Marx and the Concept of Historical Time · 第 126 页

…capital forces the workers beyond necessary labour to surplus-labour. Only in this way does it realise itself, and create surplus-value. But on the other hand, it posits necessary labour only to the extent and insofar as it is surplus-labour and the latter is realisable as surplus-value. It posits surplus-labour, then, as the condition of the necessary, and surplus-value as the limit [Grenze] of objectified labour, of value as such. As soon as it cannot posit value, it does not posit necessary labour; and, given its foundation, it cannot be otherwise. It therefore restricts labour and the creation of value – by an artificial check, as the English express it – and it does so on the same grounds as and to the same extent that it posits surplus-labour and surplus-value. By its nature, therefore, it posits a barrier [Schranke] to labour and value-creation, in contradiction to its tendency to expand them boundlessly. And inasmuch as it both posits a barrier specific to itself, and on the other side equally drives over and beyond every barrier, it is the living contradiction.¹²²

The direct context of this passage is the contradiction – and the illusion that arises from this contradiction – between the individual and collective worker (or between the individual worker and his class), a contradiction which is itself generated by the contradiction between the individual and collective capitalist (or between the individual capitalist and his class). This passage expresses the simple fact that, apart from his workers, the individual capitalist relates to the working class not as workers, but as consumers: as possessors of exchange-value in the form of money (not wages). Hence the drive to simultaneously restrict and expand what Marx describes as the worker’s ‘exchangeability’ [Tauschfähigkeit] – the capacity, that is to say, of labour-capacity to consume.¹²³ This is the meaning of capital as the ‘living contradiction’. But what predominantly interests us here is the appearance of the concepts of ‘limit’ and ‘barrier’. In the Grundrisse, and elsewhere, Marx does not systematically develop a relation, or even a difference, between the limit and the barrier. Thus the importance of this passage: it casts light on what this difference and relation might look like. Yet there is also – this thesis maintains – a more fundamental relation between the limit and barrier in Marx which must be uncovered, both because it grounds other expressions of this relation (such as the one articulated above), and because it confronts Hegel’s concepts of limit and barrier, namely as they are outlined in the second chapter of the ‘Doctrine of Being’ in the Logic: ‘Determinate Being’ [Das Dasein]. For Hegel, ‘through the limit something is what it is, and in the limit it has its quality’¹²⁴, such that the limit is ‘the mediation through which something and other each as well is, as is not.’¹²⁵ In other words, the limit of something determines the fact that its ‘beyond’ is simultaneously internal and external to it. This something is, for this reason, finite: ‘nonbeing constitutes [its] nature and being’, and hence ‘the truth of this being is [its] end.’¹²⁶ Yet this something is also, for this very same reason, possibly infinite: its concept registers the possibility that its negation – its finitude – can itself be negated. In this sense, its self-posited limit is equally a barrier: a limit that ‘ought’ [Sollen] to be transcended.¹²⁷

¹²¹ Ibid. 451.

¹²² Ibid. 421.

¹²³ ‘Capital, then, posits necessary labour-time as the barrier to the exchange-value of living labourcapacity; surplus-labour-time as the barrier to necessary labour-time; and surplus-value as the barrier to surplus-labour-time; while at the same time it drives over and beyond all these barriers, to the extent that it posits labour-capacity opposite itself as something simply engaged in exchange, as money, and surplus-labour-time as the only barrier, because creator [Schöpferin], of surplus-value.’ Karl Marx, Grundrisse der Kritik der politischen Ökonomie, in Marx and Engels, MEW, Band 42 (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1983), 337 (Grundrisse, 422-23).

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