Marx and the Concept of Historical Time

At this point, it is instructive to consider three additional points made in a passage from The German Ideology which elaborate on the ‘first premise of all human history’:

(1) …[We] must begin by stating the first premise of all human existence and, therefore, of all history, the premise, namely, that humans must be in a position to live in order to be able to “make history”. But life involves before everything else eating and drinking, a habitation, clothing and many other things. The first historical act is thus the creation of the means to satisfy these needs, the production of material life itself. And indeed this is a historical act, 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…

(2) The second point is that the satisfaction of the first need, the action of satisfying and the instrument of satisfaction which has been acquired, leads to new needs; and this creation of new needs is the first historical act…

(3) The third relation which, from the very outset, enters into historical development, is that humans, who daily remake their own life, begin to make other humans, to reproduce [fortzupflanzen] their kind: the relation between man and woman, parents and children, the family…

These three aspects of social activity are not of course to be taken as three different stages, but just as three sides or, to make it clear to the Germans, three “moments”, which have existed simultaneously since the dawn of history and the first humans, and which still assert themselves in history today. 46

The long passage quoted here introduces a transhistorical concept of life grounded in basic physiological needs: food, drink, habitation, clothing and so on. Obviously, the need to sustain human life at its most elemental level never disappears, no matter how sophisticated economic activity becomes. The new needs that are created via the satisfaction of these first needs never leave the domain of the basic sustenance of the human, even as they are not readily identifiable as basic components of human life. In other words, new needs always bear some relation to human survival: the social production of the means of life can never be disassociated from the social production of the means of subsistence, even as the expression of human life exceeds, as Marx and Engels convey it in the earlier passage, ‘the reproduction of the physical existence of…individuals’. In short, The German Ideology operates with a radically expanded concept of subsistence registered by the concept of life. But a difficulty arises in these passages: the social production of the means of life includes two ‘first historical acts’. How do we address this apparent tension?

⁴⁶ Marx and Engels, DI, 28-9 (GI, 48-50).

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The answer to this begins with the multifaceted evolution of the transhistorical concept of need [Bedürfnis] in the 1844 Manuscripts. In this text, the social human is specified by the production and consumption of social objects. For Marx, the human being’s relation to these objects is one of appropriation: the human re-appropriates the objectification of its own lifeactivity, and thereby produces a return of itself to itself as a totality. This is the ‘manifestation of…human reality.’⁴⁷ As the bearers of human beings’ essential powers, objects affirm, and indeed give pleasure, to human sensuousness. As opposed to the Theses, an orthodox meaning of sensuousness (via Hegel and Feuerbach) is being invoked here, drawing on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and pointing to the human as an irretrievably receptive, passive and suffering being. In the 1844 Manuscripts, as an objective and sensuous being, the human is not merely a suffering [leidendes], but a passionate [leidenschaftliches], being, insofar as it feels its selfmanifestation qua labour as an affirmation of its essence. These feelings are not mere matters of cognition, but, for Marx, ontologically basic forces which determine the whole being of the human. The interchange of human activities and products cultivates [Bildung] and mediates human sensuousness: ‘…not only the five senses but also the so-called mental senses – the practical senses (will, love, etc.) – in a word, human sense – the human nature of the senses – comes to be by virtue of its object, by virtue of humanised nature.’⁴⁸ This manifold expansion of the meaning of the senses goes hand-in-hand with Marx’s expansion of the philosophical scope of the object, labour and nature. The power [Kraft] behind this manifold expansion, this conceptual interdependence between the object, labour, nature and the senses, and hence this essential wealth of human being, is sociality itself: ‘the social character is the general character of the whole movement.’⁴⁹

In the 1844 Manuscripts, Marx’s conception of need is the fullest and most developed representation of this expansive human: ‘the wealthy human is simultaneously the human inneed-of a totality of human life-expression; it is the human in whom its own realisation exists as inner necessity, as need [Not].’⁵⁰ To be ‘in-need-of a totality of human life-expression’ is to be in-need-of the sheer diversity and refinement of the objectification of consciously free human life-activity as genus-activity.⁵¹ It is, as Andrew Chitty contends, the fact that ‘human beings express themselves through the creation of universal objects, and so the need for human life-expression is the need to create such objects for other human beings, i.e. to create objects that can in principle satisfy the needs of any human being...’⁵² – and we might add: for human beings to consume universal objects created by other human beings. In this way, human needs are defined by particular individuals’ needs for one another, the need to be social in the sense of the ‘interchange’ of individuals’ activities and products. But there is another dimension to need here as well. Bearing in mind that Marx’s conception of the human is both an individual already in relation to other individuals and that very relation itself, the totality of human lifeexpression that the human needs is not reducible to an aggregate production and consumption of universal objects, but is equally the very interdependency between objectification (human property), essential activity (labour) and cultivated pleasure (sensuousness) itself. In the 1844 Manuscripts, the human’s need to be a social relation is at once the source of its individuation, without which the unencumbered, consciously free refinement and diversification of needs cannot proceed. When, at a much later date, Marx states that in the future past of communism ‘…labour has become not only the means of life, but life’s first need…’⁵³, this is a speculative call for an indissociable social and individual life, wherein the production of new needs is the reproduction of the human as equally a ‘wealthy’ social relation and particular individual. For Marx, it is because of need that there are individuals, which is to say that need constitutes the ontological basis of the sociality of human individuation (there is no division of labour without need: the division of labour ontologically proceeds from human need).

⁴⁷ Marx, EPM, 139.

⁴⁸ Marx, OPM, 542 (EPM, 137). ‘…established society produces humans in the entire wealth of their being – produces wealthy humans profoundly endowed with all the senses – as their enduring actuality.’ Ibid. This established society [gewordne Gesellschaft] is for Marx the meaning of communism. ⁴⁹ Marx, EPM, 137.

⁵⁰ Ibid. 144. This is a modified transcription of Chitty’s translation of this passage in the 1844 Manuscripts, with ‘human’ replacing ‘man’ and ‘it/its’ replacing ‘he/his’. Chitty’s translation is vastly superior to others because it highlights Marx’s use of Bedürfnis as well as Not. The meaning of the latter revolves between ‘exigency’, ‘necessity’ and ‘distress’. See Chitty, ‘The Early Marx on Needs,’ 26, 30 ft. 6. Marx’s use of Not in relation to Bedürfnis in this passage fills out the relation between human sensuousness and needs in the 1844 Manuscripts.

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As with the concept of nature and the differentiation of the human from the animal, The German Ideology is in some respects continuous with this understanding of need in the 1844 Manuscripts. Need is the ontologically basic meaning of life in both texts. Whilst The German Ideology is not premised upon an affirmation of life or a confirmation of an authentic humannature – a discourse shot through the 1844 texts⁵⁴ – it nonetheless remains squarely within the bounds of the Romantic expression of the ways and means of life. It is difficult to identify a discourse more fundamental to The German Ideology than the production of the means of life.

⁵¹ For an overview of Marx’s concept of need, see Philip J. Kain, Marx and Modern Political Theory: from Hobbes to Contemporary Feminism (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 1993), 185-86. ⁵² Chitty, ‘The Early Marx on Needs’, 26.

⁵³ Karl Marx, Kritik des Gothaer Programms [1875], in Marx and Engels, MEW, Band 19 (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1987), 21 (Karl Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme, in The Marx-Engels Reader, Second Edition, ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1978), 531). The German reads as follows: ‘…nachdem die Arbeit nicht nur Mittel zum Leben, sondern selbst das erste Lebensbedürfnis geworden…’.

⁵⁴ See, in particular, Marx’s fictional ‘conversation’ with another ‘fully human being’ in his notebooks on James Mill: Marx, AJM, 462-63 (JM, 277-78).

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Yet, in nearly every other respect, Marx’s subsumption of need under a historical logic marks a break with the 1844 texts in ways far more consequential than the retroactive transformation of concepts such as nature and the human into historical concepts. ‘Need’ has not just become structured by a historical logic, but more crucially structures that very logic itself. The concept of need in The German Ideology is a vital dimension ofthe very meaning of historicalisation: insofar as labour historicalises, this cannot be comprehended apart from the production of the means to satisfy existing needs and the creation of new needs. Put differently, it is The German Ideology which philosophically enables ‘labour’ to be registered as an economic and historical concept, and history to be irretrievably tied to subsistence-level needs. When Marx and Engels speak of the material production of life itself, ‘both of one’s own in labour and of fresh life in procreation,’⁵⁵ they are explicitly referencing the basic need of the human to subsist. This is a radical focussing and concretising of the 1844 Manuscripts, whereby the ‘totality of human life-expression’ becomes permanently connected and ultimately reducible to material life as such. However, this is not necessarily a limitation of the scope of the 1844 Manuscripts. There is no reason to believe in the wake ofThe German Ideology that the human cannot be rendered in-need-of this totality, but only that this totality is permanently grounded in the recognition that the human ‘must be in a position to live’. This is the reason why Marx and Engels bemoan the fact that:

In the whole conception of history up to the present this actual basis of history has either been totally neglected or else considered as a minor matter quite irrelevant to the course of history. Hence history must always be written according to an extraneous standard; the actual production of life seems to be primeval history, whilst the truly historical appears to be separated from ordinary life, something extra-superterrestrial [Extra-Überweltliche]. With this the relation of humans to nature is excluded from history and hence the antithesis of nature and history is created.⁵⁶

The philosophy of history which Marx and Engels criticise in this passage is premised upon a fetishised conception – and, one might add, a de-historicalising temporality – of nature, which becomes the exclusive domain of the actual production of life, and which erases, as previously mentioned, humans as natural-historical beings and nature as a human-historical means of life. This philosophy of history is ideologically opposed to the conceptual status which Marx and Engels give to a ‘mode of production’ [produktionsweise], a concept which expresses history as a definite form of the production and reproduction of human life.

⁵⁵ Marx and Engels, GI, 50.

⁵⁶ Marx and Engels, DI, 39 (GI, 59).

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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.’⁵⁷ 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.’⁵⁸

⁵⁷ Marx and Engels, DI, 27 (GI, 48).

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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.⁵⁹ In this sense, ‘means’ and ‘the new’ are conceptually indissociable in Marx.⁶⁰ 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?

⁵⁸ ‘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).

⁵⁹ 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.

⁶⁰ 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.

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Marx and Engels never offer a temporal reading of the first historical act, but it is useful to make two broad observations. First, a dialectical interplay between the present and the past is signalled by the premise that the new resides within the means of satisfying existing needs. The domain of the past, or existing needs, all the way down to the basic need to eat, drink and sleep, cannot be thought apart from the means to satisfy such needs. Nor is the domain of the present, the production of these means, intelligible in isolation from the content of what they satisfy. There is no chronological succession here: one moment (the existence of a need) is not subsequently followed by another (the creation of the means to satisfy this need). Rather, the domain of the present is the dialectic between the creation of the means to satisfy existing needs and the creation of new needs. That is, the present is a dialectic unto itself, and it actively creates the past as an existing need. The relationship between the present and the past is thus a dialectical relationship between a dialectical present and a non-dialectical past. This is an interplay between the present and the past which clearly prioritises the present over the past, because the production of the means of life is the production of both new and existing needs. Existing needs and the production of the means to satisfy them may codetermine one another, but this relationship would be essentially static – it would have no temporality – were it not for these means. In Marx, the priority of the historical present – the priority of the actual – is indebted to the concept of means. This leads to the second observation. The future of the first historical act gives direction to the dialectic of the present and the past. The future by no means predetermines this dialectic, but it does guide the present’s ongoing creation and negation of the existence of the past, which is to say the ongoing expansion and satisfaction of social needs within the present. Yet – quite crucially – the future does not lie in waiting. The domain of the future is not the waiting overcoming of the present in the same way that the present actually overcomes the past. It is not the speculative formal repetition of an actual dialectic played out between the present and the past. To take this stance would be to relegate the future, and with it the temporality of the first historical act more generally, to a historicist framework wherein the future becomes ‘a moment which has yet to arrive’. Rather, the future is wholly immanent to the present’s transcendence of the past. Better yet: the present’s dialectical transcendence of the past is the past’s future (the present is the future of the past). Taken together, these two observations give shape to the twofold temporality of the first historical act.⁶¹

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The question now is: do the other decisive aspects of the materialist concept of history reframe, modify and expand this temporality of the first historical act? Do these aspects add a new dimension to this temporal reading of the materialist concept of history? Marx’s concept of need is undoubtedly a cornerstone of his transhistorical concept of wealth [Reichtum], such that the dialecticisation of need in The German Ideology provides wealth with its overriding structure of historical measure. In Marx, following Hegel, to dialecticise is to historicalise: the economic is a category of the philosophy of history because the social production of the means of life is internally – and dialectically so – differentiated between the creation of the means to satisfy existing needs and the creation of new needs. To dialecticise is also to temporalise: if ‘time’ is the name of the abstract unity of the past, the present and the future, temporalisation is the active production of the dynamic relations between these coordinates because practice and labour are – from the very outset – dialectical concepts in Marx. However, need does not, unto itself, exhaust the philosophical scope of the economic. The creation of the means of life is of course the social creation of the means of life, such that the kinds of relations that govern this creation also govern the temporal and historical intelligibility of ‘means’ and ‘life’ alike. Additionally, despite the fact that the means of life have now been investigated in relation to need, it is crucial to expand on the philosophical character of these means, such that they and the needs they satisfy can be understood as productive forces [Produktivkräfte]. This must be done if, on some level, ‘history’ for Marx is the dialectical correspondence [Entsprechung] of the economic subject to itself, if, in other words, it is the ongoing creation of new needs and the expansion of productive forces corresponding to this creation. Simply put, we have arrived at the essential contradiction between productive forces and the ‘form’, ‘means’ and ‘relations of intercourse’ [Verkehrsform, Verkehrsmittel, Verkehrsverhältnisse, respectively], each of which prefigure the place of the ‘relations of production’ [Produktionsverhältnisse] in Marx’s philosophy of history more generally.⁶²

⁶¹ Biological reproduction can be made to fit within the framework of this twofold temporality. As regards the relationship between biological, social and historical time in Marx, it is worthwhile perhaps to rework the famous passage from the Introduction to the ‘B’ (or 1787) edition of the Critique of Pure Reason, and to suggest that ‘…although all social and historical time commences with biological time, …it does not on that account all arise from biological time’ (cf. ‘…although all our cognition commences with experience, …it does not on that account all arise from experience’ Kant, CPR, B 1- 2, 136.) This move fundamentally inverts Kant: it imposes the a posteriori – or social and historical time in Marx – on Kant’s a priori, whilst holding on to the necessary and universal character exclusive to this a priori. The same manoeuvre is made in the next chapter, in relation to Heidegger’s practical philosophy.

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This arrival first necessitates a brief digression on the relationship between The German Ideology and an ongoing point of contention within Marx and Marxism alike. This is an issue which proceeds from the fact that The German Ideology, not Marx’s well-known 1859 preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (hereafter Contribution), first outlines the contradiction between the forces and relations of production at the level of the philosophy of history. The German Ideology, on the whole, affords a richer and more complex reading of the philosophical contours of ‘the economic’ than the Contribution. But it also functions as a foundation for the much maligned ‘base-superstructure’ model announced by the preface to the Contribution,⁶³ even as this model does not openly figure in The German Ideology.⁶⁴ There is an ‘economic basis’ in The German Ideology, synonymous with ‘material life itself’, which for Marx and Engels is the ‘actual basis of history’ and which might provisionally be defined as ‘the totality of the relations of production which correspond to a determinate level of the forces of production’. And it is certainly possible to interpret this basis as (implicitly) yielding a superstructure [Überbau] within which historical consciousness is dynamically embedded.⁶⁵ Yet there are other factors which need to be considered in relation to this model, factors which, when engaged, mitigate – and arguably put to rest – charges that Marx’s philosophy of history is underpinned by a mechanistic ‘economic determinism’ and vulgar historicism. One of these is the manner in which there is already always a political dimension to the economic basis in Marx, upsetting any fixed distinction between the ‘economic’ and the ‘political’ as such within his corpus. Consider, for instance, Marx’s analysis of the genesis of capitalist ground-rent, in which he declares that ‘the specific economic form in which unpaid surplus-labour is pumped out of the direct producers determines the relation of domination and bondage, as this grows directly out of production itself and in turn reacts back on it [production] in determining it.’⁶⁶ This passage is of course specific to a particular mode of production, but it nonetheless directs our attention to the viable possibility of reading the base-superstructure model as immanently co-constitutive, such that each ‘level’ mutually determines one another. This reading eases the philosophical rigidity in proclamations such as ‘life determines consciousness, consciousness does not determine life’. As Raymond Williams argues, we have to ‘revalue “determination”’ in this model ‘towards the setting of limits and the exertion of pressure, and away from a predicted, prefigured and controlled content’, in order to move the superstructure away from a unilaterally ‘reflected, reproduced or specifically dependent content.’⁶⁷ For Gramsci, this is the fashion in which ideology already always permeates every facet of the base, including the development of ‘organic’ and ‘conjunctural’ movement within the base.⁶⁸ These interventions foster, internal to the philosophy of history, the possibility of a new reading of Marx’s relation to Hegel, one grounded in an understanding of life which does much more than simply ‘invert consciousness.⁶⁹ This mutual constitution need not, as Althusser warns against, smuggle in an idealist dialectic, because it would be consistent with the idea that the economic is – but only ‘in the last instance’ – the ontological ground of history. Engels’s 1890 letter to Joseph Bloch sums this up quite nicely: ‘According to the materialist conception of history, the determining moment in history in the last instance is the production and reproduction of actual life. More than this neither Marx nor I have ever asserted. Therefore, if somebody twists this into saying that the economic moment is the only determining one, he transforms that proposition into a meaningless, abstract, senseless phrase.’⁷⁰

⁶² ‘Relations of production’ is not established as a concept in The German Ideology, but Marx and Engels already speak of the contradiction between ‘forms of intercourse’ and productive forces as the ‘origin’ of ‘all collisions in history’. See Marx and Engels, GI, 89.

⁶³ The relevant passage in the Contribution is: ‘In the social production of their lives, humans inevitably enter into definite, necessary relations, which are independent of their will, namely, relations of production corresponding to a determinate stage of development of their material forces of production. The totality [Gesamtheit] of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real basis on which there arises a legal and political superstructure and to which there correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of humans that determines their being, but their social being that determines their consciousness.’ Karl Marx, Zur Kritik der Politischen Ökonomie [1859] (hereafter KPÖ), in Marx and Engels, MEW, Band 13 (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1961), 8-9 (Marx, Contribution, 20-1).

⁶⁴ It is important to point out that this model barely emerges after the Contribution. It appears only once in the first volume of Capital, in a footnote at that. See Karl Marx, Capital: a Critique of Political Economy, Vol. 1: the Process of Production of Capital [1867] (hereafter Capital 1), trans. Ben Fowkes (London and New York: Penguin Books, 1976), 175, ft. 35.

⁶⁵ Various passages in The German Ideology anticipate the preface to the Contribution, most notably: ‘Life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life.’ Marx and Engels, GI, 47.

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⁶⁶ Karl Marx, Das Kapital: Kritik der politischen Ökonomie, Dritter Band: Der Gesamtprozeß der kapitalistischen Produktion [1894], herausgegeben von Friedrich Engels (hereafter Kapital 3), in Marx and Engels, MEW, Band 25 (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1964), 799 (Karl Marx, Capital: a Critique of Political Economy, Vol. 3: the Process of Capitalist Production as a Whole (hereafter Capital 3), ed. Friedrich Engels, trans. David Fernbach (London and New York: Penguin Books, 1991), 927. Emphasis added. See also Louis Althusser, ‘Is it Simple to be a Marxist in Philosophy?’ [1975], Essays in Self-Criticism, ed. and trans. Grahame Lock (Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press, 1998), 176.

⁶⁷ Raymond Williams, ‘Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory’, New Left Review I/82 (November/December 1973), 6.

⁶⁸ Antonio Gramsci, ‘Analysis of Situations. Relations of Force’ [1931-1934], in Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, ed. and trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1999), 180.

⁶⁹ An underappreciated contribution to this reading, which in many ways is more sophisticated than Marx’s well-known critiques of Hegel, is Herbert Marcuse, Hegel’s Ontology and the Theory of Historicity [1932], trans. Seyla Benhabib (Cambridge and London: MIT Press, 1989). In the shadow of Marx and Heidegger, this work is a systematic attempt to establish the philosophical basis of history within life, qua the ‘motility’ [Bewegtheit] of being, by way of a critical reconstruction of Hegel’s Logic, the Early Theological Writings and the Phenomenology.

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