LABOUR, VALUE,

AND THE PROBLEM OF TIME

Methodological Considerations

to Dialectics 

(2005)

1. First, the existence of a system of concepts presupposes the existence of a real system conditioning of interconnected moments of general meaning to human life. Secondly, the concepts have no meaning taken one by one; only in their systemic interconnection.

Correspondingly, real systems force their elements to be functionally interconnected too. We can of course analyse each element in single; but to understand their functions and inner relations we must observe their essential interconnections. Further, the real and the conceptual systems stand as such in mutual interconnection, which also has to be analysed as a kind of ‘meta-theory’ reflecting their mutual dependence and further developments. Here we shall mostly be concerned with only a real and conceptual pair of systems, materially and ideally of capitalist society. This, however, reduced into its most simple and abstract model.

We shall refer to a couple of quotations from Karl Marx’s Capital and E.J. Hobsbawm’s Industry and Empire. The aim of these is to give a first impression of the state of affairs at the beginning of modern epoch. On this basis, Marx characterises the ‘primitive’ state of capitalist accumulation based on “the historical process of divorcing the producer from the means of production” and consequently on the “division between the product of labour and labour itself.” This is what Marx called the “So-Called Primitive Accumulation”. 

 A division between the product of labour and labour itself, between the objective conditions of labour and subjective labour-power was … the real foundation and the starting-point of the process of capitalist production.

But what at first was merely a starting-point becomes, by means of nothing but the continuity of the process, by simple reproduction, the characteristic result of capitalist production, a result, which is constantly renewed and perpetuated.[1]

 So-called primitive accumulation is therefore nothing else than the historical process of

divorcing the producer from the means of production. It appears as ‘primitive’ because it forms the pre-history of capital, and the mode of production corresponding to capital.[2]

Thus, in this revolutionary starting point of capitalism we are confronted with an insofar-abstract society model seeing people divorced from their natal means of production and alienated from their natal way of life and reproduction. Irrelevant here is every personal love, hatred, and other forms of subjective behaviour and conduct. But just as life – even for such expropriated people – had to go on the processes of reproduction it had to continue in an uninterrupted flow of consumption and production, of sorting out and renewal. As people couldn’t secure their own subsistence any longer in their traditional ways they now had to go to the new factories in the towns offering themselves to employment by their owners.

In this way, a quite new social structure had to be built up on the ruins of the old society. This was primarily done by these ‘liberated’ and isolated (really alienated) people basing their individualised style of life on the simple sum of steadily repeated decisions on the market (incl. the labour market). The becoming capitalists, true, had the money; but the poor alienated people had to take the new initiatives to secure their survival.

2. To keep the whole analysis in its most purely abstract form we shall leave out all concern with subjective moments of agreement and specific meanings to the market ‘parties’ (cf. My Name is Weaver on this home page in the book Formale und generative Dialektik, chapter II). We shall first refer to Marx’s “general capital formula” dividing the market society in the ‘party’ or ‘class’ of simple commodity producers based on the cycle commodity-money-commodity, C-M-C, and that of the merchants representing the ‘class’ of money owners, the becoming capitalists, viewing the market cycle from the opposite side, M-C-M’, money-commodity-more money.

But it seems as if the formula M-C-M’ lacks an essential moment. You could wonder why just in this ‘general capital formula’ by Marx the labour-power has not been represented. This formula could therefore better be taken as the general formula of merchant capitalism, that is, the market as such. Nevertheless, labour-power is implicit represented insofar commodities as such are defined as labour products for sale. Further, Marx also insofar involves labour power implicitly in his formula also accepting this as a kind of commodity; thus, besides the normal commodities, the term C can represent this special commodity too.

So the combined series of single market transaction (symbolised by arrows) could be written in the following way:

   C        C         C        C

k  m  k  m  k  m  k  m  k.

        M        M’      M’’     M’’’

So the simple producers look at this chain from above, the merchants from below. In this simplified form, producer and capitalist insofar create no real opposition, only participate in the market function from opposite vantage points, distinguishable, but inseparable, realizing different moments of the same economic circulation. This is the case, then, when “we consider capitalist production in the uninterrupted flow of its renewal,” that is abstracting from all individual decisions and agreements. But note, without at least some degree of relevance looking at the world in exactly this abstract way we should in principle never be able to define the concepts of value and capital. How this is done will be shown below. On the other hand, the different perspectives, in which this uninterrupted flow of commodities and money is seen, also defines the real basis of the class struggle to develop. The aim of this sketch, however, is not to describe this development in historical terms but only to have a strictly abstract view of the central concepts of Marxian capital analysis.

3. To this end, we shall now also quote E.J. Hobsbawm’s Industry and Empire describing in an empirical way the economical situation in England in the middle of the eighteenth century, the historical preconditions for the capitalist development to come. Thereby, in fact, he also supports the more theoretical quotations from Marx above:

   We shall note above all that England [...] was already a monetary and market economy on a national scale. A ‘nation of shopkeepers’ implies a nation of producers for sale on the market; not to mention a nation of customers. In the cities this was natural enough, for a close and self-sufficient economy is impossible in towns above a certain size... [...] [with a population] whose insatiable demand for food and fuel transformed agriculture all over the South and East, drew regular supplies by land and river from even the remotest parts of Wales and the North, and stimulated the coalmines of Newcastle. Regional price variations in non-perishable and easy transportable foodstuffs like cheese were already small. What is more important, England no longer paid the heaviest penalty of self-sufficient local and regional economies, famine.[3]

So Marx’s two formulas reflect what generally happened in the local sphere of exchange. We must also mention that Marx in a strictly formal, objective way only defined the exchange value, the primary value function of just this sphere – unfortunately without ever offering a quite clear distinction between exchange value and value as such, besides of course stating the essential time dependence of the latter. But certainly he also reflects what happens in the production sphere, the use of science and technology etc. conditioning the ‘productive labour’.

But use-values are as such in the whole first volume of Capital not seriously discussed (plays first a somewhat greater role in the sector analysis in the second volume). At Marx’s time, perhaps, the really serious problem was rather to get goods in quantity than to discuss them in quality? Fact is, however, that this omission is followed by some disregard of the subjective moments of what really happens in the consumption sphere, and this has to be discussed now.

4. The matter is that the market exchange only realizes one of the sphere transgressions for normal life of the (modern) society – this exactly being based on the equivalence principle saying that commodities are to be exchanged to their values. But in fact we have to consider all three spheres and sphere transgressions, the two others being the production sphere in the workshops and the consumption sphere ‘at home’ using the commodities – including the ‘inner’ metabolic transgression in the sense of personal reproduction. Here the use value is realized as usefulness.[4] These spheres interact on the basis of balanced exchange so that its Trinitarian system reproduces itself – even more, paradoxically, strictly following this ‘Law of Value’ it in reality expands itself. Marx solved this obvious contradiction by saying that the special ‘commodity’ labour power just had the use-value of producing surplus value.

However, there is an essential difference between these spheres and their process forms. Marx himself calls the market exchange a “formal process”, i.e. an atemporal, momentary (non-physical) process changing the individual property relations. This is based on the fact that all subjective moments of decision and agreement in principle are a-temporal (but of course done at a certain ‘point of time’). Relative to this formal sphere the two others are its direct contraposition, metabolism even non-economic, and therefore in economic terms in fact undecided. In short, production and consumption are real material processes in time, and the market merely the place of their meeting; the place where something made in the past is exchanged with something to be used in the future. In the state of social equilibrium (steady state), the processes of production and consumption must therefore be in relative balance. This was just Hobsbawm’s statement. On the other hand, these spheres operate with different parameters of time, a time of production, labour time, and a time of consumption of using the commodities, so to speak, in the time of life.

5. The really ‘revolutionary’ point in British economy conditioning the primordial development of capitalism was just this ‘so-called primitive accumulation’ generating a new form of balance between sale and purchase, between money owners (capitalists), and the new class of alienated people in this newly atomised society.

On the other hand, these individuals represent only themselves (possibly their households); they were autonomous, had to seek their income where they could find it, and could themselves decide their expenditures. So each single household had to realize their own balance without supervision. Consequently, under the existing ‘Law of Value’, they were ‘free’ to ‘navigate’[5] in their own way making their expenditures a strictly private affair.

Nevertheless, without means of production, the general scarcity in goods transformed itself into a generalised scarcity in money. ‘Freedom’ therefore to many meant to be forced to offer themselves to the factories. Exactly on this basis, the narrow relation between the spheres of production and consume was established. Wages and expenditure balanced. Without this relative equilibrium no organized social life of any durability would have been possible. Money functioned as a mute distribution system so that in principle no one had to starve; no worker neither being wealthy.

6. We shall use this abstract capitalist market model here to analyse the opposite processes of (simple, without surplus) production and consumption. We could formulate this opposition by means of a symmetrical bi-implication: A basket of goods (P) produced in compound labour time t   Û  a basket of goods  (C) consumed over the same coherent period of ‘lived time’  T . The arrow sign Û is readable in both directions. In short:  P_t Û C_T . This bi-implication must, in the first narrowing, be valid to the society as a whole and in general to each single constituent economic unit too. We therefore say: P_t  and  C_T  are equivalent,  P_t ≡ C_T .

That the equivalent exchange of these baskets in fact is quantitatively mediated by means of the material money gives the immediate impression that this ‘money’ of some currency in fact represents ‘something’ distributed over the mutually exchangeable commodities in equal quantities. The equivalence we write P_t ≡ C_T , is therefore easily re-interpreted: The ‘value’ of P is identical to the ‘value’ of C:  [P_t] = [C_T]  (the sign [...] meaning ‘value’ of). But insofar the ‘value’ is inherently distributed over the opposite commodities; their ‘value’ at the same time has been numerically determined. That is, each single commodity is thereby ‘measured’ securing the ‘right’ exchange relation to maintain the balance on the market.

        Neither the claim of equivalence nor the transformation of this expression into that of identity would have been possible had this claim been quite senseless. But its accept made the final abstraction of an inherent value concept, so to say an abstract, idealised ‘value substance’ possible – even more: it thereby opened the way for the economical science. ‘Value therefore, as well as money as its meter, are both ‘meaningful’ just in this sense of being objective means to secure continuity of the social life by the market function.

7. Here we note that the two different functions P and C are characterised by their own time forms (as durations) t, respectively t. Here t is the distributed duration of making the goods, e.g. the time for realizing labour power in the workshop. On the other hand, the time T is simply the coherent time of life (the whole or a certain period thereof) of which time t is a part. The time t 0 T is for purposive making of things, production of commodities etc.; the rest of T, then, is reserved for sleep, restoration, and other personal activities.                 

We might note too that if in this model t  = T we would have P  = C which, however, would cancel the whole economic formation as such based on a concept of labour time strictly distinguished from time of life in general. In such a case, our model would rather resemble an ideal form of ‘original communism’ or a similarly idealised future ‘communism’ based on non-exploitation under the condition of, in principle, non-distinction between consumptive and productive activities. This would indicate a society in which you could “work after ability and become what you require” and consequently cancel the very concept of ‘value’ as such. In such a society we would have no essential distinction between labour and other social activities in favour of the community as a whole. But also note that ideas of making P  = C are not quite foreign to modern forms of management.

8. But we have also to encounter two strictly different forms of the ‘time’ t. We must distinguish between what we could call ‘outer’ and ‘inner’ t-time. Seen from the vantage points of the economical actors, the ‘outer’ or objective time is commonly better known and easy to operate and discuss, simply because of numerical clock reading. This form of time is connected to actions with, and movements of things, respectively other humans, all of which then are faced as objects. Relative to them we occupy the third-person stance saying for instance “this thing is observed for so and so long time”, “it moves slow or fast”, “it is staying here since…” “he has lived for seventy years” etc. This time form, measurable in countable units, is also that of the labour time to be paid for. “Time is money!” All time measurements are registered in institutionalised ways after social agreement.

Much more primitive and therefore much more difficult to handle is the ‘inner’, subjective time. Of course we self-consciously look at ourselves and state for instance “I have been satisfied for so and so long time”, “I (or we) am/are staying here for the next week”, “I (or we) am/are moving slowly” etc., or even “my birth certificate tells me that I am seventy eight years old”. Insofar there are no problems. But all these cases concern I-myself, looking at myself, meaning that my ‘I’ self-reverently is looking back at ‘me’ as in a mirror, that is, again from a third-person stance. Self-consciously we also in these cases refer to time measurements by clock readings, these in a somehow real sense representing just this third-person stance as such.

But contrary to this, the genuine ‘inner’ awareness exists only as experienced from the first-person stance, inexpressible in any full sentence (“hurry”, “running”, “longing for…”, “anticipate…” etc.) and therefore representing the real problem of the matter. Immediately experienced ‘time’ is in this sense unknown to any other/outer person that the experiencing ‘I’ himself and so just ‘unsay-able´, nor can it in any other way be confirmed and registered. Zeno of Elea most profoundly of all discussed this problem in his well-known and extremely provocatively formulated paradox of Achilles and the Tortoise (see my essay thereabout on this homepage).

This means that all references to ‘time’ as such, through clocks or otherwise, necessarily need actualisation and confirmation from some ‘outer’ vantage point from the third-person stance. This cannot be understood quite ‘automatically’. The problem is always to determine how this third-person stance in praxis is realized, possibly registered in specific institutionalised form. On the lower level, this problem is simply solved in traditional speech. On the higher level, by means of some social institution realizing the function in a more centralised way. Labour time will always be measured by how to be paid in money. Or the owner/master of a manufacture workshop by planning the production for sale for instance declares that a certain job should be finished at a certain ‘point of time’. This instruction will be internalised by the workers to organize their labour. Quite generally, it was exactly this possibility that was principally missing by poor Zenonian Achilles. On the quite elementary personal level, however, this problem is simply solved by means of the self-referring neurological equipment being an essential part of the human body as such and so (unconsciously!) creating this personal (conscious) ‘I’.

9. We assess that all movements insofar have ‘value’ or ‘meaning’ to its actor(s) or possibly to the society as a whole, if their results in some way personally can be confirmed as useful, that is through some relevant form of control. A famous example is the traditional Cartesian Cogito defining an ‘I’ in time  t_e  ( t_e for ‘extern time’ ; t_i below for ‘intern time’) thinking, cogito, and – from its third-person stance – concluding its own existence, ergo sum, e.g. as a moment of its own real bodily functions as such, but only experienced in  t_i . But such a Cartesian ‘I’ is in fact not given in advance. Presumably a worm doesn’t ‘exist’ in this way at all, but its physiological constitution nevertheless secures its material existence and the continuity of its species. Similarly my individual digestion of my food also secures the daily reproduction of my ‘I’ and thereby confirms the ‘meaning’ of my physiological constitution. So, ergo, from my own third-person stance, it has really been assessed that there are things to be studied and discussed, not least by myself.

So himself individually knows every human through his self-referential consciousness conditioned by its self-referential neurological equipment. Further, the worker in the manufacture workshop is known to this workshop’s master or owner (because also of his neurological equipment); the labourer in the capitalist firm is known to its bookkeepers, the economically determined nation by its institutionalised mint function and Ministry of Finance. Finally, the political nation as such is known and controlled by its government. (Another problem is of course how – or whether – such an institutionalisation itself can be known, controlled, possibly even modified by the single ‘Is’.) All these instances realize self-referential functions of their respective basis structures and thereby in  t_e  externally expressing the ‘meaning’ of the respective basic activities in the course of  t_i. We must assess that every temporal statement in this way contains a principal contradiction between the first- and the third-person definitions in the relevant ‘times’.

This argument has profound consequences for the whole concept of time. Besides the problem of indicating certain ‘time points’, NOWs (mathematically infinitesimals, dt [6]), the concept of time always contains a dialectical contradiction opposing an ‘inner’ (‘unsay- able’ Zenonian) time of the first-person stance to an ‘outer’, decidable, valuable, even measurable time of the third-person stance. 

10. Also ‘labour’ in the Marxian sense of the word with its socially defined third-person stance decision and valuation contains as such the dialectical contradiction between ‘concrete’ and ‘abstract’ labour. ‘Concrete labour’ means in this connection ‘navigating’ means and objects of production, which of course demands awareness over time to produce the use-values. So this moment of labour is defined through the expression  a  H  t_i  =  n  ( a for awareness,  i  again for the intern, individually first-person stance time;  n  for ‘navigation’); further, as realized after time  t_e  ( e  again for extern, third-person stance determination) we get the readymade use-value,  u =  n  H  t_e  =  a  x  t² (again contradictious time definition).

(These symbolic expressions really look like physical ones – but I shall not here strain this similarity too far. However, it is tempting to ask about the product  m H a ! The physicist would at once say ‘force’. Why not read  m  as ‘meaning’, then “meaningful awareness = consciousness”,  ¦ . Further, ¦ over time  t_e  makes  ¦ H t_e = v ,  socially defined, economical value paid for on the labour market; this formula exactly defining ‘abstract labour’. Of course the physically interested reader would easily be able to translate these terms into quasi-physical ones and so define concrete labour analogue to motion, use-value to displacement - value as the analogue to momentum (impulse) – nevertheless, in this duty he would soon get problems; se below.)

11. However, note again a remarkable contradiction in this argument. Had labour to make use-values no real meaning? From the personal point of view - not at all! The capitalist has personally no interest in his products; he only wants to alienate them. Neither the worker has any interest therein, nor the merchant on the market. The capitalists’ personal interests in production are merely to appropriate surplus value; use-value to them has only ‘meaning’ if tempting someone to buy.

The commodity readymade for the market unifies in itself value and use-value; in our notation it would have the characteristics  vu , its value  v  being realized on the market by sale, its use-value  u , on the other hand, first ‘at home’ as concrete usefulness. That is, value and use-value are not realized nor made decidable in the same action or at the same time (cf. the “canonical conjugates” in physics!).

To go even a step further in this abstract argument we could then ask what can the meaning of buying a commodity with the use-value  u  be? Certainly this must be to realize its usefulness as such, a kind of a practical ‘utility-value’, exactly the term  mu  in itself containing the concepts of decision, confirmation and meaning. (But here of course physicists have already got off; physics itself is principally unconcerned with ‘meanings’ and ‘decisions’ – albeit they in their own experimental work just realize both!)

But not only the concept of the commodity contains this dialectical contradiction; in fact all our concepts involve this dialectics! We have already seen this in the case of time. And so does each single vital unit characterise the opposition between its ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ world further in the cases of (capitalist) labour and the commodity itself comprising both value and use-value. The same is even valid to the ‘labour power’ as such. It is really no ‘force’ (as the Germans say), but really to the capitalist ‘meaningful awareness’ to be realized in the controlled time  t_e , which, however, to the worker simply is his genuine ‘vital power’, the generative, productive, and self-reproductive moment inherent in all life realized over periods of time  t_i , or continuing over time  T .

12. We could easily continue our demonstration of further dialectical contradictions criss-crossing all economical and other scientific concepts, firstly because of our self-referentially double stance experiencing, secondly, because opposite classes of people naturally register the social events from opposite stances of observation (cf. § 2).

The most critical point of ‘classical’ Marxism could therefore possibly be its dependence on traditional dialectics: its distinguishing and, at the same time unification of always two binary concepts in the relation of contraposition, each position in principle – but only in principle![7] – Confirmed in the same ‘right’ here most abstractly indicated by the ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ forms of time  t_i  and  t_e  of their subjective and objective, first- and third-person stances of observation.

But this analysis is really not sufficient. Subjectivity is not limited to t_i-temporal experiences willing to be confirmed only by  t_e-temporal confirmations. Besides, the first- and third-person stance experiences we have to consider forms also of second-person stance confirmation too. Through this the ‘I’ self-referentially experiences itself as seen, so to say as mirrored, from the position of a ‘You’, this ‘You’, however, over time t_c (c for co-ordination) seeing this ‘I’ just not as an object but rather as an ‘alloject’. Also confirmation from this instance of observation allocates essential ‘meaning’ to the subject-‘I’ and its activities.

An example. Such a ‘meaning’ is clearly experienced when singing or playing polyphone music (esp. without a conductor) as ‘allojects’. In such a situation, you immediately act out moments of mutual I-You co-ordination. This way of performing music or participating in coherent, collective activities is, seen in this light, always an act of ‘mutual ‘allojectivity’, call it ‘love’; the actors mirroring themselves from their second-person stances, commonly organizing their coherent ‘polyphone’ community of equals.

Here it would be relevant to continue the discussion from above about the Cogito. In fact, polyphone music making proposes an alternative Cogito. The harmony and joy of making music in this way proves its own ‘meaning’. Each of the participants can now say: “I think and experience the harmony and mutual ‘love’ from the second-person stance, the ‘You’, ergo sumus, we are [8], that is we exist ‘allojectively’ as a collective in which we all participate as equals in this co-operative, t_c-temporal activity. Acting and re-acting together in solidarity, finding ourselves self-referentially by confirming the meaningfulness of the common activity essential to our lives, and so in ‘love’. We assess, ‘allojectivity’ generates new social wholes ‘from below’.

13. Instead of the traditional binary dialectics we really have to develop a ‘trinary’ one based on all three forms of experience. That means a dialectics

• not only based on elementary bodily functions of the self-referential neurological and other physiological equipments with their  t_i-temporal subjectivity;
• neither based only on common intelligent functions of registration by means of objective  t_e-temporal realizations (based on the same biological equipment as above),
• but also based on the ‘emotional’ functions of allojectively  co-ordinated  t_c-temporal experiences by activities under the condition of solidarity and mutual ‘love’. This allojective t_c-temporality would also concern human activities with non-human parts of the world insofar. Also these could be acknowledged as elements of participation in general.

14. Today, a revolutionary perspective would mean to keep in view the possibility of developing new social wholes, on the one hand based on all forms of mental work and confirmed by all three instances in common. First of all, it would surely mean a more primitive and in a certain sense egalitarian (‘allojective’) social structure without dominance from any third-person instance but instead inspired by social relationships of mutual ‘love’. This new development would in all probabilities grow up from some social structure analogue to the above mentioned Hobsbawmian one and then necessarily fertilised by essential social events analogue to the Marxian “So-Called Primitive Accumulation” endowing it with new dynamics and developmental power.

I doubt whether this could happen on the basis of the still enormously growing productivity in the modern IT and other high tech lines of business – this, however, leading to a catastrophic waning of the ‘value substance’ of the most essential industrial products. But waning of this concept more than any other defining capitalism as such could, on the other hand, eventually speed up or even directly cause the disintegration of this social formation making the way for a new one. This formation, then, had conceptually to be based on a new ‘substance’ born out of the new form of some equivalence circularity.

Which new ‘substance’ of identity and growth would be generated in such a situation, and which new concepts would follow from its material basis structure is hard to foretell. On the other hand, we must assume that its germs could already be developing in the shadow of the more dramatic tensions of today and soon being ready to take over, if in essential points the old formation breaks down. Could for instance people occupied by modern forms of self-organizing in working parties and dealing with the new problems on the market not invent the provocative question about, in the long run, the meaning of the continued capitalist appropriation of enormous quantities of surplus value, when other people miss the most elementary necessities of life? Could such forms of management in fact be one of the ‘germs’ in the future?