{"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":137,"pdf_page":141,"physical_index":141,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"a308cef40c58bfbefa2dceef95a2311e03066fe7b5df4f1a233171173ea4bf4a"},"chapter":"Marx and the Concept of Historical Time","content":"What is the upshot of this? If, on some level, we are to hold on to the materialist concept of history, wherein ‘history’ can be understood as something like ‘the social production of the means of human life’, a production that satisfies existing human needs and creates new human needs, then we must recognise and work through the fact that capital is the subject that makes this understanding possible. Methodologically, this requires that we extend the logic of history to capital itself. This requires that capital – whose existing and new needs might be formulated as ‘reproduction on an expanded scale, i.e. accumulation’<sup>12</sup> – be conceived from the standpoint of producing the means of its own life. These means are irreducible to the human’s means of life – the commodities necessary for the reproduction of the owner of labour-power. Capital’s means of life are not these and other commodities, but rather theprocesses by which the ‘inner substance’ of commodities – ‘socially necessary labour-time’ – produces and circulates itself. More specifically, the processes by which this labour-time expands itself – valorises itself – constitutes capital’s means of life. It is not difficult to grasp, therefore, that capital presents us with a very different kind of ‘life’ than that of the human being. Yet whilst there is a consistent appeal to life in Marx’s critique of political economy – there is a consistent use of life-related terms – there is no (or at least no explicit) theoretical discourse on the ‘life of capital’ in this critique (indeed, the same can be said of ‘the life of the worker’, ‘living labour’, and so forth, insofar as ‘life’ here only functions ontologically around the concepts with which it is joined). What, then, is the ‘life of capital’? In what sense is this life a historical – a historicalising – life? To answer these questions, this chapter maintains, we must systematically investigate the different dimensions of capital’s need to self-expand, and thereby create a life that expresses these dimensions.<sup>13</sup> This is, in the end, how to fill out capital as the subject of history. This is how social – as opposed to individual – life occupies the standpoint (in capitalism) from which ‘historical totalisation’ and ‘historical temporalisation’ can be understood. Hence this is how Marx’s distinct challenge to the Heideggerian and Sartrean projects can ultimately be secured. As opposed to Heidegger, capital, not Dasein, is ‘the originary happening’ [das ursprüngliche Geschehen] that makes the ‘science of history’ possible (this itself stems from the fact that the individual’s being-towards-death is predominantly actual within what can be called capital’s ‘being-towards-life’<sup>14</sup>). Contra Sartre, individual praxis is not the totalising and temporalising core of historical dialectics; the life of capital – ‘universal social labour’ – is.\n\n‘[becomes] more consistent thanks to some modifications’ after 1862. Ibid. 144, 142. ‘Total social capital’ [gesellschaftlichen Gesamtkapital] is, as we will later learn, the decisive modification. Hegel is the clear interlocutor here, insofar as the three moments of the Concept in the Logic (universality, particularity and singularity) correspond to capital in general, many competing capitals and interestbearing capital in Capital. The details of this reading of the Hegel/Marx confrontation are not important here, but what needs to be stressed is that ‘capital in general’ does not turn its back on particularity and singularity, but is dialectically dependent on them. Hence the ‘historicalisation’ being discussed here is not indifferent to different particular histories, nor is it indifferent to the singularity of the historical event, but is rather dialectically dependent on them. As previously cited, this dovetails with the problem of history as ‘how to universalise the singular without suppressing its specificity.’ Mészáros, The Work of Sartre: Search for Freedom and the Challenge of History, 242.\n\n<sup>10</sup> Disclosing capital as this totaliser does not invalidate, but actually registers, Hegel’s ‘cunning of reason’, as well as the ‘invisible hand’ of Smith’s market. This is the structuralist dimension of capital’s subjectness: it is the ‘hidden’ or ‘empty’ subject of history.\n\n<sup>11</sup> Take the question of the ‘origins of capitalism’. Insofar as capitalism is a mode of production, and a mode of production is a totalising abstraction of multiple, actually existing societies, the desire to locate the origins of capitalism in a particular time, place and phenomenon (in, for instance, 16<sup>th</sup> century English agrarian relations, which is the ‘Brenner Thesis’) is fundamentally misguided. In other words, capitalism is capitalism by virtue of the fact that, as a system of social relations and forces irreducible to linear causation and time, its origins belong to no one place, time or phenomenon. This fact guides Marx’s analysis of ‘originary accumulation’, and it is, to varying degrees, lost on the leading thinkers of the origins of capitalism (e.g. Fernand Braudel, Maurice Dobb, Paul Sweezy, Robert Brenner, Perry Anderson, Immanuel Wallerstein and Ellen Meiksins Wood).\n\n<sup>12</sup> Marx, Capital 1, 763.\n\n137","previous_page":136,"next_page":138}