Marx and the Concept of Historical Time · 第 191 页

The crisis which brings Tombazos’s Time in Marx to a close – the ‘structural crisis’ – does not provide us with a solution to this problem. Framed by the promise to ‘examine the conceptual link between the totality-capital and historical time’³⁷, this conception of crisis³⁸ actually obscures the relationship between capital and historical time³⁹, and thus precludes the possibility of developing a general-historical concept of crisis out of, and in relation to, the endemic crises of capitalism. Yet this is precisely what must be done, insofar as ‘the political significance of the concept of crisis…depends upon some projected articulation of these two levels, some conjunctural political effectivity at the level of the mode of production, in response to “periodic” crisis.’⁴⁰ We might go so far as to say that this is the only possible way to think, let alone actualise, the possibility of social and historical time after capitalism. This returns us to the philosophical – and brings into the conversation the political – importance of the category of life in Marx’s work. If ‘crisis’ can, on some level, be understood as a crisis of the ‘life’ of something, such that it signals the possibility of the end of this life as such, then the politics of historical time (a politics structured both by the understanding of capital as the condition of thinking history and the process of realising historical time after capitalism) must treat the recurring crises of capitalism (whether ‘normal’ or ‘abnormal’) from the standpoint of their disruption of the life-time of capital. And this ‘life-time’ is not just the (unknowable) duration of the life of capital, such that crises enable, but only potentially, the chronological end of capitalism, but, and more fundamentally, the historicalising time of the life of capital as it is presented in this thesis (a time which is itself the ontological ground of measuring the ‘duration’ of capitalism⁴¹). This is, despite the absence of politics surrounding its presentation, the distinct political importance of the concept of ‘total social capital’ in the second volume of Capital. What this concept begs is not just a concept of historical time whose philosophical scope matches the systematicity of total social capital, but a concept of historical time whose political scope is equally systematic, such that political practice can, on some level, be thought in relation to total social capital itself. The development of a historical concept of crisis is the necessary first step towards such a philosophy and politics of historical time.

³⁴ Pierre Vilar, ‘Marxist History, a History in the Making: Towards a Dialogue with Althusser,’ New Left Review I/80 (July/August 1973), 105.

³⁵ Osborne, ‘A sudden topicality: Marx, Nietzsche and the politics of crisis’, 21. Osborne continues: ‘crisis “theory” is thus in principle inadequate to thinking the historico-political meaning of crises – and this includes Marx’s own account (or “theory”) of capitalist crises, however central to such a thinking it might be. Hence my reluctance to think of Marx as a crisis “theorist”, with respect to the politics of crises, which was his ultimate concern.’ Ibid.

³⁶ For Osborne, ‘with regard to the temporality of crisis, the cyclical character of crises of accumulation tends to instil less a sense of possibility than of repetition. This serves to reinforce the main form of temporal abstraction associated with the experience of commodities in capitalist societies: “the new”. The periodic character of crisis and the commodity-form each produce modes of experience of temporal abstraction that undermine or erode the historical experience of crises and, thereby, function to repress the political possibilities they contain.’ Ibid. 24.

³⁷ Tombazos, Time in Marx, 275.

³⁸ See ibid., Chapter 24, ‘The Structural Crises’, 291-305, which, along with its appendix, does little in the way of constructing a concept of ‘structural crisis’ as an ‘abnormal or extraordinary’ (ibid. 274) crisis of capitalism, instead offering an empirical history of business cycles over roughly the past 150 years. Why structural crises are ‘structural’, and intelligible as such as against ‘periodical crises’ (which would equally seem to be part of the structure of capitalist accumulation), is thus left at a descriptive level.

³⁹ Tombazos’s grasp of the relationship between capital and historical time comes out of his analysis of ‘structural crises’. He states: ‘far from acting in a social environment that it only conquers, capital produces its objective contents that are this environment. It produces its own history. Each particular stage of capitalism, each recovery from a structural crisis, is the peace that capital concludes with itself.’ Ibid. 300. After Hegel, ‘this correspondence between “subjectivity” and “objectivity” is not that

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