Marx and the Concept of Historical Time · 第 141 页

When we speak of the ‘production-process of capital’, we must, after Marx, internally differentiate this process between the ‘labour-process’ [Arbeitsprozeß] and the ‘valorisationprocess’ [Verwertungsprozeß]. The relationship between these two processes has, from one standpoint, already been established: it directly corresponds to the relationship between the concrete labour which produces use-values (the labour-process) and the abstract labour which produces exchange-values (the valorisation-process). Marx often depicts the relation between the labour- and valorisation-process within the terms of the concrete/abstract labour relation: ‘The production-process is the immediate unity of the labour-process and valorisation-process, just as its immediate result, the commodity, is the immediate unity of use-value and exchangevalue.’²³ Hence, as with concrete and abstract labour, we are not looking at two different acts here: the labour- and valorisation-process register one and the same purposive act, albeit from dialectically opposed standpoints. And as with abstract and concrete labour, the unity of the labour- and valorisation-process is hierarchically structured: ‘…the labour-process itself is nothing else than the means of the valorisation-process, just as the use-value of the product is nothing but a repository of its exchange value’²⁴; additionally, ‘in capitalist production the labour-process is only the means, the end is supplied by the valorisation-process.’²⁵ Therefore just as concrete labour and use-value exist as the internalised, dialectical opposites of abstract labour and value, so too is the existence of the labour-process within capitalism²⁶ predicated on the valorisation-process: the former only exists because it is internalised by the latter as its dialectical opposite. This is the sense in which ‘the labour-process is as it were incorporated in it [the valorisation-process], subsumed under it.’²⁷ Yet what Marx’s analysis of the relation between the labour- and valorisation-process gives us, which the presentation of the relation between concrete and abstract labour in Chapter 3 does not, is a direct account of why these relations exist. The relation between concrete and abstract labour presumes precisely what the relation between the labour- and valorisation-process explains: the production of the relation between necessary and surplus-labour. It is this production, and this production alone, that gives abstract labour its raison d’être, its immanent movement without which we cannot grasp capital as the condition of thinking history. Thus if Chapter 3 makes the epistemological claim that necessary and surplus-labour hinge on abstract labour for their intelligibility, this chapter makes the ontological claim that abstract labour only exists – and hence the difference between concrete and abstract labour only exists – because of the necessary/surplus-labour relation. Quite simply, the only reason why abstract labour exists is because ‘the production of surplusvalue, i.e. the objectification of unpaid labour’²⁸ exists. We can now summarise the historicalontological importance of the relationship between the labour- and valorisation-process: this relationship gives the concrete/abstract labour relation its movement because it establishes the necessary/surplus-labour relation as the engine of this movement. This is the reason why the relationship between the labour- and valorisation-process is the predominant framework of the first volume of Capital, as well as substantial portions of the 1861-63 Manuscripts and the Grundrisse. This relationship underscores the fact that, for Marx, every relation is at bottom a processual relation: a relation is only a relation because it is a material process between its relatum. Capital, in other words, directly reinforces a basic lesson of the Theses on Feuerbach: the relation, logically and ontologically, grounds the relatum (not the other way around). We must firstly prioritise the relation between the labour- and valorisation-process, such that the difference between these processes can come to light.

²³ See Karl Marx, Resultate des unmittelbaren Produktionsprozesses (Frankfurt: Archiv sozialistischer Literatur 17, Neue Kritik, 1968), 21 (Marx, Capital 1, 991). The Results of the Immediate Production-Process – and not the 1861-63 Manuscripts or the first volume of Capital (proper) – contains the most direct account of the relation between the labour- and valorisation-process.

²⁴ Marx, Resultate des unmittelbaren Produktionsprozesses, 21 (Marx, Capital 1, 990). ²⁵ Marx, Capital 1, 1001-2.

²⁶ We should remind ourselves that, as with concrete labour and use-value, Marx presents us, quite problematically, with a transhistorical labour-process per se. He does not recognise that, conceptually speaking, the ‘labour-process’, just like ‘concrete labour’ and ‘use-value’, depends on capitalism for its intelligibility. The transhistorical descriptions of the labour-process do not just appear in Chapter 7 (of the English edition) of the first volume of Capital: see, for instance, Marx, Economic Manuscripts of 1861-63, 56-9, in addition to Marx, Contribution, 36.

²⁷ Marx, Economic Manuscripts of 1861-63, 67.

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