“[Virtually all Marxist theorists] have never understood why Marx went to such lengths when writing the first chapter of Capital (which, indeed, was rewritten numerous times) and why he supposedly unnecessarily obscured what is apparently such an obvious state of affairs with recourse to a Hegelian language. Just as labor was obvious to Marxism, so too did it seem obvious to Marxism that labor quite literally creates value, in the same way that the baker bakes bread, and that in value, past labor time is preserved as dead labor time. Even in Marx it never becomes clear that abstract labor itself, both logically and historically, presupposes labor as a specific form of social activity — that it is thus the abstraction of an abstraction — or put differently, that the reduction of an activity to homogeneous units of time presupposes the existence of an abstract measure of time, which as such dominates the sphere of labor. It would never have occurred to a medieval peasant, for example, to measure the time spent harvesting his fields in hours and minutes. This is not because he did not have a watch; rather, because this activity merged with his life, and its temporal abstraction would have made no sense.”
— Norbert Trenkle, Value and Crisis: Basic Questions (1998)
