Difference and Possibility. The second related contribution of Xxxx’x Grundrisse, is the provision of a framework for understanding difference within the dialectical relation. In the Grundrisse, as Xxxxxxx (Xxxxxxx, 2008c) notes, Xxxx offers a double-sided reading of capital, one as totality that subsumes difference, “stitching” together multiple forms of (re)production into the value form; and another as possibility, of use-value and creative subjective practices un-subsumed as abstract labour. Xxxx principally locates this possibility, through the duplicitous category of labour. Here Xxxx notes that a worker is transformed into a commodity through a process of abstraction, and only “becomes exchange value in labour time” (1993, 266). For Xxxx, a person’s use value is in dialectical relation to capital it “does not exist apart from him at all, thus exists not really but only in potentiality, as his capacity…it becomes a reality once solicited by capital”. Xxxx makes the case explicitly in his letter to Xxxxxx in 1867 contending that labour has a “two-fold character” (Xxxx, 1867). In making the distinction between objectified labour and “living labour” as use value “not for specific, particular use or consumption” (1993, 469) Xxxx is demonstrating capital’s always partial abstraction of labour. Here labour appears as both use-value for capital, subjectified by the factory or household worker, and, elsewhere as “living labour” as a completely ‘denuded’ abstraction, the subjective and creative practice of labour. As Xxxxxxx (2008c) argues the conceptualisation of “living labour” allows for a reading of labour as both potential value-for-capital, but equally one which posits labour as subjective, creative practice that does not necessarily take the value form; or indeed that of any subsuming force. In doing so, Xxxx draws attention to the manner in which labour’s mobilisation as a commodity, its being in the time of value, is internally distinct from its potentiality. Drawing back to Xxxx’x critique of abstraction, Xxxx demonstrates the ways in which “abstract labour” is composed of numerous concrete differences which are unevenly held together by abstractive capitalist forces, thereby opening up a concrete way of thinking about the role of difference (from capital) as active elements in the composition of actually existing social formations. It is this conceptualisation of difference which I mobilise in this research project. In doing so, I am not making an argument that nothing is ext...
