{"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":163,"pdf_page":167,"physical_index":167,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"99d3adab3fbf7b55cd5498795ed75dac56d1c106e770b1567575d59b55b1b9a0"},"chapter":"Marx and the Concept of Historical Time","content":"This is important, because it provides us with a new framework whereby capital can be presented as the condition of thinking the materialist concept of history. Specifically, Marx’s critical appropriation of the Doctrine of Essence in Hegel’s Logic – his critical appropriation of the essence/appearance [Wesen/Erscheinung] relation in Hegel – allows us to formulate the following (speculative) proposition: ‘history’ can be thought of as something which, in itself and as such, is ‘in motion’, ‘moves on’, ‘expands’, etc., precisely because capital’s production of the ‘essential relation’ between necessary and surplus-labour – the production of surplusvalue – appears as automatic. Or, to put this another way, the expansion of human needs, and the expansion of productive forces corresponding to the expansion of human needs, can only be thought of as ‘history’ because (1) the expansion of human needs is subsumed by capital’s need to self-expand, and (2) capital’s self-expansion appears as automatic. This is the context in which Marx’s work intersects in interesting ways with Koselleck’s, such that the former potentially provides the latter with the material basis necessary to sustain the historiographicsemantic findings of Koselleck’s Future’s Past. More precisely, this is the possibility that real subsumption and the production of relative surplus-value constitute the historical-ontological ground of the emergence, in the mid-18<sup>th</sup> century, of ‘Neuzeit’ – the distinctly modern or ‘new time’ that registers, as David Cunningham expresses it, summarising Koselleck, an ‘“epochal threshold” [in which] history itself, in the collective singular, comes to be first perceived as “in motion” – a perception that Koselleck locates in a divergence between the “space of experience” and the “horizon of expectation”.’<sup>92</sup> The suggestion here is thus this: what else is Neuzeit but the historical time fostered by the production of relative surplus-value? What else is Neuzeit but the self-expanding time of capital, a time that is perceived as ‘in motion’ because the production of surplus-value appears as self-expanding? This is what an encounter between Marx and Koselleck might yield. Our working proposition that the intelligibility of ‘history’ relies on the automatic character of the production-process of capital might also function as a corrective to the predominant standpoint of ‘Systematic Dialectics’ which, as Chapter 3 points out, systematically excludes history and historical time from the domain of Marx’s systematic dialectic. Specifically, it might contribute to the sense in which, as some of the scholarship in this field has already argued<sup>93</sup>, Marx’s appropriation of Hegel’s Essence-Logic marks the most consequential homology between Capital and the Logic. This critical appropriation, this thesis maintains, allows us to grasp the fundamental historical intelligibility of passages such as the following, which, like the previous passage, is contained within the ‘Fragment on Machines’ in the Grundrisse:\n\n<sup>90</sup> Ibid. 1007.\n\n<sup>89</sup> Ibid. 255.\n\n<sup>91</sup> Ibid. 302 (see also Marx, Grundrisse, 704).\n\n<sup>92</sup> David Cunningham, ‘A Marxist heresy? Accelerationism and its discontents’, Radical Philosophy 191 (May/June 2015), 29.\n\n163","previous_page":162,"next_page":164}