{"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":107,"pdf_page":111,"physical_index":111,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"a7761d8f0b2dce00797af48af0b0cb677f1a3724ff438ef333855fb90e4a57e7"},"chapter":"Marx and the Concept of Historical Time","content":"In this regard, the hyphen within ‘labour-time’ is crucial, because it registers the ontological unity of the concept of Arbeitszeit: ‘labour-time is a part of the time of the labourer; that is, it is part of the life-time of the labourer.’<sup>37</sup> This can be specified further, because if, consequent to the commodification of labour-power, living labour (and thus the labourer who personifies this labour) is internal to the value-form, then labour-time is only actual as a part of the time of capital, as a part of the life-time of capital.\n\nThe contours of abstract labour and abstract labour-time must nevertheless be outlined before those of concrete labour and concrete labour-time. There is (and on this point we cannot waver) a dialectic of abstract and concrete labour, but this is a dialectic wherein abstract labour has, to say the least, the upper hand. Generally speaking, three things should be kept in mind. First, abstract labour is the predominant, although not self-sufficient, successor to the category of labour in general: the totalising and temporalising power of labour in general must first and foremost be reworked through the category of abstract labour. Second, Marx’s analysis of abstract labour is far more temporally informed than that of his analysis of concrete labour: the temporality of the latter is either described with vague reference to a ‘qualitative’ labourtime, or, much more common, as already reduced to abstract labour-time, in the sense that ‘the worker is nothing more…than personified labour-time.’<sup>38</sup> Indeed, unless it is stated or implied otherwise, ‘labour-time’ is to be understood as abstract labour-time. Third, and this directly follows from the previous two points, abstract labour determines concrete labour to a degree and extent that is simply unmatched by concrete labour itself. Just as use-value is internal to value, so too is use-value producing labour internal to value-producing labour, even as the latter produces the former as its dialectical opposite. Whereas ‘concrete labour has to take the form of its opposite, undifferentiated human labour, to count as socially necessary labour’<sup>39</sup>, abstract labour does not, not because it is not dialectically dependent on concrete labour, but because it is socially necessary labour.\n\nTwo common misconceptions about abstract labour can now be addressed. First, whilst this social form of labour constitutes the equalisation of qualitatively distinct concrete labours, it does not constitute the ongoing homogenisation of these labours. Abstract labour, as Werner Bonefeld articulates it in his critique of Massimo De Angelis, ‘is not concrete labour, however homogenised, monotonous, repetitive, senseless and boring it might be.’<sup>40</sup> Chris Arthur makes the same point to introduce his critique of Harry Braverman’s Labour and Monopoly Capital:\n\n<sup>37</sup> Osborne, ‘Marx and the philosophy of time’, 19.\n\n<sup>38</sup> Marx, Capital 1, 352-53.\n\n<sup>39</sup> Bonefeld, ‘Abstract labour: Against its nature and on its time’, 266.\n\n<sup>40</sup> Ibid. 260. Nor is ‘concrete labour’ abstract labour, despite the fact that the former is internal to the latter, and only actual because of the latter.\n\n107","previous_page":106,"next_page":108}