An overriding consequence of this chapter – one that the rest of this thesis reinforces – can be grasped by the following proposition: there is no place for a ‘transhistorical ontology’ in Marx, only a historical ontology. Categories such as labour and need are only ontologically valid at the level of the difference between one mode of production and another, such that the capitalist human is a fundamentally different kind of subject than the feudal human (the social individual in capitalism is a fundamentally different kind of subject than the social individual in other modes of production<sup>9</sup>). Yet this does not mean that we cannot think transhistorically. For our purposes, the specifically capitalist existence of abstract labour is exactly what allows us to think ‘labour’, ‘need’ and ‘history’ transhistorically. In short (assuming one holds to the ontological priority of a mode of production), the ‘transhistorical’ should be understood as an epistemological category in Marx, whereas the ‘historical’ is an ontological category. Hence whilst this chapter – in fact the rest of this thesis – destabilises the transhistorical basis of the claims made in the first two chapters, it does not render these claims meaningless. Rather, it shows that the capitalist mode of production is the historical condition of thinking what, up to this point, has been presented at a transhistorical level. The spirit of this chapter is thus not to shut down the possibility of ‘the transhistorical Marx’, but to historicise him. This is important because the concept of historical time must register the possibility of social and historical time after capitalism. We need the transhistorical Marx, precisely because it is impossible to think communism without him.
<sup>9</sup> This point registers the essential limit of Carol C. Gould’s Marx’s Social Ontology: Individuality and Community in Marx’s Theory of Social Reality (Cambridge and London: MIT Press, 1978). Drawing on the passages on the ‘social individual’ in the Grundrisse, Gould attempts to create a transhistorically valid social ontology as the basis from which to think the historical development of social individuality. There is something sociological in the bad sense about a methodology such as this: Gould’s manoeuvre effectively de-historicises the social in order to historicise the historical. Marx’s conception of a ‘social individual’ is intelligible because of capitalism (as is the category of ‘society’).
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