{"resolved":true,"match_type":"uuid","source_type":"original_book","book_id":"cfa147d3-494e-49cc-b356-7aceff50b181","title":"Marx and the Concept of Historical Time","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":null,"requested_by":"printed_page","book":{"source_type":"original_book","book_id":"cfa147d3-494e-49cc-b356-7aceff50b181","id":"cfa147d3-494e-49cc-b356-7aceff50b181","uuid":"cfa147d3-494e-49cc-b356-7aceff50b181","title":"Marx and the Concept of Historical Time","normalized_title":"marxandtheconceptofhistoricaltime","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":null,"isbns":[],"parsed":true,"ai_readable":true,"document_type":"book","page_count":216,"navigation_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/cfa147d3-494e-49cc-b356-7aceff50b181","title_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/title/Marx%20and%20the%20Concept%20of%20Historical%20Time","fixed_page_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/cfa147d3-494e-49cc-b356-7aceff50b181/page/{printed_page}","path_api_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/book/cfa147d3-494e-49cc-b356-7aceff50b181/page/{printed_page}","read_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/cfa147d3-494e-49cc-b356-7aceff50b181","page_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/cfa147d3-494e-49cc-b356-7aceff50b181/page","search_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/cfa147d3-494e-49cc-b356-7aceff50b181/search"},"page":{"printed_page":100,"pdf_page":104,"physical_index":104,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"ee95e4b75621fecf03b5ee93e6fe862f56ca49c8002666d80f18662f662b9446"},"chapter":"Marx and the Concept of Historical Time","content":"Yet the purpose of this chapter is not simply, or even primarily, to demonstrate that the concept of abstract labour is the condition of thinking labour in general.<sup>6</sup> It overriding purpose is in fact to systematically examine, consequent to the fact that abstract labour makes ‘labour in general’ intelligible, the complex and rich concept that is ‘abstract labour’ itself, at the heart of which is a complex and rich – if underdeveloped – account of temporalisation. Indeed, the temporal – temporalising – dialectic between abstract and concrete labour is arguably Marx’s greatest contribution to the philosophy of time, a contribution that is still far from being fully realised. To anticipate the next chapter, the reason why such attention is being paid to abstract labour is that if it is the condition of thinking labour in general, then it must also be an essential (but not the only) condition of thinking the materialist concept of history.<sup>7</sup> This chapter is thus the necessary first step towards establishing what the previous chapter speculatively proposed and what the next chapter seeks to demonstrate: against Sartre, there is a totaliser that totalises and temporalises history. It is capital. Thus whilst history does not feature prominently in this chapter, this does not mean that abstract labour is in any sense ‘outside’ of history, or that the exchange relation which simultaneously constitutes and expresses abstract labour is somehow ‘outside’ of historical time. Quite the opposite. Abstract labour and the commodity exchange relation are squarely within history and historical time, precisely because they are constitutive of history and historical time. They – and this claim can only be fully appreciated after Chapter 4 and the Conclusion – are a historical-ontological ground of the production of historical time. In opposition to the standpoint of much of the literature in so-called ‘Systematic Dialectics’, therefore, the capitalist exchange relation is not just a historical but a historicalising relation, such that historical time is – logically and actually – immanent to the systematic development of the value-form.<sup>8</sup> A crucial dimension of coming to this realisation – and this the concern of the second section of this chapter, after the totalising and temporalising power of abstract labour has been outlined – is the systematic investigation of Marx’s concepts of ‘necessary’ and ‘surplus-labour’. These two concepts must be examined not only because their difference and relation are the very reason why abstract labour exists, but because – and this is the task of Chapter 4 – the production of their difference and relation comprises, in Sartre’s words, the ‘primary intelligibility’ of history.\n\n<sup>6</sup> The question is also: if abstract labour is the condition of thinking labour in general, is it the condition of thinking Sartre’s ‘praxis’? Heidegger’s ‘Dasein’? The historical condition that makes, we might go so far as to say, the existential-phenomenological subject possible?\n\n<sup>7</sup> Chapter 4 concentrates exclusively on the materialist concept of history, but it raises the question of whether capital is the condition of thinking the modern, post-Enlightenment conception of history more generally.\n\n<sup>8</sup> ‘Systematic Dialectics’ does not grasp capital as the condition of thinking history, and hence does not think the systematic properly. Statements such as the following (which is representative of Systematic Dialectics) are thus misguided: ‘the exchanges outlined in the first chapter of Capital are not historical but logical.’ Stavros Tombazos, Time in Marx: The Categories of Time in Marx’s Capital (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2014), 62. This standpoint is common, and extends beyond Systematic Dialectics. In his Kantian rereading of commodity exchange as the a priori synthetic matrix of the social, Sohn-Rethel states that ‘the exchange abstraction excludes everything that makes up history, human and even natural history’, and that through the exchange relation ‘time becomes unhistorical time.’ Sohn-Rethel, Intellectual and Manual Labour: a Critique of Epistemology, 48-9, 56.\n\n100","previous_page":99,"next_page":101}