Marx and the Concept of Historical Time · 第 179 页

This is crucial, because it is only when originary accumulation is understood as both the presupposition and result of capitalist accumulation that the systematic relationship between originary accumulation and the production of history and historical time emerges. Generally speaking, we might state that if originary accumulation is the condition of the condition of the production-process of capital, then it is thereby the condition of the condition of thinking the materialist concept of history. Put differently, originary accumulation might be considered as a kind of ‘originary temporality’ – an originary temporality of separation, and, as we will soon consider, of violence – which makes the historical time of capital possible, but which, at the same time, the historical time of capital makes possible. The claim, therefore, is that originary accumulation is simultaneously the presupposition and result, the premise and consequence, the cause and effect, etc., of both capital’s formal and real subsumption of labour, and hence the two features at the heart of the production-process of capital (automation and alienation) without which history cannot be thought. Originary accumulation is thus inseparable from the speculative proposition which guides this chapter: valorisation is the production of historical time. This is what, at the level of the philosophical concept of history, secures the systematic character of originary accumulation, which is to say its fundamental relation to the systematichistorical dialectic that is capital. The co-constitutive relation between originary accumulation and alienation is straightforward and requires little demonstration: the separation that defines the former is both the condition and result of the various forms of separation which render the production-process of capital the production of alienation. For Marx, the ‘objective conditions of living labour appear as separated, independent [verselbständigte] values opposite living labour capacity as subjective being, which therefore appears to them only as a value of another kind’¹⁴⁸, whereby ‘the objective conditions of living labour capacity are presupposed as having an existence independent of it, as the objectivity of a subject distinct from living labour capacity and standing independently over against it.’¹⁴⁹ However, the relationship between originary accumulation and automation requires a slightly more substantial explanation. On the one hand, the relationship between originary accumulation and the real subsumption of labour is easily grasped, such that the separation underpinning and reproduced by cooperation, the division of labour and, most consequentially, the use of machinery within the productionprocess, is both enabled by originary accumulation and brings about the renewal of originary accumulation. In this regard, originary accumulation is inseparable from the manner in which, as previously analysed, the systematic use of machines – the so-called ‘automatic system of machinery’ – constitutes the conception of ‘history’ as the self-expansion of time. On the other hand, this must be supplemented – or intertwined – with the fetish character of the commodity, specifically the fact that the real subsumption of labour both conditions and is conditioned by the commodity-form (in this sense, Marx’s systematic exposition of the value-form in the first few chapters of the first volume of Capital presumes the entirety – originary accumulation included – of the exposition that follows). In other words, if, following Bonefeld, originary accumulation is the constitutive basis of the fetish character of the commodity, then it is also the ontological basis of the essential link between automation and fetishism at the level of the philosophical concept of history. If automation gives us the idea of history as something that, in itself and as such, is in motion, moves on, and expands, this is indissociable from the fetish character of the commodity-form as both the premise¹⁵⁰ and result of the production-process of capital. The originary separation between the producers and the means of production not only enables a ‘life-process of the social’ whereby the radical expansion of human needs can only appear within the value-form, but also, and because of this, whereby the social relations between humans that grounds the expansion of their needs appears, within the objects which satisfy these needs, as the ‘objective characteristics of the products of labour themselves, as the socio-natural properties of these things.’¹⁵¹ The expansion of human needs appears as the socio-natural property of commodities themselves, and this must be tied to the notion that selfexpansion – the self-expansion of time – is the essential property of history itself. Even more succinctly: ‘history’ is a fetish (but it is no less real because of this). Hence the fetish character of the commodity confirms what was previously postulated: capital’s historicalising power is at once its de-historicalising power, which is to say, first, that the modern concept of ‘history is only possible because of this de-historicalisation, and, second, that originary accumulation is what first gives capital this power (which is then systematically reproduced by capital itself). This is the necessary context of the basic relationship between originary accumulation and the bourgeois erasure of history, and therefore the context, as earlier cited, of Balibar’s claim that originary accumulation ‘brings us into the presence of the radical absence of memory which characterises history.’¹⁵² The ‘insipid childishness’ of the ‘nursery tale’ that political economy tells itself unconsciously presumes the commodity-form and its secret.

¹⁴⁸ Marx, Grundrisse, 461. ¹⁴⁹ Ibid. 462.

179