George S. Tomlinson

This chapter picks up on what Heidegger in his 1949 ‘Letter on ‘Humanism’’ calls ‘the historical in being’, that dimension of being within which, for Heidegger, a ‘productive dialogue’ between phenomenology and existentialism, on the one hand, and Marxism, on the other, ‘first becomes possible.’ It introduces the possibility of this dialogue through a particular, and particularly revealing, problem with The German Ideology: namely, Marx and Engels offer no analysis of the relationship between time, temporality and their materialist concept of history.

This chapter reviews four books published in 2018 which are not readily categorized as works in ‘modern European philosophy’: Gurminder K. Bhambra, Kerem Nişancloğlu, and Dalia Gebrial’s edited volume Decolonising the University, Chantal Mouffe’s For a Left Populism, Cinzia Arruzza, Tithi Bhattacharya, and Nancy Fraser’s Feminism for the 99%, and Andreas Malm’s The Progress of this Storm. Yet their uneasy relationship to this philosophy is precisely the reason they constitute a significant contribution to it. The philosophical originality and critical purchase of these books proceed from the fact that each is a singular case of philosophy’s dependence on ‘non-philosophy’; each exposes the impossibility of viewing philosophy as a self-sufficient discipline. In particular, they are a timely reminder that the best political philosophy is produced through actually existing social movements to change (which ecologically now means simply saving) the world. The chapter is divided into six sections: 1. Introduction; 2. Decolonizing Philosophy: Decolonising the University; 3. Anti-Post-Politics: For a Left Populism; 4. Anti-Post-Marxism: Feminism for the 99%; 5. Anti-Postmodernism: The Progress of This Storm; 6. Conclusion.

This paper proceeds from the premise that time and temporality constitute a distinct philosophical problem for Marx and Engels’s materialist concept of history in 'The German Ideology'. It is thus necessary to 'temporalize' this concept of history: to situate it in relation to the active production of a dynamic difference between the past, the present, and the future. After revisiting the philosophical dimensions of Marx’s concepts of materialism, the human, and need, this article uncovers a temporality within the materialist concept of history that is irreducible to a historicist framework of linear, progressive time.

The guiding premise of this thesis is that the concept of historical time constitutes a distinct philosophical problem for Karl Marx’s work. Marx does not examine the relationship between time and history in his work, rendering the historicist framework of linear, progressive time the overriding framework through which he understands this relationship. However, the larger problem is that, despite this lack, the philosophical originality and critical function of Marx’s work is in no small measure defined by the contribution it makes towards our understanding of this relationship. Therefore, this thesis argues that it is necessary to construct a concept of historical time out of Marx’s work. Methodologically, this begins with an outline of the broad contours of the materialist concept of history in 'The German Ideology', and a temporal reading of the historical act – the creation of the means of human life – on which this concept is based. This reading is then ontologically grounded, first by Martin Heidegger’s 'Being and Time', in order to establish how the act as such temporalises, and then by Jean-Paul Sartre’s 'Critique of Dialectical Reason', in order to grasp how this temporalisation can be thought in relation to the movement of historical totalisation, which is to say the ongoing totalisation of the time of all human lives. In short, Heidegger and Sartre enable us to secure labour and need – the two concepts upon which the materialist concept of history depends – as the two basic forces upon which historical temporalisation depends. Yet if, as Marx’s 'Capital' reveals, the specifically capitalist category of ‘abstract labour’ is the condition of thinking the transhistorical category of ‘labour in general’, and if abstract labour exists to satisfy capital’s need to self-expand, not the human’s need to live, then capital – not the human – is the condition of thinking history. Capital and its times give history its intelligibility, such that capitalism is the only standpoint from which ‘history as such’, ‘history itself’, can be conceived. However, the concept of historical time cannot simply register that capital makes the category of history possible. It must also account for the historically changing character of the relationship between time and history, and hence the possibility of social and historical time after capitalism.

Three recently published books, by Stavros Tombazos, Jonathan Martineau, and Harry Harootunian, join a now established body of literature that highlights the temporal aspects of Marx’s work. Their differences notwithstanding, these books are united by the conviction that, at its core, capitalism is an immense and complex organisation of time, and thus that the importance of Marx’s work is realised by its singular contribution to our understanding of this. Each book is centrally concerned with the historically specific character of capital’s temporal order, such that each presents a new reading of the relationship between capitalism and historical time.

This paper proceeds from the premise that time and temporality constitute a distinct philosophical problem for Marx and Engels’s materialist concept of history in The German Ideology. It is thus necessary to “temporalize” this concept of history: to situate it in relation to the active production of a dynamic difference between the past, the present, and the future. After revisiting the philosophical dimensions of Marx’s concepts of materialism, the human, and need, this article uncovers a temporality within the materialist concept of history that is irreducible to a historicist framework of linear, progressive time.

This chapter reviews three of the most consequential works in modern European philosophy published in 2017: Étienne Balibar’s Citizen Subject, Nick Nesbitt’s edited volume The Concept in Crisis, and William Clare Roberts’s Marx’s Inferno. These works reflect the fact that 2017 witnessed an upsurge of philosophical publications on Marx and Marxism. On one level, this is because 2017 was simultaneously the 150-year anniversary of the publication of the first volume of Marx’s Capital and the 100-year anniversary of the Russian Revolution. Yet on another, more substantial, level, these works point to the enduring question of the meaning of ‘Marxist philosophy’ in its dual, and disputed, relationship to transformative political practice, on the one hand, and to the history of philosophy on the other. There are different threads that tie these works together, but two concepts, coming out of Louis Althusser’s work, stand out: those of ‘conjuncture’ and ‘symptomatic reading’. In short, this chapter suggests that the importance of modern European philosophy is in large part attributable to the theoretical and political problems that Marxism constitutes for it, problems which, at the same time, Marxism cannot articulate without this philosophy. The chapter is divided into five sections: 1. Introduction; 2. Writing and Conjuncture: Citizen Subject; 3. A Symptomatic Reading: The Concept in Crisis; 4. A Symptomatic Reading? Marx’s Inferno; 5. Conclusion.