{"resolved":true,"match_type":"uuid","source_type":"original_book","book_id":"cfa147d3-494e-49cc-b356-7aceff50b181","title":"Marx and the Concept of Historical Time","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":null,"requested_by":"printed_page","book":{"source_type":"original_book","book_id":"cfa147d3-494e-49cc-b356-7aceff50b181","id":"cfa147d3-494e-49cc-b356-7aceff50b181","uuid":"cfa147d3-494e-49cc-b356-7aceff50b181","title":"Marx and the Concept of Historical Time","normalized_title":"marxandtheconceptofhistoricaltime","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":null,"isbns":[],"parsed":true,"ai_readable":true,"document_type":"book","page_count":216,"navigation_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/cfa147d3-494e-49cc-b356-7aceff50b181","title_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/title/Marx%20and%20the%20Concept%20of%20Historical%20Time","fixed_page_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/cfa147d3-494e-49cc-b356-7aceff50b181/page/{printed_page}","path_api_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/book/cfa147d3-494e-49cc-b356-7aceff50b181/page/{printed_page}","read_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/cfa147d3-494e-49cc-b356-7aceff50b181","page_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/cfa147d3-494e-49cc-b356-7aceff50b181/page","search_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/cfa147d3-494e-49cc-b356-7aceff50b181/search"},"page":{"printed_page":11,"pdf_page":15,"physical_index":15,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"6acf2dd4587ce296a76309954a62e69249ac9eb6ba7e09ad4e3afd7ea8424846"},"chapter":"Marx and the Concept of Historical Time","content":"Chapter One A Materialist Concept of History: a Temporal Reading\n\nModern political thought has concentrated its attention on history, and has not elaborated a corresponding concept of time. Even historical materialism has until now neglected to elaborate a concept of time that compares with its concept of history.<sup>1</sup>\n\nThere are a variety of reasons why the philosophical potential of The German Ideology is far from being realised, but perhaps no reason stands out more than the fact that Marx and Engels provide no analysis of the relationship between time, temporality and their materialist concept of history. In other words, they do not consider the intrinsic temporalities of complex practices and phenomena including the social production of the means of life, the creation of new needs, the dialectic ofthe forces and relations of production, and the division of labour. In Marx, ‘the human’ is a fundamentally economic and historical being, but how is it thus a fundamentally temporal being? What impact would a temporal reading of Marx’s concept of the human have on his materialist anthropology? The German Ideology introduces us to the complex relations between the natural, social and historical aspects of human being, yet the ontologically basic relationship between materiality and temporality in Marx is unclear. This relationship must be systematically investigated, such that our understanding of the ‘materiality of time’ is enriched by the materialist concept of history and Marx’s philosophy more generally.<sup>2</sup>\n\nIn its extension ofthe ‘new materialism’ of the Theses on Feuerbach, its transformation of an ‘ontology of praxis’ into an ‘ontology of production’, The German Ideology establishes a new relationship between praxis and poiêsis.<sup>3</sup> This relationship is, to be precise, doubly new. It is new to the history of philosophy, because it breaks with a tradition of separation between praxis and poiêsis beginning with Plato and Aristotle and sustained up through Kant’s critical philosophy. Yet it is also, and of greater consequence, new to the philosophy of history. The German Ideology collapses the barrier between self-transformative action by free humans and the necessary production of objects for use, concretises this collapse in its demarcation of ‘the economic’ as the social production of the means of life, and thereby establishes a philosophical basis from which ‘history’ becomes a speculative and experimental concept. The implications of this are diverse and radically open. At a basic level, we must recognise that any historical logic fundamentally structured by the ongoing objectification of human practice must express an unpredictable future, which in turn opens up the meaning – and temporality – of concepts such as ‘historical rationality’, ‘historical change’, ‘historical progress’, ‘historical evolution’, ‘historical development’ and so forth. In consideration of class struggle, for instance, Balibar argues that ‘Marx resorted less and less to pre-existing models of explanation and increasingly constructed a rationality which had no real precedent…in the incessant transformation of its conditions and forms…class struggle is its own model.’<sup>4</sup> In this way, the importance that Marx attaches to conflict (not only class struggle but more generally the conflict between the forces and relations of production) is not just a political matter: its temporal dynamic philosophically registers the concept of history as necessarily open and incomplete.\n\n<sup>1</sup> Giorgio Agamben, ‘Time and History: Critique of the Instant and the Continuum’, in his Infancy & History: Essays on the Destruction of Experience [1978], trans. Liz Heron (London and New York: Verso, 1993), 91. Agamben continues: ‘the vulgar representation of time as a precise and homogenous continuum has thus diluted the Marxist concept of history: it has become the hidden breach through which ideology has crept into the citadel of historical materialism.’ Ibid. Problematically, ‘historical materialism’ functions as a self-evident subject in this passage.\n\n2 Étienne Balibar states that ‘…Marx's philosophy, whether or not it is in a finished form, sets itself the task of thinking the materiality of time.’ Étienne Balibar, The Philosophy of Marx, trans. Chris Turner (London and New York: Verso, 1995), 81.\n\n<sup>3</sup> Ibid. 35, 40-1.\n\n11","previous_page":10,"next_page":12}