---
schema_version: "library-reader-v1"
source_type: "original_book"
title: "Marx and the Concept of Historical Time"
author: null
edition: null
publisher: null
year: null
isbn: null
library_document_id: "cfa147d3-494e-49cc-b356-7aceff50b181"
source_sha256: "2d4279b1b015960c8e16a03c073a7ede6df804796a70320ecc68e0da05ee03b2"
pdf_physical_page_count: 216
pdf_physical_page_index_base: 0
range_start: 140
range_count: 10
html_url: "https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/cfa147d3-494e-49cc-b356-7aceff50b181?start=140&limit=10"
markdown_url: "https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/cfa147d3-494e-49cc-b356-7aceff50b181.md?start=140&limit=10"
previous_url: "https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/cfa147d3-494e-49cc-b356-7aceff50b181.md?start=130&limit=10"
next_url: "https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/cfa147d3-494e-49cc-b356-7aceff50b181.md?start=150&limit=10"
---
# Marx and the Concept of Historical Time
> 页码规则：PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX 是从 0 开始的权威文件物理页索引；PRINTED_PAGE 是页面中识别出的印刷页码，可能为空，二者不得混用。
## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=140 | PRINTED_PAGE=136
6 Marx, Grundrisse, 620.
7 Marx, Capital 1, 255. I am indebted to Peter Osborne for the translation of ‘übergreifendes Subjekt’ as ‘comprehensive subject’, as opposed to Ben Fowkes’s ‘dominant subject’ (übergreifendes literally means ‘overarching’ or ‘all-grasping’). Fowkes’s translation lends itself too easily to the notion that the human subject is ‘externally dominated’ by the subject that is value (this is Postone’s ‘abstract domination’), when in fact the point is that human subjectivation is internal to value (in capitalism, the human is (predominantly) a subject because there is value). Living labour is internal to the value-form; labour-power is used. And the human consumer is predominantly a subject because there is circulation: ‘as the subject predominant [übergreifend] over the different phases of this movement, as value sustaining and multiplying itself in it, as the subject of these metamorphoses proceeding in a circular course – as a spiral, as an expanding circle – capital is circulating capital.’ Marx, Grundrisse, 620. Martin Nicolaus’s translation of übergreifend as ‘predominant’ lacks the overarching connotations of ‘comprehensive’, but it is preferable to Fowkes’s ‘dominant’.
8 The focus of this chapter is the relationship between capital and Marx’s particular post-Enlightenment concept of history, but the ultimate question which Marx poses for the philosophy of history is whether capital constitutes the condition of thinking every post-Enlightenment concept of history (from roughly the mid-eighteenth century onwards). In other words, does capital constitute the very possibility of the category of history, as conceived by the likes of Kant, Hegel, Condorcet, Comte, Dilthey, Heidegger, Collingwood, Sartre and Fukuyama? Constitute the very possibility of ‘the collective singular form of Geschichte, which since around 1780 can be conceived as history in and for itself in the absence of an associated subject or object’? Koselleck, Future’s Past: on the Semantics of Historical Time, 236. Marx does not feature in Koselleck, hence the latter never asks whether capital is the subject of ‘history…in the absence of an associated subject or object’.
9 As Roberto Fineschi says, in Marx, ‘“capital in general” [Kapital im Allgemeinen] and “universality” [Allgemeinheit] mean the same thing.’ Roberto Fineschi, ‘On Hegel’s Methodological Legacy in Marx’, in Marx’s Capital and Hegel’s Logic: A Reexamination, 140, ft. 2. Whilst these categories only appear in Marx’s work until the end of 1862, Fineschi demonstrates that ‘capital in general’ actually
136
## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=141 | PRINTED_PAGE=137
What is the upshot of this? If, on some level, we are to hold on to the materialist concept of history, wherein ‘history’ can be understood as something like ‘the social production of the means of human life’, a production that satisfies existing human needs and creates new human needs, then we must recognise and work through the fact that capital is the subject that makes this understanding possible. Methodologically, this requires that we extend the logic of history to capital itself. This requires that capital – whose existing and new needs might be formulated as ‘reproduction on an expanded scale, i.e. accumulation’12 – be conceived from the standpoint of producing the means of its own life. These means are irreducible to the human’s means of life – the commodities necessary for the reproduction of the owner of labour-power. Capital’s means of life are not these and other commodities, but rather theprocesses by which the ‘inner substance’ of commodities – ‘socially necessary labour-time’ – produces and circulates itself. More specifically, the processes by which this labour-time expands itself – valorises itself – constitutes capital’s means of life. It is not difficult to grasp, therefore, that capital presents us with a very different kind of ‘life’ than that of the human being. Yet whilst there is a consistent appeal to life in Marx’s critique of political economy – there is a consistent use of life-related terms – there is no (or at least no explicit) theoretical discourse on the ‘life of capital’ in this critique (indeed, the same can be said of ‘the life of the worker’, ‘living labour’, and so forth, insofar as ‘life’ here only functions ontologically around the concepts with which it is joined). What, then, is the ‘life of capital’? In what sense is this life a historical – a historicalising – life? To answer these questions, this chapter maintains, we must systematically investigate the different dimensions of capital’s need to self-expand, and thereby create a life that expresses these dimensions.13 This is, in the end, how to fill out capital as the subject of history. This is how social – as opposed to individual – life occupies the standpoint (in capitalism) from which ‘historical totalisation’ and ‘historical temporalisation’ can be understood. Hence this is how Marx’s distinct challenge to the Heideggerian and Sartrean projects can ultimately be secured. As opposed to Heidegger, capital, not Dasein, is ‘the originary happening’ [das ursprüngliche Geschehen] that makes the ‘science of history’ possible (this itself stems from the fact that the individual’s being-towards-death is predominantly actual within what can be called capital’s ‘being-towards-life’14). Contra Sartre, individual praxis is not the totalising and temporalising core of historical dialectics; the life of capital – ‘universal social labour’ – is.
‘[becomes] more consistent thanks to some modifications’ after 1862. Ibid. 144, 142. ‘Total social capital’ [gesellschaftlichen Gesamtkapital] is, as we will later learn, the decisive modification. Hegel is the clear interlocutor here, insofar as the three moments of the Concept in the Logic (universality, particularity and singularity) correspond to capital in general, many competing capitals and interestbearing capital in Capital. The details of this reading of the Hegel/Marx confrontation are not important here, but what needs to be stressed is that ‘capital in general’ does not turn its back on particularity and singularity, but is dialectically dependent on them. Hence the ‘historicalisation’ being discussed here is not indifferent to different particular histories, nor is it indifferent to the singularity of the historical event, but is rather dialectically dependent on them. As previously cited, this dovetails with the problem of history as ‘how to universalise the singular without suppressing its specificity.’ Mészáros, The Work of Sartre: Search for Freedom and the Challenge of History, 242.
10 Disclosing capital as this totaliser does not invalidate, but actually registers, Hegel’s ‘cunning of reason’, as well as the ‘invisible hand’ of Smith’s market. This is the structuralist dimension of capital’s subjectness: it is the ‘hidden’ or ‘empty’ subject of history.
11 Take the question of the ‘origins of capitalism’. Insofar as capitalism is a mode of production, and a mode of production is a totalising abstraction of multiple, actually existing societies, the desire to locate the origins of capitalism in a particular time, place and phenomenon (in, for instance, 16th century English agrarian relations, which is the ‘Brenner Thesis’) is fundamentally misguided. In other words, capitalism is capitalism by virtue of the fact that, as a system of social relations and forces irreducible to linear causation and time, its origins belong to no one place, time or phenomenon. This fact guides Marx’s analysis of ‘originary accumulation’, and it is, to varying degrees, lost on the leading thinkers of the origins of capitalism (e.g. Fernand Braudel, Maurice Dobb, Paul Sweezy, Robert Brenner, Perry Anderson, Immanuel Wallerstein and Ellen Meiksins Wood).
12 Marx, Capital 1, 763.
137
## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=142 | PRINTED_PAGE=138
This chapter focuses on the production-process of capital, and treats the self-expansion at the heart of this process as the practical basis upon which the materialist concept of history depends.15 In Sartrean language, this self-expansion constitutes the ‘primary intelligibility’ of history: it gives history its autonomy and – as heretical as it may be to state this – its ‘motive force’.16 Marx and Engels are correct to argue – and this chapter should be read as reinforcing this argument – that in the bourgeois conception of history – the culminating ‘conception of history up to the present’ – the ‘actual basis of history has either been totally neglected or else considered as a minor matter quite irrelevant to the course of history.’17 Yet what they do not recognise in The German Ideology, and what Marx does not demonstrate, or even suggest, in the various drafts of Capital, is that the ‘need’ without which history cannot be comprehended is not, that is, not originarily, human need, but rather capital’s need to self-expand. Ultimately, it is the two ‘great sections’18 of the movement of capital – the production- and circulationprocesses – which, taken together, render ‘the process of expansion of human needs and the productive forces corresponding to them’19 intelligible as history, but, this chapter argues, the production-process of capital takes precedence, because this process directly determines that, in capitalism, the human is not only not the subject of the expansion of its own needs, but that this displacement is the very reason why there is such a thing as ‘human history’. As we will see, the production-process is the ontological basis of some of the most basic, and seemingly self-evident, assumptions that Marx’s, if not every post-Enlightenment, conception of history tacitly accepts: human history not only exists ‘in itself and as such’20, but its progression never stops. Hence the speculative proposition which guides this chapter is this: valorisation is the production of historical time. The production-process of capital valorises value, and it does so in such a way that, to rework the Lukács quotation that frames this chapter, historical time becomes its self-knowledge.
13 The production-process of capital (Capital Vol. 1) correlates to what can be called capital’s ‘deathly life’, whereas the circulation-process of capital and its metamorphoses (Capital Vol. 2) – treated in the conclusion to this thesis – might be understood as the ‘life-circuit’ or ‘life-process’ of capital.
14 To expand on the previous footnote, the ‘life’ in this formulation must be doubly understood, as both the life of capital which, ‘vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks’ (Marx, Capital 1, 342), and as the life of capital in which the production-process is just one of the moments within each of capital’s multiple life-circuits. This formulation does not detract from the fact that, following Osborne, human finitude is the ‘ontological basis of the “value” of time’. It simply gives this fact its historical purchase. It expresses that, in capitalism, human finitude is only this basis in relation to the historicalising life of ‘self-immortalising and self-multiplying value. Marx, Grundrisse, 639.
15 The circulation-process of capital is examined in the conclusion to this thesis.
138
## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=143 | PRINTED_PAGE=139
16 The point here is not that the assertion that class struggle is the ‘motive force of history’ is necessarily misplaced, but that it must negotiate the fact that in addition to being the condition of thinking history, capital is the condition of thinking the category of ‘class’.
17 Marx and Engels, DI, 39 (GI, 59). Heidegger’s philosophy of history is the paradigmatic example of this.
18 Marx, Grundrisse, 620.
19 Osborne, How to Read Marx, 41.
20 As Ricœur stresses in his reading of Koselleck, this goes hand-in-hand with the idea that ‘history is the history of humanity, and in this worldwide sense, the world history of peoples. Humanity becomes both the total object and the unique subject of history, at the same time as history becomes a collective singular.’ Ricœur, Memory, History, Forgetting, 300. The irony here is that history first becomes the ‘history of humanity’ precisely because capital, not humanity, is the subject of this history.
139
## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=144 | PRINTED_PAGE=140
4.1 The Production-Process of Capital
There is a passage in the Grundrisse that is worth citing at the outset, because it constitutes a rare instance in which Marx addresses, that is, directly addresses21, the relationship between surplus-labour and history. It is thus worth citing in full:
The great historical quality of capital is to create…surplus-labour, superfluous labour from the standpoint of mere use-value, mere subsistence; and its historical determination is fulfilled as soon as, on the one side, there has been such a development of needs that surplus-labour above and beyond necessity [Notwendige] has itself become a universal need [Bedürfnis] arising out of individual needs themselves – and, on the other side, when the severe discipline of capital, acting on succeeding generations [Geschlechter], has developed general industriousness as the universal property of the new generation – and, finally, when the development of the productive powers of labour, which capital incessantly whips onward with its unlimited mania for wealth, as the sole conditions in which this mania can be realised, have flourished to the stage where the possession and preservation of universal wealth require a lesser labour-time of society as a whole, and where the labouring society relates scientifically to the process of its progressive reproduction, its reproduction in a constantly greater abundance; hence where labour in which a human being does what things could do has ceased. Therefore, capital and labour relate to each other here like money and commodity; the former is the universal form of wealth, the latter merely the substance destined for immediate consumption. Capital’s ceaseless striving towards the universal form of wealth drives labour beyond the limits of its ‘natural neediness’ [Naturbedürftigkeit], and thus creates the material elements for the development of the rich individuality, which is as all-sided in its production as in its consumption, and whose labour also therefore appears no longer as labour, but as the full development of activity itself, in which natural necessity in its immediate form has disappeared; because a historically created need has taken the place of a natural need. This is why capital is productive; i.e. an essential relation for the development of the social productive forces.22
This passage is not just cited for what it actually tells us, but also for what it potentially tells us, for what, that is to say, it can be made to tell us. If ‘the great historical quality of capital is to create…surplus-labour’, such that ‘surplus-labour…has itself become a universal need’, what would it mean to read this creation as the creation of the means of understanding history itself? This is the essential task of this chapter: to simultaneously ground ourselves in Marx’s analysis of the production-process of capital, and to push this analysis beyond its immediate and intended scope.
21 See also Marx, Economic Manuscripts of 1861-63, 199.
22 Marx, Grundrisse der Kritik der politischen Ökonomie, 244 (Grundrisse, 325).
140
## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=145 | PRINTED_PAGE=141
When we speak of the ‘production-process of capital’, we must, after Marx, internally differentiate this process between the ‘labour-process’ [Arbeitsprozeß] and the ‘valorisationprocess’ [Verwertungsprozeß]. The relationship between these two processes has, from one standpoint, already been established: it directly corresponds to the relationship between the concrete labour which produces use-values (the labour-process) and the abstract labour which produces exchange-values (the valorisation-process). Marx often depicts the relation between the labour- and valorisation-process within the terms of the concrete/abstract labour relation: ‘The production-process is the immediate unity of the labour-process and valorisation-process, just as its immediate result, the commodity, is the immediate unity of use-value and exchangevalue.’23 Hence, as with concrete and abstract labour, we are not looking at two different acts here: the labour- and valorisation-process register one and the same purposive act, albeit from dialectically opposed standpoints. And as with abstract and concrete labour, the unity of the labour- and valorisation-process is hierarchically structured: ‘…the labour-process itself is nothing else than the means of the valorisation-process, just as the use-value of the product is nothing but a repository of its exchange value’24; additionally, ‘in capitalist production the labour-process is only the means, the end is supplied by the valorisation-process.’25 Therefore just as concrete labour and use-value exist as the internalised, dialectical opposites of abstract labour and value, so too is the existence of the labour-process within capitalism26 predicated on the valorisation-process: the former only exists because it is internalised by the latter as its dialectical opposite. This is the sense in which ‘the labour-process is as it were incorporated in it [the valorisation-process], subsumed under it.’27 Yet what Marx’s analysis of the relation between the labour- and valorisation-process gives us, which the presentation of the relation between concrete and abstract labour in Chapter 3 does not, is a direct account of why these relations exist. The relation between concrete and abstract labour presumes precisely what the relation between the labour- and valorisation-process explains: the production of the relation between necessary and surplus-labour. It is this production, and this production alone, that gives abstract labour its raison d’être, its immanent movement without which we cannot grasp capital as the condition of thinking history. Thus if Chapter 3 makes the epistemological claim that necessary and surplus-labour hinge on abstract labour for their intelligibility, this chapter makes the ontological claim that abstract labour only exists – and hence the difference between concrete and abstract labour only exists – because of the necessary/surplus-labour relation. Quite simply, the only reason why abstract labour exists is because ‘the production of surplusvalue, i.e. the objectification of unpaid labour’28 exists. We can now summarise the historicalontological importance of the relationship between the labour- and valorisation-process: this relationship gives the concrete/abstract labour relation its movement because it establishes the necessary/surplus-labour relation as the engine of this movement. This is the reason why the relationship between the labour- and valorisation-process is the predominant framework of the first volume of Capital, as well as substantial portions of the 1861-63 Manuscripts and the Grundrisse. This relationship underscores the fact that, for Marx, every relation is at bottom a processual relation: a relation is only a relation because it is a material process between its relatum. Capital, in other words, directly reinforces a basic lesson of the Theses on Feuerbach: the relation, logically and ontologically, grounds the relatum (not the other way around). We must firstly prioritise the relation between the labour- and valorisation-process, such that the difference between these processes can come to light.
23 See Karl Marx, Resultate des unmittelbaren Produktionsprozesses (Frankfurt: Archiv sozialistischer Literatur 17, Neue Kritik, 1968), 21 (Marx, Capital 1, 991). The Results of the Immediate Production-Process – and not the 1861-63 Manuscripts or the first volume of Capital (proper) – contains the most direct account of the relation between the labour- and valorisation-process.
24 Marx, Resultate des unmittelbaren Produktionsprozesses, 21 (Marx, Capital 1, 990). 25 Marx, Capital 1, 1001-2.
26 We should remind ourselves that, as with concrete labour and use-value, Marx presents us, quite problematically, with a transhistorical labour-process per se. He does not recognise that, conceptually speaking, the ‘labour-process’, just like ‘concrete labour’ and ‘use-value’, depends on capitalism for its intelligibility. The transhistorical descriptions of the labour-process do not just appear in Chapter 7 (of the English edition) of the first volume of Capital: see, for instance, Marx, Economic Manuscripts of 1861-63, 56-9, in addition to Marx, Contribution, 36.
27 Marx, Economic Manuscripts of 1861-63, 67.
141
## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=146 | PRINTED_PAGE=142
28 Marx, Capital 1, 991.
142
## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=147 | PRINTED_PAGE=143
4.1.1 Subsumption
The concept which Marx uses to capture the relation between the labour- and valorisationprocess, a concept without which, this thesis argues, history cannot be thought, is subsumption [Subsumtion]. In short, subsumption is the concept which structures Marx’s understanding of the production-process of capital. For this reason, we must briefly consider its philosophical development leading up to Marx. The modern usage of ‘subsumption’ is associated with Kant, who was the first to establish the sense in which subsumption refers to the processes through which the universal and the particular enter in relation with one another, or more precisely the sense in which the particular is brought under the universal, and thereby transformed in some manner. In Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, subsumption is the essential process underlying the faculty of judgement [Urteilskraft]. For Kant, it captures the relation between the manifold and the categories of the understanding, between the sensible and the logical: ‘to the use of a concept there…belongs a function of the power of judgement, whereby an object is subsumed under it.’29 To return to Chapter 1, subsumption is a central feature of Kant’s analysis of the schematism of the pure concepts of the understanding.30 The Critique of Pure Reason directly assigns a temporalising logic to subsumption: the question of ‘the application of the category to appearances’31 must be addressed through the numerous schematics of time. Subsumption introduces the ‘third thing’ – the multiple time-determinations, culminating in the entire scope or ‘field of time’ [Zeitinbegriff] – that secures the possibility of a relation between categories and appearances. (The interesting thing at play here is not that the schematism of the categories provides a multidimensional framework for temporalising the relation between abstract and concrete labour, but the sense in which Marx reproduces Kant in his position that time is the ‘third thing’ that allows two commodities, and thus we might say abstract and concrete labour, to have a relation in the first place). Subsumption does not figure as extensively in Hegel as it does in Kant, but the former is consistent in his critique of the latter’s use of this concept. For Hegel, the essential problem with Kantian subsumption is that it does not register the fact that the universal is universal by virtue of the fact that it has a determinate content. In other words, Kantian subsumption is, for Hegel, a ‘one-sided’ or ‘bad’ abstraction: it strips away what is particular about the particular, and thereby prevents the universal from manifesting itself as a singularity or concrete universal. Kantian subsumption does not tell us what is essential about the object, since it lacks the concrete fullness without which abstractive power is productive. For Hegel, the manifold is not external to the concept, but is rather the concept incarnate. Thus if one takes the standpoint of the ‘self-subsistence of both subject and predicate’ (which Kant does, because his transcendental subject – the Gemüt – is a human subject), then ‘subsumption is only the application of the universal to a particular or an individual, which is placed under the universal in accordance with a vague idea that it is of inferior quality.’32 Hegel’s problem is not subsumption as such – the very rationality, the dialectical movement, of the syllogism depends on relations of subsumption – but the failure to recognise that subsumption is nothing if it is not also thought in relation to inherence [Inhärenz]. That is, subsumption registers the fact that the universal and particular inhere in one another, albeit in different ways.33
29 Kant, CPR, A248/B304, 359.
30 The opening line of the schematism of the categories reads: ‘In all subsumptions of an object under a concept the representations of the former must be homogeneous with the latter, i.e., the concept must contain that which is represented in the object that is to be subsumed under it, for that is just is what is meant by the expression “an object is contained under a concept”.’ Ibid. A137/B176, 271.
31 Ibid. A138/B177, 272.
143
## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=148 | PRINTED_PAGE=144
Commenting on Marx’s claim in the Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right that Hegel does not ask whether his use of the category of subsumption is ‘the rational, the adequate mode of subsumption’34, the Endnotes Collective suggests that:
The irony here is that it is just such a usage of this category that Marx himself goes on to develop. From the 1861-63 draft of Capital onwards, subsumption, for Marx, is the subsumption of the particularities of the labour-process under the abstract universality of the valorisation-process of capital. The abstract category, it seems, really does find itself a body. Marx’s critique of German idealist philosophy is thus paralleled in his critique of capital. However, now the error is not on the part of the speculative philosopher, for it resides, rather, in capitalist social relations themselves. The abstract universal – value – whose existence is posited by the exchange abstraction, acquires a real existence vis-à-vis particular concrete labours, which are subsumed under it. The real existence of abstractions, which acquire the ability to subsume the concrete world of production under them – and posit themselves as the truth of this world – is for Marx nothing other than a perverted, enchanted, ontologically inverted reality. The absurdity and violence which Hegel perceives in a relation of subsumption applies not only to Hegel’s system itself, but also to the actual social relations of capitalist society.35
32 Hegel, The Science of Logic, 629.
33 The Endnotes Collective gives good commentary on the place of subsumption in Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, although they overstate the manner in which this place marks a tension in Hegel’s work more broadly. It is true that, in the Philosophy of Right, Hegel in effect recreates the Kantian framework: he reproduces the sense in which the manifold is external to the pure categories of the understanding and thus subsumed under – subjected to – these categories. Here the universality of the sovereign’s decision is not configured as inhering in, and thus constituted by, the particularities of civil society. This decision does not manifest itself as a concrete universal, but is rather a decision which imposes itself upon civil society, such that the executive power – namely the judiciary and the police – have an ‘immediate bearing on the particular concerns of civil society and they make the universal interest authoritative over its particular aims.’ G.W.F. Hegel, Philosophy of Right [1821], trans. T.M. Knox (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), 189 (§287). Therefore, the ‘particular interests which are common to everyone fall within civil society and lie outside the absolutely universal interest of the state proper.’ Ibid. 189 (§288). See http://endnotes.org.uk/en/endnotes-the-history-of-subsumption (accessed 27 April 2015). 34 In full: ‘The sole philosophical statement Hegel makes about the executive is that he “subsumes” the individual and the particular under the general, etc. Hegel contents himself with this. On the one hand, the category of “subsumption” of the particular, etc. This has to be actualised. Then he takes any one of the empirical forms of existence of the Prussian or modern state (just as it is), anything which actualises this category among others, even though this category does not express its specific character. Applied mathematics is also subsumption, etc. Hegel does not ask “Is this the rational, the adequate mode of subsumption?” He only takes the one category, and contents himself with finding a corresponding existent for it. Hegel gives a political body to his logic: he does not give the logic of the body politic.’ See Karl Marx, Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, in MECW Volume 3, Marx and Engels: 1843-1844 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1975), 48.
144
## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=149 | PRINTED_PAGE=145
The merit of this reading is that it recognises the sense in which Hegel’s system reproduces, and is in fact predicated on, capitalist social relations. However, there are two problems with this reading, the identification of which cuts to the heart of Marx’s distinct use of the category of subsumption. First, Hegel did not understand subsumption to be absurd and violent; rather, this was the critique he levelled at Kant’s specific use of the category of subsumption in his 1831 Berlin lectures on logic, not subsumption per se.36 In the Logic, as the previous paragraph shows, the doubled relation of subsumption and inherence is central to Hegel’s formulation of the syllogism in the Doctrine of the Concept. It is true that the Philosophy of Right is in tension with Hegel’s critique of Kantian subsumption, as it reproduces Kant’s use of the category of subsumption, but this is not representative of Hegel’s system more broadly.
This leads to the second, more basic, problem. Like much of the secondary literature on subsumption more generally, the Endnotes Collective does not consider the complex dialectic between the labour- and valorisation-process, the understanding of which is essential not only to Marx’s understanding of subsumption, but, as we will see, the very intelligibility of history. The character of this dialectic has, once again, already been introduced – it corresponds to the dialectic between concrete and abstract labour. This dialectic is the processual manifestation of the fact that abstract labour produces, within itself, concrete labour as its dialectical exterior (this is one register of the larger sense in which, consequent to the commodification of labourpower, living labour is external to capital within the production-process). But what must now be highlighted is that this dialectic is the dynamic transposition of the dialectic of abstract and concrete labour via the category of subsumption. We must thus insist on the following point (one that much of the secondary literature fails to thematise, and in some cases acknowledge): subsumption is an indelibly dialectical category in Marx, the exposition of which grounds our exposition of the production-process of capital. Marx does not explicitly highlight this point, but it is only from the standpoint of the essentially dialectical character of subsumption that
35 See http://endnotes.org.uk/en/endnotes-the-history-of-subsumption (accessed 27 April 2015).
36 See G.W.F. Hegel, Lectures on Logic [1831], trans. Clark Butler (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008), 12-13 (§22), which the Endnotes Collective mistakenly cites as representative of Hegel’s view on subsumption as such.
145
下一段：[继续读取](https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/cfa147d3-494e-49cc-b356-7aceff50b181.md?start=150&limit=10)