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Chapter 6. Time and Labor
- State University of New York Press
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C H A P T E R 6 TIME AND LABOR Economy of time, to this all economy ultimately reduces itself. —Karl Marx, Grundrisse T he critique of capitalism has thus far received an articulation emphasizing the quality of human labor as creative/self-creative activity. This essential productive-processive capacity is usurped without return of equivalent; indeed, further, such an exchange equivalent for activated labor power cannot be found as the activity itself is essentially inalienable and unique.1 Thus, I have maintained that the central core of Marx’s critique of capitalism as it is expressed in the labor theory of value (and its implicit critique of wage labor) relies upon an ontology that distinguishes differences of being according to degree of productive novelty and that takes the productive (creative) ability that extends far beyond mere self-reproduction to be the ontological characteristic peculiar to human being. The critique then focuses on the illegitimacy of treating one as the equivalent of the other and reveals, as necessary outcome of such a practice of misappropriation , a fundamental injustice. But there is another dimension to and level of this critique, another standpoint from which it can be articulated and this additional articulation allows also the expansion of the critique. Marx’s statements regarding necessary and surplus labor as constitutive qualities of human productive activity are simultaneously expressed as temporal functions: necessary labor time and surplus labor time within the temporal extension of a workday. It is now necessary to explore how it is and why it is that the expression of the ontological character of human activity in the world must necessarily receive additional expression as a function of temporal activity. This exploration will elucidate the continuity underlying Marx’s move from the labor market to the sphere production. The qualitative ontological features expressed in the labor theory 107 of value that render the sale and purchase of labor power invalid, reappear in a quantitative temporal form that will itself receive expression both as intensive , characterizing labor power in the sphere of exchange, and as extensive, characterizing labor power activated in the sphere of production. It is the shift to this temporal form that facilitates the move into the sphere of production and the subsequent critique of capitalistic exploitation. The capitalist mode of production is an extensive act of human self and world constitution through the appropriation, productive activity, objectification and is, therefore, a mode of temporal being/becoming: the appropriation brings the past into the present, the productive activity enacts a new valuation of that data, the objectification indicates the value of this achievement for the future. It should not be surprising that, on a process view, how we make ourselves as beings is how we make ourselves in time, how we are time, and how time is us. The human being is a temporally extended social unity of a multitude of processive societies. To be, on the macroontological scale, is to be a relational unity of acts of becoming. The unity of such extensive, noncontemporaneous relations constitutes temporality. This is the equivalent of saying that being constitutes temporality or that being is temporal. Thus, a specific socio-historical mode of being will reveal itself through and as its temporal structure. It is because being and doing are concomitant notions, it is because the essential nature of human labor is existed as temporally extended that the human activity can be exploited in the ownership of the workday. The critique is, therefore, not merely directed at the real robbery of creative life itself, but also shows how such robbery is indeed itself a mode of life, a form of social relations, a specific way in which we constitute ourselves, our world, and others in, through, and over time, that is, historically. METAPHYSICS AND TIME It should be evident straight off that temporal being must be macroontological . In other words, beings that appear in time are what Whitehead would call enduring societies of actual entities. However, since it has been a basic claim throughout this work that the macroontological level is emergent from or only properly explained by the metaphysical level, it is only appropriate at this juncture to say a few introductory words about the meaning of time on the metaphysical level before launching outward to the discussion of the temporality of capitalism’s social relations. Such metaphysical analysis is no small task, and not one for which I will claim to provide any ultimate answers. What I will attempt...