{"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":161,"pdf_page":165,"physical_index":165,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"548426405b263118023ee87e9511dad95ffc864acf113333fb4059b96055c888"},"chapter":"Marx and the Concept of Historical Time","content":"This account of real subsumption and the end of labour-time as measure is, at least on Marx’s own terms, utterly confused. The notion that use-value constitutes a domain ‘external’ to production, and thereby the ‘external origin of the measure of time’<sup>83</sup>, points to the defining limit of Negri’s work: the complete lack of an analysis of commodification, specifically the complete lack of an analysis of the commodification of labour-power.<sup>84</sup> This lack has the fatal effect of removing the dialectic of concrete and abstract labour, and hence the dialectic of the labour- and valorisation-process, from his analysis. And this dovetails with his attempt to yoke real subsumption to a stagist ‘before’/‘after’ framework. Taken to its logical conclusion, this reading of real subsumption has the peculiar quality of removing the dialectic of the labourand valorisation-process from its purview, whilst at the same time announcing that, with the advent of real subsumption, this dialectic has come to its rational end, having been reduced to a non-dialectical tautology. This brings us back to the earlier cited passage from the ‘Fragment on Machines’. The reason why such attention is being paid to Negri’s reading of subsumption, why his critique of the labour theory of value has been detailed to the extent that is has, is that this reading and critique possess another peculiar quality: they effectively, and one might state self-consciously, express the idea that the automation at the heart of the production-process of capital is synonymous with the automatic expansion of capital. That is to say, Negri effectively claims that, because of real subsumption, the production-process of capital is in-itself and as such automatic. Capital expands of its own accord: the production and reproduction of capita is wholly self-sufficient.<sup>85</sup> In Negri’s world, this does not remove antagonism and exploitation from the picture (indeed, it intensifies them<sup>86</sup>), but it does dictate that they no longer bear any rational relation to the commodification of labour-power. On Negri’s terms, the function of this commodification is pure irrationality; its function is – at best – an ‘empty, miserable base of exploitation.’<sup>87</sup> (If Negri removes the dialectic of the labour- and valorisation-process from his analysis in order to announce its rational end (chronologically), and thus its irrational end (teleologically), this is because he has already made this move with the commodification of labour-power). And yet what Negri’s account obscures is that, for Marx, the commodification of labour-power not only makes real subsumption, and thus automation within the productionprocess, possible, but dictates that real subsumption remains bound to the production-process (it does not extend to ‘society’ writ large). What this account obscures is that, for Marx, after Hegel, automation is an appearance [Erscheinung], the necessary appearance of an ‘essential relation’ between necessary and surplus-labour (an essential relation underwritten by the real subsumption of labour under capital and the production of relative surplus-value). As such an appearance (as opposed to a mere illusion [Schein]), automation simultaneously (1) expresses the fact that, consequent to the commodification of labour-power and the real subsumption of labour, there is an inversion of subject and object, that machinery does displace the human as the subject of the production-process, thereby re-transforming this process into an ‘automatic system’; but it equally (2) conceals the fact that ‘surplus-value does not arise from the labourpower that has been replaced by the machinery, but from the labour-power actually employed in working with the machinery.’<sup>88</sup> In other words, automation is real, the machine is perpetual motion (so long as it is turned on and functioning properly), and, at the same time, automation is an illusion, because it generates the (false) appearance that the production of surplus-value is itself automatic, as if this production were not dependent on the commodification, and hence use, of labour-power. In opposition to Negri, the essential point here is that real subsumption constitutes the incessant entrenchment of labour-time’s function as the measure of value, not its displacement, and that this is directly tied to real subsumption transforming capital into an ‘automatic subject’<sup>89</sup> [ein automatisches Subjekt] (a necessary dimension of capital’s function as the ‘comprehensive subject’ of capitalism). Thus inasmuch as Marx, drawing on Goethe’s Faust, suggests that capital acts ‘as if consumed by love’<sup>90</sup>, that the valorisation-process is an ‘animated monster’ that works ‘as if its body were by love possessed’<sup>91</sup>, we must never lose sight of the fact that automation only exists because of the commodification of labour-power. Automation is an actual appearance of this commodification, an animation whose self-motion appears because real subsumption is its animator.\n\n<sup>81</sup> Negri, ‘The Constitution of Time’, 29.\n\n<sup>82</sup> As Negri puts it the 1978 lectures: ‘…when the theory of value cannot measure itself by a quantity of labour-time or by an individual dimension of labour, when a first displacement leads it to confront social time and the collective dimension of labour, at this moment the impossibility of measuring exploitation modifies the form of exploitation. The emptiness that appears in the theory of value, the evacuation of any element of measure which is not a generic reference to social industriousness, the liberation of social industriousness and its constitution in collective individuality, does not suppress the law of value but reduces it to a mere formality. Of course, formality does not mean a lack of efficacy. Formality does not mean a lack of meaning. The form of the law of value is, on the contrary, efficient and full of meaning, but efficacy and meaning are given to it only by its irrationality, by the end of the progressive and rationalising function of exploitation. The form is the empty, miserable base of exploitation. The form of value is pure and simple command, the pure and simple form of politics – of the “essential inessentiality”, as the young Marx would say in Hegelian terms. We are here at the culminating point of a process in which the power relations – rationally established – regulated and included within the development of capital – are reversed. Where the relation of rationality inverts itself. The inversion is total.’ Negri, Marx Beyond Marx, 147-48.\n\n<sup>83</sup> Negri, ‘The Constitution of Time’, 27.\n\n<sup>84</sup> The ‘use-value of labour-power’ features in the translator’s – Matteo Mandarini’s – introduction to ‘The Constitution of Time’, but it is nowhere to be found in Negri’s work itself. See Negri, Time for Revolution, 11. Mandarini reproduces Negri’s basic misunderstanding of labour-power when he claims that ‘the labour theory of value demanded that labour-power existed, in some sense, outside capital (outside its disciplinary regime) and needed to be drawn in.’ Ibid.\n\n161","previous_page":160,"next_page":162}