Marx and the Concept of Historical Time · 第 34 页

This arrival first necessitates a brief digression on the relationship between The German Ideology and an ongoing point of contention within Marx and Marxism alike. This is an issue which proceeds from the fact that The German Ideology, not Marx’s well-known 1859 preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (hereafter Contribution), first outlines the contradiction between the forces and relations of production at the level of the philosophy of history. The German Ideology, on the whole, affords a richer and more complex reading of the philosophical contours of ‘the economic’ than the Contribution. But it also functions as a foundation for the much maligned ‘base-superstructure’ model announced by the preface to the Contribution,⁶³ even as this model does not openly figure in The German Ideology.⁶⁴ There is an ‘economic basis’ in The German Ideology, synonymous with ‘material life itself’, which for Marx and Engels is the ‘actual basis of history’ and which might provisionally be defined as ‘the totality of the relations of production which correspond to a determinate level of the forces of production’. And it is certainly possible to interpret this basis as (implicitly) yielding a superstructure [Überbau] within which historical consciousness is dynamically embedded.⁶⁵ Yet there are other factors which need to be considered in relation to this model, factors which, when engaged, mitigate – and arguably put to rest – charges that Marx’s philosophy of history is underpinned by a mechanistic ‘economic determinism’ and vulgar historicism. One of these is the manner in which there is already always a political dimension to the economic basis in Marx, upsetting any fixed distinction between the ‘economic’ and the ‘political’ as such within his corpus. Consider, for instance, Marx’s analysis of the genesis of capitalist ground-rent, in which he declares that ‘the specific economic form in which unpaid surplus-labour is pumped out of the direct producers determines the relation of domination and bondage, as this grows directly out of production itself and in turn reacts back on it [production] in determining it.’⁶⁶ This passage is of course specific to a particular mode of production, but it nonetheless directs our attention to the viable possibility of reading the base-superstructure model as immanently co-constitutive, such that each ‘level’ mutually determines one another. This reading eases the philosophical rigidity in proclamations such as ‘life determines consciousness, consciousness does not determine life’. As Raymond Williams argues, we have to ‘revalue “determination”’ in this model ‘towards the setting of limits and the exertion of pressure, and away from a predicted, prefigured and controlled content’, in order to move the superstructure away from a unilaterally ‘reflected, reproduced or specifically dependent content.’⁶⁷ For Gramsci, this is the fashion in which ideology already always permeates every facet of the base, including the development of ‘organic’ and ‘conjunctural’ movement within the base.⁶⁸ These interventions foster, internal to the philosophy of history, the possibility of a new reading of Marx’s relation to Hegel, one grounded in an understanding of life which does much more than simply ‘invert consciousness.⁶⁹ This mutual constitution need not, as Althusser warns against, smuggle in an idealist dialectic, because it would be consistent with the idea that the economic is – but only ‘in the last instance’ – the ontological ground of history. Engels’s 1890 letter to Joseph Bloch sums this up quite nicely: ‘According to the materialist conception of history, the determining moment in history in the last instance is the production and reproduction of actual life. More than this neither Marx nor I have ever asserted. Therefore, if somebody twists this into saying that the economic moment is the only determining one, he transforms that proposition into a meaningless, abstract, senseless phrase.’⁷⁰

⁶² ‘Relations of production’ is not established as a concept in The German Ideology, but Marx and Engels already speak of the contradiction between ‘forms of intercourse’ and productive forces as the ‘origin’ of ‘all collisions in history’. See Marx and Engels, GI, 89.

⁶³ The relevant passage in the Contribution is: ‘In the social production of their lives, humans inevitably enter into definite, necessary relations, which are independent of their will, namely, relations of production corresponding to a determinate stage of development of their material forces of production. The totality [Gesamtheit] of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real basis on which there arises a legal and political superstructure and to which there correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of humans that determines their being, but their social being that determines their consciousness.’ Karl Marx, Zur Kritik der Politischen Ökonomie [1859] (hereafter KPÖ), in Marx and Engels, MEW, Band 13 (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1961), 8-9 (Marx, Contribution, 20-1).

⁶⁴ It is important to point out that this model barely emerges after the Contribution. It appears only once in the first volume of Capital, in a footnote at that. See Karl Marx, Capital: a Critique of Political Economy, Vol. 1: the Process of Production of Capital [1867] (hereafter Capital 1), trans. Ben Fowkes (London and New York: Penguin Books, 1976), 175, ft. 35.

⁶⁵ Various passages in The German Ideology anticipate the preface to the Contribution, most notably: ‘Life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life.’ Marx and Engels, GI, 47.

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