Marx and the Concept of Historical Time · 第 102 页

3.1 Abstract and Concrete Labour

We do not need to go further than the first chapter of the first volume of Capital to have a sense of how ‘labour in general’ owes its intelligibility to capital. A direct consequence of the systematic development of the value-form in this chapter is the realisation that the capitalist exchange relation does not just express but in fact constitutes the category of labour in general. The following passage encapsulates this nicely:

Men and women do not…bring the products of their labour into relation with each other as values because they see these objects as the thinglike shells [sachliche Hüllen] of homogeneous human labour. It is the opposite. By equating their different products to each other in exchange as values, they equate their different kinds of labour as the same human labour. They do not know this, but they do this.¹⁰

Marx repeatedly emphasises this point throughout the first chapter of Capital: ‘It is only the expression of equivalence between different sorts of commodities which brings to view the specific character of value-creating labour, by actually reducing the different kinds of labour embedded in the different kinds of commodity to their common quality of being human labour in general.’¹¹ In other words, the act of exchange determines the kind of labour that determines the value of what is being exchanged. The value-form, and the act of exchange that is implied by this form, are originary conditions of Marx’s labour theory of value. Value [Wert], which might be described as ‘exchangeability in definite proportions’¹², is the self-mediating ground of the social. It is determined, as we will examine, by ‘socially necessary labour-time’, but it is nothing if it is not also understood as an exchange-determined ground. Capitalist production is already always production for exchange, and thus the exchange relation must ‘be grasped as simultaneously constitutive of value and serving as its expression. 13

Any discussion of the relationship between capital and the category of labour in general must, however, attend to one particular exchange, one consistent with the exchange relation as doubly constitutive and expressive of value, but one that, given the content of what is being exchanged, stands as both the presupposition and result of the production-process of capital.

¹⁰ Marx, Kapital 1, 88 (Capital 1, 166-67). The ‘products of labour’ which men and women bring into relation with each other should also, crucially, be understood as these very same men and women. ¹¹ Marx, Capital 1, 142. Emphasis added.

¹² See Tony Smith, ‘Hegel, Marx and the Comprehension of Capitalism’, in Marx’s Capital and Hegel’s Logic: A Reexamination, ed. Fred Moseley and Tony Smith (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2014), 29.

¹³ Christopher J. Arthur, The New Dialectic and Marx’s Capital (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2004), 96.

102