Marx and the Concept of Historical Time · 第 123 页

The fact that surplus-labour is (at least ideally) contained within every commodity other than the one which yields it expands the dialectical scope of abstract labour. On the one hand, Marx’s basic formulations of the labour theory of value – the use-value of labour-power is ‘a source not only of value, but of more value than it has itself’¹¹³, or, ‘surplus-value…is only the relation of living labour to that objectified in the worker’¹¹⁴ – owe their intelligibility to abstract labour-time. Surplus-value does not make sense absent the concept of abstract labour. The essence of surplus-labour-time is the ‘theft of labour-time’, but not just because countless hours are stolen from workers. Surplus-labour-time is equally a qualitative theft, grounded by the sense in which abstract labour is firstly a purely relational – a purely social – form of time. Abstract labour has a quality, but in Hegel’s terms, the dialectic of concrete and abstract labour that produces labour-time as the measure of value cannot be directly mapped onto the dialectic of quality and quantity in the Logic. That is, quality + quantity ^ measure cannot be rewritten as ‘concrete labour + abstract labour ^ measure’. The dialectic of quality and quantity is in Marx already internal to abstract labour. Consequent to the commodification of labour-power, the quality of use-value producing labour is quantified precisely because it is already internal to the quality of exchange-value producing labour, or pure exchangeability¹¹⁵.

¹¹⁰ Tombazos, Time in Marx, 85.

¹¹¹ I am using Tombazos’s language here. See ibid. 29 (and footnote 103 in this chapter).

¹¹² This corresponds to the basic sense in which labour-power is a ‘peculiar commodity’ because the mortality of its owner directly bears on the determination of its value.

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