{"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":150,"pdf_page":154,"physical_index":154,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"f41d2f528323ef94b62f56c2d0fe512e4b5b9275b1a4bcfba07fc34a9aefc796"},"chapter":"Marx and the Concept of Historical Time","content":"As this passage shows, real, not formal, subsumption is the realisation of ‘social labour within capitalism. This social labour is spurred by the competition between individual capitals: organisational and technological innovation is driven by the desire of individual capitalists to sell – if only momentarily – commodities at an ‘individual value’ below that of their existing social value (innovation, particularly new machinery, is unevenly introduced within the same industry and across different industries). In the end, however, the idea that formal subsumption ‘precedes’ its real counterpart, that the former is simply the ‘premise and precondition’ of the latter, is not a convincing framework with which to understand their relationship. In fact, it is misleading. This is not just because ‘from one standpoint the distinction between absolute and relative surplus-value appears to be illusory.’<sup>47</sup> More fundamentally, this is because, logically as well as materially, the relationship between formal and real subsumption must be grasped as a mutually constitutive relationship, an interplay, or continual crossing-over, from one form to another, or what Tomba calls the ‘reciprocal co-penetration between absolute surplus-value and relative surplus-value.’<sup>48</sup> Real subsumption is both the logical and material premise and precondition of formal subsumption (as much as the reverse). The introduction of machinery in one branch of industry not only ‘prolong[s] the labour-time of those workers who continue to work with the old, imperfect means of production,’<sup>49</sup> it is also ‘the most powerful means of lengthening the working day beyond all natural limits in those industries first directly seized on by it.’<sup>50</sup> There is simply no ‘replacement’ of formal subsumption by real subsumption: the valorisation-process subsumes the labour-process because it relies, from the start, on the coexistence and interplay between formal and real subsumption. Real subsumption ‘is logically implicit in the concept of capital’<sup>51</sup>, and for this reason cannot be comprehended as something which chronologically succeeds formal subsumption. This does not excuse us from granting a certain priority to real subsumption/relative surplus-value over formal subsumption/absolute surplus-value. The former constitute the ‘specifically capitalist mode of production’: they are what allows capitalist production to ‘[establish] itself as a mode of production sui generis and [bring] into being a new mode of material production’<sup>52</sup> (it is, as we will see, real subsumption which ultimately is at the base of the possibility of establishing capital as constitutive of a new mode of history sui generis). Real subsumption – not formal subsumption – is the reason why, as the passage quoted above illustrates, the capitalist social productive forces of labour come into being and expand. Real subsumption – not formal subsumption – is the reason why ‘the socially productive power of labour develops as a free gift to capital…and appears as a power which capital possesses by its nature – a productive power inherent in capital.’<sup>53</sup> And yet, only the ongoing interplay between these two forms of subsumption gives rise to the self-expansion of capital; only this interplay, as we will now begin to examine in more detail, registers capital as a totalising, temporalising and thus historicalising dialectic. Taken together, formal and real subsumption constitute the material processes through which capital’s need to self-expand is actualised. These processes are crucial to our understanding of history and historical time. Yet in order to secure how capital, qua subsumption, relates to history, we must first consider how it does not. That is, we must first consider how subsumption is often situated in a historically totalising and temporalising framework that does little else but presume, and thereby obscure, how capital, time and history structure one another.\n\n<sup>47</sup> Ibid. 646. For Marx, ‘relative surplus-value is absolute, because it requires the absolute prolongation of the working day beyond the labour-time necessary to the existence of the worker himself. Absolute surplus-value is relative, because it requires a development of the productivity of labour which will allow the necessary labour-time to be restricted to a portion of the working day.’ Ibid.\n\n<sup>48</sup> Tomba, Marx’s Temporalities, 155. As Tomba states, it is because of this reciprocal co-penetration that ‘the distinction between the North and South of the world, between First, Second and Third World, …between centre, semi-periphery and periphery, and the concomitant typology of advanced or backward capitalisms, loses any meaning.’ Ibid. 155-56.\n\n<sup>49</sup> Marx, Economic Manuscripts of 1861-63, 327-28.\n\n<sup>50</sup> Marx, Capital 1, 526.\n\n<sup>51</sup> Arthur, The New Dialectic and Marx’s Capital, 76.\n\n<sup>52</sup> Marx, Capital 1, 1035.\n\n150","previous_page":149,"next_page":151}