The Philosophy of Marx by Étienne Balibar

Author:Étienne Balibar
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso Books

Towards historicity

This is the second sense of the ‘dialectic’ in Marx, which refines the first. The capitalist mode of production – the ‘basis’ of which is also ‘revolutionary’ – cannot but change. The question then becomes: change in what direction? Its movement, says Marx, is an endlessly deferred impossibility. Not a moral impossibility or a ‘contradiction in terms’, but what might be called a real contradiction, equally distinct from both a purely formal contradiction (abstract terms which exclude each other by definition), and a mere real opposition (of external forces acting in opposite directions, where one can calculate the outcome or the point of equilibrium).24 The entire originality of the Marxist dialectic lies, then, in the possibility of unreservedly thinking that contradiction is not an appearance, even ‘in the final tally’ or ‘at infinity’. It is not even a ‘ruse’ of nature, like Kantian unsociable sociability, or a ‘ruse’ of reason, like Hegelian alienation. Labour-power keeps on being transformed into a commodity and thereby enters the form of the capitalist collective (which, in the strong sense, is capital itself as a ‘social relation’). Yet such a process involves an incoercible residue, both in the individuals and in the collective (once again, this opposition does not seem pertinent). And it is this material impossibility which inscribes the reversal of the capitalist tendency in necessity, whatever the point at which it occurs.

The three questions of contradiction, temporality and socialization are, therefore, strictly indissociable. We can clearly see what is at stake here: it is what the philosophical tradition since Dilthey and Heidegger has called a theory of historicity. What we mean by this is that the problems of finality or meaning, which are posed at the level of the course of the history of humanity considered imaginarily as a totality – brought together in a single ‘Idea’ or a single grand narrative – are replaced by problems of causality or of reciprocal action on the part of the ‘forces of history’ – problems which are posed at every moment, in every present. The importance of Marx in this connection is that, no doubt for the first time since Spinoza’s conatus (‘effort’), the question of historicity (or of the ‘differential’ of the movement, instability and tension within the present which are carrying it towards its own transformation) is posed in the element of practice, and not in that of consciousness, posed on the basis of production and the conditions of production, not of representation and the life of the mind. Now, in spite of the cries of alarm uttered preventively by idealism, it turns out that this reversal is not a reduction, still less the substitution of a natural determinism for historical causality. Once again, as in the Theses on Feuerbach, we have left behind the alternative of subjectivism and ‘old materialism’, but this time we have done so on firmly materialist or, in any event, immanent lines. In this regard, contradiction is a more decisive operator than praxis (which it nonetheless includes).

However,

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