Marx and the Concept of Historical Time

…capital forces the workers beyond necessary labour to surplus-labour. Only in this way does it realise itself, and create surplus-value. But on the other hand, it posits necessary labour only to the extent and insofar as it is surplus-labour and the latter is realisable as surplus-value. It posits surplus-labour, then, as the condition of the necessary, and surplus-value as the limit [Grenze] of objectified labour, of value as such. As soon as it cannot posit value, it does not posit necessary labour; and, given its foundation, it cannot be otherwise. It therefore restricts labour and the creation of value – by an artificial check, as the English express it – and it does so on the same grounds as and to the same extent that it posits surplus-labour and surplus-value. By its nature, therefore, it posits a barrier [Schranke] to labour and value-creation, in contradiction to its tendency to expand them boundlessly. And inasmuch as it both posits a barrier specific to itself, and on the other side equally drives over and beyond every barrier, it is the living contradiction.¹²²

The direct context of this passage is the contradiction – and the illusion that arises from this contradiction – between the individual and collective worker (or between the individual worker and his class), a contradiction which is itself generated by the contradiction between the individual and collective capitalist (or between the individual capitalist and his class). This passage expresses the simple fact that, apart from his workers, the individual capitalist relates to the working class not as workers, but as consumers: as possessors of exchange-value in the form of money (not wages). Hence the drive to simultaneously restrict and expand what Marx describes as the worker’s ‘exchangeability’ [Tauschfähigkeit] – the capacity, that is to say, of labour-capacity to consume.¹²³ This is the meaning of capital as the ‘living contradiction’. But what predominantly interests us here is the appearance of the concepts of ‘limit’ and ‘barrier’. In the Grundrisse, and elsewhere, Marx does not systematically develop a relation, or even a difference, between the limit and the barrier. Thus the importance of this passage: it casts light on what this difference and relation might look like. Yet there is also – this thesis maintains – a more fundamental relation between the limit and barrier in Marx which must be uncovered, both because it grounds other expressions of this relation (such as the one articulated above), and because it confronts Hegel’s concepts of limit and barrier, namely as they are outlined in the second chapter of the ‘Doctrine of Being’ in the Logic: ‘Determinate Being’ [Das Dasein]. For Hegel, ‘through the limit something is what it is, and in the limit it has its quality’¹²⁴, such that the limit is ‘the mediation through which something and other each as well is, as is not.’¹²⁵ In other words, the limit of something determines the fact that its ‘beyond’ is simultaneously internal and external to it. This something is, for this reason, finite: ‘nonbeing constitutes [its] nature and being’, and hence ‘the truth of this being is [its] end.’¹²⁶ Yet this something is also, for this very same reason, possibly infinite: its concept registers the possibility that its negation – its finitude – can itself be negated. In this sense, its self-posited limit is equally a barrier: a limit that ‘ought’ [Sollen] to be transcended.¹²⁷

¹²¹ Ibid. 451.

¹²² Ibid. 421.

¹²³ ‘Capital, then, posits necessary labour-time as the barrier to the exchange-value of living labourcapacity; surplus-labour-time as the barrier to necessary labour-time; and surplus-value as the barrier to surplus-labour-time; while at the same time it drives over and beyond all these barriers, to the extent that it posits labour-capacity opposite itself as something simply engaged in exchange, as money, and surplus-labour-time as the only barrier, because creator [Schöpferin], of surplus-value.’ Karl Marx, Grundrisse der Kritik der politischen Ökonomie, in Marx and Engels, MEW, Band 42 (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1983), 337 (Grundrisse, 422-23).

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The doubled relation between necessary and surplus-labour fundamentally disrupts, and in so doing reworks, this philosophy of the limit. It is therefore impossible to map this doubled relation as a doubled relation between the ‘something’ and ‘other’ in Hegel’s Logic. From the standpoint of all commodities but labour-power, it is true that the labour necessary to produce labour-power stands as the limit of surplus-labour, insofar as the latter is finite because of the former, and strives to transcend the former. And it is also true that surplus-labour realises this transcendence, if only ever as a ‘bad infinity’ [Schlecht-Unendliche]: an infinity entangled, to use Hegel’s words, in an ‘alternating determination’¹²⁸ with the labour necessary to produce labour-power. Therefore, the possibility of the infinite expansion of capital exists, but only as ‘infinite expansion within limits’¹²⁹. Or, ‘the movement of capital is…limitless’¹³⁰, but only insofar as the formal circuit M–C–M’ contains material production (‘…P…’) within it.¹³¹ However, these assertions represent the reach of any kind of ‘homology’ between Hegel and Marx’s concept of the limit. From the standpoint of every commodity but labour-power, it is not enough to declare that surplus-labour has quality because its limit is the labour necessary to produce labour-power. And this is not because surplus-labour posits this necessary labour as its limit in spite of itself (this is consistent with the Logic). The basic issue, rather, is that this necessary labour is unfree to posit its own limit. From the standpoint of every commodity, surplus-labour is not the self-posited, but the imposed, limit of the labour necessary to produce labour-power. Thus it is not only necessary labour as such, but the capitalist limit itself, which exists as a ‘living contradiction’. For the production of every commodity except labour-power, the barrier is a limit which the labour necessary to reproduce labour-power not just ought but must transcend, and transcend, furthermore, as the labour necessary to produce every other commodity. For the reproduction of labour-power, two points can be made. First, the barrier is a limit that necessary labour not just ought not but must not transcend, simply because this non-transcendence is the condition of the creation of surplus-labour. This barrier may ‘always in principle be overcome’¹³², but given the regulatory power of the wage-form and the labour market, is in practice rarely overcome, and when it is, only ever momentarily. Second, this suggests that the limit of the labour necessary to reproduce labour-power is effectively a limit without barriers: an entirely unsurpassable limit. From the standpoint of the reproduction of labour-power, there is nothing but absolute separation between necessary and surplus-labour: ‘for the worker, the capitalist mode of production is alienation as unsurpassable ontological condition…the point at which the circulation of capital makes its dialectical turn for its return trip laden with surplus-value is the point of the expropriation of labour-power, which for the worker is a point of absolute and pure loss: no supersession or sublation here, merely a really bad infinity that is therefore not dialectical at all.’¹³³ In this regard, and to return to the previous chapter, we might suggest that capital temporalises through two different, but interdependent, forms of ‘being-towards-the-limit’, wherein surplus-labour is, necessarily and simultaneously, the surpassable and unsurpassable limit. Therefore, we might state that from the standpoint of temporalisation, Marx is in equal parts Hegelian and Heideggerian.

¹²⁴ Hegel, The Science of Logic, 126.

¹²⁵ Ibid. 127.

¹²⁶ Ibid. 129.

¹²⁷ ‘Something’s own limit thus posited by it as a negative which is at the same time essential, is not merely limit as such, but barrier. But what is posited as negated is not barrier alone; the negation is two-edged, since what is posited by it as negated is the limit, and this is in general what is common to both something and other, and is also a determinateness of the in-itselfof the determination as such. This in-itself, therefore, as the negative relation to its limit (which is also distinguished from it), to itself as barrier, is the ought.’ Ibid 132. This translation has been altered to render Schranke as ‘barrier’ rather than ‘limitation’.

¹²⁸ Ibid. 138.

¹²⁹ Peter Osborne, ‘A sudden topicality: Marx, Nietzsche and the politics of crisis’, Radical Philosophy 160 (March/April 2010), 21.

¹³⁰ Marx, Capital 1, 253.

¹³¹ Chris Arthur describes ‘…P…’ as the ‘“black box”…that lies at the heart of capital, and which it must manage materially, and not just formally.’ Christopher J. Arthur, ‘The Problem of Use-Value for a Dialectic of Capital’, in New Dialectics and Political Economy, ed. Robert Albritton and John Simoulidis (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 137.

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This is the context in which Marx’s analysis of ‘free’, or ‘disposable’, time – both within and without capitalism – must be situated. Marx consistently equates this time – particularly ‘disposable time’ – with wealth itself: ‘the whole development of wealth rests on the creation of disposable time’¹³⁴, and more decisively: ‘wealth is disposable time and nothing more.’¹³⁵

¹³² Osborne, ‘A sudden topicality: Marx, Nietzsche and the politics of crisis’, 21.

¹³³ Haver, ‘For a Communist Ontology’, 117.

¹³⁴ Marx, Grundrisse, 398.

¹³⁵ This formulation of wealth first appears in the Grundrisse (ibid. 397), and is elaborated on in Karl Marx, Theories of Surplus-Value, Part 3 [1861-63], trans. Jack Cohen (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1972), 255-57. This formulation is not Marx’s: it comes from an anonymous 1821 London pamphlet entitled The Source and Remedy of the National Difficulties.

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Thus together with the concepts of need and productive force, the concept of free/disposable time must be understood as constitutive of Marx’s transhistorical concept of wealth. And yet, free/disposable time – which is, amongst other things, the ‘time for education, for intellectual development, for the fulfilment of social functions, for social intercourse, for the free play of the vital forces of [the] body and…mind’¹³⁶ – is only intelligible as a concept when it is placed in relation with the concept of labour-time. In capitalist society, therefore, free/disposable time is only intelligible in relation with the doubled relation between necessary and surplus-labour; that is, the doubled relation between necessary and surplus-labour-time. The necessary labourtime which contains surplus-time within itself – the necessary labour-time to produce every commodity but labour-power – is the basis of the free time of the capitalist: ‘the free time of the non-working parts of society is based on the surplus-labour, or overwork, the surpluslabour-time, of the working part.’¹³⁷ This free time might be characterised as the ‘time of the superstructure’: the time for ‘the performance of activities which are not directly productive’ (e.g. statecraft, war), as well as the time ‘for the development of human abilities and social potentialities…which have no directly practical purpose’ (e.g. art, science).¹³⁸ Surplus-labourtime is the ‘base’ of this time of the superstructure – it is the base of ‘ideological time’ – but only insofar, to return to the first chapter, and as the upcoming passage reinforces, as there is a co-constitutive, not unilateral, relation between these two times. Additionally, the necessary labour-time which surplus-time excludes itself from – the labour-time necessary to reproduce labour-power – constitutes the basis of the free time of the worker. It is not that the individual worker does not have free time – the physiological limits of the working-day, and the ensuing struggle to reduce its length, renders this impossible – but rather that his labour-time posits his free time as ‘existing in and through the opposition to surplus-labour-time.’¹³⁹ Yet whilst this free time is opposed to surplus-labour-time, it is also – and only – ‘free’ by virtue of the fact that it is productive for capital. Consider the following passage:

The saving of labour-time [is] equal to the increase of free time, i.e. time for the full development of the individual, which in turn reacts back upon the productive power of labour as itself the greatest productive power. From the standpoint of the direct production-process, it can be regarded as the production of fixed capital, this fixed capital being man himself...Free time – which is both idle time and time for higher activity – has naturally transformed its possessor into a different subject, and he then enters into the direct production-process as this different subject. This process is then both discipline, as regards the human being in the process of becoming; and, at the same time, practice [Ausübung], experimental science, materially creative and objectifying science, as regards the human being who has become, in whose head exists, the accumulated knowledge of society.¹⁴⁰

¹³⁶ Marx, Capital 1, 375.

¹³⁷ Karl Marx, Economic Manuscripts of 1861-63, in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels Collected Works (MECW) Volume 30, Marx: 1861-1863, trans. Ben Fowkes (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1988), 191.

¹³⁸ Ibid. 190.

¹³⁹ Marx, Grundrisse der Kritik der politischen Ökonomie, 604 (Grundrisse, 708). The use of the masculine personal pronoun ‘his’ here is deliberate: it registers the fact that free time ‘existing in and through the opposition to surplus-labour-time’ must itself negotiate the fact that labour-power is reproduced through the absolute unfreedom of domestic labour-time. Simply put, Marx is indifferent to the fact that, within capitalism, domestic labour-time measures nothing, neither value nor wealth.

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This is a striking passage, one that underscores the extent to which the free time of the worker is structured by capital. It exemplifies the other side of the relation between surpluslabour-time and this free time: if, on the one hand, this free-time is opposed to surplus-labourtime, such that the latter represents what ought to be the former, the theft of the former, on the other hand, this free time is equally creative of surplus-labour-time, such that the latter is also, and contradictorily, predicated on the increase of the former. This passage needs to be doubly situated. The first context, one that will receive more attention later, is the difference between the production of circulating and fixed capital. Whereas the former involves the production of use-values which satisfy immediate needs, the latter is defined by the production of the means of this production, production ‘not towards value as an immediate object, but rather towards value creation’, which is to say the production of the ‘value-producing power of capital.’¹⁴¹ A defining dimension of capitalism is the tendential orientation towards the production of fixed, rather than circulating, capital.¹⁴² Stemming from this, the second context is quite simply the fact that the ongoing development of the capacity to produce is directly connected to ongoing development of the ‘capability to consume’¹⁴³ [Fähigkeit des Genusses, which equally means the capability to enjoy], a capability which is itself ‘the development of an individual potential, a force of production.’¹⁴⁴ These contexts ground the manner in which, ‘from the standpoint of the direct production-process, [the increase of free time] can be regarded as the production of fixed capital, this fixed capital being man himself.’ The increase of free time not only enriches the capability of the worker to transform into ‘the watchman and regulator of the productionprocess itself’, such that this process becomes ‘the appropriation of [the worker’s] own general productive power, his understanding of nature and his mastery over it by virtue of his presence as a social body.’¹⁴⁵ This increase is as much the enrichment of the worker as a consumer, the ‘human being who has become, in whose head exists, the accumulated knowledge of society’; this is the ‘full development of the individual’ which in turn fuels the general productive power of labour. The free time of the worker may ‘naturally [transform] its possessor into a different subject’, but the naturalness of this transformation, and the difference of this subject, are still structured by, because they are internal to, capital. Osborne’s critique of this passage is thus misplaced. Far from expressing ‘utterly untenable, nineteenth-century assumptions’, such that it cannot account for how ‘there is nothing “natural”, and little that is “free”, about current processes of the transformation of the individual into a “different subject” during disposable time’¹⁴⁶, this passage in fact anticipates the extent to which these processes (consumption and the culture industry) are ‘unnatural’ as well as unfree.

¹⁴⁰ Marx, Grundrisse, 711-12. Emphasis added. Marx wrote the expression ‘being man himself’ in English. See Marx, Grundrisse der Kritik der politischen Ökonomie, 607. ¹⁴¹ Marx, Grundrisse, 710.

¹⁴² ‘…it is in the production of fixed capital that capital posits itself as end-in-itself and appears active as capital, to a higher power than it does in the production of circulating capital.’ Ibid. ¹⁴³ Ibid. 711.

¹⁴⁴ Ibid.

¹⁴⁵ Ibid. 705.

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Yet the full importance of this passage only comes to light when it is read in conjunction with, and against, the following passage in Theories of Surplus-Value:

Labour-time, even if exchange-value is sublated, always remains the creative substance of wealth and the measure of the cost of its production. But free time, disposable time, is wealth itself, partly for the enjoyment of the product, and partly for free activity which – unlike labour – is not dominated by the pressure of an extraneous purpose which must be fulfilled, and the fulfilment of which is regarded as a natural necessity or a social duty, according to one’s will. It is self-evident that if labour-time is restricted to a normal amount [Maß] and, moreover, labour is no longer performed for someone else, but for oneself, and, together with the sublation of the social contradictions between master and men, etc., it acquires a quite different, a free character, it becomes real social labour, and finally the basis of disposable time – the labour-time of men who also have disposable time, must be of a much higher quality than that of working animals [Arbeitstiers].¹⁴⁷

The relation between labour-time and free/disposable time is as essential to the comprehension of communism as it is to capitalism. If there is a ‘communist ontology’ in Marx, if he provides us with an outline of a ‘communist mode of production’, then this relation – which should be understood as the relation between freedom and necessity more broadly – constitutes the basis of the ‘ontological difference’¹⁴⁸ between communism and capitalism. There is still a dialectic of freedom and necessity in communism. The difference, however, between this dialectic and its capitalist counterpart is that, in communism, it is freedom – not necessity – that constitutes the measure of wealth. In communism, ‘the measure of wealth is…not any longer, in any way, labour-time, but rather disposable time.’¹⁴⁹ As the passage above puts it, labour-time ‘always remains the creative substance of wealth and the measure of the cost of its production’, but if exchange-value – and with it abstract labour – is actually sublated, then this time is no longer the measure of wealth itself, simply because wealth no longer assumes the form of value. The dialectic of freedom and necessity in communism is a non-antagonistic dialectic – in Maoist terms, it expresses a ‘non-antagonistic contradiction’ – insofar as ‘the realm of freedom really begins only where labour determined by necessity and external expediency ends’, as well as the fact that ‘the true realm of freedom, the development of human powers as an end in itself… can only flourish with [the] realm of necessity as its basis.’¹⁵⁰ In this way, the conflict between labour-time and free/disposable time disappears, not because their difference disappears, but because surplus-labour-time disappears. Communism sublates the ‘socially necessary labourtime’ of capitalism because it abolishes the surplus-labour within this time. This is the manner in which communism is the consciously collective, thus rational, recognition of the qualitative identity between the labour-time necessary to reproduce labour-capacity and the labour-time necessary to produce every other product, whereas capitalism represents the structural refusal to recognise this identity (despite the fact that it depends on it). At the same time, this sublation not only preserves but enhances the productive power of ‘socially necessary labour-time’, but only insofar as it yields an entirely different quality of social labour-time, and thus an entirely different quality of product, than capitalism. In short, communism allows no place for surplustime within labour. ‘Free activity’ becomes the exclusive domain of this time, such that labour – ‘life’s first need’ – is the basis, but not the measure, of wealth.¹⁵¹

¹⁴⁶ Osborne, ‘Marx and the philosophy of time’, 21. Crucially, Osborne’s citation of this passage omits the sentence stating that the increase of free time ‘can be regarded as the production of fixed capital, this fixed capital being man himself.’ See ibid. 20.

¹⁴⁷ Karl Marx, Theorien über den Mehrwert, in Marx and Engels, MEW, Band 26, Dritter Teil (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1968), 253 (Theories of Surplus-Value, Part 3, 257).

¹⁴⁸ Recall that the Heideggerian notion of ‘ontological difference’ (the difference between being and entity) must in Marx be based in the difference between one mode of production and another.

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Yet the ontological difference between communism and capitalism – the fact that each produces a fundamentally different kind of time since each produces a fundamentally different kind of human, and vice versa – is only intelligible when it is framed as a historical difference. And the kind of history and historical time that communism produces is itself only intelligible from the standpoint of the kind of history and historical time that it sublates. For this reason, the relation between necessary and surplus-labour, which more than any other relation within capitalism structures the social production of the means of life, must now be configured as a distinct kind of historical relation. Specifically, how does the production of this relation relate to the materialist concept of history? How does it restructure the historicalising power of need? In short, what is the relation between valorisation and the production ofhistorical time? These questions point to the focus of the next chapter: the production-process of capital, the process which sets the relation between necessary and surplus-labour into motion as historical time.

¹⁴⁹ Marx, Grundrisse, 708. Antonio Negri’s position that ‘Communism is the negation of all measure, the affirmation of the most exasperated plurality – creativity’ is thus completely at odds with Marx’s position. Antonio Negri, Marx Beyond Marx: Lessons on the Grundrisse [1979], trans. Harry Cleaver, Michael Ryan and Maurizio Viano, ed. Jim Fleming (New York: Autonomedia, 1991), 33. ¹⁵⁰ Marx, Capital 3, 958-59.

¹⁵¹ ‘…when the narrow-minded bourgeois form is stripped away, what is wealth other than the universality of individual needs, capacities, pleasures, productive forces, etc., created through universal interchange? The full development of human mastery over the forces of nature, those of so-called “nature” as well as his own nature? The absolute working out of his creative potentialities, with no presupposition other than the previous historical development, that makes this totality of development, i.e. the development of all human powers as such, the end in itself, not as measured on a predetermined scale? Where he does not reproduce himself in one specificity, but produces his totality? Strives not to remain something he has become, but is in the absolute movement of becoming?’ Marx, Grundrisse der Kritik der politischen Ökonomie, 395-96 (Grundrisse, 488). This wealth comprises a fundamentally different kind of historical time.

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Chapter Four Capital: the Condition of Thinking History

Historical Materialism…means the self-knowledge of capitalist society.

As previously argued, the difference between the circuits C–M–C and M–C–M’ should be understood as expressing two different conceptions of need. Whereas the first circuit leads to the satisfaction of human needs – most importantly the satisfaction of the need of the worker to reproduce his own existence – the second circuit correlates to capital’s need to self-expand: the ‘constantly renewed movement’ that is ‘an end in itself.’² Furthermore, the kind of ‘need’ underlying the circuit M–C–M’ constitutes the perversion [Verrücktheit] of human need, such that, in Sartrean terms, the self-expansion of value transforms human need into exigency – the individual is compelled to sell his labour-power in order to live, precisely because capital must expand.³ In this respect, if concrete labour is internal to abstract labour – if the former totalises and temporalises, but only insofar as it is internal to the totalising and temporalising power of the latter – this is because only exchange-value, not use-value, satisfies capital’s need for selfexpansion.⁴ In other words, it is only from the standpoint of the need of capital, measured by exchange-value, that the scope of the internality of concrete labour to abstract labour reveals itself. The individual sells his labour-power because he needs to live, but this need is not the totalising and temporalising basis of his ensuing labour. The need that governs the teleological end of this labour is not the worker’s need to consume the means of life, but rather the creation of use-values predestined for exchange. In capitalism, the worker does not posit the end of his act – capital does – and thus his need to consume the means of life arises quite separately from the actual production of these means. The only thing that actually connects the production and consumption of the means of human life is the wage.

Consequently, despite the fact that concrete and abstract labour totalise and temporalise differently (this is important: there is no dialectic between them if this is not acknowledged), the historical-ontological ground of each – the ground which determines that, within each, totalisation is temporalisation, and temporalisation totalisation – is the same. This ground is, quite simply, capital’s need to self-expand.⁵ Yet if this is the case, new questions emerge: what is the relationship between capital’s need to self-expand and history? More precisely, what is the relationship between this need and the materialist concept of history? How does this need relate to this concept as a modern, philosophical concept of history? Capital’s relentless drive to expand pervades the whole of Marx’s critique of political economy, but what would it mean to reconstruct Marx’s exposition of this drive as a historicalising concept of need? A concept of need which registers the creation of history itself, such that capital’s need historicalises qua needs? These questions point to the fact that the expansive ontological scope of the concepts of necessity [Notwendigkeit] and need [Bedürfnis], as first introduced in the 1844 Manuscripts and enriched by The German Ideology, is not realised by Marx in the various drafts of Capital. In other words, from the Grundrisse onwards, Marx does not, this chapter argues, adequately sustain the ‘materialist outlook’ [materialistischer Anschauung], an outlook which, according to The German Ideology, determines not only that necessities and needs must be subjected to a historical logic, but must be understood as constituting that very logic itself. In The German Ideology, this outlook is undeniably grounded in human necessities and human needs, but this does not mean that it does not thereby extend to capital’s necessities and capital’s needs. Not at all. If, within capitalism, human needs are internal to, if they are satisfied because of, capital, what this means is that capital does more than make itself relevant to the materialist outlook. It regrounds this outlook. This must be systematically investigated, such that a general set of ontological relations between need, capital and history reveals itself, and reveals itself beyond the predominant framework through which Marx presents these relations, which is to say the ordinary understanding of history. Marx teaches us that social needs evolve and expand, and that capitalism is a historically specific formation of socially necessary labour and social need, one which alienates human necessities and human needs. This is of course true, but it presumes rather than explains the relationship between the self-expansion of capital and the materialist concept of history more generally

¹ Georg Lukács, ‘The Changing Function of Historical Materialism’ [1919], in History and Class Consciousness, 229. ‘Thus historical materialism is, in the first instance, a theory of bourgeois society and its economic structure’. Ibid.

² Marx, Capital 1, 253.

³ For Sartre, this represents the sense in which the practico-inert temporalises: exigency – or need from the standpoint of the practico-inert – constitutes the systematised perversion, the systematic co-option, of the temporalising basis of human praxis.

⁴ However, only use-value – e.g. the use-value of labour-power – produces that which satisfies capital’s need for self-expansion. Only the use-value of labour-power produces surplus-value.

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We must address this relationship because, and as we have already established, abstract labour is the condition of thinking the category of ‘labour in general’, the category upon which the intelligibility of the materialist concept of history depends. But – and this cuts to the heart of the matter – it is one thing to demonstrate that ‘labour in general’ hinges on abstract labour, and quite another thing to put this into motion as history. If capital is in essence ‘movement’, ‘motion’, and ‘unity-in-process’⁶, it must hereafter be grasped as a historicalising movement, motion, and unity-in-process. And if, furthermore, self-valorising value – i.e. capital – is the ‘comprehensive subject’ [übergreifendes Subjekt] of its own processes, ‘in which it alternately assumes and loses the form of money and the form of commodities, but preserves and expands itself through all these changes’⁷, then the comprehensiveness of this subject (the manner in which this subject is the unification – the totalising and temporalising movement – of its own processes, and thus the unity of the acts within these processes) must become its historicalising power. As should now be clear, by ‘historicalise’ we do not mean ‘historicise’ – understanding capital as a ‘historically specific’ subject (at least what is normally meant by this expression), nor do we mean situating this subject in its ‘specific time and place’, in, for example, 1860s England (this is historicism); rather, we mean the way in which, as the comprehensive subject, as the unity of the acts within the processes that it is, capital historicalises, and it does so in such a manner that it constitutes the condition of thinking Marx’s modern post-Enlightenment concept of history.⁸ This historicalisation is the condition of thinking ‘historicisation’, and, therefore, capitalism’s historical specificity. Capital (and here we mean ‘capital in general’, or ‘universality’⁹) totalises and temporalises in such a manner that these movements become historicalising movements: they become constitutive of the movement ofhistorical totalisation and historical temporalisation. Thus, against Sartre, this chapter argues that there is a totaliser – it is capital – that totalises and temporalises history.¹⁰ Broadly speaking, this is what is meant by the statement that ‘capital is the subject of history’. Ontologically, this is not to assert (and here we must draw on the historicist understanding of historical time) that capital has been the subject of all hitherto existing (human) history, and will be the subject of all (human) history to come. This is absurd. Ontologically, capital has only been, and will only be, the subject of history for as long as capitalism has existed and continues to exist (even if, strictly speaking, it is impossible to know not only when – or if – capitalism will end, but also when it ‘began’¹¹). Epistemologically, however, this does not invalidate the fact that, without capital, there is no history in and for itself: no ‘history of all hitherto existing society’ nor no ‘all history to come’. ‘History as such’, ‘history itself’, exists because of capital.

⁵ This is not to say that capital’s need to self-expand is not itself ontologically grounded by the human’s need to socially produce the means of its life, that there is not, in other words, a mutually constitutive – a reciprocal – ontological ground between capital’s need and human needs. The point, rather, is that the historical-ontological ground of the expansion of human needs within capitalism, that which gives this expansion its historical intelligibility, is capital’s need to self-expand.

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