Marx and the Concept of Historical Time

This yields a more fundamental problem. The concept of historicalisation must register the singularity of the historical event²²⁴, but do so in such a way that historical time does not become relegated to a passive medium through which this singularity is realised (Benjamin’s ‘homogenous, empty time’). Yet the only way to avoid this relegation is to likewise conceive historicalisation at the level of history as a collective singular, consistent with the idea that the problem of history is ‘how to universalise the singular without suppressing its specificity.’²²⁵ That is, the concept of historicalisation must equally register relations between totalisation, temporalisation and materiality – need-based relations of dependence – specific to history as a whole. This returns us to the argument that enveloping totalisation unsettles the formulation of history as ‘totalisation without a totaliser’. The reason why enveloping totalisation is useful is not because it provides a model for the concept of historicalisation, but because, in holding historical temporalisation ontologically accountable to ‘the real’, which is to say to the entire field of historical time, it casts considerable doubt on the idea that history is not in some sense constituted by a totaliser. This is not a ‘mysterious totaliser’²²⁶ which forces ‘the dialectic to become a divine law again, a metaphysical fate’²²⁷, but is better understood as the condition of thinking what Sartre calls ‘our History’ (viz. human history). This is the premise of the rest of this thesis: there is an identifiable totaliser that totalises, and thus temporalises, history. It has not existed throughout history, but this lack of transhistorical validity takes nothing away from the fact that it is (to date) the only historically totalising stand.

²²⁴ The existential notion of ‘historialisation’ in Sartre’s War Diaries (1939-40) and his Notebooks for an Ethics (1947-48) is the philosophical precursor of the singularity of the historical event in his second Critique. This is the sense in which the lives of, to use Sartrean examples, Flaubert and Stalin incarnate their respective ‘epochs’.

²²⁵ Mészáros, The Work of Sartre: Search for Freedom and the Challenge of History, 242. According to Mészáros, this is both the definitive problem of history and an ‘insurmountable problem’ for Sartre. ²²⁶ Ibid. 241.

²²⁷ Sartre, CDR 1, 36. It is the unconditional absence – not the presence – of a totaliser within historical totalisation which consigns the dialectic to metaphysics.

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Chapter Three Whither Labour?

…we should not say that one man’s hour is worth another man’s hour, but rather that one man during an hour is worth as much as another man during an hour. Time is everything, man is nothing; he is at the most the embodiment of time. Quality no longer matters. Quantity alone decides everything: hour for hour, day for day…¹

This thesis has, up to this point, been predominantly framed at a transhistorical level. Chapter 1 introduced a transhistorical materialist concept of history: a concept of history that, for Marx and Engels, registers all of human history. The heart of Chapter 1 is a temporal reading of the first historical act – the social production of the means of life – that is a ‘fundamental condition of all history, which today, as thousands of years ago, must daily and hourly be fulfilled merely in order to sustain human life.’² Specifically, this chapter looked at Marx and Engels’s internal specification of this act – the creation of the means of satisfying existing needs and the creation of new needs – as two different dimensions of one and the same historical act. It then argued that the basic temporal structure of this act is a dialectic between the present and the past, one immanently guided by a teleological future. What Chapter 1 established is that, for Marx and Engels, labour and need are the two categories upon which the materialist concept of history depends, and thus labour and need are the two forces without which the temporality of history cannot be thought. Chapter 2 gave us the means by which to ontologically ground the temporal reading offered by Chapter 1. Heidegger’s Dasein provides an account of how the act as such temporalises, but fails to establish need as the end of the act, whereas Sartre explicitly reworks the relation between Dasein and its world as a material relation between individual praxis and the ‘practico-inert’, thus situating need not only at the heart of temporalisation, but at the heart of the unity between totalisation and temporalisation. The conclusion of Sartre’s first Critique is the formulation of history as ‘totalisation without a totaliser’ (a formulation, we should note, which is remarkably similar to Althusser’s ‘process without a subject’). For Sartre, history can thus be conceived as the ongoing totalisation and temporalisation of all individual totalisations and temporalisations, but historical totalisation and temporalisation does not – it cannot – have a totaliser. Any attempt to identify such a totaliser is to relegate dialectics to metaphysics.

¹ Karl Marx, Das Elend der Philosophie [Misère de la Philosophie] [1847], in Marx and Engels, MEW, Band 4 (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1977), 85 (for an English edition of this passage: Karl Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy (New York: International Publishers, 1963), 53-4).

² Marx and Engels, GI, 48.

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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’³, 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.

As 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’⁴, 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:

³ 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.

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The labour-process…is purposeful activity aimed at the production of use-values. It is an appropriation of what exists in nature for the requirements of human beings. It is the universal condition for the metabolism [Stoffwechsel] between the human being and nature, the eternal, natural condition of human existence, and it is thus independent of every form of that existence, or rather it is common to all forms of society in which human beings live.⁵

The crux of the issue here is the category of ‘concrete labour’. The premise of this chapter is that capital demolishes the thought of something like a ‘transhistorical labour in general’ – a ‘concrete labour as such’ – except – and this is the essential point – as a general category that receives its intelligibility from concrete labours as particular instances of abstract labour. Put differently, the only actuality to the category of ‘labour in general’ is abstract labour: insofar as ‘labour in general’ is actual in general, it is as abstract labour. Within capitalism, ‘labour in general’ is not actual as concrete labour. It is actual as concrete labours (plural, the multiplicity of them), which is why abstract labour constitutes its condition of intelligibility. The dialectic, we will argue, between concrete labour (the Multiple) and abstract labour (the One), a dialectic that is specific to capitalism, cannot be compromised. The potential ‘controversy’ arises from the fact that Marx himself, in Capital and elsewhere, offers us passages (such as the one above) that clearly depict ‘labour’ in transhistorical terms. Passages like these are, this thesis argues, very problematic, because they do not acknowledge what Capital demonstrates: capital is their condition of possibility. As we will learn, this extends to other concepts in Marx’s critique of political economy as well, namely ‘concrete labour’, ‘use-value’ and ‘labour-power’. In some regards, therefore, this chapter is in conflict with Marx.

⁴ Ibid. 152.

⁵ Marx, Kapital 1, 198 (Capital 1, 290).

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Yet the purpose of this chapter is not simply, or even primarily, to demonstrate that the concept of abstract labour is the condition of thinking labour in general.⁶ It overriding purpose is in fact to systematically examine, consequent to the fact that abstract labour makes ‘labour in general’ intelligible, the complex and rich concept that is ‘abstract labour’ itself, at the heart of which is a complex and rich – if underdeveloped – account of temporalisation. Indeed, the temporal – temporalising – dialectic between abstract and concrete labour is arguably Marx’s greatest contribution to the philosophy of time, a contribution that is still far from being fully realised. To anticipate the next chapter, the reason why such attention is being paid to abstract labour is that if it is the condition of thinking labour in general, then it must also be an essential (but not the only) condition of thinking the materialist concept of history.⁷ This chapter is thus the necessary first step towards establishing what the previous chapter speculatively proposed and what the next chapter seeks to demonstrate: against Sartre, there is a totaliser that totalises and temporalises history. It is capital. Thus whilst history does not feature prominently in this chapter, this does not mean that abstract labour is in any sense ‘outside’ of history, or that the exchange relation which simultaneously constitutes and expresses abstract labour is somehow ‘outside’ of historical time. Quite the opposite. Abstract labour and the commodity exchange relation are squarely within history and historical time, precisely because they are constitutive of history and historical time. They – and this claim can only be fully appreciated after Chapter 4 and the Conclusion – are a historical-ontological ground of the production of historical time. In opposition to the standpoint of much of the literature in so-called ‘Systematic Dialectics’, therefore, the capitalist exchange relation is not just a historical but a historicalising relation, such that historical time is – logically and actually – immanent to the systematic development of the value-form.⁸ A crucial dimension of coming to this realisation – and this the concern of the second section of this chapter, after the totalising and temporalising power of abstract labour has been outlined – is the systematic investigation of Marx’s concepts of ‘necessary’ and ‘surplus-labour’. These two concepts must be examined not only because their difference and relation are the very reason why abstract labour exists, but because – and this is the task of Chapter 4 – the production of their difference and relation comprises, in Sartre’s words, the ‘primary intelligibility’ of history.

⁶ The question is also: if abstract labour is the condition of thinking labour in general, is it the condition of thinking Sartre’s ‘praxis’? Heidegger’s ‘Dasein’? The historical condition that makes, we might go so far as to say, the existential-phenomenological subject possible?

⁷ Chapter 4 concentrates exclusively on the materialist concept of history, but it raises the question of whether capital is the condition of thinking the modern, post-Enlightenment conception of history more generally.

⁸ ‘Systematic Dialectics’ does not grasp capital as the condition of thinking history, and hence does not think the systematic properly. Statements such as the following (which is representative of Systematic Dialectics) are thus misguided: ‘the exchanges outlined in the first chapter of Capital are not historical but logical.’ Stavros Tombazos, Time in Marx: The Categories of Time in Marx’s Capital (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2014), 62. This standpoint is common, and extends beyond Systematic Dialectics. In his Kantian rereading of commodity exchange as the a priori synthetic matrix of the social, Sohn-Rethel states that ‘the exchange abstraction excludes everything that makes up history, human and even natural history’, and that through the exchange relation ‘time becomes unhistorical time.’ Sohn-Rethel, Intellectual and Manual Labour: a Critique of Epistemology, 48-9, 56.

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An overriding consequence of this chapter – one that the rest of this thesis reinforces – can be grasped by the following proposition: there is no place for a ‘transhistorical ontology’ in Marx, only a historical ontology. Categories such as labour and need are only ontologically valid at the level of the difference between one mode of production and another, such that the capitalist human is a fundamentally different kind of subject than the feudal human (the social individual in capitalism is a fundamentally different kind of subject than the social individual in other modes of production⁹). Yet this does not mean that we cannot think transhistorically. For our purposes, the specifically capitalist existence of abstract labour is exactly what allows us to think ‘labour’, ‘need’ and ‘history’ transhistorically. In short (assuming one holds to the ontological priority of a mode of production), the ‘transhistorical’ should be understood as an epistemological category in Marx, whereas the ‘historical’ is an ontological category. Hence whilst this chapter – in fact the rest of this thesis – destabilises the transhistorical basis of the claims made in the first two chapters, it does not render these claims meaningless. Rather, it shows that the capitalist mode of production is the historical condition of thinking what, up to this point, has been presented at a transhistorical level. The spirit of this chapter is thus not to shut down the possibility of ‘the transhistorical Marx’, but to historicise him. This is important because the concept of historical time must register the possibility of social and historical time after capitalism. We need the transhistorical Marx, precisely because it is impossible to think communism without him.

⁹ This point registers the essential limit of Carol C. Gould’s Marx’s Social Ontology: Individuality and Community in Marx’s Theory of Social Reality (Cambridge and London: MIT Press, 1978). Drawing on the passages on the ‘social individual’ in the Grundrisse, Gould attempts to create a transhistorically valid social ontology as the basis from which to think the historical development of social individuality. There is something sociological in the bad sense about a methodology such as this: Gould’s manoeuvre effectively de-historicises the social in order to historicise the historical. Marx’s conception of a ‘social individual’ is intelligible because of capitalism (as is the category of ‘society’).

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3.1 Abstract and Concrete Labour

We do not need to go further than the first chapter of the first volume of Capital to have a sense of how ‘labour in general’ owes its intelligibility to capital. A direct consequence of the systematic development of the value-form in this chapter is the realisation that the capitalist exchange relation does not just express but in fact constitutes the category of labour in general. The following passage encapsulates this nicely:

Men and women do not…bring the products of their labour into relation with each other as values because they see these objects as the thinglike shells [sachliche Hüllen] of homogeneous human labour. It is the opposite. By equating their different products to each other in exchange as values, they equate their different kinds of labour as the same human labour. They do not know this, but they do this.¹⁰

Marx repeatedly emphasises this point throughout the first chapter of Capital: ‘It is only the expression of equivalence between different sorts of commodities which brings to view the specific character of value-creating labour, by actually reducing the different kinds of labour embedded in the different kinds of commodity to their common quality of being human labour in general.’¹¹ In other words, the act of exchange determines the kind of labour that determines the value of what is being exchanged. The value-form, and the act of exchange that is implied by this form, are originary conditions of Marx’s labour theory of value. Value [Wert], which might be described as ‘exchangeability in definite proportions’¹², is the self-mediating ground of the social. It is determined, as we will examine, by ‘socially necessary labour-time’, but it is nothing if it is not also understood as an exchange-determined ground. Capitalist production is already always production for exchange, and thus the exchange relation must ‘be grasped as simultaneously constitutive of value and serving as its expression. 13

Any discussion of the relationship between capital and the category of labour in general must, however, attend to one particular exchange, one consistent with the exchange relation as doubly constitutive and expressive of value, but one that, given the content of what is being exchanged, stands as both the presupposition and result of the production-process of capital.

¹⁰ Marx, Kapital 1, 88 (Capital 1, 166-67). The ‘products of labour’ which men and women bring into relation with each other should also, crucially, be understood as these very same men and women. ¹¹ Marx, Capital 1, 142. Emphasis added.

¹² See Tony Smith, ‘Hegel, Marx and the Comprehension of Capitalism’, in Marx’s Capital and Hegel’s Logic: A Reexamination, ed. Fred Moseley and Tony Smith (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2014), 29.

¹³ Christopher J. Arthur, The New Dialectic and Marx’s Capital (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2004), 96.

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This is the act of the sale and purchase of labour-capacity [Arbeitsvermögen] or labour-power [Arbeitskraft], or what Marx also calls ‘the exchange of variable capital for labour-power.’¹⁴ Marx details this exchange in Chapter 6 (of the English edition) of the first volume of Capital, emphasising the two conditions necessary for the possessor of money to encounter the owner of labour-power on the market. These are the two senses in which the potential labourer must be ‘free’: (1) free from the possession of the means of production (hence free from the means of satisfying his own needs), and (2) free – in the juridical sense of the term – to sell his sole possession (but only for a fixed amount of time, such that he ‘manages both to alienate his labour-power and to avoid renouncing his rights of ownership over it.’¹⁵) As we will learn in Chapter 4, ‘so-called originary accumulation’ [die sogenannte ursprüngliche Akkumulation] is itself the condition of these conditions. It should also be noted here that unlike the permanent presence and various metamorphoses of the category of labour in Marx’s work, the concept of labour-power does not appear until the late 1850s (the Grundrisse), and does not feature until the mid-1860s (it is everywhere in Marx’s 1849 pamphlet Wage-Labour and Capital, but only because of Engels’s editorial hand in 1891).

For our present purposes, however, we must navigate a potential ambiguity at the heart of Marx’s account of labour-power. On the one hand, he characterises it as ‘the entire field [Inbegriff] of those physical and intellectual capabilities existing in the corporeal form [Leiblichkeit], the living personality of a human being, capabilities which he sets in motion whenever he produces a use-value of any kind.’¹⁶ To the extent that it ‘exists only as a capacity of the living individual’¹⁷, labour-power might seem to function as a transhistorical – indeed a naturalistic transhistorical – concept in Marx. This reading might be likened to what Moishe Postone calls ‘traditional Marxism’, such that labour-power becomes the normative repository of labour as the ‘transhistorical essence of social life.’¹⁸ Accordingly, labour-power would come into alignment with Marx’s depiction of the labour-process as ‘the universal condition for the metabolism between the human and nature, the eternal, natural condition of human existence…independent of every form of that existence.’¹⁹ This reading also intersects with a number of recent Italian formulations of the concept of ‘biopolitics’ (this is paradoxical insofar as the relevant authors explicitly dissociate themselves from ‘traditional Marxism’). For Paolo Virno, the capitalist purchases the life and the body of the worker because ‘this life, this body, are what contains the faculty, the potential, the dynamis’²⁰, but for Virno this potentiality is irreducible to its commodification, because life is ontologically basic to capital. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri agree: ‘Labour-power has always exceeded its relation to capital in terms of its potential, in the sense that people have the capacity to do much more and produce much more than what they do at work.’²¹ The actualisation of ‘biopolitical labour-power’ – which is for Hardt and Negri the contemporary capacity of human beings to live and to love – thus leads to a ‘creativity’ which expresses the common and points beyond capital.²²

¹⁴ ‘Variable capital’ has a variable meaning throughout the various drafts of Capital, but in the context of the exchange relation it designates the wage-form (this is its predominant meaning in ‘Results of the Immediate Production-Process’, written before the publication of Capital in 1867). However, it also designates the act of labour itself, insofar as this act is only actual as ‘one of the modes of existence’ of capital. Ibid. 988.

¹⁵ Ibid. 271. In this sense, the worker’s mode of freedom and his mode of subjection are the same thing. ¹⁶ Marx, Kapital 1, 181 (Capital 1, 270).

¹⁷ Marx, Capital 1, 274.

¹⁸ Postone, Time, Labor, and Social Domination, 61.

¹⁹ Marx, Kapital 1, 198 (Capital 1, 290). This passage is nearly identical to passages in Marx, Capital 1, 133, and Marx, Contribution, 36.

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A far more definitive case can, however, be made that labour-power is only intelligible from the standpoint of its commodification. Like every other commodity, labour-power has a value and a use-value [Gebrauchswert]. Like every other commodity, its value is determined by the social labour-time necessary for its production, time that is, in this case, objectified as ‘a certain sum of the means of life’²³ essential to the preservation [Erhaltung] of the individual worker. Unlike every other commodity, therefore, the labour-time requisite for the production of labour-power is at once the labour-time necessary for its reproduction – both socially and biologically – presenting the determination of its value with ‘a historical and moral element’²⁴ which simply cannot be attributed to any other commodity. In this respect, labour-power is a ‘peculiar commodity’ [eigentümliche Ware], since its owner’s mortality directly bears on the determination of its value.²⁵ However, this peculiarity must be extended to the use-value of labour-power as well. First – and we will consider this later – because human mortality also directly bears on the determination of this use-value. The second reason, which is inseparable from the first, is that labour-power, considered from the standpoint of its use-value, is the sole provider of the use- and exchange-value [Tauschwert] of every commodity.²⁶ This peculiarity corresponds to the doubled character of labour specific to capitalism: namely, ‘concrete useful labour’ [konkrete nützlicher Arbeit], or the social individual form of labour that produces usevalues, and ‘abstract human labour’ [abstrakt menschliche Arbeit], or the purely social form of labour that produces exchange-values. These two social forms of labour do not refer to two separate or distinguishable acts, but rather ‘to two aspects of the same labour in commoditydetermined society.’²⁷ To the extent that it is defined by the production of use-value, whose status as an economic category specific to capitalism remains ambiguous²⁸, a certain degree of historical indeterminacy might seem to follow concrete labour. But when this ‘expenditure of human labour-power in a particular form and with a definite aim’²⁹ is considered – quite necessarily – in its dialectical relation to abstract labour, ‘labour as the expenditure of labourpower, whatever the “useful” mode in which it is expended’³⁰, what quickly becomes evident is that labour-power is only intelligible from the standpoint of its commodification. Abstract labour – and Marx is unambiguous on this point – is not a transhistorically valid category. Its power, qua ‘living labour’, to produce exchange-value establishes it as the ‘life-blood of capitalism’³¹ and capitalism alone. As Peter Osborne formulates it, ‘this power…is thus not “fundamentally” but rather historically ontological: it is the historico-ontological product of the process of production of capital as a whole.’³² To reinforce this point from another angle, the idea of a dialectic between a transhistorical (‘concrete’) and historical (‘abstract’) concept of labour – which is to say a dialectic between a social form of labour common to all modes of production and one specific to a particular mode of production – is nonsensical. ‘Concrete labour’ is historically specific to capitalism.³³ In short, ‘use’, ‘exchange’ and ‘labour’ can be understood as transhistorical categories, but ‘use-value’ and ‘exchange-value’, and ‘concrete labour’ and ‘abstract labour’, cannot. Likewise, the capacity to use ‘brains, muscles, nerves, hands, etc.’ is not something which is specific to capitalism, but labour-power is. In Wolfgang Haug’s terms, the purchase of labour-power is set in motion by a ‘use-value promise’³⁴ which cannot be reduced to the potentiality of life itself (in this sense, the concept of abstract labour completely destabilises Virno’s, and Hardt and Negri’s, concept of ‘biopolitics’).

²⁰ Paolo Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude, trans. Isabella Bertoletti, James Cascaito, and Andrea Casson (Los Angeles and New York: Semiotext(e), 2004), 82-3.

²¹ Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Commonwealth (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009), 151.

²² Ibid. 315.

²³ Marx, Kapital 1, 185 (Capital 1, 274).

²⁴ Marx, Capital 1, 275. By this Marx primarily means the strength and organisation of the workingclass. Class struggle features in the analysis of the production-process the next chapter. ²⁵ Ibid.

²⁶ Like value, ‘exchange-value’ is a purely relational category. It is nothing but the form of appearance, the manifestation, of value as a purely social objectivity, which is to say that ‘not an atom of matter enters into’ it. Ibid. 138. Insofar as exchange-value expresses the quantitative ratio in which one commodity is exchanged for another, money is its necessary and exclusive representative. The question here is whether labour-power is the sole provider of every use- and exchange-value. See Marx, Capital 1, 131, and footnote 28, below.

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²⁷ Postone, Time, Labor, and Social Domination, 144. For Marx, therefore, ‘…the commodity does not contain two different sorts of labour; the same labour, however, is determined as different and as opposed to itself.’ Quoted in ibid.

²⁸ The ambiguity within Marx’s account of use-value is far more pervasive than that within his account of labour-power. In the Grundrisse, the 1861-63 Manuscripts, and the Marginal Notes on Wagner, usevalue is characterised as a decidedly economic and historical category, whereas a number of passages in the first volume of Capital and the Contribution would seem to suggest that it is a category ‘outside the sphere of investigation of political economy.’ Marx, Contribution, 28. Marx should be critiqued on this front. Use-value, this thesis maintains, is only intelligible as an economic and historical category specific to capitalism. Use-value, which Marx too often conflates with ‘utility’ [Nutzen], is internal to value, even as it is produced as exterior to it. That is, use-value stands opposed to exchange-value, but only within the value-form. This will be further developed in our analysis of the dialectic of concrete and abstract labour-time.

²⁹ Marx, Capital 1, 137. Emphasis added.

³⁰ Karl Marx, Randglossen zu Adolph Wagner’s Lehrbuch der politischen Ökonomie [1879-80], in Marx and Engels, MEW, Band 19 (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1987), 370.

³¹ Marx, Capital 1, 1007.

³² Osborne, ‘Marx and the philosophy of time’, 19.

³³ Werner Bonefeld is mistaken in his position that figuring concrete labour ‘as a specifically capitalist form of labour’ amounts to an ‘absurd notion.’ Werner Bonefeld, ‘Abstract labour: Against its nature and on its time’, Capital & Class 34:2 (2010), 270. Categorically, in its meaning as the dialectical other of abstract labour, ‘concrete labour’ is a specifically capitalist form of labour.

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