Marx and the Concept of Historical Time · 第 12 页

The ground of the concept of materialism in The German Ideology is labour: social and economic activity which is indissociable from and yet irreducible to the organic and inorganic matter that this activity works with and upon. The German Ideology thus reinforces what the Theses on Feuerbach first introduces: a distinctly practical, rather than matter-based, concept of materialism. As the social production of the means of life, labour is the ontological ground ofthe historical movement between praxis and poiêsis, between, that is, the realms of freedom and necessity. In short, for Marx, labour historicalises: it produces history.⁵ The consequences of this are extensive. If labour historicalises, it must also temporalise. Labour must be grasped as an indelibly temporal concept in Marx, not simply because, as an act, it intrinsically creates time, but because it is an act which is directly constitutive of history. History is an essentially temporal process, and hence any concept of history, materialist or otherwise, is an essentially temporal concept, one which cannot be thought in isolation from the philosophy of time. We might suggest then that if The German Ideology specifies praxis as ‘production’, and if labour is necessary to think the concept of ‘mode of production’, then temporality is a condition of thinking human ontology in Marx. Temporality confirms the philosophical status of ontology in Marx: ‘mode of production’ cannot be registered as an ontological category, and cannot be internalised to the philosophy of history, without systematically investigating the relationship between labour and temporality in Marx.⁶ It is unclear to what extent, if any, Marx saw his intervention into the philosophy and politics of materialism in these terms. To be sure, Marx analyses labour and temporality in conjunction with one another, and yet these analyses, most notably that of the concept of ‘labour-time’ itself, are by and large framed by the temporalities of capital, particularly the quantifiable, durational time of what we will consider in Chapter 3: abstract labour-time. There are helpful passages in the Grundrisse, from broadly Aristotelian positions (‘since labour is motion, time is its natural measure’) to critical extensions of Hegel (‘labour is the living, form-giving fire; it is the transitoriness of things, their temporality, as their formation by living time’⁷), but the fact remains that the context of these passages is the temporalities of capital, temporalities which are inseparable from and yet cannot be conflated with the temporalities of history. This much is clear: if labour historicalises, then any attempt to establish the philosophical priority of the concept of historical time must begin by exploring the manifold dimensions of the ontological relationship between labour and temporality. The materialist concept of history in The German Ideology must be reread temporally: the human must be rendered temporal in its economic and historical being.

⁴ Ibid. 96. On the question of progress, see Chapter 4 of Balibar’s The Philosophy of Marx: ‘Time and Progress: Another Philosophy of History?

⁵ A transhistorical category, and a condition of thinking Marx’s concept of ‘mode of production’, labour mediates what Marx calls the ‘metabolism’ [Stoffwechsel] between humanity and nature.

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