Marx and the Concept of Historical Time · 第 130 页

This is a striking passage, one that underscores the extent to which the free time of the worker is structured by capital. It exemplifies the other side of the relation between surpluslabour-time and this free time: if, on the one hand, this free-time is opposed to surplus-labourtime, such that the latter represents what ought to be the former, the theft of the former, on the other hand, this free time is equally creative of surplus-labour-time, such that the latter is also, and contradictorily, predicated on the increase of the former. This passage needs to be doubly situated. The first context, one that will receive more attention later, is the difference between the production of circulating and fixed capital. Whereas the former involves the production of use-values which satisfy immediate needs, the latter is defined by the production of the means of this production, production ‘not towards value as an immediate object, but rather towards value creation’, which is to say the production of the ‘value-producing power of capital.’¹⁴¹ A defining dimension of capitalism is the tendential orientation towards the production of fixed, rather than circulating, capital.¹⁴² Stemming from this, the second context is quite simply the fact that the ongoing development of the capacity to produce is directly connected to ongoing development of the ‘capability to consume’¹⁴³ [Fähigkeit des Genusses, which equally means the capability to enjoy], a capability which is itself ‘the development of an individual potential, a force of production.’¹⁴⁴ These contexts ground the manner in which, ‘from the standpoint of the direct production-process, [the increase of free time] can be regarded as the production of fixed capital, this fixed capital being man himself.’ The increase of free time not only enriches the capability of the worker to transform into ‘the watchman and regulator of the productionprocess itself’, such that this process becomes ‘the appropriation of [the worker’s] own general productive power, his understanding of nature and his mastery over it by virtue of his presence as a social body.’¹⁴⁵ This increase is as much the enrichment of the worker as a consumer, the ‘human being who has become, in whose head exists, the accumulated knowledge of society’; this is the ‘full development of the individual’ which in turn fuels the general productive power of labour. The free time of the worker may ‘naturally [transform] its possessor into a different subject’, but the naturalness of this transformation, and the difference of this subject, are still structured by, because they are internal to, capital. Osborne’s critique of this passage is thus misplaced. Far from expressing ‘utterly untenable, nineteenth-century assumptions’, such that it cannot account for how ‘there is nothing “natural”, and little that is “free”, about current processes of the transformation of the individual into a “different subject” during disposable time’¹⁴⁶, this passage in fact anticipates the extent to which these processes (consumption and the culture industry) are ‘unnatural’ as well as unfree.

¹⁴⁰ Marx, Grundrisse, 711-12. Emphasis added. Marx wrote the expression ‘being man himself’ in English. See Marx, Grundrisse der Kritik der politischen Ökonomie, 607. ¹⁴¹ Marx, Grundrisse, 710.

¹⁴² ‘…it is in the production of fixed capital that capital posits itself as end-in-itself and appears active as capital, to a higher power than it does in the production of circulating capital.’ Ibid. ¹⁴³ Ibid. 711.

¹⁴⁴ Ibid.

¹⁴⁵ Ibid. 705.

130