Candidate: 94653 1

Abstract Temporality in Marx's Critique of Political

Economy: Appearance and mediation in an inverted world.

Some of the existing literature on Marx's critique of political economy has made good inroads into its temporal dimension, yet it has not before been adequately investigated as to how abstract temporality formally determines and mediates capitalist social forms. This dissertation begins by engaging with the critique of the value-form in order to bring this temporal dimension to light. In particular, the forms of appearance of value are analysed in the terms of measuring a time in abstraction from the concrete content it measures. The paper then proceeds to discuss how this is to be understood historically through the notion of primitive accumulation, suggesting it as a useful historical analytic of wage-labour. Finally the paper posits how this develops both a determinate yet non-programmatic theory of praxis, and an idea of communism. Ultimately Marx is understood as identifying and attempting to resolve the peculiar dialectic of capitalism which is carried by abstract time, a largely new interpretation of his critical social theory.

Abstract

Candidate: 94653 2

Introduction 3

Chapter 1: The Temporality of Value

I. The Dialectic of Labour 5

II. The Value-Form & Abstract Labour 8III. The Appearance of Money & Its Qualities

12

IV. Need, Theft and Value in the Wage-Form

14

V. The 'Self-Movement' of Capital 18

Chapter 2: The Temporal Enclosure

I. Primitive Accumulation as a Temporal Force

21

II. Wage-Labour as the Temporal Enclosure

24

III. The Presupposition of Abstract Time 27IV. Primitive Accumulation as the Real Abstraction

28

Chapter 3: Time, Struggle and Communism

I. Labour, Freedom and Time-Measurement

32

II. Labour-Time in Communism 37III. The Struggle for Time 40IV. Lower Communism 44

Concluding Remarks 48

Bibliography 50

Contents

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_Of all the facets of existence in capitalist society, it can be fairly suggested that our

notion of time tends to receive among the least attention. Time measured by the clock,

the day divided into equal and constant hours, minutes and seconds, is a time abstract

from any particular content. One can hence only assume that this apparent non-

involvement in the social world is the ultimate reason that it remains, relatively speaking,

a terra incognita for social critique.

Karl Marx's so-called 'economic manuscripts', compose one such critique whose

temporal dimension has been to a greater or lesser extent untapped. Approaching this

ouevre as a unified body of work, which I will call the critique of political economy,1 will

provide an inestimable insight not only into Marx's philosophy but simultaneously into

capitalist society itself. It is ultimately to be seen that the critique of capitalist social

forms therein is unintelligible without the critique of abstract temporality which

underpins it.

Through a close reading of the critique of political economy I will engage with Marx

primarily on the temporal level to draw out how exactly Marx implicitly understands

abstract temporality to operate in capitalism. Starting with his critique of the value-form

it will be shown that the social forms he analyses must be understood primarily in terms

of their abstract temporal foundations or mediation – abstractions which are shown not to

be ontologically empty but find their dialectical genesis in real human contents, which

they then formally suspend. Analysis of money, wages, and capital eventually discovers

the motions of capitalist society to be determined by abstract time itself.

After establishing this, abstract temporality can then be accounted for historically. In

particular, Marx's theory of primitive accumulation offers an unrivalled perspective for

ascertaining the social dominance abstract time exerts. Through primitive accumulation it

will then be seen that the temporality of value suggests the dominance of the temporal

over the spatial in capitalism, something previously neglected by most theorists,

1 In particular, the three published instalments of Capital, its rough-draft the Grundrisse, and a variety of shorter texts (e.g. 'Results of the Immediate Process of Production', 'A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy') make up this project. Disregarding all other variations, the temporal critique found therein legitimates the methodological assertion of their unity.

Introduction

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including Marx himself.

In the final instance Marx's application of the Hegelian dialectic to the temporal

mediation of capitalist social relations is found vindicated in the production of a

compelling and non-programmatic critical theory for the abolition of capital on temporal

grounds. At the same time, however, the alternative Marx presents is somewhat

incomplete, albeit not without reason: 'the owl of Minerva', after all, 'begins its flight

only with the onset of dusk.'2

2 GWF Hegel, 'Preface' to Elements of the Philosophy of Right (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004) p. 23.

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1I. The Dialectic of Labour

In order to begin my inquiry into the temporality of capitalism, it is necessary to

establish how exactly the social forms which are subject to Marx's critique are seen to

relate. This is by no means intended as a comprehensive overview, yet only pursuing this

does the salience of the temporal in Marx's dialectic become clear, in the final instance

demonstrating our perception of time and its measurement, abstract time, to be both

constituted by and constitutive of capitalist social relations. This mutual determination is

to be attributed to the idiosyncratic position of labour in this society: at once both private

and social, and, through this separation, superordinate of both that particular (the worker)

and this general (society). Because the subject of Marx's critique are those social

relations engendered by 'material production [resting] on value', I will then move on to

analyse the value-form, which opens the critique to this temporal investigation.3 Before

this is to be achieved, it must be explained 'why this content', labour, 'has assumed that

particular form' in Marx's view.4

This question demonstrates a point of great significance: labour is in no way an historical

constant for Marx, but is rather an activity whose form is socially and historically by this

society. The form of labour in capitalism is characterised foremost by the separation

between the individual producer and her social relations appearing as something 'alien

and objective' to her.5 Labour is at once both an individual and a social action: the

labourer produces immediately for herself while mediately for others, albeit through this

mediation in a reciprocally indifferent fashion.6 This indifferently social dimension of

labour forms the product's exchange-value while the immediate function of labour is the

3 Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (Rough Draft), trans. Nicolaus (London: Penguin, 1973), p. 81, 704.

4 Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. I. trans. Fowkes (London: Penguin, 1990) p. 174.

5 Marx, Grundrisse, p. 157.6 The point here is not that the producer directly appropriates a part of her product, but how her

productive activity is itself characterised.

The Temporality of Value

Candidate: 94653 6

origin of its use-value.7 The crucial lesson here is that 'this dimension of reality is

simultaneously subjective and objective';8 capitalist labour, in other words, has a 'dual

character' and in the process of labour the worker creates her objective conditions.9 In

other words, labour produces value which mediates the social realm in a way that

subordinates the subject, assuming the appearance of 'something alien … autonomous, as

a thing.'10 Hans-Georg Backhaus quite aptly calls this 'the self-distortion

(Selbstzerissenheit), and the self-contradiction of social labour.'11 Social relations are first

mediated by value, and then reified as money and capital: the individual 'carries [her]

social power, as well as [her] bond with society, in [her] pocket.'12 Having no immediate

access to the products of society, the worker becomes indentured to her own social

relations through wage-labour. At the heart of the process is hence a qualitative and

materially substantiated account of an alienation provides the social footing for the

abstract qualities of time in this society, and determines the quantitative movement of

capital.

To describe the critique of political economy as immanent thus signifies that its scope is

internal to the movement of society in which labour occupies a special place, unearthing

the really-existing human foundation of an abstract system. This is the key to Marx's use

of the dialectical method – on the basis of its epistemological consonance with the social

forms of capitalism, rather than as a universally applicable 'science' of natural history.

The priority of production in Marx's critique cannot be considered his own; the

discussion on labour does not provide a normative position from 'the standpoint of

production' as others have claimed.13 Rather, this priority is a real attribute of material life

in bourgeois society.14 Although all moments of the same political-economic process,

production, consumption, distribution, and exchange are neither 'independent,

7 Marx, Capital I, pp. 131-3.8 Hans-Georg Backhaus, 'On the Dialectics of the Value-Form' trans. Eldred & Roth, Thesis Eleven, 1

(1980), p. 112.9 Marx, Capital I, p. 131.10 Marx, Grundrisse, p. 157.11 Backhaus op. cit., p. 108.12 Marx, Grundrisse, p. 157.13 Alfred Sohn-Rethel for example poses 'the standpoint of exchange' as that which dominates capitalism

against the 'standpoint of production' which allegedly belongs to socialism. See Intellectual and Manual Labour: A Critique of Epistemology, trans. Martin Sohn-Rethel (London: Macmillan, 1978), pp. 139-40.

14 'As if ... the task were the dialectic balancing of concepts, and not the grasping of real relations!' Marx, Grundrisse, p. 90.

Candidate: 94653 7

autonomous neighbours' nor do they stand in 'unity'; to view each in a static relation to

the others is to falsely posit the process as 'a regular syllogism'. Instead, the dynamism of

the material process arises with production as the 'predominant moment' in capitalist

society,15 wherein production occurs 'for production's sake'.16 The mode of production

issues forth the modes of distribution, exchange, and consumption, which are again

reproduced as production returns to itself through its realisation in these modes.17

In capitalism mode of production is, in itself, a mode of alienation – it produces

something that stands autonomously over the productive subject. Through the real

separation between the private producer and the social character of her labour, the labour

process itself assumes social dominance. Labour in capitalism is to be understood as

mediator of the social whole. This is to say that wage-labour is of an intrinsically

superordinate position, and that to ignore its mediating function in this society is to fail to

grasp labour at all. In Intellectual and Manual Labour, Alfred Sohn-Rethel calls Marx's

materialist notion of total social mediation 'social synthesis'. Whereas he attempts to

attach this to commodity exchange (and we are told 'nothing else' can explain the

cohesion of capitalist society), in Marx's critique of political economy social synthesis is

in fact a function effected by labour.18

Marx's discussion of the 'formal' and 'real subsumption of labour' flags an interesting and

critical terminological problem for this analysis. Here Marx describes a process in which

the subsumption of labour by capital could be interpreted as the subsumption either of

simple material production, of the direct producers, or a third reading which implies that

capitalist labour itself is merely harnessed by this external thing. Perusal of the

discussion shows the distinction between formal and real to be the crux of the matter. Put

simply, in formal subsumption Marx wants to articulate the process through which

simple material production becomes 'the process of capital itself'; by real subsumption

Marx means the subsumption of the direct producers themselves: a loss of sight of 'the

productive power either of the individual worker or of the workers joined together'.19 The

class of workers is subsumed by capital, an autonomous appearance of their own social 15 Marx, Grundrisse, pp. 89-90.16 Marx, 'Results of the Immediate Process of Production' in Capital I, p. 1037.17 Marx, Grundrisse, pp. 94-8.18 Sohn-Rethel op. cit., pp. 29-34. Moishe Postone rightly spells out the failings this thesis creates for

Sohn-Rethel's theory of the 'exchange abstraction'. See: Time, Labor, and Social Domination: A reinterpretation of Marx's critical theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2003) pp. 177-8.

19 Marx 'Results of the Immediate Process of Production', pp. 1020-1, 1024.

Candidate: 94653 8

activity; they are subordinated 'to relations which subsist independently of them and

which arise out of collisions between [these] mutually indifferent individuals.'20 The point

to elaborate here is that the labour process in capitalism is this totalising moment of

production. Labour in a sense becomes more than and opposed to itself, and is thus the

centre-point of the temporal contradictions which are found later in this paper.

It is now possible to begin a reading of capitalist temporality through labour-determined

social forms. Given that production asserts itself as the dominant moment, it follows that

value is also of a dominant, general, and determining nature. As the 'dual character' of

capitalist labour is understood as the genesis of value, it is imperative to now analyse the

value-form in this context in order to unpack the full weight this has for the inquiry into

abstract time.

II. The Value-Form & Abstract Labour

With the perspective that the material and social conditions of labour cause its

objectification in the form of an alien thing, value will consequently be shown to take

forms of appearance other than its essential self. Value is hence the mystified, but all the

same real, kernel of capitalism; the truths of bourgeois society are found within this form.

Of particular relevance to the analysis is the central place value, as a structuring

determinant of the social whole, confers to abstract time. In the first instance, however,

what precisely is value?

Value, to be sure, is the ideal which objectively governs production in capitalism, hence

performing the function of the workers' own sociality. Within the very first pages of

Capital it is made clear that the 'substance' of this abstraction is 'equal human labour'.21

But how is it that the 'activity through which the metabolism between man and nature is

mediated' can be equal and provide the essence of the abstract thing value?22 This is to

be explained through the abstract function of the labour-time socially necessary for the

production of any given commodity, which operates as an intangible average across the

given society. Within this temporal measurement each unit is 'the same as any other'.

20 Marx, Grundrisse, p. 157.21 Marx, Capital I, p. 129.22 Karl Marx, 'The Production Process of Capital', Marx/Engels Collected Works, Vol. 30 (London:

Lawrence & Wishart) p. 40

Candidate: 94653 9

Thus, socially necessary labour-time 'exclusively determines the magnitude of the value

of any article' by way of the abstract measurement of time as homogeneous.23

This arises as both a logical consequence and condition of the law of equivalence that

value enacts. In order that commodities are exchangeable their value must refer to

something extraneous to their material selves – 'a third thing' which exists in abstraction

from the direct relation of each commodity to another. The extrinsic content of this

measurement is labour-time, 'a social relation' that disguises its own social character as

this process of measurement 'goes on behind the backs of the producers'.24 This character

is attributed by the 'self-distortion' labour, and disguises it by way of reference only to

itself as a measurement of value. As this third thing, value is both an abstraction and an

actual process of measurement which dominates production as much as it dominates

exchange, circulation, distribution and consumption. But how is it that labour is itself

made equable, even with regard to the abstract dimension of its measurement? This is

achieved through the really-existing abstract form of labour.

As has been shown, value-determined labour has a 'dual' character inasmuch as, in the

first instance (known as concrete labour) it necessarily produces use-values and, in the

second (abstract labour), it mediates the social whole.25 In his seminal Time, Labor, and

Social Domination, Moishe Postone clarifies that abstract labour 'is not only socially

general in the sense that it constitutes a mediation among all producers; the character of

the mediation is socially general as well.'26 To put this differently, abstract labour is the

application of productive human activity without regard to either production of particular

use-values (with the end of satisfying particular human needs) nor to the individual

producers whom it subsumes. More than this, its character is law-like insofar as it

mediates production and hence society in toto, moulding it in the image of general

equivalence. It acquires this socially general character through a 'real social process of

abstraction' from both 'material specificity and social particularity.'27 But this process of

abstraction from the use-value dimension still requires abstract labour to refer to some

third thing in order to serve its social function.28 The content of this general equivalence 23 Marx, Capital I, p. 129.24 Marx, Grundrisse, p. 144; Capital I, p. 135.25 Marx, Capital I, pp. 131-7.26 Postone op. cit., p. 152.27 Ibid.28 Regarding abstract labour, a lengthy and important debate on Marx's 'ambivalent' use of the term has

taken place. Space will not permit this to be addressed here directly, although my position in the debate

Candidate: 94653 10

is, like its form, located in abstract temporal measurement. Abstract time consequently

must be considered precisely the formative principle of the value-form.

It is clear how this process of measurement operates. In the rough-draft of Capital, Marx

describes how the value of any given product is determined not by the the precise amount

of labour time 'incorporated' in it 'but rather the amount of labour time necessary at a

given moment.' Even when each instance of concrete labour appears to receive payment

corresponding to its cost to the labourer, it is not simply so. This view takes the

categories of political economy at face-value and in stasis. The magnitude of each

commodity's value is not determined by its own constituent moment of labour alone but

rather by the amount of labour-time socially necessary for its production, a measure

applied through the function of abstract labour, which as the universal quality of

commodities comes to appear in the money-form.29

This is a dynamic relation: first in the sense that 'the value of a commodity is related to

the value of any other commodity as the labour-time necessary for the production of the

other', but also in the sense that 'the labour-time required for its production … changes

with every variation in the productivity of labour'.30 This is a dynamism in relation to

concrete historical (variable in duration of its own production) and abstractly social terms

(the average duration of production). The value of a commodity is hence acquired as part

of a motional social process, and it is through this temporal dimension that labour

mediates. As such, the exchange-value of any given commodity appears as a particular

quantity of the same general labour-time,31 expressed in a term relative to all other

commodities. Socially necessary labour-time is thus the appearance of abstract labour in

motion; its formal equability and indifference to the contents of labour functioning as a

real and obliging temporal measurement.

The presupposition and product of this process, in its cyclical motion, is the generalised

dominance of the law of equivalence. As Marx's enquires of money: 'What does a solely

quantitative difference between things presuppose? The identity of their qualities. Hence,

the quantitative measure of labours presupposes the equivalence, the identity of their

is implicit. For example, see: Werner Bonefeld, 'Abstract Labour: Against its nature and on its time', Capital & Class 34, 2 (2010) pp. 257-76.

29 Marx, Grundrisse, p. 135.30 Marx, Capital I, p. 130.31 Karl Marx, 'Zur Kritik der Politischen Ökonomie', Marx-Engels-Werke 13, 7 (Berlin: Dietz Verlag,

1971) p. 19

Candidate: 94653 11

quality.'32 The abstract measurement of labour by time levels or homogenises the

qualitative (concrete) content of real human behaviours by way of quantification; the

same process betrays labour to be a temporally tautological cycle which, rather than

aporetic, signifies its central function in absolute social mediation. Abstract time hence

corresponds both formally and actually to abstract labour in a direct manner. It haunts

labour with a 'phantom-like objectivity',33 pervading the entire social world as a universal

mediator, reducing the qualities of the real human content it measures to quantifiable

abstractions and thus giving them the appearance of something other than they really are:

magnitudes of value.

Quoting Daniel Bensaïd, Werner Bonefeld writes: 'Labour time as the measure of wealth

is also the substance of wealth. That is to say, time as a measure of its own substance

“must itself be measured”, in the form of profit, the rate of return on expropriated unpaid

labour time.'34 By way of its self-measurement, labour-time, and hence value, is never

transcended but rather assumes an appearance other than its essence. The intrinsic

relation between the sensuous forms of appearance and supersensible forms of essence

that is elemental to Marx's critique is shown by Helmut Reichelt. He demonstrates that

the Hegelian structure of concrete, sensuous specificity and abstract, supersensible

generality is operative in its application to material relations rather than the categorial

development of Reason in Hegel.35 The 'vulgar economist' clings to appearances and

affirms them, whereas Marx's critique shows value to be invisibly yet actually animating

the 'real relations' of bourgeois society through a system of appearances,36 crucially with

labour as its substance. The supersensible substance of a sensible world is hence one in

which 'all activities are “in themselves inverted”. They are all, in their vanishing

appearance, immediately their own opposite: the persistence of the general.'37 Abstract

labour thus becomes opposed to the labourer herself in the 'self-grounding' form of

capital, articulated by the qualitatively conditioning mediation of abstract time. However,

abstract labour is in a limited but real sense still human productive activity: the autonomy

32 Marx, Grundrisse, p. 173.33 Marx, Capital I, p. 128.34 Bonefeld, 'Abstract Labour', p. 269.35 Helmut Reichelt, 'Social Reality as Appearance: Some Notes on Marx's Conception of Reality' trans.

Bonefeld in Bonefeld and Psychopedis, eds. Human Dignity: Social Autonomy and the Critique of Capitalism (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005) p. 39-40.

36 Karl Marx, 'Letter to Ludwig Kugelmann in Hanover, 11 July 1868', Marx/Engels Collected Works, Vol. 43 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1988), p. 67.

37 Reichelt op. cit., p. 47.

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of capital is only formal, and the truth of its movement can be revealed.

Postone continues in this vein, positing that value expresses the '“inner nexus of

connections” (inneren Zussamenhang) of the capitalist social formation.'38 Most

importantly, value as an essential form of 'the inverted world of capital'39 takes new forms

of appearance, and as such must be abolished rather than realised in communism. In this

inverted world value exists as a linchpin; not only is it the essence of multifarious social

forms, but is itself the inverted social mediation of the direct producers with their

individual needs. As Bonefeld poignantly shows, the significance of this extends to

labour-time, which articulates these alternative forms of appearance through its motion of

self-measurement. As self-measurement we learn not only that labour-time is a

contingency of value and that value is temporally contingent, but that this self-enclosed

movement of real abstraction is the very motor of valorisation. In other words, an

appraisal of abstract time is critical to understanding the formal process of 'self-

valorisation',40 which is to be seen after the genesis of value's forms of appearance can be

elaborated.

III. The Appearance of Money & Its Qualities

A large number of thinkers in the traditions of Marxism and critical theory who

have attempted an appraisal of capitalist temporality have found it sufficient to argue for

a largely conceptual view of time as abstract, homogeneous and empty.41 Up until this

point I have indeed largely limited myself to this discourse. Yet, as Backhaus states, the

point is to ascend 'from the abstract to the concrete, from value to the form of appearance

of value.'42 It must be enquired, in other words, how this abstract emptiness and

homogeneity is expressed in reality. In particular it remains to be shown how the

homogeneous quality of value takes the embodied appearance of money. It has already

been mentioned that abstract labour measured in time is a universal quality of

commodities which comes to appear in the money-form, and it does not bear repeating

38 Postone op. cit., p. 134.39 Reichelt op. cit., p. 39.40 Karl Marx, 'Results of the Immediate Process of Production', in Capital I, p. 1039.41 It is equally inadequate to address the regimentation of time in capitalism without also being able to

account for its fluidity. This is another certain ramification of abstract labour's temporal mediation, for which insufficient space could be provided for discussion.

42 Backhaus, op. cit., p. 108.

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that the dual character of capitalist labour gives rise to the Janus-faced character of the

commodity. How the value of a product comes to be expressed as its price, and hence the

existence of money, however, is thus far an open question, and it is important to elaborate

this process in order that the temporal point can be sufficiently demonstrated.

The answer is found with the labour-time socially necessary to produce a commodity,

which determines its value. Socially necessary labour-time in this respect operates as (but

is not merely) a compulsive real standard against which value derives, and yet at the

same time it is intangible as an inexpressible quantity of self-measured units of abstract

time. Owing to this intangibility, value henceforth must assume an alternative form of

appearance in order to become realisable in exchange. This becomes necessary because

value is a temporal tautology – labour-time measured by labour-time – and, on the basis

of this abstraction away from concrete content, it therefore has no adequate expression

within itself to which it could refer. The measurement of an exchange-value by labour-

time hence 'necessarily leads to the formation money.'43 Not only does value determine

the content of commodity-production (that is, the amount of abstractly quantifiable

labour), but it thereby produces a dialectical 'doubling' in the commodity-form;44 the

universal quality of the commodity-form separates from the commodity itself. The

commodity becomes both commodity and money, which Backhaus highlights is a

'paradoxical relation in which the commodity is itself and at the same time its other:

money. It is therefore the identity of identity and non-identity. The commodity is equal in

essence to money and at the same time different from it.'45

Money is the reified 'necessary form of appearance' that adequately embodies the

universal quality of value, namely 'abstract and therefore equal human labour.'46 It now

represents this abstract quality in a way which can objectively express itself as a

qualitatively commensurable generality: as a derivative and variable particular quantity.

It is only 'as a specific amount of labour time' that it becomes possible for a commodity

to be compared with other amounts of labour-time,47 which is now registered as a

monetary expression. However, as a relative quantity this is by no means stable: the

disturbances of exchange-values, hence prices, are products of the inherent relativity of

43 Marx quoted in Backhaus op cit., p. 108.44 Ibid., p. 109-10.45 Ibid., p. 109.46 Marx, Capital I, pp. 188, 184.47 Marx, Grundrisse, p. 143.

Candidate: 94653 14

the labour-time which they represent.48 Though there is insufficient room to sufficiently

open discussion on the matter here, it must be noted that the fluctuations of exchange-

value and price primarily originate in the abstract temporal index of value. Any thorough

Marxist analysis of, for example, finance capital, must therefore proceed from this point:

the temporally-determined commensurability of money potentiates speculation ab ovo.

Through the money-form, what had originally been abstract units of time now appear as

circumstantial prices which mediate exchange. Though money is formally 'distinct from

labour time',49 it is this distinction which allows the contradictions of labour-time to be

objectified. Expressed in money, the relative expression of labour-time is now 'divisible

at will'.50 The dynamic of social activity which had been levelled by value therefore finds

its expression in a form of appearance made necessary by the abstract measurement of

labour-time. The divisibility of money is related intrinsically to the variability of abstract

time-measurement – a time with equable, homogeneous content.51 Hence Marx does not

merely provide an account of labour-time in value, but an implicit and forceful critique

of abstract time itself, ultimately identifying this notion of time-measurement with the

universal mediating form that is to be stripped away.

IV. Need, Theft and Value in the Wage-Form

To continue the ascension from the abstract to the concrete, it is now to be

demonstrated how the wage-form expresses the real temporal 'emptiness' of value. In

order to achieve this, I will start by exploring its relation to wealth – inverted initially in

the commodity-form which then expresses itself through the wage-system. Marx's notes

in the Grundrisse are especially insightful on this subject:

As a value, every commodity is equally divisible; in its natural existence this is

not the case. As a value it remains the same no matter how many metamorphoses

and forms of existence it goes through; in reality, commodities are exchanged

only because they are not the same and correspond to different systems of

needs. ... As a value, the measure of its exchangeability is determined by itself;

exchange value expresses precisely the relation in which it replaces other

48 Ibid., p. 139.49 Marx, Grundrisse, p. 168-9. Emphasis in the original.50 Marx, Capital I, p. 184.51 Backhaus op. cit., p. 105.

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commodities; in real exchange it is exchangeable only in quantities which are

linked with its natural properties and which correspond to the needs of the

participants in exchange.52

Within the motions of value, the products of human labour acquire a reality other than

their material selves. The commodity hangs in a state of contradiction, between

materiality and the social relations it expresses. For Marx this duality of use-value and

exchange-value cannot be over-emphasised: while every commodity must satisfy a

concrete need (in use), it must also be abstractly commensurable (in exchange). But what

more is to be said for this formal contradiction? The exchangeability of the commodity

evidently does not transcend its utility, and only conceals its particular usefulness in the

moment of exchange. The commodity considered this way does not necessitate thinking

of use-value as an inherently capitalist category,53 but it does require shifting focus from

the relation between use- and exchange-value to the (other) inner qualities of value so

that its underlying dynamic can be unlocked.

To follow on from Marx, it is possible to determine the abstract qualities of time in two

of its real expressions – the commodity-form and wage-labour. On the commodity, it is

must be recognised in the above quote that the dual character signifies that its

commensurability is abstracted from its correspondence to 'different systems of needs.'

To paraphrase, exchange-value at once relies upon and denies, or suspends (hebt auf) in

an inverted form, the use-value dimension of the product. Commodity-exchange is an

inverted realisation of needs in which the form of wealth, value, only indifferently and

coincidentally fulfils its content as wealth: the satisfaction of particular needs. Value is

thus commensurate with need only in an inverted way, as a motor of production,

valorisation and accumulation.

With respect to the wage-form, then, what is to be taken from this notion of value as

inverted wealth? Of particular relevance is the wage as a peculiar appearance of a

peculiar commodity's price. Labour-power, as Chris Arthur rightly stresses, is not a

'genuine' commodity insofar as it is not produced by capital alone – therefore its price,

the wage, is not perfectly brought under the law of value.54 In consequence, the wage

52 Marx, Grundrisse, pp. 141-2.53 Although there is much to be challenged in some interpretations of use-value as an extrinsic component

of capital, space does not permit discussion here.54 Christopher J. Arthur, 'The Inner Totality of Capitalism', Historical Materialism 14, 3 (2006) pp. 90-1.

Candidate: 94653 16

conceals a chasm between itself and the true value of labour-power, 'veiling' the truth that

labour alone creates value.55 This is of critical importance. Because the realisation of

value entails the realisation of the surplus-value extracted from labour in the course of

the working-day, the wage received falsely appears to recompense the whole 'aggregate

labour'. However, the value created by labour exceeds that needed to merely reproduce

the worker as worker; surplus-value then appears as profit for the capitalist. The wage is

therefore but a disguise for the fact that the producer is only paid for a certain amount of

labour-time.56 It follows that this unpaid component is surplus labour-time that can be

given freely to capital, made permissible insofar as its abstract measurement disregards

its concrete content – namely, the individual worker producing so she may live. As a

price expression of its value, the wage renders labour-power inherently divisible – an

amalgamation of units of labour-time. The wage thus divided in turn divides up the

producer's access to the means of subsistence. Wage-labour hence necessarily imposes a

separation between the worker and a part of her life, expressed in the form itself as a

mere component of the costs against which profit is realised.57

In this analysis, time as an empty, mere abstraction finds the ultimate expression of its

social mediation in the fact the worker is 'nothing other than labour-power for the

duration of [her] whole life'. Every moment of time as abstract is rendered labour-time 'to

be devoted to the self-valorisation of capital.'58 Any historical analysis of the scientific

management of production, for example Taylorism and its later developments, must

hence proceed from this inherent principle. For this is no aberration but the reality of the

temporal abstraction from human contents in motion. First through value and then in the

wage the worker's individuality is subsumed by her own sociality. She cannot exist

except on a wage – where as wage-labour she is socially nothing more than an asset to

the valorisation of capital.

With the means to life inaccessible to her, the worker is hence forced into future labour-

time.59 Having reproduced capital, labour comes up against itself in an alien form: the

worker's life stands before her in a form of self-denial, against itself, or the perversion of

55 Postone op. cit., p. 136.56 Karl Marx, Value, Price and Profit: Addressed to working men, ed. Marx Aveling (London: George

Allen & Unwin, 1942) pp. 62-4.57 Cf. Marx, Capital I, p. 430; 'Results of the Immediate Process of Production', pp. 956-9.58 Marx, Capital I., p. 375.59 Ibid., pp. 415-6

Candidate: 94653 17

life.60 The means to freedom from need appear instead as its subsistence, and life as a

merely longer or shorter death.61 The process is a kind of inversion: it is the 'means of

subsistence that actually purchase human beings', by throwing the producer back into

work, and not the producer who purchases the means of subsistence.62

As Marx notes in Capital, this separation in the wage constitutes and is constituted by a

fundamental contradiction of capitalist labour, expressly that between private and social

labour. Personifying capital, this sociality, the owner of the means of production demands

a portion of labour's value for valorisation, a demand as equally legitimate as it is an

expropriation from the individual worker.63 Consequently Marx finds it no surprise that

the capitalist 'snatches' minutes from the worker across the working-day, from meal-

times as well as off-time;64 the very logic of valorisation compels it, and it is rendered

possible by the abstraction from real content in the temporal measurement which it

operates. Yet each faces the other as an owner of the same labour-power and hence with

an equal right to its disposition by the laws of commodity exchange.65 Capitalist

temporality is therefore in essence 'the theft of alien labour time',66 which the wage

imposes subjectively as an expropriation from the labourer's life. In the final instance,

then, this theft is suggestive that the worker could, and indeed must, be reunited with

both her product and sociality. The wage, commanding this contradiction between the

worker's life and the process of valorisation, hence presents the opening for class struggle

in the temporal realm. This is explored in the third part of this paper.

Investigation of the wage and the divisions it entails reveals that capitalist accumulation

is in the first and final instance the accumulation of units of labour-time, rendered

commensurable by abstract time which gives form to this need-suspending wealth.

Theodor Adorno's critique of the theory of progress can be related to this point in Marx.

In his words, progress in this society is only that 'from the slingshot to the megaton

bomb'67 – little more than the transposition of capital's temporal logic to a sociohistorical

60 On the notion of perversion, see: Werner Bonefeld, 'Kapital and its Subtitle: A note on the meaning of critique', Capital & Class 25, 3 (Autumn 2001) p. 61n7.

61 Cf. Marx, Capital I., 716.62 Ibid., pp. 352-3.63 Ibid., pp. 342-6.64 Ibid., p. 352.-365 Ibid., pp. 342-6.66 Marx, Grundrisse, p. 705.67 Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. Ashton (London: Continuum, 1973) p. 320.

Candidate: 94653 18

Weltanschauung. This logic is itself the character of abstract, homogeneous and empty

time in motion.

VI. The 'Self-Movement' of Capital

Given the centrality of abstract time to Marx's critique of the value-form it

becomes necessary to theorise how the process of valorisation is temporally determined.

Although labour provides the 'agency' of capital's apparent self-valorisation, it exists as

mere 'means' to this end.68 This is to say that the process is driven by the formal, temporal

structure of value itself. As discussed ad infinitum, value is for itself temporal self-

measurement at the start. As abstractly commensurable and homogeneously constituted

by the temporal motions of abstract labour, the measurement of each commodity is at the

same time itself and all other instances of value – expressed in reality by money. This

notion is clarified in the Grundrisse:

We have seen already, in the case of money, how value … is capable of no other

motion than a quantitative one; to increase itself. It is according to its concept

the quintessence of all use values; but, since it is always only a definite amount

of money (here, capital), its quantitative limit is in contradiction with its

quality. … value which insists on itself as value preserves itself through

increase; and it preserves itself precisely only by constantly driving beyond its

quantitative barrier, which contradicts its character as form, its inner

generality. … It thus does not by any means have the capacity which according

to its general concept it ought to have … [capital] is therefore the constant

drive to go beyond its quantitative limit: an endless process. ... Everything

which has been said here about money holds even more for capital, in which

money actually develops in its completed character for the first time. ... it is not

this commodity or that commodity, but all commodities.69

Value's process of self-measurement is hence in contradiction not against use-value, but

within itself as the abstraction. Its abstract character in any case permits measurement by

emptying each commodity of its particularity given its general substance in labour-time.

Through the law of equivalence, value in some sense seeks the completion of this

68 Marx, 'Results of the Immediate Process of Production', p. 1039.69 Marx, Grundrisse, p. 271.

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emptiness by striving against measure and its abstract point of departure altogether. In

this much the process of self-valorisation wants to transcend itself, but this is a process

with no end. Valorisation is incompletable, a process wherein value attempts and can

only fail to transcend itself. This does not signify the movement of money toward

infinitude, but rather its qualitative disposition toward expressing the universality of

commodities in its own quantitative terms.70 Capital, in Marx's view, thus develops

immanently from the temporal self-measurement of value itself. In Hegelian terms, value

remains for itself in this process, but can never become in-and-for itself on the grounds of

its abstract identity.

The same notion of measurement appears in Capital where the point is illustrated in more

tangible terms. In discussing the General Formula of Capital, Marx posits the

augmentation of value in the metamorphosis of £100 to £110 through the simple

exchange of commodities. While £110 is of a different quantitative magnitude to £100,

the two sums are in themselves equal as capital: 'considered qualitatively, £100 is the

same as £110, namely money; while, from the quantitative point of view, £110 is, like

£100, a sum of definite and limited value.'71 This absolute commensurability, issuing

from the abstract temporal index of labour-time and reified in money, hence renders

value on the one hand inherently augmentative, while on the other hand the fungibility of

each moment of value makes it divisible on the same count. As capital, each moment has

'the same need for valorisation', being identical as 'limited expressions of exchange-value'

and hence immanently concerned with approaching 'as near as possible absolute wealth',72 that is all wealth. The proportion in which this is achieved is circumstantial rather than

a theoretical concern, although it does provide the grounding for an analysis of monopoly

capitalism which cannot be achieved here.

Marx thus resolves the logic of commodity-exchange – buy low, sell high – within the

generalised law of equivalence in the temporality of value. This can only be explained

insofar as the appropriation of use-values as use-values, namely the satisfaction of need,

is extrinsic to the value-form. In other words, this law of equivalence not only determines

the trajectory capital must take through time, but also signifies the processive separation

70 For a notable example of how a reader of Marx could confuse this universality for infinitude, see: John Rosenthal 'The Escape from Hegel', Science and Society 63, 3 (Fall 1999) pp. 296-300

71 Marx, Capital I, pp. 249-54.72 Ibid.

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of the means of subsistence from the producer who is thrown back into valorisation: both

capital and labour 'reproduces itself by reproducing the other, its negation.'73

In light of this it must be said that the self-valorisation process of capital is temporally

cyclical, in terms of its qualitative essence as self-measurement as well as in the

quantitative sense of a process driving towards a permanently unattainable telos. At the

same time, this cyclicality is an abstraction from and in contradiction to the delimited,

linear temporality of labour's measurement, a contradiction reified in the wage. But this

cyclical process is not of an uncertain origin. In other words, the social bond between the

producers exists as a real suspension (Aufhebung) of the individual life-span of the

producer herself, and it is a suspension of her own creation. This, together with the

creation of capital by the worker, explains the self-movement of capital as a real

appearance. Time's abstract qualities in the process of production find their expression in

the veritable, ceaseless, and cyclical theft of time from Marx's subject.

73 Marx, Grundrisse, p. 458.

Candidate: 94653 21

2I. Primitive Accumulation as a Temporal Force

After analysing Marx's critique of the value-form, it is necessary to heed

Backhaus who warned that the 'analysis of the logical structure of the value-form is not

to be separated from the analysis of its historical, social content.'74 The historical and

social analytic which has thus far remained untouched is found in the theory of 'primitive

accumulation'. Despite being presented only in the closing part of Capital, it forms a

foundation-stone in Marx's critique of capitalist social relations. In fact, as Bonefeld

suggests, its very emergence at the tail-end of Capital's first volume indicates the actual

priority of primitive accumulation in historico-theoretical terms.75 Defining it as 'an

accumulation which is not the result of the capitalist mode of production but [the] point

of departure' for the formation of capitalism, this phenomenon is at once of both great

historical and great theoretical import.

Primitive accumulation provides historical significance to the critique of political

economy in the light it sheds on the 'notorious fact' that the originary historical moment

of capitalism is ultimately one of 'force', rather than the 'idyllic' tale of the prudence,

fortitude and right proffered by the classical political economists. This forceful and

violent nature of capitalism's birth gives substance to the Marxist critique of the political

and the economic as inseparable spheres. In this much, it is only with the history of

primitive accumulation 'written in the annals of [humankind] in the letters of blood and

fire' that capital can be counted for.76

The overwhelming part of Marxist literature on primitive accumulation exists within this

74 Backhaus op. cit., p. 107.75 Werner Bonefeld, 'Primitive Accumulation and Capitalist Accumulation: Notes on Social Constitution

and Expropriation', Science & Society 75, 3 (July 2011) pp. 391-2.76 Marx, Capital I, pp. 873-5.

The Temporal Enclosure

Candidate: 94653 22

historical paradigm: as insight into Marx's oft-mooted philosophy of history, or as

research into the phenomenon, especially with regard to the history of European and later

US colonialism and imperialism. The largely more significant theoretical ramifications

hence require more attention. Viewed in the full light of Marx's critique, primitive

accumulation holds the truth not only for specific, delineated historical moments, but for

the actuality of capitalism itself. Primitive accumulation is not merely a discreet event

which earmarks transition from pre-capitalism to capitalism proper, but a defining

boundary of this society – a permanent feature of capitalism.

Enclosure of the commons and the dispossession of a class of labourers, and the

centralisation of wealth to the owners of the means of production, provide 'the

fundamental conditions of capitalist production' which come to be sustained by 'the

constant flux of [capital's] incessant renewal' in the process of reproduction.77 In Capital's

third volume Marx declares this 'severance' of the producers from the means to

subsistence as beginning with primitive accumulation, which thenceforth becomes 'a

permanent process in the accumulation and concentration of capital'.78 This historical

sustenance (as opposed to periodic repetition) issues from the cyclical temporality of

capital. To paraphrase: capital and primitive accumulation never sleep. The violence of

enclosure and dispossession is a pervasive and permeating theme in the history of

capitalism, which in the final instance is hence a uniform history of small differences.79

This view of historical time as a permanence issuing from capital's cyclicality supplants

Postone's historical thesis. For his part, Postone attempts to resolve his need to identify a

'concrete time' of capitalism with the progressive march of productivity. Exclusively

aligning productivity with relative surplus-value, his position that this alone constitutes

historical time is specious and ultimately untenable. It will suffice here to highlight the

identification of 'technical, organisational, and scientific knowledge and experience' on

the first hand with history as such, and on the second as a result of the 'treadmill effect' of

relative surplus-value.80 How such specific advances in knowledge and experience may

arise by other means are inexplicable, and in particular the foundational moment of

77 Ibid., pp. 874; 711.78 Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. III (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1977) p.

246. Emphasis added.79 Even on the immediate level 'primitive accumulation' is a temporal-semantic rejoinder to Adam Smith's

'previous accumulation', implying the phenomenon's permanence. Ibid., p. 873.80 Postone op. cit., pp. 291-8.

Candidate: 94653 23

violence remains out of reach. More than this, attention should be paid to the terms in

which productivity appears in the inverted expression of intensified labour in Capital's

first volume. That increased productivity can be yielded by the inward expansion of

capital into labour-time,81 and not only an historical advance in technology, makes a

strong case for the view that this movement of historical time is provided by the motion

of primitive accumulation within the temporal sphere.

Nonetheless, the primitive accumulation theory of historical time intersects with Postone

where he endeavours to fulfil his identification of 'the social constitution of two forms of

time – abstract time and historical time – that are related intrinsically.' To be sure,

Postone is not mistaken in his account of how 'frames' of abstract time move forward and

intensify due to relative surplus-value; likewise the 'flow of history' in the former view is

by no means denied,82 only resolved at a level ontologically prior to (and theoretically

more fluent than) that in Postone.83

The theoretical implications for the permanence of primitive accumulation hold for

abstract temporality as much as they do for society's movement through history. As

Bonefeld correctly identifies, 'the systematic character of primitive accumulation subsists

... in suspended form through the constituted relations of capital', in particular appearing

'suspended (aufgehoben) in the commodity form'.84 Abstract time as the determining

structure of value and capital evidently falls within this sphere of constituted social

relations, and the wage-form especially purveys the direct relation between abstract time

in motion and the separation of the workers from the means to subsistence which

primitive accumulation represents.

It can be considered no coincidence, after all, that there is some consensus in critical

histories of the clock and wage-labour finding the two to be intimately linked. Jacques Le

Goff, for example, traces the social prominence of 'certain hours' to the measurement of

labour in European centres of nascent wage-labour as early as the fourteenth century.

Systems of work bells in particular prove the shift in power from the Church to the

81 Cf. Marx, Capital I, pp. 533-9.82 Postone, op. cit., pp. 292-3. Emphasis in the original text. 83 In Postone's wake, this possible alternative view of the constitution of historical time – watermarked by

primitive accumulation – goes some way to reconcile Postone with the criticisms laid out by Bonefeld in his review 'On Postone's Courageous but Unsuccessful Attempt to Banish the Class Antagonism from the Critique of Political Economy', Historical Materialism, 12, 3 (2004) pp. 103-24.

84 Werner Bonefeld, 'The Permanence of Primitive Accumulation: Commodity Fetishism and Social Constitution', The Commoner 2 (Sept 2001) pp. 7, 4-5.

Candidate: 94653 24

ascendant bourgeoisie and underscore the total command over workers' lives that

measurable time began to attain.85 Abstract time's social relevance is thus to be located

within the wage-system, and it is unsurprising that the length of the working-day was the

primary concern in workers' struggles through the late fourteenth and early fifteenth

centuries, not the magnitude of wages.86 G.J. Whitrow likewise finds the birth of the

clock in this epoch, linking its distribution to the technological advances in, for example,

metal-work at the time.87 Taken together, the accounts vindicate the implication of Marx's

critique that abstract time corresponds directly to both the material and social structure of

capital. Consequently the birthmark of capitalism, to use Marx against himself, must be

identified with its temporal violence before (in a non-exclusive sense) its spatial

separation, both theoretically and historically. There is much room for further historical

research to be undertaken with this view of wage-labour as a form of temporal enclosure

which is precedent to the enclosures of land,88 wherein time is to be viewed as some type

of 'common' in its own right, but for now it will suffice to continue with the theoretical

concerns at hand. By returning to the inquiry into wage-labour I will evaluate what the

permanence of primitive accumulation denotes for the appraisal of abstract time-

measurement in the critique of political economy.

II. Wage-Labour as the Temporal Enclosure

Returning to the wage-form, then, the theoretical points of major relevance to

primitive accumulation from the last section should be re-emphasised, in particular the

extraction of surplus-value. The essence-appearance thesis tells us that profit is the

appearance value takes at the moment of its realisation in sale, for 'normal and average

profits are made by selling commodities not above, but at their real values.'89 This is not

to say that profit is in some way unreal but that it conceals a social relation which is not

immediately apparent. After all, value is constituted by the duration taken to realise the

85 Jacques Le Goff, Time, Work, and Culture in the Middle Ages, trans. Goldhammer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977) pp. 43-52.

86 Ibid., p. 47.87 G.J. Whitrow, Time in History: The evolution of our general awareness of time and temporal

perspective (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), pp. 82-7, 97-114.88 Postone regrettably does not expose the history of wage-labour and time-measurement to the theory of

primitive accumulation or history of enclosures, but does give a lengthier discussion of the existing literature. Cf. op. cit., pp. 200-16.

89 Marx, Value, Prices and Profit, pp. 64-6. Emphasis is in the original text.

Candidate: 94653 25

worker's wage plus surplus labour-time: surplus because this is 'free' labour for capital,

for which the worker is effectively unremunerated. This generation of surplus-value is

the essence of capital, the process of so-called self-valorisation.

It is this concern with value as the composite of paid and unpaid labour which is of

interest here. The wage figures as centrally important to commodity production in the

form it gives to labour, and its magnitude is determined principally by the 'certain

quantity of the means of subsistence … sufficient to maintain [the worker in her] normal

state as a working individual.' Of course, however, the value of these means of

subsistence – food, warmth, shelter, and so forth – themselves vary as per the quantity of

labour-time required for their production; again the tautological self-measurement of

time becomes visible in another guise.90 What is salient with the wage-form, however, is

that in itself it logically provides only restrictive access to the means of subsistence

(ultimately the minimum socially necessary for the reproduction of the labourer as

labourer) and in turn that this magnitude is by its nature in flux. Maintaining sight of the

fact that valorisation is the extraction of surplus labour-time, Marx leads us to a stark

verdict on the wage: the time spent in labour always exceeds the equivalent access

granted to the means of subsistence as the wage invokes a temporal separation. This

indication that the wage therefore inherently does not fully provide the means of

subsistence it promises cannot be escaped. The wage appears to provide the satisfaction

of various needs, but to what extent this is actually achieved is circumstantial, for its

essence is the subsistence of need itself. In the guise of satisfying need the wage

perpetuates this very separation of the worker from the means to life, or: the condition of

primitive accumulation to capitalist production is reproduced in the wage-form. The

process posits the presupposition. Primitive accumulation subsists as a temporal relation.

Beyond the simple variability of the access to subsistence which the wage will accord in

line with the rising or falling costs of subsistence (i.e. the fluctuating 'real wage'), the

wage varies also within the dimensional difference between the value and market price of

labour-power. When labour-power's price falls to the minimum 'physically indispensable'

to the worker, 'it falls below its value, since under such circumstances it can be

maintained and developed only in a crippled state'.91 This is the political economic

90 Marx, Capital I, pp. 274-5; 276.91 Ibid., p. 277.

Candidate: 94653 26

evaluation of abject poverty which suggests the ultimately existential truth of labour-

power's value being concealed by its price. Any given worker may receive a wage above

or below the value of labour-power averagely given across society, but even when the

worker may with the grace of luck be relatively well remunerated, she always

qualitatively suffers a temporal loss greater in scope than the traditional 'sociological'

understanding of alienated labour can register. In light of this critique of the wage it

becomes evident that Marx is in no way contingent on a Victorian image of poverty: that

multifarious, socially-constituted needs are only ever satisfied circumstantially by the

wage, which as an extenuation of value has no immanent concern for them, conditions

the worker to a state whereby her needs subsist as long as she subsists herself. Primitive

accumulation exists through this temporal separation imposed by labour, and precarity is

in every circumstance its quality.

Time in the abstract manifestly plays no innocent part in this perpetuity of expropriation.

On one side both value and the wage are constituted by abstract temporal measurement,

while on the other temporal expropriation becomes possible only due to its abstract,

empty character. This is to say that time in the abstract, emptied and homogeneous, is

indifferent with regard to its content and hence prepares the temporal terrain for capitalist

enclosure. Abstract temporality presents indifference toward the labouring life, while it is

through abstract time that the movement against this life is completed: in mediating the

surface appearances of social forms and their deep-lying essence of value. In this

analysis, abstract time is the locus of a double inversion: the appearance of wealth as

need, and the appearance of need-satisfaction as a legitimated expropriation. Abstract

time's blank face disguises capitalism to be a timeless theft of time itself. 'The mediated

movement disappears in its own result and leaves no trace.'92

Deploying the critique of political economy to abstract time thus reveals an antagonism

at the heart of Marx's critical theory. The grounded yet implicit image of abstract time as

the locus of capitalist expropriation must be understood in terms of the immanent

contradiction between the expansive movement of capital and the finite lifespans of its

servitors, against which it makes its claims for boundlessness. The suspension of

primitive accumulation in the wage-form is to be seen as a socialisation, in some sense,

of the primacy of object over subject. Pace Peter Osborne, there implicitly is an 'appeal

92 Marx quoted in Backhaus op. cit., p. 111.

Candidate: 94653 27

to finitude in the account of labour-time as the measure of value'.93 Marx evidently takes

this temporal contradiction seriously not merely in his contemporaneous account of

proletarian immiseration but in this immanently insoluble contradiction of capital which

in times of crisis leads to the destruction of wealth in order that it can be created anew.

III. The Presupposition of Abstract Time

Separating the worker from her means to subsistence, the suspension (Aufhebung)

of primitive accumulation in the wage-form purveys abstract time to be both a

determining and determinate elemental force of capital. This is to say that abstract time is

both a presupposition and a product of capitalism, theoretically as well as historically.

Counterpoised to this insight is the position developed by Georg Lukács in his essay

'Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat', where the dynamic of capital

'degrades time to the dimension of space'.94 While this may appear an attractively

sophisticated theory of capitalist spatio-temporality, it does not bear the weight of Marx's

critique. The proposition rests on an assumption that at some early historical stage

capitalist spatiality is not only independent from but qualitatively different to and

dominant over the temporal. Ultimately this can be identified with the prevailing

consensus that reads primitive accumulation as a foundation and expansion only of

private property.

Lukács must at least be credited with seeing temporality as epistemologically flexible;

like Marx, time is not a metaphysical category but temporal experience is instead

historically constituted. However, without qualifying the perception of time and space as

independent realms Lukács risks hypostatising the spatio-temporal separation he himself

recognises to belong to the capitalist production process, in particular where he declares

that 'the union in time and space of … heterogeneous use-values' is 'forcibly separated' by

the commodity-form.95 Lukács' claim that time can become spatialised infers that space

is in some way the dominant dimension of the value-form. To be sure, he explains that

'time is transformed into abstract, exactly measurable, physical space'.96 Space, for

93 Peter Osborne, 'Marx and the Philosophy of Time', Radical Philosophy 147 (Jan/Feb 2008) p. 20.94 Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, trans. Livingstone.

(London: Merlin Press, 2010) p. 8995 Ibid.96 It is unclear whether Lukács perceives the measurability of space a 'physical' quality, or whether this is

Candidate: 94653 28

Lukács, is thus the origin of abstract equivalence. His argument consequently is this: the

spatialisation of time, ultimately figuring in the reduction of the worker to 'the

incarnation of time',97 is the translation of a logic found in the tangible 'spatial'

constituent of capitalism to the temporal dimension of social relations, in particular the

wage relation. Lukács therefore wrongly asserts the private ownership of the means of

production and their compartmentalisation as the foundation for value-imposed and

value-imposing temporal equivalence; private property is seen as the premiss and cause

of abstract time which only through this process dominates the worker. Primitive

accumulation as an historical analytic of the value-form suggests rather that this

degradation of the worker is something temporally proper to capitalism from its birth.

Indeed, this is not a concept novel to Marx's critique of political economy. His much

earlier text on estranged labour resolves that private property is its effect and not its

cause, although it may appear conversely, 'just as the gods were originally not the cause

but the effect of the confusion in men's [sic] minds'. This relationship only thenceforth

becomes 'reciprocal.'98 There appears therefore to be an unpronounced connection in

Marx's own mind between wage-labour and primitive accumulation. Although he does

not expressly articulate his theory on the production of time and space in capitalism, it is

evidently something which underpins the entirety of the critique of political economy,

without which the analysis of the value-form would be unintelligible. Ultimately Lukács

must be understood to himself confuse human behaviour (registered temporally, and

reified) for the character of things (spatialised private property): an inverted image of an

inverted world.

IV. Primitive Accumulation as the Real Abstraction

The argument presented here so far is that the separation expressed in value, and

reified in the wage, is a real temporal abstraction: not a mere concept, but an actually

existing perversion of the worker's life which drives self-valorisation. For the purpose of

further elucidating how primitive accumulation is a defining feature of capitalist

itself an epistemological standpoint which can be historically situated. Ibid., p. 90.97 Marx quoted in Lukács op. cit., p. 89.98 Karl Marx, 'Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts', in Early Writings, trans. Livingstone & Benton

(London: Penguin, 1975) p. 332.

Candidate: 94653 29

temporality, it is useful to put this in discussion with Sohn-Rethel's 'exchange abstraction'

thesis which proposes a novel schema for charting the emergence of abstract time in

bourgeois society. Whereas Lukács' thesis offers little by the way of an epistemological

history of abstract time, Intellectual and Manual Labour goes to great lengths to establish

the origin in the philosophy of mathematics which allegedly derives from the 'exchange

abstraction', encompassing time and space equally.99

For Sohn-Rethel this abstraction is commanded by the exchange-value dimension of

commodities which governs the 'conceptual mode of thinking peculiar to societies based

on commodity production.'100 He defines this specifically as the abstraction found in the

first section of Capital and in A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy which

is 'an abstraction other than that of thought', associated with the real abstract action of

exchange as opposed to the concrete action of use.101 Yet while there is much of merit in

the theory of commodity-exchange as an abstract action and its emphasis on the

commodity as a determining social form, in focussing on the separation of consciousness

from action Sohn-Rethel's presentation of Marx's real abstraction is skewed. While it is

certainly through exchange that a commodity's exchange-value is realised – which does

not contain 'an atom of use-value' – its form as commodity is coterminous of both

dimensions in a 'dual character'. It is only as use-values that commodities can become the

'material bearers [Träger] of ... exchange-value'. Exchange is hence not the source of this

abstraction, for an exchange-value is itself 'the necessary ... form of appearance, of

value', the critique of which shows it in turn to be an objectification of labour measured

in abstract time.102

By going beyond the commodity as a reified form of human activity in itself – thus

conditioning its abstractness on successful exchange – Sohn-Rethel overshoots the root

of the abstraction in labour. Consequently, abstract time is the 'emptying out' of 'material

contents' of time's use-value dimension in the moment of trade. It is the market which

gives abstract time its 'purely human significance connected with the social status of

people and things',103 a view which leaves no explanation for the commensurability of

abstract labour and hence value. The exclusion of labour from analysis comes to fruition

99 Sohn-Rethel, op. cit., pp. 88-103.100 Ibid., p. 23.101 Ibid., p. 19.102 Marx, Capital I, pp. 126-9.103 Sohn-Rethel op. cit., pp. 48-9

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here in emphasising the commodity as a material body and its required immutability in

exchange.104 But labour-power is itself a commodity – the crucial commodity in

capitalism – which in the process of its exchange for wages must not remain 'immutable'

but normally consumed before the wage is given, and exploited to the highest degree

possible in order that valorisation may occur.

The commodity already embodies a real abstraction before its realisation in exchange; an

abstraction has already taken place whose form of appearance is structured by the

abstract temporal index of self-measurement. Value must be identified as the site of real

abstraction in the critique of political economy. This is a real abstraction from use-value

insofar as it expresses the separation from the workers of their social bond which might

otherwise satisfy their particular needs. In other words, the abstraction is that where the

labourer produces socially in a private mode. If it is possible to say that 'commodity

exchange is abstract because it excludes use',105 then it is from the perspective that wage-

labour presupposes and posits primitive accumulation, temporally forcing the labourer

from using the means to live. This is hence not only a temporal separation, but one

through which the spatial separation is achieved. That capitalist exchange can take place

is conditioned by this permanence in wage-labour of primitive accumulation, which as a

temporal phenomenon gives abstract time its command over life. Primitive accumulation

governs Marx's real abstraction, which alienates the workers from their sociality.

To be sure, Sohn-Rethel is open in his disjunction from Marx, stating his concern is not

the critique of political economy. Yet the result is that he purposely blinds himself from

'the relationship of value to labour', as if an epistemological critique of the division of

intellectual and manual labour could be fruitfully achieved without this integral

condition.106 Therefore while Sohn-Rethel makes a commendable attempt to break with

orthodox Marxism through a radical reappraisal of Marx's critique, he can only find new

justifications for the old fallacious position that capitalism fails simply in realising the

full potential of labour as such.107 Instead, the real abstraction must be identified as the

alienation which primitive accumulation purveys: the value-form contains a temporal

suspension (Aufhebung) of expropriation. Abstract time functions this expropriation

104 Ibid., p. 28.105 Ibid.106 Ibid., pp. 22-3.107 Cf. Ibid., pp. 139-40. For more on the critique of labour and the break with 'traditional Marxism' see:

Postone, op. cit., Ch. 2.

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through the indifference of content in its measurement, first potentiating primitive

accumulation and then imposing it. The contradiction this ultimately represents, namely

between the subject and the objectivity she creates which steals from her, delimits Marx's

temporal foundation of social transformation. Emancipation is to be seen as a revolution

in time itself.

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3I. Labour, Freedom and Time-Measurement

Having established that Marx's critique of capitalist social relations also yields a

staunch critique of abstract time, it now proves necessary to deduce the ineluctable

theoretical implications this holds for the temporality of post-capitalist, or communist,

relations. To be certain, while this is not the immediate subject of inquiry in the critique,

to a very real degree the critique itself already exposes the temporal meaning of

communism. As Backhaus is sure to remind us: 'the demand to abolish (aufzuheben) the

calculation of value ... is a compelling consequence, a substantial and not merely an

accidental component of Marx’s theory of value.'108

Value has been described as labour-time's self-measurement, and that this is possible is

rendered so by time's abstract index in capitalism, its empty, equable and homogeneous

temporal framework. This does not arise independently, however: abstract time can

rightly be called the tangible temporality of abstract labour, which imposes this

temporality necessarily through its role of social synthesis. Capitalist society from this

perspective is the society in which labour cannot be escaped. Value as a time-measuring

mode of wealth indicates the permanence of primitive accumulation, and hence the deep-

lying 'unfreedom' which commands the social whole. Wage-labour in this schema is the

specifically capitalist condition of unfreedom.

In the sixth notebook of the Grundrisse this point is made directly as a rejoinder to Adam

Smith, who has no inkling that work could be 'a liberating activity' in itself when he

posits it transhistorically as a sacrifice of tranquility, freedom and happiness. This

opposition between the external and forced character of labour and the freedom of 'not-

labour' is one proper to bourgeois society rather than its critique.109 Labour is sacrifice,

108 Backhaus op. cit., p. 107.109 To be precise, this division between the labour of the many and the happiness of the few is also

Time, Struggle, and Communism

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but only on the subjective terms of the wage-labourer, entailing, if nothing else, a

temporal loss. Breaking this paradigm does not mean that labour becomes 'mere fun,

mere amusement' but rather that labour becomes the serious activity of 'self-realisation'.

The abolition of wage-labour and the actualisation of freedom hence does not mean the

abolition of 'material production' itself, but its transformation from an alienated activity

into a properly subjective, social one.110 It is through this productive activity that the

social general and the individual are to be concretely united: this is the material condition

for freedom.

The emancipation from capitalism therefore entails the realisation of freedom, but not in

an empty or tautological sense. If the locus of capitalist unfreedom is found in the wage

relation, emancipation is necessarily hallmarked by the total abolition of the capitalist

mode of production. This provides the only possible temporal determination of freedom

– overcoming the temporal enclosure which the wage-system both depends upon and

enforces. Time free from production ultimately must not stand in opposition to time in

production, but become a quality of one and the same process of self-realisation;111 if

capitalism is social being, the emancipated society is social becoming. Capitalist society

is underscored as an inverted world, and the essence-appearance thesis hence opens a

critical insight into the concrete meaning of unfreedom, which ultimately lies with wage-

labour in capitalist production. It is this labour's abstract form which, after all, both

determines capitalist production and performs social synthesis. In this light, 'Abolition of

the wages system!' becomes not just a 'revolutionary watchword' but suggests a

functioning understanding of capitalism itself.112

To be sure, abstract labour is a determinate feature of value-dominated production, but so

it also constitutes and reconstitutes social forms without pause. 'All that is solid melts

into air', and yet the qualitative function of that sublime catalyst remains.113 If abstract

time is to be properly considered the time of abstract labour, then, the abstract-concrete

labour paradigm promises to serve as an avenue through which to explore what a

properly post-capitalist temporality may entail – or more accurately, what forms it cannot identified in slavery and serfdom, though these are not directly relevant to our subject of inquiry.

110 Marx, Grundrisse, pp. 610-14. The discussion on Smith's notion of labour as sacrifice also makes its way into Capital I, pp. 137-8n16.

111 Marx, Grundrisse, p. 712112 Marx, Value, Price and Profit, p. 93.113 Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels, 'The Communist Manifesto', Marx/Engels Collected Works, Vol. 6

(London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1976) p. 487.

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take as per Marx's temporal definitions of capitalism. The most illuminating passage in

the entire critique of political economy on how post-capitalist society must be constituted

is presented in the third volume of Capital. For the sake of clarity it is worth reproducing

much of this tract at length:

Surplus-labour in general, as labour performed over and above the given

requirements, must always remain. ... It is one of the civilising aspects of

capital that it enforces this surplus-labour in a manner and under conditions

which are more advantageous to the development of the productive forces,

social relations, and the creation of the elements for a new and higher form

than under the preceding forms of slavery, serfdom, etc. ... it creates the

material means and embryonic conditions, making it possible in a higher form

of society to combine this surplus-labour with a greater reduction of time

devoted to material labour in general.

… it depends upon the labour productivity how much use-value shall be

produced in a definite time, hence also in a definite surplus labour-time. The

actual wealth of society, and the possibility of constantly expanding its

reproduction process, therefore, do not depend upon the duration of surplus-

labour, but upon its productivity and the more or less copious conditions of

production under which it is performed. In fact, the realm of freedom actually

begins only where labour which is determined by necessity and mundane

considerations ceases; thus in the very nature of things it lies beyond the sphere

of actual material production. Just as the savage [sic] must wrestle with nature

to satisfy [her] wants, to maintain and reproduce life, so must civilised man

[sic], and he must do so in all social formations and under all possible modes

of production.114

What becomes immediately apparent in this otherwise lucid excerpt is the tension

between Marx's stated historico-philosophical perspective and his prior critique, which is

otherwise opposed to such an (implicit) standpoint of labour. There can be no doubt that

this is the cause for the dilemmatic debate in the secondary literature on the infamous

passage: either the destructive critique of capital, value, and labour itself, or an

affirmation of this labour as transhistorically given. However, it is to be seen that this is

in many senses a false paradigm given the structure of the critique rather than the

114 Marx, Capital III, p. 819-20.

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terminology of this tract alone.

Paramount to this historical thesis is the concept of labour, smuggled in initially as

'surplus-labour'. On the face of it, 'labour' seems to be a clearly defined concept which

has been at the centre of critique leading up to this point. Indeed, the entire critique is a

discussion on the various forms of the same labour takes, presented variously as abstract,

concrete, wage or direct labour. Closer analysis reveals however that the labour in

discussion rather cannot be intended to signify continuity of the capitalist form of labour

post festum, i.e. after capital is abolished – this would be paradoxical to Marx's account.

What differs here from that prior discussion on labour and surplus-value is that it is

evidently not labour in capitalism which is the concern, but the eternal picture of

humanity 'wrestling with nature' to satisfy its needs. This is the farthest reach of the

argument in this respect: humankind is existentially bound to the objective world by the

material reality of its living needs – by no means controversial in any historical

materialist account. By contrast, abstract labour is to vanish 'as soon as we come to other

forms of production.'115 At first this linguistic nuance might seem a cheap way to explain

the tension in the text, yet this is not to suggest that Marx is somehow immutably correct

or poorly translated. Rather the point is to highlight that this terminological failure is the

beginning of some cloudy and questionable theorising which may lead to this certain

impasse on how to treat labour.116

Moreover, to propose that the labour here simply means concrete labour would be

ignorant of labour's dual character in capitalist production: under the rule of abstract

labour, concrete labour has no independent role. It exists in capitalism as the use-value

counterpart to the abstract, the very content which is suspended (aufgehoben) and

transformed by this form.117 This is not to say that concrete labour, understood as the

production of need-satisfying wealth, cannot exist beyond capitalism, but instead that its

dynamic relation to abstract labour shows it must in turn must undergo a total

transformation with the overcoming of its abstract form. Capitalist forms of concrete

labour have no sovereign right to exist after emancipation from the inverted world.

Instead, 'labour' in this passage is to be understood as synonymous with simple or

115 Marx, Capital I, p. 169.116 To be sure, Capital's third volume was of course never prepared for publication by Marx, but this is not

the first time he is guilty of using ambivalent language on labour. For example, see discussion in: Bonefeld, Abstract Labour, pp. 257-62.

117 Ibid., pp. 131-7.

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material production, the societal 'life-process'. This objective necessity must be the

intended referent of 'material labour'.118

The emphasis on simple production signifies, therefore, the total abolition of the system

of appearances in capitalism, of which value is the inner nexus. Of course value is both

the essence of capitalist production and the appearance wealth assumes in this society, a

form of wealth that is contingent on labour appearing in an abstract and superordinate

form. If labour must necessarily be stripped of this dual character then consequently

abstract time, abstract labour's temporal function and feature, must either suffer the same

fate or at least assume a different social significance. Surplus labour-time will thence

become a qualitative affirmation of life rather than its inversion as an alien theft.

After certifying that material production is an inherent feature of every social formation,

Marx continues:

With [the development of humanity] this realm of physical necessity expands as

a result of [their] wants; but, at the same time, the forces of production which

satisfy these wants also increase. Freedom in this field can only consist in

socialised man [sic], the associated producers, rationally regulating their

interchange with nature, bringing it under their common control, instead of

being ruled by it as by the blind forces of nature; and achieving this with the

least expenditure of energy and under conditions most favourable to, and

worthy of, their human nature. But it nonetheless still remains a realm of

necessity. Beyond it begins that development of human energy which is an end

in itself, the true realm of freedom, which, however, can blossom forth only

with this realm of necessity as its basis. The shortening of the working-day is its

basic prerequisite.119

Freedom in production manifests itself in the unity of general and particular through free

association, the practice of social bonds, and is also materially substantiated through its

mediation of need. The determinate subsistence of need in the value-form comes to be

resolved in the rational organisation of the producer's means to life by herself and

functional ownership over her own sociality. Material labour hence takes a new meaning

altogether from its appearance in capitalism. It is no longer self-mediating through

abstract temporal determinations, but mediates need directly, overcoming the material

118 Karl Marx, 'Results of the Immediate Process of Production', in Capital I, p. 990.119 Marx, Capital III, p. 820. Emphasis added.

Candidate: 94653 37

obstacle to social freedom. Social being is becoming, a dynamic quality; life is given the

substance of living. The compulsive character of abstract time falls away as freedom

issues from the principle 'from each according to [her] ability, to each according to [her]

needs'.120 So why does Marx refer to this as 'the realm of necessity'? As Marx's comments

on Smith explain, self-realisation is a 'serious activity'. The introduction of the 'realm of

necessity' does not dispel this conception of freedom, but rather reaffirms it. Material

production and self-development are symbiotic moments of the same 'free' whole, in

which the 'realm of freedom' is a metaphor for the freedom of self-development.121

The critical question posed by this concrete vision of freedom is where social synthesis is

to occur after abstract labour. What is poignant here is of course that labour in itself no

longer provides this synthesising moment, but does this indicate that the producers in

their association synthesise society through the rational organisation of production? It is

with recourse to the temporal hypothesis that the ramifications of this become clear. With

the direct mediation of need in the sphere of production, abstract social forms lose all

mandate. Value is consigned to history and hence its mode of time-measurement also

falls away. This is not to say that the clock loses all social relevance, but that the

synthetic moment it previously represented shifts. The notion of freedom as a somehow

truer objectification of the subject is instrumental in this thesis; it is not the coercion of

'labour' that retains the synthetic moment so much as the subject herself, not only as her

very self but as an individual which becomes the nexus of society. Abstract time is no

longer a necessary structure of society, nor of labour. The general issues from the

individuals who no longer stand in social contradiction. The peculiar dialectic of

capitalism which gives rise to the abstract measurement of time is resolved.

II. Labour-Time in Communism

Seeing how post-capitalist labour-time is to be of a qualitatively different nature,

the schema now opens toward an understanding of how labour-time in communism is

120 Karl Marx, 'Critique of the Gotha Programme', Marx/Engels Collected Works, Vol. 24 (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1989) p. 87.

121 See, for example, Herbert Marcuse's reading of the relation between freedom and necessity which neglects the temporal critique of Smith et al: 'The Realm of Freedom and the Realm of Necessity', Praxis 5 (1969) pp. 20-25.

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also to vary in quantitative terms. Again this is to be achieved through the idea that

communism is in some sense a reversion of the inverted world of capital, albeit resolving

in an altogether new social formation rather than a return to pre-capitalism. In particular

Marx's sub-theory of technology in the critique of surplus-value comes to fruition here

in his vision of social emancipation.

In the chapter on machinery in Capital's first volume, Marx describes at length how the

introduction of new technologies (specifically in this instance large-scale plant

machinery) dictates the creation of an industrial reserve army, the prolongation of the

working-day, and then the intensification of labour. Whereas machinery, 'the most

powerful instrument for reducing labour-time', could otherwise free a quantity of time to

the direct producer for self-development, under value-dominant production it only

enforces greater indenture. Again, this is 'a dialectical inversion': potential freedom

becomes actual unfreedom as the worker's whole lifespan comes to the disposal of

capitalist valorisation.122 At first this manifests as the 'immoderate lengthening' of the

working-day, but soon thereafter must logically intensify the labour-power expended as

value demands the optimisation of its exploitation.123

Under the capitalist mode of production disposable (otherwise 'free') time is converted

into surplus-labour, in the form not only of surplus-value but also in the form of surplus

working populations who are thrown out of wage-labour by new technology: 'since the

worker has sunk to the level of a machine, [she] can be confronted by the machine as a

competitor.'124 The evaluation that the existence of an 'industrial reserve army' assists the

capitalist in realising greater surplus-value is overshadowed by the even more insightful

consideration of how this changes with the transformation of the labour process through

emancipation.

In this society, the objectification of knowledge in the various technologies appears in an

alien form, and yet the actuality of this knowledge grants an integrative potential to the

material basis for a new social formation.125 The proliferation of this technology is not

accidental but bound directly to labour as the synthesis of society, and represents 'the

moving contradiction' of capital which at once diminishes socially necessary labour-time,

122 Marx, Capital I, pp. 531-2.123 Ibid., pp. 533-4.124 Ibid., pp. 531-2. Emphasis in the original text.125 Marx, Grundrisse, pp. 692, 706.

Candidate: 94653 39

while at the same time re-positing labour-time as the 'sole measure and source of wealth'.126 Thus 'by all the means of art and science' capital increases surplus-value rather than

freeing up time for the pursuit of the arts and sciences.127

Every which way is found to convert potentially emancipatory developments in culture

into means for an even greater theft from capital's servitors. In view of this torquing

motion capital imposes on society, the epistemological conditions for theorising the

temporality of a new social formation become possible: after labour has ceased to be 'the

great well-spring of wealth', that is as technology materially enriches society, labour-time

likewise must cease to be wealth's measure.128 Concomitantly the dominating and

mediating function of abstract time falls away as the impetus for time's self-measurement

is negated in the abolition of the capitalist form of labour. With the abstract form of

wealth abolished, society integrates technology into the production process in a way

which serves the direct producers, not vice versa: the workers serving the machines.

The post-capitalist reduction of labour-time thereby does not intensify working

conditions, nor does it mark individuals or groups for unemployment, but rather awards

all the direct producers a greater degree of non-labour-time through their development of

the production process itself. Both the presupposition and the result of this process is a

new form of wealth which is not derived from abstract temporal forms but belongs

properly to the 'social individual'. This 'real' measure of wealth Marx holds to be

disposable time.129 But does this indicate a measurement of time akin to that of its

abstract form?

Again Marx's wording is ambiguous but the theory only has integrity if this is taken not

as the 'measurement' of disposable time in the quantitative terms that value imposes, but

a qualitative measure of wealth as the freedom of the individual to pursue her own

development.130 With freely-organised production catering for the material necessities of

life, communist society is necessarily a post-scarcity society in which wealth registers

with the individual herself, rather than in a general form, something defying our abstract

measurement of time. Wealth most simply becomes the satisfaction of society's

126 Ibid., p. 706.127 Ibid., p. 708.128 Ibid., pp. 704-5.129 Ibid., pp. 705,708.130 Cf. Ibid., p. 708.

Candidate: 94653 40

multifarious needs. Just as the 'real' individual of On the Jewish Question is to resume the

abstract citizen 'into' herself,131 Marx's vision of communism is the return of wealth and

time from abstraction to the concrete in the person of the social individual.

In a communist social formation the real reduction of labour-time is therefore a

potentiality responsive to the participating subject rather than an absolute feature of it as

such, an altogether new sense of disposable time. Machinery and technology will then

allow for a real reduction in labour through automation or other such efficacies, and the

production of use-values will not be contingent on the enforced extension or

intensification of work. The temporal enclosure is reopened as the inverted world is

reverted: time in labour becomes labour for time.

III. The Struggle for Time

As per Marx's theory of social reproduction, the concomitantly social and

material collapse of value's abstract temporal determination has to be both result and

contingency of emancipation from capital: it must be asserted in order to be produced

and reproduced. In other words, primitive accumulation must be temporally negated.

This collapse is not automatic, arising logically from capital, but rather occurs only

through the direct social action of producers themselves. It is for this reason that Marx

declares the shortening of the working-day a prerequisite of freedom. In particular Marx

cites the International Working-Men's Association (IWA) declaration of his own

authorship which pronounces the eight-hour working-day a 'preliminary condition

without which all further attempts at improvement and emancipation must prove

abortive'.132 What remains to be answered is how the legal shortening of the working-day

is to be beneficial to such ends.

The first line of argument to be traced could be called an instrumental rationale. Given

the relation he posits between the historical arrival of a legally defined working-day and

the logical pursuit of productivity by capital,133 Marx appears to theorise that capitalist

production must attain a certain level of development in order that the freedoms of post-

131 Karl Marx, 'On the Jewish Question', Early Writings, p. 234.132 Marx, Capital I, p. 415.133 Marx, Capital I, p. 531-4.

Candidate: 94653 41

capitalism become realisable. While this is not something he openly declares, it is

evidently a contributing, indeed integral, factor to his theory of emancipation. This

rationale is instrumental insofar as it is a means unto an end and not an end in itself. It

demands the manipulation of capitalist production as a necessary condition for attaining

the level of cultural knowledge which epistemologically potentiates transformative social

action. The abstract temporal framework (namely the eight-hour day) is hence accepted,

but only as the site within which struggle can take place. Moreover, the demand is

instrumental in that it provides only a means for possible praxis. The demand itself is not

to break the real subsumption of labour by capital: greater productivity does not only

mean greater wealth-creation, but under value-dominant production this logically

transposes into labour's intensification.

Following this is the subjectivational rationale, which is neither subordinate nor in any

sense inferior to the first. In this respect the shortening of the working-day proves to be

of utmost importance in transforming the worker from a mere incarnation of labour-time

into a potentially revolutionary subject. In relation to this, particular attention should be

paid to the fictitious 'plea of the worker' found in the chapter on the working-day in

Capital Vol. I. Here the worker is found to declare: 'by the means of the price [the

capitalist pays for my labour-power] every day, I must be able to reproduce it every day,

thus allowing myself to sell it again.'134 Osborne has demonstrated the linguistic force of

this statement; according to him, this 'must' does not apply in the general laws of capital

to the individual worker, for it is only that 'labour qua variable capital' enters the

valorisation process. The general social form, capital, remains indifferent to the

reproduction of the the individual worker. But this adds the urgency to the statement: it is

an 'existential imperative – an existentially grounded “should” or “ought” (Sollen) – that

is in permanent danger of being crushed beneath the weight of the dictates of social

form'.135 Without the shortening of the working-day, any attempt at emancipation must

prove abortive.

To supplement Osborne's interpretation, this 'I' already prefigures something other than

its mere self: a plurality which in a certain sense is both 'I' and 'we'. This is an 'I' which

represents every 'I': individuality as a general concept as well as in the particular.136 It is

134 Marx, Capital I, p. 343. Emphasis added.135 Osborne op. cit., p. 20.136 This could well be interpreted as an application of Hegel's '“I” that is “We” and “We” that is “I”.' See:

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for this reason that Marx evokes an anonymous hypothetical worker rather than quotes

the real manifesto the plea is loosely based upon. This 'I' is key to the notion of the social

individual in Marx's communist society. It is through the general domination experienced

by every individual worker within the temporal enclosure of wage-labour that the

working-class can become a class for itself, that is a class of social individuals, a class of

communist subjectivity. In the final instance, then, the working-day must be shortened in

order that I can live.

This process of subjectivation begins with this 'I' but does not end here. Rather, the

specific relation 'I' find myself to have with my own life and personal development leads

me to demand a better deal, temporally speaking, from my wage contract: one in which 'I'

have time to truly live, to be social as well as to foster my personal capabilities. Such a

release from labour will thus free the time to promote the manifestation of this social 'I',

in particular through organisation. Marx's IWA resolution states this explicitly where the

limitation of the working day is identified as necessary 'to restore the health and physical

energies of the working class … as well as to secure them the possibility of intellectual

development, sociable intercourse, social and political action.'137 The imperative to

shorten the working-day is not founded on the moral indignation of a politics of class but

reveals the temporal basis for Marx's emancipatory class politics. Insofar as disposable

time exists in opposition to labour-time it exists as a potentially revolutionary

antagonism. Any attempt at emancipation is to be primed by the nascent social

individuals of the working-class by pushing this contradiction which previously appeared

as the equal rights of the labourer and the capitalist as commodity-owners and is now

proven existential to the worker. Struggle therefore entails 'robbing' the capitalist of this

disposable time, sabotaging labour-time.138

With struggle understood in its temporally-determined place, the theory of revolution can

now be further elaborated. It is clear that the image of labour in the 'Critique of the Gotha

Programme' should be no more transhistorical than it has found in the critique of political

economy. By implication, Marx's advocacy here of the 'standardisation of the working

day' in its shortening should not indicate the rational division of the day into equable

Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977) §177137 Karl Max, The First International and After: Political Writings Vol. 3, ed. Fernbach (London: Verso,

2010) p. 87.138 Marx, Capital I, p. 342.

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parts of labour, rest, and recreation; it does not represent an absolute, optimal volume of

productive activity.139 Such a conception is absurd in his estimation: the notion that post-

capitalist society is structured according to the optimal duration of labour-time insists on

the synthesis of that society remaining with labour. The subject to be emancipated is after

all not 'labour' but the working-class from capitalist labour.140

Understanding that capitalism is to be overcome not before the material negation of

scarcity, it follows that the shortening of the working-day does not stop on the eighth

hour per se but may contract further as social and material circumstances allow. These

eight-hours of labour, then, are not promulgated as an affirmation of capital's abstract

temporal index. Rather, it is to be appreciated that emancipatory praxis begins by

situating the immanent contradiction between the real, linear lifetime of the worker and

the abstract, cyclical time of capital in its sociohistorical context. The result must hence

negate the conditions of the real abstraction – a victory which forecloses the

superordinate structuring function of abstract time in the worker's life.

Though the content of the eight-hour working-day is therefore not absolute, the form (i.e.

shortening the working-day) remains absolute inasmuch as it is the prerequisite of

emancipation on pains of defeat. This is however a necessity furnished by the

contradictions of capitalist society itself. The crucial lesson here is worth reiterating: the

contradiction between the linear time of the worker's life and the cyclical time of

valorisation signifies the possibility of rupture. Through the shortening of the working-

day, as a priority for development of the worker and her class, the rupture is to be

pursued primarily in the arena of struggle which others have named the 'everyday'.141 If

the everyday is the terrain upon which the battle is, at least initially, to take place, this

provides a useful and open suggestion as to how praxis logically develops from Marx's

critique. The point is not to offer a prescriptive programme but to emphasise the (albeit

underdeveloped) importance of the everyday and the worker's subjective temporal

experience therein, which is thus suggestive of the relative subordination of the political

to this particular notion of the social.

139 Marx, 'Critique of the Gotha Programme', pp. 98.140 Ibid., p. 88.141 Helga Nowotny, for example, has written one of the more interesting of texts on the politics of the

everyday in struggle. See: Time: The modern and postmodern experience (Cambridge: Polity, 1994), Ch. 4.

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IV. Lower Communism

Marx's emancipatory praxis leads to the final subject of discussion which can be

described as the transition within the process of emancipation itself from value-dominant

society to the freely-associated society. This topic is not the least important because it

reveals a significant tension which has until now been undetected in Marx's writings. The

tension lies specifically between the critique of time-chits in the Grundrisse and the

theory of 'lower communism' as it appears in the later Critique of the Gotha Programme.

Lower communism is a stage in society's development which has not developed 'its own

foundations' but is 'in every respect … still stamped with the birthmarks of the old

society from whose womb it emerges.' It is a transitional period between capitalism and

communist society proper which is economically defined by the payment back to each

individual producer 'exactly what [she] gives to it'. Labour is hence still measured by its

duration, as each producer is to withdraw the equivalent quantity from the social stock of

goods as is worth her 'individual labour time' contribution to it. Marx himself

acknowledges this to be under the reign of the law of equivalence, and that goods in this

society remain commodities.142

What differs from the capitalist mode of production is, in Marx's eyes, the abolition of

the private ownership of the means of production and that 'no one can give anything

except [her] labour', which I interpret as signifying the abolition of capital as a general

form.143 This is greatly problematic given that private property is not the elemental force

of the value-form in Marx's critique. There appears to be a substantial fudge here insofar

as Marx is wrong to believe value can survive the abolition of capital; the two are not

synonymous but neither are they independent, rather they are to be seen as two moments

of the same dialectical whole. The law of value laid out in Capital shows that capital

inherently develops from the universal equivalent, be that known as 'money' or any other

name, such as a lower communist labour 'certificate'.144 Commodities, value, money, and

capital are inseparably part of the same process of abstract temporal equivalence which is

not derivative of private property – something tacitly acknowledged by the acceptance

that lower communism is formed in the image of the commodity.

142 Marx, 'Critique of the Gotha Programme', pp. 85-6.143 Ibid., p. 86.144 Marx, Capital I, pp. 247-8; Ibid.

Candidate: 94653 45

This is something Marx is altogether more conscious of in the Grundrisse where he

critiques the time-chit system advocated by a number of the so-called utopian socialists.

The time-chits under discussion here bear a remarkable likeness to the 'certificates' in

Marx's lower communism, figuring as a method of payment in which each individual chit

is worth the same fixed hour of labour-time. Marx refers to the time-chit therefore as

'labour money', an accurate description given its embodiment of labour-time as the

universal quality of commodities, against which the consumption of commodities in

general is meted.145

The problem with the time-chit is identified on two levels. First is its equation of price

and value, which, although the latter 'appears as the law of motions through which the

former runs', are in themselves distinct and 'balance only coincidentally and

exceptionally'. Thus the 'time-chitters' confuse the nominal for the real.146 Second, and

relatedly, is the assumption of fixity of labour-power and thus the value of the labour-

hour, whereas in truth the production process is dynamic and constantly increases

productivity. Neither is one labour-hour worth the same as another in another area of

production, nor are two labour-hours in the same workplace immutably of the same value

when expended at different times. The labour-hour embodied in the time-chit is therefore

merely 'average labour time' which, like the labour-time represented in the value-form,

'never' (or better: only coincidentally and exceptionally) corresponds to 'actual labour

time',147 but unlike value it cannot express the movement of this average labour-time.

The time-chit therefore fails in its self-declared goal: rather than overcoming the market

oscillation of prices it merely institutes the same dynamic in a different form. For Marx

this is inferior to value, for its abstract identity of market and real values creates the basis

for mercantile capital (i.e. speculation on the oscillation of prices, now the very

constitution of the form of money itself) but in a way in which commodities are

simultaneously equivalent and non-equivalent, and where the form of money is hence

qualitatively inconvertible and non-commensurable.

In consequence 'the confusion' of political economy reaches untold heights: three hours'

labour-time objectified in one commodity is equivalent to two time-chits; a second

145 Marx, Grundrisse, pp. 136-7.146 Ibid., pp. 137-8.147 Ibid., p. 139. Emphasis is in the original text.

Candidate: 94653 46

commodity, also of three hours' labour, is equivalent to four time-chits. Money prices

thus express this contradiction 'but in a veiled form.'148 Essence and appearance enjoin in

a singular yet substantively dual-charactered form. Value persists through the mediation

of labour-time measured in abstract hours, but in a way which is false unto itself. While

surplus-value is removed insofar as the worker appropriates the entire value of her

labour-time, it re-emerges interstitially from the formal staticity of labour-money that

renders the dynamism of production inexpressible. If we talk of money, after all, then we

are also talking of accumulation, and accumulated time-chits would 'constantly

appreciate together with the newly issued ones, and thus ... the rising productivity of

labour would go to the benefit of non-workers'.149 In other words, the qualitatively

temporal theft from the workers which capital represents merely finds a novel (yet not

altogether new) mode of expression. Abstract labour and its temporal counterpart,

abstract time, undergo a superficial transformation, and emancipation remains but an

ideal.

In full view of this, how are we to read the theory of lower communism? It appears at

once that Marx's labour certificates are themselves only a variation in name on the time-

chit and hence apply equally to this substantive critique. The lower communist

certificates are evidently dissonant with the critique of the value-form, so as the source of

this tension they must be dispelled for the critique to be coherent. Certificates or time-

chits after all denotes the continued synthesis of the social whole by labour, even before

the genesis of capital arises from them. If Marx's idea of post-capitalism needs tethering

to a process of transition (a question which remains principally open from the perspective

of the critique of political economy) then this has to be achieved other than by this notion

which is seemingly meant to appear as something like a 'soft' form of capitalist

commodity-exchange. Moreover, how this is seen necessarily to be transitional is

disputed by the historical logic mentioned in the first part of this paper: might not the

notion of progress be a mere transposition of the logic of accumulation to a counterpart

notion of history as the accumulation of historical time?

If this is to be evaluated as an attempt to abolish spatial primitive accumulation, it is

manifestly unsuccessful given the continued reign of the temporal. Yet while Marx

148 Ibid.149 Ibid., p. 136.

Candidate: 94653 47

provides a sound argument for the material and social negation of the value-form in the

critique of political economy, it should not be taken as a chance occurrence that his

theory of lower communism offers no such argument for preserving value in the abolition

of capital. Lower communism seems to be an afterthought which forms part of an

historical theory of social transformation which, although in part derivative of the

critique of political economy, is independent and significantly opposed to it. The

certificates are therefore a non-sequitur rather than an about-turn. They simply do not

comply with his grammar of wage abolition, namely: the transformation from the

temporal suspension of primitive accumulation, which functions through the separation

of the worker from her social bond, to the reign of social individuality, i.e. resumption of

the social bond by the social subject.

To propose an explanation for Marx's mistake it is necessary to return to the ambiguous

invocation of 'labour'. At times Marx appears to suggest the persistence of capitalist

labour whereas in truth he seems to want only to say 'material labour'. It appears quite

possible that his own terminological problems mislead him into identifying 'labour' as an

absolute, transhistorically subjective act. The critique of political economy instead

reveals labour to be superordinate of this society and substantive of capital's inner nexus.

As a consequence the centrality of abstract time-measurement to capital's innate function

is either forgotten or under-appreciated, and the 'real subsumption of labour' comes to be

presented as the antidote to the value-form. In order to rescue Marx from this impasse,

the critique of political economy must be recognised as the apex of his theoretical oeuvre

in almost every respect. It is through that body of work that the full temporal sanction of

praxis and hence communism is possible.

Candidate: 94653 48

4Taking the critique of the value-form as the definitive point in the critique of

political economy shows that Marx considers the social forms of capitalism to be

significantly determined by abstract temporality. In particular, both value and the

appearances it takes, such as prices, wages, profit and capital are found to be both

formally determined and mediated by the measurement of abstract time. It is possible to

conclude that it is only with this abstract notion of time that capitalism is articulated,

hence becoming a temporally tautological system of 'self-movement'.

In this respect it is anticipated that some objections to this paper may be levelled on

account of the emphasis given to abstract time. The point, however, has been to mark the

possibility of further research emanating from this: namely, that the critique of political

economy cannot be understood without the sophisticated reading Marx gives of how time

in the abstract mediates and forms society. It is certainly accepted that Marx does not

explicitly discuss abstract time, clocks, or time-measurement in general, yet the

framework provided here is a deduction from the real theoretical structure of the critique

of political economy and at no point conjecture.

Through critiquing value as the capitalist form of wealth, Marx suggests that primitive

accumulation is a permanent feature of capitalism, not only in terms of imperialist

expansion but also (and foremost) as the inherent intensive expansion of capital into

labour-time. Value, after all, is shown to be inverted insofar as it cannot satisfy human

need but instead subsists it. In light of this thesis it is necessary, first, that further research

is undertaken into Marx's theorisation of need, i.e. how it is produced and satisfied across

different social formations, with particular attention paid to the perceived temporal

structure of each. Second, through and beyond this, attention must extend with regard to

how primitive accumulation persists in temporal suspension in more recent capitalist

history (for example in finance capital), as well as with regard to the particular historical

analytic of wage-labour as a temporal enclosure – in many senses the archetypal

capitalist enclosure. This will logically yield far-reaching implications for our

understanding of how time and space relate in capitalism.

Concluding Remarks

Candidate: 94653 49

The notion that capitalism is a timeless theft of time provides a new insight into Marx's

theory of praxis. As a theft, capitalist labour must ultimately entail its overcoming.

Communism is hence an historical rupture which truly opens the annals of history. Yet

the tension between the critique of political economy and Marx's vision of lower

communism begs the question: does his theory of revolution require a sudden rupture, or

do the failures of lower communism signify the impossibility of giving voice to the

actual dynamism of transformation? At any rate, the praxis Marx develops is open, i.e.

left materially and socially contingent, excepting only that the determinate negation of

capitalism requires a temporal strategy and tactic.

Similarly, for the reason of this 'openness' the paper has been unable to suggest any

concrete alternative notion of time-perception as such; Marx provides only the

possibility of theorising an alternative social arrangement of time, not detail on how this

may look. The erasure of this timeless theft of time itself is characterised by the coming

of a society in which time does not exist for labour, but labour exists for time. But,

beyond this, how may it be conceived?

Candidate: 94653 50

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