{"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":187,"pdf_page":191,"physical_index":191,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"935fa98c3c4d11ecea335f840fbbd6ec7c86506d394be17c85e4c81367b18f22"},"chapter":"Marx and the Concept of Historical Time","content":"This passage raises many questions which might foster some speculative conclusions. Namely, is Marx’s concept of accumulation – at the level of ‘total social capital’ – a model of historical time? That is, does total social capital secure the manner in which the expansion of human needs can be understood as history? Is total social capital ultimately what totalises and temporalises history? Is it the comprehensive historicalising, and therefore de-historicalising, subject? These questions may come across as unrelentingly abstract and hence as orientating human history and its ‘real material basis’ in precisely the opposite direction which Marx and Engels desire in The German Ideology. Indeed, they may seem to disregard Marx and Engels’s exhortation in The Holy Family that ‘history does nothing, it does not “possess vast wealth”, it does not “fight battles”! Rather, it is humans, actual, living humans, who do all that, who possess and fight; it is not “history” that uses humans as a means to pursue its own ends, as if it were a person apart. History is nothing but the activity of humans pursuing their ends.’<sup>16</sup> Yet to read these questions as complicit in the mystification of ‘history’ is to forget precisely what kind of ‘subject’ capital – total social capital – is. It is to forget that, in capitalism, total social capital is the comprehensive subject which makes human historical acts possible, which provides the unity of the human act with its historical intelligibility. As Marx declares, after the passage quoted above: ‘those who consider the autonomisation [Verselbstständigung] o value as a mere abstraction forget that the movement of industrial capital is this abstraction in action.’<sup>17</sup> The point to take from this is not that this autonomisation is not produced by human beings, but rather that human beings are equally, and in fact asymmetrically, produced by this autonomisation, such that this autonomisation makes possible the idea that ‘history is nothing but the activity of humans pursuing their ends.’ ‘Human history’ is only conceivable because, in capitalism, human beings produce and satisfy their needs as the personifications and bearers of the ‘movement of independent value, acting with the force [Gewalt] of an elemental naturalprocess.’<sup>18</sup> In this way, if total social capital and its process is the unity of the production- and circulation-processes proper<sup>19</sup>, its time, which might be characterised as ‘the time of the totalprocess of capitalist production’, or indeed as ‘the unity of the time of production and the time of circulation’, is not, after Tombazos, the ‘organic time of capital’, but rather the historical time of capital, a historical time whose material basis is introduced (albeit in highly abstract terms) in the second volume of Capital, and subsequently concretised in the third volume of Capital.<sup>20</sup>\n\n<sup>16</sup> Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Die heilige Familie, oder Kritik der kritischen Kritik. Gegen Bruno Bauer und Konsorten [1845], in Marx and Engels, MEW, Band 2 (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1962), 98 (Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Holy Family, or Critique of Critical Criticism. Against Bruno Bauer and Company, in MECW, Volume 4, Marx and Engels, 1844-1845, trans. Richard Dixon and Clemens Dutt (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1975), 93).\n\n<sup>17</sup> Marx, Capital 2, 185.\n\n<sup>18</sup> Marx, Kapital 2, 109 (Capital 2, 185).\n\n<sup>19</sup> Marx, Capital 2, 180.\n\n187","previous_page":186,"next_page":188}