"The Labor of Fire:
On Time and Labor in the Grundrisse"
Bruno Gulli, Found Object
Labor is the living, form-giving fire; it is the transitoriness of things, their temporality, as their formation by living time. — Marx, Grundrisse
1. The Thisness of Time and Production
The Grundrisse is a work about time, and it is so in a fundamental sense. This means that time is the most fundamental category of the Grundrisse. Again, it means that time is the subject of Marx’s critique of political economy–subject in the double sense of subject-matter (or object) and of ground (or foundation). This becomes evident as soon as one opens the Grundrisse : "The object before us, to begin with, material production" (Marx 1973, 83). This is how Notebook M starts.
But material production is time, both as objectified and as subjective labor. The tense of this time, which is immediately labor, is alternatively the perfect or present tense: "The difference between previous, objectified labor and living, present labor here [i.e., in the accumulation of capital] appears as a merely formal difference between the different tenses of labor, at one time in the perfect and at another in the present" (465-466; brackets added). Material production is, then, time both as having been produced and as producing, as having become and as becoming. The difference between these two modalities is the difference between the substantial form of capital and living labor, between the capitalist and the worker. It is a difference, which presents itself immediately as antagonism and opposition. It is, in fact, the structural constitution of the class struggle.