Marx and the Concept of Historical Time · 第 9 页

On the surface of things, it may seem ironic – if not problematic – that a thesis about history and historical time in Marx pays little attention to Marx’s actual historical writings. Yet the absence, for instance, of The Eighteenth Brumaire or Marx’s later writings on Russia should not be interpreted as indifference towards the ‘real history’ that these writings register. The reason why the philosophical dimensions of The German Ideology receive such attention, why these dimensions are subsequently read through Heidegger and Sartre, and finally why the economic writings (the various drafts of Capital) are the near-exclusive focus of the latter half of this thesis, is not because Marx’s historical writings are in any sense unimportant, but because the intelligibility of their ‘history’ depends on what Sartre calls the ‘formal structures of history (just as these formal structures depend on ‘real history’). The point here is that there can be no appeal to an unadulterated ‘real history’ as a fundamental-ontological baseline from which the formal structures of history are ‘derived’.¹⁸ ‘Real history’ and its formal structures are dialectically dependent on one another.

On the surface of things, this thesis may also come across as indifferent to the politics of historical time. This thesis does not, as earlier suggested, thematise class struggle, nor does it engage what in The German Ideology Marx and Engels call ‘the communist consciousness’ – the ‘consciousness of the necessity of a fundamental revolution’ – something which is for them a ‘conclusion’ of ‘the conception of history we have sketched.’¹⁹ Its purpose is rather to investigate, at a philosophically basic level, Marx’s contribution to our understanding of the historically changing relationship between time and history. Yet in the end, this understanding is – it cannot but be – a political understanding. As the conclusion to this thesis discusses, the concept of historical time matters not only because it unsettles the authority of historicism and because it establishes capital as the condition of thinking history, but also because it compels us to think beyond the historical time of capital, which is to say that it compels us to register the possibility of social and historical time after capitalism. This is the definitive philosophical and political problem of the concept of historical time: if capital makes possible the (modern) category of history, how do we think history beyond capital? To put this another way: what is the difference, and what is the relation, between the historical time of capital and the time of history? This is not a thesis about politics, at least not directly. But it is not thereby indifferent to the politics of historical time.

¹⁸ István Mészáros’s critique of Sartre, particularly his The Work of Sartre: Search for Freedom and the Challenge of History (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2012), comes dangerously close to this position. For all of his appeals to ‘real history’, Mészáros does not dialecticise its relation to the formal structures of history. Rather, ‘real history’ functions as a fundamental-ontological baseline for him, from which, it seems, the formal structures are derived. This is rather ironic, insofar as Mészáros places himself directly in line with Heidegger’s ‘fundamental ontology’, albeit in an inverted form. Heidegger is a consistent target of critique across Mészáros’s work.

¹⁹ Marx and Engels, GI, 94.

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