{"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":127,"pdf_page":131,"physical_index":131,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"a059aef139c2e075b1ddc0c6e69dca06d0a703231af0acac7e37ce24b70364cd"},"chapter":"Marx and the Concept of Historical Time","content":"The doubled relation between necessary and surplus-labour fundamentally disrupts, and in so doing reworks, this philosophy of the limit. It is therefore impossible to map this doubled relation as a doubled relation between the ‘something’ and ‘other’ in Hegel’s Logic. From the standpoint of all commodities but labour-power, it is true that the labour necessary to produce labour-power stands as the limit of surplus-labour, insofar as the latter is finite because of the former, and strives to transcend the former. And it is also true that surplus-labour realises this transcendence, if only ever as a ‘bad infinity’ [Schlecht-Unendliche]: an infinity entangled, to use Hegel’s words, in an ‘alternating determination’<sup>128</sup> with the labour necessary to produce labour-power. Therefore, the possibility of the infinite expansion of capital exists, but only as ‘infinite expansion within limits’<sup>129</sup>. Or, ‘the movement of capital is…limitless’<sup>130</sup>, but only insofar as the formal circuit M–C–M’ contains material production (‘…P…’) within it.<sup>131</sup> However, these assertions represent the reach of any kind of ‘homology’ between Hegel and Marx’s concept of the limit. From the standpoint of every commodity but labour-power, it is not enough to declare that surplus-labour has quality because its limit is the labour necessary to produce labour-power. And this is not because surplus-labour posits this necessary labour as its limit in spite of itself (this is consistent with the Logic). The basic issue, rather, is that this necessary labour is unfree to posit its own limit. From the standpoint of every commodity, surplus-labour is not the self-posited, but the imposed, limit of the labour necessary to produce labour-power. Thus it is not only necessary labour as such, but the capitalist limit itself, which exists as a ‘living contradiction’. For the production of every commodity except labour-power, the barrier is a limit which the labour necessary to reproduce labour-power not just ought but must transcend, and transcend, furthermore, as the labour necessary to produce every other commodity. For the reproduction of labour-power, two points can be made. First, the barrier is a limit that necessary labour not just ought not but must not transcend, simply because this non-transcendence is the condition of the creation of surplus-labour. This barrier may ‘always in principle be overcome’<sup>132</sup>, but given the regulatory power of the wage-form and the labour market, is in practice rarely overcome, and when it is, only ever momentarily. Second, this suggests that the limit of the labour necessary to reproduce labour-power is effectively a limit without barriers: an entirely unsurpassable limit. From the standpoint of the reproduction of labour-power, there is nothing but absolute separation between necessary and surplus-labour: ‘for the worker, the capitalist mode of production is alienation as unsurpassable ontological condition…the point at which the circulation of capital makes its dialectical turn for its return trip laden with surplus-value is the point of the expropriation of labour-power, which for the worker is a point of absolute and pure loss: no supersession or sublation here, merely a really bad infinity that is therefore not dialectical at all.’<sup>133</sup> In this regard, and to return to the previous chapter, we might suggest that capital temporalises through two different, but interdependent, forms of ‘being-towards-the-limit’, wherein surplus-labour is, necessarily and simultaneously, the surpassable and unsurpassable limit. Therefore, we might state that from the standpoint of temporalisation, Marx is in equal parts Hegelian and Heideggerian.\n\n<sup>124</sup> Hegel, The Science of Logic, 126.\n\n<sup>125</sup> Ibid. 127.\n\n<sup>126</sup> Ibid. 129.\n\n<sup>127</sup> ‘Something’s own limit thus posited by it as a negative which is at the same time essential, is not merely limit as such, but barrier. But what is posited as negated is not barrier alone; the negation is two-edged, since what is posited by it as negated is the limit, and this is in general what is common to both something and other, and is also a determinateness of the in-itselfof the determination as such. This in-itself, therefore, as the negative relation to its limit (which is also distinguished from it), to itself as barrier, is the ought.’ Ibid 132. This translation has been altered to render Schranke as ‘barrier’ rather than ‘limitation’.\n\n<sup>128</sup> Ibid. 138.\n\n<sup>129</sup> Peter Osborne, ‘A sudden topicality: Marx, Nietzsche and the politics of crisis’, Radical Philosophy 160 (March/April 2010), 21.\n\n<sup>130</sup> Marx, Capital 1, 253.\n\n<sup>131</sup> Chris Arthur describes ‘…P…’ as the ‘“black box”…that lies at the heart of capital, and which it must manage materially, and not just formally.’ Christopher J. Arthur, ‘The Problem of Use-Value for a Dialectic of Capital’, in New Dialectics and Political Economy, ed. Robert Albritton and John Simoulidis (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 137.\n\n127","previous_page":126,"next_page":128}