First published on OutHistory May 23, 2022, 9:35 pm ET
Last edit December 9, 2023, 10 AM ET

This is the second version of my essay on The Standard Model.

I argue here that Marx’s analysis of the human “labor process,” our production of what we hope are useful creations, constitutes:

One, a universal, ahistorical framework for empirically researching and analyzing the fundamental characters of historically specific societies;

Two, a theory of human power as depending on control of effective means of action.

Three, his theory of power also suggests a human determinism stressing our role as, simultaneously, individuals and members of classes in creating the societies in which we live. This theory points to the responsibility of individuals, as members of means controlling classes, for their actions' results, intended and unintended. 

Four, Marx also formulated a general theory and particular model of the structure of human action. His "mode of production" analysis applies not only to our understanding of “economic production” under capitalism but to how we socially organize every kind of human action.

Marx quickly moved on from his analysis of the general, abstract labor process to his major focus of interest, the labor process as organized under capitalism. So the full implications of Marx’s vision of the abstract labor process still deserve further analysis.

The Basic Parts of the Laobr Process
In Capital, Volume 1, Marx lists three “elementary factors of the labor process”: 1, human "labor," "work," and "activity"; 2, the "subject" of work, that which is worked on; and 3, the "instruments," "tools," or "means" of work.

In discussing the labor process Marx also mentions four more elementary factors of that process: 4, the worker, 5, the human “purpose” of work (the “aim” or “want” it is meant to fulfill); and 6, the “product” or “result” of work.

7, Marx's speaking of laboring as a "process" or movement assumes that it occurs over time, another basic factor of the labor process.

8, The labor process is also located in space, another basic aspect of the labor process not named by Marx.

9, All the elementary factors of the labor process are interrelated, another aspect of that process unnamed by Marx.

10, Marx's analysis of the labor process apart from its historical forms actually posits a universal, abstract form of organization as an elementary factor of the labor process. That general, ahistorical organizational form contrasts with what Marx later calls different historical "modes of production."

The expanded labor process thus includes:

1   Workers

2   Their aims

3   Their work

4   The materials on which they work

5   Their means of work

6   Space

7   Time

8   The product of their work

9   The relationships among all these parts

10 Their work's mode of organization

The Standard Model
I stress that this expanded formulation of the labor process constitutes a Standard Model of the Social-Historical Universe. The analogy is to the “Standard Model” of the physical universe formulated by physicists, but the analogy does not suggest any extra-human, physical determining. Quite the contrary.

A Universal Framework for Studying Historically Specific Societies
I suggest that this abstract, universal model is a tool for researching, interpreting, and understanding empirical evidence of historically specific societies. The model does suggest what empirical evidence is important to study and interpret and what evidence is less important for understanding the fundamental character of a particular society. The universal model does not tell us anything about the specific historical forms characterizing a particular society. It is only a tool for investigating and interrogating the evidence of present and past societies. 

Initiation
This theory stresses that humans initiate the process of production, construction, and action. However active a machine may be in creating products and results, however active a locomotive, they only start to act after humans set them in motion.

Time
The inclusion of time as one of the elementary factors of the labor process makes this a theory of the human making of changing, as well as relatively static, social-historical worlds.

Space
The inclusion of space as one of the elementary factors of the labor process suggests that location is of great importance in understanding particular historical societies.

Modes of Organization
Marx’s pointing to the changing historical ways that humans have organized the labor process as radically changing “modes of production” is a major contribution to our comprehension of how humans organize all kinds of action. This theory suggests that the social-historical world is a way of structuring human action, a mode of construction, a productive order, an economy. An economy refers then not just to the organization of wage labor under capitalism, but to the organization of all kinds of human activity in every society. This idea constitutes what I consider an orthodox revision and extension of Marx’s mode of production theory.

Subjective Aims, Purposes, Wants
This is a theory that every mode of construction includes subjective human aims as basic, essential elements. These subjective aims include ideas and fact claims, value judgments, and feelings. Every organization of production, action, and power includes these subjective elements. Human society includes no ideal, subjective “superstructure” distinguished from a material “base,” as maintained in some earlier interpretations of Marx's ideas. The inclusion of subjective aims as an elementary factor of the labor process constitutes what I consider another orthodox revision and extension of Marx’s mode of production theory. A major example of a Marxist historian applying these ideas is E. P. Thompson.

A Theory of Human Action
This theory of the structuring of human labor also constitutes a general theory of human action. It posits that all human actions include these same, ten elementary parts as the ten-part labor process outlined above. I suggest that the social universe is simultaneously a mode of human production, an organization of human construction, and, more generally, a system of human action.

This theory stresses the identity of human action, construction, creation, labor, making, production, reproduction, and work. The distinction between capitalist wage work and all other kinds of activity is only one historically specific way of organizing and conceptualizing human activity. Marx's theory of action contrasts sharply with that of the human action theorist Talcott Parsons, a sociologist, who almosot completely ignores the importance of means of action in realizing human aims.

The ten parts of the labor process expressed as ten parts of the human action process include the following:

1   Human actors

2   Their aims

3   Their action

4   The materials on which they act

5   Their means of acting

6   Space

7   Time

8   The product of their action

9   Their action's mode of organization

10   The relationships among all these parts

A Theory of Human Power
Marx formulated a theory of power suggesting that those who control the means of effective action, construction, and production control power. This is a theory that different classes of humans have different amounts of power based on their control over particular, effective means of action. This is a theory that some means of action, construction, and production have more effect than others. This theory stresses that means of power are means of production and means of action. This theory posits that different classes of humans are constituted in practice by their relationship to means of action, means of construction, and means of production.

A Human Determinism
This theory suggests that the means of power are the means of determining the character of the social universe. This is a theory of the human determination of the social-historical world.

Social-Historical Construction
Marx made a major contribution not only to our understanding of “economic production” under capitalism but to our comprehension of how we organize all kinds of human action and socially construct particular historical worlds. I suggest that "social construction theory" is a close relative of Marx's mode of production theory.

Actors
Humans act as simultaneously individuals and members of groups. Group actors include armies, bureaucrats, capitalists, corporation managers, critical thinkers, data crunchers, dictators, emotion manipulators, factory and office workers, families, friendship networks, historians, idea makers, law-makers, police forces, presidents, public intellectuals, value judgment producers, and the working class, etc.

Actors sometimes distinguish themselves and are distinguished by others by their ability, age, class, ethnicity, fame, gender, influence, intelligence, nationality, power, race, religion, sex, sexuality, etc. These are particular historical ways of actors’ self-and-other-making, particular ways of identifying themselves and being identified.

Within capitalism, the responsibility of particular human actors for their actions' results is often unaccounted and mystified.

Marx stressed the importance of workers' identifying collectively as workers and their identifying of capitalists as an exploitative owning class as crucial to the future making of a worker revolution and their creation of a new worker-made system.  

A Worldview
All of Marx's theories constitute a worldview, a way of understanding our present, everyday social worlds, and past social-historical worlds.

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NOTES

Marx on the “elementary factors of the labour-process,” Capital, Volume 1, Section 1: “The Labor Process or the Production of Use-Values,” Capital, Volume 1, p. 127; https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/Capital-Volume-I.pdf

For a scholarly exegesis of the above ideas see Jonathan Ned Katz, “Envisioning the World We Make,” February 2, 2016, OutHistory.org,  http://outhistory.org/exhibits/show/katz-writing-work/katz-vision-intro