{"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":157,"pdf_page":161,"physical_index":161,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"fe214f789ab2aab29514b4d2ef80a9d1770d315d801045efad80f43269d39478"},"chapter":"Marx and the Concept of Historical Time","content":"What must be emphasised here is the fact that the quality of labour already contained in the means of production, and that being added to the production-process, is, as Marx articulates it, identical.<sup>70</sup> Each represent different quantities of this labour, but both involve the same kind of ‘general social labour’: abstract labour. Thus consequent to the commodification of labourpower, the objectivity of each, whether it has already been constituted or is still in the process of constituting itself, is structured by the purely social objectivity of the value-form. This is the objectivity being expressed here: the ‘ghost-like’ objectivity not just of value, but of value in an automatic state of process, neither of which are something like ‘the course sensuousness of matter’. Thus consequent to the commodification of labour-power, the objectivity of the present and the past, or, more precisely, the objectivity of the dialectic of the present and the past within the production-process of capital, is structured by the purely social objectivity of the value-form. This presents us with a crucial development on what has been a basic concern of this thesis: the temporality of the ongoing first historical act, the temporality that provides us with a possible basis of historical time. Insofar as there is a relationship between the social production of the means of human life and the production-process of capital, this, as should now be clear, is a relationship that is entirely mediated by the value-form: if capital constitutes a radically historicalising power, if its production constitutes the incessant production of new human needs, such that capital systematises human needs in ways unmatched (to date) by any other historical subject, then this is so because these new needs appear within the social form of value. But the ontological power that gives the temporality of the first historical act within capitalism its movement has now been potentially identified: the replacement of living labour by dead labour: the tendential replacement of living labour by the machine. This is, to be sure, a dialectical replacement: the replacement of the worker by the machine in one industry is the active creation – the active expansion – of living labour in other, new industries. Thus the past is not ‘replacing’ the present, but rather past labour is, within the present, within the dialectic of the present and the past, replacing present labour, and, in so doing, constituting the manifold expansion of the historical present. The constitutive power of the past is therefore not Sartre’s practical-inert, but rather the automation of dead labour. Sartre’s determination of the present by the past within the present (the practico-inert) cannot account for the immanent movement of this process (this also accounts for his recourse to the synchrony/diachrony model), whereas Marx’s determination of the present by the past within the present does: it gives us the reason (real subsumption spearheaded by machinery) why the production-process sets into motion a kind of historical time. The future – the historical future – is here animated as well: the telos underwritten by the production-process of capital is what gives the historical future its place within the ongoing, self-expanding, dialectic of the present and the past.\n\npresent in time, alive, then it can be present only as the living subject, in which it exists as capacity, as possibility; hence as worker.’ Marx, Grundrisse, 272. The crucial thing to keep in mind in this passage, as well as its counterpart in the Results of the Immediate Production-Process, is that, consequent to the commodification of labour-power, ‘living labour’, ‘non-objectified labour’ as well as ‘labour which is present in time’ (all of which mean the same thing), is labour subsumed by the valorisation-process. In other words, the worker may be a human being opposed to capital, but this ‘living subject’ is only a subject by virtue of being within the production-process.\n\n157","previous_page":156,"next_page":158}