This thesis – particularly Chapter 1 – is therefore undeniably a work of reconstruction. It formulates the meaning of certain categories in Marx’s work in ways which Marx did not necessarily do himself. The most notable example here is the formulation of ‘the economic’ as ‘the social production of the means of life’. In other words, human being’s social production of the means of their existence permeates the ‘Feuerbach Chapter’, but nowhere do Marx and Engels – at least explicitly – state that this social production constitutes the meaning of ‘the economic’. However, it is the contention of this thesis that ‘the economic’ must be figured as ‘the social production of the means of life’, because to do so opens up the wealth of social and historical insight that Marx’s works contains. It allows us to approach ‘the economic’ as a rich philosophical concept in its own right, as an ontological concept that designates the meaning of ‘human being’ itself. This is, as we will see, the basis from which – to invoke the quotation that frames this introduction – ‘the economic’ and ‘the economy’ can be grasped as indelibly temporal categories in ways beyond, but not necessarily in tension with, Marx’s understanding of their temporal bearings. This is also the basis from which certain passages in The German Ideology take precedence over others. Of particular note here is the passage containing Marx and Engels’s description of what they call ‘the first historical act’ (which, at the outset, we should point out is a necessarily ongoing ‘first historical act’). Indeed, the intelligibility of not only Chapter 1 but the entirety of this thesis hinges on attaching to the first historical act and its temporality a philosophical importance which undoubtedly exceeds what Marx and Engels intended – and surely even imagined – when they wrote The German Ideology. Finally, this thesis constitutes a reconstruction of Marx’s work insofar as it prioritises certain categories in his canon over others. It does this not only within the framework of the materialist concept of history but across Marx’s work more generally. Certain categories, first and foremost ‘labour’, ‘need’ and ‘life’, are prioritised over others, namely class and class struggle. This thesis does this not to dismiss the importance of class and class struggle, but to underscore the extent to which the philosophical and historical intelligibility of concepts such as class (and the division of labour from whence classes arise) is ultimately based in the categories of labour and need. Class and class struggle are, as we will learn, ontologically ‘down the line’ from labour and need. One of the basic concerns of this thesis – at least its first half – is to develop what might be called a ‘transhistorical materialist concept of history’. Hence if one wishes to take the line that, famously, ‘the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles’<sup>9</sup>, this thesis argues that this stance can only be philosophically sustained after the transhistorical dimensions of Marx’s concepts of labour and need have been established.
<sup>8</sup> Gary K. Browning, ‘The German Ideology: the Theory of History and the History of Theory’, History of Political Thought 14:3 (Autumn 1993), 456. According to Browning, The German Ideology ‘should be analysed and interpreted as an integral whole’, such that ‘its various sections are intimately related to one another and share a community of purpose and character.’ Ibid. 455.
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