Marx and the Concept of Historical Time · 第 189 页

However, and Marx regularly stresses this point, this understanding of crisis is nothing but the formal possibility of crisis, ‘the general, abstract possibility of crisis [that] denotes no more than the most abstract form of crisis, without content, without a compelling motivating factor.’²⁸ In capitalism, the ‘content’ which transforms the formal possibility of crisis into an actual crisis is a conjunctural question, and consequently can only be known through actual political-economic events. Yet what, on Marx’s terms, each and every specifically capitalist crisis registers – and this is the second level to which we must attend – are the ‘periodic’ crises which characterise the cycles of industrial capital, crises which are, as Tombazos expresses it, ‘“normal”, necessary and inevitable moments of capitalist production.’²⁹ Osborne summarises this understanding of crisis nicely:

1. Crises are modes of appearance of structural contradictions within the process of capitalist production – they bring contradictions ‘to the surface’, as Marx says.

1. Crises are means for the temporary solution, and hence new forms of mediation, of such contradictions, which restore the conditions for accumulation.

1. The restoration of conditions for accumulation is at the same time the renewal of the terms of the contradictions within the system that gave rise to the crisis in the first place.³⁰

From this standpoint, a crisis is a functional aspect of the expanded reproduction of industrial capital. At the level of total social capital, crisis can be comprehended as the manifestation of contradiction within one or many of the ‘life-cycles’ of capital, and the temporary (enforced) resolution of the consequent ‘arrhythmia’, such that crisis is in fact reproductive of the broader turnover-time [Umschlagszeit] of capital.³¹ In this sense, a crisis is simultaneously a disruption of the unity of production- and circulation-time and also a condition of the renewal of what is already always a contradictory unity. At the level of both the potentiality (the value-form) and actuality (the industrial cycle) of the accumulation of capital, therefore, crisis is constitutive of history and historical time. The idea that ‘history’ constitutes – in and of itself – the ongoing self-expansion of time is (to date) predicated on capitalist crises.

²⁵ Marx, Capital 1, 209. The point here is that the value-form in no way ensures that the movement of valorisation is continuous. Marx’s well-known critique of Say’s law summarises this: ‘no one can sell unless someone else purchases. But no one directly needs to purchase because he has just sold.’ Ibid. 208-9.

²⁶ Marx, Economic Manuscripts of 1861-63 (Continuation), in MECW, Volume 32, 144.

²⁷ Marx, Grundrisse, 600. See also ibid. 443-44.

²⁸ Marx, Economic Manuscripts of 1861-63 (Continuation), in MECW, Volume 32, 140.

²⁹ Tombazos, Time in Marx, 274.

³⁰ Osborne, ‘A sudden topicality: Marx, Nietzsche and the politics of crisis’, 20.

189