Marx and the Concept of Historical Time · 第 112 页

The unavoidable question must now be asked: what exactly is ‘concrete labour-time’? That is, does it have a ‘measure’ which is not – at least not immediately – reducible to abstract labour-time? This is a difficult question to address, given Marx’s conviction that:

If the mere quantity of labour functions as a measure of value regardless of quality, it presupposes that simple labour has become the pivot of industry. It presupposes that labour has been equalised by the subordination of men and women to the machine or by the extreme division of labour; that men and women are effaced by their labour; that the pendulum of the clock has become as accurate a measure of the relative activity of two workers as it is of the speed of two locomotives. Therefore, we should not say that one man’s hour is worth another man’s hour, but rather that one man during an hour is worth as much as another man during an hour. Time is everything, man is nothing; he is at the most the embodiment of time [die Verkörperung der Zeit]. Quality no longer matters. Quantity alone decides everything: hour for hour, day for day… 69

This well-known passage from The Poverty of Philosophy (the last part of which frames this chapter) was composed over a decade before the dialectic of abstract and concrete labour becomes a feature of Marx’s writings, but it nonetheless typifies his temporal understanding of this dialectic, and should therefore be read from the standpoint of this dialectic. It expresses a relation between abstract and concrete labour so asymmetric that ‘the opposition at stake is not one between two forms of time…but one between time per se (figured as quantitative) and the human (figured as qualitative).’⁷⁰ Marx does not always de-temporalise the human (which in this passage can be read as ‘concrete labour’) in such radical terms. For instance, there are passages (primarily in the Grundrisse) in which human labour (the ‘living, form-giving fire’⁷¹) is not only not opposed to time, but in which its time – its time within capitalism – possesses a qualitative dimension:

⁶⁵ As Tombazos puts it, ‘abstract labour introduces a division within itself that is usually called the “division of labour”.’ Tombazos, Time in Marx, 29.

⁶⁶ See ibid. 26-7, 36, 53. See also Marx, Capital 3, 288.

⁶⁷ Tombazos, Time in Marx, 26-7.

⁶⁸ Marx, Capital 3, 288.

⁶⁹ Marx, Das Elend der Philosophie [Misère de la Philosophie], 85 (The Poverty of Philosophy, 53-4).

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