{"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":97,"pdf_page":101,"physical_index":101,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"8de327a9a62bff5cb726f1d02e847ca24bc80c98e442a43e5df9378b28027f12"},"chapter":"Marx and the Concept of Historical Time","content":"Chapter Three Whither Labour?\n\n…we should not say that one man’s hour is worth another man’s hour, but rather that one man during an hour is worth as much as another man during an hour. Time is everything, man is nothing; he is at the most the embodiment of time. Quality no longer matters. Quantity alone decides everything: hour for hour, day for day…<sup>1</sup>\n\nThis thesis has, up to this point, been predominantly framed at a transhistorical level. Chapter 1 introduced a transhistorical materialist concept of history: a concept of history that, for Marx and Engels, registers all of human history. The heart of Chapter 1 is a temporal reading of the first historical act – the social production of the means of life – that is a ‘fundamental condition of all history, which today, as thousands of years ago, must daily and hourly be fulfilled merely in order to sustain human life.’<sup>2</sup> Specifically, this chapter looked at Marx and Engels’s internal specification of this act – the creation of the means of satisfying existing needs and the creation of new needs – as two different dimensions of one and the same historical act. It then argued that the basic temporal structure of this act is a dialectic between the present and the past, one immanently guided by a teleological future. What Chapter 1 established is that, for Marx and Engels, labour and need are the two categories upon which the materialist concept of history depends, and thus labour and need are the two forces without which the temporality of history cannot be thought. Chapter 2 gave us the means by which to ontologically ground the temporal reading offered by Chapter 1. Heidegger’s Dasein provides an account of how the act as such temporalises, but fails to establish need as the end of the act, whereas Sartre explicitly reworks the relation between Dasein and its world as a material relation between individual praxis and the ‘practico-inert’, thus situating need not only at the heart of temporalisation, but at the heart of the unity between totalisation and temporalisation. The conclusion of Sartre’s first Critique is the formulation of history as ‘totalisation without a totaliser’ (a formulation, we should note, which is remarkably similar to Althusser’s ‘process without a subject’). For Sartre, history can thus be conceived as the ongoing totalisation and temporalisation of all individual totalisations and temporalisations, but historical totalisation and temporalisation does not – it cannot – have a totaliser. Any attempt to identify such a totaliser is to relegate dialectics to metaphysics.\n\n<sup>1</sup> Karl Marx, Das Elend der Philosophie [Misère de la Philosophie] [1847], in Marx and Engels, MEW, Band 4 (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1977), 85 (for an English edition of this passage: Karl Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy (New York: International Publishers, 1963), 53-4).\n\n<sup>2</sup> Marx and Engels, GI, 48.\n\n97","previous_page":96,"next_page":98}