Marx and the Concept of Historical Time

As the bearers of concrete labour, individuals temporalise by virtue of the fact that they are social individuals. Consequently, if the existential basis of temporalisation is to have any meaning at all in Marx, it must itself be based in the sociality of human individuation specific to capitalism. Consider the following passage by Osborne:

If one agrees with something like the early Heidegger’s argument that the anticipation of death is the existential basis of temporalisation…(modified to register the social basis of this anticipation in relations with others, and hence the sociality of human individuation), then it is a short step to inferring that human finitude, in the sense of the existential register of mortality, is the ontological basis of the “value” of time and, thereby, the ontological ground of labour-time’s functioning as a universal measure of value. And this, despite the fact that any such “measurement”, in itself, involves the social instantiation of a degraded, “ordinary” or merely chronological conception of time (negating the existential temporalisation upon which it depends). At its limit, time is valuable because it (that is, “your” time) runs out.⁸⁷

This passage can be read from various different (highly interrelated) standpoints: the exchange relation, the division of labour, the dialectic of abstract and concrete labour, and so forth. Yet one standpoint particularly draws our attention, not just because it takes in each of these other standpoints, but because it does so as the capitalist origin from which the materialist concept of history must be restructured. This origin is the commodification of labour-power: it sets off a dual and asymmetric form of historical totalisation and temporalisation.

The sale of labour-power must be viewed from ‘the standpoint of the simple circulation of commodities’⁸⁸, because this sale constitutes an initial act of the circuit C–M–C: the simple transformation of one commodity into another, wherein money is nothing but the disappearing means with which to complete the circuit. As Tombazos reminds us, the economic subject of this circuit – selling in order to buy – is the individual human being⁸⁹, not because this circuit is instigated by individual will, but because it ensures that individual need does not exceed the need to conserve and reproduce oneself (which this circuit satisfies). The peculiar importance of the ‘peculiar commodity’ labour-power is in this sense doubled: its sale not only represents the exclusive entryway into the labour-process, but dictates that the only relationship between the circuit C–M–C and the satisfaction of need is the purchase of ‘a certain sum of the means of life’ (in the restricted sense of Leben as ‘subsistence’). For our purposes, this importance is manifested in the manner in which concrete labour – the labour yielded by labour-power from the standpoint of its sale – temporalises history. Insofar as it can be treated as a specification of individual praxis in Sartre’s terms, concrete labour constitutes, to quote from Chapter 2, ‘a dialectical movement between the present and the past wherein the present is prioritised as the totalising transcendence of the past towards the future.’ Moreover, the existential basis of this temporalisation is, following Heidegger, the individual worker’s finitude (on the condition, to return to Chapter 2 again, that finitude is understood as a being-towards a factical limit which structures – temporalises – each and every act). Therefore, and to tie this back to Chapter 1, concrete labour might be conceived as a ‘first historical act’: it produces the ‘dialectical time’ (to use Sartre’s expression) that epitomises the creation of the means to satisfy existing needs and the creation of new needs.⁹⁰

⁸⁷ Osborne, ‘Marx and the philosophy of time’, 20.

⁸⁸ Marx, Capital 1, 209.

⁸⁹ Tombazos, Time in Marx, 61.

116

Yet even from the limited standpoint of the labour-process, this description of historical temporalisation is obviously inadequate. The use-values produced by concrete labour are only means of life – they only satisfy existing needs and create new needs for their producers – by virtue of the fact that they do not belong to these producers, that, in other words, they authorise the payment of the wage which is then exchanged for other means of life. Thanks to the wageform, the means of life are only actual as objects of exchange, as commodities, and hence their production has already been determined by abstract labour (the diverse metamorphoses of this at the level of historical totalisation and temporalisation will be developed in the next chapter). However, before we comment on this, we must address the character of this ‘already’. This is not a straightforward thing to do, if in fact:

Social labour-time exists in…commodities in a latent state…and becomes evident only in the course of their exchange. The point of departure is not the labour of individuals considered as social labour, but on the contrary the particular kinds of labour of private individuals, i.e. labour which proves that it is universal social labour only by the sublation of its original character in the exchange process. Universal social labour is consequently not a readymade presupposition but an emerging result. Thus a new difficulty arises: on the one hand, commodities must enter the exchange process as objectified universal labour-time, on the other hand, the labour-time of individuals becomes objectified universal labour-time only as a result of the exchange process.⁹¹

⁹⁰ In this regard, concrete labour represents a concrete form of ‘labour in general’, which is to say that it temporalises and historicalises as a kind of ‘labour in particular’.

⁹¹ Marx, KPÖ, 31-2 (Contribution, 45).

117

As Arthur notes, Marx’s solution to the contradiction at the end of this passage is money, yet ‘although money certainly posits the labour it represents, and hence by reflection the labour represented by all commodities, as abstract universal labour, the abstraction is still not posited prior to exchange.’⁹² After Rubin, Arthur concludes that this contradiction is better addressed within the production-process itself, such that generalised commodity production – production that is already always production for exchange – is predicated on ‘living labour [being] treated as abstract prior to exchange precisely because it is treated as abstract in exchange.’⁹³ This is not to say that – within the production-process itself – concrete labour-time is actually realised as abstract labour-time (only the act of exchange achieves this), but it does mean that – within this process – concrete labour-time is already internal to abstract labour-time. This internality is what is often described as the ‘imposition’ and ‘policing’ of abstract labour-time; its agents are the foreman and the clock. It is along these lines that Bonefeld, drawing on the work of Riccardo Bellofiore, characterises abstract labour as a real abstraction that ‘projects the “ghost of value”…back into production, where the ghost turns into a vampire that sucks living labour dry, reducing it to “time’s carcase”.’⁹⁴ The exchange relation is the sole guarantor of socially necessary labour-time, but, ‘if anything, the constitution of labour as abstract in the capital relation is more fundamental than its constitution as abstract in exchange’⁹⁵, because only the labour-process makes possible the transformation of the ‘ontological basis of the “value” of time’ into socially necessary labour-time.

If, consequent to the commodification of labour-power, concrete labour is internal to abstract labour, then human need (the temporalising and historicalising ground of the act, that from which the teleological end, hence the unity, of this act derives) is internal to capital. In Chapter 4 of the first volume of Capital – ‘The General Formula for Capital’ – Marx asserts that ‘the simple circulation of commodities…is a means to a final goal which lies outside circulation, namely the appropriation of use-values, the satisfaction of needs’, whereas ‘the circulation of money as capital is an end in itself, for the valorisation of value takes place only within this constantly renewed movement.’⁹⁶ There are two, and two fundamentally opposed, conceptions of need – and with them teleologies – at work here, and establishing the difference and relation between them is one of the primary tasks of the following chapter. But what must be emphasised now is that whereas the satisfaction of individual needs lies outside of simple circulation, the creation of the means to satisfy these needs lies squarely inside the circulation of money as capital. Unlike the simple circulation of commodities, the circulation of money as capital not only presupposes but posits the means of satisfying individual needs.⁹⁷ Again, we are faced with the peculiar importance of the commodification of labour-power. It not only dictates that the acts within a particular instance of the circuit C–M–C (i.e., the sale of labourpower, the concrete act of labour, and the exchange of the wage for the means of life) are only actual within the circuit M–C–M’ (the definitive circuit of capital: buying in order to sell), but that, insofar as it leads to the satisfaction of individual needs, every act within every instance of C–M–C is only actual within M–C–M’. In sum, the materiality of C–M–C is predicated on M–C–M’, and thus the totalising and temporalising capacity of concrete labour as a historical act is based in the totalising and temporalising power of abstract labour, or the labour yielded by labour-power from the standpoint of its purchase. In Sartre’s terms, abstract labour totalises and temporalises not because it is driven by human need, but because it internally transforms – it perverts – this need into exigency. Hence for the worker (to return to two previously cited passages in the Critique), ‘the future governs the present insofar as this future strictly identifies itself with the past’⁹⁸, and ‘the future to be realised is already fabricated as mechanical inertia in the way in which past being is transcended.’⁹⁹ As a ‘living organism’, capital’s self-renewal is expressed by this temporality of exigency, a temporality that quantifies human need. If, as the previous chapter argues, human need grounds ‘death’ as the existential limit in relation to which ‘temporality temporalises itself’, such that the act temporalises itself as a kind of‘being towards-need’, then exigency constitutes the capitalist restructuration of this, whereby the ‘ontological basis of the “value” of time’ is reduced to the number of years, months, days, etc. that the individual worker has left to live.¹⁰⁰ This despite the fact – in fact precisely because – capital ‘is indifferent to his or her reproduction other than as part of a certain social aggregate of labour-power.’¹⁰¹ This has significant ramifications for the materialist concept of history. Capital, as the next chapter establishes, is the subject of history (this is synonymous with the fact that it is the economic subject of M–C–M’), but it is this subject because its needs deprive human beings of their capacity to totalise and temporalise history (on their own terms). This is the reason why, as Chapter 4 also argues, Capital is the condition of thinking the materialist concept of history in The German Ideology, but only because it destabilises this concept: the condition of thinking the first historical act is, as we will see, its de-historicalisation. It cannot and never will realise its ultimate end (infinite wealth), but until it is gone, capital will never cease attempting to ensure that human need, and thus ‘material life itself’, does not exceed the ‘reproduction of the physical existence of…individuals.’¹⁰²

⁹² Arthur, The New Dialectic and Marx’s Capital, 46.

⁹³ Ibid. ‘In effect, abstract labour as a form-determination of the living labour of the wage worker, and abstract labour as the dead labour objectified in a commodity, are the same thing, in the one case looked at as activity, in the other as its result.’ Ibid.

⁹⁴ Bonefeld, ‘Abstract labour: Against its nature and on its time’, 266. The expression ‘time’s carcase’ is a translation of ‘die Verkörperung der Zeit’, from the passage in The Poverty of Philosophy cited earlier (see footnotes 1 and 69 in this chapter). ‘The embodiment of time’ is a more literal translation. ⁹⁵ Arthur, The New Dialectic and Marx’s Capital, 45.

⁹⁶ Marx, Capital 1, 253.

118

⁹⁸ Sartre, CDR 1, 82. 98 Sartre CDR 1. 82

⁹⁷ As Tombazos shows, Marx’s understanding of the difference between simple circulation and the circulation of money-capital is indebted to the transition from chemism to teleology in Hegel’s Logic. See Tombazos, Time in Marx, 75-9. Unlike the chemical process (simple circulation), the teleological process (capital) not only presupposes but posits the moments of its self-renewal.

⁹⁹ Ibid. 235.

¹⁰⁰ Marx’s concept of capital could well be understood as a dialectic of mortality (in both its existential and chronological registers) and immortality, inasmuch as ‘the immortality which money strove to achieve by setting itself negatively against circulation, by withdrawing from it, is achieved by capital, which preserves itself precisely by abandoning itself to circulation’, and ‘value is capital only as selfimmortalising and self-multiplying value.’ Marx, Grundrisse, 261, 639.

¹⁰¹ Osborne, ‘Marx and the philosophy of time’, 20.

119

There is no doubt that the category of labour in general is irrevocably altered by Marx’s critique of political economy. In the aftermath of the Contribution and Capital, the totalising, temporalising and historicalising power of labour must be rethought through the concept of abstract labour, unto itself and in its dynamic relationship with concrete labour.¹⁰³ Yet abstract labour is nothing – it has no practical materiality – if it is not joined with the other ‘best point of the first volume of Capital: the concept of surplus-value [Mehrwert]. More than any other concept, surplus-value – the investigation of which guides the rest of this chapter – illuminates the complex (and politically vexing) directions history takes within capitalism. Insofar as ‘the only utility [Nützlichkeit] whatsoever which an object can have for capital can be to preserve or increase it’¹⁰⁴, surplus-value determines the fact that living labour ‘confronts capital not as a use-value, but as the use-value pure and simple…the use-value of capital itself.’¹⁰⁵ From the dialectic of abstract and concrete labour two new concepts appear (which, again, are identical): surplus-labour [Surplusarbeit] and surplus-labour-time [Surplusarbeitszeit]¹⁰⁶. Just like the surplus-value it produces, surplus-labour is by no means a straightforward concept (as is often assumed). It registers a contradiction at the heart of ‘socially necessary labour-time’ (one more basic than the contradiction between the social labour necessary to produce a commodity and the social need for that commodity). Surplus-labour thus registers a contradiction at the heart of abstract labour/value, and for this reason the relation between necessary and surplus-labour must be examined in its own right, before – and this is the task of Chapter 4 – it can be grasped as constitutive of a distinct historical dynamic.

¹⁰² Marx and Engels, DI, 21 (GI, 42).

¹⁰³ Consider this passage by Tombazos : ‘In the usual way of reading Capital, the commodity divides itself into abstract and concrete labour, in value and use-value, without being able to be value if it is not also use-value, and vice versa. This is correct but insufficient. Abstract labour divides itself, within itself, into abstract labour (universality) and abstract/concrete labour (universality/particularity)…It seems to us more correct to say that the commodity is divided into value and value/use-value in order to highlight the non-independent (and neutral) character of use-values under capitalism. Thus, abstract labour appears in two forms: as a simple unity with itself (value, universality) and as a “composed” unity (value/use-value, abstract/concrete labour, particularity).’ Tombazos, Time in Marx, 29-30. The problem with this passage is not that all use-values are dependent on value, but that they are all neutral (the use-value of labour-power is by no means ‘neutral’).

¹⁰⁴ Marx, Grundrisse, 270.

¹⁰⁵ Ibid. 295, 297. Like most passages in the Grundrisse, this passage must be read from the retroactive standpoint of the dialectic of abstract and concrete labour. See, in addition, Arthur, The New Dialectic and Marx’s Capital, 42.

¹⁰⁶ Unlike ‘concrete labour’, ‘abstract labour’ and ‘necessary labour’, ‘surplus-labour’ will be written with a hyphen in order to reflect the unity of the original German. The same holds for ‘surplus-labourtime’ (as against ‘necessary labour-time’ [notwendige Arbeitszeit]). In the Grundrisse, Marx often uses the term ‘surplus-time’ [Surpluszeit] synonymously with surplus-labour-time.

120

121

3.2 Necessary and Surplus-Labour

The concepts of surplus-labour and surplus-value add a new dimension to the complex lineage of, and relationship between, concepts within Marx’s critique of political economy. Unlike the concepts of labour-power, abstract labour and concrete labour, surplus-labour and surplusvalue feature prominently from the start of this critique (on the assumption that the Grundrisse constitutes this start). In the Grundrisse, the exposition of surplus-labour and surplus-value is far more developed than that of labour-power, even as it already registers the extent to which surplus-labour, surplus-value and labour-power are conceptually inseparable. Of even greater consequence, however, is the fact that this exposition is not mediated by a dialectic of abstract and concrete labour. The lack of a concept of abstract labour in the Grundrisse is particularly important. If, as Osborne maintains, ‘the concepts of abstract labour and labour-power are indissociable’, such that ‘ontologically, both are actual only as ideal objectivities’¹⁰⁷, the same must be said of the concept of surplus-labour (i.e. surplus-labour must be added to this list of indissociable concepts). Surplus-labour is not identical to abstract labour. It is, rather, abstract labour from the standpoint of the difference between the value of labour-power and every other commodity. Once more, the logic of retroactivity emerges here, insofar as surplus-labour and surplus-value function as developed concepts in the Grundrisse, but only on the condition that they are refigured through abstract labour and its dialectical relation with concrete labour. This is important, because the Grundrisse – not the 1861-63 Manuscripts nor Capital, each of which dedicate significant attention to surplus-labour and surplus-value¹⁰⁸ – arguably contains the most philosophically constructive passages on surplus-labour and surplus-value, primarily because they critically appropriate the difference and relation between the barrier [Schranke] and the limit [Grenze] in Hegel’s Logic.¹⁰⁹ Hence we might say – not without irony – that the Grundrisse offers some of the most philosophically constructive passages on abstract labour as well. The point here (one which extends across Marx’s critique of political economy, if not his entire corpus) is that the logic of retroactivity is at once a logic of mutual constitution. In other words, it is fair to state that the Grundrisse offers as much to Capital as Capital does to the Grundrisse.

Surplus-value constitutes ‘the hidden time of the commodity’, as Tombazos depicts it, because it emerges from the difference between the labour-time necessary for the production of a commodity and the labour-time necessary for the reproduction of the labour-power whose use produces this commodity.¹¹⁰ This difference is a purely quantitative difference, in terms of both substance and measure. There are not two different kinds of socially necessary labourtime at work here: the labour-time necessary for the reproduction of labour-power is the same type of labour-time necessary for the production of all commodities (labour-power is the same as every other commodity in that it can only be reproduced through every other commodity). Nevertheless – and this is crucial – this difference sets into motion a single ‘necessary labour (and with it a singular concept of need) internally opposed to itself, such that necessary labour divides itself, within itself, into the labour-time necessary to reproduce labour-power and that necessary to produce every other commodity.¹¹¹ Surplus-value thus not only sets labour-power against every other commodity (labour-power is not ‘peculiar’ because it has no ‘hidden time’, but because its ‘hidden time’ is the absence of this time¹¹²), but sets abstract labour and value against themselves more generally. A contradiction – in fact a dialectic – is thereby produced between labour-power and every other commodity, including the labour necessary to produce each (this despite the fact that each derive from the same kind of labour-time). Surplus-value does this for a very simple reason: its existence, which is to say the existence of capital, hinges on creating an excess out of a relationship of equivalence. And as Capital makes clear, there is precisely one commodity which has the capacity to yield an excess from the inviolable ‘law of commodity exchange’. Labour-power, and labour-power alone, yields the surplus-labour that yields surplus-value, and it is for this reason commodified. This is the context from which the practical relationship between abstract and surplus-labour must be understood. Surpluslabour depends on abstract labour for its temporal intelligibility, but abstract labour-time only exists because ‘necessary labour’ simultaneously contains and does not contain surplus-labour within itself. The homogeneity, quantifiability and divisibility of abstract labour-time – a time, we must recall, which is originarily not a quantity but a social relation – is not fundamentally based on any difference which manifests itself in it, but on the difference between the labourtime necessary to produce labour-power and every other commodity. Abstract labour-time is ‘socially necessary labour-time’, but only on the condition the latter is grasped as both separate and opposed to surplus-labour, and as containing surplus-labour within itself.

¹⁰⁷ Osborne, ‘Marx and the philosophy of time’, 19.

¹⁰⁸ Surplus-labour and surplus-value do not feature in the Contribution, which is essentially a draft of the first three chapters of the first volume of Capital.

¹⁰⁹ See, in particular, Marx, Grundrisse, 415-16 and 420-23.

122

The fact that surplus-labour is (at least ideally) contained within every commodity other than the one which yields it expands the dialectical scope of abstract labour. On the one hand, Marx’s basic formulations of the labour theory of value – the use-value of labour-power is ‘a source not only of value, but of more value than it has itself’¹¹³, or, ‘surplus-value…is only the relation of living labour to that objectified in the worker’¹¹⁴ – owe their intelligibility to abstract labour-time. Surplus-value does not make sense absent the concept of abstract labour. The essence of surplus-labour-time is the ‘theft of labour-time’, but not just because countless hours are stolen from workers. Surplus-labour-time is equally a qualitative theft, grounded by the sense in which abstract labour is firstly a purely relational – a purely social – form of time. Abstract labour has a quality, but in Hegel’s terms, the dialectic of concrete and abstract labour that produces labour-time as the measure of value cannot be directly mapped onto the dialectic of quality and quantity in the Logic. That is, quality + quantity ^ measure cannot be rewritten as ‘concrete labour + abstract labour ^ measure’. The dialectic of quality and quantity is in Marx already internal to abstract labour. Consequent to the commodification of labour-power, the quality of use-value producing labour is quantified precisely because it is already internal to the quality of exchange-value producing labour, or pure exchangeability¹¹⁵.

¹¹⁰ Tombazos, Time in Marx, 85.

¹¹¹ I am using Tombazos’s language here. See ibid. 29 (and footnote 103 in this chapter).

¹¹² This corresponds to the basic sense in which labour-power is a ‘peculiar commodity’ because the mortality of its owner directly bears on the determination of its value.

123

However, and on the other hand, the purely relational quality of abstract labour must be grasped as immanent to, in fact as emerging from, the doubled relation between necessary and surplus-labour. We have already postulated this, and the bulk of Chapter 4 will redevelop this from the standpoint of the production of historical time. But what needs to be stressed here is that if, at its core, abstract labour originates from the doubled relation between necessary and surplus-labour, it also conceals this relation. The homogeneity, quantifiability and divisibility of abstract labour-time both expresses and disguises the doubled relation between necessary and surplus-labour; or, this expression and disguise exist within and at the same time. Hence the dual importance of money as the ‘materialisation of general labour-time’. The sale of every product of labour except labour-power ideally expresses (profit) and veils (price) the surpluslabour, the surplus-value, within these products. This realisation is retroactive and corresponds to the sense in which surplus-labour is internal to socially necessary labour. The sale of labourpower is more complex, but can be characterised in similar terms. It sets into motion both the expression (rate of profit) and the concealment (price of labour, the wage¹¹⁶) of the extraction of surplus-labour, thus latent surplus-value, from individual workers. This extraction is both prospective and retroactive¹¹⁷, and corresponds to the sense in which surplus-labour is defined against socially necessary labour. In Hegelian mode, the basic point here is that the ‘essential relation’ abstract labour does not only just exist, but is both manifestation [Erscheinung] and semblance [Schein], because it is itself based in the doubled relation between necessary and surplus-labour. Abstract labour-time simultaneously realises the fact that, within capitalism, ‘surplus-labour and necessary labour are mingled together’¹¹⁸, as well as the fact that surpluslabour is nothing other than ‘forced labour’.¹¹⁹

¹¹³ Marx, Capital 1, 301.

¹¹⁴ Marx, Grundrisse, 337. For Marx, ‘it is not at all contradictory, or, rather, the in-every-way mutually contradictory statements that labour is absolute poverty as object, on one side, and is, on the other side, the general possibility of wealth as subject and as activity, are reciprocally determined and follow from the essence of labour, such as it is presupposed by capital as its contradiction and as its contradictory being, and such as it, in turn, presupposes capital.’ Ibid. 296.

¹¹⁵ This point is indebted to the fifth chapter of Arthur’s The New Dialectic and Marx’s Capital. See Arthur, The New Dialectic and Marx’s Capital, 90, 109. In addition to this, see Christopher J. Arthur, ‘Marx, Hegel and the Value-Form’, in Marx’s Capital and Hegel’s Logic: A Reexamination, 269-91. Tombazos is correct to point out that abstract labour is indifferent to the productivity of concrete labour, that it can thus only be ‘more or less extensive and intensive’, but it does not follow that abstract labour is a purely quantitative category, that, as he puts it, ‘the “quality” of abstract labour is precisely that it has no “quality”.’ Tombazos, Time in Marx, 112.

124

The dialectic that confronts us is thus not the ‘dialectic of necessary and surplus-labour’ (there is no such thing), but rather, within capitalism, the dialectic within necessary labour as such. This dialectic differs from that between abstract and concrete labour in two crucial ways. First, as previously stated, this dialectic comes out of two different manifestations of one and the same kind of labour and time. Second, and more importantly, the structure of this dialectic is essentially different. Whereas concrete labour is produced by abstract labour as both internal and external to abstract labour (this is the manner in which living labour is external to capital because it is internal to the production-process), surplus-labour produces itselfas both internal and external to necessary labour. In other words, if a defining feature of capitalism is that surplus determines necessity, then this is so because surplus-labour simultaneously determines itself as internal (from the standpoint of the production of all commodities but labour-power) and external (from the standpoint ofthe production of labour-power) to necessary labour. Thus the objective conditions of the production-process which make possible the transformation of value into surplus-value not only appear, but are posited, as the result of surplus-value itself.¹²⁰ Consequently, ‘the particular forms which value…must adopt in order to realise itself anew, i.e. to posit itself as capital…are…only particular forms of surplus-labour itself.’¹²¹ This is the framework through which the following passage must be read:

¹¹⁶ ‘Wage-labour always consists of paid and unpaid labour’ (Marx, Grundrisse, 574), and at the same time, ‘in wage-labour…even surplus-labour, or unpaid labour, appears as paid.’ (Marx, Capital 1, 680). ¹¹⁷ In other words, the commodification of labour-power chronologically precedes the labour-process, but the exchange of labour-power for the wage is only actual (the worker is only paid) after this process. ¹¹⁸ Ibid. 346. Marx’s statement that ‘capital did not invent surplus-labour’ (Ibid. 344) is misleading. It is true that within the corvée system ‘the necessary labour which the Wallachian peasant performs for his own maintenance is distinctly marked off from his surplus-labour on behalf of the boyar’ (Ibid. 346), but this surplus-labour is not just the unhidden predecessor of surplus-labour within capitalism, as Marx’s analysis of the working-day [der Arbeitstag] suggests. The various forms of feudal surpluslabour are fundamentally different from the kind of ‘surplus-labour’ which characterises capitalism. If anything, and just like the relation between abstract labour and labour in general, surplus-labour within capitalism is the condition of thinking ‘surplus-labour’ transhistorically. ¹¹⁹ Marx, Grundrisse, 324.

¹²⁰ ‘…the values he [the capitalist] gave in that exchange [the wage for living labour capacity] were not values which he originally put into circulation out of his own funds; they were, rather, objectified alien labour which he appropriated without giving any equivalent whatsoever, and which he now reexchanges for alien living labour.’ Ibid. 457.

125