{"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":190,"pdf_page":194,"physical_index":194,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"c5f91a12cdd1594f3d0e049b5822ee7ced2efdeaebf91d2b5dd1a0c6b2783174"},"chapter":"Marx and the Concept of Historical Time","content":"However, neither of these levels take in what Osborne calls ‘the all-pervasive, generalhistorical character of the concept of crisis in its modern form (including the historico-political notion of a crisis of the capitalist system as a whole, as a condition of a transition to a new mode of production – a notion which clearly motivated Marx).’<sup>32</sup> In opposition to this concept of crisis (the third and final level to which we must attend), the second level (and by extension the first level, which is simply the formal possibility of the second) possesses a ‘restrictedly conjunctural character and relatively narrow political-economic basis.’<sup>33</sup> The difference – or rather the disjunction – between these three levels is crucial, because it cuts to the core of the philosophical and political problem that the introduction to this thesis first raised, and to which we can finally return: namely, capital is the condition of thinking history and hence historical time, but the philosophical concept of history must register the possibility (but by no means the inevitability) of social and historical time after capitalism. The thought of history, in other words, necessarily unsettles its ongoing comprehensive condition of possibility, because the realisation of history’s ‘true’ teleological end (there are several ways of grasping this in Marx: e.g. the flourishing of the ‘true’ realm of freedom, or the emergence of the ‘genuinely’ social individual, or the ‘absolute’ movement of becoming) hinges on the speculative chronological end of capitalism. In a word, the concept of historical time compels us to think ‘the time of history’ beyond the historical time of capital, as inclusive, that is to say, of the historical time of communism and its subjects. This does not mean that, unlike the historical time of capital, the ‘time of history’ is not grounded by the ongoing expansion of human needs and productive forces, or that it is not a form of self-expanding time. Far from it. It just means that capital is sublated as the comprehensive subject of historical time. We might put it this way: the ‘time of history’ must be thought from the standpoint of the sublation of the contradiction that, for Marx, human beings simultaneously live (to date) in pre-history and history. Hence the need to realise the end of ‘pre-history’ (a political category) within history; that is, to negate (which is reversible…it can regress) the ‘pre-history’ of the ongoing historical present and, therefore, usher in the beginning of a new unified kind of history, which is, as Pierre Vilar puts it, ‘the task of another mode of production.’<sup>34</sup> This is what the concept of crisis must register, which Marx’s concept of crisis does not. Politically and philosophically, ‘crisis’ is here a historical category, not simply a political-economic concept specific to capitalism. This is the context in which Osborne states that ‘analysis of the historical process demands not merely an account of fundamental contradictions and their expression in conflicts and crises, but an account of crisis as a condition of possibility of the new, in this case the qualitatively historically new: new forms of social production, new relations of production and forms of organisation.’<sup>35</sup> And yet, despite the fact that capitalist crises intrinsically point beyond the confines of the political economy of capitalism (and therefore beyond the political-economic scope of Marx’s concept of crisis), the repetitive nature of these crises is precisely what makes it so difficult to imagine how the qualitatively historically new can be realised, such that this new is already structured, and thereby foreclosed, by the historicalising temporality of capital.<sup>36</sup>\n\n<sup>31</sup> ‘…a crisis is always the starting-point of a large volume of new investment. It is also, therefore, if we consider the society as a whole, more or less a new material basis for the next turnover cycle. Marx, Capital 2, 264.\n\n<sup>32</sup> Osborne, ‘A sudden topicality: Marx, Nietzsche and the politics of crisis’, 20. Osborne goes on to define this concept of crisis as ‘its fundamental political meaning at the level of its greatest historical generality…the generality and fundamentally historical character of the concept of crisis.’ Ibid. 22. <sup>33</sup> Ibid. 20.\n\n190","previous_page":189,"next_page":191}