Marx and the Concept of Historical Time · 第 113 页

Labour-time itself exists as such only subjectively, only in the form of activity. In so far as it is exchangeable (itself a commodity) as such, it is defined and differentiated not only quantitatively but also qualitatively, and is by no means general, selfequivalent labour-time; rather, labour-time as subject corresponds as little to the general labour-time which determines exchange-values as the particular commodities and products correspond to it as object.⁷²

Yet unlike the labour-time in this passage (which should be read as concrete labour-time), the vast majority of Marx’s critique of political economy depicts concrete labour as a time already outside of and opposed to itself, as a time which concrete labour is compelled to embody. The secondary literature on abstract labour – one that is still governed by the position that abstract labour is extrinsic, rather than internal, to historical time – registers this. The issue here is not this fidelity to Marx, but the lack of a concept of concrete labour-time within this literature, a concept accountable to abstract labour as a distinct form of social time specific to capitalism. There are statements to the effect that concrete labour ‘has a concrete temporality’⁷³, that its time ‘has a particular content…that is experienced subjectively’⁷⁴, but there has been (to date) no systematic attempt to conceptualise concrete labour as a social form of time simultaneously internal and external to abstract labour. There are numerous possible explanations for this, but one in particular stands out: this literature remains internal to Marx’s philosophy of time (such that it exists).⁷⁵ In other words, this literature (Bensaïd, Bonefeld, Postone, Tomba, Tombazos, etc.) does not adequately confront the fact that Marx offers us a concept of abstract labour but not of concrete labour. It thus maximises, yet stays within the limits of, the concept of abstract labour, such that this concept constitutes a historical ontology of ‘ordinary time’ which, to be sure, Heidegger and Sartre do not offer, but which also must account for the idea that the time of concrete labour – a time which abstract labour produces and upon which it depends – is not immediately reducible to abstract labour.

⁷⁰ Osborne, ‘Marx and the philosophy of time’, 18.

⁷¹ Marx, Grundrisse, 361.

⁷² Ibid. 171.

⁷³ Bonefeld, ‘Abstract labour: Against its nature and on its time’, 267.

⁷⁴ Tombazos, Time in Marx, 18.

⁷⁵ More often than not, a condition of this interiority is a certain exteriority – indifference – towards Marx’s philosophy of history.

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