the proletariat among labor processes, the worker’s labor power is rendered an abstract force, alien to him.35
The law of value, then, is not only the law of labor time under capitalism (division of labor), the law of surplus value(exploitation), but also the mechanism of alienation. When capitalism is immature and laborers carry to the capitalist controlled labor process skills and knowledge necessary for production, this alienation is primarily the alienation of the worker from his product. As capitalism develops and the division of labor increases within the production process, the worker increasingly becomes alienated from the work process itself, reduced to a mere source of homogeneous, abstract human energy. The worker becomes in form and essence merely an extension of capital, so that the cooperative productive power of the masses appears as the productive power of capital.
- John Weeks
