{"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":152,"pdf_page":156,"physical_index":156,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"24557324c99dddd8cf19e1ac632ef3ff61bca7b125c4d5e1adbbf31d3dfb6281"},"chapter":"Marx and the Concept of Historical Time","content":"Jameson’s recent rereading of the first volume of Capital, and illustrates the way in which he uses the category of subsumption to substantiate his theory that the first volume of Capital is essentially about unemployment:\n\nThis particular Marxian “law” – “in proportion as capital accumulates, the situation of the worker, be his payment high or low, must grow worse” (Capital 1, 799) – was the object of much mockery during the affluent post-war 1950s and 1960s. It is today no longer a joking matter. Along with Marx’s intimations of globalisation, these analyses seem to renew the actuality today of Capital on a world scale. In another sense they designate a stage of “subsumption” in which the extra-economic or social no longer lies outside capital and economics but has been absorbed into it: so that being unemployed or without economic function is no longer to be expelled from capital but to remain within it. Where everything has been subsumed under capitalism, there is no longer anything outside it; and the unemployed – or here the destitute, the paupers – are as it were employed by capital to be unemployed; they fulfil an economic function by way of their very non-functioning (even if they are not paid to do so).<sup>58</sup>\n\nThe second passage comes from Antonio Negri’s 1981 essay ‘The Constitution of Time’, and, echoing Camatte, encapsulates what Negri later calls ‘the phase of the total subsumption of society.’<sup>59</sup>\n\n[with real subsumption] use-value cannot appear except under the guise of exchangevalue. There is no longer an external vantage point upon which use-value can depend…Real subsumption means the complete realisation of the law of value...social labour covers all the time of life, and invests all of its regions...the entire time of life has become the time of production.<sup>60</sup>\n\nThese passages can be critiqued on a number of different fronts. The opposition which Jameson establishes between the ‘economic’ and the ‘social’, such that we can ‘designate a stage of “subsumption” in which the extra-economic or social no longer lies outside capital and economics but has been absorbed into it’, is to miss the essential point that, for Marx, the economic is a category of the social, that, as Chapter 1 illustrates, the ‘economic’ is, after The German Ideology, synonymous with the social production of the means of life, and thus the historical meaning of the human as an essentially social being.<sup>61</sup> We must also draw attention to Jameson’s conflation of ‘capital’ and ‘capitalism’, leading to statements such as ‘everything has been subsumed under capitalism’ (capital is the comprehensive, the predominant, subject of capitalism, not its exclusive subject). Negri’s argument that ‘there is no longer an external vantage point upon which use-value can depend’ is also, as the previous chapter demonstrates, to miss the historical specificity of the category of use-value. Disregarding for the moment the question of whether it is even possible to speak of a ‘historical phase’ of formal as opposed to real subsumption, the idea that there was once, within capitalism, a moment wherein use-value had such an ‘external’ vantage point is to forget the fact that, within capitalism, use-value has always only appeared ‘under the guise of exchange-value’, that use-value only stands opposed to exchange-value within the value-form. But what needs to be stressed here, a point that these critiques orbit around but do not directly confront, is the manner in which Camatte, Jameson and, most of all, Negri do not just presume what needs to be explained, but do so even as they invoke the very category which allows us to explain what needs to be explained. To be more direct: they reveal, albeit unintentionally and unconsciously, that there is an ontologically and epistemologically basic relationship between the subsumption of labour under capital and the production of historical time, and, furthermore, that the category of totalisation is what first allows us to uncover this relationship. Put differently, their primary problem is not their desire (something that Marx would certainly not endorse) to extend the scope of subsumption beyond the production-process of capital – to ‘everything’ (Jameson), or to ‘the entire time of life’ (Negri) – a desire which does little less but conflate the basic difference between capital and capitalism, or more specifically the difference between the production-process of capital and social reproduction more generally.<sup>62</sup> Nor is the primary problem their desire to create distinct, chronological historical stages corresponding to formal and then real subsumption, a desire that dismisses the constant interplay within capitalism, from its start, between these two forms of subsumption. These are significant problems that threaten to jettison the very intelligibility of Marx’s work, but, in the end, they point towards an even more fundamental problem: the failure to recognise that the intelligibility of history hinges on what conception of ‘totalisation guides it. Simply put, the totalisation that guides Camatte’s ‘total subsumption of labour under capital’, as well as Negri’s ‘total subsumption of society’, is the vulgar meaning of totalisation: a totalising process whose unidirectional advance contains, within itself, the possibility of its own ‘completion’ (and wherein real subsumption becomes, whether Negri intends this or not, synonymous with the (chronological) ‘end’ of history).<sup>63</sup> To this understanding of totalisation corresponds the vulgar meaning of temporalisation, whose historical register is well-known: the linear and irreversible understanding of time whose custodian is of course chronology. Yet the problem is not, strictly speaking, chronology as such, but rather the fact that this model of historical time only expresses what must be explained: historical time is ‘historical’ by virtue of the fact that it appears as a self-expanding time, or, in other words, that historical time is historical time because it expands of its own accord. The ordinary understanding of historical time registers this, but it does so in a way that the origins of self-expansion are disguised (this is why it is the dominant model of historical time). In merely reproducing the ordinary concept of historical time, Camatte, Jameson and Negri cannot explain what their accounts implicitly rely on: ‘history’ as, in and for itself, the perpetual movement of self-expansion. This despite the fact, and ironically, that it is precisely Marx’s analysis of the subsumption of labour under capital which allows us to account for this. It is not a closed and completed totality that makes this possible, but rather a totalisation which is by definition open and incomplete, whose unity, as should now be evident, is the very process of its differentiation. In short, it is the ongoing dialectic between the labour- and valorisation-process, as previously characterised – the very dialectic that Camatte, Jameson and Negri neglect – that constitutes the condition of thinking the self-expansion of historical time. Subsumption is a historical category, not because it is a periodising – or even a historicising – category, but because it is historicalising category: it is a category which registers the very constitution of history itself.\n\n<sup>58</sup> Frederic Jameson, Representing Capital: a Commentary on Volume One (London and New York: Verso, 2011), 71.\n\n<sup>59</sup> Antonio Negri, ‘Twenty Theses on Marx: Interpretation of the Class Situation Today’, in Marxism Beyond Marxism, ed. Saree Makdisi, Cesare Casarino and Rebecca E. Karl (New York: Routledge, 1996), 159.\n\n<sup>60</sup> Antonio Negri, ‘The Constitution of Time’ [1981], in Time for Revolution, trans. Matteo Mandarini (London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013), 25-9.\n\n152","previous_page":151,"next_page":153}