{"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":135,"pdf_page":139,"physical_index":139,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"f62fbbbb785db8fbfb5ab6a5c4bbefd201e23621c066c3f17d89d715c1e1b6ec"},"chapter":"Marx and the Concept of Historical Time","content":"We must address this relationship because, and as we have already established, abstract labour is the condition of thinking the category of ‘labour in general’, the category upon which the intelligibility of the materialist concept of history depends. But – and this cuts to the heart of the matter – it is one thing to demonstrate that ‘labour in general’ hinges on abstract labour, and quite another thing to put this into motion as history. If capital is in essence ‘movement’, ‘motion’, and ‘unity-in-process’<sup>6</sup>, it must hereafter be grasped as a historicalising movement, motion, and unity-in-process. And if, furthermore, self-valorising value – i.e. capital – is the ‘comprehensive subject’ [übergreifendes Subjekt] of its own processes, ‘in which it alternately assumes and loses the form of money and the form of commodities, but preserves and expands itself through all these changes’<sup>7</sup>, then the comprehensiveness of this subject (the manner in which this subject is the unification – the totalising and temporalising movement – of its own processes, and thus the unity of the acts within these processes) must become its historicalising power. As should now be clear, by ‘historicalise’ we do not mean ‘historicise’ – understanding capital as a ‘historically specific’ subject (at least what is normally meant by this expression), nor do we mean situating this subject in its ‘specific time and place’, in, for example, 1860s England (this is historicism); rather, we mean the way in which, as the comprehensive subject, as the unity of the acts within the processes that it is, capital historicalises, and it does so in such a manner that it constitutes the condition of thinking Marx’s modern post-Enlightenment concept of history.<sup>8</sup> This historicalisation is the condition of thinking ‘historicisation’, and, therefore, capitalism’s historical specificity. Capital (and here we mean ‘capital in general’, or ‘universality’<sup>9</sup>) totalises and temporalises in such a manner that these movements become historicalising movements: they become constitutive of the movement ofhistorical totalisation and historical temporalisation. Thus, against Sartre, this chapter argues that there is a totaliser – it is capital – that totalises and temporalises history.<sup>10</sup> Broadly speaking, this is what is meant by the statement that ‘capital is the subject of history’. Ontologically, this is not to assert (and here we must draw on the historicist understanding of historical time) that capital has been the subject of all hitherto existing (human) history, and will be the subject of all (human) history to come. This is absurd. Ontologically, capital has only been, and will only be, the subject of history for as long as capitalism has existed and continues to exist (even if, strictly speaking, it is impossible to know not only when – or if – capitalism will end, but also when it ‘began’<sup>11</sup>). Epistemologically, however, this does not invalidate the fact that, without capital, there is no history in and for itself: no ‘history of all hitherto existing society’ nor no ‘all history to come’. ‘History as such’, ‘history itself’, exists because of capital.\n\n<sup>5</sup> This is not to say that capital’s need to self-expand is not itself ontologically grounded by the human’s need to socially produce the means of its life, that there is not, in other words, a mutually constitutive – a reciprocal – ontological ground between capital’s need and human needs. The point, rather, is that the historical-ontological ground of the expansion of human needs within capitalism, that which gives this expansion its historical intelligibility, is capital’s need to self-expand.\n\n135","previous_page":134,"next_page":136}