<sup>27</sup> Postone, Time, Labor, and Social Domination, 144. For Marx, therefore, ‘…the commodity does not contain two different sorts of labour; the same labour, however, is determined as different and as opposed to itself.’ Quoted in ibid.
<sup>28</sup> The ambiguity within Marx’s account of use-value is far more pervasive than that within his account of labour-power. In the Grundrisse, the 1861-63 Manuscripts, and the Marginal Notes on Wagner, usevalue is characterised as a decidedly economic and historical category, whereas a number of passages in the first volume of Capital and the Contribution would seem to suggest that it is a category ‘outside the sphere of investigation of political economy.’ Marx, Contribution, 28. Marx should be critiqued on this front. Use-value, this thesis maintains, is only intelligible as an economic and historical category specific to capitalism. Use-value, which Marx too often conflates with ‘utility’ [Nutzen], is internal to value, even as it is produced as exterior to it. That is, use-value stands opposed to exchange-value, but only within the value-form. This will be further developed in our analysis of the dialectic of concrete and abstract labour-time.
<sup>29</sup> Marx, Capital 1, 137. Emphasis added.
<sup>30</sup> Karl Marx, Randglossen zu Adolph Wagner’s Lehrbuch der politischen Ökonomie [1879-80], in Marx and Engels, MEW, Band 19 (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1987), 370.
<sup>31</sup> Marx, Capital 1, 1007.
<sup>32</sup> Osborne, ‘Marx and the philosophy of time’, 19.
<sup>33</sup> Werner Bonefeld is mistaken in his position that figuring concrete labour ‘as a specifically capitalist form of labour’ amounts to an ‘absurd notion.’ Werner Bonefeld, ‘Abstract labour: Against its nature and on its time’, Capital & Class 34:2 (2010), 270. Categorically, in its meaning as the dialectical other of abstract labour, ‘concrete labour’ is a specifically capitalist form of labour.
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