Marx and the Concept of Historical Time · 第 114 页

To his credit, Postone has gone the furthest in an attempt to temporalise concrete labour in ways which avoid this immediate reduction. At the heart of his reinterpretation of abstract labour as a general social mediation is a dialectic between ‘concrete time’ (time as a ‘function of events, occurrences or actions’, hence time as a ‘dependent variable’) and ‘abstract time’ (‘uniform, continuous, homogeneous, “empty” time’, hence time as an ‘independent variable’, an ‘independent framework within which motion, events, and action occur.’⁷⁶) Abstract time, he goes on to say, ‘is divisible into equal, constant, nonqualitative units.’⁷⁷ The specifically capitalist iteration of this is the changing dynamic between the productivity of labour (concrete time) and the consequent redetermination of the constant social labour hour (abstract time).⁷⁸ This ‘ongoing directional movement of time’⁷⁹, which Postone likens to a ‘treadmill pattern’, has an intrinsic historical dimension: it ‘can be grasped as a dialectic of abstract and historical time’⁸⁰ immanent to the value-form. In short, ‘historical time’ in capitalist society is ‘concrete time’.⁸¹ There are multiple problems with this reading of Marx, but they all proceed from the fact that severing ‘labour’ from abstract and concrete labour-time dehistoricises, it absolutises, the historically specific character of labour in capitalism that Postone insists on (ad nauseam). Abstract labour qua ‘abstract time’ does not temporalise history, or even temporalise as such: it is rather the readymade backdrop against which temporalisation – qua ‘concrete time’ – is measured (this explains why, for Postone, abstract time is already ‘abstract domination’.)⁸² As Bonefeld summarises it from a different perspective, ‘Postone presupposes what needs to be explained.’⁸³ As for ‘concrete time’, its exclusive identity as the historical time of capitalism renders abstract labour a form of unhistorical time.⁸⁴ It thereby renders the difference between the historical time of capitalism and other modes of production indistinguishable: the defining aspect of capitalist historical time is not the dialectic of abstract and concrete labour, but the productivity of concrete labour within itself. In sum, a ‘dialectic of abstract and historical time has no historicity, nor can it be understood as immanent to the value-form. It is unintentional, but the social totality which features in Time, Labor, and Social Domination turns its back on the dialectical – the historicalising – relationship between abstract and concrete labour-time.⁸⁵ Simply put, it does not register this relationship historically.

⁷⁶ Postone, Time, Labor, and Social Domination, 202.

⁷⁷ Ibid. Once again, Postone’s concept of abstract time conflates abstract labour-time with clock-time. The progress made by his dialectic of concrete and abstract time is immediately undone by his dedialectisation of abstract labour-time, such that this time is not understood as a dialectical relation between two different manifestations of clock-time, but as clock-time itself. 79

⁷⁸ Ibid. 292-93.

⁷⁹ Ibid. 293.

⁸⁰ Ibid. 295.

⁸¹ ‘Historical time in capitalism…can be considered as a form of concrete time that is socially constituted and expresses an ongoing qualitative transformation of work and production, of social life more generally, and of forms of consciousness, values, and needs. Unlike the “flow” of abstract time, this movement of time is not equable, but changes and can even accelerate.’ Ibid. 294.

⁸² See, for instance, ibid. 191. Hence abstract labour qua ‘abstract time’ de-temporalises history. ⁸³ See Werner Bonefeld, ‘On Postone’s Courageous but Unsuccessful Attempt to Banish the Class Antagonism from the Critique of Political Economy’, Historical Materialism 12:3 (2004), 104.

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