{"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":146,"pdf_page":150,"physical_index":150,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"076ab41b227eda4563fb8fca46a288b98de30301ce34391699c41e243df97483"},"chapter":"Marx and the Concept of Historical Time","content":"Marx’s indebtedness to Kant and Hegel, as well as his critical departure from them, can be realised. On one level, the valorisation-process subsumes the labour-process in much the same way that subsumption functions in the Critique of Pure Reason: the labour-process is brought under the valorisation-process in such a way that the labour-process – as a sensible object of appearance – is transformed into an object of capital’s self-knowledge, thus authorising the universality and necessity of the valorisation-process. Despite Hegel’s protestations that such a grasping of subsumption ‘alters what is immediate…strip[s] away what is sensory, and lift[s] out the universal’<sup>37</sup>, this is precisely the point: capital is wholly indifferent to the particularities of the labour-process. This indifference marks the self-expansion of capital via the production of exchange-values: capital is predicated on the erasure of the concrete, sensual particularities of the labour-process. On another level, however, this erasure is at once the creation of these particularities. This is the deeply Hegelian dimension of Marx’s concept of subsumption: the dialectical manner though which the subsumption of the labour-process under the valorisationprocess is the logical and ontological creation of the particularities of the labour-process, such that, after the Logic, the universality of the concept – here the valorisation-process – inheres within these particularities. This is the syllogistic structure of capital from the standpoint of subsumption. Marx’s concept of subsumption thus represents a unique confrontation between Kant and Hegel’s conceptions of subsumption. Yet despite the fact that the Kantian aspect of Marx’s concept of subsumption is the most immediate and explicit dimension in Capital, it is ultimately the dialectical dimension – a dimension which proceeds from Hegel but critically restructures him at the same time – which grounds the uniqueness of this concept.\n\nThree points follow from this. First, Marx’s concept of subsumption confirms the sense in which the relation ontologically precedes the relatum: it is not as if one pre-existing thing (the valorisation-process) subsumes another (the labour-process). Rather, following the basic logic of totalisation and temporalisation, ‘subsumption’ denotes the active production of the relation between the valorisation-process and labour-process, and thereby the intelligibility of the difference between these processes. Second, this concept specifies the sense in which the labour-process is internal to the valorisation-process, and for this reason subsumption replaces the logic of ‘internalisation’ which, up to this point, has structured our comprehension of the relationship between concrete and abstract labour, and the relation between human needs and the needs of capital. However, and this should now be clear, subsumption is not simply another word for ‘internalisation’, but is rather a dialectic of interiorisation and exteriorisation. If, after Sartre, an exteriorised totality is reinteriorised through praxis, such that this reinteriorisation is at once ‘an interior negation of interiority’<sup>38</sup>, then we might transpose this to Marx and state that the interiorisation of the labour-process into the valorisation-process is at once the interior negation of the interiority of the valorisation-process. The erasure of the particularities of the labour-process is dialectically fastened to the expanding creation of these particularities. The difference, however, between Sartre and Marx is that, consequent to the commodification of labour-power, this dialectic must be understood as the self-creation of the valorisation-process itself (the valorisation-process externalises the labour-process within itself). This leads to the third and final point, one that signals the greatest critical departure from Hegel. Subsumption is, after Peter Osborne, what we might call an ‘actual abstraction’. As Osborne suggests, ‘once we divest ourselves of Hegel’s notion of an achieved absolute’ (as a side note: this is precisely the problem with Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, the reason why Hegel’s otherwise consistent commitment to the dialectical character of subsumption is lost in this work), then ‘analytically “good” abstraction, “concrete fullness of abstraction”, or the unity of the categorial forms of a systematic dialectic, may now correspond to practically “bad” abstraction: paradigmatically, in Marx’s analysis, domination by the abstractions of the value-form.’<sup>39</sup> In other words, once we recognise subsumption for what it is – a necessarily ongoing and open process – then the analytically ‘good’ dimension of subsumption – the manner in which the concrete fullness of the valorisation-process is constitutive of the particularities of the labour-process – may now correspond to the practically ‘bad’ dimension of subsumption – the erasure, consequent to the commodification of labour-power, of the particularities of the labour-process. However, as Osborne points out, ‘this kind of practically “bad” abstraction has a different logical form to the “one-sided” bad abstractions of the understanding, from which the discourse of good and bad abstractions derives.’<sup>40</sup> In other words, the subsumption of the labour-process under the valorisation-process (here in the sense that the latter ‘erases’ the concrete particularities of the former) is a ‘bad’ erasure immanent to a ‘good’ creation.\n\n<sup>37</sup> Ibid. 12 (§22).\n\n146","previous_page":145,"next_page":147}