Marx and the Concept of Historical Time · 第 140 页

4.1 The Production-Process of Capital

There is a passage in the Grundrisse that is worth citing at the outset, because it constitutes a rare instance in which Marx addresses, that is, directly addresses²¹, the relationship between surplus-labour and history. It is thus worth citing in full:

The great historical quality of capital is to create…surplus-labour, superfluous labour from the standpoint of mere use-value, mere subsistence; and its historical determination is fulfilled as soon as, on the one side, there has been such a development of needs that surplus-labour above and beyond necessity [Notwendige] has itself become a universal need [Bedürfnis] arising out of individual needs themselves – and, on the other side, when the severe discipline of capital, acting on succeeding generations [Geschlechter], has developed general industriousness as the universal property of the new generation – and, finally, when the development of the productive powers of labour, which capital incessantly whips onward with its unlimited mania for wealth, as the sole conditions in which this mania can be realised, have flourished to the stage where the possession and preservation of universal wealth require a lesser labour-time of society as a whole, and where the labouring society relates scientifically to the process of its progressive reproduction, its reproduction in a constantly greater abundance; hence where labour in which a human being does what things could do has ceased. Therefore, capital and labour relate to each other here like money and commodity; the former is the universal form of wealth, the latter merely the substance destined for immediate consumption. Capital’s ceaseless striving towards the universal form of wealth drives labour beyond the limits of its ‘natural neediness’ [Naturbedürftigkeit], and thus creates the material elements for the development of the rich individuality, which is as all-sided in its production as in its consumption, and whose labour also therefore appears no longer as labour, but as the full development of activity itself, in which natural necessity in its immediate form has disappeared; because a historically created need has taken the place of a natural need. This is why capital is productive; i.e. an essential relation for the development of the social productive forces.²²

This passage is not just cited for what it actually tells us, but also for what it potentially tells us, for what, that is to say, it can be made to tell us. If ‘the great historical quality of capital is to create…surplus-labour’, such that ‘surplus-labour…has itself become a universal need’, what would it mean to read this creation as the creation of the means of understanding history itself? This is the essential task of this chapter: to simultaneously ground ourselves in Marx’s analysis of the production-process of capital, and to push this analysis beyond its immediate and intended scope.

²¹ See also Marx, Economic Manuscripts of 1861-63, 199.

²² Marx, Grundrisse der Kritik der politischen Ökonomie, 244 (Grundrisse, 325).

140