Marx and the Concept of Historical Time

Marx’s indebtedness to Kant and Hegel, as well as his critical departure from them, can be realised. On one level, the valorisation-process subsumes the labour-process in much the same way that subsumption functions in the Critique of Pure Reason: the labour-process is brought under the valorisation-process in such a way that the labour-process – as a sensible object of appearance – is transformed into an object of capital’s self-knowledge, thus authorising the universality and necessity of the valorisation-process. Despite Hegel’s protestations that such a grasping of subsumption ‘alters what is immediate…strip[s] away what is sensory, and lift[s] out the universal’³⁷, this is precisely the point: capital is wholly indifferent to the particularities of the labour-process. This indifference marks the self-expansion of capital via the production of exchange-values: capital is predicated on the erasure of the concrete, sensual particularities of the labour-process. On another level, however, this erasure is at once the creation of these particularities. This is the deeply Hegelian dimension of Marx’s concept of subsumption: the dialectical manner though which the subsumption of the labour-process under the valorisationprocess is the logical and ontological creation of the particularities of the labour-process, such that, after the Logic, the universality of the concept – here the valorisation-process – inheres within these particularities. This is the syllogistic structure of capital from the standpoint of subsumption. Marx’s concept of subsumption thus represents a unique confrontation between Kant and Hegel’s conceptions of subsumption. Yet despite the fact that the Kantian aspect of Marx’s concept of subsumption is the most immediate and explicit dimension in Capital, it is ultimately the dialectical dimension – a dimension which proceeds from Hegel but critically restructures him at the same time – which grounds the uniqueness of this concept.

Three points follow from this. First, Marx’s concept of subsumption confirms the sense in which the relation ontologically precedes the relatum: it is not as if one pre-existing thing (the valorisation-process) subsumes another (the labour-process). Rather, following the basic logic of totalisation and temporalisation, ‘subsumption’ denotes the active production of the relation between the valorisation-process and labour-process, and thereby the intelligibility of the difference between these processes. Second, this concept specifies the sense in which the labour-process is internal to the valorisation-process, and for this reason subsumption replaces the logic of ‘internalisation’ which, up to this point, has structured our comprehension of the relationship between concrete and abstract labour, and the relation between human needs and the needs of capital. However, and this should now be clear, subsumption is not simply another word for ‘internalisation’, but is rather a dialectic of interiorisation and exteriorisation. If, after Sartre, an exteriorised totality is reinteriorised through praxis, such that this reinteriorisation is at once ‘an interior negation of interiority’³⁸, then we might transpose this to Marx and state that the interiorisation of the labour-process into the valorisation-process is at once the interior negation of the interiority of the valorisation-process. The erasure of the particularities of the labour-process is dialectically fastened to the expanding creation of these particularities. The difference, however, between Sartre and Marx is that, consequent to the commodification of labour-power, this dialectic must be understood as the self-creation of the valorisation-process itself (the valorisation-process externalises the labour-process within itself). This leads to the third and final point, one that signals the greatest critical departure from Hegel. Subsumption is, after Peter Osborne, what we might call an ‘actual abstraction’. As Osborne suggests, ‘once we divest ourselves of Hegel’s notion of an achieved absolute’ (as a side note: this is precisely the problem with Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, the reason why Hegel’s otherwise consistent commitment to the dialectical character of subsumption is lost in this work), then ‘analytically “good” abstraction, “concrete fullness of abstraction”, or the unity of the categorial forms of a systematic dialectic, may now correspond to practically “bad” abstraction: paradigmatically, in Marx’s analysis, domination by the abstractions of the value-form.’³⁹ In other words, once we recognise subsumption for what it is – a necessarily ongoing and open process – then the analytically ‘good’ dimension of subsumption – the manner in which the concrete fullness of the valorisation-process is constitutive of the particularities of the labour-process – may now correspond to the practically ‘bad’ dimension of subsumption – the erasure, consequent to the commodification of labour-power, of the particularities of the labour-process. However, as Osborne points out, ‘this kind of practically “bad” abstraction has a different logical form to the “one-sided” bad abstractions of the understanding, from which the discourse of good and bad abstractions derives.’⁴⁰ In other words, the subsumption of the labour-process under the valorisation-process (here in the sense that the latter ‘erases’ the concrete particularities of the former) is a ‘bad’ erasure immanent to a ‘good’ creation.

³⁷ Ibid. 12 (§22).

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This is the philosophical context in which the two forms of subsumption that constitute capitalism – formal subsumption and real subsumption – must be situated. For Marx, formal subsumption is ‘formal’ because it denotes the way in which capital ‘takes hold’ of the labourprocess without actually transforming the content of this process, whereas real subsumption is ‘real’ because capital actually transforms this process – it actually, and incessantly, recreates this process in order to increase the productivity of labour. Marx primarily makes use of formal subsumption in order to highlight how existing labour-processes are brought under the capital relation⁴¹, how, for instance, guild-labourers become wage-labourers without actually having the content of their labour-process transformed. Real subsumption, on the other hand, yields what Marx describes as the ‘specifically capitalist mode of production’. As is well-known, the production of surplus-value – the production of the difference and relation between necessary and surplus-labour – motors both formal and real subsumption alike: the valorisation-process subsumes the labour-process because capital needs to self-expand (to produce surplus-value). Accordingly, Marx directly ties the two different forms of subsumption to two different forms of the production of surplus-value, the analysis of which constitutes half of the first volume of Capital. Formal subsumption corresponds to the production of ‘absolute surplus-value’: the absolute extension of the working-day past the labour-time necessary to reproduce the owner of labour-power, whereas real subsumption corresponds to the production of ‘relative-surplus value’: the reduction of the labour-time necessary to reproduce the owner of labour-power and therefore the ‘corresponding alteration in the respective lengths of the two components of the working-day.’⁴² Thus absolute surplus-value is ‘absolute’ as it involves the absolute extension of the time beyond that necessary to reproduce the worker, whereas relative surplus-value is ‘relative’ because the increase of surplus-labour-time is relative to the reduction of necessary labour-time, such that the working-day may stay at the same length, or even decrease. In short, formal subsumption, and the absolute surplus-value correlating to it, is an extensive process, whereas real subsumption, and the relative surplus-value that correlates to it, is an intensive process. However, as with the labour- and valorisation-process, it is not the difference between formal/real subsumption, and thus absolute/relative surplus-value, that ultimately concerns us, but rather the relations between them, because it is these relations which constitute, one might say, the ‘inner substance’ of the dialectic of the labour- and valorisation-process. Subsumption is, for Marx, a dialectical category: it registers how the valorisation-process both internalises and externalises – within itself – the labour-process, but this does not mean that the relations between formal and real subsumption are dialectical relations. Unto themselves, formal and real subsumption can be understood as dialectical processes, insofar as each express different forms of the relation between the labour- and valorisation-process, but there is, in Marx, no such thing as ‘the dialectic of formal and real subsumption’ (nor is there a ‘dialectic of absolute and relative surplus-value’). However, this takes nothing away from the need to uncover the relations between formal and real subsumption, as well as those between absolute and relative surplus-value, because they constitute the internal engine of the production-process of capital more generally.

³⁸ Sartre, CDR 1, 57.

³⁹ Peter Osborne, ‘The reproach of abstraction’, Radical Philosophy 127 (September/October 2004), 27. ⁴⁰ Ibid.

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⁴¹ Marx, Capital 1, 1020-21.

⁴² Ibid. 432. Whereas Marx rarely directly uses the term ‘subsumption’ in the first volume of Capital proper, the Results of the Immediate Production-Process renders the relationship between formal and real subsumption, and absolute and relative surplus-value, quite explicit: ‘If the production of absolute surplus-value was the material expression [materieller Ausdruck] of the formal subsumption of labour under capital, then the production of relative surplus-value may be viewed as its real subsumption. Ibid. 1025.

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One dimension of Marx’s writings from the 1861-63 Manuscripts onwards is the sense in which formal subsumption, and hence absolute surplus-value, ‘precede’ real subsumption and relative surplus-value.⁴³ In this way, formal subsumption is the ‘premise and precondition of…real subsumption.’⁴⁴ On one level, this characterisation is not surprising: it proceeds from Marx’s examination of the working-day, such that ‘the constant tendency of capital’ to extend the length of the working-day to its ‘utmost physically possible limit’⁴⁵, and the subsequent struggle by workers to reduce the length of this day, can be comprehended as fuelling dynamic transformations of the labour-process itself, transformations that directly raise the productivity of labour and thereby lower the time necessary to the produce workers’ means of life. In this manner, formal subsumption might be understood as the premise and precondition of the three definitive developments within real subsumption: cooperation, the division of labour, and the use of machinery. The absolute limits of absolute surplus-value give rise to the quality of real subsumption, the ‘specifically capitalist mode of production’. According to Marx, it is only in real subsumption wherein:

The social productive forces of labour, or the productive forces of directly social, socialised (i.e. collective) labour come into being through cooperation, the division of labour within the workshop, the use of machinery, and in general the transformation of production by the conscious use of the sciences, of mechanics, chemistry, etc. for specific ends, technology, etc. and similarly, through the enormous increase of scale corresponding to such developments (for it is only socialised labour that is capable of applying the general products of human development, such as mathematics, to the immediate production-process; and, conversely, progress in these sciences presupposes a certain level of material production). This entire development of the productive forces of socialised labour (in contrast to the more or less isolated labour of individuals), and together with it the use of science (the general product of social development), in the immediate process of production, takes the form of the productive power of capital.⁴⁶

⁴⁴ Ibid. 1026.

⁴³ See, in particular, ibid. 1025.

⁴⁵ Karl Marx, Value, Price and Profit [1865], as cited in Tomba, Marx’s Temporalities, 134.

⁴⁶ Marx, Capital 1, 1024. ‘With the real subsumption of labour under capital a complete (and constantly repeated) revolution takes place in the mode of production, in the productivity of the workers and in the relations between workers and capitalists.’ Ibid. 1035. The expression ‘a complete and constantly repeated revolution’ is Marx’s self-reference to The Communist Manifesto.

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As this passage shows, real, not formal, subsumption is the realisation of ‘social labour within capitalism. This social labour is spurred by the competition between individual capitals: organisational and technological innovation is driven by the desire of individual capitalists to sell – if only momentarily – commodities at an ‘individual value’ below that of their existing social value (innovation, particularly new machinery, is unevenly introduced within the same industry and across different industries). In the end, however, the idea that formal subsumption ‘precedes’ its real counterpart, that the former is simply the ‘premise and precondition’ of the latter, is not a convincing framework with which to understand their relationship. In fact, it is misleading. This is not just because ‘from one standpoint the distinction between absolute and relative surplus-value appears to be illusory.’⁴⁷ More fundamentally, this is because, logically as well as materially, the relationship between formal and real subsumption must be grasped as a mutually constitutive relationship, an interplay, or continual crossing-over, from one form to another, or what Tomba calls the ‘reciprocal co-penetration between absolute surplus-value and relative surplus-value.’⁴⁸ Real subsumption is both the logical and material premise and precondition of formal subsumption (as much as the reverse). The introduction of machinery in one branch of industry not only ‘prolong[s] the labour-time of those workers who continue to work with the old, imperfect means of production,’⁴⁹ it is also ‘the most powerful means of lengthening the working day beyond all natural limits in those industries first directly seized on by it.’⁵⁰ There is simply no ‘replacement’ of formal subsumption by real subsumption: the valorisation-process subsumes the labour-process because it relies, from the start, on the coexistence and interplay between formal and real subsumption. Real subsumption ‘is logically implicit in the concept of capital’⁵¹, and for this reason cannot be comprehended as something which chronologically succeeds formal subsumption. This does not excuse us from granting a certain priority to real subsumption/relative surplus-value over formal subsumption/absolute surplus-value. The former constitute the ‘specifically capitalist mode of production’: they are what allows capitalist production to ‘[establish] itself as a mode of production sui generis and [bring] into being a new mode of material production’⁵² (it is, as we will see, real subsumption which ultimately is at the base of the possibility of establishing capital as constitutive of a new mode of history sui generis). Real subsumption – not formal subsumption – is the reason why, as the passage quoted above illustrates, the capitalist social productive forces of labour come into being and expand. Real subsumption – not formal subsumption – is the reason why ‘the socially productive power of labour develops as a free gift to capital…and appears as a power which capital possesses by its nature – a productive power inherent in capital.’⁵³ And yet, only the ongoing interplay between these two forms of subsumption gives rise to the self-expansion of capital; only this interplay, as we will now begin to examine in more detail, registers capital as a totalising, temporalising and thus historicalising dialectic. Taken together, formal and real subsumption constitute the material processes through which capital’s need to self-expand is actualised. These processes are crucial to our understanding of history and historical time. Yet in order to secure how capital, qua subsumption, relates to history, we must first consider how it does not. That is, we must first consider how subsumption is often situated in a historically totalising and temporalising framework that does little else but presume, and thereby obscure, how capital, time and history structure one another.

⁴⁷ Ibid. 646. For Marx, ‘relative surplus-value is absolute, because it requires the absolute prolongation of the working day beyond the labour-time necessary to the existence of the worker himself. Absolute surplus-value is relative, because it requires a development of the productivity of labour which will allow the necessary labour-time to be restricted to a portion of the working day.’ Ibid.

⁴⁸ Tomba, Marx’s Temporalities, 155. As Tomba states, it is because of this reciprocal co-penetration that ‘the distinction between the North and South of the world, between First, Second and Third World, …between centre, semi-periphery and periphery, and the concomitant typology of advanced or backward capitalisms, loses any meaning.’ Ibid. 155-56.

⁴⁹ Marx, Economic Manuscripts of 1861-63, 327-28.

⁵⁰ Marx, Capital 1, 526.

⁵¹ Arthur, The New Dialectic and Marx’s Capital, 76.

⁵² Marx, Capital 1, 1035.

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Over the last thirty to forty years, a common reading of the relationship between history and subsumption has arisen, which for all its internal variations holds two basic assumptions.⁵⁴ First, ‘subsumption’ in Marx can be understood as a category of historical periodisation, such that successive periods of history (no matter how they are demarcated) directly correspond to successive phases of formal and real subsumption. The precise meaning of formal as opposed to real subsumption in these accounts varies, but the conviction that formal subsumption both logically and historically precedes real subsumption is firm.⁵⁵ Theses readings are exclusively limited to the history of Western Europe. Second, the contemporary (the early 1970s onwards) phase of real subsumption can be taken as what Jacques Camatte calls the ‘total subsumption of labour under capital.’⁵⁶ This is the manner in which real subsumption has, one might state, ‘completed’ the subsumption of labour under capital. There are two passages⁵⁷ that exemplify these two assumptions, particularly that of ‘total subsumption’. The first comes from Fredric

⁵³ Ibid. 381.

⁵⁴ Despite its shortcomings, the Endnotes Collective provides a useful and critical introduction to this reading. See http://endnotes.org.uk/en/endnotes-the-history-of-subsumption (accessed 27 April 2015). The primary focus of this article is the French group Théorie Communiste.

55 See e.g. Étienne Balibar, ‘Elements for a Theory of Transition’, in Althusser and Balibar, Reading Capital, 302-3, wherein formal subsumption ‘begins with the form of outwork on behalf of a merchant capitalist and ends with the industrial revolution.’ For Balibar, formal subsumption thus coincides with Marx’s analysis of manufacture, and possesses the structure and form of a transition wherein there is a distinct non-correspondence – a dislocation – between the forces and relations of production.

⁵⁶ Jacques Camatte, Capital and Community [1976], trans. David Brown (London: Unpopular Books, 1988), 45. I am indebted to the Endnotes Collective for this reference.

⁵⁷ I am indebted to Andrés Sáenz de Sicilia for both of these references.

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Jameson’s recent rereading of the first volume of Capital, and illustrates the way in which he uses the category of subsumption to substantiate his theory that the first volume of Capital is essentially about unemployment:

This particular Marxian “law” – “in proportion as capital accumulates, the situation of the worker, be his payment high or low, must grow worse” (Capital 1, 799) – was the object of much mockery during the affluent post-war 1950s and 1960s. It is today no longer a joking matter. Along with Marx’s intimations of globalisation, these analyses seem to renew the actuality today of Capital on a world scale. In another sense they designate a stage of “subsumption” in which the extra-economic or social no longer lies outside capital and economics but has been absorbed into it: so that being unemployed or without economic function is no longer to be expelled from capital but to remain within it. Where everything has been subsumed under capitalism, there is no longer anything outside it; and the unemployed – or here the destitute, the paupers – are as it were employed by capital to be unemployed; they fulfil an economic function by way of their very non-functioning (even if they are not paid to do so).⁵⁸

The second passage comes from Antonio Negri’s 1981 essay ‘The Constitution of Time’, and, echoing Camatte, encapsulates what Negri later calls ‘the phase of the total subsumption of society.’⁵⁹

[with real subsumption] use-value cannot appear except under the guise of exchangevalue. There is no longer an external vantage point upon which use-value can depend…Real subsumption means the complete realisation of the law of value...social labour covers all the time of life, and invests all of its regions...the entire time of life has become the time of production.⁶⁰

These passages can be critiqued on a number of different fronts. The opposition which Jameson establishes between the ‘economic’ and the ‘social’, such that we can ‘designate a stage of “subsumption” in which the extra-economic or social no longer lies outside capital and economics but has been absorbed into it’, is to miss the essential point that, for Marx, the economic is a category of the social, that, as Chapter 1 illustrates, the ‘economic’ is, after The German Ideology, synonymous with the social production of the means of life, and thus the historical meaning of the human as an essentially social being.⁶¹ We must also draw attention to Jameson’s conflation of ‘capital’ and ‘capitalism’, leading to statements such as ‘everything has been subsumed under capitalism’ (capital is the comprehensive, the predominant, subject of capitalism, not its exclusive subject). Negri’s argument that ‘there is no longer an external vantage point upon which use-value can depend’ is also, as the previous chapter demonstrates, to miss the historical specificity of the category of use-value. Disregarding for the moment the question of whether it is even possible to speak of a ‘historical phase’ of formal as opposed to real subsumption, the idea that there was once, within capitalism, a moment wherein use-value had such an ‘external’ vantage point is to forget the fact that, within capitalism, use-value has always only appeared ‘under the guise of exchange-value’, that use-value only stands opposed to exchange-value within the value-form. But what needs to be stressed here, a point that these critiques orbit around but do not directly confront, is the manner in which Camatte, Jameson and, most of all, Negri do not just presume what needs to be explained, but do so even as they invoke the very category which allows us to explain what needs to be explained. To be more direct: they reveal, albeit unintentionally and unconsciously, that there is an ontologically and epistemologically basic relationship between the subsumption of labour under capital and the production of historical time, and, furthermore, that the category of totalisation is what first allows us to uncover this relationship. Put differently, their primary problem is not their desire (something that Marx would certainly not endorse) to extend the scope of subsumption beyond the production-process of capital – to ‘everything’ (Jameson), or to ‘the entire time of life’ (Negri) – a desire which does little less but conflate the basic difference between capital and capitalism, or more specifically the difference between the production-process of capital and social reproduction more generally.⁶² Nor is the primary problem their desire to create distinct, chronological historical stages corresponding to formal and then real subsumption, a desire that dismisses the constant interplay within capitalism, from its start, between these two forms of subsumption. These are significant problems that threaten to jettison the very intelligibility of Marx’s work, but, in the end, they point towards an even more fundamental problem: the failure to recognise that the intelligibility of history hinges on what conception of ‘totalisation guides it. Simply put, the totalisation that guides Camatte’s ‘total subsumption of labour under capital’, as well as Negri’s ‘total subsumption of society’, is the vulgar meaning of totalisation: a totalising process whose unidirectional advance contains, within itself, the possibility of its own ‘completion’ (and wherein real subsumption becomes, whether Negri intends this or not, synonymous with the (chronological) ‘end’ of history).⁶³ To this understanding of totalisation corresponds the vulgar meaning of temporalisation, whose historical register is well-known: the linear and irreversible understanding of time whose custodian is of course chronology. Yet the problem is not, strictly speaking, chronology as such, but rather the fact that this model of historical time only expresses what must be explained: historical time is ‘historical’ by virtue of the fact that it appears as a self-expanding time, or, in other words, that historical time is historical time because it expands of its own accord. The ordinary understanding of historical time registers this, but it does so in a way that the origins of self-expansion are disguised (this is why it is the dominant model of historical time). In merely reproducing the ordinary concept of historical time, Camatte, Jameson and Negri cannot explain what their accounts implicitly rely on: ‘history’ as, in and for itself, the perpetual movement of self-expansion. This despite the fact, and ironically, that it is precisely Marx’s analysis of the subsumption of labour under capital which allows us to account for this. It is not a closed and completed totality that makes this possible, but rather a totalisation which is by definition open and incomplete, whose unity, as should now be evident, is the very process of its differentiation. In short, it is the ongoing dialectic between the labour- and valorisation-process, as previously characterised – the very dialectic that Camatte, Jameson and Negri neglect – that constitutes the condition of thinking the self-expansion of historical time. Subsumption is a historical category, not because it is a periodising – or even a historicising – category, but because it is historicalising category: it is a category which registers the very constitution of history itself.

⁵⁸ Frederic Jameson, Representing Capital: a Commentary on Volume One (London and New York: Verso, 2011), 71.

⁵⁹ Antonio Negri, ‘Twenty Theses on Marx: Interpretation of the Class Situation Today’, in Marxism Beyond Marxism, ed. Saree Makdisi, Cesare Casarino and Rebecca E. Karl (New York: Routledge, 1996), 159.

⁶⁰ Antonio Negri, ‘The Constitution of Time’ [1981], in Time for Revolution, trans. Matteo Mandarini (London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013), 25-9.

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⁶¹ This is important because it points to the sense in which Jameson’s category of ‘postmodernity’ (that Representing Capital certainly holds on to) can be understood as an essentially ahistorical, if not antihistorical, category. If ‘postmodernity’ is ‘our’ current historical conjuncture wherein real subsumption subsumes ‘everything’, the irony here is that Jameson’s philosophy of history aligns with Marx’s – the economic and the social become intertwined – precisely at the moment that Jameson evacuates history from Marx (who provides, one might say, a ‘pre-postmodern’ account of capitalism).

⁶² What these accounts – particularly Negri’s – do is eradicate the ineradicable, the unsurpassable, limit to capital: the commodification of labour-power. The consequences of this are immense, and leave us with a Marx that is barely recognisable. When, as Negri says, ‘social labour covers all the time of life’, it is not just the difference between labour-power and living labour which disappears, but the very difference between the production- and circulation-process of capital. ‘Social life’ as such becomes synonymous with ‘labour-time’, such that the raison d’être of capitalism is not valorisation, but the tautological desire for command for command’s sake.

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⁶³ If Negri’s concept of totalisation correlates to the ordinary concept of totality – totalisation extending into every facet of the ‘social’ and ‘life’ – this is because, for him, ‘valorisation is a continuous and totalitarian process, it knows neither limit nor repose.’ Negri, Marx Beyond Marx, 76. Jettisoning the commodification of labour-power as the defining limit of valorisation, is, in short, to confuse, and thus conflate, totalisation and totalitarianism.

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4.1.2 Automation

We are now in a position to establish how the production-process of capital gives rise to the materialist concept of history, to establish, that is to say, the fundamental relation between the production of surplus-value and Marx’s modern, post-Enlightenment conception of history. If the expansion of human needs is the essence of this concept, and if the expansion of capital is the historical-ontological ground of understanding the expansion of human needs as ‘history’, then the subsumption of the labour-process by the valorisation-process is not only the material expression of capital’s need to self-expand, but the relation that makes the category of history possible. If, in what follows, the valorisation-process is prioritised over the labour-process and real subsumption is prioritised over formal subsumption – both of which we must do – this is not because the valorisation-process is in any way ‘independent’ of the labour-process, or that real subsumption somehow ‘replaces’ formal subsumption, but because Marx singles out the valorisation-process and real subsumption as the truly ‘capitalist’ features of the productionprocess of capital. To secure capital as the condition of thinking history is to stress the defining features of the valorisation-process and real subsumption. Two features in particular stand out, the investigation of which guides the next two sections. The first of these is automation.

The discourse of automation is shot through Marx’s critique of political economy from the Grundrisse onwards. Broadly speaking, the real subsumption of the labour-process by the valorisation-process is grounded by the transformation of objectified labour, or more precisely the transformation of the means of production, into capital itself: ‘Within the framework of capitalist production this ability of objectified labour to transform itself into capital, i.e. to transform the means of production into the means of controlling and exploiting living labour, appears as something utterly appropriate to them…as inseparable from them and hence as a quality attributable to them as things, as use-values, as means of production.’⁶⁴ In this regard, the means of production become – as a quality unto themselves – defined by movement (as opposed to being static objects put into motion by an external force), and thus human beings are no longer the subjects whose labour animates objects in order to satisfy human needs. Real subsumption inverts this relation: ‘…at the level of material production, of the life-process in the realm of the social – for that is what the production-process is – we find the same situation that we find in religion at the ideological level, namely the inversion of subject into object and vice versa.’⁶⁵ Real subsumption and its most developed material expression – machinery – is that wherein the ‘motion and the activity of the instrument of labour asserts its independence vis-a-vis the worker’, such that ‘the instrument of labour now becomes an industrial form of perpetual motion.’⁶⁶ With this inversion of subject and object, this automatisation of the means of production themselves, comes a radical restructuring of the relationship between material production and ‘life’. The labour-process in capitalism can still – because it must – be grasped as yielding the means of human life, but only insofar as this process, and with it human need, serves the needs of the valorisation-process. In other words, if the dialectic of the labour- and valorisation-process constitutes the manifold expansion and diversification of human needs, this is because human needs are inessential to this dialectic: ‘the production in enormous mass quantities which is posited with machinery destroys every connection of the product with the direct need of the producer, and hence with direct use-value; it is already posited in the form of the product’s production and in the relations in which it is produced that it is produced only as a conveyor of value, and its use-value only as condition to that end.’⁶⁷ From the standpoint of the production-process of capital, human life is thus superfluous. It exists in an exterior and purely negative relation to the life of capital, since ‘the worker consumes his provisions during pauses in the labour-process, whereas the machine consumes what is essential to it while it is still functioning.’⁶⁸ The life of capital, ‘the life-process of the social’, is its self-produced need to be already always in motion.

⁶⁴ Marx, Capital 1, 988-89.

⁶⁵ Marx, Resultate des unmittelbaren Produktionsprozesses, 20 (Marx, Capital 1, 990).

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