Historical Materialism 17 (2009) 4465

brill.nl/hima

Historical Temporalities of Capital:

An Anti-Historicist Perspective
Massimiliano Tomba
University of Padua
massimiliano.tomba@unipd.it

Abstract
Marxs rethinking of the combination between absolute surplus-value and relative surplus-value
during the 1860s is very important in order to reconsider the co-presence of dierent forms of
historical temporality and exploitation. Postmodernism presents a picture of a plurality of
historical times in which the old lies beside the modern and the sweatshop beside the high-tech
factory. Because it fails to provide an explanation of the relation between these forms,
postmodernism produces a false image of an ahistorical present. In this article I want to show
how the combination of dierentials of surplus-value works and why a representation of a
plurality of historical temporalities synchronised by the temporality of socially-necessary labour
is the most adequate image to comprehend it. The theoretical task is to show how the mature
categorial structure of Capital not only does not need an historicist philosophy of history, but is
in fact incompatible with it.
Keywords
historicism, time, historical temporalities, dierentials of surplus-value, accumulation,
synchronisation

Nothing has corrupted the German working class so much

as the notion that it was moving with the current
Walter Benjamin, On the Concept of History1

If we are to comprehend what today goes by the name of globalisation, this

will certainly include overcoming the distinction between the First, Second
and Third Worlds. These levels reciprocally interpenetrate, giving rise to the
co-existence, in a striking spatial proximity, of high technological levels and
absolute forms of extortion of surplus-value. It would be an error to consider
these forms of exploitation today as residual, or regressions to the nineteenth
century. Rather, they must be understood as the forms most adequate to the

1. Benjamin 1999, p. 250.

Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2009

DOI: 10.1163/146544609X12537556703115

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45

current complex of capitalist relations of production. The inadequacy of a whole

manner of reasoning in terms of tendency and residue is now so obvious
that one cannot disagree with the severe judgement of Chakrabarty when he
arms that to speak of a survival of an earlier mode of production means to
reason with stagist and elitist conceptions of history and, polemicising against
theories of uneven development, maintains that it is historicist to consider
Marxs distinction between formal and real subsumption of labour [. . .]
as a question of historical transition.2 But the same critique is also valid for a
part of one of the most intelligent theoretical and political traditions of
European Marxism: operaismo [workerism].3 This tradition, having begun
from the perspective of the political centrality of the mass-worker [operaio
massa], went on to consider industrial labour as secondary and residual
because, as Negri writes today, we live in a society characterised ever more
strongly by the hegemony of immaterial labour,4 because the cognitariat has
become the fundamental productive force that makes the system work.5
Before undertaking any theoretical reection it is necessary to ask: To which
fragment of the planet do these analyses refer? And why are material labour and
the most brutal forms of extortion of absolute surplus-value not residual in fourfths of the planet? We certainly do not lack information regarding the global
phenomenology of labour.6 The problem concerns the lack of rigour in the
categories adopted in order to apprehend and intervene in the social relations. The
problems seem to arise with the workerist gesture of pursuing the subject of
antagonism in an historical process whose tendency is derived from observation of
a small corner of the world. Beginning from this, a geschichtsphilosophisch rhythm
is then ascribed to the rest of the planet.7 As Walter Benjamin teaches, we have to
put on trial both the idea of progress and the idea of a capitalist development that
is supposed to carry even the contradictions to the highest level. His critique of
historicism was rst of all a critique of the idea of progress and of the modern
philosophical concept of history. If we want to think politics dierently, we have
to learn to think history dierently.
In order avoid surrendering to those historicist equations according to which
the industrial working class today would stand in the same relation to immaterial
labour as the peasants did to the industrial working class in the nineteenth century,
2. Chakrabarty 2000, pp. 1214 and p. 261, n. 37.
3. See Wright 2002 and the Afterword of the Italian edition of the same book: Belloore and
Tomba 2008.
4. Introduzione alla nuova edizione, in Negri 1998, p. 8.
5. Negri 2008, p. 183.
6. See Sacchetto and Tomba 2008 and Silver 2003.
7. Compare Tomba 2007a.

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it is necessary to re-descend into the hidden abodes of production. It is necessary

to follow the chains of valorisation that, through delocalisation, not only exit from
the factory but also cross national frontiers, and thus also the salary-dierentials
from which capital prots.
If we need to re-read Marx, it is not in order to put him underneath the
depoliticising glass-case of an ossied philology. We need, like never before, to
think the unthought of Marx. The weak points, the faults in Marxs theory, should
not be covered over with the same plaster that was once used to erect busts in the
squares of Eastern Europe. It is within the faultlines that we need to rethink Marx
today, opening them up as much as possible. It is necessary to re-examine the
conceptual structure that makes it possible for us to comprehend contemporary
capitalist forms of exploitation, to retrace Marxs movement from the abstract to
the concrete. It is not a case of giving merely an objective representation of the
processes currently underway. We have to understand the subjective insurgencies
that disarticulate the process, because the political task is to re-articulate them on
new foundations.
In the famous Preface of 1859, Marx delineated the progressive process of
universal history according to denite stages, starting with the Asiatic mode of
production, through the ancient, the feudal to the bourgeois. The latter was
dened as the nal antagonistic form of the process of production. The theoretical
task today is to show how the mature categorial structure of Capital not only does
not need this philosophy of history, but is incompatible with it.8 In the debates
over the Asiatic mode of production and with the Russian populists,9 Marx
understood that there are no predetermined stages of capitalist development.
In a letter from the end of 1877 to the editorial board of Otecestvennye Zapiski,
he wrote that his argument on the genesis of capitalism in Western Europe cannot
be transformed into a historical-philosophical theory of predetermined universal
development of the destiny of all peoples, whatever the historical circumstances in
which they nd themselves. It is not possible to understand historical phenomena
with the passe-partout of a philosophy of history, whose supreme virtue is to be
supra-historical.10 Marx arrived at this theoretical result by making an idea of the
development of the forces of production interact with the concrete responses of
history; that is to say, the histories of the struggles that, interacting with the
atemporal historicity of capital, co-determine its history.11 From conversations
with Maxim Kovalevskij on forms of collective property of the land in Russia,
8. See Tomba 2008.
9. On the centre-periphery problem see Dussel 1990, Chapter Seven, and Shanin 1983.
10. See the Letter from Marx to Editor of the Otyecestvenniye Zapisky (End of November
1877) in Marx 1989a, p. 201.
11. On the plurality of historical times in Marx, see Bensad 1996.

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47

Marx began to think about the possibility of the transition to communism without
going through the hell of the capitalist mode of production. It was a transition
that was neither immediate nor conceivable in a single country. In the preface to
the Russian edition of the Manifesto of the Communist Party, Marx wondered if the
Russian obshchina could pass into the form of common ownership of the land or
whether, instead, it would need rst to pass through the same process of dissolution
that constitutes the historical evolution of the West. Marxs answer was that
if the Russian revolution becomes the signal for a proletarian revolution in the
West, so that both complement each other reciprocally, the current Russian
common ownership of land could serves as a starting point for a communist
development.12

1. What is the beginning of Capital ?

If, in the rst place, use-value is an object, its utility, or its being a means
for the satisfaction of needs, is something characteristic of every epoch. A
commodity is a use-value, but at the same time it is also the bearer [Trger] of
value, that is, it is produced not for its utility, nor to satisfy specic needs, but
to be sold. It can satisfy needs only because it must be sold. This domination
by the abstraction of value over the concrete is what denes the capitalist
mode of production as such. The deconcretisation of use-value, an indenite
distortion of the sphere of needs, and the liquefaction of social relations are
not degenerate phenomena to be contrasted with more authentic relations,
and to the return to a life at once more austere, less complex, and less gratuitous.
Rather, they express a denaturalisation of needs in which new innovative
opportunities for liberation become possible. If the critique of modernity
is not able to deal with this productive ambivalence, it remains simply
reactionary.
Starting with the Konkretum of the commodity,13 Marx demonstrates that the
condition of its being a use-value is to be simultaneously something intangible, an
expression and phenomenal form of the intangible. The incipit of Capital is not
innocent: this asymmetry becomes explosive in relation to the specic commodity
of labour-power, in which use-value and its subjectivity come to aect the
relationship between the labour-process and the valorisation-process no longer
in terms of a subsumption of the former by the latter, but as opposition. The
categorial exposition that follows that incipit, from labour abstracted to value and

12. Marx and Engels 1989, p. 425.

13. Marx 1989b, p. 538.

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from socially-necessary labour to exchange-value, is forged in the re of that

opposition.
The hasty liquidation of the notion of value in some tendencies of contemporary
Marxism has not helped our understanding of Marxs rethinking of this conceptual
structure during the years in which he wrote Capital. For Marx, the notion of
value constituted a problem. It was for this reason that he continually returned
to it. It has been noted that it is only at the end of the 1857/58 Manuscript of the
Grundrisse, in a section immediately cut short on value, that Marx informs us of
the need to begin the exposition with the commodity.14 This is a realisation
that will be coherently maintained in all subsequent expositions, from A Critique
of Political Economy through to the various editions of Capital. The problem
troubles him not only during the preparation of Capital, but also later, forcing
him to revise the dierent editions and to intervene in the French translation.
A discerning Marxian philology provides us today with an enormous quantity of
material for comprehending the meaning of this work in progress.15 It is probably
useful not so much to seek some solution of Marxs to the question of value, but
rather to retrace Marxs gesture; that is, to pose once again the problem from
within the question of value.
Before his reections in the 1860s, Marx had not yet cleared up some important
categorial distinctions relative to abstract labour and value.16 Continuing to reect
on the value-form, Marx ever more forcefully emphasises both the social nature of
the relation of value, and its historically determinate character.
First, that which should be noted straight away: the general or abstract character
of labour is, in the production of commodities, its social [gesellschaftlich] character,
because it is the character of the equality [Gleichheit] of the labours incorporated
in the dierent products of labour. This determinate form of social labour [Diese
bestimmte Form der gesellschaftlichen Arbeit] distinguishes commodity production
from other modes of production.17

The abstract character of labour refers to the social character of the labour of
production of commodities, which is characterised as a specically capitalist
form of production and distinct from any other mode of production whose
end is the production of use-value. Marx is looking for a distinctive element,
14. The rst category in which bourgeois wealth presents itself is that of the commodity:
Marx 1984, p. 767; Marx 1973, p. 881.
15. See, for example, Belloore and Fineschi 2009.
16. In the Grundrisse, Marx had not only not yet cleared up the terminological distinction
between the two characters of labour that produce commodities, but also had not yet claried
the important notion of socially-necessary labour: compare Hecker 1987, in particular on the
reections in the 1850s on pp. 14950.
17. Marx 1987, pp. 289.

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49

capable of indicating what transforms ordinary products into commodities. It

is the very nature of exchange that changes in the capitalist mode of production.
The fetishism of the commodity derives from this. Since commodities are
exchangeable, it is necessary to determine a common substance that permits
them to be equivalents. Two dierent commodities are exchangeable because
they have something in common, because they are things made of an identical
social substance human labour.18 Value is delineated in the Marxian
understanding of it as the form of the exchangeability of commodities: since
it is called upon to explain exchange, and therefore is a condition of its
possibility, it cannot derive from exchange.
This passage is fully intelligible when reading the seventh chapter (The Labour
Process and the Process of Producing Surplus-Value) as simultaneously
presupposed by and the result of that which precedes it.19 Due to his will to a
system, Marx developed abstract labour and value before the process of
valorisation. This order has generated the illusion of being able to historicise
simple commodity-production, distinguishing it from capitalist production in the
strict sense.20 A reading of this type gives rise to a metahistorical theory of value.
At the same time, it develops diachronically conceptual determinations that
should, instead, be understood synchronically. This view has generated, as we will
soon see, the misunderstanding of the paradigm in two stages and the extension
of the commodity-form to non-capitalist modes of production. Instead, the
commodity exists only in a specically capitalist constellation of the mode and
relations of production: What I proceed from is the simplest social form in which
the product of labour presents itself in contemporary society, and this is the
commodity.21 This acquisition allows us to understand the constitutive categories
of capital as entirely operative from the origin of the capitalist mode of production.
That means that, when we speak of capital, it is necessary to assume the entire
conceptual constellation as given. hmm not sure about this
The epochal character of capitalism consists in this indierence with respect to
use-values, an indierence that Marx analyses through the category of value and
the concept of valorisation. In order to demarcate the break with a whole continent
of thought extraneous to the relations of capitalist production, Marx, starting

18. Marx 1989c, p. 58; Marx 1990a, p. 138.

19. Cf. Belloore 2004, pp. 170210; Finelli 2005, pp. 21123.
20. It was Engels who linked the category of simple mercantile production to the part on the
commodity in Capital, thus giving an historicist interpretation of capitalist development;
compare Hecker 1997, p. 122: Engelss explanation of simple commodity production as feudal
production represents the attempt of the historicisation of social relations.
21. Marx 1989b, p. 544.

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from the Appendix [Anhang] to the edition of 1867,22 calls Aristotle into
question. The problem regards that which renders one commodity immediately
exchangeable [unmittelbar austuaschbar] with another: this common element is,
for Marx, the undierentiated human labour, that is like all other commodityproducing labour, it is . . . labour in its directly social form.23 Aristotle was able to
grasp that there can be no exchange without equivalence, and that there cannot
be equivalence without commensurability.24 Aristotle understands that two
commodities cannot be referable to another commensurable quantity if not for
the presence of an essential equivalence, but he stopped when faced with this
common essence, and he tells us that things that are so heterogeneous cannot be
commensurable. The concept that Aristotle lacked, Marx emphasises, was that of
equal human labour, that could not be put forward because Greek society was
founded on the labour of slaves, hence had as its natural basis the inequality of men
and of their labour-powers.25 Aristotle could not identify the secret of the expression
of value; he could think of the existence of a common substance that rendered
commensurable dierent objects, but he could not think the concept of value. In
fact, writes Marx, the
secret of the expression of value, namely the equality [Gleichheit] and equivalence
of all kinds of labour because and in so far as they are human labour in general,
could not be deciphered until the concept of human equality [Begri der
menschlichen Gleichheit] had already acquired the permanence of a xed popular
opinion.26

This clarication, added by Marx in the Anhang and then brought up again
in successive editions, allows him nally to demonstrate the transition of
the commodity-form into value in terms of a historical discontinuity. The
intelligibility of value, an impossibility in Aristotle, becomes possible only
when the concept of equality possesses the tenacit dun prjug populaire, as we
read in the French edition edited by Marx. It is evident that, discussing this
historical determinacy pulled out of the cannon-re of the American Civil
War,27 Marx intended to explain categorial abstractions by their concrete
historical content: the class-struggle. Here begins the other science of Marx: the

22. Marx 1983, pp. 62649. In the subsequent German editions of Capital the Appendix of
1867 became part of the rst chapter.
23. Marx 1989c, p. 73; Marx 1990a, p. 150.
24. Aristotle 1984, pp. 17889 (1133b).
25. Marx 1989c p. 74; Marx 1990a, p. 152.
26. Ibid.
27. See Marx 1985a, pp. 41920.

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political economy of the working class.28 Political economy can remain a science
only so long as the class-struggle is latent or manifests itself only in isolated and
sporadic phenomena.29 It is a question not only of extension, but of the
perspective from which to observe the capital/labour relation. This new
perspective is the class-struggle. Equality as a popular prejudice does not fall
from the sky, but is the result of concrete struggles, in which the oppressed
classes have shattered to pieces the old authoritative hierarchical relations and
social rankings that were claimed to be founded in nature. This process of
dissolution is carried out by concrete practices of liberation of the serfs, who
re-enter contractually into work relations as formally free workers, waged
labourers who sell their labour-power to the capitalist. In other modes of
production, such as the patriarchal family or in the ancient Asiatic community,
the product of labour is not a commodity, but possesses instead a determinate
social character that derives from its being produced for consumption in that
particular community.30 In the production of commodities, the social form of
labour is instead indierence: commodities behave towards one another as
equals [Ihresgleichen], as expenditures of human labour-power. The indierent
sociality of abstract labour destroys the previous community-relations and the
multiplicity of the dierences between the particular spheres of society,
producing a new, radical dierence: that between capital and waged labour.
And it is within this dierence and starting from it that the previous dierences
are re-invented and re-articulated as dierences of ethnicity, race and culture,
forms suitable for concealing and combating the dierence of class.
When Marx poses the notion of equality as a popular prejudice as the condition
of possibility for deciphering the notions of value and abstract labour, he is putting
in a categorial context a historical determinacy that is not only a sign of the
particularity of modern society, but forces us to think of the category of capital as
radically traversed by class-antagonism.

2. The permanence of original accumulation

In his analyses of the so-called primitive accumulation [sogenannte ursprngliche
Akkumulation], Marx attempts to highlight the specic function of stateviolence [Staatsgewalt] in the temporally and geographically determined
historical process of production of the separation of the producer from the
means of production. It occurs in the genetic process of wage-labour. Between
28. Marx 1985b, pp. 513.
29. Marx 1989c, p. 20; Marx 1990a, p. 17.
30. Marx 1987, pp. 29 and 44.

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the rst and the second editions of the rst volume of Capital, Marx intervenes
in order to tone down some emphases on Entwicklungsgeschichte: the succession
of historical processes [Reihe historischer Prozesse] is replaced by the analysis of
the English case,31 where the transition to the capitalist mode of production is
investigated by directing attention to the violent levers [ gewaltsame Hebeln]32
that made it possible. It was Staatsgewalt that forced the dissolution of the
feudal system.
These pages should be read contemporaneously with those of the chapter
dedicated to machines and large-scale industry. Here, Marx illustrates the barrackrgime of large-scale industry and the production, alongside that of the production
of all new commodities, also of new forms of non-civilisation that threaten the
lives of the workers.
Thus large-scale industry, by its very nature, necessitates variations of labour,
uidity of functions, and mobility of the worker in all directions. But on the other
hand, in its capitalist form, it reproduces the old division of labour with its ossied
particularities. We have seen how this absolute contradiction does away with all
repose, all xity and all security as far as the workers life-situation is concerned;
how it constantly threatens, by taking away the instruments of labour, to snatch
from his hands his means of subsistence and, by suppressing his specialized
function, to make him superuous. We have seen, too, how this contradiction
bursts forth without restraint in the ceaseless human sacrices required from the
working class, in the reckless squandering of labour-powers, and in the devastating
eects of social anarchy. This is the negative side. But . . . 33

If all that is the negative aspect, the but [aber] foreshadows something
positive. It is not a dialectical inversion. It is, instead, the co-presence of
antagonistic forces within the real situation. That but does not indicate the
point of inversion, but the incipit of the second voice of the fugue:
But if, at present, variation of labour imposes itself after the manner of an
overpowering natural law, and with the blindly destructive action of a natural law
that meets with obstacles everywhere, large-scale industry, through its very
catastrophes, makes the recognition of variation of labour and hence of the tness
of the worker for the maximum number of dierent kinds of labour into a
question of life and death. . . . The partially developed individual, who is merely
the bearer of one specialized social function, must be replaced by the totally
developed individual, for whom the dierent social functions are dierent modes
of activity he takes up in turn. One aspect of this transformation . . . is the
establishment of technical and agricultural schools. . . . Though the Factory Act,
31. Marx 1983, p. 581; Marx 1989c, p. 751; Marx 1990a, p. 884.
32. Marx 1989c, p. 751; Marx 1990a, p. 883.
33. Marx 1989c, p. 511; Marx 1990a, p. 618.

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53

that rst and meagre concession wrung from capital, is limited to combining
elementary education with work in the factory, there can be no doubt that when
the working-class comes into power, as inevitably it must, technical instruction,
both theoretical and practical, will take its proper place in the working-class
schools. 34

The factory-laws did not fall from the sky, they were not the concession of a
paternalist state, but were one of the conquests of the working class on the
concrete terrain of the class-struggle. Analogous is the discourse on obligatory
instruction, which tries to extract children from the dulling and physical
catastrophe derived from the factory-work that takes up their entire day. Using
those half-processed works of the Reports of the factory-inspectors, Marx
describes the young workers of the London typography-workshops as utter
savages and very extraordinary creatures; when they become too old for such
childs work, that is about 17 at the latest, they are discharged from the printing
establishments. They become recruits of crime. Several attempts to procure
them employment elsewhere, were rendered of no avail by their ignorance and
brutality, and by their mental and bodily degradation.35 The factory-inspectors
describe these conditions of labour, and Marx does not add any comment.
What Marx accomplishes is the montage of these materials, making them
become an integral part of critical theory. Marxs technique of montage still
needs to be studied. However, many new philologists of Marx prefer to
continue to seek assonances with Hegels Science of Logic. Assembling those
reports so as to make them become theoretical material, Marx instead develops
a conception of critique that is not moral indignation in the face of brutalisation;
rather, he shows the intrinsic noxiousness of capitalistic production.
In the conictual dynamics that led to the factory-laws, the state presents its
relative autonomy. It is not simply an instrument in the hands of the dominant
class. The state is in the service of the dominant class to the extent that it is on one
side in the struggle against the class-struggle, to the extent that its function is that
of neutralising conict; but, precisely in the undertaking of its role, it plays a
relatively autonomous role. The dynamic of conict and of forces in the eld of
struggle can lead the state to enact a legislation that limits the autocracy of capital
in the factory and its destructive nature within and outside the factory. It can also,
in order to protect the children of the proletarians, proclaim the rights of children
against the abuse of paternal authority when they try to reduce their own children
to machines for pumping out a weekly wage.36 Thus undermining the authority of
34. Marx 1989c, pp. 51112; Marx 1990a, p. 619.
35. Marx 1989c, p. 509; Marx 1990a, p. 615.
36. Marx 1989c, p. 513; Marx 1990a, p. 619.

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the pater familias, the state works at the destruction of the traditional and
patriarchal form of the family; in doing this, the state does not do anything other
than explicate its own nature: what Jacob Burckhardt calls the systematisation of
Gewalt.
Disrupting the paragraph on the factory-laws and placing it alongside the pages
on so-called primitive accumulation, we will see the attention with which Marx
follows the state-interventions in relation to the class-struggle and the dissolution
of social forms:
If the general extension of factory legislation to all trades for the purpose of
protecting the working-class both in mind and body has become inevitable, on
the other hand, as we have already pointed out, that extension hastens on the
general conversion of numerous isolated small industries into a few combined
industries carried on upon a large scale; it therefore accelerates the concentration
of capital and the exclusive predominance of the factory system. It destroys both
the ancient and the transitional forms, behind which the dominion of capital is
still in part concealed, and replaces them by the direct and open sway of capital;
but thereby it also generalises the direct opposition to this sway.37

If the interventions of public Gewalt, from the sixteenth century onwards, had
favoured the formation of an army of wage-workers and contributed to the
destruction of forms of authority based upon the estates, Marx seeks to
comprehend the ambivalence of the state-interventions regarding the factorylaws. These interventions in defence of the conditions and demands of the
workers also produce a concentration of capital. In this process, forms of
production and authority are dissolved so that the antagonism of class assumes
a more openly capitalist form. These tendencies are contradictory because they
are the precipitate of the class-struggle. Materialist historiography has the task
of showing the possibility of a new social formation within the revolutionising
elements of the old society.38 State-violence itself is understood as an ambivalent
process: where it destroys forms, it opens new possibilities. It is in this sense
that Marx denes violence [Gewalt] as the midwife of every old society,
pregnant with a new society.39 This armation of Marxs, so scandalous that
it needed to be exorcised as a violent philosophy of history or as an apology for
violence tout court, refers instead to the power of the state [Staatsmacht]. This
concentrated and organised violence has acted as an economic power
[konomische Potenz] that contributed to the transformation of the feudal
system into the capitalist mode of production. This intervention was not
37. Marx 1989c, pp. 5256; Marx 1990a, p. 635.
38. Marx 1989c, p. 526; Marx 1990a, p. 635.
39. Marx 1989c, p. 779; Marx 1990a, p. 916.

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linked to the bourgeois domination of the state, but was implicit in the
monopoly of violence that characterised the modern state and its relative
autonomy. Putting this chapter in tension with the chapter on large-scale
industry, we can see how the role of Staatsgewalt continues to work within
social and political forms. Factory-laws and obligatory schooling are two faces
of a change in the social relations. Here, for Marx, there was the possibility of
a new political initiative on the part of the working class. Primitive accumulation
and large-scale industry do not represent the beginning and the end of an
historical process; both are traversed by state-violence that, even today,
regulates them as co-present elements in the contemporaneity of diverse forms
of accumulation.40
According to these considerations we must speak of permanence of primitive
accumulation. The English word primitive is a bad translation of the German
ursprnglich. The Marxian original accumulation is not merely an episode of
the proto-history of the capitalistic form. This does not mean that the accumulation
is an ancient moment of capitalisms history; rather, accumulation is the
continuous driving-power of capitalism. Accumulation is the combination of
dierent and relative independent moments: violence of the state; production of
proletarians and formally free labour; colonisation; slavery; dissolution of ancient
forms of auctoritas; enclosures; separation between producers and means of
production; and disciplining of the wage-workers.
The peculiarity of accumulation is a sort of extra-economic intervention which
solders together the terrorism of the separation between means of production and
workers41 with the extra-economic violence of the state in order to increase
the absolute exploitation of living labour both in intensity and extension. For
this reason, the so-called primitive accumulation [sogenannte ursprngliche
Akklumulation] is not primitive;42 it is not an historical moment of the birth of
capitalistic production; rather, it accompanies the whole history of this mode of
production.
Without these histories of extra-economic violence, colonisation and modern
slavery, without their synchronisation through the state, the capitalist mode of
production would not have existed. The great slaughter of the innocents, as Marx
calls the sogenannte ursprngliche Akklumulation, is a combination of the colonial
system, public debts, heavy taxes, protection, commercial wars, &c.. Marx
analyses the systematic combination of these elements in England, because this
specic combination was actually in force only there. For this reason, the genesis
40. Compare De Angelis 2007.
41. Bonefeld 2001; Bonefeld 2008..
42. Marx takes the term from Smith, who spoke of previous accumulation. Compare Smith
1994, p. 300.

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of capitalism in Western Europe could not be transformed into a historicalphilosophical theory of universal development, predetermined by fate, for all
peoples . . ..43
Original [ursprnglich] accumulation begins always again through extraeconomic violence, which heightens the process of accumulation. It is original or
primary44 because it is the basic element that always re-initiates the temporal
counter of capitalistic modernity. To understand the permanence of original
accumulation now, we need a kind of historiography of the present that would
allow us to understand the current combination of dierent temporalities in the
attempt to synchronise them through the intervention of extra-economic violence.
I use the English word synchronisation to translate the Nazi term Gleichschaltung,
which means, roughly, switching on to the same track. The capitalist mode of
production, its origin and its permanence, is the encounter and combination of
dierent temporalities that make this possible. They require nevertheless their
synchronisation through extra-economic violence, in order to produce dierentials
of surplus-values, and to be synchronised to the world-rhythm of socially-necessary
labour. Neither the combination of these temporalities nor their connection to
each other is indierent, because the temporality of socially-necessary labour and
the action of the extra-economic violence synchronise them. There is thus a very
important dierence between the former temporalities and the dominant
temporality of socially-necessary labour. Capitalist modernity holds to this
violence, whose continuum includes both fascism and liberal democracy.45

3. World-market: temporalisation of global space

The categories of the capitalist mode of production do not unfold in diachronic
succession, but present themselves as a unitary constellation within which
each concept, as a monad, is enclosed. Commodities are exchanged with the
growth of a labour-time indierent to the qualitative character of labour itself
and of the objective basis of that labour. What is really exchanged is de-skilled
labour-time,46 indierent to the use-value of the object and ontologised in
value, which is the telos of the process of valorisation. The time really employed
in the production of a given commodity counts only in relation to the abstract
time, de-skilled, that is needed for labour of an average social intensity to
produce that commodity. Only the capitalist mode of production uncovers
43. Compare Marx 1989a, p. 201.
44. The term was suggested to me by Ferruccio Gambino during discussions of the Marxseminar in Padua.
45. Tomba 2009.
46. Compare Krahl 1984, p. 313.

M. Tomba / Historical Materialism 17 (2009) 4465

57

this absolute equality that makes labour something universally common:

abstract labour. It is this character of labour that means that a commodity no
longer stands in a social relation with merely one other kind of commodity,
but with the whole world of commodities as well.47 De-skilled time, time that
is objectied in commodities, manifests itself as quantitative time. It is time
that has broken its relationship with nature. Capital has not only suppressed
the classic prohibition of night-work, altering the natural rhythms of the day
and night, but, as a means of increasing the productiveness of labour with
respect to the social average, it has also overcome the natural limit of the
twenty-four hour day. For the rst time in human history, it is possible to have
working days of thirty or more hours (of socially-necessary labour) within the
natural limits of twenty-four hours. The reections on time and historiography
brought forth in late modernity will be read as expressions and attempts to
metabolise this anthropological mutation. This modication in temporality is
intertwined with the discontinuity of the class-conict. The textile-workers of
the fourteenth century who either silenced or stole the Werkglocke that signalled
the start and end of the working day already sought to disconnect that
continuum.
The crucial question concerns not the de-skilling of time itself but rather its
measure: this derives from the productive power of socially-necessary labour,
which represents the quantitatively determined expression of abstract labour. It is
important to understand exchange-value not as the objectication of labour
immediately spent in the production of a determinate commodity, but as an
expression of the quantity of social labour objectied in the commodity: that
which determines the magnitude of the value of any article is the amount of
labour socially necessary, or the labour time socially necessary for its production.48
It is in Capital that we nd the highest level of conceptual determination of
socially-necessary labour, and it is this determination that needs to be assumed in
order to test Marxs entire theoretical edice. What we need to be clear about,
and which also contains a moment of real diculty, is that the labour objectied
in the exchange-value of a commodity does not correspond to the quantity of
labour immediately spent in its production. Instead, it is the fruit of a mediation
with socially allocated labour. In this sense, the expression individual value
[individueller Wert] is a contradiction in terms: not only because, as Marx
emphasises in the Randglossen of 18812 (the dates are important in this case),
exchange-value in the singular does not exist,49 but because it presupposes a value
determined quantitatively by labour individually employed in the production of
47. Marx 1989c, p. 77; Marx 1990a, p. 155.
48. Marx 1989c, p. 54; Marx 1990a, p. 129.
49. Marx 1989b, p. 533: exchange-value, without at least two of them, does not exist.

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M. Tomba / Historical Materialism 17 (2009) 4465

this commodity, and not by social labour. This, however, is not a denite size
xed once and for all. Rather, it is variable and its variability retroacts on the
determination of the quantity of social labour contained in a commodity. If the
general conditions inside which a certain quantity of commodities are produced
change, then Marx arms a reverse eect [Rckwirkung] takes place.50 It is
possible that a determinate quantity of labour-time already objectied in a
commodity changes due to a change in the social productivity of labour, which
retroacts on the exchange-value of the commodity itself.
This important Marxian understanding is possible only within a constellation
that is clear on the social character of the labour that valorises value:

The value of a commodity is certainly determined by the quantity of labour

contained in it, but this quantity is itself socially [gesellschaftlich] determined. If
the amount of labour-time socially necessary for the production of any commodity
alters . . . this reacts back on all the old commodities of the same type, because . . .
their value at any given time is measured by the labour socially necessary to
produce them, i.e., by the labour necessary under the social conditions existing at
the time.51

In other words: the changes in the productive force of socially-necessary labour

react back on the commodities already produced, causing a change in the
labour-time objectied in them.52
If Capital represents the high-point of categorial elaboration, it is here that we
must nd the most mature consequences of this way of understanding social
labour and exchange-value. As we have already seen,
The real value of a commodity, however, is not its individual, but its social value;
that is to say, its value is not measured by the labour-time that the article costs the
producer in each individual case, but by the labour-time socially required for its
production.53

Therefore, if the value of a commodity depends upon the labour-time

objectied in it, it should be kept in mind that this labour-time is not that
eectively employed for the production of a given use-object, but can be either
greater or smaller than it. The generic human labour-time objectied in the
substance of value must be adjusted to the time that social labour would need
50. Compare Marx 1990b, p. 75.
51. Ibid.
52. I agree with Geert Reuten, who writes that the notion of socially necessary labour-time
is associated with this notion of productive force and that, in this context, productive force
must be taken as average. Compare Reuten 2004, pp. 11745.
53. Marx 1989c, p. 336; Marx 1990a, p. 434.

M. Tomba / Historical Materialism 17 (2009) 4465

59

to carry out that same job. Surplus-value is not a quantiable amount within the
accounting of a single rm.
Considering the case of production through machines, it was only after
clarifying to himself the nature of exchange-value that Marx was able to show that
the machine produces neither value nor surplus-value.54 Nevertheless, the machines
make possible the production of surplus-value in two ways: rst, indirectly,
through the devalorisation of labour-power following the expulsion of workers
replaced by machines; second, extra surplus-value, through exploiting the sporadic
introduction of machines. The latter circumstance is that which allows the
exploitation of labour of a greater productive power than the social average, so
that the individual labour objectied in this commodity is less than the quantity
of socially average labour.55 As we know by now, only the latter determines
exchange-value.
It can happen that an hour of work of high productive force corresponds to two
hours of social labour, in situations where the society as a whole still does not use
technological innovation. This exchange, where one is equal to two, violates only
the intellectual principles of whomever holds to primary-school mathematics; the
value of commodities in general, and therefore also of those produced with
technological innovation, is its social value that is, the quantity of sociallynecessary labour objectied in it. This phenomenon imposes itself violently in the
world-market, where an increase in the productive power of labour through the
introduction of a new machine allows the capitalist who uses the technological
innovation, by selling the commodity at its value, to appropriate social surplusvalue, and therefore exchanges one hour of labour for two: Hence the capitalist
who applies the improved method of production appropriates and devotes to
surplus labour a greater portion [Extramehrwert] of the working day that the other
capitalists in the same business.56 Beyond numbers, the Extramehrwert that is
appropriated by the capitalist corresponds to the quantity of social surplus-value
that she can withdraw from the society to the extent that she is an extractor of
relative surplus-value.
Caffen.In the comparison between labours of dierent intensity and productive force,
pointthere occurs a transfer of value from production-spheres in which the productivity
of labour is lower relative to those in which capital exploits labour at a productivity
that is higher than the social average. If exchange-value and surplus-value are
determined by the quantity of socially-necessary labour objectied in a commodity,
it is clear that the labour individually performed in the production of a given
commodity will have to be placed in relation to socially-necessary labour. Extra
54. Marx 1989c, p. 429; Marx 1990a, p. 530.
55. Ibid.
56. Marx 1989c, p. 336; Marx 1990a, p. 436.

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M. Tomba / Historical Materialism 17 (2009) 4465

surplus-value can be obtained only if the introduction of the innovation of

machinery remains sporadic; that is, only if the productive force of sociallynecessary labour remains inferior to that of the labour strengthened by the new
and machine. If the productive force of the labour strengthened by machinery becomes
WHEN
universally dominant that is, becomes the productive force of socially-necessary
labour then the advantage gained by the capitalist through the introduction of
new machinery vanishes. When technological innovation becomes widespread,
the growing productive force of labour obtained through its employment becomes
socially dominant:
As machinery comes into general use in a particular branch of production, the
social value of the machines product sinks down to its individual value, and the
following law asserts itself: surplus-value does not arise from the labour-power
that has been replaced by the machinery, but from the labour-power actually
employed in working with the machinery.57

The capitalist can no longer gain social surplus-value though her growing
productive force. What remains to her is the most ruthless and excessive
prolongation of the working day. Analogously, if the intensity of labour were to
increase simultaneously and equally in every branch of industry, then the new
and higher degree of intensity would become the normal social degree of
intensity, and would therefore cease to count as an extensive magnitude.58
The economic and extra-economic violence of capital works to ensure that
these dierentials are produced, maintained and reproduced on a global scale. In
this way a greater number of hours of labour concretely performed pass through
the hands of the capitalist, who utilises a greater productive power of labour
without violating the law of equivalence. The dierence between capitalists who
exploit labour of dierent productivity is therefore necessary so that it will be
possible to extract relative surplus-value from the advantage that springs from
technological innovation. This can be seen not only on a worldwide scale, where
capital is continually in search of masses of absolute surplus-value, but also within
the Western metropolises, and even within the same corporation, broken up into
apparently independent productive segments in competition with each other.
Capital needs to create geographical areas or productive sectors where it can
produce an enormous quantity of absolute surplus-value. The primary violence of
the accumulation must be repeated ever anew. It accompanies the whole history
of capital as a basso continuo. George Caentzis is not overstating the matter when
he says that new enclosures in the countryside must accompany the rise of
57. Marx 1989c, p. 429; Marx 1990a, p. 530.
58. Marx 1989c, p. 548; Marx 1990a, pp. 6612.

M. Tomba / Historical Materialism 17 (2009) 4465

61

automatic processes in industry, the computer requires the sweatshop, and the
cyborgs existence is premised on the slave.59 In addition to this, we can recall
the economic and political function of the borders in order to set the price of the
migrant-force of labour and to dene ethnic divisions of labour.
The immediate repercussion of a technological innovation is a prolonging of
labour-time wherever the innovation is not yet employed: One of the rst
consequences of the introduction of new machinery, before it has become
dominant in its branch of production, is the prolongation of the labour-time of
the labourers who continue to work with the old and unimproved means of
production.60 The introduction of a new machine generates an increase in relative
surplus-value, an increase that, in order to be realised, must be sustained by a
proportional increase in the extraction of absolute surplus-value, where workers
resistance is lower, or by exploiting the national dierences in wages.
This means that the introduction of new machinery is not a pre-determined
route in the history of all countries; rather, on the contrary, dierent capitals in
head-to-head competition with each other in the world-market must seek-out or
create geographical areas with dierent labour-powers having dierent wages and
productive powers.61 If the reciprocal implication of the various forms of surplusvalue are grasped, then it is only out of faith in some progressive and Eurocentric
philosophy of history that it is possible to consider some forms of production as
backward, and wage-labour, extended to the whole world, as residual.
It was an error to read the development of capital in evolutionist terms:
politically, this view has coincided with that of progress. Thus, not only is any
society denied the possibility of leaping over the natural phases of its development,
but forms of exploitation are laid out diachronically, when they are, instead,
entirely complementary. This is the case of absolute and relative surplus-value,
that is, of the extortion of surplus-value by means of a lengthening of the working
day and the strengthening of labour through the introduction of machines. The
transition from formal subsumption to real subsumption, from the extortion of
absolute surplus-value to relative surplus-value, is not marked according to a
paradigm of stages in which the rst gives way to the second.62 The transition from
the third part (The Production of Absolute Surplus-Value) to the fourth (The
Production of Relative Surplus-Value) is marked by the nal lines of Chapter
Ten, wherein the workers, as a class, succeed in establishing a state-law on the
59. Compare Caentzis 1998.
60. Marx 1990b, p. 323.
61. Interesting in this respect is the argument of Marini 1991, pp. 810.
62. This historicising formulation is found in the writings of Negri from the 1970s to Hardt
and Negri 2000, pp. 2545: At a certain point, as capitalist expansion reaches its limit, the
processes of formal subsumption can no longer play the central role.

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M. Tomba / Historical Materialism 17 (2009) 4465

duration of the working day. If in fact the creation of a normal working-day is . . .

the product of a protracted civil war, more or less concealed, between the capitalist
class and the working class,63 capital responds to the war with an augmentation of
the productive force of labour by means of machines. Progress is measured by
this intensication of exploitation. For this reason, it is unrealistic, even when not
in bad faith, to prophesise the liberation of labour by means of machines within
capitalist relations of production, when the use-value of labour remains intrinsically
capitalist. Innovation is a response to the insurgency of living labour. This means
that capital introduces new machinery because it is compelled to, both by the
unruliness of the workers and the physiological limit reached in the exploitation
of labour-power.
Absolute and relative surplus-value are not to be thought synchronically in an
historical-temporal multiversum.64 Relative surplus-value is such only in relation to
absolute surplus-value: relative surplus-value not only does not replace absolute
surplus-value, but necessitates, for its own realisation, an increase of the quantity
of socially-produced absolute surplus-value. The use of machines in production
allows the exploitation of labour with a greater productive power with respect to
the social average of exploitation, and it is precisely this dierential quota that
constitutes relative surplus-value. This gap must necessarily be covered by a
production of absolute surplus-value, which thus, far from being an archaic form
of capitalist exploitation or a residue of the nineteenth century, is the form of
extortion of surplus-value most adequate to our times.
Formal subsumption is the basis of capitalist production as the production of
surplus-value in a process whose end is the production of commodities for the
market; real subsumption presents itself instead as a specically capitalist form
because it does not allow the previous social relations to remain, but rather
revolutionises the technical processes of production and the formation of social
groups [gesellschaftliche Gruppierungen].65 To these two forms should also be added
a third form, rarely studied: that of the hybrid or intermediate forms [Zwitterformen]
of subsumption.66 Marx speaks of them for the rst time in Capital. They are
forms in which surplus-labour is extracted by means of direct coercion [direkter
Zwang], without there being formal subsumption of labour to capital. Marx
observes how these forms can indeed be understood as forms of transition, but can
also be reproduced in the background of large-scale industry. The hybrid-forms,
63. Marx 1989c, p. 316; Marx 1990a, p. 412.
64. I take this concept from Bloch 1985. About the topic of the temporalisation of space,
compare Harvey 1989.
65. Marx 1989c, p. 533; Marx 1990a, p. 645.
66. Marx 1989c, p. 533; Marx 1990a, p. 645. An exception is the work of Murray, who
recalled my attention to hybrid-subsumption: Murray 2004, pp. 24373; Murray 2000,
p. 122.

M. Tomba / Historical Materialism 17 (2009) 4465

63

though they are not formally subsumed to capital, and though labour is not given
in the form of wage-labour, fall under the command of capital. This allows us to
comprehend the contemporaneity of apparently anachronistic forms like slavery,
which are not mere residues of past epochs67 but rather forms that, though with
an altered physiognomy, are produced and reproduced in the background of the
current capitalist mode of production. The exploitation of child-labour in Asian
countries and working hours of up to eighteen a day68 are not cases of capitalist
underdevelopment, but, rather, express the current levels of production of social
surplus-value.69
Slave-labour was not backward or residual with respect to European capitalist
development, but was, rather, increased precisely by that development. It was a
form of labour absolutely adequate and complementary to the most developed
capitalist production of the metropoles. The time of labour of the slaves was and
is marked by global industry.70 The crack of the whip of the slave-driver, then just
as now, is synchronised with the rhythm of the world-market.
Translated by Peter Thomas and Steven Colatrella

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