Marx and the Concept of Historical Time · 第 176 页

Primitive accumulation is the centrifugal point around which resolves the specific capitalist mode of existence of labour-power, the determination of human purposeful activity in the form of a labouring commodity. While the capitalist production and exchange relations subsist through the commodity-form, primitive accumulation is the secret history of the determination of human purposeful practice in the form of a wagelabour commodity. The commodity-form subsists through this determination, presupposes it and, through its form, denies it in the name of abstract equality and freedom.¹³⁸

There is an indissociable relationship between ‘the secret’ [das Geheimnis] of the commodityform and that of originary accumulation. Originary accumulation is the historical-ontological condition of the fetish character of exchange-determined social relations, such that ‘the social relations between…private labours appear as what they are, i.e. not as direct social relations between persons at work, but as thing-like relations between persons and social relations between things.’¹³⁹ That is to say, originary accumulation is the condition of the condition (the commodification of labour-power) without which relations between persons cannot appear as relations between things. If this accumulation ‘is suspended in the commodity-form as its “subterranean” condition, constitutive presupposition, and historical basis’¹⁴⁰, this is because it makes ‘social labour’ in capitalism possible.

¹³⁶ Marx, Grundrisse, 459.

¹³⁷ Bonefeld, ‘History and Social Constitution: Primitive Accumulation is not Primitive’, 6. Thus ‘the notion that the essence of primitive accumulation is suspended [aufgehoben] in accumulation proper means that the principle of primitive accumulation, that is separation, is raised to a new level, rendering primitive accumulation as a specific epoch historically redundant. At the same time, its essential character is maintained as the constitutive presupposition of capital: separation.’ Ibid. 4. However, as we will consider shortly, the relationship between originary accumulation and the ‘historical becoming of the accumulation of capital cannot be restricted to the historical past (in its chronological register), because, as the constitutive basis of capital, originary accumulation is the ongoing constitutive basis of history as the ongoing self-expansion of time.

¹³⁸ Bonefeld, ‘The Permanence of Primitive Accumulation: Commodity Fetishism and Social Constitution’, 5.

¹³⁹ Marx, Kapital 1, 87 (Capital 1, 166).

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