Marx and the Concept of Historical Time · 第 36 页

Setting aside this digression, we must now address, albeit at a broad level of abstraction, the relationship between the temporality of the first historical act and the dialectic of the forces and relations of production. In other words, what is the temporal relation between the dialectic of the creation of the means to satisfy existing needs and the creation of new needs, on the one hand, and the dialectic of the forces and relations of production, on the other? The answer to this question begins with a short account of what productive forces are. Along with needs and time⁷¹, productive forces fill out Marx’s category of wealth (‘wealth’, for Marx, is a particular relation between needs, productive forces and time.⁷²) Accordingly, the scope of a productive force is expansive. It takes in, although it is not exhausted by, what David Harvey describes as ‘the power to transform and appropriate nature through human labour.’⁷³ Productive forces encompass, but are irreducible to, the means of production [Produktionsmittel]: e.g. the tools, instruments, technologies and machineries of production (this includes, it is important to add, human bodies).⁷⁴ Socialised matter – both organic and inorganic matter – is a productive force, and this register informs, to take the most notable example, Marx’s extensive analyses of the relationship between land and production. Conceptually, it is important to indicate that in The German Ideology and elsewhere, forces/powers [Kräfte] should be conceived as ontologically basic to ‘means’ [Mitteln], although our understanding of the relationship between ‘productive forces’ and the broader philosophical literature on forces/powers remains largely in the dark.⁷⁵ It would seem, at the very least, that Marx’s ‘productive force’ is indebted to the work of Kant, Hegel and particularly Leibniz, whose internalisation of motion and force within matter points towards a necessary condition of Marx’s critical reconstruction of materialism more broadly.⁷⁶

⁷⁰ Friedrich Engels, letter to Joseph Bloch (in Königsberg) on 21 September 1890, quoted in Althusser, ‘Is it Simple to be a Marxist in Philosophy?’, 176. Translation modified: see Marx and Engels, MEW, Band 37 (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1967), 463. For Althusser, ‘…to talk about the determination by the economy in the last instance is to mark oneself off from every mechanistic conception of determinism and to adopt a dialectical position.’ Althusser, ‘Is it Simple to be a Marxist in Philosophy?’, 177. ⁷¹ The essential relation between time and wealth is addressed in Chapter 3. As we will later see, ‘the whole development of wealth rests on the creation of disposable time.’ Marx, Grundrisse, 398. ⁷² Osborne, ‘Marx and the philosophy of time’, 21.

⁷³ David Harvey, The Limits to Capital [1982] (London and New York: Verso, 1999), 101.) Alex Callinicos defines productive forces as ‘the methods of labour and thereby its social productivity.’ Alex Callinicos, Making History: Agency, Structure, and Change in Social Theory (Leiden/Boston/Cologne: Brill, 2004), 42-4.

⁷⁴ ‘Means of production’ also include the objective conditions without which social production cannot occur (e.g. office buildings, factories, fields, and so forth).

⁷⁵ To my knowledge, there is no work in the Anglophone secondary literature that looks at this relation. ⁷⁶ Drawing on an unpublished manuscript by Gareth Stedman Jones, Patrick Riley states (without providing any further analysis) that ‘…Leibniz’s notion of “force” and forces (Kräfte) may be the remote ancestor of Marx’s “forces of production”.’ Patrick Riley, Leibniz’s Universal Jurisprudence:

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