Marx and the Concept of Historical Time · 第 110 页

Abstract labour temporalises – it is already always abstract labour-time – because it is the meaning of ‘social labour’ within capitalism. There is a fundamental social dimension to concrete labour: the ‘social individual’ within capitalism is the bearer of concrete labour as a distinct social form (one, that is to say, characterised by a private and isolating existence). Yet abstract labour represents the originary social character of commodity producing society: ‘the general or abstract character of labour is…its social character, because it is the character of the equality of the labours incorporated in the different products of labour. This determinate form of social labour distinguishes commodity production from other modes of production.’⁵³ Thus any conception of ‘social time’ specific to capitalism must proceed from abstract labour. As Tomba articulates it, ‘the time of abstract labour, positing itself as that which regulates the relations of exchange, constitutes a new form of the transcendental, conditioning the a priori structures of experience.’⁵⁴ In Foucault’s positivist terms, this is a historical a priori that, to rewrite a passage in The Archaeology of Knowledge, is an ongoing ‘a condition of reality for acts…an a priori not of truths that might never be done, or really given to experience; but the a priori of a history that is given, since it is that of things actually done.’⁵⁵ Postone’s persistent emphasis on abstract labour as a ‘general social mediation’ and a ‘socially total mediation’ is thus warranted: abstract labour is not just what is common to the entire multiplicity of concrete labours; ‘rather, it is the social function of[abstract] labour which makes it general.’⁵⁶ It is the substance and measure of value by virtue of the fact that it is a purely socialising time, a time that renders exchangeable all individual temporalisations (in Marx’s terms, it makes possible the reduction of every form of ‘complex labour’ to ‘simple average labour’). This time ‘has no reality apart from its exchangeability’⁵⁷, as Guy Debord asserts, but it is important to stress that abstract labour-time is not originarily a quantity but a social relation, a regulatory force that ‘can only be quantified through the effect of a difference that manifests itself in it.’⁵⁸ It is equally important to stress that abstract labour-time is not the same thing as clock-time. The former ontologically depends on the latter – its homogeneity, quantifiability and divisibility is predicated on the clock – but it is not equivalent to it.⁵⁹ The clock historically precedes, and will continue to exist after, abstract labour (this point dovetails with Heidegger’s position that the clock ‘is factically necessary’⁶⁰, which is to say that it is not necessarily ‘inauthentic’). But this is not the most important point. Abstract labour controls the clock – most immediately by its measure ofconcrete labour – yet its own measure is not the clock but money (in capitalism, the clock is subservient to money as a temporal form: it does not register the ‘natural’ time of sunlight but the ‘natural’ law of valorisation).⁶¹ Money, in both its function as a commodity and as capital – as the ‘materialisation of universal labour-time’⁶² and as value made formally independent⁶³ – constitutes the real measure of abstract labour.

⁵³ Karl Marx, quoted in Massimiliano Tomba, ‘Historical Temporalities of Capital: An Anti-Historicist Perspective’, Historical Materialism 17 (2009), 48.

⁵⁴ Tomba, Marx’s Temporalities, 108.

⁵⁵ ‘…what I mean by the term is an a priori that is…a condition of reality for statements…an a priori not of truths that might never be said, or really given to experience; but the a priori of a history that is given, since it is that of things actually said.’ Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language [1969], trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon Books, 1972), 127. This a priori is the successor to the ‘positive unconscious of knowledge’ in The Order of Things: a distinctly historical unconscious underlying scientific discourses. See Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: an Archaeology of the Human Sciences [1966] (New York and London: Routledge Classics, 2002), xi-xii.

⁵⁶ Postone, Time, Labor, and Social Domination, 151. As Althusser says of Sartre, so too can we say of Postone: he is ‘the philosopher of mediations par excellence.’ See Louis Althusser, ‘Marxism is not a Historicism’, in Althusser and Balibar, Reading Capital, 136. Consider Postone’s culminating definition of value: ‘Value is, then, a category of mediation: it is at once a historically determinate, self-distributing form of wealth and an objectified, self-mediating form of social relations.’ Postone, Time, Labor and Social Domination, 154.

⁵⁷ Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle [1967], trans. Ken Knabb (London: Rebel Press, 1992), 87. I owe this reference to Bonefeld, ‘Abstract labour: Against its nature and on its time’, 262.

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