{"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":155,"pdf_page":159,"physical_index":159,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"e6279082da0d8fb1c7d07af3939e398885cae3678218a0bddd3839ef22f3d2f2"},"chapter":"Marx and the Concept of Historical Time","content":"4.1.2 Automation\n\nWe are now in a position to establish how the production-process of capital gives rise to the materialist concept of history, to establish, that is to say, the fundamental relation between the production of surplus-value and Marx’s modern, post-Enlightenment conception of history. If the expansion of human needs is the essence of this concept, and if the expansion of capital is the historical-ontological ground of understanding the expansion of human needs as ‘history’, then the subsumption of the labour-process by the valorisation-process is not only the material expression of capital’s need to self-expand, but the relation that makes the category of history possible. If, in what follows, the valorisation-process is prioritised over the labour-process and real subsumption is prioritised over formal subsumption – both of which we must do – this is not because the valorisation-process is in any way ‘independent’ of the labour-process, or that real subsumption somehow ‘replaces’ formal subsumption, but because Marx singles out the valorisation-process and real subsumption as the truly ‘capitalist’ features of the productionprocess of capital. To secure capital as the condition of thinking history is to stress the defining features of the valorisation-process and real subsumption. Two features in particular stand out, the investigation of which guides the next two sections. The first of these is automation.\n\nThe discourse of automation is shot through Marx’s critique of political economy from the Grundrisse onwards. Broadly speaking, the real subsumption of the labour-process by the valorisation-process is grounded by the transformation of objectified labour, or more precisely the transformation of the means of production, into capital itself: ‘Within the framework of capitalist production this ability of objectified labour to transform itself into capital, i.e. to transform the means of production into the means of controlling and exploiting living labour, appears as something utterly appropriate to them…as inseparable from them and hence as a quality attributable to them as things, as use-values, as means of production.’<sup>64</sup> In this regard, the means of production become – as a quality unto themselves – defined by movement (as opposed to being static objects put into motion by an external force), and thus human beings are no longer the subjects whose labour animates objects in order to satisfy human needs. Real subsumption inverts this relation: ‘…at the level of material production, of the life-process in the realm of the social – for that is what the production-process is – we find the same situation that we find in religion at the ideological level, namely the inversion of subject into object and vice versa.’<sup>65</sup> Real subsumption and its most developed material expression – machinery – is that wherein the ‘motion and the activity of the instrument of labour asserts its independence vis-a-vis the worker’, such that ‘the instrument of labour now becomes an industrial form of perpetual motion.’<sup>66</sup> With this inversion of subject and object, this automatisation of the means of production themselves, comes a radical restructuring of the relationship between material production and ‘life’. The labour-process in capitalism can still – because it must – be grasped as yielding the means of human life, but only insofar as this process, and with it human need, serves the needs of the valorisation-process. In other words, if the dialectic of the labour- and valorisation-process constitutes the manifold expansion and diversification of human needs, this is because human needs are inessential to this dialectic: ‘the production in enormous mass quantities which is posited with machinery destroys every connection of the product with the direct need of the producer, and hence with direct use-value; it is already posited in the form of the product’s production and in the relations in which it is produced that it is produced only as a conveyor of value, and its use-value only as condition to that end.’<sup>67</sup> From the standpoint of the production-process of capital, human life is thus superfluous. It exists in an exterior and purely negative relation to the life of capital, since ‘the worker consumes his provisions during pauses in the labour-process, whereas the machine consumes what is essential to it while it is still functioning.’<sup>68</sup> The life of capital, ‘the life-process of the social’, is its self-produced need to be already always in motion.\n\n<sup>64</sup> Marx, Capital 1, 988-89.\n\n<sup>65</sup> Marx, Resultate des unmittelbaren Produktionsprozesses, 20 (Marx, Capital 1, 990).\n\n155","previous_page":154,"next_page":156}