Marx and the Concept of Historical Time · 第 104 页

A far more definitive case can, however, be made that labour-power is only intelligible from the standpoint of its commodification. Like every other commodity, labour-power has a value and a use-value [Gebrauchswert]. Like every other commodity, its value is determined by the social labour-time necessary for its production, time that is, in this case, objectified as ‘a certain sum of the means of life’²³ essential to the preservation [Erhaltung] of the individual worker. Unlike every other commodity, therefore, the labour-time requisite for the production of labour-power is at once the labour-time necessary for its reproduction – both socially and biologically – presenting the determination of its value with ‘a historical and moral element’²⁴ which simply cannot be attributed to any other commodity. In this respect, labour-power is a ‘peculiar commodity’ [eigentümliche Ware], since its owner’s mortality directly bears on the determination of its value.²⁵ However, this peculiarity must be extended to the use-value of labour-power as well. First – and we will consider this later – because human mortality also directly bears on the determination of this use-value. The second reason, which is inseparable from the first, is that labour-power, considered from the standpoint of its use-value, is the sole provider of the use- and exchange-value [Tauschwert] of every commodity.²⁶ This peculiarity corresponds to the doubled character of labour specific to capitalism: namely, ‘concrete useful labour’ [konkrete nützlicher Arbeit], or the social individual form of labour that produces usevalues, and ‘abstract human labour’ [abstrakt menschliche Arbeit], or the purely social form of labour that produces exchange-values. These two social forms of labour do not refer to two separate or distinguishable acts, but rather ‘to two aspects of the same labour in commoditydetermined society.’²⁷ To the extent that it is defined by the production of use-value, whose status as an economic category specific to capitalism remains ambiguous²⁸, a certain degree of historical indeterminacy might seem to follow concrete labour. But when this ‘expenditure of human labour-power in a particular form and with a definite aim’²⁹ is considered – quite necessarily – in its dialectical relation to abstract labour, ‘labour as the expenditure of labourpower, whatever the “useful” mode in which it is expended’³⁰, what quickly becomes evident is that labour-power is only intelligible from the standpoint of its commodification. Abstract labour – and Marx is unambiguous on this point – is not a transhistorically valid category. Its power, qua ‘living labour’, to produce exchange-value establishes it as the ‘life-blood of capitalism’³¹ and capitalism alone. As Peter Osborne formulates it, ‘this power…is thus not “fundamentally” but rather historically ontological: it is the historico-ontological product of the process of production of capital as a whole.’³² To reinforce this point from another angle, the idea of a dialectic between a transhistorical (‘concrete’) and historical (‘abstract’) concept of labour – which is to say a dialectic between a social form of labour common to all modes of production and one specific to a particular mode of production – is nonsensical. ‘Concrete labour’ is historically specific to capitalism.³³ In short, ‘use’, ‘exchange’ and ‘labour’ can be understood as transhistorical categories, but ‘use-value’ and ‘exchange-value’, and ‘concrete labour’ and ‘abstract labour’, cannot. Likewise, the capacity to use ‘brains, muscles, nerves, hands, etc.’ is not something which is specific to capitalism, but labour-power is. In Wolfgang Haug’s terms, the purchase of labour-power is set in motion by a ‘use-value promise’³⁴ which cannot be reduced to the potentiality of life itself (in this sense, the concept of abstract labour completely destabilises Virno’s, and Hardt and Negri’s, concept of ‘biopolitics’).

²⁰ Paolo Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude, trans. Isabella Bertoletti, James Cascaito, and Andrea Casson (Los Angeles and New York: Semiotext(e), 2004), 82-3.

²¹ Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Commonwealth (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009), 151.

²² Ibid. 315.

²³ Marx, Kapital 1, 185 (Capital 1, 274).

²⁴ Marx, Capital 1, 275. By this Marx primarily means the strength and organisation of the workingclass. Class struggle features in the analysis of the production-process the next chapter. ²⁵ Ibid.

²⁶ Like value, ‘exchange-value’ is a purely relational category. It is nothing but the form of appearance, the manifestation, of value as a purely social objectivity, which is to say that ‘not an atom of matter enters into’ it. Ibid. 138. Insofar as exchange-value expresses the quantitative ratio in which one commodity is exchanged for another, money is its necessary and exclusive representative. The question here is whether labour-power is the sole provider of every use- and exchange-value. See Marx, Capital 1, 131, and footnote 28, below.

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