Marx and the Concept of Historical Time · 第 145 页

The merit of this reading is that it recognises the sense in which Hegel’s system reproduces, and is in fact predicated on, capitalist social relations. However, there are two problems with this reading, the identification of which cuts to the heart of Marx’s distinct use of the category of subsumption. First, Hegel did not understand subsumption to be absurd and violent; rather, this was the critique he levelled at Kant’s specific use of the category of subsumption in his 1831 Berlin lectures on logic, not subsumption per se.³⁶ In the Logic, as the previous paragraph shows, the doubled relation of subsumption and inherence is central to Hegel’s formulation of the syllogism in the Doctrine of the Concept. It is true that the Philosophy of Right is in tension with Hegel’s critique of Kantian subsumption, as it reproduces Kant’s use of the category of subsumption, but this is not representative of Hegel’s system more broadly.

This leads to the second, more basic, problem. Like much of the secondary literature on subsumption more generally, the Endnotes Collective does not consider the complex dialectic between the labour- and valorisation-process, the understanding of which is essential not only to Marx’s understanding of subsumption, but, as we will see, the very intelligibility of history. The character of this dialectic has, once again, already been introduced – it corresponds to the dialectic between concrete and abstract labour. This dialectic is the processual manifestation of the fact that abstract labour produces, within itself, concrete labour as its dialectical exterior (this is one register of the larger sense in which, consequent to the commodification of labourpower, living labour is external to capital within the production-process). But what must now be highlighted is that this dialectic is the dynamic transposition of the dialectic of abstract and concrete labour via the category of subsumption. We must thus insist on the following point (one that much of the secondary literature fails to thematise, and in some cases acknowledge): subsumption is an indelibly dialectical category in Marx, the exposition of which grounds our exposition of the production-process of capital. Marx does not explicitly highlight this point, but it is only from the standpoint of the essentially dialectical character of subsumption that

³⁵ See http://endnotes.org.uk/en/endnotes-the-history-of-subsumption (accessed 27 April 2015).

³⁶ See G.W.F. Hegel, Lectures on Logic [1831], trans. Clark Butler (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008), 12-13 (§22), which the Endnotes Collective mistakenly cites as representative of Hegel’s view on subsumption as such.

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