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DIALOGUE AND UNIVERSALISM
No. 3/2018
WEALTH AND SUFFERING: ON CAPITAL
CHAPTER I
ABSTRACT
Karl Marx's is critique of the capitalistically organised social relations of
reproduction. It recognises economic categories as perverted social categories and asks
about the manner in which human social practice manifests itself in the form of
independent economic categories and laws that unfold as if governed by invisible
principles. He says, the capitalist relations are beyond human control and he argues that
the individuals act under economic compulsion and are controlled by the products of
their own labour. His critique says, in the capitalist social relations the individuals act as
personification of economic categories. The immense wealth of capitalist society is
abstract, it appears in the form of money as more money. In these wealth-relations, time
is money, the satisfaction of human needs a mere sideshow. Yet, the economic
categories are purely social forms. Critique of political economy is social critique of
economic inversion, it is about the sheer unrest of live as the hidden misery of economic
things.
Keywords: Marx’s Capital; capitalism, labour economy.
INTRODUCTION
Karl Marx’s is critique of the capitalistically organised social
relations of production. On this there is general agreement. Disagreements
emerge about the character of critique. Traditionally, it was understood as a
critique of capitalism from the standpoint of labour. In this argument, capitalism
amounts to a historically specific ‘anatomy’ of labour economy. In contrast, the
critical conception is characterised by social form analysis. It does not argue
from the standpoint of labour. Rather, it conceives of the capitalist categories as
the definite forms of the actual social relations. Social form analysis therefore
entails
a critique of (the standpoint of) labour.
6
In the traditional perspective, labour is the source of all social wealth. It rejects
capitalism as a crisis-prone system of labour exploitation for private gain. Its
critique entails the demand for the emancipation of labour from capitalist
domination in socialism, which comprises a planned labour economy that works
in the interests of society at large. The traditional critique of capitalism is
premised on a transhistorical conception of labour. It does not offer a critique of
the concept of labour economy. Instead, it goes forward as a theory of modes of
production (Postone, 1993; also Lotz, 2014). In this conception, “the
contradictory unity between the materiality of human life and its historically-
determined social forms” (Kiciloff, Starosta, 2007, 24) is the most decisive for the
understanding of capitalism as a mode of production. For the standpoint critique,
the first chapter of Marx’s establishes thus the “generic materiality” of
human life as the transhistorical presupposition of “the specific determination
[…] of the commodity as a historical form of wealth” (Starosta, 2008, 25;
Starosta, 2015; Haug, 2005). The first chapter, therefore, tells us that “in any form
of society human beings productively expend their corporeal powers” (Starosta,
2008, 31). This is
a trivial discovery, by any standards. In the words of Marx, it is of course “much
easier to discover by analysis the earthly core of the earthly kernel of the misty
creations of religion than to do the opposite, i.e. to develop from the actual, given
relations of life the forms in which these have been apotheosized. The latter
method is the only materialist one, and therefore the only scientific one.” The
former method belongs to the abstract materialism of the natural sciences “that
excludes history and its process” (Marx, 1990, 494, fn. 4). The traditional account
derives its argument about the transhistorical character of labour economy from
its analysis of the capitalist labour economy. It reads the capitalist labour
economy into history, then analyses capitalism as a specific historical mode of
that same labour economy, and finally derives socialism from capitalist labour
economy as its progressive further development.
Marx’s point about the actual relations of life is key to social form analysis.
It rejects the notion that the capitalist economic forms have a transhistorical
nature. It holds that Marx’s critique is critique of economic nature. It asks about
social constitution of the economic categories and expounds their social nature.
For social form analysis, thus, the forces of production are the forces of the
actual capitalist social relations. In the words of Moishe Postone (1993, 56),
“Marx’s critique transforms the categories of political economy from
transhistorical categories of the constitution of wealth into critical categories of
the specificity of the forms of wealth and social relations in capitalism;” see
also (Heinrich, 2012; Lotz, 2014; Tomba, 2014; Bonefeld, 2014). In sharp
contrast, therefore, to the traditional reading, the first chapter of
conceptualises the distinct character of commodity-determined labour.
The paper argues that the critique of labour is fundamental to social form
analysis (Bonefeld, 2014; 2016). This contention is not generally shared, even
Capital 7
by proponents of social form analysis.1 Although social form analysis rejects the
naturalisation of capitalist labour economy as a historical mode of labour, it
itself has tended to shun discussion of labour, of wealth and suffering, class and
struggle, as a distraction to the analysis of value and the value form (Arthur,
2004; Backhaus, 1997; Reichelt, 2008). The paper explores the
characterisations of labour in the first chapter of . Marx introduces the
term capital in chapter 4 of and develops its dynamic of valorisation, of
money that yields more money, in the subsequent chapters that explore surplus
value as the fundamental category of capitalist wealth. The account presented
here presumes the dynamic of valorisation as the hidden secrete of the law of
value. The paper develops the critique of political economy as a social theory of
economic inversion; it is about the sheer unrest of live as the hidden misery of
economic things.2 As social critique, the critique of political economy has its
origin in suffering.
In the order of presentation, exploration of the capitalist character of labour
comes first. Then the argument turns to the exposition of abstract labour as the
social labour of capitalist wealth and to socially necessary labour time as the
time of abstract labour. The final section expounds abstract labour as the
category of the sheer unrest of life. The conclusion summarises the argument
and draws out practical implications.
CRITIQUE OF LABOUR AND THE LABOUR TRADITION
For Marx, the double character of capitalist labour is fundamental “to
understanding of the facts” (Marx, 1987a, 407). He differentiates between a
concrete labour that produces use-values and an abstract labour that produces
value. The standpoint critique of capitalism appears on safe grounds with regard
to concrete labour. In every society, the human metabolism with nature entails
labour as a praxis of social reproduction, and the social organisation of the
relations of human subsistence is therefore of upmost importance in any enquiry
into the human condition. Nevertheless, the argument about the transhistorical
validity of the concrete labour of use-value production is fraught with
difficulties. As I explain below, the circumstance that Man has to eat does not
explain capitalist social reproduction. Man does not eat in the abstract.
Regarding abstract labour, the point about its transhistorical nature seems
a difficult one to fathom at first. For Marx, it is the value-producing labour,
which produces the specifically capitalist form of wealth, that is, value.
However, the argument in favour of its transhistorical (mis-)conception is quite
straightforward. The traditional account conceives of abstract labour in
1 See however Tomba (2014). Postone (1993) conceives of Marx’s critique as a critique of
labour but does not follow this through. See Bonefeld (2004).
2 Holloway (2002) identifies the sheer unrest of life as a category of hope in the not-yet of an
emancipated humanity. See also (Dinerstein, 2015). The premise of hope is hopelessness.
8
physiological terms as expenditure of human energy in abstraction from the
concrete purposes to which it is applied. If abstract labour really is expenditure
of human energy, a biological fact of nature, then it can indeed be defined
without further ado in precise physiological terms. That is, “muscles burn
sugar” (Haug, 2005, 108).3 Muscles have burned sugar since time immemorial
and will continue to do so, regardless of the specific form of society. Like Haug,
Kicillof and Startosta, and Carchedi (2009) too, hold that the physiological
determination is the “only meaningful definition of abstract labour, which, as
much as its concrete aspect, is a purely material form, bearing no social or
historical specificity. And yet, when performed privately and independently,
and once congealed in the natural materially of the product of labour, that
purely material form acquires the form of value of the commodity, i.e. a purely
social form that embodies ‘not an atom of matter’ ” (Kicillof, Starosta, 2007,
34–5; quoting Marx). In the standpoint critique of labour, abstract labour is
‘the’ transhistorically valid labour. As Makoto Itoh (1988, 114) explains, Marx
recognised abstract labour as “the” labour, and this discovery at the start of
“was made possible by the development of modern capitalist
commodity economy. However, once obtained, the recognition can possibly be
applicable to other social formations.” Marx, says Itoh, recognised the basic
condition “of the metabolism between human beings and nature as general
economic norms in the analysis of the labour-and-production process” (ibid.,
121). Since abstract labour is a natural condition of human existence, its critique
is fundamentally a critique of its capitalist modality, and an argument for its
socialist rationalisation, that is, the rational planning of the expenditure of
human energy in socialism. Indeed, the presumed transhistorical materiality of
labour is said to contain a progressive dynamic in that the “material specificity
of [capitalism] … consists, precisely, in the development of the human
productive capacity to organise social labour in a fully conscious fashion”
(Kicilof, Starosta, 2007, 36) in a planned labour economy, in socialism. It seems
as if the—transhistorically conceived, or in any case naturally determined—
forces of production rebel against the socially constituted relations of
production with a history making dynamic and force. The standpoint critique
thus holds that class struggle expresses the “contradictory unity between
materiality and social form” (ibid., 34, see also 24). This formulation is
reminiscent of ontological conceptions of historical materialism, according to
which, as Murray (2005, 64, fn. 21) put it, “the ‘forces of production’ are not
3 Haug’s biological definition of abstract labour as sugar burning is apt, to the point, and simple
in its nature (Bonefeld, 2009). Compare also Guglielmo Carchedi (2011) with Bonefeld (2011).
Carchedi’s is a robust defence of the physiological definition of abstract labour, which leads him
to argue that the determination of value by abstract labour has to do with the consumption of
calories during the production process measured by labour time—how many calories per hour of
labour is embodied in the commodity? The biological fact that muscles burn sugar does not
explain any form of society whatsoever, nor does it have anything to say about the specific
character of capitalist wealth.
Capital 9
social-form-determined but, on the contrary, are the ultimate determinant of the
‘relations of production’.”4
The argument about the transhistorical character of abstract labour connects
with Marx’s physiological definition according to which it is a “productive
expenditure of human brains, nerves, and muscles” (Marx, 1990, 134).
However, he also, conceives of it as “a purely social reality […] that can only
appear in the social relation between commodity and commodity” (ibid., 139)
and that therefore manifests itself only in exchange.5 The development of the
latter conception belongs to social form analysis, which conceives of the
capitalist relations as “purely social” in character, and not as a historically
specific modality of the transhistorical forces of production.
Social form analysis, which goes back to Isaak Rubin’s (1972) critical value
theory, rejects the physiological conception of abstract labour as a “naturalistic
deformation of the social reality of capitalism” (de Vroey, 1982, 44; also Kay,
1999; Arthur, 2011).6 Indeed, and as argued by Eldret and Hanlon (1981, 40).
“[the] determination of abstract labour as a physiological expenditure of labour-
power leads to the crudest understanding of value and the loss of the socially
specific character of value-creating labour. The abstractness of value-creating
labour is determined by the exchange process, which accomplishes the
abstraction from the multifarious concrete labours objectified in commodities.”
In distinction therefore, to the traditional view, which holds that value is
established in production independent from exchange and money and that the
substance of value is merely realised in exchange for money, the critical
approach holds, following Postone, that value “is both a historically specific
form of wealth a form of social synthesis and mediation” (Postone, 1993,
28).
Nevertheless, although robust in its critique of the traditional view, the social
form conception of abstract labour as a specifically capitalist form of labour is
limited.7 Marx’s form analytical conception of abstract labour entails the
4 The idea of an historically active ontological force perverts Marx’s materialism, which
amounts to a critique of things understood dogmatically. On this see (Gunn, 1992).
5 Marx’s account is ambivalent and contradictory. It contains naturalistic conceptions, which
derive from classical political economy, and social conceptions that make clear that capitalist
phenomena have no basis in nature. They belong to the society from which they spring. On this,
see Bonefeld (2010), Heinrich (2009), and Reichelt (1995).
6 Isaak Rubin was a soviet Marxist. He worked on value in the 1920, was arrested in 1930 and
executed in 1937. His account was re-discovered in the early 1970s. He had argued that “one of
two things is possible: if abstract labour is an expenditure of human energy in physiological form,
then value has a reified-material character. Or value is a social phenomenon, and then abstract
labour must also be understood as a social phenomenon connected with a determined social form
of production. It is not possible to reconcile a physiological concept of abstract labour with the
historical character of the value which it creates” (Rubin, 1972, 135).
7 Hans-Georg Backhaus (2000, 174), for example, conceives of it correctly as a real abstraction
of social labour and then argues, wrongly, that it contradicts the capitalist form of labour, which
for him is private in character. Since abstract labour is social in character, he understands it as an
inverted form of communism. At the same time, he understands that capitalist labour is directly
10
determination of value as having a “phantom-like objectivity” (Marx, 1990,
128). As Riccardo Bellofiore (2009, 185) puts it, strictly speaking, value “is a
” However, and as Bellofiore also points out, at the point of production
the ghost of value is a Vampire. Social form analysis has tended to conceive of
value one-sidedly (see, for example, Backhaus, 1997; Reichelt, 2008). With
great care, it has developed the money form of capitalist wealth as the form of
appearance of the “ghost of value” and in this context, it has conceived of
abstract labour as
a mental abstraction, if indeed it is necessary at all to speak about labour in the
context of the analysis of the value form (see especially Arthur, 2004).
Bellofiore’s insight that the ghost of value, which appears, however fleetingly,
in the form of money, is also a Vampire is thus resolved one-sidedly in favour
of arguments about value as some abstractly conceived essence that appears in
an “inverted reality” in which commodities “simply instantiate their abstract
essence as values” (Arthur, 2004, 80).
Leaving aside Marx’s ambivalences and interpretative oversights of
contemporary social form analysis, social form is, following Murray (2005, 64;
2017), “the central concept of .” However, it is so only on the
understanding that capital as “pure process, relation, fluidity” is a real
abstraction of “living labour” (Lotz, 2014, 29). Abstract labour is a “social
category” and a “social substance” (Postone, 1993, 145; see also Bonefeld,
2010, 2018). In the following sections, the argument turns towards the
conception of abstract labour as a real abstraction of social labour. It argues that
the labour of capitalist production is valid only as expenditure of socially
necessary labour time. The private appropriation of social labour counts for
nothing if it has no value in exchange. Staying abreast of the competitors, each
trying to validate their private appropriation of social labour in exchange for a
definite quantity of money, is the name of the game, however destructive in its
consequences for the two sources of social wealth, labour and nature. That is to
say, the exchange equivalence between commodities expresses an equivalence
between equal units of valid social labour time, expressed in the form of money.
Postone’s (1993, 146) point that “Marx’s theory of value is identical to his
theory of the fetish” has thus much to recommend it by. Value validity is the
validity of a labour time made abstract, expressed in exchange for a definite
quantity of money.
VALUE AND FETISHISM: ON THE FORM OF LABOUR
In his Marx makes the point that “man” in general
has no natural tendency, needs, consciousness, etc. Man has needs only as
social in character and maintains against the Ricardian tradition that abstract labour is a
specifically capitalist form of labour.
Capital 11
concrete Man and that is, the “determinate character of this social man is to be
brought forward as the starting point, i.e. the determinate character of the
existing community in which he lives” (Marx, 1962, 362). What does this hold
in relation to labour? Regarding use-value producing concrete labour, its social
constitution is easily understood, despite the fact that “use-values […] constitute
the substance of all wealth, whatever may be the social form of that wealth”
(Marx, 1990, 126). Use-values are the “basis of all social progress” (ibid., 293)
and the increase in their “quantity […] is an increase of material wealth” (ibid.,
136). Nevertheless, although “hunger is hunger […] the hunger gratified by
cooked meat eaten with a knife and a fork is a different hunger from that which
bolts down raw meat with the aid of hand, nail and tooth” (Marx, 1973, 92).
Commodity production entails use-values as use-values for others, “social use-
values.” What therefore makes use-value “historically-specific [in] character”
(Marx, 1962, 370; Marx, 1990, 131) is their social form. They are not the use
values, or simply products, of the commons, family, clan, feudal society, or the
Asian mode of production, etc. As was already pointed out by Adam Smith
(1976, chap. 2) use values are not produced to satisfy human needs directly.
They are produced to satisfy the self-interest of what he calls the masters. For
them the use-values have value alone because they have value in exchange. A
product that is not exchanged does not have a social use-value, and the labour
that went into its production was spent unproductively. It is a failed commodity.
What cannot be exchanged for money might as well be burned or left to rot,
regardless of the specific needs that its consumption might satisfy. That is, for
its buyer it is of interest because of its concrete quality. It satisfies certain wants
and definite needs. Its seller, in contrast, is interested in how much money he
can get for it. What is its value in exchange? For its seller, the question is how
long a time did it take to get it ready for exchange for a tidy sum of money that
more than covering the costs of production yields a profit, too. On the pain of
ruin, there really is no time to spare.
For Marx the two distinct qualities of capitalist labour, concrete labour and
abstract labour, belong to the same labour. There is only one labour and there is
only one reality. Regarding concrete labour, which is characterized by its
special quality and utility, it “is not the only source of material wealth” (Marx,
1990, 134). Nature is a source of material wealth too. The labour that is decisive
in the production of capitalist wealth, of value in exchange, is abstract labour.
Abstract labour is difficult to grasp because it is not a concrete labour.
Physiological expenditure of labour is expenditure of concrete labour. Muscles
do not burn sugar in the abstract. That is, physiological expenditure of labour
entails a specific productive application. Labouring in the abstract is quite
impossible. Abstract labour does not produce use-values. It produces value,
which becomes visible in exchange in the form of money. The concrete labour
of use-value production has to prove itself as socially valid in exchange. The
labour that determines whether the expenditure of concrete labour was
12
productive of a social use-value is abstract labour. Abstract labour is therefore
the social reality of concrete labour. Against Adam Smith, Marx emphasises
that it is a labour that is “forcibly brought about” by exchange (Marx, 1987b,
299). What Marx means here by exchange is not “exchange with nature,” in
which human energy is expended, but the exchange of commodities in capitalist
society. Commodities either realise their social use-values through exchange
with money or they fail to do so. Money does not express their use-value. It
expresses their exchange value. Value can therefore not be the substance of a
single commodity. The value of a commodity is thus its social value.
The social character of capitalist labour entails a process of a real
abstraction. In explanation,
“the bodies of commodities are combinations of two elements—matter and
labour. If we take away the useful labour expended upon them, a material
substratum is always left, which is furnished by Nature without any help
of Man. We see, then, that labour is not the only source of material wealth,
of use-values produced by labour” (Marx, 1990, 133).
In distinction, the value of a commodity represents “human labour in the
abstract” (ibid., 128), which comprises “a purely social” reality (ibid., 139) that
is both invisible and visible, and above all exacting. Indeed, if we abstract from
the useful labour expended on a product, we do not discover the so-called
generic materiality of abstract labour. What we find is matter, something for
use, furnished by Nature. In contrast, abstract labour does “not contain an atom
of use value” (ibid., 128). It is devoid of anything concrete. Abstract labour
“ either a geometrical, a chemical, or any other of
commodities. Such properties claim our attention only in so far as they affect
the utility of those commodities, make them use-values” (ibid., 127, emphasis
WB). Indeed, no chemist
“has ever discovered exchange value either in a pearl or a diamond. The
economic discoverers of this chemical element, who by-the-by lay special
claim to critical acumen, find however that the use-value of objects belongs
to them independently of their material properties, while their value, on the
other hand, forms a part of them as objects. What confirms them in this
view, is the peculiar circumstance that the use value of objects is realised
without exchange, by means of a direct relation between the objects and
man, while, on the other their value is realised only by exchange, that is, by
means of a social process” (ibid., 177).
What, then, is specific about capitalism, is not abstract labour as such but the
circumstance that concrete labour has to take the form of its opposite, abstract
labour, to achieve value-validity as expenditure of socially necessary labour.
Capital 13
Abstract labour is a “specific social form of labour” (Marx, 1987b, 278)—it is
the labour that determines the social validity of the private expenditure of
concrete labour.
The concrete labour that was expended in the production of a social use-
value achieves social validity in exchange for money. Money makes the
expenditure of abstract labour visible. However, money does not express the
value of a commodity; the commodity does not have an intrinsic value. Rather,
and as Christopher J. Arthur puts it, money represents the measurability of
value (Arthur, 2005, 117). Money is the form in which a commodity expresses
its validity as a product of abstract labour. As a real abstraction, abstract labour
extinguishes therefore society’s “sensuous characteristics” (Marx, 1990, 128). It
is indeed the case that “there is no difference or distinction in things of equal
value. One hundred pounds’ worth of lead or iron, is of as great value as one
hundred pounds’ worth of silver or gold” (ibid., 127–28). Money does not
objectify an intrinsic material quality. Rather, it objectifies a ‘social quality
(relation) which is, at the same time, external to [the social individuals] (Marx,
1973, 226). Indeed, the money form of capitalist wealth ‘conceals the social
character of private labour’ (Marx, 1990, 164). In fact, it privatises the
individuals as personifications of economic abstractions, each trying to maintain
the strength of their connection to a dynamic of social wealth that imposes itself
upon them as if by force of nature. There is no freedom from economic
compulsion; there is however the freedom to adjust to the movement of
economic things. Thus, “the commodity reflects the social characteristics of
Men’s own labour as objectified characteristics of the products of labour
themselves, as social natural properties of these things” (ibid., 164–65). As the
next section argues, what asserts itself as such is the law of value as a real
abstraction of social time, a time without content, pure quantity, yet variable
and restless, and exacting to the point of madness.
ON THE TIME OF VALUE
The previous section argued that abstract labour is the substance of value as
the socially necessary expenditure of concrete labour. The measure of socially
necessary labour is socially necessary labour time. This section argues that the
time of abstract labour is a time made abstract. This time, as Guy Debord (1992,
87) put it, “has no reality apart from its . Value emerges thus as
an “abstraction of social time” (Bensaid, 2002, 75). In the words of Tony Smith
(2005, 176), value is a “perverse form of sociality based on the of
private producers.” Its sociality comprises a sociality of money. Money is the
“real community [ !]” of capitalist wealth (Marx, 1973, 225). In the
capitalist metabolism with nature the satisfaction of human needs is really just
14
a sideshow. What counts is exchangeability for money for the sake of money as
more money.
Marx developed the connection between abstract labour and social labour
time in his " of 1859. is not as explicit on this connection, but, in
my view, presupposes it. He quotes from his " in volume one:
“As values, all commodities are only definite masses of congealed labour-time”
(Marx, 1990, 130; 1987a, 272). In his " he argues that “[o]n the one
hand, commodities must enter the exchange process as objectified universal
labour time, on the other hand, the labour time of individuals becomes
objectified universal labour time only as a result of the exchange process”
(Marx, 1987b, 286). When talking about value, we are therefore talking about
the expenditure of “definite masses of crystallised [social] labour time” (Marx,
1990, 297). That is to say, “labour time is the living state of existence of labour
[…] it is the living quantitative aspect of labour as well as its inherent measure”
(Marx, 1987b, 272). Concrete labour takes place in its own good time. It has a
concrete temporality. In order for this labour to count as a valid expenditure of
social labour, it has to appear as its opposite, as an exemplar of abstract social
time, that is, as an expenditure of socially necessary labour time.
Capitalist wealth is haunted by the spectre of socially necessary labour time.
“Socially necessary labour time is the labour-time required to produce any use-
value under the prevailing socially normal conditions of production and with the
prevalent socially average degree of skill and intensity of labour” (Marx, 1990,
129). It is independent from the individual expenditure of labour; and yet,
results “from the actions of the producers” (Postone, 1993, 191, also 215). The
commodity entails a clash of temporalities. The time of abstract labour exists
only through the concrete labour of definite social production processes, and
every concrete labour takes place in its own time. The establishment of socially
necessary labour time is an abstraction of social labour time, which as such does
not exist. Nevertheless, this “abstraction […] is made on a daily basis in every
social production process. The dissolution of all commodities into labour-time
is no greater an abstraction, but no less real than that of all organic bodies into
air” (Marx, 1987b, 272). It is a “social process that goes on behind the backs of
the producers” (Marx, 1990, 135) and yet, it is their work.
It is thus not Man who meets her needs in time. Rather, time subsumes Man,
as if by fate, and organises her labour according to an economy of time that
never stands still and as such, and on the pain of ruin, ticks and tacks the
“exchangeability” of the concrete expenditures of labour. On the one hand,
then, actual labour is always labour that is “actually expended” (Marx 1990:
143) within its own time. On the other, each commodity “objectifies general
social labour time, a specific quantity of general labour time, is expressed in its
exchange value in a series in determinate quantities of different use-values, and
conversely, the exchange value of all other commodities measures the use-value
of this exclusive commodity” (Marx, 1987b, 288). Concrete labour-time has to
Capital 15
occur within a time made abstract, this is the time of socially necessary labour.
Concrete labour time is compelled to occur within the time of abstract labour. If
it does not, it counts of nothing and is valueless. In sum, the time of abstract
labour is dissociated from the actual human affairs of which it is a social
average and which it measures as socially valid. There is thus no time for
enjoyment. There is only one time and that is the time of “exchangeability”
(Debord). For the expenditure of private labour to be valid as social labour on a
world market scale, it cannot occur in its own good time. Socially necessary
labour time is thus both “a measure of value and […] its substance” (Bensaid,
2002, 80). It is the time of exchangeability, and thus the time of economic
success or failure, value validity or bankruptcy.
In sum, the value of a commodity is “its social value; that is to say, its value
is not measured by the labour-time that the article costs the producer in each
individual case, but by the labour time socially required for its production”
(Marx, 1990, 434). Value equivalence is equivalence of definite units of valid
social labour time. “Only because the labour time of the spinner and the labour
time of the weaver represent universal labour time and their products are thus
universal equivalents, is the social aspect of the labour of the two individuals
represented for each of them by the labour of the other” (Marx, 1987b, 274). In
this sense, each labourer is a personification of units of abstract social time. As
Marx put it in his ", “labour, which is thus measured by time, does not
seem, indeed, to be the labour of different subjects, but on the contrary the
different working individuals seem to be mere organs of labour [… of]
labour ” (ibid., 272). Different expenditures of validated
private
labours are thus different expenditures of the same social labour time (see ibid.,
273-74). Objectified social labour is the objectified labour of a working
individual, an “individual indistinguishable from all other individuals” (ibid.,
274, translation amended). “The total labour power of society, which is
manifested in the values of the world of commodities, counts here as one
homogeneous mass of labour-power, although composed of innumerable
individual units of labour power” (Marx, 1990, 129). Insofar as “each of these
units is the same as any other, to the extent that it has the character of a socially
average unit of labour-power [...] only needs […] the labour time which is…
socially necessary” (ibid.). Social labour time “is both the substance that turns
[the use-values] into exchange values and therefore into commodities, and the
standard by which the precise magnitude of their value is measured” (Marx,
1987b, 272). Social labour time is therefore the ‘hidden secrete under the
apparent movement in the relative values of commodities’ (Marx, 1990, 168).
Price movements do thus not express the coincidence of selling and buying.8
8 According to Marx (1990, 168) the first chapter of is the outcome of his research into
the monetary-prices of commodities. As he put it, “it was solely the analysis of the prices of
commodities which led to the determination of the magnitude of value, and solely the common
16
Rather, “in the midst of the accidental and every fluctuating exchange relations
between the products, the labour-time socially necessary to them asserts itself as
a regulative law of nature” (ibid., 168). The idea of an invisible hand of market
regulation is therefore not untrue. Its truth “has its origin […] in the peculiar
social character of the labour that produces them” (165).
expression of all commodities in money which led to the establishment of their character as
values.”
Capital 17
TIME IS MONEY AND THE SHEER UNREST OF LIFE
Socially necessary labour time is not fixed and given. It increases or falls
with the increase or fall in social labour productivity. The “labour time that
yesterday was without doubt socially necessary for the production of a yard of
linen, ceases to be so today” (Marx, 1990, 202). That is to say, whether the
concrete expenditure of labour time is valid as a socially necessary expenditure
of labour time can only be established # (Tomba, 2014, 140).
Concrete labour is expended “in the hope, rather than the assurance, that the
labour they perform will turn out to be socially required” (Smith 1990, 69).
Labour that does not produce value in exchange is wasted with potentially
ruinous consequences. Indeed, “the labour content of commodities deserves the
name of value of a certain magnitude only insofar as it proves itself to be such
through being sold. Only then (that is, #) can we properly speak of the
labour performed in the immediate process of production as value-creating
[social] labour” (Eldret, Hanlon, 1981, 26). The concrete labour time that was
effectively expended in a definite labour process might be inferior or superior to
the existing conditions of socially necessary labour time. This commander of
labour time might struggle to make the cut while another might as well sell “as
less than its social value, even though he sells [above] its individual value”
(Tomba, 2014, 142).9 Instead of throwing away the key and declaring his capital
defunct, the inferior employer of social labour will struggle to reassert himself
as a valuable member of the community of money by exerting pressure achieve
greater labour productivity or by reducing the costs of labour, driving down the
conditions of labour, etc. The struggle for competitiveness is constant. The
dynamic of socially necessary labour time, this abstract form of economic
compulsion for the achievement of lower unit labour costs, appears in
competition as a seemingly “external coercive [law]” whereas in fact it asserts
“the immanent laws of capitalist production” (Marx, 1990, 739).
The dynamic of socially necessary labour time is not limited to the social
validity of actual labour processes. It also affects the social value of already
produced and exchanged commodities. In relation to constant capital, Marx
speaks about the risk of moral depreciation, which reduces retroactively the
exchange value of, say, a machine or raw materials that only yesterday
established a competitive advantage. According to Marx (1990, 318) and
drawing on Tomba (2014, 141), a machine loses exchange-value, either because
machines of the same sort are being produced more cheaply than it was, or
9 Tomba’s use of the term individual value is problematic. It sails close to the traditional labour
theory of embodied value, of value as an intrinsic substance of a commodity. Yet, is also says
what needs to be said: Labour with higher productivity reduces the socially necessary labour and
takes a greater share of social value than that labour which lags behind. Competition for the social
validation of private labour compels the laggard to adjust and the productivity “leader” to
maintain its advantage. There is no time for relaxation.
18
because better machines are entering into competition with it. In both cases,
however full of life the machine may be, its value is not determined by the
socially necessary
labour-time that was originally objectified in it, but by the social labour-time
necessary to produce either it anew or the better machine. In this case, it has
been devalued to a greater or less extent. Every capitalist might therefore find
that a new piece of equipment that only yesterday seemed to secure a
competitive advantage, making his production process superior to the existing
conditions of socially necessary labour time, only to find that shortly thereafter
its value is drastically reduced by some further innovation. Its moral
depreciation threatens the capitalist with a loss and spurs him into action to
preserve his capital by frantically seeking to keep the machinery running
without interruption, day and night, to secure the ready transfer of its value to
new commodities before its value diminishes and depreciates “prematurely.”
For labour the implications are formidable, including the pressure to extend
the working day through shift work, intensification of labour, increased density
of work, cuts in down time for the worker, or other cost cutting measures such
as cheaper workers and raw materials to compensate for the loss of the value
that has been sunk into the depreciating machinery.10 Marx therefore argues that
in capitalism every social progress turns into a calamity has to do with the
impact of enhanced labour productivity on the conditions of socially necessary
labour time.11 Every increase in social labour productivity increases material
wealth but in its capitalist form cheapens the commodities leading to intensified
competition for what is called market shares, getting value in exchange from
committed labour. Furthermore, every increase in labour productivity shortens
the hours of labour but in its capitalist form, it lengthens them. The introduction
of sophisticated machinery lightens labour but in its capitalist form, it heightens
the intensity of labour. Every increase in the productivity of labour increases the
material wealth of society but in its capitalist form cheapens the labourers,
whose commodity, that is, labour power, is falls in value as less socially
necessary labour time is required for its reproduction. Most importantly of all,
greater labour productivity sets labour free, makes labour redundant. But rather
than shortening the hours of work and thus absorbing available labour into
production on the basis of a shorter working day, liberating social time from
production for enjoyment, those in employment are worked more intensively,
while those made redundant find themselves on the scrap heap of a mode of
production in which the satisfaction of human needs is a mere sideshow.
10 The points raised here about moral depreciation reinforces the argument of social form
analysis that value is fundamentally a social value and that, with reference to Marx (1990: 318),
the value of a commodity is at any time “measured by the labour socially necessary to produce
them, i.e., by the labour necessary under the social conditions existing at the time.” On the
connection between enhanced labour productive and the cheapening of labour, see Marx (1990,
part 5; 1966, chaps. 13–15).
11 On the calamities of capitalist development see Marx (1990, 568–69).
Capital 19
Capital is thus the moving contradiction, [in] that it presses to reduce [social]
labour time to a minimum, while it posits [socially necessary] labour time, on
the other side, as sole measure and source of wealth” (Marx, 1973, 706). And
then, without forewarning, “[s]ociety suddenly finds itself put back into a state
of momentary barbarism; it appears as if famine, a universal war of devastation
had cut off the supply of every means of subsistence; industry and commerce
seem to be destroyed; and why? Because there is too much civilisation, too
much means of subsistence; too much industry, too much commerce. The
productive forces at the disposal of society no longer tend to further the
development of the conditions of bourgeois property; on the contrary, they have
become too powerful for these conditions, by which they are fettered, and so
soon as they overcome these fetters, they bring disorder into the whole of
bourgeois society, endanger the existence of bourgeois property. The conditions
of bourgeois society are too narrow to comprise the wealth created by them.
And how does bourgeois society get over these crises? On the one hand by
enforced destruction of a mass of productive forces; on the other, by the
conquest of new markets, and by the more thorough exploitation of the old
ones’ (Marx, Engels, 1997, 18–19). Overproduction is a false name for glutted
market conditions. In the face of manifest social need, it is not the use-values
that have been overproduced as such. What has been overproduced are social
use-value that as failed commodities cannot be converted into money as more
money.
I have argued that abstract labour is a real abstraction of social compulsion.
It “exerts an abstract form of compulsion” (Postone, 1993, 214) that compels
the social individuals as personifications of a motion of abstract time that does
indeed seem to be regulated by an invisible hand.12 Work has to be performed
not in its own good time, but within a time made abstract. Work that is not
completed within the time of value validity is wasted, valueless, regardless of
the social needs that its useful expenditure might satisfy. That is, ‘the labour
time expended must not exceed what is necessary under the given social
conditions of production’ (Marx, 1990, 295). How much labour went in to it?
How long a time did it take? Time is money and money is time. Time cannot be
wasted. If then, capitalism reduces everything to an abstract time that as such
does not exist in the concrete labour processes and that therefore is dissociated
from the concrete human circumstances and purposes which it measures in
terms of their social value, then, really, time is everything. If “
$, [then] %& & ” (Marx,
1976, 127). In distinction to a substantialist labour theory of value, which holds
that value is embodied in commodities, one man’s hour is not worth another
man’s hour of labour. Rather, on the condition that each hour represents an
expenditure of socially necessary labour, “one man during an hour is worth just
12 Marx says, fetishism is real—it is neither an illusion nor untrue. Rather, its truth is its own
untruth. That is, its reality is an objective illusion.
20
as much as another man during an hour” (ibid.). Whether this or that hour, or
both, represent such expenditures of socially necessary labour time is
established in exchange, after the labour has been committed. There really is
therefore no time to lose to ensure that its expenditure really is socially valid as
the labour of “exchangeability.” Abstract labour is a ghost-like labour. At the
point of production, it feeds on living labour, like a Vampire. “Nibbling and
cribbling at meal times,” “petty pilfering of minutes” and “snatching a few
minutes” of additional labour time comprise the “elements of profit.” For the
sake of capitalist wealth, the worker is really “nothing more than personified
labour-time” (Marx, 1990, 352–3)—a “ .”
Value-validity is the validity of a time made abstract. Time is money.
Labour time is money time. What counts is money as more money. In a world
governed by the movement of economic quantities, human suffering appears
thus as a mere metaphysical distraction. That is to say, the macro-economic
calculation of the unemployed as economic zeros is not untrue. It makes clear
that labouring for money, for “profitable exchangeability” (Bonefeld, 2016), is
innate to the concept of the worker. Suffering disappears in the form of an
“immense collection of commodities” (Marx, 1990, 125). Its disappearance is
also its appearance in the form of money as more money, that is, it appears in
the real community of capitalist wealth with a price tag.
CONCLUSION
I have argued that in capitalism, every concrete labour is “the” social labour
on the condition that it is productive of value in exchange, expressed in the form
of money. Concrete labour that does not produce value in exchange is valueless.
To the vanishing point of death, the life of the class tied to work hangs by the
success of turning her labour into money, cash, price and profit, in competition
with all other sellers of labour power on a global scale. The alternatives are
bleak. Yesterday’s valuable appropriation of some other person’s labour buys
another Man today, the buyer for the sake of making a profit to avoid
bankruptcy; the seller in order to live. What can the seller of redundant labour
power trade in its stead—body and body substances: how many for the
sweatshops of the world, enslavement to gang-masters, and how many for
pornography and prostitution, and how many for drug mules and kidney sales
(Bonefeld, 2006)?
Distinct conceptions of abstract labour entail different political implications.
In the traditional perspective, abstract labour is labour in the physiological
sense, as productive expenditure of brains, muscles, nerves and hands. It is seen
as “the” transhistorically valid labour. The traditional critique of capitalism is
critique of the capitalist mode of labour economy and for the socialist mode of
labour economy that is characterised by central economic planning. Rubin’s
(1972) turn towards a critical theory of value argued against the transhistorical
Capital 21
naturalisation of abstract labour and for its determination as a specifically
capitalist form of labour. Politically, this turn rejected socialism as a well-
ordered republic of labour. The traditional understanding of labour as economic
necessity remains mired in the illusionary certainty of transhistorical laws of
development, which on closer inspection seems in every respect to be tied to
capitalist realities, from the materiality of labour and labourism (Marx, 1970) to
the philosophy of history (Benjamin, 1999).
The social form critique of the capitalist labour points towards a distinct
conception of social wealth in communism. In this “association of free men”
(Marx, 1990, 171) wealth is not labour time. Rather, it is freely disposable time,
time for enjoyment (Marx, 1973, 708). The wealth of the communist individuals
and the wealth of capitalist labour belong to different realities.13 For
communism social time is labour time, equality is an abstract equality
before the money and the labourer is a time’s carcass. It is not ruled by
social abstractions. Its metabolism with nature is a means towards the
accumulation of abstract wealth. Rather, this society of communist individuals
is characterized by the equality of individual human needs, and the satisfaction
of human beings. It recognizes humanity as a purpose, not as a means. The time
of value and the time of human purposes belong to different worlds. The time of
human purposes is the time of the democratic organization of the means of
human existence by the community of the communist individuals themselves.
This community of equals does not produce social use-values. It produces
goods for the satisfaction of the freely associated indivuals, of the commons.14
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR — PhD, professor, University of York, Department of
Politics, York YO10 5 DD, UK. He studied at the University of Marburg, the Free
University of Berlin and the University of Edinburgh where he received his doctorate.
Before coming to York he taught at the Universities of Frankfurt and Edinburgh. His
Capital 23
work contributed to the development of the internationally recognized Open Marxism
School. Recent book publications: 2014. '"4
5 Blomomsbury Academic% 2017. ' 25 .
Rowman & Littlefield;2018. Co-editor, with Beverley Best and Chris O’Kane, '
5-,2,', three volumes. Sage.
E-mail:werner.bonefeld@york.ac.uk