Marx and the Concept of Historical Time · 第 1 页

Introduction Marx, Time and History

Economy of time. To this all economy ultimately reduces itself.¹

What does Marx’s work tell us about the relationship between time and history? In short, this thesis maintains, quite little and a significant amount at the same time. Quite little, because nowhere in Marx’s oeuvre is there a sustained examination of this relationship; a significant amount, because this oeuvre constitutes one of the greatest, if still largely untapped, resources with which to comprehend this relationship in the modern European philosophical tradition more generally. This relationship has of course been examined within Marxism since Marx’s time (the work of Walter Benjamin, Louis Althusser, Jean-Paul Sartre and Ernst Bloch being prominent examples²), but the fact remains that Marx’s contribution to our understanding of this relationship is still largely in the dark. This thesis is an attempt to bring this contribution to light, and to do so through the concept of historical time. Broadly speaking, this is a concept that not only registers the relationship between time and history, but the historically changing relationship between time and history. There is no readily identifiable concept of historical time in Marx. He never provides us with anything like – to use Althusser’s words – ‘an outline for a concept of historical time’. Nonetheless, there is, this thesis argues, a concept of historical time that can be systematically constructed out of Marx’s work.

If there is a single work that is the inspiration for this thesis, it is The German Ideology³. The premise of this thesis is that something like ‘a materialist concept of history’ exists within

¹ Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (Rough Draft) [1857-8] (hereafter Grundrisse), trans. Martin Nicolaus (London and New York: Penguin Books, 1993), 173.

² See, in particular, Walter Benjamin, ‘On the Concept of History’ [1940], trans. Harry Zohn, in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 4, 1938-1940, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003), 389-400; Louis Althusser, ‘The Errors of Classical Economics: an Outline for a Concept of Historical Time’, in Louis Althusser and Étienne Balibar, Reading Capital [1968], trans. Ben Brewster (London: Verso, 1997), 91-118; Jean-Paul Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, Volume 1: Theory of Practical Ensembles [1960] (hereafter CDR 1), trans. Alan Sheridan-Smith (London and New York: Verso, 2004); and Ernst Bloch, ‘Nonsynchronism and the Obligation to its Dialectics’ [1932], trans. Mark Ritter, New German Critique 11 (Spring 1977), 22-38. ‘Nonsynchronism’ is a translation of the German word Ungleichzeitigkeit, which is better (and more literally) rendered as ‘non-sametimeliness’. This essay is also published in Ernst Bloch, Heritage of Our Times [1935], trans. Neville and Stephen Plaice (Berkeley: The University of California Press, 1990).

³ The English language edition of The German Ideology used in this thesis is Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology [1845-6] (hereafter GI), trans. S.W. Ryazanskaya (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1965). When the translation of passages within this and other English language editions of

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