{"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":147,"pdf_page":151,"physical_index":151,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"8a118d77f51b8dfdd2225407f5ca2b9f2ae9cab45b6b66787d80cf230b53c740"},"chapter":"Marx and the Concept of Historical Time","content":"This is the philosophical context in which the two forms of subsumption that constitute capitalism – formal subsumption and real subsumption – must be situated. For Marx, formal subsumption is ‘formal’ because it denotes the way in which capital ‘takes hold’ of the labourprocess without actually transforming the content of this process, whereas real subsumption is ‘real’ because capital actually transforms this process – it actually, and incessantly, recreates this process in order to increase the productivity of labour. Marx primarily makes use of formal subsumption in order to highlight how existing labour-processes are brought under the capital relation<sup>41</sup>, how, for instance, guild-labourers become wage-labourers without actually having the content of their labour-process transformed. Real subsumption, on the other hand, yields what Marx describes as the ‘specifically capitalist mode of production’. As is well-known, the production of surplus-value – the production of the difference and relation between necessary and surplus-labour – motors both formal and real subsumption alike: the valorisation-process subsumes the labour-process because capital needs to self-expand (to produce surplus-value). Accordingly, Marx directly ties the two different forms of subsumption to two different forms of the production of surplus-value, the analysis of which constitutes half of the first volume of Capital. Formal subsumption corresponds to the production of ‘absolute surplus-value’: the absolute extension of the working-day past the labour-time necessary to reproduce the owner of labour-power, whereas real subsumption corresponds to the production of ‘relative-surplus value’: the reduction of the labour-time necessary to reproduce the owner of labour-power and therefore the ‘corresponding alteration in the respective lengths of the two components of the working-day.’<sup>42</sup> Thus absolute surplus-value is ‘absolute’ as it involves the absolute extension of the time beyond that necessary to reproduce the worker, whereas relative surplus-value is ‘relative’ because the increase of surplus-labour-time is relative to the reduction of necessary labour-time, such that the working-day may stay at the same length, or even decrease. In short, formal subsumption, and the absolute surplus-value correlating to it, is an extensive process, whereas real subsumption, and the relative surplus-value that correlates to it, is an intensive process. However, as with the labour- and valorisation-process, it is not the difference between formal/real subsumption, and thus absolute/relative surplus-value, that ultimately concerns us, but rather the relations between them, because it is these relations which constitute, one might say, the ‘inner substance’ of the dialectic of the labour- and valorisation-process. Subsumption is, for Marx, a dialectical category: it registers how the valorisation-process both internalises and externalises – within itself – the labour-process, but this does not mean that the relations between formal and real subsumption are dialectical relations. Unto themselves, formal and real subsumption can be understood as dialectical processes, insofar as each express different forms of the relation between the labour- and valorisation-process, but there is, in Marx, no such thing as ‘the dialectic of formal and real subsumption’ (nor is there a ‘dialectic of absolute and relative surplus-value’). However, this takes nothing away from the need to uncover the relations between formal and real subsumption, as well as those between absolute and relative surplus-value, because they constitute the internal engine of the production-process of capital more generally.\n\n<sup>38</sup> Sartre, CDR 1, 57.\n\n<sup>39</sup> Peter Osborne, ‘The reproach of abstraction’, Radical Philosophy 127 (September/October 2004), 27. <sup>40</sup> Ibid.\n\n147","previous_page":146,"next_page":148}