of the conceptual totality of capital with an external empirical reality, with a neutral historical time. Rather, it is the relative correspondence of the former with the objective determinations it produces. Ibid. Thus, ‘capital as an “Idea” is the correspondence of a logical order of time – obeying its own immanent criteria – with historical time. This correspondence is a permanent relation of tension and conflict, a relation of sometimes hidden and sometimes evident contradiction. Crises, particularly structural crises, are violent moments of confrontation between antagonistic forces. They open up various possibilities, among which is that of a new “peace” between the “subjective side” and “objective side” of capital. This is why capitalism is a coherent system of determinations, at the same time completed and open, dynamic and in movement.’ Ibid. There are two problems with this reading. First, history/historical time are reduced to the ‘objective side’ of the dialectic of capital, the ‘empirical world’ that is dialectically tied to the ‘subjective side’ – the ‘thought’ or ‘universal reason’ – of capital, wherein a ‘mutual fertilisation’ and ‘contradictory unity’ between the universal logic and particular history of capital exists. Ibid. 303. This stands against the idea of this thesis that history/historical time are the manifestations of the dialectic of capital itself– from both the standpoint of its objectivity and subjectivity. Second, Tombazos’s concept of crisis (both ‘periodical’ and ‘structural’) thus precludes the possibility of constructing a historical concept of crisis: the fundamentally historical character of crisis is here not simply limited to capital, but to the objective side of capital at that. The ‘various possibilities’ of crises thus become one possibility: historical repetition.
<sup>40</sup> Osborne, ‘A sudden topicality: Marx, Nietzsche and the politics of crisis’, 21. The ‘two levels’ here are the ‘historical development of the mode of production beyond its own limits, on the one hand, and political economy of capital, on the other’. Ibid. For Osborne, ‘the failure to adhere to the disjunction’ between these two levels ‘generates the quasi-theological notion of a “final” crisis of the capitalist system, as a whole, as some kind of event, rather than a process with a duration of many decades, if not centuries, appropriate to the idea of a “social” rather than a merely “political” revolution. And it is this notion that lies behind the substitution of a theory of breakdown for a (generational) politics of transformation.’ Ibid.
<sup>41</sup> See Chapter 4, footnote 11.
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