In the view of this old hand, the price of admission to post-modernity may be had for close attention to less than a dozen pages of the Grundrisse, namely pages 704 to 714 of the Vintage edition. In those pages there are mysteries within mysteries that might take a pretty comprehensive understanding of Das Kap. to unravel. But the outline is there, dense as it is.
I hesitate to mention (because you will wrongly suppose that I'm kidding) that those ten pages can be summarized in a four word inversion of Benjamin Franklin's injunction that "time is money": wealth is disposable time.
If I could cut and paste from the .pdf copy of Empire, I would send you pages 401 to 403 where Hardt and Negri try to say the same thing in several hundred times as many words. The best they can come up with is:
"The progressive indistinction between production and reproduction in the biopolitical context also highlights once again the immeasurability of time and value. As labor moves outside the factory walls, it is increasingly difficult to maintain the fiction of any measure of the working day and thus separate the time of production from the time of reproduction, or work time from leisure time. There are no time clocks to punch on the terrain of biopolitical production; the proletariat produces all its generality everywhere all day long."
Which is to say, wealth is disposable time.
24/7 is the negation of disposable time and thus *value* at this late and lamentable stage is the negation of *wealth*. Tom Walker Bowen Island, BC 604 947 2213