{"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":138,"pdf_page":142,"physical_index":142,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"5955e6fd215c9238617778a928bf4bf49fd234f14d41b93c49f27e3db47e5613"},"chapter":"Marx and the Concept of Historical Time","content":"This chapter focuses on the production-process of capital, and treats the self-expansion at the heart of this process as the practical basis upon which the materialist concept of history depends.<sup>15</sup> In Sartrean language, this self-expansion constitutes the ‘primary intelligibility’ of history: it gives history its autonomy and – as heretical as it may be to state this – its ‘motive force’.<sup>16</sup> Marx and Engels are correct to argue – and this chapter should be read as reinforcing this argument – that in the bourgeois conception of history – the culminating ‘conception of history up to the present’ – the ‘actual basis of history has either been totally neglected or else considered as a minor matter quite irrelevant to the course of history.’<sup>17</sup> Yet what they do not recognise in The German Ideology, and what Marx does not demonstrate, or even suggest, in the various drafts of Capital, is that the ‘need’ without which history cannot be comprehended is not, that is, not originarily, human need, but rather capital’s need to self-expand. Ultimately, it is the two ‘great sections’<sup>18</sup> of the movement of capital – the production- and circulationprocesses – which, taken together, render ‘the process of expansion of human needs and the productive forces corresponding to them’<sup>19</sup> intelligible as history, but, this chapter argues, the production-process of capital takes precedence, because this process directly determines that, in capitalism, the human is not only not the subject of the expansion of its own needs, but that this displacement is the very reason why there is such a thing as ‘human history’. As we will see, the production-process is the ontological basis of some of the most basic, and seemingly self-evident, assumptions that Marx’s, if not every post-Enlightenment, conception of history tacitly accepts: human history not only exists ‘in itself and as such’<sup>20</sup>, but its progression never stops. Hence the speculative proposition which guides this chapter is this: valorisation is the production of historical time. The production-process of capital valorises value, and it does so in such a way that, to rework the Lukács quotation that frames this chapter, historical time becomes its self-knowledge.\n\n<sup>13</sup> The production-process of capital (Capital Vol. 1) correlates to what can be called capital’s ‘deathly life’, whereas the circulation-process of capital and its metamorphoses (Capital Vol. 2) – treated in the conclusion to this thesis – might be understood as the ‘life-circuit’ or ‘life-process’ of capital.\n\n<sup>14</sup> To expand on the previous footnote, the ‘life’ in this formulation must be doubly understood, as both the life of capital which, ‘vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks’ (Marx, Capital 1, 342), and as the life of capital in which the production-process is just one of the moments within each of capital’s multiple life-circuits. This formulation does not detract from the fact that, following Osborne, human finitude is the ‘ontological basis of the “value” of time’. It simply gives this fact its historical purchase. It expresses that, in capitalism, human finitude is only this basis in relation to the historicalising life of ‘self-immortalising and self-multiplying value. Marx, Grundrisse, 639.\n\n<sup>15</sup> The circulation-process of capital is examined in the conclusion to this thesis.\n\n138","previous_page":137,"next_page":139}