{"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":180,"pdf_page":184,"physical_index":184,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"b6344d53a5b38cd88c3069a638d577b668696006d213fb23e172cd2bcd5d7317"},"chapter":"Marx and the Concept of Historical Time","content":"A final note about violence [Gewalt]. Violence is of course pivotal to Marx’s analysis of originary accumulation and what should be understood as its ‘comprehensive subject’: the modern, bourgeois state. In short, for Marx, the violence of originary accumulation ‘is itself an economic power [ökonomische Potenz].’<sup>153</sup> However, for our purposes, capital’s peculiar de-historicalising power – that is, the dialectic of historicalisation and de-historicalisation to which capital gives rise – must be understood through its essential ontological relation to the systematic violence which is originary accumulation. This returns us to the logic with which Marx’s – and this section’s – analysis of originary accumulation begins: again, the seemingly seamless, and self-expanding, circle whereby the accumulation of capital presupposes surplusvalue, surplus-value presupposes capitalist production, and capitalist production presupposes the accumulation of capital. We have, after Marx, now broken this circle, exposed the basis – the originary accumulation – upon which this circle depends and (here diverting from Marx) reproduces. What must now be considered is, first, the essential place of violence within this circle and thus, second, the essential place of violence in relation to the production of historical time. What the violence of originary accumulation first (and to this day<sup>154</sup>) enables is the fact that capital proceeds as if [als ob] labour-power can always be commodified, which is to say that capital not only proceeds as if labour-power is a readymade commodity, but moreover as if it directly produces labour-power as its own commodity (this is its utter indifference to the production of the means of human life). This is because the violence of originary accumulation is not just the presupposition of the circularity of capital, but its hidden, its secret, or, better, its expelled, presupposition: violence is the presupposition of capitalist accumulation precisely because it is immediately effaced by capital as its constitutive presupposition. As Jason Read expresses it: ‘poised as it were at the point of transformation, the moment of violence almost disappears in its execution…the violence of primitive accumulation is immediately justified within and by the new order that it constitutes.’<sup>155</sup> The violence of originary accumulation is, in other words, immediately foreclosed by the production-process of capital, a foreclosure that secures and is secured by the fetishism of the commodity-form. As Read shows, this leads to a transformation of violence itself – ‘the emergence of a new type of violence’ – one that not only registers the fact that ‘the sporadic and excessive feudal forms of violence pass into the universality of law’<sup>156</sup> (into the universality, in Marx’s words, ‘of state-power [Staatsmacht], the concentrated and organised violence of society’<sup>157</sup>), but also into ‘the quotidian relations that are the effects and cause of the law’<sup>158</sup>, which is to say the everyday life of the productionprocess of capital.<sup>159</sup>\n\n<sup>150</sup> ‘I call this the fetishism which attaches itself to the products of labour as soon as they are produced as commodities, and is therefore inseparable from the production of commodities.’ Marx, Capital 1, 165.\n\n<sup>151</sup> Ibid. 164-65.\n\n<sup>152</sup> Balibar, ‘Elements for a Theory of Transition’, 283.\n\n180","previous_page":179,"next_page":181}