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Marx After Marx
History and Time in the Expansion of Capitalism
Harry Harootunian
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Marx After Marx
History and Time in the Expansion of Capitalism
Harry Harootunian
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About This Book
In Marx After Marx, Harry Harootunian questions the claims of Western Marxism and its presumption of the final completion of capitalism. If this shift in Marxism reflected the recognition that the expected revolutions were not forthcoming in the years before World War II, its Cold War afterlife helped to both unify the West in its struggle with the Soviet Union and bolster the belief that capitalism remained dominant in the contest over progress.
This book deprovincializes Marx and the West's cultural turn by returning to the theorist's earlier explanations of capital's origins and development, which followed a trajectory beyond Euro-America to Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Marx's expansive view shows how local circumstances, time, and culture intervened to reshape capital's system of production in these regions. His outline of a diversified global capitalism was much more robust than was his sketch of the English experience in Capital and helps explain the disparate routes that evolved during the twentieth century. Engaging with the texts of Lenin, Luxemburg, Gramsci, and other pivotal theorists, Harootunian strips contemporary Marxism of its cultural preoccupation by reasserting the deep relevance of history.
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Historia social1
MARX, TIME, HISTORY
An often acknowledged paradox of historical practice, whose knowledge has been organized according to categories denoting time and its passage from a “before” to an “after,” is how little interest it has shown in actually addressing the question of time and temporality itself and its status in constructing the “historical field.” Fernand Braudel’s conceptual panorama was an obvious exception, with his successive three-tiered levels of time denoting long durations resembling the glacial movement of geological formations, an “unaltering history,” a history of “gentle rhythms,” another name for the broader conception of conjuncture, and, lastly, the history of events, whose movement followed a progressive narrowing. Another historian is Reinhart Koselleck, who proposed “temporal levels” (Zeitschichten) that followed the stratifications of geologic epochs, which he wanted to differentiate from nature, lying on top of one another to constitute the figure of a palimpsest, inasmuch as the layers signified different durations that remain visible and contemporary to each other that escape the succession of a simple, singular, linear trajectory.1 Koselleck’s “levels” resembled the philosopher Watsuji Tetsurō’s “stadialized” pasts (jūsōsei), stratigraphic layers imposed on each other representing a vertically organized inventory of past epochal traces, even though their direction appears progressive.2 While Braudel’s temporalities were graded according to scale, from the historical movements resembling large and slow-moving geological structures down to the singular event, Koselleck’s temporal levels opened the possibility of nonsynchronous synchronicities, different times coexisting with one another in the same present, rather than a pyramidal hierarchy of levels. Be that as it may, sensitivity expressed by historians toward the temporal dimensions of history rarely exceeds the abstract measuring of time and its quantification in chronology, the marking of calendar time and the passage from one day to the next, contrasting dramatically with the commitment of philosophy, which, since Henri Bergson’s and Martin Heidegger’s project promising a “reckoning with time,” had already embarked on a search for the forms of qualitative time. While this philosophical intervention has rarely assessed the relationship between time and capitalism (and thus history), more recent signs of interest have sought to make philosophy answerable to history and vice versa. This has entailed confronting the central role occupied by capitalism as the temporal dominant of modern society and thereby the need to address the effects of its structuring of time on history and politics. Such efforts invariably have converged on the incontrovertible observation that capitalism itself is, among other things, an immense conceptual organization of time that seeks to regulate and thus dominate a system of “social metabolic” control capable of penetrating every aspect of society.3 In fact, this view matches precisely the contemporary experience of capitalism as an all-encompassing temporal rhythmology dedicated to ordering the differing tempos of time with an unrelenting and inescapable circularity, which, accordingly, has truncated history itself, if not bracketing it altogether, and appears now to constitute “the exclusive material of the construction of life.”4 Capital’s logic thus points to “annihilating” history because it is posited on the eternality of the present, as Marx himself had observed regarding the “religion” of bourgeois political economy and its claims to have no history.
The historian’s indifference toward the problem of time, especially its agental aptitude, validates Jacques Rancière’s observation that judgments like charges of anachronism reflect a misrecognition because the question of historical time is a philosophic one and cannot be resolved as if it were reducible to the methodology or epistemology of history. Moreover, the charge of anachronism constitutes a political dismissal of any expression of time that does not correspond to the order of a linear chronology since it belongs to another time to represent time out of joint. The identification of anachronism itself may well signal the fear of coexisting temporalities in a present pledged to obeying the rhythms of social normative time. For Rancière, the knotted question posed between the present of historical enunciation and the past it seeks to rescue concerns not a Rankean fidelity to the idea of reality that conformed to the “way things were” but rather the status of the present’s priority as the locus of history’s representation. In a sense, this move resembles Gilles Deleuze’s earlier proposal that both past and future are dimensions of the present tense. Yet even before, Georg Simmel had already perceived how the present under capitalism had virtually been “ontologized,” while Marx saw in it the housing of a vast, heterogeneous inventory and “conjuncture” of temporalities no longer stigmatized for having been cast out of time but rather as expressions of contretemps, simultaneous nonsimultaneities (Gleichzeitigkeit und Ungleichzeítigkeit), contemporaneous noncontemporaneities or uneven times, and zeitwidrig, time’s turmoil, times out of joint, multiple temporalities, in other words, instances of multiversum testifying to untimeliness itself fully immanent to what constitutes normative social time. The supposed unity of time projected by capital and nation-state is a masquerade that invariably fails to conceal the ceaseless confrontation of different times. For Marx, these were instances of how time, or temporality, temporalized itself in the present, beginning with the process of production and reproduction where the colliding patterns of unevenness generated untimeliness and political struggle.5 In his own histories like The Class Struggles in France and The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Marx saw not only that the immediate present was the locus of history, one that, according to Engels, appeared to be unfolding before his eyes, but that political disruptions invariably introduced associations of prior pasts in the contemporary context to jar the presumed stability and “tranquility” of normative social time. In this connection, it became evident that the past could not lay claim to the identity of being historical in itself but rather acquires this status through the mediation of the present. Nor is it, as a result of this bonding to the present, a horizontal perspective, moving from a point of departure (origin) to its place of arrival (completion), since the location of the present is never fixed. Instead, a history derived from the present inclines toward verticality and its appearance is always changeable, brought to the surface by excavating and digging into the layered depths of different historical times, which are never completely lost. Marx was, I believe, the first to see and record the experience of the past as constantly intruding in the lived present, thus persuading him of the necessity of negotiating the multiple temporalities of noncontemporaneity individuals must always confront in their daily lives. This is, in effect, the point of his announcement in the preface to the first volume of Capital that “we suffer not only from the development of capitalist production, but also from the incompleteness of that development. Alongside the modern evils, we are oppressed by a whole series of inherited evils, arising from the passive survival of archaic and outmoded modes of production, with their accompanying train of anachronistic social and political relations. We suffer not only from the living, but from the dead. Le mort saisit le vif!”6 This collision of times was dismissed as a vast jumble by Claude Lévi-Strauss but valorized by Louis Althusser as instantiating how different temporalities of semiautonomous domains of what he called the social formation momentarily coagulate into a conjunctural unity, thus providing the nation, driven by the necessity to standardize time by synchronizing it to eliminate the scandal of plural temporalities, with its principal vocation to singularize time into a coherent narrative or story line that was both completed and timeless.7 It is an interesting paradox that while most history is uneven and unequal, according to Samir Amin, the historical narratives of diverse nations have rarely, if ever, recognized this disparity within their own historiographical borders.
In Capital, especially, Marx showed that changing the world required grasping the nature of the temporal dominant ushering in the new, modern era everywhere—the circumstances of the transformative force of capitalism that established the permanence and the primacy of the present as a temporal tense and with it the hegemony of a vast conceptual organization of time deposited and embodied in forms empowered to act as agents capable of reconfiguring the historical field. This reconfiguration resulted in an active erasure of capitalism’s own prehistory by accelerating the process of forgetting itself through enacting the task of normalization demanded by the new mode of production that followed a rhythm of repetition. As for the act of forgetting an earlier history of violence, incorporating it within capitalism, Marx reported that it presumably attended the emergence of the capitalist mode of production. Eventually, this history was realized by homologizing the categorial structure of capitalism with Hegel’s logic and its preoccupation with the primacy of forms, bracketing empirical history and presenting the order of categories synchronically. Consequently, this operation underscored the privilege accorded to the present without a past, as such, and projected a virtual history of and by itself, all reflecting a logic of inversion that proceeded from abstraction to the concrete, consciousness and reason’s self-activity to history. Yet the history it projected is “virtual” and is one that must be written according to capitalism’s viewpoint, “as a given totality retrojecting its interior moments in the past.” Such a history, moreover, “is both logically implicit and historically ungrounded [and] is evident from the hypothetical nature of the language Marx used in discussing it.”8
Marx’s Capital is still the most detailed accounting of capital’s structure of abstract temporality, presenting itself as a natural, ordinary time, world time, whose notice has even escaped the practice of historical materialism at risk of “dilut[ing]” its conception of history.9 Georgio Agamben was referring to how this neglect forced a vulgate version of historical materialism to adopt a linear and homogeneous conception of time alongside a revolutionary concept of history, constraining events to a development along infinite time progressing toward some distant future. In Capital, time is divided among production, circulation, and reproduction: the time of production, abstract, measureable, divisible, is linear; circulation relates to the rotation of value, is circular or cyclical; and reproduction consists of an organic union of production and circulation, reproducing them repetitively but always with a difference.10 While these temporalities of capitalism constitute different moments in capitalism’s operations, they are necessarily synchronized—a process that is ultimately guaranteed by the state. Despite the synchronisms linking them into a homogeneous unity, collision and crisis are always possible and punctually probable. In this scheme, there is no apparent separation between the immanent abstract logic and economic rationality at work in capitalism and history, ensuring the outcome of a reciprocal relationship and a shared narrative. If history were subordinated to capital logic and its temporality designated to serve as a placeholder for unilinear time, then the meaning of history could not be separated from capitalism. The abstract logic and economic rationality is realized in concrete historical forms, economic and political institutions, which periodically enter into crisis that exceed all bounds, syncopating history and directing it. By the same token, history is not a predetermined destiny in such instances since the great crises constitute interruptions of its homogeneous accountancy of (clock) time to produce moments of probability and even possibility.11 When such critical episodes interrupt the homogeneity of normal social time, historical time is released, in the form of political change, and appears as a distinct temporality. “Capital,” according to Massimiliano Tomba, “marks the rhythm of history in structural and tendential terms. But this temporality is abstract until it encounters the historical counter temporalities of the class-struggle. The historical time that results from it is flowing and contingent.”12 In this regard, it often assumes the form of a figure from the past now activated in the present that confers historical status on it but also announces the “presence” of the past in the present.13
What lies at the core of this relationship between capital’s abstract logic and history is the bonding supplied by formal subsumption—capitalism’s rule of development—and its inexhaustible capacity to make history by joining what it takes over or appropriates for use and combining with it the new. Above all else, it should be stated at the outset that the rule of formal subsumption was a temporal category that performed as a form bound to neither a specific time nor place, which, through its protean capacity to appropriate from the past what it found useful to capitalism, constantly introduced practices that embodied past times in every present. It was capital’s logic that made possible history, as we know it, and defined the relationship between itself and the past. It occurred at the point when capitalism’s abstract logic entered a received history and began altering and directing it on a new course, which produced uneven temporalities along every step of the way but sought to conceal it by implanting homogeneous time as the measure of capital’s progressive vocation. This process, constituting the central thematic of this book, results in combining presents with past, fusing a capitalist system of production with what has been appropriated from prior practices that are at hand. But what is often overlooked in such considerations that call attention to the contemporizing of pasts is the temporal incommensurability such a maneuver frequently entails and the tension and discordance it is capable of producing that is difficult to overcome. It seems to me that this was a crucial but unnoticed problem in all those earlier Marxist tactical controversies that sought to align peasants, living under semifeudal conditions belonging more to medieval agricultural life than modernity, to industrial workers, without considering the different temporal regimes characterizing and separating each. It was even truer of the encounter of industrial capitalism and the victims of colonial seizure.
In view of this relationship among capitalism, history, and time, there are, for our purposes, two related and mutually intertwined aspects of this temporal dominant of the present that we need to look at more closely: the separation or differentiation of history from capital logic and its temporal demands and, conversely, the problem of historical time in capitalism. I will be concerned with the role Marx assigned to the historicity of precapitalist formations and the appearance of capitalism as a conceptual organization of time, an active rationality, the idea of the immediate and what Marx often described as “abstraction in actu,” whereby capital becomes the logic of its own history.14 As for the former, the production of historical time that remained external to capitalism, Marx described it as a process “lying behind the system,” behind its “becoming” that also coexisted alongside of it and is external to it. What seems important is how history, before the emergence of capitalism, is externalized, positioned behind the system and, in some cases, alongside it, which was the way it functioned in late developing and colonial societies. In Theories of Surplus Value, Marx explained this history that lies behind and remained external to capitalism, and how antecedents from past practices are taken over and subjected to capital. “In the course of its evolution, industrial capital must…subjugate these [older] forms and transform them into derived or special functions of itself. It encounters these older forms in the epoch of its formation and development, it encounters them as antecedents, but not as antecedents established by itself, not as forms of its own life process.”15 As early as The German Ideology (1845), he and Engels were already on record for having proposed that “the various stages (of history) and interests are never completely overcome, but only subordinated to the prevailing interest.” While these practices of the past functioned as antecedents, Marx insisted they were not antecedents to capital’s life process. They were antecedents belonging to another history and social process. In Grundrisse, these antecedents were interchangeable with what Marx called suspended historical presuppositions to capital. The history of such presuppositions could not have been prior to the development of capitalism but were produced by it, which only meant that they became historical presuppositions from the perspective of a later capitalism. Marx, in his accounting of both precapitalist formations and primitive accumulation, shows how the order of history follows the order of the present and its determination of historical necessity, where structure precedes history and event. This particular decision undoubtedly stemmed from the conviction that if the past could be known at all, access to it yielded only a partial knowledge that was secured through the mediation of the capitalist present. What Marx implied was the existence of a wide cleft separating the capitali...