Marx and the Concept of Historical Time

At this point, it is vital to outline three deeply intertwined (and admittedly jargonistic) concepts which receive their fullest philosophical exposition in Chapter 2, but which guide this thesis as a whole. The first of these is what, in the existential-phenomenological tradition, is usually referred to as ‘temporalisation’. Broadly speaking, temporalisation means the active production of a dynamic difference and relation between the past, the present, and the future. In this regard, if ‘temporality’ signifies a dynamic relation between the past, the present, and the future, temporalisation is the active production of temporality. This is the sense in which, after Martin Heidegger, the movement of existence ‘temporalises itself’ – it is the creation of the three primary coordinates of human time. The concept of temporalisation is quite crucial, because it is the philosophical basis upon which the possibility of a temporal reading depends. Insofar as a ‘temporal reading’ of anything – a concept, a practice, a phenomenon, etc. – is sustainable, it must provide an account of temporalisation in order to ground its reading. This dovetails with the previously stated aim of destabilising the dominant temporality of Historical Materialism (the linear, progressive time of historicism). The concept of temporalisation is inherently critical: it upends how we (to use a Heideggerian expression) ‘initially and for the most part’ comprehend action, activity, and the act themselves.¹⁵ Temporally speaking, the sense in which Marx’s concept of ‘the economic’ is an inherently critical concept – the sense in which ‘the social production of the means of life’ is an inherently critical way of configuring history – comes to light through the concept of temporalisation.

The second concept which guides this thesis is a concept without which history cannot be thought, and is therefore a concept without which we cannot develop a concept of historical time in Marx. This concept is totalisation. The problem of totalisation is at the heart of every modern, post-Enlightenment philosophical conception of history (this includes the materialist concept of history). This is because – as Chapter 2 contends – every modern concept of history is, whether it registers it or not, a concept of history structured by the idea that history is the ongoing totalisation of the time of all human lives. That is, totalisation is what gives the notion of ‘history’ as a collective singular – as a whole – its intelligibility. As we will see, coming to grips with the concept of totalisation – and this comes out of our analysis of Heidegger and Sartre in Chapter 2 – is predicated on dissociating ourselves from the ordinary understanding of totalisation. Broadly speaking, totalisation is not, as it is often understood to be, a process of unification that is subsequent to an existing state of difference. Totalisation is not the adding up of innumerable multiplicities into a single whole. Rather, totalisation is the production of difference, a unification whose unity is the process of its differentiation. In this way, a ‘whole has unity precisely because this unity is the process of its differentiation. Totalisation must be conceived at multiple levels – at the level of the individual, at the level of the social, and at the level of history itself. It is therefore not only necessary to speak of ‘individual totalisation (this is the sense in which an individual act totalises the material field of which it is a part), as opposed to ‘social totalisation’ and ‘historical totalisation’, but equally to address the relation between these different levels. Whereas, as we will see, Heidegger’s work does not adequately address this relation, Sartre’s work does. Specifically, Sartre provides a framework through which ‘historical totalisation’ might be understood as the ongoing totalisation of all individual and social totalisations. To put this within the terms of The German Ideology, we might state then that ‘history’ is the ongoing totalisation of each and every ‘first historical act’ (considered from the standpoint of both its individual actors as well as the sociality of the act itself). It is also necessary to state here that there is an indissociable relationship between totalisation and temporalisation. In short, the very intelligibility of temporalisation proceeds from totalisation. Totalisation is the material basis from which temporalisation is itselfa unification whose unity is the process of its differentiation (in this case the differentiation between the past, the present, and the future). Thus if history is the ongoing totalisation of each and every first historical act, it is likewise the ongoing temporalisation of each and every first historical act. As we will see, the first historical act – the social production of the means of life – provides us with a possible model of historical time, but only inasmuch as all first historical acts are themselves totalised and temporalised.

¹⁵ On rare occasions, ‘temporalisation’ will be employed to denote a temporal reading itself, such that one might ‘temporalise a concept of history’, such that ‘temporalisation’ renders explicit the concept’s implicit temporality, renders explicit the implicit temporalities of the practices and phenomena that this concept registers. However, the vast majority of the use of ‘temporalisation’ in this thesis is faithful to the existential-phenomenological tradition: it denotes the production of temporality by the act itself.

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This leads us to the third and final concept, one which indisputably has a Heideggerian and Sartrean provenance, but which is also used by neither Heidegger nor Sartre. This concept is historicalisation. At its most basic level, ‘historicalisation’ denotes any individual or social act, process or movement which produces history. That is, historicalisation is any individual or social act, process or movement whose totalisation and temporalisation is, on some level, constitutive of history. In Marx’s terms, historicalisation registers the production of the means of satisfying existing needs and hence the creation of new needs. Historicalisation is obviously not a concept which Marx uses, but it is, this thesis contends, productively integrated into his work. First and foremost, this is the sense in which labour historicalises: labour – and this is a concern of every chapter of this thesis – constitutes history. Labour does not just temporalise. It does not just create time. It historicalises. It creates time that is itself constitutive of history.

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In short, historicalisation is the production of historical time. We must clearly differentiate historicalisation from ‘historicisation’: whereas historicalisation is an ontological concept that registers the creation of history itself, historicisation is an epistemological concept inseparable from its origins within historicism. This is the sense in which to ‘historicise’ something is to place it in its particular historical context, its ‘particular time and place’. Historicisation is the meaning of the ‘historical specificity’ of something (such as capitalism). Historicalisation, this thesis argues, is the condition of possibility of historicisation. Historicisation is ontologically grounded by historicalisation.

Two points follow from this conceptual outline. First, it is important to highlight at the outset that the ‘history’ which features in this thesis is, as earlier indicated, a distinctly modern, post-Enlightenment understanding of history. After Reinhart Koselleck, this is history as ‘the collective singular form of Geschichte, which since around 1780 can be conceived as history in and for itself in the absence of an associated subject or object.’¹⁶ In Sartre’s words, this is history conceived at the level of ‘one human history, with one truth and one intelligibility.’¹⁷ Unless otherwise indicated, the ‘history’ in this thesis is not, as one might put it, the ‘history of the historians’ (methodologically speaking, the empirical comprehension of history which structures most academic history departments), nor is it the kind of history associated with the theological tradition, which is to say history as the independent otherness of God.

The second point is more substantial. In fact, it is the essential point of the second half of this thesis. This point is a direct response to Sartre’s position, as we will learn, that historical totalisation is a totalisation which does not have a totaliser. In other words, according to Sartre, the ongoing totalisation of all individual and social totalisations exists, but this is a totalisation without a totaliser. In opposition to this, the second half of this thesis maintains that one of the philosophical consequences of Marx’s critique of political economy (e.g. from the Grundrisse onwards) is that, contrary to Sartre’s position, there is a totaliser that totalises and temporalises history. It is capital. This does not mean that capital has existed in all human history to date, or will exist in all human history from now, but it does mean that, as the comprehensive subject of the mode of production to which it gives rise, capital historicalises, and it does so in such a way that it is the condition of thinking the materialist concept of history (if not the modern, post-Enlightenment conception of history more generally). The arguments of Chapters 3 and 4 are thus simultaneously ontological and epistemological. Chapter 3 begins building the case for grasping capital as the condition of thinking history by arguing that, consequent to the fact that the specifically capitalist form of labour known as ‘abstract labour’ is the condition of thinking Marx’s transhistorical category of labour (or ‘labour in general’), the totalising and temporalising power of abstract labour is a fundamental dimension of capital’s historicalising power. In the wake of the examination of Marx’s concepts of ‘necessary’ and ‘surplus-labour in Chapter 3 (concepts that also owe their intelligibility to abstract labour), Chapter 4 rereads the production-process of capital – the valorisation-process – as the production of historical time, indeed as the production of the kind of historical time upon which every modern concept of history – the materialist concept of history included – depends. The production-process of capital, we will see, is precisely what makes possible our understanding of some of the most basic qualities of history itself: it not only exists ‘it itself and as such’, but its time never stops.

¹⁶ Reinhart Koselleck, Future’s Past: on the Semantics of Historical Time [1979], trans. Keith Tribe (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 236.

¹⁷ Sartre, CDR 1, 69.

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On the surface of things, it may seem ironic – if not problematic – that a thesis about history and historical time in Marx pays little attention to Marx’s actual historical writings. Yet the absence, for instance, of The Eighteenth Brumaire or Marx’s later writings on Russia should not be interpreted as indifference towards the ‘real history’ that these writings register. The reason why the philosophical dimensions of The German Ideology receive such attention, why these dimensions are subsequently read through Heidegger and Sartre, and finally why the economic writings (the various drafts of Capital) are the near-exclusive focus of the latter half of this thesis, is not because Marx’s historical writings are in any sense unimportant, but because the intelligibility of their ‘history’ depends on what Sartre calls the ‘formal structures of history (just as these formal structures depend on ‘real history’). The point here is that there can be no appeal to an unadulterated ‘real history’ as a fundamental-ontological baseline from which the formal structures of history are ‘derived’.¹⁸ ‘Real history’ and its formal structures are dialectically dependent on one another.

On the surface of things, this thesis may also come across as indifferent to the politics of historical time. This thesis does not, as earlier suggested, thematise class struggle, nor does it engage what in The German Ideology Marx and Engels call ‘the communist consciousness’ – the ‘consciousness of the necessity of a fundamental revolution’ – something which is for them a ‘conclusion’ of ‘the conception of history we have sketched.’¹⁹ Its purpose is rather to investigate, at a philosophically basic level, Marx’s contribution to our understanding of the historically changing relationship between time and history. Yet in the end, this understanding is – it cannot but be – a political understanding. As the conclusion to this thesis discusses, the concept of historical time matters not only because it unsettles the authority of historicism and because it establishes capital as the condition of thinking history, but also because it compels us to think beyond the historical time of capital, which is to say that it compels us to register the possibility of social and historical time after capitalism. This is the definitive philosophical and political problem of the concept of historical time: if capital makes possible the (modern) category of history, how do we think history beyond capital? To put this another way: what is the difference, and what is the relation, between the historical time of capital and the time of history? This is not a thesis about politics, at least not directly. But it is not thereby indifferent to the politics of historical time.

¹⁸ István Mészáros’s critique of Sartre, particularly his The Work of Sartre: Search for Freedom and the Challenge of History (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2012), comes dangerously close to this position. For all of his appeals to ‘real history’, Mészáros does not dialecticise its relation to the formal structures of history. Rather, ‘real history’ functions as a fundamental-ontological baseline for him, from which, it seems, the formal structures are derived. This is rather ironic, insofar as Mészáros places himself directly in line with Heidegger’s ‘fundamental ontology’, albeit in an inverted form. Heidegger is a consistent target of critique across Mészáros’s work.

¹⁹ Marx and Engels, GI, 94.

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Chapter One A Materialist Concept of History: a Temporal Reading

Modern political thought has concentrated its attention on history, and has not elaborated a corresponding concept of time. Even historical materialism has until now neglected to elaborate a concept of time that compares with its concept of history.¹

There are a variety of reasons why the philosophical potential of The German Ideology is far from being realised, but perhaps no reason stands out more than the fact that Marx and Engels provide no analysis of the relationship between time, temporality and their materialist concept of history. In other words, they do not consider the intrinsic temporalities of complex practices and phenomena including the social production of the means of life, the creation of new needs, the dialectic ofthe forces and relations of production, and the division of labour. In Marx, ‘the human’ is a fundamentally economic and historical being, but how is it thus a fundamentally temporal being? What impact would a temporal reading of Marx’s concept of the human have on his materialist anthropology? The German Ideology introduces us to the complex relations between the natural, social and historical aspects of human being, yet the ontologically basic relationship between materiality and temporality in Marx is unclear. This relationship must be systematically investigated, such that our understanding of the ‘materiality of time’ is enriched by the materialist concept of history and Marx’s philosophy more generally.²

In its extension ofthe ‘new materialism’ of the Theses on Feuerbach, its transformation of an ‘ontology of praxis’ into an ‘ontology of production’, The German Ideology establishes a new relationship between praxis and poiêsis.³ This relationship is, to be precise, doubly new. It is new to the history of philosophy, because it breaks with a tradition of separation between praxis and poiêsis beginning with Plato and Aristotle and sustained up through Kant’s critical philosophy. Yet it is also, and of greater consequence, new to the philosophy of history. The German Ideology collapses the barrier between self-transformative action by free humans and the necessary production of objects for use, concretises this collapse in its demarcation of ‘the economic’ as the social production of the means of life, and thereby establishes a philosophical basis from which ‘history’ becomes a speculative and experimental concept. The implications of this are diverse and radically open. At a basic level, we must recognise that any historical logic fundamentally structured by the ongoing objectification of human practice must express an unpredictable future, which in turn opens up the meaning – and temporality – of concepts such as ‘historical rationality’, ‘historical change’, ‘historical progress’, ‘historical evolution’, ‘historical development’ and so forth. In consideration of class struggle, for instance, Balibar argues that ‘Marx resorted less and less to pre-existing models of explanation and increasingly constructed a rationality which had no real precedent…in the incessant transformation of its conditions and forms…class struggle is its own model.’⁴ In this way, the importance that Marx attaches to conflict (not only class struggle but more generally the conflict between the forces and relations of production) is not just a political matter: its temporal dynamic philosophically registers the concept of history as necessarily open and incomplete.

¹ Giorgio Agamben, ‘Time and History: Critique of the Instant and the Continuum’, in his Infancy & History: Essays on the Destruction of Experience [1978], trans. Liz Heron (London and New York: Verso, 1993), 91. Agamben continues: ‘the vulgar representation of time as a precise and homogenous continuum has thus diluted the Marxist concept of history: it has become the hidden breach through which ideology has crept into the citadel of historical materialism.’ Ibid. Problematically, ‘historical materialism’ functions as a self-evident subject in this passage.

2 Étienne Balibar states that ‘…Marx's philosophy, whether or not it is in a finished form, sets itself the task of thinking the materiality of time.’ Étienne Balibar, The Philosophy of Marx, trans. Chris Turner (London and New York: Verso, 1995), 81.

³ Ibid. 35, 40-1.

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The ground of the concept of materialism in The German Ideology is labour: social and economic activity which is indissociable from and yet irreducible to the organic and inorganic matter that this activity works with and upon. The German Ideology thus reinforces what the Theses on Feuerbach first introduces: a distinctly practical, rather than matter-based, concept of materialism. As the social production of the means of life, labour is the ontological ground ofthe historical movement between praxis and poiêsis, between, that is, the realms of freedom and necessity. In short, for Marx, labour historicalises: it produces history.⁵ The consequences of this are extensive. If labour historicalises, it must also temporalise. Labour must be grasped as an indelibly temporal concept in Marx, not simply because, as an act, it intrinsically creates time, but because it is an act which is directly constitutive of history. History is an essentially temporal process, and hence any concept of history, materialist or otherwise, is an essentially temporal concept, one which cannot be thought in isolation from the philosophy of time. We might suggest then that if The German Ideology specifies praxis as ‘production’, and if labour is necessary to think the concept of ‘mode of production’, then temporality is a condition of thinking human ontology in Marx. Temporality confirms the philosophical status of ontology in Marx: ‘mode of production’ cannot be registered as an ontological category, and cannot be internalised to the philosophy of history, without systematically investigating the relationship between labour and temporality in Marx.⁶ It is unclear to what extent, if any, Marx saw his intervention into the philosophy and politics of materialism in these terms. To be sure, Marx analyses labour and temporality in conjunction with one another, and yet these analyses, most notably that of the concept of ‘labour-time’ itself, are by and large framed by the temporalities of capital, particularly the quantifiable, durational time of what we will consider in Chapter 3: abstract labour-time. There are helpful passages in the Grundrisse, from broadly Aristotelian positions (‘since labour is motion, time is its natural measure’) to critical extensions of Hegel (‘labour is the living, form-giving fire; it is the transitoriness of things, their temporality, as their formation by living time’⁷), but the fact remains that the context of these passages is the temporalities of capital, temporalities which are inseparable from and yet cannot be conflated with the temporalities of history. This much is clear: if labour historicalises, then any attempt to establish the philosophical priority of the concept of historical time must begin by exploring the manifold dimensions of the ontological relationship between labour and temporality. The materialist concept of history in The German Ideology must be reread temporally: the human must be rendered temporal in its economic and historical being.

⁴ Ibid. 96. On the question of progress, see Chapter 4 of Balibar’s The Philosophy of Marx: ‘Time and Progress: Another Philosophy of History?

⁵ A transhistorical category, and a condition of thinking Marx’s concept of ‘mode of production’, labour mediates what Marx calls the ‘metabolism’ [Stoffwechsel] between humanity and nature.

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The removal of a fixed distinction between praxis and poiêsis in The German Ideology is sustained by a unique philosophy of history. As Balibar puts it, ‘there is never any effective freedom which is not also a material transformation, which is not registered historically in exteriority. But nor is there any work which is not a transformation of self, as though human beings could change their conditions of existence whilst maintaining an invariant “essence”.’⁸ In Marx, after 1845, ‘materialism’ must already be a historical materialism if it is to have any meaning as a practical and social materialism. To be sure, temporality is introduced by Marx’s practical materialism in the Theses on Feuerbach, inasmuch as ‘sensuous human activity’ is an implicitly temporal concept. At the same time, the temporality of practice is not redeemed by these theses. This redemption is left to The German Ideology, wherein the temporality of practice is grounded by the historicalising concept of need. Because it historically grounds the materialism of the Theses on Feuerbach, The German Ideology introduces a distinct historical temporality to labour as practice immanent to need. Does The German Ideology enable us to read materiality as temporality in Marx? This remains to be seen.⁹ As Althusser puts it, we are still far from clearing up ‘the confusion that surrounds the concept of history.’¹⁰ To invoke Marx, the unexplored interchange [Austausch] between materiality and temporality heightens the need to address the following questions: what are the philosophical outcomes of a temporal reading of Marx’s practical, social, and historical materialism? What interpretive possibilities are introduced? If Marx’s materialism is in fact a ‘new’ materialism, does it thereby introduce a new temporality? That is, does this materialism affect a new configuration between the past, the present and the future? If The German Ideology subjects the materialism of the Theses on Feuerbach to a historical logic, is a new historical temporality thereby produced? What light do these questions shed on the relationship between time and history, if indeed the concept of one poses a problem for the philosophy of the other?¹¹ These questions mark the beginning of the central problem of this thesis: how do we critically reconstruct Marx’s materialist concept of history as a concept of historical time?

⁶ William Haver’s contention that ‘…in Marx, the mode of production is ontology. There is nothing outside a mode of production…’ is only sustainable from the standpoint of the philosophy of time. William Haver, ‘For a Communist Ontology,’ in The Politics of Culture: Around the Work of Naoki Sakai, ed. Richard Calichman and John Namjun Kim (London and New York: Routledge, 2010), 107. ⁷ Marx, Grundrisse, 205, 361. The latter quotation reworks Hegel’s position in the Logic that ‘matter is that which is indifferent to form.’ See G.W.F. Hegel, The Science of Logic [1812], trans. A.V. Miller (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1969), 451. Still, it is unclear in this passage if the human is itself included within the realm of ‘things’. Minus such inclusion, the indifference between ‘living time’ and the ‘temporality of things’ cannot be historicised.

⁸ Balibar, The Philosophy of Marx, 40.

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⁹ Haver goes so far as to claim that ‘for Marx, materiality and temporality are the same thing.’ Haver, ‘For a Communist Ontology’, 114. However, the problem of history is noticeably absent from his analysis. This reading hinges on developing a concept of materiality [Materialität] that simply put does not exist in Marx’s corpus. This concept would emerge from – and yet would need to ontologically ground – Marx’s critical reconstruction of materialism [Materialismus] in the Theses on Feuerbach as a dynamisation of the subject-object relation in modern (post-Kantian) epistemology.

¹⁰ Althusser, ‘The Errors of Classical Economics: an Outline for a Concept of Historical Time’, 93.

¹¹ Peter Osborne, ‘Marx and the philosophy of time’, Radical Philosophy 147 (January/February 2008), 15.

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1.1 A Practical Materialism: the Theses on Feuerbach

The chief defect of all hitherto existing materialism (that of Feuerbach included) is that objectivity [der Gegenstand], actuality, sensuousness, is grasped only in the form of the object [Objekt] or of intuition [Anschauung], but not as sensuous human activity, praxis, not subjectively. Hence, in opposition to materialism, the active side was developed abstractly by idealism, which naturally does not know actual, sensuous activity as such. Feuerbach wants sensuous objects, really distinguished from thoughtobjects, but he does not comprehend human activity itself as objective activity [gegenständliche Tätigkeit]…therefore he does not comprehend the significance of “revolutionary”, of “practical-critical” activity.¹²

The materialist concept of history must initially be approached from the standpoint of Marx’s critical reconstruction of the concept of materialism. Written in Brussels during the spring of 1845, Marx’s eleven Theses on Feuerbach (hereafter Theses) reject the notion that a sensible object of appearance [Gegenstand], and thus actuality and sensuousness, are captured only by intuition or only as an object of knowledge [Objekt]. The first thesis (above) directly targets the ‘old’ or substantialist (which is to say, matter-based) materialism, which is polemically and reductively assigned to Feuerbach, so as to create space for a ‘new’ or practical (which is to say, human-based) materialism. At a basic level, the chief defect of existing materialism is, according to Marx, that it is pre-Kantian: it has no viable concept of the subject. At the same time, and of equal philosophical importance, Marx critiques the character of Kant’s subjective constitution of objectivity [Objektivität] on which Feuerbach’s materialism relies. The Theses are a critical extension of the subject-object relation of modern epistemology as inaugurated by Kant: an extension, because they constitute the first materialism of the subject within the Kantian tradition; critical, because they reject the sensuously passive and hence ideally active character of the subject-object relation in Kant’s transcendental logic. In his declaration that objectivity, sensibility and actuality are not comprehended subjectively by existing discourses of materialism, Marx not only dismisses the old metaphysics of matter in these discourses, but confronts the very dynamic of subjectivity in Kant. The transformation of a sensible object of appearance [Gegenstand] presented to consciousness by intuition into an object of knowledge [Objekt] is a movement – from actual passivity to ideal activity – which defines the subject in Kant. It is a movement that authorises the universality and necessity of the pure concepts of the understanding. To suggest, as Marx does, that objectivity, sensibility and actuality are not grasped subjectively by all hitherto existing materialism is to suggest, against Kant, that the subject can be nothing else than sensuous human activity itself, nothing else than practice.¹³ As Balibar asserts, in the wake of the Theses, ‘…the only true subject is the practical subject or the subject of practice or, better still, that the subject is nothing other than practice which has always already begun and continues indefinitely.’¹⁴

¹² Karl Marx, Thesen über Feuerbach [1845] (hereafter TüF), in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Marx Engels Werke (hereafter MEW), Band 3 (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1978), 5 (Karl Marx, Theses on Feuerbach (hereafter ToF), in Karl Marx, Early Writings, trans. Rodney Livingstone and Gregor Benton (London and New York: Penguin Books, 1992), 421-22).

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