Inversion
Marx stated repeatedly in the Grundrisse that capital
inverts the relationship between necessary and superfluous labour time. Capital
both creates disposable time and expropriates it in the form of surplus value,
reversing the nature-imposed priority of necessity before superfluity and
making the performance of necessary labour conditional on the production of
surplus value. Marx’s analysis of this inversion bears unmistakeable traces of
Ludwig Feuerbach’s critique in The Essence of Christianity of the
inversion of collective humanity and the divine, which had so influenced the young
Marx. The theme of inversion returns in the first chapter of Capital in the
section on the fetishism of the commodity, where in the first sentence Marx comments
on the commodity’s abundant