{"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":159,"pdf_page":163,"physical_index":163,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"e790de570520273f3bf0d2047f0081fa6576afff35ecdee286cfbfb5fa77657e"},"chapter":"Marx and the Concept of Historical Time","content":"This passage reconfirms much of what has already been established in relation to the dialectic of the labour- and valorisation-process: (1) there is a totalising relation between these processes (the valorisation-process in this passage can be comprehended as based on a ‘system of machinery’), such that the labour-process is a mere ‘organ’ of the machine (this reproduces the relation between concrete and abstract labour as depicted in the previous chapter); (2) the machine – not the worker – is what ‘animates’ the production-process of capital; and thus (3) what gives ‘life’ to the production-process is capital’s need to be in perpetual motion, not the human being (which needs to rest). But what must now be raised and commented on here is the possibility that this passage registers a basic shift – if not a structural realignment – within the fabric of capitalism itself. More precisely, this is the possibility that the automatic system of machinery displaces what had up to the introduction of this system defined capitalism as a mode of production. More than anyone else, Negri most forcefully expresses this position. His direct commentary on this passage, first presented in his seminars in the spring of 1978 at the École Normale Supérieure, conforms to his reading of real subsumption in ‘The Constitution of Time’: the system of machinery does not just reduce the labour-process to ‘a simple element of the process of valorisation’<sup>72</sup>, but extends the production-process into society as such. Thus for Negri, ‘real subsumption of labour can’t but be (in the same moment) real subsumption of society. Of society, in other words of the productive social forces, especially of science…the moment arrives when the whole system is displaced and advances.’<sup>73</sup> We have previously outlined the problems with the notion of ‘the total subsumption of society’ and do not need to restate them again. However, we have yet to consider what, for Negri, is the overall practical consequence of this subsumption: the displacement of the ‘law of value’ itself, such that real subsumption constitutes the abolition of labour-time as the measure of value. As Negri asserts, provocatively, in ‘The Constitution of Time’: ‘in the displacement produced by the realisation of subsumption, the unitary paradigm of time-as-measure of value is smashed. Subsumption generates a completely enveloping temporal Umwelt that dissolves the possibility of measure.’<sup>74</sup> Simply put, this is the fundamental axis around which Negri’s reading of Marx in this period unfolds (which, to date, Negri has not abandoned<sup>75</sup>). We might summarise it in this way<sup>76</sup>: up to the ‘stage’ of real subsumption, the capacity of time to measure value was based on the externality of use-value to exchange-value. This is because (1) the reduction of all kinds of labour to ‘simple average labour’, and the time corresponding to this reduction (e.g. socially necessary labour-time, the time of exchange-value, the time of measure) was, as Marx puts it, ‘established by a social process that goes on behind the backs of the producers’<sup>77</sup>; and thus (2) ‘time-as-measure’ was determined by the domain external to production: the domain of usevalue. In this sense, use-value was the external catalyst that made the time of exchange-value possible: ‘the measure of exchange-value is determined from outside…by temporal quantities founded on use-value.’<sup>78</sup> However, with the advent of real, or ‘total’, subsumption, use-value is completely (i.e. non-dialectically) internalised and redefined by exchange-value, rendering different labours irreducible to ‘simple average labour’, and hence the time of measure a ‘pure and simple tautology’<sup>79</sup>, a time that, without an external standpoint from which it is measured, becomes its own measure. ‘Social labour’ is thus no longer intelligible in relation to the ‘social labour-time’ Marx presents us with, but becomes a form of labour wherein ‘the totality of life’ and ‘the totality of time from which this life is woven’ are indistinguishable.<sup>80</sup> Time can no longer be presented as measure, but ‘must rather be presented as the global phenomenological fabric, as base, substance and flow of production in its entirety.’<sup>81</sup> The production-process of capital is now synonymous with the production of society as a whole, whereby the exploitation that the value-form previously expressed becomes ‘pure and simple command.’<sup>82</sup>\n\n<sup>71</sup> Marx, Grundrisse der Kritik der politischen Ökonomie, 592-93 (Grundrisse, 692-93). There is a counterpart to this passage, in the 1861-63 Manuscripts, which captures the automation within the other aspects of real subsumption: cooperation and the division of labour. In this passage, Marx stresses the manner in which the worker becomes the ‘exclusive life-process’ of one of the multiple ‘monosyllabic’ processes involved in the production of a commodity, such that ‘the overall production-process of a single commodity appears now as a combined operation, a complex of many operations, all of which complement each other independently, and can be carried out simultaneously alongside each other.’ Indeed, it is for Marx simultaneity [Gleichzeitigkeit] that is the defining temporal feature of cooperation and the division of labour. With real subsumption, the multiple processes that yield a commodity no longer ‘follow each other in chronological sequence’, but are simultaneously undertaken, such that ‘the complementarity of the different processes is here transferred from the future to the present, whereby a commodity which is begun at one side is finished at the other.’ Marx, Economic Manuscripts of 1861- 63, 277-78.\n\n<sup>72</sup> Negri, Marx Beyond Marx, 142.\n\n<sup>73</sup> Ibid. Therefore ‘the subsumption of society has become the production of that same society. The displacement is total…at this stage, the capitalist appropriation of society is total.’ Ibid. 142-43.\n\n159","previous_page":158,"next_page":160}