{"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":168,"pdf_page":172,"physical_index":172,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"cf2fd3e5126ed74a39c396f84deffd98a57b25f54965d567d37c46be6a02682a"},"chapter":"Marx and the Concept of Historical Time","content":"…[capital] creates the material elements for the development of the rich individuality, which is as all-sided in its production as in its consumption, and whose labour also therefore appears no longer as labour, but as the full development of activity itself, in which natural necessity in its immediate form has disappeared; because a historically created need has taken the place of a natural need. This is why capital is productive; i.e. an essential relation for the development of the social productive forces. 105\n\nThere is a distinct tension in Marx – from the Grundrisse onwards – between two discourses: alienation both is and is not the separation and dispossession of the human from the expansion of its needs. Yet this tension is precisely that through which we must comprehend the relation between alienation and the materialist concept of history. These discourses are dialectically bound to one another: if there was no development of these needs and powers by capital there would be no possibility of their active reappropriation (no possibility, that is, of communism). This tension – dialectic – cuts to the heart of the meaning of the ‘social individual’ in Marx (which, as Chapter 2 argues, Mészáros does not grasp): the notion of history as the ‘expansion of productive forces’ is predicated on the existence of a mode of production in which, ‘on the one hand, we have a totality of productive forces, which have…taken on a material form and are for the individuals no longer the forces of the individuals but of private property, and hence of the individuals only insofar as they are owners of private property themselves’<sup>106</sup> (that is, only insofar as labour-power is commodified); and in which, on the other hand, the productive powers of social individuals are being actively developed by capital in the production-process (indeed in capitalist society more generally). This tension and dialectic are complicated further by Capital, such that the deeply structuralist dimension of human beings as the ‘bearers’ and ‘personifications’ of alienated social relations simultaneously registers the distance of human beings from the structures that they personify, to the point where they are overdetermined by these structures, and yet – at the same time – these human beings are these structures. In other words, ‘the capitalist’ may just be the personification of capital, but he is no less an individual because of this, just as ‘the worker’ may be the personification of ‘variable capital’, but he is likewise no less an individual because of this.\n\nWe are now at the point where the constitutive place of class and class struggle<sup>107</sup> must be reassessed in relation to Marx’s philosophical concept of history. Chapter 1 briefly raises the question of whether category of ‘class’ can, on some level, be grasped in transhistorical terms, and suggests that whereas something like ‘the differentiation and grouping of humans in relation to the surplus product’ might be understood as transhistorically valid (that is, in all human history up to the present), classes and the struggles they constitute cannot, in the last instance, and as much as some Marxists would reject this, be comprehended as ontologically originary in the same way that labour and need can and must. Class and the division of labour are ontologically ‘down the line’ from labour and need, such that class and class struggle can only be logically comprehended as a ‘motive force’ or ‘engine’ of history after needs and the labours which satisfy these needs have been established as the basic intelligibility of history. 108 However, once capital is established as the condition of thinking history (once abstract labour becomes the condition of thinking ‘labour in general’ and once capital’s need to self-expand becomes the condition of thinking the expansion of human needs), class takes on a constitutive function that previously – at a transhistorical level – was impossible for us to justify. This is because the formation of classes specific to capitalism – the formation of classes not just from the ownership of the means of producing life, but from the exclusive ownership of these means by one class as against another – is a material basis without which alienation and estrangement, and hence ‘history’, would not exist. The non-ownership of all facets of the labour-process (the activity, means and products of labour) by the producers is, in other words, a direct condition of thinking history. The specifically capitalist aspect of this is crucial. If, as The German Ideology contends, there is (to date) no consciousness in isolation from the originary division between spiritual and material labour, which is to say in isolation from the existence of a ruling class, Marx’s analysis of the subsumption of the labour-process by the valorisationprocess implicitly reworks this, and reveals that there is (to date) no historical consciousness, no consciousness of history in itself and as such, in isolation from the division of labour and consequent creation of classes within capitalism. Hence when Balibar states, as earlier cited, that ‘Marx…[extends] the scheme of the division of labour to its fullest extent…’ whereby he ‘accord[s] existence to classes on the dual plane of the division of labour and consciousness, and therefore also [makes]…the division of society into classes a condition or a structure of thought’<sup>109</sup>, we must specify this and declare that only the capitalist division of society into classes gives the thought of ‘history’ its possibility. If for Marx and Engels class ‘achieves an independent existence over against…individuals,’ and if these individuals ‘become subsumed under it [class],’<sup>110</sup> this must be understood as an essential condition of history, in both thought and actual existence. Yet this condition is only valid from the standpoint of the subsumption of the labour-process (individuals) under the valorisation-process (‘class’, a category whose intelligibility relies on abstract labour).<sup>111</sup>\n\n<sup>105</sup> Marx, Grundrisse der Kritik der politischen Ökonomie, 244 (Grundrisse, 325).\n\n<sup>106</sup> Marx and Engels, GI, 92.\n\n<sup>107</sup> These two terms should be understood synonymously. In Marx, ‘class’ is not a static category which is subsequently put into motion through struggle. ‘Class’ is already always class struggle, which is to say that, so long as classes exist, they only ever exist through struggle. To rearticulate the relationship between needs and the means of their satisfaction in Chapter 1, there is no chronological succession here: one moment (the existence of a class) is not subsequently followed by another (the struggle of this class).\n\n168","previous_page":167,"next_page":169}