Marx and the Concept of Historical Time · 第 4 页

This prompts a brief digression on the difference between the ‘transhistorical’ and the ‘historically specific’ in Marx. This is a difference which must first be approached from the standpoint of Marx’s conception of ‘mode of production’. In short, the ‘transhistorical’ is that which is common to all modes of production, although the ‘all’ in this formulation must, as earlier suggested, be differentiated between, on the one hand, all modes of production to date, and, on the other, all modes of production to date and those (speculatively) to come. Categories such as wealth, life, labour, need and, as we will see, time, are in this sense transhistorically valid: they exist, and will exist, in the words of The German Ideology, throughout ‘all human existence’ and ‘all history’.¹⁰ In contrast to this, the ‘historically specific’ signifies that which is specific to a particular mode of production, such that capitalism is a ‘historically specific form of the production of the means of life and thereby a ‘historically specific’ articulation of the relationship between the forces and relations of production. For this reason, ‘historical specificity’ in Marx should not, at its most basic level, be understood as the difference between 1860s England and 1960s France (this is historicism), but rather as the difference between one mode of production and another. But what must be emphasised here is that – in Marx – the ‘transhistorical’ is not an ‘ahistorical’ category: it does not represent that which is somehow ‘above’, ‘beyond’ or ‘outside’ of history altogether. The ‘trans’ within Marx’s transhistorical registers that which exists within, throughout and across all human history, not that which is outside of history. Transhistorical categories such as wealth are therefore not ‘natural’ (in the ordinary sense of the term) categories. This is crucial, because the transhistorical dimensions of Marx’s work are too often overlooked, if not outright dismissed, through invocations of the ‘historical specificity’ of this work. The problem here is that when the ‘historical specificity of Marx’s work is invoked without any reference to its relation to the transhistoricality of his work, historicism becomes the tacit framework of history and historical time. Capitalism is a historically specific mode of production, but this can only be grasped in relation to the concept of history that renders this specificity intelligible. More often than not, those readers of Marx who critically employ the ‘historical specificity’ of his work never establish this relation.¹¹

⁹ Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party [1848], trans. Samuel Moore (London: Verso, 1998), 34.

¹⁰ Marx and Engels, GI, 48. ‘Class’ can be conceived in transhistorical terms, but only on the condition that its transhistoricality ends with the (speculative) chronological end of capitalism.

4