<sup>16</sup> The point here is not that the assertion that class struggle is the ‘motive force of history’ is necessarily misplaced, but that it must negotiate the fact that in addition to being the condition of thinking history, capital is the condition of thinking the category of ‘class’.
<sup>17</sup> Marx and Engels, DI, 39 (GI, 59). Heidegger’s philosophy of history is the paradigmatic example of this.
<sup>18</sup> Marx, Grundrisse, 620.
<sup>19</sup> Osborne, How to Read Marx, 41.
<sup>20</sup> As Ricœur stresses in his reading of Koselleck, this goes hand-in-hand with the idea that ‘history is the history of humanity, and in this worldwide sense, the world history of peoples. Humanity becomes both the total object and the unique subject of history, at the same time as history becomes a collective singular.’ Ricœur, Memory, History, Forgetting, 300. The irony here is that history first becomes the ‘history of humanity’ precisely because capital, not humanity, is the subject of this history.
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