Reading Capital: Part II Continued (The Marxist Social Totality and Historical Time)

We can do the same for Marx: we can deduce his notion of historical time from his conception of social totality. Marx’s “whole” or social totality is unlike Hegel’s in that its unity is complex and not directly expressive. Rather, it “is constituted by a certain type of complexity, the unity of a structured whole containing what can be called levels of instances which are distinct and ‘relatively autonomous’” [as we’ve already seen in Part I] “and co-exist within this complex structural unity, articulated with one another according to specific determinations, fixed in the last instance by the level or instance of the economy” (97).

This sort of whole does not allow an “essential section.” It is more dynamic and discontinuous than the Hegelian whole.

The Marxist social totality is a structure made up of structures, each with a relative degree of autonomy, and each assigned a place and determined “in the last instance” by the dominant structure, that of a certain type of production.

This means that any given segment of the social whole does not express its “idea,” i.e. does not holographically express the totality or embody the essential (contra Hegel). Time is not contemporaneous and continuous, therefore.

Every level of the Maxist social whole has its own time of development, in which it proceeds in relative independence. But this independence in turn relies on a certain kind of dependence—the articulation of the whole, determined in the last instance by the dominant structure (the dominant mode of production).

In other words, just as there are mutually implicated but relatively autonomous structures that make up the social whole, there are separate times or separate histories of each of these structures, but these diverge in such a way that their divergence is regular and can be understood as a sort of harmony.

How are we to understand this relation? The concept of each time must be constructed out of various phenomenological and sequential times.

We only arrive at (a) properly historical time by constructing it through concepts, otherwise all we have is a mishmash of various times. Each level or structure has its concept, but this must include its determination in the last instance by the dominant structure. Furthermore, the concept of each level includes its articulation relative to all the other levels. Thus there is relative autonomy but also a sort of harmony at work.

A proper history must first determine what is proper to the sphere it is investigating—what is essentially scientific, philosophical, economic etc. Having done so, it can identify what are properly events or occurrences which exert a determinative, shaping influence on the history in question. Such a history is never a simple chronological sequence.

In other words, the object of knowledge must be laboriously constructed, and then the concept of its history may be constructed. If there is a time of all histories, then, it is not abstract and empty succession; if anything, it is a time that is each time projected differently as the history of a phenomenon is articulated with the histories of other phenomena. In other words: These discontinuities do not themselves subsist in a single time of times.


Thus an ‘essential section’ is impossible; a break on one level has no direct, contemporary correspondence in the others, because they are relatively autonomous; but this does not mean that it has no effect on the others, and thus they are mutually articulated. “The break ‘valid’ for a determinate level, political or economic, the break that would correspond to an ‘essential section’ in politics, for example, does not correspond to anything of the kind in the other levels, the economic, the ideological, the aesthetic, the philosophical or the scientific—which live in different times and know other breaks, other rhythms and other punctuations” (104).

The system of these discontinuities is the real historical present, or the conjuncture.

Thus language of backwardness and forwardness is metaphorical and indicates the function of a particular element in the configuration of the whole.

Determining this function is the theory of the conjuncture. Such theory is synchronic—the synchrony is in knowledge and indicates the systematicity of the KO.

This is a long way from The German Ideology. The dominant structure organizes the whole, but within each structure there is relative autonomy, and thus there are as many histories as there are “levels.” The effectivity of the structure of the whole upon its elements is precisely this relative discontinuity and dislocation; the structure of the whole is nothing but a power of differentiation, thus there is no overarching time of the whole. Thus, we have a peculiar “whole.”