Marx and the Concept of Historical Time

In a letter to Engels written after the publication of Capital, Marx identifies his analysis of ‘the doubled character of labour, according to whether it is expressed in use-value or in exchange-value’, as one of the two ‘best points of my book.’³⁵ ‘All understanding of the facts depends on this’³⁶, he claims (to which we might add: ‘so too our understanding of historical totalisation and temporalisation’). Like the concept of labour-power, the concepts of concrete and abstract labour do not extend across Marx’s corpus. In the Grundrisse, ‘labour as such [Arbeit schlechthin] and ‘labour sans phrase’ appear as proto-formulations of abstract labour, but they are not concepts of abstract labour, because they are not structured dialectically in relation to concrete labour. It is only after the Contribution (from 1859) wherein concrete and abstract labour feature as concepts essential to Marx’s critique of political economy (this is interesting insofar as ‘labour-power’ does not feature until the mid-1860s). Therefore, despite the fact that ‘labour-time’ [Arbeitszeit] does feature in the Grundrisse, we cannot state that it functions as a concept in Marx until after the Contribution (there are several passages in the Grundrisse with which to construct ‘concrete labour-time’ and ‘abstract labour-time’ alike as concepts, but only on the condition that they are retroactively read through the dialectic of concrete and abstract labour). This dovetails with the standpoint (of this thesis) that Marx must be read in such a way that ‘concrete labour’ and ‘concrete labour-time’, and ‘abstract labour’ and ‘abstract labour-time’, each become two different expressions of one and the same thing. Thus, for instance, abstract labour is already always abstract labour-time: a particular form of homogenous, quantifiable and divisible time which constitutes the measure and substance of value. In both its concrete and abstract manifestations, the ‘time’ of labour-time is inseparable from the ‘labour’. However it is grasped (even if it never leaves the domain of the ‘ordinary conception of time), it is not something which can be tacked on to, and severed from, ‘labour’.

³⁴ Wolfgang Fritz Haug, ‘Commodity aesthetics revisited: Exchange relations as the source of antagonistic aesthetization’, Radical Philosophy 135 (January/February 2006), 19. Labour-power is a problem for Haug, insofar as its use-value promise – the ‘aspects offered by the commodity’ – cannot be reduced to ‘the Archimedean ellipse of commodity aesthetics.’ Ibid. 19-20.

³⁵ Letter to Engels on 24 August 1867, Marx and Engels, MEW, Band 31 (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1965), 326. According to Marx, the other best point of the first volume of Capital is his ‘treatment of surplusvalue independently of its particular forms as profit, interest, ground-rent, etc.’ Ibid. ³⁶ Ibid.

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In this regard, the hyphen within ‘labour-time’ is crucial, because it registers the ontological unity of the concept of Arbeitszeit: ‘labour-time is a part of the time of the labourer; that is, it is part of the life-time of the labourer.’³⁷ This can be specified further, because if, consequent to the commodification of labour-power, living labour (and thus the labourer who personifies this labour) is internal to the value-form, then labour-time is only actual as a part of the time of capital, as a part of the life-time of capital.

The contours of abstract labour and abstract labour-time must nevertheless be outlined before those of concrete labour and concrete labour-time. There is (and on this point we cannot waver) a dialectic of abstract and concrete labour, but this is a dialectic wherein abstract labour has, to say the least, the upper hand. Generally speaking, three things should be kept in mind. First, abstract labour is the predominant, although not self-sufficient, successor to the category of labour in general: the totalising and temporalising power of labour in general must first and foremost be reworked through the category of abstract labour. Second, Marx’s analysis of abstract labour is far more temporally informed than that of his analysis of concrete labour: the temporality of the latter is either described with vague reference to a ‘qualitative’ labourtime, or, much more common, as already reduced to abstract labour-time, in the sense that ‘the worker is nothing more…than personified labour-time.’³⁸ Indeed, unless it is stated or implied otherwise, ‘labour-time’ is to be understood as abstract labour-time. Third, and this directly follows from the previous two points, abstract labour determines concrete labour to a degree and extent that is simply unmatched by concrete labour itself. Just as use-value is internal to value, so too is use-value producing labour internal to value-producing labour, even as the latter produces the former as its dialectical opposite. Whereas ‘concrete labour has to take the form of its opposite, undifferentiated human labour, to count as socially necessary labour’³⁹, abstract labour does not, not because it is not dialectically dependent on concrete labour, but because it is socially necessary labour.

Two common misconceptions about abstract labour can now be addressed. First, whilst this social form of labour constitutes the equalisation of qualitatively distinct concrete labours, it does not constitute the ongoing homogenisation of these labours. Abstract labour, as Werner Bonefeld articulates it in his critique of Massimo De Angelis, ‘is not concrete labour, however homogenised, monotonous, repetitive, senseless and boring it might be.’⁴⁰ Chris Arthur makes the same point to introduce his critique of Harry Braverman’s Labour and Monopoly Capital:

³⁷ Osborne, ‘Marx and the philosophy of time’, 19.

³⁸ Marx, Capital 1, 352-53.

³⁹ Bonefeld, ‘Abstract labour: Against its nature and on its time’, 266.

⁴⁰ Ibid. 260. Nor is ‘concrete labour’ abstract labour, despite the fact that the former is internal to the latter, and only actual because of the latter.

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‘the simplification of [concrete] labour refers to an impoverishment of its quality. But even the simplest motion still has some quality, it can never be abstraction as such.’⁴¹ Simply put, the ‘content’ of abstract labour cannot be conflated with Taylorism or the assembly line.

A second and far more widespread misconception about abstract labour requires a more detailed examination. The passages on the physiological dimension of this labour in the first chapters of the Contribution and Capital – abstract labour as the ‘productive expenditure of human brains, muscles, nerves, hands, etc.’⁴² – continue to cause something of a rift within the secondary literature. I.I. Rubin’s Essays on Marx’s Theory of Value (1923) (or, to be exact, the rediscovery of this work in the early 1970s) is at the origin of this. Rubin argues that:

One of two things is possible: if abstract labour is an expenditure of human energy in physiological form, then value has a reified-material character. Or value is a social phenomenon, and then abstract labour must also be understood as a social phenomenon connected with a determined social form of production. It is not possible to reconcile a physiological concept of abstract labour with the historical character of the value which it creates.⁴³

An ‘irreconcilable’ divide between the physiological and social dimensions of Marx’s concept of abstract labour is often framed as a transhistorical-historical divide, and in this sense might be understood as parallel to, if not constitutive of, the ambiguities inherent within his accounts of labour-power and use-value. This has prompted several commentators to make a choice on Marx’s behalf, thereby clearing the way for a critical (that is, consistent) reconstruction of this concept. Following Rubin, Bonefeld rejects any place for physiology within abstract labour: the ‘asocial physiological terms’ in which it is defined are incompatible with its existence as ‘a specific temporal form of capitalist labour.’⁴⁴ On the other hand, and against Rubin, Axel Kicillof and Guido Starosta maintain that the physiological definition is the ‘only meaningful definition of abstract labour, which, as much as its concrete aspect, is a purely material form, bearing no social or historical specificity.’⁴⁵ Postone takes a (seemingly) more nuanced stance:

⁴¹ Arthur, The New Dialectic and Marx’s Capital, 44.

⁴² Marx, Capital 1, 134. See also Marx, Contribution, 30-1.

⁴³ Isaak Illich Rubin, Essays on Marx’s Theory of Value [1923, 3^rd edition 1928], trans. Miloš Samardžija and Fredy Perlman (Detroit: Black and Red, 1972), 135.

⁴⁴ Bonefeld, ‘Abstract labour: Against its nature and on its time’, 258.

⁴⁵ Axel Kicillof and Guido Starosta, ‘On Materiality and Social Form: a Political Critique of Rubin’s Value-Form Theory’, Historical Materialism 15:3 (2007), 34. Kicillof and Starosta expand on this by stating that ‘when performed privately and independently, and once congealed in the natural materiality of the product of labour, that purely material form acquires the form of the value of the commodity, i.e. a purely social form that embodies “not an atom of matter”.’ Ibid. 34-5. The problems with this reading are too many to detail here, but Kicillof and Starosta are unique insofar as they effectively state that abstract labour is not just a transhistorical generalisation of concrete labour which is transformed

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we must ‘move beyond the physiological definition of abstract human labour’ and yet, at the same time, uncover why Marx presents the value-forming substance as physiological; that is, as ‘transhistorical, natural, and thus historically empty.’⁴⁶ The answer, for Postone, is Marx’s analysis of commodity fetishism: the expenditure of brains, muscles, etc. is the necessary form of appearance [Erscheinung] of abstract labour as a general social mediation, and is thus ‘the fundamental core of the fetish of capitalism.’⁴⁷ Yet there is a fundamental flaw to this position, the identification of which sheds light on a problem shared by each of these commentators. ‘The discovery of abstract labour-time leads ineluctably to that of commodity fetishism’⁴⁸, as Daniel Bensaïd is right to declare, but this is not because physiological labour amounts to the form of appearance of abstract labour, but because, from the standpoint of capital, the human body is completely reducible to abstract labour, to purely social brains, muscles, nerves, hands etc., the expenditure of which satisfies purely social needs.⁴⁹ This is what Marx calls ‘simple average labour’, and this labour is precisely what is both expressed and veiled by the valueform (namely money). The ‘labour’ that capital (and political economy) would like us to think creates value, that labour which is transhistorical and natural, etc., is not the atomised form of physiological labour which Marx presents, but the labour of qualitatively distinct and unified human beings and bodies, labour which ‘has value itself’ and which ‘appears as paid labou r.’⁵⁰ In short, the physiological dimension of Marx’s concept of abstract labour does not vitiate its historical specificity or purely social character, but registers it. As Alfred Schmidt reminds us, in Marx, ‘history itself projects into the physiological structure of the human being,’⁵¹ and one (but by no means the only) aspect of this, specific to capitalism, is the reduction of the human body to the same ‘phantom-like objectivity’⁵² which exemplifies value.

into a purely social form of labour specific to capitalism, but both of these forms of labour at the same time.

⁴⁶ Postone, Time, Labor, and Social Domination, 145. This passage reflects the fact that, for Postone, the ‘ontological’ and the ‘transhistorical’ are synonymous. In other words, he systematically dissociates ontology and history, and thus refuses the possibility of a historical ontology.

⁴⁷ Ibid. 170. For Postone, the physiological definition of abstract labour is accordingly central to Marx’s immanent critique, because it is a ‘part of an analysis of capitalism in its own terms, that is, as the forms present themselves.’ Ibid.

⁴⁸ Daniel Bensaïd, Marx for Our Times: Adventures and Misadventures of a Critique [1995], trans. Gregory Elliott (London: Verso, 2002), 118.

⁴⁹ To put this another way: from the standpoint of capital, the use-value of labour-power, a usefulness which ‘is conditioned by the properties of the bodies of commodities’, is purely social brains, muscles, nerves, hands, etc. Marx, Kapital 1, 50 (Capital 1, 126). I owe this reference and translation to C.E. McMenamin.

⁵⁰ Marx, Capital 1, 677, 680.

⁵¹ Alfred Schmidt, The Concept of Nature in Marx [1962], trans. Ben Fowkes (London and Brooklyn: Verso, 2014), 84.

⁵² Marx, Capital 1, 128.

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Abstract labour temporalises – it is already always abstract labour-time – because it is the meaning of ‘social labour’ within capitalism. There is a fundamental social dimension to concrete labour: the ‘social individual’ within capitalism is the bearer of concrete labour as a distinct social form (one, that is to say, characterised by a private and isolating existence). Yet abstract labour represents the originary social character of commodity producing society: ‘the general or abstract character of labour is…its social character, because it is the character of the equality of the labours incorporated in the different products of labour. This determinate form of social labour distinguishes commodity production from other modes of production.’⁵³ Thus any conception of ‘social time’ specific to capitalism must proceed from abstract labour. As Tomba articulates it, ‘the time of abstract labour, positing itself as that which regulates the relations of exchange, constitutes a new form of the transcendental, conditioning the a priori structures of experience.’⁵⁴ In Foucault’s positivist terms, this is a historical a priori that, to rewrite a passage in The Archaeology of Knowledge, is an ongoing ‘a condition of reality for acts…an a priori not of truths that might never be done, or really given to experience; but the a priori of a history that is given, since it is that of things actually done.’⁵⁵ Postone’s persistent emphasis on abstract labour as a ‘general social mediation’ and a ‘socially total mediation’ is thus warranted: abstract labour is not just what is common to the entire multiplicity of concrete labours; ‘rather, it is the social function of[abstract] labour which makes it general.’⁵⁶ It is the substance and measure of value by virtue of the fact that it is a purely socialising time, a time that renders exchangeable all individual temporalisations (in Marx’s terms, it makes possible the reduction of every form of ‘complex labour’ to ‘simple average labour’). This time ‘has no reality apart from its exchangeability’⁵⁷, as Guy Debord asserts, but it is important to stress that abstract labour-time is not originarily a quantity but a social relation, a regulatory force that ‘can only be quantified through the effect of a difference that manifests itself in it.’⁵⁸ It is equally important to stress that abstract labour-time is not the same thing as clock-time. The former ontologically depends on the latter – its homogeneity, quantifiability and divisibility is predicated on the clock – but it is not equivalent to it.⁵⁹ The clock historically precedes, and will continue to exist after, abstract labour (this point dovetails with Heidegger’s position that the clock ‘is factically necessary’⁶⁰, which is to say that it is not necessarily ‘inauthentic’). But this is not the most important point. Abstract labour controls the clock – most immediately by its measure ofconcrete labour – yet its own measure is not the clock but money (in capitalism, the clock is subservient to money as a temporal form: it does not register the ‘natural’ time of sunlight but the ‘natural’ law of valorisation).⁶¹ Money, in both its function as a commodity and as capital – as the ‘materialisation of universal labour-time’⁶² and as value made formally independent⁶³ – constitutes the real measure of abstract labour.

⁵³ Karl Marx, quoted in Massimiliano Tomba, ‘Historical Temporalities of Capital: An Anti-Historicist Perspective’, Historical Materialism 17 (2009), 48.

⁵⁴ Tomba, Marx’s Temporalities, 108.

⁵⁵ ‘…what I mean by the term is an a priori that is…a condition of reality for statements…an a priori not of truths that might never be said, or really given to experience; but the a priori of a history that is given, since it is that of things actually said.’ Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language [1969], trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon Books, 1972), 127. This a priori is the successor to the ‘positive unconscious of knowledge’ in The Order of Things: a distinctly historical unconscious underlying scientific discourses. See Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: an Archaeology of the Human Sciences [1966] (New York and London: Routledge Classics, 2002), xi-xii.

⁵⁶ Postone, Time, Labor, and Social Domination, 151. As Althusser says of Sartre, so too can we say of Postone: he is ‘the philosopher of mediations par excellence.’ See Louis Althusser, ‘Marxism is not a Historicism’, in Althusser and Balibar, Reading Capital, 136. Consider Postone’s culminating definition of value: ‘Value is, then, a category of mediation: it is at once a historically determinate, self-distributing form of wealth and an objectified, self-mediating form of social relations.’ Postone, Time, Labor and Social Domination, 154.

⁵⁷ Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle [1967], trans. Ken Knabb (London: Rebel Press, 1992), 87. I owe this reference to Bonefeld, ‘Abstract labour: Against its nature and on its time’, 262.

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The temporalising time of abstract labour is at once its totalising power. ‘Social labour’, ‘total labour-power’, ‘universal social labour’, etc. – expressions which recur throughout the Contribution and Capital and which must be grasped as synonymous with abstract labour – are totalising concepts in the full Sartrean sense of the term. Their unity is the process of their differentiation, a dialectical fact which is most basically expressed by Marx’s characterisation of concrete labour as a ‘mere organ’ of abstract labour: ‘labour, thus measured by time, does not seem, indeed, to be the labour of different persons, but on the contrary the different working individuals seem to be mere organs of this labour.’⁶⁴ To put this another way, the individual act of labour totalises and temporalises – it has unity – because it is totalised and temporalised by abstract labour. In capitalist society, abstract labour is thus the condition of both the individuation of the act of labour and the historical intelligibility of the division of labour.⁶⁵ The averageness of ‘simple average labour’ is critical here, because it quantifies the totalising core of abstract labour: it secures the identity between abstract labour and ‘socially necessary labour-time.’ Simple average labour thus lies at the basis of what Tombazos, in his analysis of the third volume of Capital, identifies as the culminating contradiction of socially necessary labour-time: that between the social labour required to produce a commodity (the aliquot time of total labour-power allotted to the production of a particular use-value), and the social need for that commodity (the aliquot time of total social need offered as an equivalent for this use-value).⁶⁶ At this level, value can be defined as the ‘link or the interaction between these two times’⁶⁷, even if this connection, as Marx emphasises, is only ever fortuitous.⁶⁸ The basic point, however, still remains: abstract labour is only intelligible from the standpoint of totalisation. It only temporalises from this standpoint, because only totalisation registers the dialectical relation between abstract and concrete labour.

⁵⁸ Tombazos, Time in Marx, 4.

⁵⁹ Postone’s historical sketch of ‘abstract time’ comes dangerously close to conflating abstract labourtime with clock-time. See Postone, Time, Labor, and Social Domination, 200-16.

⁶⁰ Heidegger, BT, 466. Recall that ‘world-time’ and ‘ordinary time’ are not necessarily inauthentic, that, for Heidegger, ‘originary temporality’ is not the sole domain of ‘authentic temporality’.

⁶¹ As Tomba says: ‘The clock measures the labour-time concretely performed in production, while the time of abstract labour objectivised in the same commodity as socially-necessary labour – thus, as exchange-value – has a social measure, given by money. The first temporality is measured by the capitalist or by his overseers with the stopwatch in his right hand and the Principles of Scientific Management in the left; the second temporality is, instead, regulated on the global markets.’ Tomba, Marx’s Temporalities, 103.

⁶² Marx, Contribution, 49.

⁶³ The essential function of money-capital is to overcome its own limit, the contradiction between its own quality (the ‘quintessence of all use-values’ (Marx, Grundrisse, 270), viz. infinite general wealth) and the necessity of its quantification (it is only ever a definite amount of money). This dialectic of infinitude and finitude is the historical-ontological basis of (modern) clock-time.

⁶⁴ Marx, Contribution, 30. Or: ‘the abstractly general counts not as a property of the concrete, sensibly real, but on the contrary the sensibly concrete counts as the mere form of appearance or definite form of realisation of the abstractly general.’ Karl Marx, quoted in Arthur, The New Dialectic and Marx’s Capital, 46.

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The unavoidable question must now be asked: what exactly is ‘concrete labour-time’? That is, does it have a ‘measure’ which is not – at least not immediately – reducible to abstract labour-time? This is a difficult question to address, given Marx’s conviction that:

If the mere quantity of labour functions as a measure of value regardless of quality, it presupposes that simple labour has become the pivot of industry. It presupposes that labour has been equalised by the subordination of men and women to the machine or by the extreme division of labour; that men and women are effaced by their labour; that the pendulum of the clock has become as accurate a measure of the relative activity of two workers as it is of the speed of two locomotives. Therefore, 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 [die Verkörperung der Zeit]. Quality no longer matters. Quantity alone decides everything: hour for hour, day for day… 69

This well-known passage from The Poverty of Philosophy (the last part of which frames this chapter) was composed over a decade before the dialectic of abstract and concrete labour becomes a feature of Marx’s writings, but it nonetheless typifies his temporal understanding of this dialectic, and should therefore be read from the standpoint of this dialectic. It expresses a relation between abstract and concrete labour so asymmetric that ‘the opposition at stake is not one between two forms of time…but one between time per se (figured as quantitative) and the human (figured as qualitative).’⁷⁰ Marx does not always de-temporalise the human (which in this passage can be read as ‘concrete labour’) in such radical terms. For instance, there are passages (primarily in the Grundrisse) in which human labour (the ‘living, form-giving fire’⁷¹) is not only not opposed to time, but in which its time – its time within capitalism – possesses a qualitative dimension:

⁶⁵ As Tombazos puts it, ‘abstract labour introduces a division within itself that is usually called the “division of labour”.’ Tombazos, Time in Marx, 29.

⁶⁶ See ibid. 26-7, 36, 53. See also Marx, Capital 3, 288.

⁶⁷ Tombazos, Time in Marx, 26-7.

⁶⁸ Marx, Capital 3, 288.

⁶⁹ Marx, Das Elend der Philosophie [Misère de la Philosophie], 85 (The Poverty of Philosophy, 53-4).

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Labour-time itself exists as such only subjectively, only in the form of activity. In so far as it is exchangeable (itself a commodity) as such, it is defined and differentiated not only quantitatively but also qualitatively, and is by no means general, selfequivalent labour-time; rather, labour-time as subject corresponds as little to the general labour-time which determines exchange-values as the particular commodities and products correspond to it as object.⁷²

Yet unlike the labour-time in this passage (which should be read as concrete labour-time), the vast majority of Marx’s critique of political economy depicts concrete labour as a time already outside of and opposed to itself, as a time which concrete labour is compelled to embody. The secondary literature on abstract labour – one that is still governed by the position that abstract labour is extrinsic, rather than internal, to historical time – registers this. The issue here is not this fidelity to Marx, but the lack of a concept of concrete labour-time within this literature, a concept accountable to abstract labour as a distinct form of social time specific to capitalism. There are statements to the effect that concrete labour ‘has a concrete temporality’⁷³, that its time ‘has a particular content…that is experienced subjectively’⁷⁴, but there has been (to date) no systematic attempt to conceptualise concrete labour as a social form of time simultaneously internal and external to abstract labour. There are numerous possible explanations for this, but one in particular stands out: this literature remains internal to Marx’s philosophy of time (such that it exists).⁷⁵ In other words, this literature (Bensaïd, Bonefeld, Postone, Tomba, Tombazos, etc.) does not adequately confront the fact that Marx offers us a concept of abstract labour but not of concrete labour. It thus maximises, yet stays within the limits of, the concept of abstract labour, such that this concept constitutes a historical ontology of ‘ordinary time’ which, to be sure, Heidegger and Sartre do not offer, but which also must account for the idea that the time of concrete labour – a time which abstract labour produces and upon which it depends – is not immediately reducible to abstract labour.

⁷⁰ Osborne, ‘Marx and the philosophy of time’, 18.

⁷¹ Marx, Grundrisse, 361.

⁷² Ibid. 171.

⁷³ Bonefeld, ‘Abstract labour: Against its nature and on its time’, 267.

⁷⁴ Tombazos, Time in Marx, 18.

⁷⁵ More often than not, a condition of this interiority is a certain exteriority – indifference – towards Marx’s philosophy of history.

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To his credit, Postone has gone the furthest in an attempt to temporalise concrete labour in ways which avoid this immediate reduction. At the heart of his reinterpretation of abstract labour as a general social mediation is a dialectic between ‘concrete time’ (time as a ‘function of events, occurrences or actions’, hence time as a ‘dependent variable’) and ‘abstract time’ (‘uniform, continuous, homogeneous, “empty” time’, hence time as an ‘independent variable’, an ‘independent framework within which motion, events, and action occur.’⁷⁶) Abstract time, he goes on to say, ‘is divisible into equal, constant, nonqualitative units.’⁷⁷ The specifically capitalist iteration of this is the changing dynamic between the productivity of labour (concrete time) and the consequent redetermination of the constant social labour hour (abstract time).⁷⁸ This ‘ongoing directional movement of time’⁷⁹, which Postone likens to a ‘treadmill pattern’, has an intrinsic historical dimension: it ‘can be grasped as a dialectic of abstract and historical time’⁸⁰ immanent to the value-form. In short, ‘historical time’ in capitalist society is ‘concrete time’.⁸¹ There are multiple problems with this reading of Marx, but they all proceed from the fact that severing ‘labour’ from abstract and concrete labour-time dehistoricises, it absolutises, the historically specific character of labour in capitalism that Postone insists on (ad nauseam). Abstract labour qua ‘abstract time’ does not temporalise history, or even temporalise as such: it is rather the readymade backdrop against which temporalisation – qua ‘concrete time’ – is measured (this explains why, for Postone, abstract time is already ‘abstract domination’.)⁸² As Bonefeld summarises it from a different perspective, ‘Postone presupposes what needs to be explained.’⁸³ As for ‘concrete time’, its exclusive identity as the historical time of capitalism renders abstract labour a form of unhistorical time.⁸⁴ It thereby renders the difference between the historical time of capitalism and other modes of production indistinguishable: the defining aspect of capitalist historical time is not the dialectic of abstract and concrete labour, but the productivity of concrete labour within itself. In sum, a ‘dialectic of abstract and historical time has no historicity, nor can it be understood as immanent to the value-form. It is unintentional, but the social totality which features in Time, Labor, and Social Domination turns its back on the dialectical – the historicalising – relationship between abstract and concrete labour-time.⁸⁵ Simply put, it does not register this relationship historically.

⁷⁶ Postone, Time, Labor, and Social Domination, 202.

⁷⁷ Ibid. Once again, Postone’s concept of abstract time conflates abstract labour-time with clock-time. The progress made by his dialectic of concrete and abstract time is immediately undone by his dedialectisation of abstract labour-time, such that this time is not understood as a dialectical relation between two different manifestations of clock-time, but as clock-time itself. 79

⁷⁸ Ibid. 292-93.

⁷⁹ Ibid. 293.

⁸⁰ Ibid. 295.

⁸¹ ‘Historical time in capitalism…can be considered as a form of concrete time that is socially constituted and expresses an ongoing qualitative transformation of work and production, of social life more generally, and of forms of consciousness, values, and needs. Unlike the “flow” of abstract time, this movement of time is not equable, but changes and can even accelerate.’ Ibid. 294.

⁸² See, for instance, ibid. 191. Hence abstract labour qua ‘abstract time’ de-temporalises history. ⁸³ See Werner Bonefeld, ‘On Postone’s Courageous but Unsuccessful Attempt to Banish the Class Antagonism from the Critique of Political Economy’, Historical Materialism 12:3 (2004), 104.

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If Postone’s attempt to ‘temporalise’ concrete labour is a failed attempt, it nevertheless reminds us that concrete labour-time is only intelligible in its dialectical relation with abstract labour-time. This much is evident: there is no such thing as concrete labour as such: ‘concrete labour’ is only ever particular concrete labours, a social form of labour which in its concretion is necessarily multiple. Nor can we state that concrete labour produces value (this is as much to say that concrete labour is not immediately reducible to abstract labour). The production of value is the sole purview of abstract labour. In Marx, therefore, it is impossible to conceive of concrete labour at a level of generality equal to that of abstract labour. Yet this does not mean that concrete labour cannot be examined as a form of temporalisation itself, that there is not, we might say, a temporalising structure common to each and every instance of concrete labour. A crucial problem that the concept of concrete labour produces is how to negotiate its explicit empirical basis (one which restricts most analyses of concrete labour to a time that must ‘occur within “homogenous time”…is compelled to occur within the time of its abstract measure’⁸⁶) with its implicit existential basis (one shared by each and every social individual), while at the same time maintaining its historical basis (one secured by its relation to abstract labour). Put differently, the empirical temporality of shipbuilding is not the same as that of writing a thesis, but it is still possible to assign a shared existential basis to each, the generality of which is not the same as that represented by abstract labour (but is no less historically specific to capitalism because of this). However, we must insist on this point: if this basis is a ‘measure’ of concrete labour, it is only because it is internal to – it is an existential condition of – the social measure constituted by abstract labour and expressed by money.

⁸⁴ This puts Postone squarely in line with Sohn-Rethel: see footnote 8 in this chapter.

⁸⁵ Postone maintains that Sartre’s Critique ‘presuppose[s] the concepts of “moment” and “totality” ontologically.’ Postone, Time, Labor and Social Domination, 152, ft. 86. He goes on to argue that, as against Sartre and Althusser alike, his work ‘treats the relation of moment and totality as historically constituted, a function of the peculiar properties of the social forms analysed by Marx with his categories of value, abstract labor, commodity, and capital.’ Ibid. Assuming that ‘ontologically’ means ‘ahistorically’ here, we can state that Postone’s concepts of ‘abstract time’ and ‘concrete time’, as well as the relation he establishes between them, can be subjected to the same critique.

⁸⁶ Bonefeld, ‘Abstract labour: Against its nature and on its time’, 267-68. Most analyses of concrete labour-time are in this sense Kantian: they accord to the schematism of the categories, in particular the schemas of magnitude and substance. See Kant, CPR, A143-44/B182-84, 274-75.

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