{"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":30,"pdf_page":34,"physical_index":34,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"3a8ac03d149d5d0b96e64b6cc43361be066fd2c9d7fdaeeef8965a18f342c260"},"chapter":"Marx and the Concept of Historical Time","content":"This brings us to the third ‘moment’ of history, to the place occupied by the biological reproduction of the human – the propagation of the human as a living organism – in relation to the materialist concept of history more generally. On the one hand, this reproduction is a philosophical problem for Marx, because the social materialism begun in the Theses and given historicalising power in The German Ideology is indifferent to the matter of this reproduction, which is to say – above all else – the procreative capacities of the human body. On the other hand, the meaning of history in The German Ideology is simultaneously the acknowledgement and perpetuation of this indifference. In this work, social activity is historical activity precisely because ‘life’ ontologically proceeds from the social needs of living human beings, not from the biological genesis of human life itself. Life is first and foremost a social category in Marx, such that need and labour – the two fundamental expressions of human sociality – provide life with its historical intelligibility. The point here is not to downplay the importance of biological reproduction, but rather to indicate that this third moment is only ‘historical’ by virtue of the fact that it is internal to the social production of the means of human life (here the ‘means’ are ‘fresh lives’ themselves). Framed, as it is, by a relational ontology, the moment of biological reproduction also introduces another tenet of Marx’s philosophy of history: the production of the means of life is inseparable from the kind of relations that structure this production. In the case of biological reproduction, Marx and Engels characterise these relations as the relations between man and woman, parents and children, the family, and so on, relations that raise the question of whether ‘the economic’ in Marx is a sexed ontological category of the human, and thus a sexed category of history. The philosophical and political significance of this question is not realised by the obvious answer (the economic is undeniably a sexed category in Marx), but rather by the potential formation of a materialist feminism made possible by this answer. In The German Ideology and elsewhere, there is no evidence to suggest that Marx thinks ‘sex as anything else than biologically given (that is to say that individual human bodies are sexed prior to their socialisation), a testament – rich with irony – to the remarkable ideological power ofthe dominant concept of sex which, suffice to say, excises nature from history and undercuts the social core of Marx’s concept of the human. From the standpoint of the philosophy of sex, The German Ideology is complicit in its critique of ‘self-sufficient philosophy’ as being blind to ‘the practical activity, the practical process of the development of humans.’<sup>57</sup> Yet it is also essential to state that The German Ideology potentially fosters a critical theory of sex, wherein ‘sex’ is not a fetishised ‘natural’ given but a social relation which the production of the means of life reproduces and upon which it depends. Christine Delphy’s work on the relation between materialism and oppression is the crucial point of departure here. For her, sex is a category of domination, a social relation of oppression wherein biological reproduction is the historically exploitative domain of social life as a woman. In this reading of Marx’s materialism, historical oppression is ‘the fundamental reality, the point of departure.’<sup>58</sup>\n\n<sup>57</sup> Marx and Engels, DI, 27 (GI, 48).\n\n30","previous_page":29,"next_page":31}