{"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":134,"pdf_page":138,"physical_index":138,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"f146bfe4202ef8ad25a1cb18be4551a49451a4f4e02adad96a3f5be5345719bd"},"chapter":"Marx and the Concept of Historical Time","content":"Chapter Four Capital: the Condition of Thinking History\n\nHistorical Materialism…means the self-knowledge of capitalist society.\n\nAs previously argued, the difference between the circuits C–M–C and M–C–M’ should be understood as expressing two different conceptions of need. Whereas the first circuit leads to the satisfaction of human needs – most importantly the satisfaction of the need of the worker to reproduce his own existence – the second circuit correlates to capital’s need to self-expand: the ‘constantly renewed movement’ that is ‘an end in itself.’<sup>2</sup> Furthermore, the kind of ‘need’ underlying the circuit M–C–M’ constitutes the perversion [Verrücktheit] of human need, such that, in Sartrean terms, the self-expansion of value transforms human need into exigency – the individual is compelled to sell his labour-power in order to live, precisely because capital must expand.<sup>3</sup> In this respect, if concrete labour is internal to abstract labour – if the former totalises and temporalises, but only insofar as it is internal to the totalising and temporalising power of the latter – this is because only exchange-value, not use-value, satisfies capital’s need for selfexpansion.<sup>4</sup> In other words, it is only from the standpoint of the need of capital, measured by exchange-value, that the scope of the internality of concrete labour to abstract labour reveals itself. The individual sells his labour-power because he needs to live, but this need is not the totalising and temporalising basis of his ensuing labour. The need that governs the teleological end of this labour is not the worker’s need to consume the means of life, but rather the creation of use-values predestined for exchange. In capitalism, the worker does not posit the end of his act – capital does – and thus his need to consume the means of life arises quite separately from the actual production of these means. The only thing that actually connects the production and consumption of the means of human life is the wage.\n\nConsequently, despite the fact that concrete and abstract labour totalise and temporalise differently (this is important: there is no dialectic between them if this is not acknowledged), the historical-ontological ground of each – the ground which determines that, within each, totalisation is temporalisation, and temporalisation totalisation – is the same. This ground is, quite simply, capital’s need to self-expand.<sup>5</sup> Yet if this is the case, new questions emerge: what is the relationship between capital’s need to self-expand and history? More precisely, what is the relationship between this need and the materialist concept of history? How does this need relate to this concept as a modern, philosophical concept of history? Capital’s relentless drive to expand pervades the whole of Marx’s critique of political economy, but what would it mean to reconstruct Marx’s exposition of this drive as a historicalising concept of need? A concept of need which registers the creation of history itself, such that capital’s need historicalises qua needs? These questions point to the fact that the expansive ontological scope of the concepts of necessity [Notwendigkeit] and need [Bedürfnis], as first introduced in the 1844 Manuscripts and enriched by The German Ideology, is not realised by Marx in the various drafts of Capital. In other words, from the Grundrisse onwards, Marx does not, this chapter argues, adequately sustain the ‘materialist outlook’ [materialistischer Anschauung], an outlook which, according to The German Ideology, determines not only that necessities and needs must be subjected to a historical logic, but must be understood as constituting that very logic itself. In The German Ideology, this outlook is undeniably grounded in human necessities and human needs, but this does not mean that it does not thereby extend to capital’s necessities and capital’s needs. Not at all. If, within capitalism, human needs are internal to, if they are satisfied because of, capital, what this means is that capital does more than make itself relevant to the materialist outlook. It regrounds this outlook. This must be systematically investigated, such that a general set of ontological relations between need, capital and history reveals itself, and reveals itself beyond the predominant framework through which Marx presents these relations, which is to say the ordinary understanding of history. Marx teaches us that social needs evolve and expand, and that capitalism is a historically specific formation of socially necessary labour and social need, one which alienates human necessities and human needs. This is of course true, but it presumes rather than explains the relationship between the self-expansion of capital and the materialist concept of history more generally\n\n<sup>1</sup> Georg Lukács, ‘The Changing Function of Historical Materialism’ [1919], in History and Class Consciousness, 229. ‘Thus historical materialism is, in the first instance, a theory of bourgeois society and its economic structure’. Ibid.\n\n<sup>2</sup> Marx, Capital 1, 253.\n\n<sup>3</sup> For Sartre, this represents the sense in which the practico-inert temporalises: exigency – or need from the standpoint of the practico-inert – constitutes the systematised perversion, the systematic co-option, of the temporalising basis of human praxis.\n\n<sup>4</sup> However, only use-value – e.g. the use-value of labour-power – produces that which satisfies capital’s need for self-expansion. Only the use-value of labour-power produces surplus-value.\n\n134","previous_page":133,"next_page":135}