Marx and the Concept of Historical Time

Primitive accumulation is the centrifugal point around which resolves the specific capitalist mode of existence of labour-power, the determination of human purposeful activity in the form of a labouring commodity. While the capitalist production and exchange relations subsist through the commodity-form, primitive accumulation is the secret history of the determination of human purposeful practice in the form of a wagelabour commodity. The commodity-form subsists through this determination, presupposes it and, through its form, denies it in the name of abstract equality and freedom.¹³⁸

There is an indissociable relationship between ‘the secret’ [das Geheimnis] of the commodityform and that of originary accumulation. Originary accumulation is the historical-ontological condition of the fetish character of exchange-determined social relations, such that ‘the social relations between…private labours appear as what they are, i.e. not as direct social relations between persons at work, but as thing-like relations between persons and social relations between things.’¹³⁹ That is to say, originary accumulation is the condition of the condition (the commodification of labour-power) without which relations between persons cannot appear as relations between things. If this accumulation ‘is suspended in the commodity-form as its “subterranean” condition, constitutive presupposition, and historical basis’¹⁴⁰, this is because it makes ‘social labour’ in capitalism possible.

¹³⁶ Marx, Grundrisse, 459.

¹³⁷ Bonefeld, ‘History and Social Constitution: Primitive Accumulation is not Primitive’, 6. Thus ‘the notion that the essence of primitive accumulation is suspended [aufgehoben] in accumulation proper means that the principle of primitive accumulation, that is separation, is raised to a new level, rendering primitive accumulation as a specific epoch historically redundant. At the same time, its essential character is maintained as the constitutive presupposition of capital: separation.’ Ibid. 4. However, as we will consider shortly, the relationship between originary accumulation and the ‘historical becoming of the accumulation of capital cannot be restricted to the historical past (in its chronological register), because, as the constitutive basis of capital, originary accumulation is the ongoing constitutive basis of history as the ongoing self-expansion of time.

¹³⁸ Bonefeld, ‘The Permanence of Primitive Accumulation: Commodity Fetishism and Social Constitution’, 5.

¹³⁹ Marx, Kapital 1, 87 (Capital 1, 166).

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Bonefeld’s work brings into relief a defining problem of the relation between originary and capitalist accumulation: namely, does the ‘permanence’ of originary accumulation refer to the principle of separation it first enacts, or – on top of this – originary accumulation itself? That is, consequent to the sublation of originary within capitalist accumulation, is it just the separation of labour from its means that is incessantly reproduced by capital, as capital’s own presupposition and result, or is originary accumulation itself also therefore reproduced? Is it possible to grasp originary accumulation – not just the separation it first engenders – as not simply the historical premise but the historical result of capitalist accumulation? In short, is originary accumulation itself an ongoing process?¹⁴¹ To answer this question affirmatively is to come into unavoidable conflict with Marx himself, who on multiple occasions – in Capital and elsewhere – makes assertions to the effect that originary accumulation ‘is not the result of the capitalist mode of production but its point of departure’¹⁴², that this accumulation ‘is the historical basis, instead of the historical result, of specifically capitalist production.’¹⁴³ Marx should be critiqued here. Originary accumulation is not just continuous because the separation to which it gives rise ‘subsequently appear[s] as a constant process in the accumulation and concentration of capital’¹⁴⁴, but also because, consequent to capitalist accumulation ‘proper’, human beings continue to be separated from the means of production in ways that cannot be secured by capitalist accumulation alone. At the crux of this issue is the difference and relation between a ‘capitalist’ and ‘non-capitalist’ labour-process. What is important to realise is that there is no linear progression here, no movement towards the ‘complete subsumption’ of what is ‘non-capitalist’ by what is ‘capitalist’. Rather, the vast majority – at least today – of ‘noncapitalist’ labour-processes are in fact capitalist labour-processes that have been re-designated by capital as ‘non-capitalist’. In this way, the ongoing totalisation of capital is not just ongoing because the subsumption of countless labour-processes under the valorisation-process is in fact the manifold differentiation and expansion of labour-processes themselves, but equally because the totalisation of capital designates existing labour-processes as either ‘insufficiently capitalist’ or as outright ‘non-capitalist’: ‘antiquated’ labour-processes (this process dovetails with the dialectical production of the ‘new’ qua the active creation of the ‘old’, as outlined in relation to the ongoing first historical act in Chapter 1). Herein lies the importance of originary accumulation. The designation of what is an ‘insufficiently’ or ‘non-capitalist’ labour-process is of course dialectically subject to what is ‘sufficiently’ capitalist, and hence subject to being re-created – subsumed – as a new labour-process. What makes this re-creation possible is the re-separation of the means of production from the producers, a process which is in no way predominantly characterised by coercion and violence, but which is never absent the latent possibility (everywhere) and overt actuality (somewhere) of originary accumulation. To deny this is to effectively deny capital’s ongoing need for a state (only the state ensures and insures capital as the subject of capitalism), in addition to its ongoing recourse to war.¹⁴⁵ In this regard, the real subsumption of labour – or the ‘specifically capitalist mode of production’ – not only results, as previously shown, in the expansion of the formal subsumption of labour, but in the originary accumulation of capital itself. If real subsumption constitutes a ‘constantly repeated revolution’ in the production-process, then originary accumulation is both a presupposition and result of this. To put this another way, originary accumulation is simultaneously the cause and effect of the actuality that ‘separation’ is not a one-off act but is in capitalism ephemeral, precisely because what constitutes the ‘means’ and ‘conditions’ of production – and thus the production-process of capital more generally – is constantly being revolutionised. In other words, if ‘once developed historically, capital itself creates the conditions of its existence (not as conditions for its arising, but as results of its being)’¹⁴⁶, then originary accumulation must be understood as one of the conditions that is the result of capital’s being.¹⁴⁷

¹⁴⁰ Bonefeld, ‘The Permanence of Primitive Accumulation: Commodity Fetishism and Social Constitution’, 6.

¹⁴¹ As Bonefeld conveys it: ‘primitive accumulation is a constantly reproduced accumulation, be it in terms of the renewed separation of new populations from the means of production and subsistence, or in terms of the reproduction of the wage relation in the “established” relations of capital’, such that, and as previously cited, originary accumulation ‘is the presupposition of capital and the result of its reproduction.’ Ibid. 1-2, emphasis added. Both Bonefeld and De Angelis point towards Samir Amin’s Accumulation on a World Scale: a Critique of the Theory of Underdevelopment (1974) as a pioneering work that explicitly presents originary accumulation itself as necessarily ongoing. ¹⁴² Marx, Capital 1, 873.

¹⁴³ Ibid. 775.

¹⁴⁴ Marx, Capital 3, 355.

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¹⁴⁵ The implicit temporal orientation of those analyses that stress the ‘continuous character’ of originary accumulation is – for the most part – the past, which is to say that originary accumulation is (within capitalism) predominantly theorised as a reactionary process. This is the underlying assumption behind David Harvey’s rereading of originary accumulation as ‘accumulation by dispossession’, such that the ‘new imperialism’ is fundamentally a response to the economic crises of the 1970s. See David Harvey, The New Imperialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). De Angelis argues that ‘the temporal dimension [of originary accumulation] includes in principle both the period of the establishment of a capitalist mode of production and the preservation and expansion of the capitalist mode of production any time the producers set themselves as an obstacle to the reproduction of their separation to the means of production.’ De Angelis, ‘Marx and primitive accumulation: The continuous character of capital’s “enclosures”’, 13. Originary accumulation thereby becomes a deliberate response or strategy, ex post facto, to existing forms of class struggle. This is not incorrect, but it obscures the sense in which originary accumulation is also and systematically structured by the future, such that it represents a form of speculation – a gamble, a hedge – on capital’s need to self-expand. ¹⁴⁶ Marx, Grundrisse, 459.

¹⁴⁷ ‘Thus, primitive accumulation becomes not only a cause of the capitalist mode of production but its effect.’ Read, ‘Primitive Accumulation: the Aleatory Foundation of Capitalism’, 37.

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This is crucial, because it is only when originary accumulation is understood as both the presupposition and result of capitalist accumulation that the systematic relationship between originary accumulation and the production of history and historical time emerges. Generally speaking, we might state that if originary accumulation is the condition of the condition of the production-process of capital, then it is thereby the condition of the condition of thinking the materialist concept of history. Put differently, originary accumulation might be considered as a kind of ‘originary temporality’ – an originary temporality of separation, and, as we will soon consider, of violence – which makes the historical time of capital possible, but which, at the same time, the historical time of capital makes possible. The claim, therefore, is that originary accumulation is simultaneously the presupposition and result, the premise and consequence, the cause and effect, etc., of both capital’s formal and real subsumption of labour, and hence the two features at the heart of the production-process of capital (automation and alienation) without which history cannot be thought. Originary accumulation is thus inseparable from the speculative proposition which guides this chapter: valorisation is the production of historical time. This is what, at the level of the philosophical concept of history, secures the systematic character of originary accumulation, which is to say its fundamental relation to the systematichistorical dialectic that is capital. The co-constitutive relation between originary accumulation and alienation is straightforward and requires little demonstration: the separation that defines the former is both the condition and result of the various forms of separation which render the production-process of capital the production of alienation. For Marx, the ‘objective conditions of living labour appear as separated, independent [verselbständigte] values opposite living labour capacity as subjective being, which therefore appears to them only as a value of another kind’¹⁴⁸, whereby ‘the objective conditions of living labour capacity are presupposed as having an existence independent of it, as the objectivity of a subject distinct from living labour capacity and standing independently over against it.’¹⁴⁹ However, the relationship between originary accumulation and automation requires a slightly more substantial explanation. On the one hand, the relationship between originary accumulation and the real subsumption of labour is easily grasped, such that the separation underpinning and reproduced by cooperation, the division of labour and, most consequentially, the use of machinery within the productionprocess, is both enabled by originary accumulation and brings about the renewal of originary accumulation. In this regard, originary accumulation is inseparable from the manner in which, as previously analysed, the systematic use of machines – the so-called ‘automatic system of machinery’ – constitutes the conception of ‘history’ as the self-expansion of time. On the other hand, this must be supplemented – or intertwined – with the fetish character of the commodity, specifically the fact that the real subsumption of labour both conditions and is conditioned by the commodity-form (in this sense, Marx’s systematic exposition of the value-form in the first few chapters of the first volume of Capital presumes the entirety – originary accumulation included – of the exposition that follows). In other words, if, following Bonefeld, originary accumulation is the constitutive basis of the fetish character of the commodity, then it is also the ontological basis of the essential link between automation and fetishism at the level of the philosophical concept of history. If automation gives us the idea of history as something that, in itself and as such, is in motion, moves on, and expands, this is indissociable from the fetish character of the commodity-form as both the premise¹⁵⁰ and result of the production-process of capital. The originary separation between the producers and the means of production not only enables a ‘life-process of the social’ whereby the radical expansion of human needs can only appear within the value-form, but also, and because of this, whereby the social relations between humans that grounds the expansion of their needs appears, within the objects which satisfy these needs, as the ‘objective characteristics of the products of labour themselves, as the socio-natural properties of these things.’¹⁵¹ The expansion of human needs appears as the socio-natural property of commodities themselves, and this must be tied to the notion that selfexpansion – the self-expansion of time – is the essential property of history itself. Even more succinctly: ‘history’ is a fetish (but it is no less real because of this). Hence the fetish character of the commodity confirms what was previously postulated: capital’s historicalising power is at once its de-historicalising power, which is to say, first, that the modern concept of ‘history is only possible because of this de-historicalisation, and, second, that originary accumulation is what first gives capital this power (which is then systematically reproduced by capital itself). This is the necessary context of the basic relationship between originary accumulation and the bourgeois erasure of history, and therefore the context, as earlier cited, of Balibar’s claim that originary accumulation ‘brings us into the presence of the radical absence of memory which characterises history.’¹⁵² The ‘insipid childishness’ of the ‘nursery tale’ that political economy tells itself unconsciously presumes the commodity-form and its secret.

¹⁴⁸ Marx, Grundrisse, 461. ¹⁴⁹ Ibid. 462.

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A final note about violence [Gewalt]. Violence is of course pivotal to Marx’s analysis of originary accumulation and what should be understood as its ‘comprehensive subject’: the modern, bourgeois state. In short, for Marx, the violence of originary accumulation ‘is itself an economic power [ökonomische Potenz].’¹⁵³ However, for our purposes, capital’s peculiar de-historicalising power – that is, the dialectic of historicalisation and de-historicalisation to which capital gives rise – must be understood through its essential ontological relation to the systematic violence which is originary accumulation. This returns us to the logic with which Marx’s – and this section’s – analysis of originary accumulation begins: again, the seemingly seamless, and self-expanding, circle whereby the accumulation of capital presupposes surplusvalue, surplus-value presupposes capitalist production, and capitalist production presupposes the accumulation of capital. We have, after Marx, now broken this circle, exposed the basis – the originary accumulation – upon which this circle depends and (here diverting from Marx) reproduces. What must now be considered is, first, the essential place of violence within this circle and thus, second, the essential place of violence in relation to the production of historical time. What the violence of originary accumulation first (and to this day¹⁵⁴) enables is the fact that capital proceeds as if [als ob] labour-power can always be commodified, which is to say that capital not only proceeds as if labour-power is a readymade commodity, but moreover as if it directly produces labour-power as its own commodity (this is its utter indifference to the production of the means of human life). This is because the violence of originary accumulation is not just the presupposition of the circularity of capital, but its hidden, its secret, or, better, its expelled, presupposition: violence is the presupposition of capitalist accumulation precisely because it is immediately effaced by capital as its constitutive presupposition. As Jason Read expresses it: ‘poised as it were at the point of transformation, the moment of violence almost disappears in its execution…the violence of primitive accumulation is immediately justified within and by the new order that it constitutes.’¹⁵⁵ The violence of originary accumulation is, in other words, immediately foreclosed by the production-process of capital, a foreclosure that secures and is secured by the fetishism of the commodity-form. As Read shows, this leads to a transformation of violence itself – ‘the emergence of a new type of violence’ – one that not only registers the fact that ‘the sporadic and excessive feudal forms of violence pass into the universality of law’¹⁵⁶ (into the universality, in Marx’s words, ‘of state-power [Staatsmacht], the concentrated and organised violence of society’¹⁵⁷), but also into ‘the quotidian relations that are the effects and cause of the law’¹⁵⁸, which is to say the everyday life of the productionprocess of capital.¹⁵⁹

¹⁵⁰ ‘I call this the fetishism which attaches itself to the products of labour as soon as they are produced as commodities, and is therefore inseparable from the production of commodities.’ Marx, Capital 1, 165.

¹⁵¹ Ibid. 164-65.

¹⁵² Balibar, ‘Elements for a Theory of Transition’, 283.

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¹⁵³ Marx, Capital 1, 916.

¹⁵⁴ ‘To this day’, but, and once again, in no way predominantly overtly today. The violence of originary accumulation is indeed aufgehoben within capitalist accumulation, but this takes nothing away from the ongoing necessity of originary to capitalist accumulation.

¹⁵⁵ Read, ‘Primitive Accumulation: the Aleatory Foundation of Capitalism’, 37. Read formulates this in conjunction with the following passage in Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus: ‘Hence the very particular character of State violence: it is very difficult to pinpoint this violence because it always presents itself as preaccomplished. It is not even adequate to say that the violence rests with the mode of production. Marx made the observation in the case of capitalism: there is a violence that necessarily operates through the State, precedes the capitalist mode of production, constitutes the “primitive accumulation”, and makes possible the capitalist mode of production itself. From a standpoint within the capitalist mode of production, it is very difficult to say who is the thief and who is the victim, or even where the violence resides. That is because the worker is born entirely naked and the capitalist objectively “clothed”, an independent owner. That which gave the worker and the capitalist this form eludes us because it operated in other modes of production. It is a violence that posits itself as preaccomplished, even though it is reactivated every day.’ See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia [1980], trans. and foreword by Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 447.

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We might conclude, therefore, by suggesting that the modern, philosophical concepts of history and historical time are inherently violent concepts, insofar as originary accumulation is woven into the very fabric of valorisation and hence the production of historical time. The seemingly indifferent, if not benign, character of historical time as the self-expansion of time, as the background, in Marx’s terms, in which change within and between modes of production occurs, is in fact predicated on a systematic violence – specific to capitalism – that is not only ‘immediately justified within and by the new order that it constitutes’, but is actively recreated by this order. The temporal intelligibility of the ongoing creation of new needs – the temporal intelligibility of the ongoing first historical act – is in fact predicated on a peculiar temporality of violence that not only ‘always presents itself as preaccomplished’¹⁶⁰, but does so precisely because it is reproduced by a mode of production that presents itself as preaccomplished, that presents itself as the self-sufficient condition of its own being.

¹⁵⁶ Read, ‘Primitive Accumulation: the Aleatory Foundation of Capitalism’, 38.

¹⁵⁷ Marx, Kapital 1, 779 (Capital 1, 915).

¹⁵⁸ Read, ‘Primitive Accumulation: the Aleatory Foundation of Capitalism’, 38.

¹⁵⁹ Therefore, ‘capitalist accumulation is nothing other than primitive accumulation continued onto the shop floor, thus nothing other than a continuation of the modification of violence begun with “bloody legislation” and the enclosure acts.’ Ibid.

¹⁶⁰ Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, 447.

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Conclusion The Historical Time of Capital and the Time of History

Time is the measure of life itself.¹

The production-process of capital is given priority in this thesis because it is the first and most immediate ground from which ‘the social production of the means of life’ becomes intelligible as history. Yet inasmuch as it is a necessary point of departure, the production-process – and with it the first volume of Capital – does not secure capital as the condition of thinking history, and therefore does not exhaust the scope of the relation between capital and historical time. Ultimately, it is only when the immediate production-process is examined in conjunction with the circulation-process of capital, that the basis of the materialist concept of history, and thus the possibility of developing a concept of historical time out of this concept of history, is truly disclosed. The significance of the circulation-process is not registered by so-called ‘simple circulation’ (the circulation of money and commodities in the narrow sense of the term), but rather by the circulation of money and commodities as capital. It is this circulation, or what Marx frequently calls ‘the circulation-process proper’ [den eigentlichen Zirkulationsprozeß], which, on the one hand, and along with the ‘actual’ production-process, constitutes one of ‘the two great sections’² of the movement of capital, such that we can identify, and differentiate, a ‘circulation-time’ from a ‘production-time’.³ On the other hand, and this is a basic concern of the second volume of Capital, ‘circulation’ must equally be understood as a broader and more comprehensive [übergreifendes] category, one that, at a higher level of abstraction, actually contains, as a necessary moment within itself, the immediate production-process of capital.

¹ Marx, Economic Manuscripts of 1861-63, 52.

² Marx states: ‘the total production-process [Gesamtproduktionsprozeß] of capital includes both the circulation-process proper and the actual production-process. These form the two great sections of its movement, which appears as the totality of these two processes. On one side, labour-time, and on the other, circulation-time. And the whole of the movement appears as unity of labour-time and circulationtime, as unity of production and circulation. This unity itself is motion, process. Capital appears as this unity-in-process of production and circulation, a unity which can be regarded both as the totality of the production-process, as well as the specific completion of one turnover of the capital, one movement returning into itself.’ Marx, Grundrisse der Kritik der politischen Ökonomie, 520 (Grundrisse, 620). The ‘proper’ in the expression ‘the circulation-process proper’ and the ‘actual’ in the expression ‘the actual production-process’ are two different translations of the same German word: eigentlichen.

³ Therefore, ‘circulation-time and production-time are mutually exclusive. During its circulation-time, capital does not function as productive capital, and...produces neither commodities nor surplus-value. See Karl Marx, Capital: a Critique of Political Economy, Vol. 2: the Process of Circulation of Capital [1885] (hereafter Capital 2), trans. David Fernbach (London and New York: Penguin Books, 1978), 203. See also Marx, Grundrisse, 658, where circulation-time is figured as ‘not-production-time’ as well as ‘not-value-positing-time’.

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From this standpoint, the ‘circulation-process’ is not the dialectical opposite of the productionprocess – this is not the circulation-process proper – but is rather a category that expresses the unity of the production- and circulation-processes proper. This is what Marx calls the ‘overallprocess’ [Gesamtverlaufs] or ‘total-circuit’ [Gesamtkreislauf] of capital, which later becomes the ‘overall’ or ‘total’ (as opposed to the immediate) production-process of capital in the third volume of Capital.⁴ The subject of this process is not simply ‘capital’, but more precisely what Marx calls ‘total social capital’ [gesellschaftlichen Gesamtkapital], a concept which must be understood as the successor of ‘capital in general’ [Kapital im Allgemeinen], but which, at the same time, does not invalidate the concept of ‘capital in general’.⁵ It is total social capital and its metamorphoses – its three cycles or circuits [Kreislauf] – which concerns us now, because this allows us to bring this thesis to a close.

What must be emphasised is that the opening chapters of the second volume of Capital, in particular Chapter 4 – ‘The Three Figures of the Circuit’ – equal the systematicity of the systematic development of the value-form in the first chapters of the first volume of Capital. Moreover, these chapters in Volume Two offer what their counterpart in Volume One cannot: a systematic presentation of the various forms of capital itself, or, in other words, a systematic presentation of capital subsequent to the establishment of capital as self-expanding value.⁶ They present – for the first time – a framework wherein capital might be systematised as the condition of thinking history and historical time. In sharp contrast to Marx’s analysis of the production-process in the first volume of Capital (above all his depiction of the overt violence of originary accumulation), these opening chapters of the second volume of Capital present ‘capital’ at a much higher level of abstraction: the struggle to reduce the length of the workingday does not, for instance, figure (at least explicitly) in these pages.⁷ This does not, however, diminish their speculative contribution to our comprehension of history and historical time. In the three circuits of ‘total social capital’ – the circuits of money capital, productive capital and commodity capital, each of which include the moment of production within themselves – we have a rich and multifaceted exposition of what was raised in the introduction to Chapter 4, but which the body of that chapter only presents from the limited standpoint of the immediate production-process: the life through which capital satisfies its need to self-expand. The three circuits of total social capital form different but interrelated ‘life-processes’ – ‘life-circuits’ – of capital, and thus represent a crucial, if not the most important, means with which to enrich the (underdeveloped) discourse of life in Marx’s critique of political economy more broadly.⁸ Tombazos’s Time in Marx stands apart in its analysis of this largely unexplored dimension of Marx’s work.⁹ Drawing upon the figures of the syllogism in Hegel’s Logic (not to mention Marx’s direct acknowledgement of his indebtedness to this syllogism), Tombazos shows the extent to which the different positions and relations between money (M), the commodity (C) and production (P) represent a critical appropriation of Hegel that nonetheless corresponds to the different positions and relations between universality (U), particularity (P) and singularity (S) within the syllogism. This is, as Tombazos says, ‘the syllogistic structure of capital’¹⁰, and, after the Logic, it directly correlates to the sense in which, as the ‘Idea’, capital is a processual ‘living being’ – a teleological ‘living organism’ – which divides itself, within itself, into three processes¹¹: (1) the ‘living individual’, or ‘shape’ (the circuit of productive capital); (2) the ‘life-process’, or ‘assimilation’ (the circuit of commodity capital); and (3) the ‘genus-process’ (the circuit of money capital). The details of this homology between Marx and Hegel (which most of the work in so-called ‘Systematic Dialectics’ after Tombazos does not address) cannot be taken any further here.¹² It must suffice to state that the circuits of money capital, productive capital and commodity capital make up, respectively, the ‘valorisation, conservation and autocritique/self-control of value’¹³, such that, as a ‘triple autonomous movement’, as a ‘rich and complex organisation of rhythms’¹⁴, ‘total social capital’ is Marx’s most complete expression of the ‘life of capital’. This leads us to the following passage in the second volume of Capital, Marx’s most comprehensive passage on total social capital:

⁴ Hence insofar as there is some kind of ‘logic’ (apart from Engels’s editorial hand) that structures the three volumes of Capital, it is not the dialectic ‘Volume 1 + Volume 2 = Volume 3’, as is occasionally assumed, but rather a logic wherein the immediate production-process (Volume 1) is subsumed by the circulation-process, broadly construed (Volume 2), which is thereafter actualised by the total-process of capitalist production (Volume 3). This is the sense in which the aim of Volume 3 is to ‘discover and present the concrete forms which grow out of the process of capital's movement considered as a whole.’ Marx, Capital 3, 117. That is, Volume 3 actualises – via categories such as ‘profit’ and ‘price’ – what Volume 2 has already established, albeit at a high level of abstraction.

⁵ See Chapter 4, footnote 9. From the second volume of Capital on, the categories of ‘abstract labour’ and ‘value’ can be understood from the standpoint of ‘total social capital’.

⁶ This thesis accordingly shares Tombazos’s enthusiasm for the opening chapters of the second volume of Capital, particularly Chapter 4. See Tombazos, Time in Marx, 2, 4, 124.

⁷ Marx is well aware of this when, for instance, he states that ‘capital, as self-valorising value, does not just comprise class relations, a definite social character that depends on the existence of labour as wagelabour. It is a movement, a circulatory-process through different stages, which itself in turn includes three different forms of the circulatory-process. Hence it can only be grasped as a movement, and not as a static thing.’ Marx, Capital 2, 185.

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⁸ The following two passages in the Grundrisse are also quite instructive: first, ‘Capital…exists as the subject of circulation; circulation is posited as its own life’s course. But whilst capital thus, as the whole of circulation, is circulating capital, is the process of going from one phase into the other, it is at the same time, within each phase, posited in a specific aspect, restricted to a particular form, which is the negation of itself as the subject of the whole movement. Therefore, capital in each of its particular phases is the negation of itself as the subject of all the various metamorphoses’; and, second, ‘Insofar as capital in every moment of the process is itself the possibility of going over into its other, next phase, and is thus the possibility of the whole process, which expresses capital’s act of life, to that extent each of the moments appears potentially as capital – hence commodity capital, money capital – along with the value positing itself in the production-process as capital.’ Marx, Grundrisse, 620, 637. Marx’s use of the expression ‘the life-process of capital’ (see also Capital 1, 425) cuts across his entire critique of political economy, but the second volume of Capital is arguably unmatched in its contribution to our understanding of the relation between the concept of capital and the philosophical concept of life. ⁹ See, in particular, Tombazos, Time in Marx, Chapter Eleven, ‘Capital as Syllogism’, and Chapter Twelve, ‘Capital in Marx, or “Life” in Hegel’.

¹⁰ Ibid. 140.

¹¹ ‘The living being is the syllogism whose very moments are inwardly systems and syllogisms…but they are active syllogisms, or processes; and within the subjective unity of the living being they are only One process. Thus, the living being is the process of its own concluding with itself, which runs through three processes.’ G.W.F. Hegel, The Encyclopaedia Logic (Part I of the Encyclopaedia of Philosophical Sciences with the Zusätze) [1817, 1830], trans. T.F. Geraets, W.A. Suchting and H.S. Harris (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1991, 292 (§217).

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