The Practical Truth of Abstract Labour - Chris Arthur

Arthur 14-Dec-12 24
labour has to be measured solely by duration (as the classicals
assumed); but it is necessary that pure activity exists solely in the
dimension of pure time. Because of the inversion of the concrete and
abstract aspects of activity here, this time is abstract time, time in its
concept, the passage between two intervals.
And whose time exactly? Because it is capital that brings commodities
into relation, and capital that commensurates them, it is capital’s time
that counts. Capital measures its rate of return as the generation of an
increment of money between two intervals. Hence, having sunk into
production, the circuit of capital determines the time of production as the
time of capital. New value cannot be generated all at once, but takes
time, because living labour takes time to produce what has value. So
material labour is required of value-positing, by the necessary descent
into finitude of the logic of valorisation. The time of the capital circuit
must pass from the logic of succession to the real time of duration. What
really moves is always a concrete material process, yet this is
determined as the carrier of the ideal logical movement; thus the time it
takes is now resignified as capital’s time. The magnitude of value is
determined by the elapsed time of capital. The adding of concrete
labours by time is required because this is the dimension in which the
comparison of one process with another is undertaken by capital. One
32 Arthur 2002, p. 171.