{"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":98,"pdf_page":102,"physical_index":102,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"9fd930bbad83ccc33bbaa91ce97c1353945a69dc1f7bbd3c03eea0ed0051e287"},"chapter":"Marx and the Concept of Historical Time","content":"The underlying concern of this chapter – in fact the rest of this thesis – is the fate of the materialist concept of history, and hence the fate of Heidegger and Sartre’s contribution to our temporal understanding of this concept, in the wake of Marx’s critique of political economy from the late 1850s onwards, which is to say from the Grundrisse onwards. In what ways does this critique problematise the transhistoricality of the materialist concept of history? In what ways does it force us to rethink ‘transhistoricality’ in Marx more generally? If labour and need are the two essential categories at the heart of the materialist concept of history, in what sense does this critique modify our understanding of these categories, our understanding, that is, of how labour and need temporalise and historicalise? This chapter concentrates on the category of labour, whereas the following chapter will, in light of what is demonstrated in this chapter, thematise the category of need. So what becomes of Marx’s category of labour in the wake of his critique of political economy? How does this critique transform the category of ‘labour in general’, the transhistorical category which, one might state, registers the ontological basis of the totalisation and temporalisation of history? We must address these questions because, and contrary to some readings of Marx, ‘human labour in general’ [menschliche Arbeit überhaupt] does not fall out of his critique of political economy. In actual fact, labour in general is at the forefront of this critique, albeit in ways which radically alter the scope and critical function of this category in both the 1844 Manuscripts as well as The German Ideology. This is because, this chapter argues, Marx’s critique of political economy introduces a concept without which labour in general cannot be thought, a concept which is the historically specific (to capitalism) condition of thinking this category. In short, this concept is Marx’s concept of ‘abstract human labour’ [abstrakt menschliche Arbeit], a concept that is a cornerstone of his concept of capital and that is the central focus of this chapter. To suggest that abstract labour is the condition of conceiving ‘labour in general’ does not mean that capital is ‘a necessary feature of the human labour-process as such, irrespective of the historical forms it has assumed’<sup>3</sup>, but it does mean that we cannot conceptualise this process, nor the historical forms it assumes, in isolation from the totalising and temporalising power of capital.\n\nAs controversial as it may be to declare this, this chapter proceeds from the premise that Capital readily demonstrates that abstract labour is the condition of thinking labour in general. ‘Labour in general’ is an epistemological consequence of the commodity exchange relation in capitalism, an exchange relation that both constitutes and is constituted by the ‘value-forming substance’: abstract labour. Hence when Marx asserts that ‘the equality and equivalence of all kinds of labour because and insofar as they are human labour in general’ is predicated on ‘the dominant social relation…[being]…the relation between men as possessors of commodities’<sup>4</sup>, this does not mean that, consequent to the establishment of a generalised system of commodity exchange (capitalism), abstract labour emerges as the ‘historically specific’ form of an already existing – transhistorical – labour in general, but rather that something like ‘labour in general becomes, for the first time in history, intelligible because capitalism creates a particular kind of labour – abstract labour – as its own condition. This thesis argues that there is no basis other than abstract labour, and therefore no mode of production other than capitalism, which enables us to think ‘labour’ transhistorically, which enables passages like:\n\n<sup>3</sup> Marx, Capital 1, 981. When capital is comprehended as a necessary feature of labour as such, ‘it is consequently something permanent, determined by the nature of human labour itself.’ Ibid. This is, in short, the defining error of classical political economy, an error in which ‘capital comes to be thought of as a thing...[that] plays…a role appropriate to it as a thing in the process of production.’ Ibid. 982.\n\n98","previous_page":97,"next_page":99}