Yet the ontological difference between communism and capitalism – the fact that each produces a fundamentally different kind of time since each produces a fundamentally different kind of human, and vice versa – is only intelligible when it is framed as a historical difference. And the kind of history and historical time that communism produces is itself only intelligible from the standpoint of the kind of history and historical time that it sublates. For this reason, the relation between necessary and surplus-labour, which more than any other relation within capitalism structures the social production of the means of life, must now be configured as a distinct kind of historical relation. Specifically, how does the production of this relation relate to the materialist concept of history? How does it restructure the historicalising power of need? In short, what is the relation between valorisation and the production ofhistorical time? These questions point to the focus of the next chapter: the production-process of capital, the process which sets the relation between necessary and surplus-labour into motion as historical time.
<sup>149</sup> Marx, Grundrisse, 708. Antonio Negri’s position that ‘Communism is the negation of all measure, the affirmation of the most exasperated plurality – creativity’ is thus completely at odds with Marx’s position. Antonio Negri, Marx Beyond Marx: Lessons on the Grundrisse [1979], trans. Harry Cleaver, Michael Ryan and Maurizio Viano, ed. Jim Fleming (New York: Autonomedia, 1991), 33. <sup>150</sup> Marx, Capital 3, 958-59.
<sup>151</sup> ‘…when the narrow-minded bourgeois form is stripped away, what is wealth other than the universality of individual needs, capacities, pleasures, productive forces, etc., created through universal interchange? The full development of human mastery over the forces of nature, those of so-called “nature” as well as his own nature? The absolute working out of his creative potentialities, with no presupposition other than the previous historical development, that makes this totality of development, i.e. the development of all human powers as such, the end in itself, not as measured on a predetermined scale? Where he does not reproduce himself in one specificity, but produces his totality? Strives not to remain something he has become, but is in the absolute movement of becoming?’ Marx, Grundrisse der Kritik der politischen Ökonomie, 395-96 (Grundrisse, 488). This wealth comprises a fundamentally different kind of historical time.
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