Marx and the Concept of Historical Time · 第 5 页

The transhistorical categories of labour and need are important, because they introduce the possibility of constructing a concept of historical time out of Marx’s work. Indeed, if there is a single question that guides this thesis, it is this: how do we reconstruct Marx’s materialist concept of history as a concept of historical time? The answer to this question begins with a temporal reading of the materialist concept of history. Specifically, it begins with a temporal reading of the ‘first historical act’ – the social production of the means of life, which is, as we will consider, internally differentiated between the creation of the means of satisfying existing needs and the creation of new needs. And what we will discover with this reading is that the materialist concept of history enables an incipient conception of historical time which deviates from – in fact stands in opposition to – the predominant framework through which historical time is comprehended: historicism, which is to say – after Benjamin – the suffocating confines of ‘homogenous, empty time.’¹² Therefore, one of the premises of this thesis is that a temporal reading of the materialist concept of history – the first but by no means the only step towards developing a concept of historical time in Marx – de-codifies the codified tradition known as ‘Historical Materialism’¹³. So-called ‘Historical Materialism’ (again, a term never used by Marx himself) has for too long suffered, at the hands of Marxists and non-Marxists alike, from what Harry Harootunian aptly describes as the ‘narrative and continuist story line that move[s] like a fast-moving express train for a predetermined destination.’¹⁴ A temporal reading of the materialist concept of history – Chapter 1 – thus uncovers, in the spirit ofBenjamin, Althusser, Sartre and Bloch, a distinctly non-linear temporality at the heart of history.

¹¹ Moishe Postone’s Time, Labor, and Social Domination: a Reinterpretation of Marx’s Critical Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993) is at the forefront of this problem. Postone repeatedly calls upon the authority of the ‘historically specific’ character of Marx’s work – ad nauseam – but he never considers what concept of history renders this character intelligible. Indeed, for Postone, Marx’s ‘historically specific social theory’ is completely at odds with the philosophy of history, such that ‘the historical specificity of the critique of political economy delineates Marx’s final break with his earlier transhistorical understanding of historical materialism and, hence, with notions of the philosophy of history [Geschichtsphilosophie].’ Ibid. 140, 258.

¹² Benjamin, ‘On the Concept of History’, 395.

¹³ This thesis avoids the use of the term ‘historical materialism’ without the indefinite article ‘a’.

¹⁴ Harry Harootunian, ‘Historical Materialism’s Task in an “Age of Globalization”’, Radical History Review 79 (Winter 2001), 95.

5