Marx and the Concept of Historical Time · 第 184 页

From this standpoint, the ‘circulation-process’ is not the dialectical opposite of the productionprocess – this is not the circulation-process proper – but is rather a category that expresses the unity of the production- and circulation-processes proper. This is what Marx calls the ‘overallprocess’ [Gesamtverlaufs] or ‘total-circuit’ [Gesamtkreislauf] of capital, which later becomes the ‘overall’ or ‘total’ (as opposed to the immediate) production-process of capital in the third volume of Capital.⁴ The subject of this process is not simply ‘capital’, but more precisely what Marx calls ‘total social capital’ [gesellschaftlichen Gesamtkapital], a concept which must be understood as the successor of ‘capital in general’ [Kapital im Allgemeinen], but which, at the same time, does not invalidate the concept of ‘capital in general’.⁵ It is total social capital and its metamorphoses – its three cycles or circuits [Kreislauf] – which concerns us now, because this allows us to bring this thesis to a close.

What must be emphasised is that the opening chapters of the second volume of Capital, in particular Chapter 4 – ‘The Three Figures of the Circuit’ – equal the systematicity of the systematic development of the value-form in the first chapters of the first volume of Capital. Moreover, these chapters in Volume Two offer what their counterpart in Volume One cannot: a systematic presentation of the various forms of capital itself, or, in other words, a systematic presentation of capital subsequent to the establishment of capital as self-expanding value.⁶ They present – for the first time – a framework wherein capital might be systematised as the condition of thinking history and historical time. In sharp contrast to Marx’s analysis of the production-process in the first volume of Capital (above all his depiction of the overt violence of originary accumulation), these opening chapters of the second volume of Capital present ‘capital’ at a much higher level of abstraction: the struggle to reduce the length of the workingday does not, for instance, figure (at least explicitly) in these pages.⁷ This does not, however, diminish their speculative contribution to our comprehension of history and historical time. In the three circuits of ‘total social capital’ – the circuits of money capital, productive capital and commodity capital, each of which include the moment of production within themselves – we have a rich and multifaceted exposition of what was raised in the introduction to Chapter 4, but which the body of that chapter only presents from the limited standpoint of the immediate production-process: the life through which capital satisfies its need to self-expand. The three circuits of total social capital form different but interrelated ‘life-processes’ – ‘life-circuits’ – of capital, and thus represent a crucial, if not the most important, means with which to enrich the (underdeveloped) discourse of life in Marx’s critique of political economy more broadly.⁸ Tombazos’s Time in Marx stands apart in its analysis of this largely unexplored dimension of Marx’s work.⁹ Drawing upon the figures of the syllogism in Hegel’s Logic (not to mention Marx’s direct acknowledgement of his indebtedness to this syllogism), Tombazos shows the extent to which the different positions and relations between money (M), the commodity (C) and production (P) represent a critical appropriation of Hegel that nonetheless corresponds to the different positions and relations between universality (U), particularity (P) and singularity (S) within the syllogism. This is, as Tombazos says, ‘the syllogistic structure of capital’¹⁰, and, after the Logic, it directly correlates to the sense in which, as the ‘Idea’, capital is a processual ‘living being’ – a teleological ‘living organism’ – which divides itself, within itself, into three processes¹¹: (1) the ‘living individual’, or ‘shape’ (the circuit of productive capital); (2) the ‘life-process’, or ‘assimilation’ (the circuit of commodity capital); and (3) the ‘genus-process’ (the circuit of money capital). The details of this homology between Marx and Hegel (which most of the work in so-called ‘Systematic Dialectics’ after Tombazos does not address) cannot be taken any further here.¹² It must suffice to state that the circuits of money capital, productive capital and commodity capital make up, respectively, the ‘valorisation, conservation and autocritique/self-control of value’¹³, such that, as a ‘triple autonomous movement’, as a ‘rich and complex organisation of rhythms’¹⁴, ‘total social capital’ is Marx’s most complete expression of the ‘life of capital’. This leads us to the following passage in the second volume of Capital, Marx’s most comprehensive passage on total social capital:

⁴ Hence insofar as there is some kind of ‘logic’ (apart from Engels’s editorial hand) that structures the three volumes of Capital, it is not the dialectic ‘Volume 1 + Volume 2 = Volume 3’, as is occasionally assumed, but rather a logic wherein the immediate production-process (Volume 1) is subsumed by the circulation-process, broadly construed (Volume 2), which is thereafter actualised by the total-process of capitalist production (Volume 3). This is the sense in which the aim of Volume 3 is to ‘discover and present the concrete forms which grow out of the process of capital's movement considered as a whole.’ Marx, Capital 3, 117. That is, Volume 3 actualises – via categories such as ‘profit’ and ‘price’ – what Volume 2 has already established, albeit at a high level of abstraction.

⁵ See Chapter 4, footnote 9. From the second volume of Capital on, the categories of ‘abstract labour’ and ‘value’ can be understood from the standpoint of ‘total social capital’.

⁶ This thesis accordingly shares Tombazos’s enthusiasm for the opening chapters of the second volume of Capital, particularly Chapter 4. See Tombazos, Time in Marx, 2, 4, 124.

⁷ Marx is well aware of this when, for instance, he states that ‘capital, as self-valorising value, does not just comprise class relations, a definite social character that depends on the existence of labour as wagelabour. It is a movement, a circulatory-process through different stages, which itself in turn includes three different forms of the circulatory-process. Hence it can only be grasped as a movement, and not as a static thing.’ Marx, Capital 2, 185.

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