{"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":116,"pdf_page":120,"physical_index":120,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"ac3827e4022ae29377a4caf74a5876bc4c053845b3448f67504b93ff36ac5722"},"chapter":"Marx and the Concept of Historical Time","content":"As the bearers of concrete labour, individuals temporalise by virtue of the fact that they are social individuals. Consequently, if the existential basis of temporalisation is to have any meaning at all in Marx, it must itself be based in the sociality of human individuation specific to capitalism. Consider the following passage by Osborne:\n\nIf one agrees with something like the early Heidegger’s argument that the anticipation of death is the existential basis of temporalisation…(modified to register the social basis of this anticipation in relations with others, and hence the sociality of human individuation), then it is a short step to inferring that human finitude, in the sense of the existential register of mortality, is the ontological basis of the “value” of time and, thereby, the ontological ground of labour-time’s functioning as a universal measure of value. And this, despite the fact that any such “measurement”, in itself, involves the social instantiation of a degraded, “ordinary” or merely chronological conception of time (negating the existential temporalisation upon which it depends). At its limit, time is valuable because it (that is, “your” time) runs out.<sup>87</sup>\n\nThis passage can be read from various different (highly interrelated) standpoints: the exchange relation, the division of labour, the dialectic of abstract and concrete labour, and so forth. Yet one standpoint particularly draws our attention, not just because it takes in each of these other standpoints, but because it does so as the capitalist origin from which the materialist concept of history must be restructured. This origin is the commodification of labour-power: it sets off a dual and asymmetric form of historical totalisation and temporalisation.\n\nThe sale of labour-power must be viewed from ‘the standpoint of the simple circulation of commodities’<sup>88</sup>, because this sale constitutes an initial act of the circuit C–M–C: the simple transformation of one commodity into another, wherein money is nothing but the disappearing means with which to complete the circuit. As Tombazos reminds us, the economic subject of this circuit – selling in order to buy – is the individual human being<sup>89</sup>, not because this circuit is instigated by individual will, but because it ensures that individual need does not exceed the need to conserve and reproduce oneself (which this circuit satisfies). The peculiar importance of the ‘peculiar commodity’ labour-power is in this sense doubled: its sale not only represents the exclusive entryway into the labour-process, but dictates that the only relationship between the circuit C–M–C and the satisfaction of need is the purchase of ‘a certain sum of the means of life’ (in the restricted sense of Leben as ‘subsistence’). For our purposes, this importance is manifested in the manner in which concrete labour – the labour yielded by labour-power from the standpoint of its sale – temporalises history. Insofar as it can be treated as a specification of individual praxis in Sartre’s terms, concrete labour constitutes, to quote from Chapter 2, ‘a dialectical movement between the present and the past wherein the present is prioritised as the totalising transcendence of the past towards the future.’ Moreover, the existential basis of this temporalisation is, following Heidegger, the individual worker’s finitude (on the condition, to return to Chapter 2 again, that finitude is understood as a being-towards a factical limit which structures – temporalises – each and every act). Therefore, and to tie this back to Chapter 1, concrete labour might be conceived as a ‘first historical act’: it produces the ‘dialectical time’ (to use Sartre’s expression) that epitomises the creation of the means to satisfy existing needs and the creation of new needs.<sup>90</sup>\n\n<sup>87</sup> Osborne, ‘Marx and the philosophy of time’, 20.\n\n<sup>88</sup> Marx, Capital 1, 209.\n\n<sup>89</sup> Tombazos, Time in Marx, 61.\n\n116","previous_page":115,"next_page":117}