{"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":118,"pdf_page":122,"physical_index":122,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"e029302b9576d29824c87099f96d6bef9a425f79705d5f80b93f30503ee5dafb"},"chapter":"Marx and the Concept of Historical Time","content":"As Arthur notes, Marx’s solution to the contradiction at the end of this passage is money, yet ‘although money certainly posits the labour it represents, and hence by reflection the labour represented by all commodities, as abstract universal labour, the abstraction is still not posited prior to exchange.’<sup>92</sup> After Rubin, Arthur concludes that this contradiction is better addressed within the production-process itself, such that generalised commodity production – production that is already always production for exchange – is predicated on ‘living labour [being] treated as abstract prior to exchange precisely because it is treated as abstract in exchange.’<sup>93</sup> This is not to say that – within the production-process itself – concrete labour-time is actually realised as abstract labour-time (only the act of exchange achieves this), but it does mean that – within this process – concrete labour-time is already internal to abstract labour-time. This internality is what is often described as the ‘imposition’ and ‘policing’ of abstract labour-time; its agents are the foreman and the clock. It is along these lines that Bonefeld, drawing on the work of Riccardo Bellofiore, characterises abstract labour as a real abstraction that ‘projects the “ghost of value”…back into production, where the ghost turns into a vampire that sucks living labour dry, reducing it to “time’s carcase”.’<sup>94</sup> The exchange relation is the sole guarantor of socially necessary labour-time, but, ‘if anything, the constitution of labour as abstract in the capital relation is more fundamental than its constitution as abstract in exchange’<sup>95</sup>, because only the labour-process makes possible the transformation of the ‘ontological basis of the “value” of time’ into socially necessary labour-time.\n\nIf, consequent to the commodification of labour-power, concrete labour is internal to abstract labour, then human need (the temporalising and historicalising ground of the act, that from which the teleological end, hence the unity, of this act derives) is internal to capital. In Chapter 4 of the first volume of Capital – ‘The General Formula for Capital’ – Marx asserts that ‘the simple circulation of commodities…is a means to a final goal which lies outside circulation, namely the appropriation of use-values, the satisfaction of needs’, whereas ‘the circulation of money as capital is an end in itself, for the valorisation of value takes place only within this constantly renewed movement.’<sup>96</sup> There are two, and two fundamentally opposed, conceptions of need – and with them teleologies – at work here, and establishing the difference and relation between them is one of the primary tasks of the following chapter. But what must be emphasised now is that whereas the satisfaction of individual needs lies outside of simple circulation, the creation of the means to satisfy these needs lies squarely inside the circulation of money as capital. Unlike the simple circulation of commodities, the circulation of money as capital not only presupposes but posits the means of satisfying individual needs.<sup>97</sup> Again, we are faced with the peculiar importance of the commodification of labour-power. It not only dictates that the acts within a particular instance of the circuit C–M–C (i.e., the sale of labourpower, the concrete act of labour, and the exchange of the wage for the means of life) are only actual within the circuit M–C–M’ (the definitive circuit of capital: buying in order to sell), but that, insofar as it leads to the satisfaction of individual needs, every act within every instance of C–M–C is only actual within M–C–M’. In sum, the materiality of C–M–C is predicated on M–C–M’, and thus the totalising and temporalising capacity of concrete labour as a historical act is based in the totalising and temporalising power of abstract labour, or the labour yielded by labour-power from the standpoint of its purchase. In Sartre’s terms, abstract labour totalises and temporalises not because it is driven by human need, but because it internally transforms – it perverts – this need into exigency. Hence for the worker (to return to two previously cited passages in the Critique), ‘the future governs the present insofar as this future strictly identifies itself with the past’<sup>98</sup>, and ‘the future to be realised is already fabricated as mechanical inertia in the way in which past being is transcended.’<sup>99</sup> As a ‘living organism’, capital’s self-renewal is expressed by this temporality of exigency, a temporality that quantifies human need. If, as the previous chapter argues, human need grounds ‘death’ as the existential limit in relation to which ‘temporality temporalises itself’, such that the act temporalises itself as a kind of‘being towards-need’, then exigency constitutes the capitalist restructuration of this, whereby the ‘ontological basis of the “value” of time’ is reduced to the number of years, months, days, etc. that the individual worker has left to live.<sup>100</sup> This despite the fact – in fact precisely because – capital ‘is indifferent to his or her reproduction other than as part of a certain social aggregate of labour-power.’<sup>101</sup> This has significant ramifications for the materialist concept of history. Capital, as the next chapter establishes, is the subject of history (this is synonymous with the fact that it is the economic subject of M–C–M’), but it is this subject because its needs deprive human beings of their capacity to totalise and temporalise history (on their own terms). This is the reason why, as Chapter 4 also argues, Capital is the condition of thinking the materialist concept of history in The German Ideology, but only because it destabilises this concept: the condition of thinking the first historical act is, as we will see, its de-historicalisation. It cannot and never will realise its ultimate end (infinite wealth), but until it is gone, capital will never cease attempting to ensure that human need, and thus ‘material life itself’, does not exceed the ‘reproduction of the physical existence of…individuals.’<sup>102</sup>\n\n<sup>92</sup> Arthur, The New Dialectic and Marx’s Capital, 46.\n\n<sup>93</sup> Ibid. ‘In effect, abstract labour as a form-determination of the living labour of the wage worker, and abstract labour as the dead labour objectified in a commodity, are the same thing, in the one case looked at as activity, in the other as its result.’ Ibid.\n\n<sup>94</sup> Bonefeld, ‘Abstract labour: Against its nature and on its time’, 266. The expression ‘time’s carcase’ is a translation of ‘die Verkörperung der Zeit’, from the passage in The Poverty of Philosophy cited earlier (see footnotes 1 and 69 in this chapter). ‘The embodiment of time’ is a more literal translation. <sup>95</sup> Arthur, The New Dialectic and Marx’s Capital, 45.\n\n<sup>96</sup> Marx, Capital 1, 253.\n\n118","previous_page":117,"next_page":119}