The labour-process…is purposeful activity aimed at the production of use-values. It is an appropriation of what exists in nature for the requirements of human beings. It is the universal condition for the metabolism [Stoffwechsel] between the human being and nature, the eternal, natural condition of human existence, and it is thus independent of every form of that existence, or rather it is common to all forms of society in which human beings live.<sup>5</sup>
The crux of the issue here is the category of ‘concrete labour’. The premise of this chapter is that capital demolishes the thought of something like a ‘transhistorical labour in general’ – a ‘concrete labour as such’ – except – and this is the essential point – as a general category that receives its intelligibility from concrete labours as particular instances of abstract labour. Put differently, the only actuality to the category of ‘labour in general’ is abstract labour: insofar as ‘labour in general’ is actual in general, it is as abstract labour. Within capitalism, ‘labour in general’ is not actual as concrete labour. It is actual as concrete labours (plural, the multiplicity of them), which is why abstract labour constitutes its condition of intelligibility. The dialectic, we will argue, between concrete labour (the Multiple) and abstract labour (the One), a dialectic that is specific to capitalism, cannot be compromised. The potential ‘controversy’ arises from the fact that Marx himself, in Capital and elsewhere, offers us passages (such as the one above) that clearly depict ‘labour’ in transhistorical terms. Passages like these are, this thesis argues, very problematic, because they do not acknowledge what Capital demonstrates: capital is their condition of possibility. As we will learn, this extends to other concepts in Marx’s critique of political economy as well, namely ‘concrete labour’, ‘use-value’ and ‘labour-power’. In some regards, therefore, this chapter is in conflict with Marx.
<sup>4</sup> Ibid. 152.
<sup>5</sup> Marx, Kapital 1, 198 (Capital 1, 290).
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