Marx and the Concept of Historical Time · 第 149 页

One dimension of Marx’s writings from the 1861-63 Manuscripts onwards is the sense in which formal subsumption, and hence absolute surplus-value, ‘precede’ real subsumption and relative surplus-value.⁴³ In this way, formal subsumption is the ‘premise and precondition of…real subsumption.’⁴⁴ On one level, this characterisation is not surprising: it proceeds from Marx’s examination of the working-day, such that ‘the constant tendency of capital’ to extend the length of the working-day to its ‘utmost physically possible limit’⁴⁵, and the subsequent struggle by workers to reduce the length of this day, can be comprehended as fuelling dynamic transformations of the labour-process itself, transformations that directly raise the productivity of labour and thereby lower the time necessary to the produce workers’ means of life. In this manner, formal subsumption might be understood as the premise and precondition of the three definitive developments within real subsumption: cooperation, the division of labour, and the use of machinery. The absolute limits of absolute surplus-value give rise to the quality of real subsumption, the ‘specifically capitalist mode of production’. According to Marx, it is only in real subsumption wherein:

The social productive forces of labour, or the productive forces of directly social, socialised (i.e. collective) labour come into being through cooperation, the division of labour within the workshop, the use of machinery, and in general the transformation of production by the conscious use of the sciences, of mechanics, chemistry, etc. for specific ends, technology, etc. and similarly, through the enormous increase of scale corresponding to such developments (for it is only socialised labour that is capable of applying the general products of human development, such as mathematics, to the immediate production-process; and, conversely, progress in these sciences presupposes a certain level of material production). This entire development of the productive forces of socialised labour (in contrast to the more or less isolated labour of individuals), and together with it the use of science (the general product of social development), in the immediate process of production, takes the form of the productive power of capital.⁴⁶

⁴⁴ Ibid. 1026.

⁴³ See, in particular, ibid. 1025.

⁴⁵ Karl Marx, Value, Price and Profit [1865], as cited in Tomba, Marx’s Temporalities, 134.

⁴⁶ Marx, Capital 1, 1024. ‘With the real subsumption of labour under capital a complete (and constantly repeated) revolution takes place in the mode of production, in the productivity of the workers and in the relations between workers and capitalists.’ Ibid. 1035. The expression ‘a complete and constantly repeated revolution’ is Marx’s self-reference to The Communist Manifesto.

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