{"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":23,"pdf_page":27,"physical_index":27,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"dc9c9f17dd9afceeeb4ca0f81b2796e9198c31a94c8399173ff4c7b717377a10"},"chapter":"Marx and the Concept of Historical Time","content":"Marx, ‘the human’ is a kinetic, economic being, which means that it is the very activity of the social production of the means of life. At first glance, this concept of the human does not seem to represent much of a departure from the 1844 Manuscripts nor the notebooks on James Mill. In these writings, ‘the human’ and ‘the social’ are already always tightly interwoven concepts, later condensed in the sixth thesis of the Theses. By 1844, the human has already been figured as an indelibly social being: both an individual in relation to and interchange [Austausch] with other individuals and that very relation and interchange itself.<sup>34</sup> As Marx says across his 1844 writings: ‘the individual is the social being…the human’s individual and generic life are not different’, ‘social being…is no abstract, universal power standing over against the individual, but is the essence of every individual…’, and ‘my own existence is social activity.’<sup>35</sup> In what sense, then, does The German Ideology critically transform the 1844 writings? In what sense does it (retroactively) provide these writings with a historical logic?\n\nWe might begin by considering the concept of nature in relation to the ‘first premise of all human history’. The human being does not make its own history alongside a self-sufficient nature, a nature in itself and as such. More radically, the first premise of all human history is the premise of history per se: the notion of a ‘history of nature’ in isolation from the ‘existence of living human individuals’ is, for Marx, nonsensical. As he puts it: ‘We know only a single science, the science of history. One can look at history from two sides and divide it into the history of nature and the history of humanity. The two sides are, however, inseparable; the history of nature and the history of humans are dependent on each other so long as humankind exists.’<sup>36</sup> And further: ‘…nature, the nature that preceded human history, is not by any means the nature in which Feuerbach lives, it is nature which today no longer exists anywhere…and which, therefore, does not exist for Feuerbach.’<sup>37</sup> Should humankind cease to exist, that would not mean that other forms of organic and inorganic matter would also not exist. Marx’s claim, rather, is that these other forms of matter would be neither historical nor natural: ‘history’ and ‘nature’ alike come to an end with the end of the human being. It is evident that, for Marx, the ‘existence of living human individuals’ is inextricably tied to nature. But what is missing from the 1844 Manuscripts and the notebooks on James Mill, and what is emphasised from the very outset of The German Ideology, is (to rework the 1844 Manuscripts) the existence of humans as natural-historical beings and nature as a human-historical means of life, which is to say a human-historical ‘matter, …object, and…instrument of life activity.’<sup>38</sup> The German Ideology clearly continues the emphasis the 1844 Manuscripts place upon humanity’s metabolism with nature. At the same time, this shared emphasis is critically enriched in The German Ideology, because it is framed by a decisive historical logic which structures human universality qua the objectification of its labour. This opens up the possibility of conceiving nature as an ongoing extension of the human, such that nature becomes humanity’s historical ‘inorganic body’. The explicit association between labour, universality and nature in the works from 1844 finds its historical-ontological ground in The German Ideology. Whilst the temporal consequences of this remain to be developed, we might suggest that the materialist concept of history can be grasped as a continual cross-fertilisation between the temporality of human activity and that of nature, or, in the language of the ‘materialist method’, as an ‘intercourse’ [Verkehr] between the inseparable temporalities of the natural-human and those of human-nature.\n\n<sup>34</sup> After Andrew Chitty, I translate Austausch as ‘interchange’ rather than ‘exchange’ [Tausch]. The former has a more expansive meaning than the latter: for Marx, Tausch denotes the exchange of private property, or what Chitty refers to as ‘conditional exchange’. See Andrew Chitty, ‘The Early Marx on Needs’, Radical Philosophy 64 (Summer 1993), 30, ft. 13.\n\n<sup>35</sup> Marx, OPM, 538-39; Marx, AJM, 451; Marx, OPM, 538 (respectively, EPM, 138; JM, 265; EPM, 137). ‘The human, much as it may therefore be a particular individual (and it is precisely its particularity which makes it an individual and an actual individual social being), is just as much the totality, the ideal totality, the subjective existence of thought and experienced society for itself; just as it exists also in actuality as the intuition and the actual enjoyment of social existence, and as a totality of the human manifestation of life.’ Marx, OPM, 539 (EPM, 138).\n\n<sup>36</sup> This passage in The German Ideology is famous, in part, because it was crossed out in a final revision of the manuscript. This particular translation appears in Osborne, How to Read Marx, 38. Emphasis added. A slightly different translation of this passage also appears in a footnote in Alfred Sohn-Rethel, Intellectual and Manual Labour: a Critique of Epistemology [1970], trans. Martin Sohn-Rethel (Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press, 1977), 18.\n\n<sup>37</sup> Marx and Engels, GI, 63.\n\n23","previous_page":22,"next_page":24}