3. Marx and the Critique of Capital’s Tempo
What seems to me at stake in most postcolonial arguments is the misrecognition of the fact that Marxism is and has been, at least to a certain extent, an intellectual tradition committed to a critique of capital’s temporality and its modes of historicization. However, as Althusser recognized as early as in 1965, this topic has not been clearly articulated, and sometimes not even fully acknowledged as a conceptual problem (cf. Althusser, 2009 Part II. 4). Perhaps one of the most accomplished among poststructuralist and postcolonial endeavours has been the deconstruction of the conception of a linear, homogeneous time, a mirror-conception for the ideological time of capital. However, similar procedures can be found as earlier as the young Marx, for instance in his reflections on the economic and political backwardness but nonetheless philosophical coevalness of Germany, when compared to ‘advanced’ England (economically) and France (politically) –that is, the first ‘Marxist’ ruminations on the multiple character constituent of modern temporality. In the ‘Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law.
Introduction’, of 1843, Marx stated that “Germans have gone through our posthistory in thought, in philosophy. We are philosophical contemporaries of the present without being its historical contemporaries.” (Marx and Engels, 2010b, 3:180)
Furthermore, ‘The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte’ affords a critical reading of the different and uneven structures of temporality that, in their disjointed interaction, overdetermined the political conjuncture of post-1848 France, leading to the ascension of Napoleon III to power. A conjuncture in which the capitalist order appeals to the past (to Napoleon, that is, by means of his farcical projection onto his nephew Luis Bonaparte) in order to secure the present and prevent it from its own
35 (proletarian) future. As Massimiliano Tomba puts it, the great innovation of this text rests on “the duplication of historiographic registers. Instead of relegating the tradition into the past, [Marx] grasped its specific temporality as the past-present.”
(2013: 43–4) In a similar vein, Bob Jessop argues that perdiodizations and chronologies are of different nature:
[W]hereas a chronology orders actions, events, or periods on a single unilinear time scale, a periodisation operates with several time scales.
Thus the Eighteenth Brumaire is replete with references to intersecting and overlapping time horizons, to unintended as well as self-conscious repetitions, to dramatic reversals and forced retreats as well as surprising turnarounds and forward advances, and to actions and events whose true significance would only emerge in the ensuing train of events. (2002: 184)
The main temporalities clashing here are, on the one hand, the conservative-revolutionary temporality represented by the bourgeoisie alongside the peasants (anxious to hold land titles), or ‘temporality of hoarding’, on the one hand, and the suspended proletarian-revolutionary temporality of moving-forward self-criticism, or ‘temporality of distillation’, on the other.17 The absent subject of this story narrated by Marx – the working class– lurks ubiquitously behind the scene, just because what is being confronted in this text is the history made against the class-struggle as aroused in 1847-1848. The Second Empire thereby becomes the spectral, phantasmagorical (Tomba 2013, ch. 3) stage in which class-struggle – along with the disjointed temporalities that determine it – is (farcically) represented.
To break with the bourgeois conception of history was therefore at the centre of Marx’s intellectual concerns. As Massimiliano Tomba (2013, 55) explains it, Marx
“reasons with a plural semantics of history: he counterposes a notion of history marked with fractures to the history of continuum. This contraposition is political: it grows out of the search for a revolution capable of interrupting that continuum.” In turn, Daniel Bensaïd (2009: 80, 77) recognizes that Marx’s Capital is nothing but an
17 Of course, this aggregation implies a complex set of tempralization partially converging in a determinate conjuncture. I’m borrowing Amy Wendling’s (2003) terminology of ‘hoarding’ and ‘distilling’ to speak of the two main temporalities at stake in Marx’s text.
36 exploration into the pluralization of duration through a critique of capital-time.
According to his reading of Marx’s magnum opus, ‘capital’ appears as a specific and contradictory organization of social time based on the appropriation of surplus-value, that is, non-remunerated work-time. Along the volumes of Capital, Marx’s account goes from the mechanical-linear time of production (volume 1) to the chemical-cyclical time of circulation (volume 2) to the organic time of reproduction (volume 3), the latter permanently menaced by the disruptive-yet-constitutive time of crisis. “Marx”, Bensaïd concludes, “deconstructs the notion of universal history”
rather than reinforces it. And what emerges from the ruins of universal history “is a rhythmology of capital” (2009: 32, 35). A rhythmology that, as Tomba points out, is not a “mosaic of temporalities” insofar as they do not dwell indifferently to one another; rather, “the real problem is their combination by means of the world-market’s mechanisms of synchronisation.” (2013: xiv)
I draw upon Tomba’s notion of synchronization, which itself draws on Ernst Bloch’s account of non-contemporaneity and its dialectic, in order to identify the structural18 instance in which different, uneven and combined temporalities incorporated into the capitalist world market –where the foremost ‘synchronizer’ is the law of value. Bloch termed ‘multi-level dialectics’ the methodical recognition of contradictions that are synchronous –roughly, capital against living labour– as well as non-synchronous ones –capitalism against intermediate elements or ‘remnants’.
The source of non-synchronous contradictions “is a past which, in places, is not only not past in terms of classes, but not even completely redeemed materially” (1977:
35). Existing along the lines of the synchronous contradiction, those non-synchronous elements may be driven against either the bourgeoisie or the proletariat; the prospect of a proletariat hegemony, therefore, “cannot be managed, especially if the hegemony is to be undiluted and secure, unless dialectics also thoroughly ‘masters’ the material of nonsynchrononism and its heterogeneous contradiction.” To ‘master’ non-synchronicity means, for Bloch, to posses it “in the actual heritage of its ends in the Now”, that is, to gain “additional revolutionary
18 I follow here Peter Osborne’s (2015) critical remarks on Tomba’s work. According to Osborne, the key caveat to bear in mind when using Bloch’s categories lies in the conceptual distinction between the axes of synchronous/non-synchronous (‘structural’ differences of temporalities, which is Tomba’s framework), simultaneous/non-simultaneous (rather a chronological organizer), and contemporaneous/non-contemporaneous (which corresponds to a complex and multi-layered register of the temporal matrix).
37 force from the incomplete wealth of the past, especially if it is not ‘sublated’ in the last stage.” (1977: 36, 38)
In turn, in Tomba’s argument “capital organises and synchronises different temporalities according to the dominant temporality of socially-necessary labour time.” (2015: 84, original emphasis) This does not imply the complete subsumption of non-capitalist temporalities, but undoubtedly remains a violent form of imposition: “the indifferent sociality of abstract labour destroys the previous community-relations and the multiplicity of the differences between the particular spheres of society, producing a new, radical difference: that between capital and wage labour.” (Tomba, 2009: 51) Thus, the violence of what Marx called original or primitive accumulation – i.e. homogeneization of populations through dispossession – prepares the ground for the rule of the law of value as ‘economic’
synchronizer at the level of the world market.
Tomba also recognizes a second, extra-economic synchronizer in the nation-state form; insofar as the value of the socially-necessary labour time is not a given but its determination “contains a historical and moral element” (Marx, 1976: 275), the more concrete dimension in which capital organizes itself to confront class-struggle is the nation-state. State ‘extra-economic’ violence, in his view, is the way to synchronize the contingent combination of different temporalities “in order to produce differentials of surplus value”, and hence to concur to the market’s competition so as “to be synchronised to the world-rhythm of socially-necessary labour.” (Tomba, 2009: 56).
Last but not least, there are the texts (reading notebooks, letters or letter drafts, editorial sheets, and the like) written by Marx in the last decade of his prolific life, that is, between the defeat of the Paris Commune in 1871 and his own death in 1883.
By and large unpublished during Marx’s lifetime, they are perhaps the writings in which the non-linear conception of development he achieved throughout his work is exposed in a more definite form. These texts show the increasing concern with the agrarian commune in general, and particularly the Russian obschina. As we will see in this research, these texts have been of enormous significance for Latin American Marxism, for instance in the surprisingly similar perspective displayed by Mariátegui, even when the latter could not be aware of these texts’ existence; or the work made by Aricó on this ‘fragmentary’ part of Marx’s work. Regarding the
38 evolutionary possibilities of development for such a communal form, Marx wrote (in the Third Draft, never submitted, of his ‘Reply Letter’ to Russian Nardonik Vera Zasulich) that it
occupies a unique situation without any precedent in history. Alone in Europe, it is still the organic, predominant form of rural life in a vast empire. Communal land ownership offers it the natural basis for collective appropriation, and its historical context –the contemporaneity of capitalist production- provides it with the ready-made material conditions for large-scale co-operative labour organised on a large scale.
It may therefore incorporate the positive achievements developed by the capitalist system, without having to pass under its harsh tribute [...] it may become the direct starting-point of the economic system towards which modern society is tending; it may open a new chapter that does not begin with its own suicide. (1983: 121).
According to Marx (1983: 124), the destiny of the Russian community was not written in the stars; just as it had been the product of specific historical conditions and constraints, its future depended on its ongoing success in resisting the challenges of a present increasingly characterized by the alliance of large landowning and capital. The acknowledgment of the non-inevitability of the ‘harsh tributes’ that capitalist development imposes to the prospects of a post-capitalist production advances a multilinear perspective on the basis of which the late Marx considered the increasingly global capitalist structure in its uneven (multi-layered) and combined (coeval) contradictory modes of operation.
This brief survey shows that Marx’s original contributions were far from a mere unilinear conception of historical time, although of course one could find instances of such unilinearism, in the Communist Manifesto as well as other texts written by him or co-authored by Engels. The reduction of Marx’s perspective to a set of sequential stages led by deterministic forces was grounded in the pervasive Eurocentrism of the socialist movement’s politics and worldviews. Insofar as his analysis of capital and capitalism became more and more complex, Marx’s image of modernity appears as a force-field in which different structures of temporalization
39 are tendentially subsumed by capital’s, as the latter’s pace goes on covering the entire world.