{"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":31,"pdf_page":35,"physical_index":35,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"25223b77ffdd0fa901be325964d53587a8534c71ef872e8cf5f6bd6af69fb7e0"},"chapter":"Marx and the Concept of Historical Time","content":"It is difficult to overstate how pivotal the concept of means [Mittel] is to the materialist concept of history. This importance emerges with the first of the two first historical acts: the creation of the means to satisfy existing needs (not the satisfaction of those needs themselves). This emphasis on means returns us to the apparent tension between the two first historical acts that constitute history. The second first historical act, the creation of new needs, must now be examined in relation to the first first historical act, the creation of the means to satisfy existing needs. The issue here is not the content of new needs, but the way in which these needs – qua new – constitute a historical logic more generally. Marx and Engels are not confusing matters by identifying two first historical acts, but in fact consider the creation of the means to satisfy existing needs and the creation of new needs as two different expressions of one and the same historical act.<sup>59</sup> In this sense, ‘means’ and ‘the new’ are conceptually indissociable in Marx.<sup>60</sup> The production of the means of life, not life per se, unites existing and new needs, whilst not collapsing the difference between the domain of the existing and that of the new. What follows from this is an unmistakable – if underdeveloped – historical logic. A dynamic and open ‘first historical act’ gives rise to a concept of history that is implicitly alien to any fixed opposition between the existing and the new. The notion of historical change is consequently destabilised. Establishing the difference and relation between one historical act and another, demarcating the end of one historical act and the beginning of another, becomes unsettled in the sense that it is impossible to claim that there is such a thing as ‘after’ the social production of the means of life. This impossibility is underpinned by the concept of means, which, like Marx’s concept of ‘productive force’, can (at least in part) be grasped as an objectification of a social relation orientated towards an end, in fact the end (teleologically speaking), which is nothing else than life itself. The materialist concept of history is structured by a dialectic between existing and new needs, which is, moreover, a necessarily open dialectic, because the end (chronologically speaking) of the first historical act is, strictly speaking, unintelligible. Thus the question arises: is there a historical temporality to be disinterred from this?\n\n<sup>58</sup> ‘Marxism is…materialist. To this extent it can be used by feminism. Insofar as materialism concerns oppression, and inversely if we accept that to start from oppression defines among other things a materialist approach, “a feminist science…wants to reach an explanation of the oppression; to do this it must start with it (and)…it will tend inevitably towards a materialist theory of history”…materialism is not one possible tool, amongst others, for oppressed groups; it is the tool precisely in so far as it is the only theory of history for which oppression is the fundamental reality, the point of departure. Christine Delphy, ‘A Materialist Feminism is Possible’, trans. Diana Leonard, Feminist Review 4 (1980), 87. The quotation embedded within this passage is a self-quotation by Delphy, from ‘Pour un feminisme materialiste’, L’Arc 61 (1976).\n\n<sup>59</sup> As Peter Osborne states, ‘Marx’s grammar is confusing (the manuscript never received its final revision), but there is only one act at issue here. The “production of the means to satisfy existing needs” and the “creation of new needs” refer to two aspects of the same act, since the production of new means to satisfy existing needs creates a (hitherto non-existent) need for these means.’ Osborne, How to Read Marx, 41. For an additional explanation of this ‘confusion’, see Soper, On Human Needs, 46.\n\n<sup>60</sup> This conceptual inseparability critically enriches Marx’s understanding of the human as a ‘genusbeing’ [Gattungswesen] in the 1844 Manuscripts. If the movement of Gattungswesen is the movement of humans becoming more than themselves, if it denotes the movement whereby humans become ‘more-than-human’ [Übermensch], then The German Ideology effectively stipulates that this movement is based in the historical and historicalising movement which is the creation of new needs.\n\n31","previous_page":30,"next_page":32}