Marx and the Concept of Historical Time · 第 108 页

‘the simplification of [concrete] labour refers to an impoverishment of its quality. But even the simplest motion still has some quality, it can never be abstraction as such.’⁴¹ Simply put, the ‘content’ of abstract labour cannot be conflated with Taylorism or the assembly line.

A second and far more widespread misconception about abstract labour requires a more detailed examination. The passages on the physiological dimension of this labour in the first chapters of the Contribution and Capital – abstract labour as the ‘productive expenditure of human brains, muscles, nerves, hands, etc.’⁴² – continue to cause something of a rift within the secondary literature. I.I. Rubin’s Essays on Marx’s Theory of Value (1923) (or, to be exact, the rediscovery of this work in the early 1970s) is at the origin of this. Rubin argues that:

One of two things is possible: if abstract labour is an expenditure of human energy in physiological form, then value has a reified-material character. Or value is a social phenomenon, and then abstract labour must also be understood as a social phenomenon connected with a determined social form of production. It is not possible to reconcile a physiological concept of abstract labour with the historical character of the value which it creates.⁴³

An ‘irreconcilable’ divide between the physiological and social dimensions of Marx’s concept of abstract labour is often framed as a transhistorical-historical divide, and in this sense might be understood as parallel to, if not constitutive of, the ambiguities inherent within his accounts of labour-power and use-value. This has prompted several commentators to make a choice on Marx’s behalf, thereby clearing the way for a critical (that is, consistent) reconstruction of this concept. Following Rubin, Bonefeld rejects any place for physiology within abstract labour: the ‘asocial physiological terms’ in which it is defined are incompatible with its existence as ‘a specific temporal form of capitalist labour.’⁴⁴ On the other hand, and against Rubin, Axel Kicillof and Guido Starosta maintain that the physiological definition is the ‘only meaningful definition of abstract labour, which, as much as its concrete aspect, is a purely material form, bearing no social or historical specificity.’⁴⁵ Postone takes a (seemingly) more nuanced stance:

⁴¹ Arthur, The New Dialectic and Marx’s Capital, 44.

⁴² Marx, Capital 1, 134. See also Marx, Contribution, 30-1.

⁴³ Isaak Illich Rubin, Essays on Marx’s Theory of Value [1923, 3^rd edition 1928], trans. Miloš Samardžija and Fredy Perlman (Detroit: Black and Red, 1972), 135.

⁴⁴ Bonefeld, ‘Abstract labour: Against its nature and on its time’, 258.

⁴⁵ Axel Kicillof and Guido Starosta, ‘On Materiality and Social Form: a Political Critique of Rubin’s Value-Form Theory’, Historical Materialism 15:3 (2007), 34. Kicillof and Starosta expand on this by stating that ‘when performed privately and independently, and once congealed in the natural materiality of the product of labour, that purely material form acquires the form of the value of the commodity, i.e. a purely social form that embodies “not an atom of matter”.’ Ibid. 34-5. The problems with this reading are too many to detail here, but Kicillof and Starosta are unique insofar as they effectively state that abstract labour is not just a transhistorical generalisation of concrete labour which is transformed

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