This leads us to the third and final concept, one which indisputably has a Heideggerian and Sartrean provenance, but which is also used by neither Heidegger nor Sartre. This concept is historicalisation. At its most basic level, ‘historicalisation’ denotes any individual or social act, process or movement which produces history. That is, historicalisation is any individual or social act, process or movement whose totalisation and temporalisation is, on some level, constitutive of history. In Marx’s terms, historicalisation registers the production of the means of satisfying existing needs and hence the creation of new needs. Historicalisation is obviously not a concept which Marx uses, but it is, this thesis contends, productively integrated into his work. First and foremost, this is the sense in which labour historicalises: labour – and this is a concern of every chapter of this thesis – constitutes history. Labour does not just temporalise. It does not just create time. It historicalises. It creates time that is itself constitutive of history.
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