{"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":125,"pdf_page":129,"physical_index":129,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"aafd1da840c64cf2b2472fbcba92d5aa69153ddd1e5b28633cf371d6dfa6b4ec"},"chapter":"Marx and the Concept of Historical Time","content":"The dialectic that confronts us is thus not the ‘dialectic of necessary and surplus-labour’ (there is no such thing), but rather, within capitalism, the dialectic within necessary labour as such. This dialectic differs from that between abstract and concrete labour in two crucial ways. First, as previously stated, this dialectic comes out of two different manifestations of one and the same kind of labour and time. Second, and more importantly, the structure of this dialectic is essentially different. Whereas concrete labour is produced by abstract labour as both internal and external to abstract labour (this is the manner in which living labour is external to capital because it is internal to the production-process), surplus-labour produces itselfas both internal and external to necessary labour. In other words, if a defining feature of capitalism is that surplus determines necessity, then this is so because surplus-labour simultaneously determines itself as internal (from the standpoint of the production of all commodities but labour-power) and external (from the standpoint ofthe production of labour-power) to necessary labour. Thus the objective conditions of the production-process which make possible the transformation of value into surplus-value not only appear, but are posited, as the result of surplus-value itself.<sup>120</sup> Consequently, ‘the particular forms which value…must adopt in order to realise itself anew, i.e. to posit itself as capital…are…only particular forms of surplus-labour itself.’<sup>121</sup> This is the framework through which the following passage must be read:\n\n<sup>116</sup> ‘Wage-labour always consists of paid and unpaid labour’ (Marx, Grundrisse, 574), and at the same time, ‘in wage-labour…even surplus-labour, or unpaid labour, appears as paid.’ (Marx, Capital 1, 680). <sup>117</sup> In other words, the commodification of labour-power chronologically precedes the labour-process, but the exchange of labour-power for the wage is only actual (the worker is only paid) after this process. <sup>118</sup> Ibid. 346. Marx’s statement that ‘capital did not invent surplus-labour’ (Ibid. 344) is misleading. It is true that within the corvée system ‘the necessary labour which the Wallachian peasant performs for his own maintenance is distinctly marked off from his surplus-labour on behalf of the boyar’ (Ibid. 346), but this surplus-labour is not just the unhidden predecessor of surplus-labour within capitalism, as Marx’s analysis of the working-day [der Arbeitstag] suggests. The various forms of feudal surpluslabour are fundamentally different from the kind of ‘surplus-labour’ which characterises capitalism. If anything, and just like the relation between abstract labour and labour in general, surplus-labour within capitalism is the condition of thinking ‘surplus-labour’ transhistorically. <sup>119</sup> Marx, Grundrisse, 324.\n\n<sup>120</sup> ‘…the values he [the capitalist] gave in that exchange [the wage for living labour capacity] were not values which he originally put into circulation out of his own funds; they were, rather, objectified alien labour which he appropriated without giving any equivalent whatsoever, and which he now reexchanges for alien living labour.’ Ibid. 457.\n\n125","previous_page":124,"next_page":126}