Marx and the Concept of Historical Time · 第 111 页

The temporalising time of abstract labour is at once its totalising power. ‘Social labour’, ‘total labour-power’, ‘universal social labour’, etc. – expressions which recur throughout the Contribution and Capital and which must be grasped as synonymous with abstract labour – are totalising concepts in the full Sartrean sense of the term. Their unity is the process of their differentiation, a dialectical fact which is most basically expressed by Marx’s characterisation of concrete labour as a ‘mere organ’ of abstract labour: ‘labour, thus measured by time, does not seem, indeed, to be the labour of different persons, but on the contrary the different working individuals seem to be mere organs of this labour.’⁶⁴ To put this another way, the individual act of labour totalises and temporalises – it has unity – because it is totalised and temporalised by abstract labour. In capitalist society, abstract labour is thus the condition of both the individuation of the act of labour and the historical intelligibility of the division of labour.⁶⁵ The averageness of ‘simple average labour’ is critical here, because it quantifies the totalising core of abstract labour: it secures the identity between abstract labour and ‘socially necessary labour-time.’ Simple average labour thus lies at the basis of what Tombazos, in his analysis of the third volume of Capital, identifies as the culminating contradiction of socially necessary labour-time: that between the social labour required to produce a commodity (the aliquot time of total labour-power allotted to the production of a particular use-value), and the social need for that commodity (the aliquot time of total social need offered as an equivalent for this use-value).⁶⁶ At this level, value can be defined as the ‘link or the interaction between these two times’⁶⁷, even if this connection, as Marx emphasises, is only ever fortuitous.⁶⁸ The basic point, however, still remains: abstract labour is only intelligible from the standpoint of totalisation. It only temporalises from this standpoint, because only totalisation registers the dialectical relation between abstract and concrete labour.

⁵⁸ Tombazos, Time in Marx, 4.

⁵⁹ Postone’s historical sketch of ‘abstract time’ comes dangerously close to conflating abstract labourtime with clock-time. See Postone, Time, Labor, and Social Domination, 200-16.

⁶⁰ Heidegger, BT, 466. Recall that ‘world-time’ and ‘ordinary time’ are not necessarily inauthentic, that, for Heidegger, ‘originary temporality’ is not the sole domain of ‘authentic temporality’.

⁶¹ As Tomba says: ‘The clock measures the labour-time concretely performed in production, while the time of abstract labour objectivised in the same commodity as socially-necessary labour – thus, as exchange-value – has a social measure, given by money. The first temporality is measured by the capitalist or by his overseers with the stopwatch in his right hand and the Principles of Scientific Management in the left; the second temporality is, instead, regulated on the global markets.’ Tomba, Marx’s Temporalities, 103.

⁶² Marx, Contribution, 49.

⁶³ The essential function of money-capital is to overcome its own limit, the contradiction between its own quality (the ‘quintessence of all use-values’ (Marx, Grundrisse, 270), viz. infinite general wealth) and the necessity of its quantification (it is only ever a definite amount of money). This dialectic of infinitude and finitude is the historical-ontological basis of (modern) clock-time.

⁶⁴ Marx, Contribution, 30. Or: ‘the abstractly general counts not as a property of the concrete, sensibly real, but on the contrary the sensibly concrete counts as the mere form of appearance or definite form of realisation of the abstractly general.’ Karl Marx, quoted in Arthur, The New Dialectic and Marx’s Capital, 46.

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