{"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":29,"pdf_page":33,"physical_index":33,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"a8157a0fdbf44e11200871f57a1dbde030c12c8e519244c85436e3170f6cf5c2"},"chapter":"Marx and the Concept of Historical Time","content":"Yet, in nearly every other respect, Marx’s subsumption of need under a historical logic marks a break with the 1844 texts in ways far more consequential than the retroactive transformation of concepts such as nature and the human into historical concepts. ‘Need’ has not just become structured by a historical logic, but more crucially structures that very logic itself. The concept of need in The German Ideology is a vital dimension ofthe very meaning of historicalisation: insofar as labour historicalises, this cannot be comprehended apart from the production of the means to satisfy existing needs and the creation of new needs. Put differently, it is The German Ideology which philosophically enables ‘labour’ to be registered as an economic and historical concept, and history to be irretrievably tied to subsistence-level needs. When Marx and Engels speak of the material production of life itself, ‘both of one’s own in labour and of fresh life in procreation,’<sup>55</sup> they are explicitly referencing the basic need of the human to subsist. This is a radical focussing and concretising of the 1844 Manuscripts, whereby the ‘totality of human life-expression’ becomes permanently connected and ultimately reducible to material life as such. However, this is not necessarily a limitation of the scope of the 1844 Manuscripts. There is no reason to believe in the wake ofThe German Ideology that the human cannot be rendered in-need-of this totality, but only that this totality is permanently grounded in the recognition that the human ‘must be in a position to live’. This is the reason why Marx and Engels bemoan the fact that:\n\nIn the whole conception of history up to the present this actual basis of history has either been totally neglected or else considered as a minor matter quite irrelevant to the course of history. Hence history must always be written according to an extraneous standard; the actual production of life seems to be primeval history, whilst the truly historical appears to be separated from ordinary life, something extra-superterrestrial [Extra-Überweltliche]. With this the relation of humans to nature is excluded from history and hence the antithesis of nature and history is created.<sup>56</sup>\n\nThe philosophy of history which Marx and Engels criticise in this passage is premised upon a fetishised conception – and, one might add, a de-historicalising temporality – of nature, which becomes the exclusive domain of the actual production of life, and which erases, as previously mentioned, humans as natural-historical beings and nature as a human-historical means of life. This philosophy of history is ideologically opposed to the conceptual status which Marx and Engels give to a ‘mode of production’ [produktionsweise], a concept which expresses history as a definite form of the production and reproduction of human life.\n\n<sup>55</sup> Marx and Engels, GI, 50.\n\n<sup>56</sup> Marx and Engels, DI, 39 (GI, 59).\n\n29","previous_page":28,"next_page":30}