{"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":183,"pdf_page":187,"physical_index":187,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"3c2eaa0b5c30986c8c325dbd5fe619094e1b043878b3200de75efeb12b72b602"},"chapter":"Marx and the Concept of Historical Time","content":"Conclusion The Historical Time of Capital and the Time of History\n\nTime is the measure of life itself.<sup>1</sup>\n\nThe production-process of capital is given priority in this thesis because it is the first and most immediate ground from which ‘the social production of the means of life’ becomes intelligible as history. Yet inasmuch as it is a necessary point of departure, the production-process – and with it the first volume of Capital – does not secure capital as the condition of thinking history, and therefore does not exhaust the scope of the relation between capital and historical time. Ultimately, it is only when the immediate production-process is examined in conjunction with the circulation-process of capital, that the basis of the materialist concept of history, and thus the possibility of developing a concept of historical time out of this concept of history, is truly disclosed. The significance of the circulation-process is not registered by so-called ‘simple circulation’ (the circulation of money and commodities in the narrow sense of the term), but rather by the circulation of money and commodities as capital. It is this circulation, or what Marx frequently calls ‘the circulation-process proper’ [den eigentlichen Zirkulationsprozeß], which, on the one hand, and along with the ‘actual’ production-process, constitutes one of ‘the two great sections’<sup>2</sup> of the movement of capital, such that we can identify, and differentiate, a ‘circulation-time’ from a ‘production-time’.<sup>3</sup> On the other hand, and this is a basic concern of the second volume of Capital, ‘circulation’ must equally be understood as a broader and more comprehensive [übergreifendes] category, one that, at a higher level of abstraction, actually contains, as a necessary moment within itself, the immediate production-process of capital.\n\n<sup>1</sup> Marx, Economic Manuscripts of 1861-63, 52.\n\n<sup>2</sup> Marx states: ‘the total production-process [Gesamtproduktionsprozeß] of capital includes both the circulation-process proper and the actual production-process. These form the two great sections of its movement, which appears as the totality of these two processes. On one side, labour-time, and on the other, circulation-time. And the whole of the movement appears as unity of labour-time and circulationtime, as unity of production and circulation. This unity itself is motion, process. Capital appears as this unity-in-process of production and circulation, a unity which can be regarded both as the totality of the production-process, as well as the specific completion of one turnover of the capital, one movement returning into itself.’ Marx, Grundrisse der Kritik der politischen Ökonomie, 520 (Grundrisse, 620). The ‘proper’ in the expression ‘the circulation-process proper’ and the ‘actual’ in the expression ‘the actual production-process’ are two different translations of the same German word: eigentlichen.\n\n<sup>3</sup> Therefore, ‘circulation-time and production-time are mutually exclusive. During its circulation-time, capital does not function as productive capital, and...produces neither commodities nor surplus-value. See Karl Marx, Capital: a Critique of Political Economy, Vol. 2: the Process of Circulation of Capital [1885] (hereafter Capital 2), trans. David Fernbach (London and New York: Penguin Books, 1978), 203. See also Marx, Grundrisse, 658, where circulation-time is figured as ‘not-production-time’ as well as ‘not-value-positing-time’.\n\n183","previous_page":182,"next_page":184}