Marx and the Concept of Historical Time

In the Results of the Immediate Production-Process, there is a compelling passage that describes the relationship between automation and the production-process in temporal terms. Remarking on the difference between the labour already contained in the means of production and the labour which is added to the production-process, Marx writes:

The two kinds of labour are distinguished only by the fact that the one is already objectified in use-values while the other is in the process of being so objectified. The one is in the past, the other in the present; the one dead, the other living; the one objectified in the past, the other objectifying itself in the present. To the extent that past labour replaces living labour, it itself becomes a process, valorises itself; it becomes a fluens that creates a fluxion. This absorption into itself of additional living labour is its process of self-valorisation, its authentic transformation into capital, into value generating itself, its transformation from a constant amount of value into a variable value in a state of process. 69

⁶⁶ Ibid. 526.

⁶⁷ Marx, Grundrisse, 694.

⁶⁸ Marx, Capital 1, 984.

⁶⁹ Ibid. 994. If a fluens is a ‘flowing’, then a fluxion is, after Isaac Newton, this flowing as a continuous function. This passage must be read in conjunction with the following passage from the Grundrisse: ‘The communal substance of all commodities, i.e. their substance not as material stuff, as physical character, but their communal substance as commodities and hence exchange-values, is this, that they are objectified labour. The only thing distinct from objectified labour is non-objectified labour, labour which is still objectifying itself, labour as subjectivity. Or, objectified labour, i.e. labour which is present in space, can also be opposed, as past labour, to labour which is present in time. If it is to be

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What must be emphasised here is the fact that the quality of labour already contained in the means of production, and that being added to the production-process, is, as Marx articulates it, identical.⁷⁰ Each represent different quantities of this labour, but both involve the same kind of ‘general social labour’: abstract labour. Thus consequent to the commodification of labourpower, the objectivity of each, whether it has already been constituted or is still in the process of constituting itself, is structured by the purely social objectivity of the value-form. This is the objectivity being expressed here: the ‘ghost-like’ objectivity not just of value, but of value in an automatic state of process, neither of which are something like ‘the course sensuousness of matter’. Thus consequent to the commodification of labour-power, the objectivity of the present and the past, or, more precisely, the objectivity of the dialectic of the present and the past within the production-process of capital, is structured by the purely social objectivity of the value-form. This presents us with a crucial development on what has been a basic concern of this thesis: the temporality of the ongoing first historical act, the temporality that provides us with a possible basis of historical time. Insofar as there is a relationship between the social production of the means of human life and the production-process of capital, this, as should now be clear, is a relationship that is entirely mediated by the value-form: if capital constitutes a radically historicalising power, if its production constitutes the incessant production of new human needs, such that capital systematises human needs in ways unmatched (to date) by any other historical subject, then this is so because these new needs appear within the social form of value. But the ontological power that gives the temporality of the first historical act within capitalism its movement has now been potentially identified: the replacement of living labour by dead labour: the tendential replacement of living labour by the machine. This is, to be sure, a dialectical replacement: the replacement of the worker by the machine in one industry is the active creation – the active expansion – of living labour in other, new industries. Thus the past is not ‘replacing’ the present, but rather past labour is, within the present, within the dialectic of the present and the past, replacing present labour, and, in so doing, constituting the manifold expansion of the historical present. The constitutive power of the past is therefore not Sartre’s practical-inert, but rather the automation of dead labour. Sartre’s determination of the present by the past within the present (the practico-inert) cannot account for the immanent movement of this process (this also accounts for his recourse to the synchrony/diachrony model), whereas Marx’s determination of the present by the past within the present does: it gives us the reason (real subsumption spearheaded by machinery) why the production-process sets into motion a kind of historical time. The future – the historical future – is here animated as well: the telos underwritten by the production-process of capital is what gives the historical future its place within the ongoing, self-expanding, dialectic of the present and the past.

present in time, alive, then it can be present only as the living subject, in which it exists as capacity, as possibility; hence as worker.’ Marx, Grundrisse, 272. The crucial thing to keep in mind in this passage, as well as its counterpart in the Results of the Immediate Production-Process, is that, consequent to the commodification of labour-power, ‘living labour’, ‘non-objectified labour’ as well as ‘labour which is present in time’ (all of which mean the same thing), is labour subsumed by the valorisation-process. In other words, the worker may be a human being opposed to capital, but this ‘living subject’ is only a subject by virtue of being within the production-process.

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This brings us to Marx’s so-called ‘Fragment on Machines’. It is worthwhile to cite and comment on a long passage within this section of the Grundrisse, not only because it captures the essential place of automation within real subsumption, but also because commentators on Marx – particularly Negri – have read this and similar passages in ways that threaten to jettison their historical intelligibility. Marx writes the following:

…once adopted into the production-process of capital, the means of labour passes through different metamorphoses, whose culmination is the machine, or rather, an automatic system of machinery (system of machinery: the automatic one is merely its most complete, most adequate form, and alone transforms machinery into a system), set in motion by an automaton, a moving power that moves itself; this automaton consisting of numerous mechanical and intellectual organs, so that the workers themselves are cast merely as its conscious linkages. In the machine, and even more in machinery as an automatic system, the use-value, i.e. the material quality of the means of labour, is transformed into an existence adequate to fixed capital and to capital as such; and the form in which it was adopted into the production-process of capital, the direct means of labour, is sublated by a form posited by capital itself and corresponding to it. In no way does the machine appear as the individual worker’s means of labour. Its distinguishing characteristic is not in the least, as with the means of labour, to transmit the worker's activity to the object; this activity, rather, is posited in such a way that it merely transmits the machine’s work, the machine’s action, on to the raw material – supervises it and guards against interruptions. Not as with the instrument, which the worker animates and makes into his organ with his skill and strength, and whose handling therefore depends on his virtuosity. Rather, it is the machine which possesses skill and strength in place of the worker, is itself the virtuoso, with a soul of its own in the mechanical laws acting through it; and it consumes coal, oil etc. (matières instrumentales), just as the worker consumes food, to keep up its perpetual motion. The worker's activity, reduced to a mere abstraction of activity, is determined and regulated on all sides by the movement of the machinery, and not the opposite. The science which compels the inanimate limbs of the machinery, by their construction, to act purposefully, as an automaton, does not exist in the worker’s consciousness, but rather acts upon him through the machine as an alien power, as the power of the machine itself. The appropriation of living labour by objectified labour – of the power or activity which creates value by value existing for-itself – which lies in the concept of capital, is posited, in production resting on machinery, as the character of the production-process itself, including its material elements and its material motion. The production-process has ceased to be a labour-process in the sense of a process dominated by labour as its governing unity. Labour appears, rather, merely as a conscious organ, scattered among the individual living workers at numerous points of the mechanical system; subsumed under the total-process [Gesamtprozeß] of the machinery itself, as itself only a link of the system, whose unity exists not in the living workers, but rather in the living (active) machinery, which confronts his individual, insignificant doings as a mighty organism…⁷¹

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This passage reconfirms much of what has already been established in relation to the dialectic of the labour- and valorisation-process: (1) there is a totalising relation between these processes (the valorisation-process in this passage can be comprehended as based on a ‘system of machinery’), such that the labour-process is a mere ‘organ’ of the machine (this reproduces the relation between concrete and abstract labour as depicted in the previous chapter); (2) the machine – not the worker – is what ‘animates’ the production-process of capital; and thus (3) what gives ‘life’ to the production-process is capital’s need to be in perpetual motion, not the human being (which needs to rest). But what must now be raised and commented on here is the possibility that this passage registers a basic shift – if not a structural realignment – within the fabric of capitalism itself. More precisely, this is the possibility that the automatic system of machinery displaces what had up to the introduction of this system defined capitalism as a mode of production. More than anyone else, Negri most forcefully expresses this position. His direct commentary on this passage, first presented in his seminars in the spring of 1978 at the École Normale Supérieure, conforms to his reading of real subsumption in ‘The Constitution of Time’: the system of machinery does not just reduce the labour-process to ‘a simple element of the process of valorisation’⁷², but extends the production-process into society as such. Thus for Negri, ‘real subsumption of labour can’t but be (in the same moment) real subsumption of society. Of society, in other words of the productive social forces, especially of science…the moment arrives when the whole system is displaced and advances.’⁷³ We have previously outlined the problems with the notion of ‘the total subsumption of society’ and do not need to restate them again. However, we have yet to consider what, for Negri, is the overall practical consequence of this subsumption: the displacement of the ‘law of value’ itself, such that real subsumption constitutes the abolition of labour-time as the measure of value. As Negri asserts, provocatively, in ‘The Constitution of Time’: ‘in the displacement produced by the realisation of subsumption, the unitary paradigm of time-as-measure of value is smashed. Subsumption generates a completely enveloping temporal Umwelt that dissolves the possibility of measure.’⁷⁴ Simply put, this is the fundamental axis around which Negri’s reading of Marx in this period unfolds (which, to date, Negri has not abandoned⁷⁵). We might summarise it in this way⁷⁶: up to the ‘stage’ of real subsumption, the capacity of time to measure value was based on the externality of use-value to exchange-value. This is because (1) the reduction of all kinds of labour to ‘simple average labour’, and the time corresponding to this reduction (e.g. socially necessary labour-time, the time of exchange-value, the time of measure) was, as Marx puts it, ‘established by a social process that goes on behind the backs of the producers’⁷⁷; and thus (2) ‘time-as-measure’ was determined by the domain external to production: the domain of usevalue. In this sense, use-value was the external catalyst that made the time of exchange-value possible: ‘the measure of exchange-value is determined from outside…by temporal quantities founded on use-value.’⁷⁸ However, with the advent of real, or ‘total’, subsumption, use-value is completely (i.e. non-dialectically) internalised and redefined by exchange-value, rendering different labours irreducible to ‘simple average labour’, and hence the time of measure a ‘pure and simple tautology’⁷⁹, a time that, without an external standpoint from which it is measured, becomes its own measure. ‘Social labour’ is thus no longer intelligible in relation to the ‘social labour-time’ Marx presents us with, but becomes a form of labour wherein ‘the totality of life’ and ‘the totality of time from which this life is woven’ are indistinguishable.⁸⁰ Time can no longer be presented as measure, but ‘must rather be presented as the global phenomenological fabric, as base, substance and flow of production in its entirety.’⁸¹ The production-process of capital is now synonymous with the production of society as a whole, whereby the exploitation that the value-form previously expressed becomes ‘pure and simple command.’⁸²

⁷¹ Marx, Grundrisse der Kritik der politischen Ökonomie, 592-93 (Grundrisse, 692-93). There is a counterpart to this passage, in the 1861-63 Manuscripts, which captures the automation within the other aspects of real subsumption: cooperation and the division of labour. In this passage, Marx stresses the manner in which the worker becomes the ‘exclusive life-process’ of one of the multiple ‘monosyllabic’ processes involved in the production of a commodity, such that ‘the overall production-process of a single commodity appears now as a combined operation, a complex of many operations, all of which complement each other independently, and can be carried out simultaneously alongside each other.’ Indeed, it is for Marx simultaneity [Gleichzeitigkeit] that is the defining temporal feature of cooperation and the division of labour. With real subsumption, the multiple processes that yield a commodity no longer ‘follow each other in chronological sequence’, but are simultaneously undertaken, such that ‘the complementarity of the different processes is here transferred from the future to the present, whereby a commodity which is begun at one side is finished at the other.’ Marx, Economic Manuscripts of 1861- 63, 277-78.

⁷² Negri, Marx Beyond Marx, 142.

⁷³ Ibid. Therefore ‘the subsumption of society has become the production of that same society. The displacement is total…at this stage, the capitalist appropriation of society is total.’ Ibid. 142-43.

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⁷⁴ Negri, ‘The Constitution of Time’, 42.

⁷⁵ The displacement of the labour theory of value is at the heart of Hardt and Negri’s well-known, and much maligned, ‘trilogy’: Empire (2000), Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (2004), and Commonwealth (2009).

⁷⁶ This is simply a summary of the first section of the first chapter of ‘The Constitution of Time’, which Negri entitles ‘Time-as-measure and productive time’, but the fact is that this section grounds Negri’s broader critique of the labour theory of value. See Negri, ‘The Constitution of Time’, 23-9. ⁷⁷ Marx, Capital 1, 135.

⁷⁸ Negri, ‘The Constitution of Time’, 24.

⁷⁹ Ibid. 27. If ‘time-as-measure’ remains, it is only ‘in the flow between labour and time. A continuous time. A tautological time.’ Ibid.

⁸⁰ Ibid. 29. Negri’s work in this period paved the way for analyses of what has become variously known as ‘immaterial labour’, ‘cognitive capitalism’ and ‘affective labour’. See, for instance, Paolo Virno, ‘General Intellect’, Historical Materialism 15:3 (2007), 3-8, as well as Carlo Vercellone, ‘From Formal Subsumption to General Intellect: Elements for a Marxist Reading of the Thesis of Cognitive Capitalism’, Historical Materialism 15:1 (2007), 13-36, which argues that Marx’s use of the expression ‘general intellect’ marks a new historical stage of development ‘after’ formal and real subsumption.

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This account of real subsumption and the end of labour-time as measure is, at least on Marx’s own terms, utterly confused. The notion that use-value constitutes a domain ‘external’ to production, and thereby the ‘external origin of the measure of time’⁸³, points to the defining limit of Negri’s work: the complete lack of an analysis of commodification, specifically the complete lack of an analysis of the commodification of labour-power.⁸⁴ This lack has the fatal effect of removing the dialectic of concrete and abstract labour, and hence the dialectic of the labour- and valorisation-process, from his analysis. And this dovetails with his attempt to yoke real subsumption to a stagist ‘before’/‘after’ framework. Taken to its logical conclusion, this reading of real subsumption has the peculiar quality of removing the dialectic of the labourand valorisation-process from its purview, whilst at the same time announcing that, with the advent of real subsumption, this dialectic has come to its rational end, having been reduced to a non-dialectical tautology. This brings us back to the earlier cited passage from the ‘Fragment on Machines’. The reason why such attention is being paid to Negri’s reading of subsumption, why his critique of the labour theory of value has been detailed to the extent that is has, is that this reading and critique possess another peculiar quality: they effectively, and one might state self-consciously, express the idea that the automation at the heart of the production-process of capital is synonymous with the automatic expansion of capital. That is to say, Negri effectively claims that, because of real subsumption, the production-process of capital is in-itself and as such automatic. Capital expands of its own accord: the production and reproduction of capita is wholly self-sufficient.⁸⁵ In Negri’s world, this does not remove antagonism and exploitation from the picture (indeed, it intensifies them⁸⁶), but it does dictate that they no longer bear any rational relation to the commodification of labour-power. On Negri’s terms, the function of this commodification is pure irrationality; its function is – at best – an ‘empty, miserable base of exploitation.’⁸⁷ (If Negri removes the dialectic of the labour- and valorisation-process from his analysis in order to announce its rational end (chronologically), and thus its irrational end (teleologically), this is because he has already made this move with the commodification of labour-power). And yet what Negri’s account obscures is that, for Marx, the commodification of labour-power not only makes real subsumption, and thus automation within the productionprocess, possible, but dictates that real subsumption remains bound to the production-process (it does not extend to ‘society’ writ large). What this account obscures is that, for Marx, after Hegel, automation is an appearance [Erscheinung], the necessary appearance of an ‘essential relation’ between necessary and surplus-labour (an essential relation underwritten by the real subsumption of labour under capital and the production of relative surplus-value). As such an appearance (as opposed to a mere illusion [Schein]), automation simultaneously (1) expresses the fact that, consequent to the commodification of labour-power and the real subsumption of labour, there is an inversion of subject and object, that machinery does displace the human as the subject of the production-process, thereby re-transforming this process into an ‘automatic system’; but it equally (2) conceals the fact that ‘surplus-value does not arise from the labourpower that has been replaced by the machinery, but from the labour-power actually employed in working with the machinery.’⁸⁸ In other words, automation is real, the machine is perpetual motion (so long as it is turned on and functioning properly), and, at the same time, automation is an illusion, because it generates the (false) appearance that the production of surplus-value is itself automatic, as if this production were not dependent on the commodification, and hence use, of labour-power. In opposition to Negri, the essential point here is that real subsumption constitutes the incessant entrenchment of labour-time’s function as the measure of value, not its displacement, and that this is directly tied to real subsumption transforming capital into an ‘automatic subject’⁸⁹ [ein automatisches Subjekt] (a necessary dimension of capital’s function as the ‘comprehensive subject’ of capitalism). Thus inasmuch as Marx, drawing on Goethe’s Faust, suggests that capital acts ‘as if consumed by love’⁹⁰, that the valorisation-process is an ‘animated monster’ that works ‘as if its body were by love possessed’⁹¹, we must never lose sight of the fact that automation only exists because of the commodification of labour-power. Automation is an actual appearance of this commodification, an animation whose self-motion appears because real subsumption is its animator.

⁸¹ Negri, ‘The Constitution of Time’, 29.

⁸² As Negri puts it the 1978 lectures: ‘…when the theory of value cannot measure itself by a quantity of labour-time or by an individual dimension of labour, when a first displacement leads it to confront social time and the collective dimension of labour, at this moment the impossibility of measuring exploitation modifies the form of exploitation. The emptiness that appears in the theory of value, the evacuation of any element of measure which is not a generic reference to social industriousness, the liberation of social industriousness and its constitution in collective individuality, does not suppress the law of value but reduces it to a mere formality. Of course, formality does not mean a lack of efficacy. Formality does not mean a lack of meaning. The form of the law of value is, on the contrary, efficient and full of meaning, but efficacy and meaning are given to it only by its irrationality, by the end of the progressive and rationalising function of exploitation. The form is the empty, miserable base of exploitation. The form of value is pure and simple command, the pure and simple form of politics – of the “essential inessentiality”, as the young Marx would say in Hegelian terms. We are here at the culminating point of a process in which the power relations – rationally established – regulated and included within the development of capital – are reversed. Where the relation of rationality inverts itself. The inversion is total.’ Negri, Marx Beyond Marx, 147-48.

⁸³ Negri, ‘The Constitution of Time’, 27.

⁸⁴ The ‘use-value of labour-power’ features in the translator’s – Matteo Mandarini’s – introduction to ‘The Constitution of Time’, but it is nowhere to be found in Negri’s work itself. See Negri, Time for Revolution, 11. Mandarini reproduces Negri’s basic misunderstanding of labour-power when he claims that ‘the labour theory of value demanded that labour-power existed, in some sense, outside capital (outside its disciplinary regime) and needed to be drawn in.’ Ibid.

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⁸⁵ In Negri’s words: ‘This transcendental of the society of real subsumption is the transformation of Prometheus into Narcissus, the ideal of the complete self-sufficiency of the schema of production and of automatic functioning. Ecstasy.’ Negri, ‘The Constitution of Time’, 48.

⁸⁶ For Negri, ‘the first result produced by the logic of separation is to displace the relationship necessary labour/surplus labour to…the level of the capacity of capital to subsume society, and to transform the relation between two complete, opposed subjectivities that are hostile to the point of destroying each other reciprocally.’ Negri, Marx Beyond Marx, 145.

⁸⁷ Ibid. 148.

⁸⁸ Marx, Capital 1, 530. ‘Machinery…creates no new value.’ Ibid. 509.

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This is important, because it provides us with a new framework whereby capital can be presented as the condition of thinking the materialist concept of history. Specifically, Marx’s critical appropriation of the Doctrine of Essence in Hegel’s Logic – his critical appropriation of the essence/appearance [Wesen/Erscheinung] relation in Hegel – allows us to formulate the following (speculative) proposition: ‘history’ can be thought of as something which, in itself and as such, is ‘in motion’, ‘moves on’, ‘expands’, etc., precisely because capital’s production of the ‘essential relation’ between necessary and surplus-labour – the production of surplusvalue – appears as automatic. Or, to put this another way, the expansion of human needs, and the expansion of productive forces corresponding to the expansion of human needs, can only be thought of as ‘history’ because (1) the expansion of human needs is subsumed by capital’s need to self-expand, and (2) capital’s self-expansion appears as automatic. This is the context in which Marx’s work intersects in interesting ways with Koselleck’s, such that the former potentially provides the latter with the material basis necessary to sustain the historiographicsemantic findings of Koselleck’s Future’s Past. More precisely, this is the possibility that real subsumption and the production of relative surplus-value constitute the historical-ontological ground of the emergence, in the mid-18^th century, of ‘Neuzeit’ – the distinctly modern or ‘new time’ that registers, as David Cunningham expresses it, summarising Koselleck, an ‘“epochal threshold” [in which] history itself, in the collective singular, comes to be first perceived as “in motion” – a perception that Koselleck locates in a divergence between the “space of experience” and the “horizon of expectation”.’⁹² The suggestion here is thus this: what else is Neuzeit but the historical time fostered by the production of relative surplus-value? What else is Neuzeit but the self-expanding time of capital, a time that is perceived as ‘in motion’ because the production of surplus-value appears as self-expanding? This is what an encounter between Marx and Koselleck might yield. Our working proposition that the intelligibility of ‘history’ relies on the automatic character of the production-process of capital might also function as a corrective to the predominant standpoint of ‘Systematic Dialectics’ which, as Chapter 3 points out, systematically excludes history and historical time from the domain of Marx’s systematic dialectic. Specifically, it might contribute to the sense in which, as some of the scholarship in this field has already argued⁹³, Marx’s appropriation of Hegel’s Essence-Logic marks the most consequential homology between Capital and the Logic. This critical appropriation, this thesis maintains, allows us to grasp the fundamental historical intelligibility of passages such as the following, which, like the previous passage, is contained within the ‘Fragment on Machines’ in the Grundrisse:

⁹⁰ Ibid. 1007.

⁸⁹ Ibid. 255.

⁹¹ Ibid. 302 (see also Marx, Grundrisse, 704).

⁹² David Cunningham, ‘A Marxist heresy? Accelerationism and its discontents’, Radical Philosophy 191 (May/June 2015), 29.

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In machinery, objectified labour itself appears not only in the form of the product or of the product employed as means of labour, but in the form of the force of production itself…the accumulation of knowledge and of skill, of the general productive forces of the social brain [des gesellschaftlichen Gehirns], is thus absorbed into capital, as opposed to labour, and hence appears as an attribute of capital, and more specifically of fixed capital, insofar as it enters into the production-process as a means of production proper…in machinery, knowledge appears as alien, external to him; and living labour [as] subsumed under self-activating objectified labour. The worker appears as superfluous to the extent that his action is not determined by the needs of capital [die Bedürfnisse des Kapitals].⁹⁴

Like its earlier cited counterpart, this passage allows us to grasp the essential relation between the self-expansion of capital and the materialist concept of history, epitomised by the assertion that ‘self-activating objectified labour’ appears as ‘the force of production itself’. Yet of equal importance here, and what we will examine now, is something that, in addition to automation (although indissociable from it), constitutes another dimension of the valorisation-process and real subsumption, thus something that, along with automation, secures capital as the condition of thinking history. This feature is alienation.

⁹³ See, in particular, Tony Smith, ‘Hegel, Marx and the Comprehension of Capitalism’, and Riccardo Bellofiore, ‘Lost in Translation: Once Again on the Marx–Hegel Connection’, both of which appear in Marx’s Capital and Hegel’s Logic: A Reexamination, ed. Fred Moseley and Tony Smith.

⁹⁴ Marx, Grundrisse der Kritik der politischen Ökonomie, 594-95 (Grundrisse, 694-95). The ‘social brain’ in this passage dovetails with the physiological dimension of Marx’s concept of abstract labour highlighted in the previous chapter.

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4.1.3 Alienation

The alienation [Entäußerung] and estrangement [Entfremdung]⁹⁵ of human life is of course a defining feature of Marx’s entire oeuvre. In Marx’s earlier writings, it is the 1844 Manuscripts, not The German Ideology, that makes up the primary locus of Marx’s analysis of the alienation of human labour and thus the explicit locus of Marx’s appropriation of the philosophical status of alienation in Hegel. In the 1844 Manuscripts, Marx transforms the self-externalisation and objectification of consciousness in the Phenomenology of Spirit into an existential and moral critique of the law of political economy, the law of ‘national economy’ [Nationalökonomie], a law that dictates – above all – that the means of production, and thus the means of life, are private property. This is the context of Marx’s renowned, fourfold specification of alienation as: (1) the alienation of the worker from the product of his labour (‘the object which labour produces – its product – stands opposed to it as an alien being, as a power independent of the producer’⁹⁶); (2) the alienation of the labour-process itself, which is to say the ‘self-activity of the worker’ (‘production itself must be active alienation, the alienation of activity, the activity of alienation’⁹⁷); (3) after Feuerbach, the alienation of the worker as a human being and thus as a genus-being [Gattungswesen] (‘estranged labour…turns humanity’s genus-being…into a being alien to it, into a means of individual existence’⁹⁸); and (4) the alienation of one worker from another, one individual human being from another (‘an immediate consequence of men and women’s estrangement from the product of their labour, their life activity, their genericbeing, is the estrangement of men and women from other men and women’⁹⁹).

Alienation does not feature in the first chapter of this thesis, and for a very basic reason: unlike the concepts of labour, need and productive force, and a certain conception of class and the division of labour, alienation is not something that Marx presents in transhistorical terms. In short, alienation and estrangement exist for Marx because they are capitalist alienation and capitalist estrangement. This is apparent in the 1844 Manuscripts (which is essentially Marx’s ‘Hegelianisation’ of Engels’s 1843 Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy), wherein the analysis of alienation is explicitly presented from the standpoint of capitalist private property, which is to say the standpoint of the ‘economic fact of the present.’¹⁰⁰ For our purposes, we must consider the alienation generated by the production-process of capital, or more precisely the alienation created by the subsumption of the labour-process under the valorisation-process. This alienation is vital, because like the automation with which it is intertwined, it constitutes an essential standpoint of the intelligibility of history. In other words, the notion, as previously proposed, that the form of appearance of the production of relative surplus-value (automation) makes possible the idea that ‘history’ is something which, in itself and as such, is in motion, moves on and expands, must be supplemented by the idea that alienation, as the manifestation of the fact that surplus-value is produced by and with private property, constitutes an additional standpoint without which ‘history’ cannot be thought. This is the notion that ‘history’ not only stands outside of and opposed to human beings – that it is indifferent to them – but also, and as a consequence, that history is a force that independently determines and governs them. To express this notion through Marx’s words, consider this description of the valorisation-process in the Grundrisse:

⁹⁵ Marx’s use of the terms Entäußerung and Entfremdung reflects Hegel’s complex philosophical response to the English word ‘alienation’. Strictly speaking, Entäußerung means ‘externalisation’, and hence does not capture the entire scope of ‘alienation’ in English [from the Latin alius (other, another) and alienus (alien, foreign, and belonging to someone else)]. Hence despite the fact that Entäußerung is commonly translated as ‘alienation’, one should keep in mind that this translation relies on the ‘alien’ [fremd] within Entfremdung for its intelligibility.

⁹⁶ Marx, OPM, 511 (EPM, 108).

⁹⁷ Marx, EPM, 110.

⁹⁸ Marx, OPM, 517 (EPM, 114).

⁹⁹ Marx, EPM, 114.

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