{"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":188,"pdf_page":192,"physical_index":192,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"62d5ff9a5a19b16150b396fe44cb0ec0cfe3899ec49ea6b79a5446f21fc9e0ef"},"chapter":"Marx and the Concept of Historical Time","content":"However – and this point guides the second part of this conclusion – it is impossible to imagine the ‘historical time of capital’ – the concepts of history and historical time which exist because of total social capital – in isolation from Marx’s concept of crisis. Inasmuch as capital is, as Tombazos describes it, a ‘rich and complex organisation of rhythms’, it is, and because of this, equally the permanent tendency towards crisis, such that its rhythmic unity contains, within itself, the permanent possibility of ‘a kind of “arrhythmia”…a momentary disturbance of the system’s coherence.’<sup>21</sup> Generally speaking, we must attend to three different levels at which ‘crisis’ operates in Marx’s work, but which, when taken together as a whole, casts considerable doubt on the unity of Marx’s understanding of crisis, such that it is questionable whether one can identify a ‘concept’ of crisis in Marx.<sup>22</sup> The first two levels are immanent to capitalism. They proceed from Marx’s position that, at their core, crises are manifestations of the ineradicable contradictions of capital: they bring ‘to the surface’ the barriers [Schranken] ‘to the free development of the productive forces’, barriers which capitalism ‘contains within itself’.<sup>23</sup> This begins – and this is the first level – with the fact that the potential for crisis is immanent to the value-form itself. Even the most simple metamorphosis of the commodity, the ongoing separation, in time and space, between its purchase and sale<sup>24</sup>, contains the seeds of crisis within itself, because when the ‘assertion of [the] external independence [äußerliche Verselbstständigung]’ of the two processes ‘which lack internal independence’ ‘proceeds to a certain critical point, their unity violently makes itself felt by producing – a crisis.’<sup>25</sup> In this regard, ‘crisis’ can be understood as the enforced movement of interdependent processes that have become immobile. Crisis is therefore not just the lack of the essential movement which is capital, but so too ‘the forcible establishment of unity between elements that have become independent and the enforced separation from one another of elements which are essentially one.’<sup>26</sup> ‘Alongside the interrupted circulation’, as Marx puts it elsewhere, ‘a forced circulation takes place.’<sup>27</sup>\n\n<sup>20</sup> Tombazos’s ‘organic time’ is the comprehensive concept of the third and final section of his Time in Marx. It is the culminating conceptual formulation which unites ‘the time of production’ and ‘the time of circulation’ as, respectively, a ‘linear time’ and ‘cyclical time’. The problems with this reading aside, we must note that it goes hand-in-hand with a systematic lack of an analysis of the concept of need, a fact which results in the separation, for Tombazos, of the ‘logical’ and ‘historical’ time of capital. <sup>21</sup> Tombazos, Time in Marx, 145.\n\n<sup>22</sup> Much of the discussion that follows is indebted to Peter Osborne’s recent article ‘A sudden topicality: Marx, Nietzsche and the politics of crisis’, Radical Philosophy 160 (March/April 2010), 19-26, which proceeds from the premise that whereas Marx is undoubtedly a thinker of crisis, it is unclear whether he is a theorist of crisis, whether, that is to say, he ‘propound[s] something that might legitimately be called a “crisis theory”.’ Ibid. 19. This dovetails with Tombazos’s argument that Marx only analyses ‘periodical crises linked to the industrial cycle, which are therefore “normal”, necessary and inevitable moments of capitalist production’, but leaves unanalysed ‘the structural crises that are abnormal or extraordinary in that they cannot be overcome by the spontaneous or endogenous mechanisms of the system.’ Tombazos, Time in Marx, 274. However, what Tombazos calls a ‘structural crisis’ is not the same thing as what Osborne calls ‘the all-pervasive, general-historical character of the concept of crisis in its modern form’, a concept of crisis which Tombazos leaves unanalysed and with which, as we will learn, the concept of historical time must reckon. See Osborne, ‘A sudden topicality: Marx, Nietzsche and the politics of crisis’, 20.\n\n<sup>23</sup> Karl Marx, Economic Manuscripts of 1861-63 (Continuation), in MECW, Volume 32, Marx: 1861- 1863, trans. Renate Simpson (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1989), 157. See also Karl Marx, Theories of Surplus-Value, Part 2 [1861-63], trans. Renate Simpson (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1969), 528. <sup>24</sup> Marx, Economic Manuscripts of 1861-63 (Continuation), in MECW, Volume 32, 140, 145.\n\n188","previous_page":187,"next_page":189}