Candidate: 94653

Abstract Temporality in Marx's Critique of Political Economy:

Appearance and mediation in an inverted world.

Abstract
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.

Candidate: 94653

Contents
Introduction Chapter 1: The Temporality of Value I. The Dialectic of Labour 3 5

II. The Value-Form & Abstract Labour 8 III. The Appearance of Money & Its 12 Qualities IV. Need, Theft and Value in the Wage- 14 Form V. The 'Self-Movement' of Capital 18 Chapter 2: The Temporal Enclosure I. Primitive Accumulation as a Temporal Force II. Wage-Labour as the Temporal Enclosure III. The Presupposition of Abstract Time IV. Primitive Accumulation as the Real Abstraction I. Labour, Freedom and TimeMeasurement II. Labour-Time in Communism III. The Struggle for Time IV. Lower Communism Concluding Remarks Bibliography 21 24 27 28 32 37 40 44 48 50

Chapter 3: Time, Struggle and Communism

Candidate: 94653

Introduction

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 noninvolvement 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.

Candidate: 94653 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.

Candidate: 94653

The Temporality of Value

I. 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.

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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.

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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 16 17 18 Marx, Grundrisse, pp. 89-90. Marx, 'Results of the Immediate Process of Production' in Capital I, p. 1037. Marx, Grundrisse, pp. 94-8. 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

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

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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 24 25 26 27 28 Marx, Capital I, p. 129. Marx, Grundrisse, p. 144; Capital I, p. 135. Marx, Capital I, pp. 131-7. Postone op. cit., p. 152. Ibid. 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

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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 konomie', Marx-Engels-Werke 13, 7 (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1971) p. 19

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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 Bensad, 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 33 34 35 Marx, Grundrisse, p. 173. Marx, Capital I, p. 128. Bonefeld, 'Abstract Labour', p. 269. 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.

Candidate: 94653 of capital is only formal, and the truth of its movement can be revealed.

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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 'selfvalorisation',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 39 40 41 Postone op. cit., p. 134. Reichelt op. cit., p. 39. Karl Marx, 'Results of the Immediate Process of Production', in Capital I, p. 1039. 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 labourtime 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 44 45 46 47 Marx quoted in Backhaus op cit., p. 108. Ibid., p. 109-10. Ibid., p. 109. Marx, Capital I, pp. 188, 184. Marx, Grundrisse, p. 143.

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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 exchangevalue 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 49 50 51 Ibid., p. 139. Marx, Grundrisse, p. 168-9. Emphasis in the original. Marx, Capital I, p. 184. 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

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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.

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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 labourtime.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

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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 mealtimes 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.-3 65 Ibid., pp. 342-6. 66 Marx, Grundrisse, p. 705. 67 Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. Ashton (London: Continuum, 1973) p. 320.

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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 selfmeasurement 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.

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The Temporal Enclosure

I. 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.

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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.

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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.

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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 timemeasurement 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.

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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.

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evaluation of abject poverty which suggests the ultimately existential truth of labourpower'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.

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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 Lukcs 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. Lukcs 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 Lukcs 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 Lukcs' 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 Lukcs, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, trans. Livingstone. (London: Merlin Press, 2010) p. 89 95 Ibid. 96 It is unclear whether Lukcs perceives the measurability of space a 'physical' quality, or whether this is

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Lukcs, 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. Lukcs 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 Lukcs 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 Lukcs op. cit., p. 89. 98 Karl Marx, 'Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts', in Early Writings, trans. Livingstone & Benton (London: Penguin, 1975) p. 332.

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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 Lukcs' 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 [Trger] 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 wagelabour 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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Time, Struggle, and Communism

I. 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 Marxs 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 deeplying '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 'notlabour' 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

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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 wagelabour 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. 712 112 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 surpluslabour, 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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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.

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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.

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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.

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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 post131 Karl Marx, 'On the Jewish Question', Early Writings, p. 234. 132 Marx, Capital I, p. 415. 133 Marx, Capital I, p. 531-4.

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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) 177 137 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 postcapitalist 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 workingday, 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.

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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 labourhour, 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.

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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 timechit 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 timechits 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.

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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.

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Concluding Remarks

Taking 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.

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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?

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Books

Bibliography

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'The Production Process of Capital' in Marx/Engels Collected Works. Volume 30. London: Lawrence & Wishart. Value, Price and Profit: Addressed to working men. Edited by Eleanor Marx Aveling. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1942. 'Zur Kritik der Politischen konomie', Marx-Engels-Werke Band 13, 7. Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1971. Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels. 'The Communist Manifesto' in Marx/Engels Collected Works.Volume 6. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1976. Negri, Antonio. Time for Revolution. London: Continuum, 2003. Nowotny, Helga. Time: The modern and postmodern experience. Cambridge: Polity, 1994. Postone, Moishe. Time, Labor, and Social Domination: A reinterpretation of Marx's critical theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2003. Reichelt, Helmut. Zur logischen Struktur des Kapitalbegriffs bei Karl Marx. Frankfurtam-Main: Europische Verlagsanstalt, 1973. Sohn-Rethel, Alfred. Intellectual and Manual Labour: A Critique of Epistemology. Translated by Martin Sohn-Rethel. London: Macmillan, 1978. Whitrow, G.J. Time in History: The evolution of our general awareness of time and temporal perspective. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988.

Articles & Essays

Adorno, Theodor. 'Free Time' in Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords. Translated by Henry W. Pickford. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998. Arthur, Christopher J. 'The Inner Totality of Capitalism' in Historical Materialism. Volume 14. Issue 3. 2006. Backhaus, Hans-Georg. 'Between Philosophy and Science: Marxian Social Economy as Critical Theory' in Open Marxism Volume 1: Dialectics and History. Edited by Werner Bonefeld, Richard Gunn and Kosmas Psychopedis. London: Pluto, 1992. 'On the Dialectics of the Value-Form'. Translated by Michael Eldred and Mike Roth. Thesis Eleven. Volume 1. 1980. 'Some Aspects of Marx's Concept of Critique in the Context of his EconomicPhilosophical Theory'. in Human Dignity: Social Autonomy and the Critique of Capitalism. Edited by Werner Bonefeld and Kosmas Psychopedis. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005. Bonefeld, Werner. 'Abstract Labour: Against its nature and on its time' in Capital &

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'Capital, Labour and Primitive Accumulation: On Class and Constitution' in The Labour Debate: An investigation into the Theory and Reality of Capitalist Work. Edited by Ana C. Dinerstein and Michael Neary. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002. 'Kapital and its Subtitle: A note on the meaning of critique' in Capital & Class. Volume 25. Issue 3. Autumn 2001. 'On Postone's Courageous but Unsuccessful Attempt to Banish the Class Antagonism from the Critique of Political Economy' in Historical Materialism. Volume 12, Issue 3. 2004. 'Primitive Accumulation and Capitalist Accumulation: Notes on Social Constitution and Expropriation' in Science & Society. Volume 75. Issue 3. July 2011. 'The Permanence of Primitive Accumulation: Commodity Fetishism and Social Constitution' in The Commoner. Volume 2. Sept 2001. de Angelis, Massimo. 'Hayek, Bentham and the Global Work Machine: The Emergence of the Fractal-Panopticon' in The Labour Debate: An investigation into the Theory and Reality of Capitalist Work. Edited by Ana C. Dinerstein and Michael Neary. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002. Marcuse, Herbert. 'The Realm of Freedom and the Realm of Necessity' in Praxis. Volume 5. 1969. Osborne, Peter. 'Marx and the Philosophy of Time' in Radical Philosophy. Volume 147. January/February 2008. Reichelt, Helmut. 'Social Reality as Appearance: Some Notes on Marx's Conception of Reality'. Translated by Werner Bonefeld, in Human Dignity: Social Autonomy and the Critique of Capitalism. Edited by Werner Bonefeld and Kosmas Psychopedis. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005. Rosenthal, John. 'The Escape from Hegel' in Science and Society. Volume 63. Issue 3. Fall 1999. Thompson, E.P. 'Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism' in Past and Present. Volume 38. Issue 1. 1967.