{"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":103,"pdf_page":107,"physical_index":107,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"db8fe27b58ad54efb98036952537fc61df01ae24e2648ebc2a87db0a2c8e27ab"},"chapter":"Marx and the Concept of Historical Time","content":"This is the act of the sale and purchase of labour-capacity [Arbeitsvermögen] or labour-power [Arbeitskraft], or what Marx also calls ‘the exchange of variable capital for labour-power.’14 Marx details this exchange in Chapter 6 (of the English edition) of the first volume of Capital, emphasising the two conditions necessary for the possessor of money to encounter the owner of labour-power on the market. These are the two senses in which the potential labourer must be ‘free’: (1) free from the possession of the means of production (hence free from the means of satisfying his own needs), and (2) free – in the juridical sense of the term – to sell his sole possession (but only for a fixed amount of time, such that he ‘manages both to alienate his labour-power and to avoid renouncing his rights of ownership over it.’15) As we will learn in Chapter 4, ‘so-called originary accumulation’ [die sogenannte ursprüngliche Akkumulation] is itself the condition of these conditions. It should also be noted here that unlike the permanent presence and various metamorphoses of the category of labour in Marx’s work, the concept of labour-power does not appear until the late 1850s (the Grundrisse), and does not feature until the mid-1860s (it is everywhere in Marx’s 1849 pamphlet Wage-Labour and Capital, but only because of Engels’s editorial hand in 1891).\n\nFor our present purposes, however, we must navigate a potential ambiguity at the heart of Marx’s account of labour-power. On the one hand, he characterises it as ‘the entire field [Inbegriff] of those physical and intellectual capabilities existing in the corporeal form [Leiblichkeit], the living personality of a human being, capabilities which he sets in motion whenever he produces a use-value of any kind.’16 To the extent that it ‘exists only as a capacity of the living individual’17, labour-power might seem to function as a transhistorical – indeed a naturalistic transhistorical – concept in Marx. This reading might be likened to what Moishe Postone calls ‘traditional Marxism’, such that labour-power becomes the normative repository of labour as the ‘transhistorical essence of social life.’18 Accordingly, labour-power would come into alignment with Marx’s depiction of the labour-process as ‘the universal condition for the metabolism between the human and nature, the eternal, natural condition of human existence…independent of every form of that existence.’19 This reading also intersects with a number of recent Italian formulations of the concept of ‘biopolitics’ (this is paradoxical insofar as the relevant authors explicitly dissociate themselves from ‘traditional Marxism’). For Paolo Virno, the capitalist purchases the life and the body of the worker because ‘this life, this body, are what contains the faculty, the potential, the dynamis’20, but for Virno this potentiality is irreducible to its commodification, because life is ontologically basic to capital. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri agree: ‘Labour-power has always exceeded its relation to capital in terms of its potential, in the sense that people have the capacity to do much more and produce much more than what they do at work.’21 The actualisation of ‘biopolitical labour-power’ – which is for Hardt and Negri the contemporary capacity of human beings to live and to love – thus leads to a ‘creativity’ which expresses the common and points beyond capital.22\n\n14 ‘Variable capital’ has a variable meaning throughout the various drafts of Capital, but in the context of the exchange relation it designates the wage-form (this is its predominant meaning in ‘Results of the Immediate Production-Process’, written before the publication of Capital in 1867). However, it also designates the act of labour itself, insofar as this act is only actual as ‘one of the modes of existence’ of capital. Ibid. 988.\n\n15 Ibid. 271. In this sense, the worker’s mode of freedom and his mode of subjection are the same thing. 16 Marx, Kapital 1, 181 (Capital 1, 270).\n\n17 Marx, Capital 1, 274.\n\n18 Postone, Time, Labor, and Social Domination, 61.\n\n19 Marx, Kapital 1, 198 (Capital 1, 290). This passage is nearly identical to passages in Marx, Capital 1, 133, and Marx, Contribution, 36.\n\n103","previous_page":102,"next_page":104}