Karl Marx, Historian of Social Times and Spaces

George García-Quesada - 978-90-04-49991-1

 Historical Materialism
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George García-Quesada - 978-90-04-49991-1

Karl Marx, Historian of Social
Times and Spaces

By

George García-Quesada

leiden | boston

George García-Quesada - 978-90-04-49991-1

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George García-Quesada - 978-90-04-49991-1

In memory of my friend and mentor,
Elizabeth Muñoz Barquero

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George García-Quesada - 978-90-04-49991-1
Contents

Acknowledgements ix
List of Figures and Tables x

Introduction: For a Multilinear Science of History 1

1 History with Social Ontology 17

1.1 Praxis and Spatio-Temporal Totalisation 20
1.2 Historical Being, Historicity and Categories 33
1.3 From World-History to Spatio-Temporal Complexity 42
Epilogue 52

2 Theory, Models and Explanation 54

2.1 Abstraction and Method 56
2.2 Modes of Production and Spatio-Temporal Models 70
2.3 Space-Time in Historical Explanation 81
Epilogue 91

3 In Marx’s Archive 94
3.1 Documentary Critique and Critique of Ideology 96
3.2 The Imperial Archive and the Limits to Interpretation 105
3.3 Beyond Marx’s Archive 113
Epilogue 121

4 Narrative as Presentation 124

4.1 Presentation, Chronotopes, Narrative 126
4.2 Poetics of Theory 136
4.3 Emplotment as Politics 144
Epilogue 154

Conclusions: Towards a Politics of Spatio-Temporal Totalisation 157

Bibliography 165
Index 183

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George García-Quesada - 978-90-04-49991-1
Acknowledgements

My deepest gratitude goes to Peter Osborne, whose careful readings and obser-
vations always led to substantial improvements to previous versions of this
writing. Useful suggestions and challenging questions about this work were for-
mulated at different moments by Peter Hallward, Howard Caygill and Étienne
Balibar. Héctor Hernández, Maria Chehonadskih, George Tomlinson, Eric-John
Russell, Rebecca Carson and Francisco Víctor gently read one or more chapters,
and their comments have made this a better book. The anonymous reviewers
of the original manuscript have also contributed decisively to this version. I am
also indebted to Pablo Quirós Solís and Danny Hayward for their help with this
edition. The limitations of this work are nonetheless my exclusive responsibil-
ity.
I would also like to thank my mother Ingrid Quesada and her husband,
Richard Doud (r.i.p.), for their decisive support before and during my research.
I also extend thanks to Saray Córdoba as well as Sammy, Fabio and Yessika, for
their valuable time and resources in helping me with diverse errands in Costa
Rica, and to Eilyn Baltodano and her family for their hospitality during my first
weeks in the United Kingdom. My friends and colleagues Minor Calderón, Gis-
elle Marín, Alexánder Jiménez, Pablo Hernández and Mario Salas honoured me
with their time and trust in dealing with other requirements. Last but not least,
I want to express my gratitude to my partner Amanda Alfaro for her support at
every level during the writing of this book.
The investigation leading to this book has been possible thanks to the partial
sponsorship of the University of Costa Rica.

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Figures and Tables

Figures

1 Moments of method in the Grundrisse 58

2 Levels of abstraction in historical knowledge 63
3 Events and narrative causality 134
4 Events in a narrative of uneven development 136

Table

1 Domains of reality 59

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 introduction

For a Multilinear Science of History

Critics and interpreters have endlessly cited, to the point of bore-

dom, the fact that Marx, ‘by mere accident’, had again picked up
Hegel’s Science of Logic. They want to find correspondences and
analogies. But they have not investigated the other side, namely,
how history – of the conditions of the workers and their struggles –
entered into Marx’s conceptual elaboration; how the structure of
Capital is not deducible beginning from a presumed Ausgangskat-
egorie, but has, rather, the discontinuity of strata in tension with
each other; how the historical material is assembled in the text and
enters into tension, but in the same constellation, with conceptual
exposition. A report on a workers’ struggle is not, for Marx, only a
fact of journalistic sensation that can be cited as an example, but the
point of condensation in which the entire theoretical exposition is
concentrated and exploded.1

∵
This investigation seeks to establish a dialogue between Marx’s conception of
history and some current problems in the philosophy of history, through the
analysis of the categories of social space and social time. Along these lines, I
interpret and systematise Marx’s conception of history in its various levels in
order to clarify his explicit positions, but equally to explore possibilities that he
did not always thoroughly develop. This helps us address and reformulate prob-
lems of historical theory and historiography. Although the reading presented
here seeks to understand Marx’s corpus rigorously in its philosophical, histor-
ical and philological aspects, my aim is not to present an ‘original Marx’ – an
attempt that has proved impossible after more than a century and a half of
conflicting interpretations2 – but to highlight the possibilities of a ‘best Marx’

1 Tomba 2013a, p. 158.

2 ‘We cannot maintain the naïve pretention of reading Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex or Shake-
speare’s Hamlet as if Freud had not existed. When interpretations are effective, they do not

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2022 | doi:10.1163/9789004499911_002

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2 introduction

in terms of the capacity of his theory and historical research to account for
complex, unevenly developing social totalisations.3
As the first chapter argues, Marx’s formulations in the direction of a mul-
tilinear conception of history – based on social forms rather than on stages –
first appear in his 1856–7 Grundrisse, and assume a perspective that enables
the integration of diverse social space-times without reducing them to a single
social principle. In this conception, knowledge about actual historical pro-
cesses requires both empirical and theoretical grounding, and thus the study of
Marx’s conception of history implies not just the revision of his more abstract
analyses of modes of production – with capitalism as the mode of production
par excellence – but also, necessarily, an engagement with his analyses of actual
historical cases.
In this manner, the epigraph by Massimiliano Tomba appropriately descri-
bes the importance of Marx’s case studies and contingency in his conception
of history. The historically particular is a ‘point of condensation’ inasmuch as it
is comprised by multiple social relations and practices. Therefore, when prop-
erly done, historical explanation accounts for the complexity of phenomena by
presenting the social totalisation through its contradictory relations. Historical
knowledge is produced in the tension between the abstract and the concrete:
Marx’s concept of a ‘mode of production’ is essential for historical analysis, but
particular socio-historical contexts are equally important to his theory of his-
tory. This is the argument of the second chapter.
This consideration is important in order to not exaggerate the distance
between Marx’s writings on political economy and those that deal with particu-
lar historical events. David Harvey’s idea of ‘two Marxisms’ – one deterministic,
the other voluntaristic – is complicit in this kind of exaggeration, by maintain-
ing that there is ‘a seemingly unbridgeable divide between the fluid, accidental
and voluntaristic tone of the historical and political writings, on the one hand,
and the rigorously scientific and lawlike political economy on the other.’4 If
Harvey’s position were correct, Marx’s writings about conjunctural processes
would be completely devoid of theoretical content.
To be sure, these writings were produced under quite different circum-
stances and have different value in terms of their contribution to Marx’s theory
of history. As we will note in the third chapter, the conditions for the production
of the different texts had a decisive influence on their contents. For instance,

simply translate a text rich with uncertainties into an intelligible code, but they are incorpor-
ated into the work and their context of reception’. Grüner 1995, p. 11.
3 Johnson 1982, pp. 153–201.
4 Harvey 2013, p. 15.

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for a multilinear science of history 3

his entries for the American Encyclopedia were written merely for the sake of
earning income, and have a distant relation – if none at all – with his theory
of history, while The Civil War in France was written as a political communica-
tion from the International Workingmen’s Association, and centred its analysis
on aspects of the development of the French state. On the other hand, his art-
icles on the Civil War in the United States, written for audiences unfamiliar
with social conditions in that country, contextualise with historical materialist
rigour the economic and political contradictions that led to this military con-
frontation.
In this sense, Kevin Anderson’s praise of Marx’s post-1856 writings about
particular cases needs nuance: some of them contain, as he argues, signific-
ant theoretical analyses of specific historical societies – especially non-Western
societies – with greater detail and depth than his writings on political eco-
nomy,5 while others, in contrast, possess a significantly more limited scope. In
particular, I will be addressing Marx’s analyses about the origins of capitalism
in Volume One of Capital, on the Commune in The Civil War in France, and
his and Engels’s articles about the Civil War in the United States. These texts
explain processes of varying spatial and temporal scales, and deal with differ-
ent aspects of the development of capitalism, like dispossession of the means
of the working people, modern slave labour, and the relations between classes
and the state.6
In these analyses Marx concretely approaches each of the particular pro-
cesses, and in order to do so he elaborates narratives for their explanation –
even in the case of the articles about the US Civil War, which, in spite of their
fragmentary condition, amount to a coherent narrative. Indeed, as I will argue,
this narrative component is not opposed to structural explanation but is wholly
necessary for the explanation of historical processes. This opens the theme
of the literary dimension of historiography but, far from leading to an aes-
thetic formalism that downplays the epistemological value of historiography, a
Marxian approach to narrative – which Marx himself does not develop – high-
lights the role of political positions in historical knowledge. This is a central
concern of the fourth chapter.

5 Anderson 2010, pp. 5–7.

6 In spite of the analytical subtlety of texts like the 18th Brumaire and Class Struggles in France,
the dismissive remarks in them about the peasantry, for example, indicate that during this
period Marx’s conception was still indebted to the unilinearity of the predominant Enlight-
enment conception of history. Also, while these texts follow a rigorous conception of class
struggle, they still lack a theory of capitalism through which to articulate politics and eco-
nomy – a perspective that was especially advanced by the Grundrisse.

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4 introduction

Because some of these cases – e.g. the two mentioned civil wars – took place
while or shortly before Marx was writing about them, the consideration of
these analyses in a work about the philosophy of history also requires a pre-
liminary indication of Marx’s conception of history. For reasons that will soon
become clear, the title of this work should not be understood as an endorse-
ment of history as the discipline that traditionally has had the past as its object
of study: the categories of space and time at the core of Marx’s concept of
history radically differ from those of the most influential nineteenth-century
historians. In contemporary terms, Marx comprehended the science of history
as a transdisciplinary, totalising approach in the social sciences. Thus the title
of this book, in deliberate reference to Eduardo Grüner’s profound and suggest-
ive preface to Class Struggles in France,7 alludes to Marx as a social researcher
at philosophical, theoretical and empirical levels. Underlying this dialectical
unity is a conception of history as an object that can be grasped through appro-
priate categories, while at the same time the research of actual historical form-
ations helps to advance historical theory.
Having said this, while Marx’s conception of history is broader than that of
traditional disciplinary historical studies, the problems in the latter are non-
etheless closely related to those which the materialist conception deals with,
especially due to the inescapable temporal dimension of historical research,
which other disciplines in the social sciences traditionally ignored. However,
the importance of the problems of the philosophy of history was downplayed
in much of Marxist theory during the twentieth century, wherein, as Peter
Osborne indicates, the concern for history

was replaced by an interest in anthropological and sociological theories

which tend to abstract from the problem of historical time altogether.
Thus was the ground laid for the various syncretic combinations of Marx-
ism and sociology that have since become the mainstream of a philo-
sophically ambiguous ‘social theory’. In the meantime, the pursuit of a
better understanding of the idea of history was continued in non-Marxist
debates about the methodology of historiography, the essentially tran-
scendental form of which registers their continuity with the project of
Dilthey’s critique of historical reason.8

7 Grüner 2005. In a line close to the work of this and other Latin American authors – such as
Enrique Dussel, Ludovico Silva and Bolívar Echeverría – the present investigation seeks to
address Marxian and Marxist categories as means for the explanation of global capitalism
and its peripheral formations in particular.
8 Osborne 2010, p. 32. See also Fracchia 2004, pp. 125–46.

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for a multilinear science of history 5

Whereas the philosophy of history in the last few decades has been dom-
inated by perspectives according to which historical knowledge is limited to
the linguistic, and in particular to the literary, mechanisms of historiography,9
one of the major non-Marxist contributions in this field has come from Paul Ri-
coeur’s hermeneutical approach to history. This author considers that history
has its roots in memory, but is also autonomous from it, and argues that it is
both a scientific and literary discipline. Hence, he analyses the construction of
historical knowledge as a multifaceted process whose account entails differ-
ent moments. In his Memory, History, Forgetting, Ricoeur differentiates three
indispensable epistemological phases, which are not meant to be considered
as distinct successive chronological stages, but as equally important ‘method-
ological moments, interwoven with one another.’10
He characterises these phases as follows:

I shall call the ‘documentary phase’ the one that runs from the declara-
tions of eyewitnesses to the constituting of archives, which takes as its
epistemological program the establishing of documentary proof. Next
I shall call the explanation/understanding [explicative/compréhensive]
phase the one that has to do with the multiple uses of the connective
‘because’ responding to the question ‘why?’: Why did things happen like
that and not otherwise? The double term ‘explanation/understanding’ is
indicative of my refusing the opposition between explanation and under-
standing that all too often has prevented grasping the treatment of the
historical ‘because’ in its full amplitude and complexity. Finally, I shall
call the ‘representative phase’ the putting into literary or written form of
discourse offered to the readers of history. If the major epistemological
crux occurs in the explanation/understanding phase, it does not exhaust
itself there inasmuch as it is the phase of writing that plainly states the
historian’s intention, which is to represent the past just as it happened –
whatever meaning may be assigned to this ‘just as’.11

It is arguable that an exaggeration of one of these phases – with the consequent

obfuscation of the rest – leads to approaches that undermine the explicative
possibilities of historiography. While a fetishism of the documentary phase
lies at the heart of the late nineteenth-century allegedly non-interpretive his-
tory based on ‘bare facts’, an exaggerated emphasis on the explanation/under-

9 On the ‘linguistic turn’ in historiography, see in particular Ankersmit 2001, pp. 29–74.
10 Ricoeur 2004, p. 137.
11 Ricoeur 2004, p. 136. The English translator has bracketed the French terms in this quote.

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6 introduction

standing phase led to schematic formulations with no awareness of the actual

conditions of the specific social processes – theoreticism, where conceptual
speculation substitutes empirical analysis.12 In turn, the currently predomin-
ant philosophy of history, by considering that historical discourse is prefigured
decisively by narrative forms and linguistic tropes independently of methodo-
logical and source conditions, tends to fetishise the third phase.13
Ricoeur’s philosophy of history has the merit of actually being elaborated
through the analysis of historiography and its methodological problems: his
philosophical considerations abound on works from historians like Labrousse,
Ginzburg, De Certeau, Braudel and Foucault. This effort of building bridges
between the philosophy of history and historical research has been especially
opportune in times when the former lost all relevance for the latter – if it ever
had any – and philosophers of history seemed to consider historiography only
as a source of examples for their already formulated positions. In addition to
this, Ricoeur’s interlocution with structuralism, poststructuralism and analytic
philosophy makes his hermeneutical approach to the different aspects and
phases of historical thinking a particularly productive point of departure for
the systematisation of a materialist philosophy of history.14
In our dialogue between Ricoeur and Marx, however, not only the contents
but also the order of the moments is changed: while the former, in a phe-
nomenological manner, seeks to abstract from the ‘things themselves’ and thus
arrive at their essences, Marx’s dialectics start from abstractions and arrive at
concrete objects of thought by adding determinations to them. Consequently,
Ricoeur’s philosophy of history analyses the epistemological phases before dis-
cussing their ontological implications; inversely, the Marxian approach con-
siders that the abstract ontological categories should be the base upon which
the theory of history – dealing especially with the construction of modes of
production – is articulated. Thus, in this movement from the abstract to the
concrete, the phase of theory functions as the mediation between the more
general categories and the empirical analyses. Since reality does not directly
appear to the human subject but has to be explained through scientific theor-
ies, this phase is fundamental to Marx’s conception of history.

12 For a critique of theoreticism see Banaji 2011, p. 8. Also see below, Chapter 2.
13 Against such reduction, Ricoeur maintains that ‘a gap remains between narrative explan-
ation and historical explanation, a gap that is enquiry as well. This gap prevents us from
taking history, as Gallie does, as a species of the genus “story” ’. Ricoeur 1984a, p. 179. See
below, Chapter 5.
14 In this sense, see Jameson’s assessment on this philosopher: Jameson 2010, p. 486.

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for a multilinear science of history 7

Because of the central function of this phase, the present work differs from
Ricoeur’s perspective in another significant way: while the French philosopher
tends to maintain a descriptive attitude towards the different possibilities of
explanation/understanding – as his very wording of this phase indicates – and
thus his methodological considerations are vague, Marx’s interest in the devel-
opment of a theory of history leads to a normative methodology which seeks
not only to describe the basic conditions of any historiography, but those con-
ditions necessary for an epistemologically adequate historical explanation. In
this sense, my reading of Marx is indebted to the critical realism of authors
like Roy Bhaskar, Andrew Sayer and others who have contributed to a Marx-
influenced philosophy of science.
This critical realist approach clarifies the production of historical know-
ledge, and in our case the Marxian conception of this. From this perspective,
Tomba’s call in the epigraph for the consideration of the relations between the
‘historical material’ and the conceptual exposition in Marx’s work leads to the
interplay between different levels of abstraction that produces historical know-
ledge. While the abstract concepts guide the research of particular cases, the
analysis of the latter can also lead to new concepts of varying levels of abstrac-
tion. Even the higher levels of abstraction are subject to their reformulation
under new circumstances or through the better understanding of the objects
to which they refer.
The Marxian approach to history thus differs in another decisive way from
Ricoeur’s philosophy of history: while Ricoeur makes no explicit reference to
the relations between the ‘historical condition’ and its historical conditions of
possibility – he makes no reference to capitalism, or history in general beyond
the realm of the conceptual – Marx’s conception necessarily considers its own
historicity. This thematisation of the material conditions of the ontology of his-
tory points not only to the temporal dimension of the latter but to its social
space as well; space is an inescapable problem for a materialist conception of
history, which has to account for social formations in different historical traject-
ories in terms of their spaces as much as their times. As the first chapter argues,
social space and social time are forms – products of human praxis – that organ-
ise social processes, and their analysis therefore helps to clarify those processes
and render the social agents within them visible.
The consideration of both social space and social time is thus a fundamental
aspect of explaining history as a multilinear process of human production. By
not reducing complex historical trajectories to a single principle, a properly
spatio-temporalised approach both distinguishes and relates those processes
in their uneven development. While the conceptual separation of time from
space and space from time can be productive in order to clarify the diverse

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8 introduction

mechanisms at work, this should be approached as a result of space and time

becoming relatively independent forms through specific historical mechan-
isms, as in the cases of the commodified space of land rent and of the alienated
time of abstract labour, whose explanation requires knowledge about the cap-
italist mode of production.
The examination of the relation between space and time as forms within his-
torical totalities avoids the overlaps and gaps that result from perspectives that
overstate the scope of one or the other. For instance, Lefebvre and Agamben
assign space and time, respectively, the fundamental role for social organisa-
tion and have consequently claimed in almost identical terms the priority of
each of these social forms for revolutionary transformation.15 It can be argued
that this convergence results from a heavily temporalised concept of space in
Lefebvre’s theory and from a heavily spatialised concept of time in Agamben’s
work. The analysis of these categories as part of a wider conception of history
can thus help to clarify them and their relations while showing their import-
ance for historical explanation.
This work thus presents a transversal analysis, interpretation and discussion
of the roles of social space and social time in Marx’s philosophy of history. Since
the ‘best Marx’ cannot be a museum piece, I develop my reading of his work in
dialogue with recent authors and trends in social theory and philosophy, thus
exploring the possibilities opened by his conceptual and his analytical works.16
In this manner, I will argue for the relevance of Marx’s work to the explanation
of contemporary problems of historical research, both theoretical and empir-
ical.
In this sense, the growing awareness in the social sciences in the last three
decades about the active role of space and time in society – albeit usually
treated separately, as in the so-called spatial turn – has led different Marxist
and post-Marxist authors to formulate conceptual problems that call for clari-
fications at the level of ontology. Henri Lefebvre’s Production of Space has been
crucial for authors such as Harvey, Jameson and Soja, who develop their con-
siderations on the culture and political economy of cities through the ontology
outlined by the French Marxist philosopher. As to the concept of social time,
Martineau has shown the historical development of the alienation of time in
capitalism; Lefebvre himself develops the problematics of social time through
his theory of a rhythmanalysis; and Pierre Bourdieu – whose general social

15 Lefebvre 1997, p. 190; Agamben 1993, p. 91.

16 In this brief account I do not deal with monographic works about space and time in Marx,
which nonetheless form part of the discussions in later chapters of this book.

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for a multilinear science of history 9

theory is not properly Marxist – maintains a theory of social practice where

time is socially produced.17
As regards social space, while Soja, at a theoretical and methodological level,
proposes the refoundation of Marxist theory as ‘historical-geographical materi-
alism’ – to which I refer below – based on a spatialised ontology, Harvey applies
Lefebvre’s theory of the social production of space through the perspective of
the political economy of the city, and Jameson explores the cultural implica-
tions of space in late capitalism. For the purposes of this book, the concepts
of space-time compression and of cognitive mapping in Harvey and Jameson
are particularly important for the conceptualisation of social time and space.
The former argues that in capitalism there is a tendency for the necessity to
accelerate the turnover time of commodities in order to maximise capitalist
accumulation to generate an acceleration of social life and culture. The concept
of cognitive mapping, on the other hand, plays a central role in Jameson’s con-
ception of politics in contemporary global society. This concept does not refer
to a ‘realist’ representation of objective space, but to the ‘practical reconquest
of a sense of place and the construction or reconstruction of an articulated
ensemble which can be retained in memory and which the individual sub-
ject can map and remap along the moments of mobile, alternative trajector-
ies’.18
For Jameson, cognitive mapping thus serves the function that class con-
sciousness used to play in previous stages of capitalism. But the postmodern
city, he argues, makes cognitive mapping impossible by creating a perception
of simultaneous and fragmentary spaces that suspends the subject’s ability to
situate him- or herself in a coherent temporal experience. In such a context,
the alienation of space is manifested by the incapacity of people to map in
their own minds their positions in the urban totality in which they find them-
selves. Jameson exemplifies this dislocation with the Westin Bonaventure hotel
in Los Angeles and Frank Gehry’s famous house in Santa Monica. In this sense,
he interprets the latter’s combination of interior spaces with seemingly incom-
patible perspectives – that is, perspectives that defy the expectations of spatial

17 Bourdieu affirms that social theory should reconstruct ‘the point of view of the acting
agent, of practice as “temporalisation”, therefore revealing that practice is not in time but
makes time (human time, as opposed to biological or astronomical time)’. Bourdieu 2000,
p. 206. For a description and critique of the emergence of space and time in the social
sciences, see Merryman 2012, pp. 13–27. On the concept and history of the ‘spatial turn’:
Massey 2005 and Tally Jr. 2013, pp. 11–43. Harvey 1991; Jameson 1991; Soja 1989; Martineau
2016; Lefebvre 2004.
18 Jameson 1991, p. 51. On space-time compression, Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity.

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10 introduction

perception in the building – as a spatialised way of thinking the contradictions

between the perception of unrepresentable abstract spaces and our everyday
representations of space and place.19
As for social time, both Bourdieu’s theory of practice and Lefebvre’s rhyth-
manalysis focus on the more immediate and corporeal aspects of social time. In
these authors, the locus of the creating activity is the socialised body, through
an intelligence of the body (Lefebvre) or an habitus (Bourdieu). Likewise, there
is a plurality of times derived from the variety of praxes, which Bourdieu frames
within a total social field, comprehended as a multidimensional array of differ-
ent kinds of social wealth (this is what he calls capital).20 These are productive
approaches in terms of the relations between subject and structure; however,
by conceptualising temporality from the outlook of the individual body, they
ignore the transgenerational problems of time – the problem of properly his-
torical time.
Martineau’s book puts the accent on the socially produced temporal rela-
tions and their relation to natural processes and cycles. This analysis assumes
that different modes of production produce different social temporal relations,
which in capitalism become alienated with the emergence of abstract time as
expressed by clock-time. Capitalism apparently unites the diversity of temporal
relations under this abstraction, but history as such is concrete time, which – as
the author indicates – can be also understood as many concrete times, and this
leads to the crucial question of why totalisation is necessary. While Martineau
argues this in a historicist manner – by considering that the unity of history is
produced by the totalising character of capitalism – which I consider correct,
I maintain that, besides this path, the concept of praxis already presupposes a
relation with historical totalisation.
Although these works deal with specific cases or formulate concepts and
methods in order to analyse empirical problems, their theoretical frameworks
imply more abstract problems about what society and history are, as well as
their relations to the human being and nature – ontological problems. These
theories encompass the different aspects of space and time in late capital-
ism: their objective or subjective (cultural) tendencies and the epistemological
problems that correspond to the most recent social conditions. Perhaps one of
the most evident problems is the very separation of space and time in most
of this literature: even when time-space is treated as a unit (as Sassen and

19 On cognitive mapping, Jameson 1997, pp. 415–18, 160–1; about Gehry’s house and the
Westin Bonaventure, Jameson 1997, pp. 40–54, 108–129.
20 Bourdieu 1998, p. 7.

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for a multilinear science of history 11

occasionally Harvey treat it) the reason for doing this is not argued. This is par-
ticularly a problem in Soja’s book, whose argument for a historical-geographical
materialism at moments assumes a dualism where space is exclusively geo-
graphical and time is exclusively historical – a position that is not compatible
with Marx’s totalising conception of history.
In contrast, the first chapter maintains that this importance of space and
time in social theory has an ontological foundation that can be accounted
for, precisely, through the concept of totalisation (especially as elaborated by
Sartre), which not only clarifies the problems raised by these recent authors,
but also enhances Lefebvre’s theory of the production of space – which should
also account for the production of social time. The spatial dimension of total-
isation, in turn, has to be made explicit: both Sartre and Lefebvre are neces-
sary to develop Marx’s concept of praxis in the most productive manner. This
should lead to an ontology capable of explaining uneven spatial and temporal
development as part of a complex historical totalisation, while also helping to
clarify the relations between history (with its praxical, objective and subjective
moments) and our knowledge of it.
The second chapter, in turn, maintains a dialogue with the spatio-temporal
conceptions of social researchers that have made scale a central element of
their theories. Fernand Braudel’s theory of large scale history is here a fun-
damental reference.21 He not only argues convincingly for the advantages of
studying geographically and temporally large social units, but also incorpor-
ates the consideration of spatial configuration or arrangement, as he calls it,
and of differential temporalities (multiple temporalities developing with differ-
ent rhythms): the first with the core-periphery model developed originally by
the dependence theories, the latter especially through his use of secular cycles
for the analysis of capitalist development. Hence, scale, spatial configuration
and rhythm emerge as central determinations for historical research, helping
to shape the analysis of uneven and combined development.
Theorists of globalisation such as Wallerstein, Castells and Sassen follow
Braudel in their large-scale approaches but, while the former adds a third inter-
mediate element – the semiperiphery – to the core-periphery model, the other
two explore the more dynamic aspects of recent global capitalism, elaborating
more nuanced concepts for the analysis of globalisation.22 Hence, instead of
the core-periphery model, Castells’s theory shifts from a logic of the space of
places in non-informational societies to one based on a space of flows (of cap-

21 Braudel 1984; Braudel 1982.

22 Wallerstein 1974; Castells 2010.

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12 introduction

ital, organisational interactions, images, technology, symbols and, of course,

information) in current globalisation. These flows are organised through a
global network consisting of nodes and hubs of different densities and intens-
ities, where a hub can become a centre or retreat into the periphery depending
on the amount of flows it puts into motion. Sassen, on the other hand, analyses
this global order as the coexistence and imbrication between the established
national spatio-temporal order constituted by bureaucratisation, with a found-
ing myth that lies in the past, and the emerging new order, which ‘brings the
experience of an instantaneously transnational time-space hinged on velocity
and the future’.23 The space-time of the national is hence centripetal, while
that of the global is centrifugal. She treats this configuration of global spatio-
temporal discontinuities and contradictions as an assemblage from which an
in-between order emerges.
But, while the temporal and spatial large-scale approach explains the imper-
sonal dynamics of the world-system, the experiences of individual lives and
communities remain invisible to them. This path has been explored thoroughly
by microhistory, in a much closer methodological relation to cultural anthropo-
logy than to sociology, and maintains that the reduction of the scale of observa-
tion, through an intensive study of the documentary material, may be applied
to any object independently of its dimensions. Its treatment – in contrast with
the large-scale approaches – is openly narrative, but this does not entail a con-
cession to the old histories of events. It is an alternative (or a complement) to
the quantitative and serial methods of approaching subordinate classes, one
that allows social research to reconstruct not only indistinct masses, but also
individual personalities, in a way such that dealing with the uniqueness of
the particular case does not imply ignoring the more general historical trends.
Hence, while agency resides in the individual characters of the narrative, the
aim of microhistory tends towards the use of these characters as personifica-
tions of social situations. In this sense, class struggle is the totalising criterion
within the narratives of authors such as Ginzburg and Levi.24
How, under the light of these contemporary concepts and problems on
space and time, do Marx’s analyses explain specific historical processes and
help to develop explanatory models? In order to observe how Marx’s theory
and explanations deal with the determinations of scale, spatial configuration
and rhythm, this question requires a clarification of the relations between the
Marxian concepts of the mode of production, the social formation and the

23 Sassen 2008, p. 378.

24 Levi 1991; Ginzburg 1980.

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conjuncture – and of their very ontological and epistemological differences.

Also, as regards to the dialectic of macro- and microhistory, although large-
scale is the main approach for the analysis of the historical development of the
modes of production, Marx’s case studies also allow us to examine the interplay
between different scales of time and space, and to analyse in consequence the
themes of structure and agency in history.
The third chapter deals with the problems emerging with the so-called
archival turn which, as Ann Stoler has affirmed, elevated the archive to a new
theoretical status, thereby shifting the perspective from archive-as-source to
archive-as-subject.25 The conditions and criteria by which certain documents
are produced and gathered not only indicate a great deal about the voices in
the archive shaping potential historical narratives, but also about its implicit
exclusions. Source criticism should thus be complemented by an account of
which archive the source was taken from: although each primary source is sin-
gular, the historiographical operation is not atomised because the conservation
of sources is a socially practical – and often institutionalised – process. In his-
torical investigation, therefore, there is not only a need to offer a critique of the
sources, but a critique of the archive.
The recognition of the social determinations of sources and archives is
then a central element of historical research in the documentary phase, and
such a critical approach can be enhanced by considering their spatio-temporal
characters. The transition from memory to historiography depends upon the
archival act,26 and it is hence imperative to problematise the institutional and
sociopolitical underpinnings of the archive, as well as the historiographies res-
ulting from them. Researchers like Foucault and Ginzburg have insisted on
the necessity of making subaltern cultures visible by using sources in which
the subaltern subjects left their mark almost accidentally. In such cases, the
scarcity of sources condemns historians to fragmentary reconstructions and
obliges them to read sources ‘against the grain’ – in manners different from
the intentions of the archivers – in order to shed light on some aspects of the
repressed popular cultures.27
Similarly, subaltern and post-colonial studies make a substantial contribu-
tion to the critique of the archive, by indicating its geopolitical criteria and its
relation to historiography and empire. Authors such as Richards, Guha and
Mbembe have explained different aspects of this matter: While the former

25 Stoler 2002, p. 86.

26 Ricoeur 2004, pp. 148–9.
27 Ginzburg 1980; Foucault 1997; Foucault 1982.

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14 introduction

demonstrates the state-centrist bias of the traditional archive, which in the late
nineteenth-century was imagined by the imperial élites as a project of total
knowledge and shaped the relation between knowledge and the state, Guha
argues that this imperial project introduced history (and specifically so-called
World-History) to India, and enumerates several examples of histories which
would have been lost if we were to have relied exclusively on traditional state
archives. Mbembe, in addition to this, argues that the archive sets the lim-
its of the temporalities – as well as the spatialities, we should add – woven
together by the historian in order to compose the possible historiographical
narratives. This is particularly important because it indicates that the critique
of the archive – not only the state-centrist kind – should consider the space-
time of the contents of the archived documents as much as the space-times
determining the activity of registering them.28
In this sense, the use of the traditional state-centrist archive is unavoid-
able, but should be properly thematised, and eventually complemented with
other archives in order not to obfuscate subaltern agents. The analysis of Marx’s
archive is of particular importance because it shows the possibilities of for-
mulating counter-hegemonic interpretations on the base of mostly hegemonic
sources. Moreover, it allows the assessment of his philosophy of history, and
more specifically of his theory of history, as regards to the spatio-temporal
bias – Eurocentrism – of which he has been repeatedly accused. Also, by analys-
ing how later investigations of the specific cases studied by Marx consider space
and time when formulating their explanations, we can enhance our under-
standing of the reach and limitations of his archive – and his explanations –
in contrast to the archive available to recent researchers.
Finally, the fourth chapter deals especially with Ricoeur’s account of the rela-
tions between time and narrative, from the point of view of historiography.
After this philosopher, authors following the dialectical tradition such as Jame-
son and Osborne conceive narrative as the fundamental means by which lan-
guage allows the subject to grasp temporality.29 But, while Ricoeur argues for a
pluralism of temporalities and narratives, in which a totalising narrative which
accounts for all the implied temporalities cannot emerge, for the latter authors
totalisation is a fundamental issue in dealing with the problems of histori-
ographical representation.30 Moreover, they argue that it is imperative to relate

28 Richards 1993; Guha 2009; Mbembe 2002.

29 Ricoeur 1984a; Ricoeur 1984b; Ricoeur 1990; Osborne 2010; Jameson 2010, pp. 475–612.
30 In the phenomenological tradition the unity of multiple narratives is ultimately based in
contingent intersubjective prejudices. Koselleck 2002, pp. 117–8. Also: Carr 1991. On the
re-vindication of prejudice, see Gadamer 2004.

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for a multilinear science of history 15

the structures of social reality and their representation: hence the theoretical
criterion of social totalisation should also be the thread of the corresponding
historical narratives.
In the works by Osborne and Jameson, time is a product of history – which
is not immediately apparent – and hence a theory of history is necessary in
order to account for the narratives that shape diverse existential temporalit-
ies. Totalisation would be the operation by which the gaps, contradictions and
relations in general between temporalities are incorporated into a contradict-
ory history; there is one history, but it is not constituted by homogeneous times.
However, the development of the category of temporality leads both Jameson
and Osborne to problems of spatiality: the former through globalisation, the
latter through the materiality of the conditions of everyday praxis. Their efforts
to make history emerge from time end up making space emerge as well, be it at
the ‘micro’ or planetary level – arguably the widest scale of social life. A mater-
ialist approach always has an immanent spatial as well as temporal dimension;
how to relate space and narrativity is, hence, a central issue for a materialist
conception of representation.
In this sense, I propose a re-formulation of Bakhtin’s concept of the chrono-
tope and of Marx’s concept of presentation (Darstellung) following a critical
realist reading of Ricoeur, in order to address the problem of developing nar-
ratives capable of explaining social processes and their outcomes by better
accounting for their spatio-temporal dynamics. The formulation of a specific-
ally historiographical concept of the chronotope also throws light on the cru-
cial matter of the political side-taking of historiography. This ultimately leads
the chapter to deal with narrativist authors like Hayden White, who typically
hypostatise language while they overlook the role of time and space for histori-
ography – and the need to relate them to a theory of history.
Finally, a note on my approach to Marx’s work in this book. Since my inten-
tion is to systematise Marx’s conception of history on the base of the categories
of social time and social space – which, as I argue, should be fundamental at
every level of the social and historical analysis – I deal with Marx’s biographical
conditions only secondarily. I do however pay close attention to the conditions
in which his texts were elaborated and to his original wording in order to cla-
rify the meaning of several key fragments in the work. My interpretation of
Marx’s conception of space and time – especially since the Grundrisse – is then
guided by the phases defined by Ricoeur’s philosophy of history, albeit adap-
ted in a realist and materialist direction, which help to clarify the problems of
historical knowledge in current discussions. My approach is thus in part her-
meneutical and in part properly philosophical and theoretical: what is at stake
with this book is, indeed, the argument for a materialist and realist approach to

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16 introduction

history, one with a direct relation to historical research – a relation broken by

the prevalence of positions in philosophy of history that deny the possibility of
historical knowledge.
The concept of history as a complex spatio-temporal totalisation, on the
other hand, helps us to avoid the theoretical simplification of social processes,
and allows for a better understanding of problems such as those generated by
globalisation. In my view, Marx’s conception – more clearly after the first half
of the 1850s – is not Eurocentric, and in the occasions when he holds posi-
tions of this kind this happens because he does not follow his own method.
His decentred conception of history, on the contrary, opens the possibility for
different historical subjects depending on where oppression takes place – as
Marx observed, for example, during the rebellions in India, China and Ireland.
The necessary spatio-temporalisation of Marx’s conception should then high-
light the de-provincialised character of his approach to history and politics.
As we will observe in the next chapters, some tensions arise between the
possibilities opened by Marx’s theories and some of his actual historiograph-
ical accounts; the discussion of such tensions in this investigation will help
advance a version of the ‘best Marx’, one who offers the best philosophical, the-
oretical and methodological framework for the most concrete explanation and
exposition of history as a complex social reality. This writing argues, in con-
sequence, that this framework is capable of articulating structural necessity
with actual contingency, and that space and time are fundamental categor-
ies that best apprehend the multilinear transformations of diverse historical
processes, while taking into account – as regards the formation of our world-
system – the totalising drive of capital.

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 chapter 1

History with Social Ontology

History is no entity advancing along a single line, in which capit-

alism for instance, as the final stage, has resolved all the previous
ones; but it is a polyrhythmic and multi-spatial entity, with enough
unmastered and as yet by no means revealed and resolved corners.1

∵
Ontology has not had a good reputation in the recent philosophy of history.
The rejection of ontological issues in the reflection on history was initially
part of a reconfiguration in the mid twentieth-century of the philosophy of
history as a surrogate to epistemology in analytical philosophy, but was consol-
idated with the arrival of poststructuralism and the linguistic turn after Hayden
White’s influential Metahistory in the 1970s. Underlying this rejection was the
directive that the philosophy of history was only possible as a philosophy of
historiography: analytical philosophy dictated that the conditions of historical
knowledge were the only appropriate object of the philosophy of history, and
with narrativism the analysis of textual mechanisms – be it literary tropes or
chains of signifiers – substituted the consideration of history as res gestae.2 The
question of the being of history was for the narrativists an unreachable referent.
The more conceptually-minded historians, on the other hand, became ac-
customed to developing their methodological considerations on the basis of
assumptions having a strictly operational validity: there could be no universal
applicability beyond their immediate objects of study. Foucault’s image of the-
ory as a toolbox is probably the most famous formulation of this trend, which
usually conceals an ontology behind a set of epistemological and methodo-
logical assumptions which otherwise attempt to avoid more abstract philo-
sophical discussions.3 But even when such discussions take place, theories of
history often propose ‘weak’ ontologies that are interchangeable, depending

1 Bloch 2009, p. 62.

2 Walsh 1960; Danto 2007; White 2014; Paul 2015, pp. 1–16; Jenkins 1997, pp. 1–30.
3 ‘I would like my books to be a kind of tool-box which others can rummage through to find a
tool which they can use however they wish in their own area … I don’t write for an audience,

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2022 | doi:10.1163/9789004499911_003

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18 chapter 1

on the paradigms ‘chosen’ for the specific research. Pragmatism is the anti-
philosophical philosophy behind this stance, which became especially fashion-
able during the time of postmodern critiques of ‘grand narratives’.4
Hence, historians and philosophers of history who dismiss ontology con-
sider that getting to know totalising structures in history – or eventually any
structuration at all – is a priori impossible. In any case, it is arguable that
there is not only an implicit ontology in ‘pragmatist’ theories of history, but
also in the analytical approaches derived from Popperian epistemology and
Whitean narrativism. In particular, since theories of history deal basically with
the relations between concepts and empirical data, and thus operate at lower
levels of abstraction, they can function without explicit ontological founda-
tions. However, they do not necessarily exclude the latter: in fact, Marx’s con-
ception of history encompasses these levels, by relating the epistemological
and methodological with the ontological aspects of historical research.
When Marx and Engels propose their ‘science of history’, they have a specific
conception of what the social (natural-historical) world is, and only thus can
it be the subject of this science. However, because Marx does not render the
philosophical system that underlies this theory of history explicit, the matter
of whether it is possible (or consistent with his method) to find and develop a
Marxian ontology – or even specifically an ontology of history – from his essen-
tial categories has led to controversies.5 Nonetheless, his work is loaded with
considerations about the most general structures of the world – especially con-
cerning history and society – and this is particularly expressed by his arguments
about method.
The systematisation of these indications about the most general and ab-
stract structures of human agency, history and society constitute what this
chapter considers to be Marx’s ontology of history: what Anievas and Nişan-
cioğlu characterise as ‘a general, abstract set of determinants highlighting a

I write for users, not readers’. Michel Foucault, ‘Prisons et asiles dans le mécanisme du
pouvoir’, quoted in O’Farrell 2005, p. 50; Paul 2015, p. 13; Fulbrook 2002, pp. 35–7.
4 Osborne explains this perspective with regards to post-Marxist cultural studies, but the same
point is valid vis-à-vis the post-Marxist theory of history. Osborne 2000, pp. 1–19. On weak
ontology, see Rovatti and Vattimo 2013.
5 Schmidt, for example, argues that it is not possible to speak of an ontology in Marx except in
a negative sense, because Marx assigns no content to positive metaphysical principles such
as nature. However, Schmidt’s references to this term are related to his rejection of unmedi-
ated objectivism, which in turn relates to his criticism of Soviet diamat as a dehistoricised
ontology. This position assumes that ontology cannot be historicised, which I argue against
in this chapter. See Schmidt 2014, pp. 83–93 and pp. 138–9.

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history with social ontology 19

general condition confronted by all societies irrespective of historical context,’6

whose categories underpin the possibility of the knowledge of any particular
historical process. Along with this ontology’s focus on objective socio-historical
processes, the ontology of historical being deals with the specifically conceived
dimension of history – a hermeneutical horizon that Marx approaches as the
problem of historicisation.
From this dialectic, Marx’s conception of history emerges as a spatio-tem-
porally complex global process. The root of this complexity, as I will argue in
the first section of this chapter, ultimately lies for Marx in human praxis, which
totalises history in a spatio-temporally differentiated manner through differ-
ent strata (productive, political, cultural, etc.) and spheres of social reality in
a mode of production. The latter, as a social totalisation, is hence shown to be
always mediated by the different space-times that dialectically compose it: in
this sense, the Marxian ontology of history is not related to a conception of
continuous and homogeneous time or space, nor does it conceive the collect-
ive human activity in a reductive manner.
The second section deals with the relation between modes of production
as part of a common human history, which leads to the problem of their
common structure while considering the inherent historicity of Marx’s cat-
egories. The expansion of capitalism opens the possibility of conceiving his-
tory as the unity of all human experience, and in consequence introduces
the question of how to apprehend the apparent multiplicity of social forms
through a unitary theory of history. Rather than by an evolutionist conception,
I will argue, this is best achieved in Marx’s work by means of trans-historical
abstractions that guide the concrete historical explanations through empirical
research.
The third section, in turn, argues that Marx developed his materialist con-
ception of history most consistently during and after his writing of the Grund-
risse, opening the possibility of conceiving the unity of human experience
without reducing it to a unilinear path, in opposition to the unilinear conce-
pion of history that prevailed in writings such as the Manifesto. In the case
of capitalism, such spatio-temporal complexity, I argue, is best accounted for
through the Marxian concept of subsumption.

6 Anievas and Nişancioğlu 2015, p. 58.

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20 chapter 1

1.1 Praxis and Spatio-Temporal Totalisation

As in the case of other scientific approaches to reality since the eighteenth

century, an ontology of historicity lies at the heart of Marx’s conception of his-
tory. Modern cosmology, geology and evolutionary biology have arisen from
and developed within this conception of permanent structuration and de-
structuration, whose historical conditions of possibility will be addressed in
the next section. In this line, Marx argues that the role of human activity is the
creative force that produces a specifically human history; his concept of history
thus emerges from the consideration of historicity at the most general level,
beyond the human, and seeks to account for social transformation through
human production. Hence, even his most abstract categories about social being
are themselves historical.
The ontological foundations of Marx’s conception of social being are set by
his early critique of Hegelianism, in which his concept of praxis plays the cent-
ral role.7 Marx elaborates the more abstract concepts of his social ontology into
the concrete concepts he later applies to particular social forms and contexts,
as in the case of his early concept of alienation, which reappears with more
determinations in the concept of commodity fetishism – the cornerstone of
his analysis of capitalism, no less. Hence, his later theoretical trajectory can be
interpreted as a process of making his abstract concepts more concrete, rather
than as a break in respect to his early texts; several levels of abstraction and
concreteness coexist and interact throughout Marx’s oeuvre.8
In particular, the importance of the concept of production in Marx does
not stem from bourgeois productivism, as Baudrillard maintains, but from a
Romantic ideal of creative activity and its influence on German Idealism. As
early as his Theses on Feuerbach, praxis is the point of departure for Marx’s
formulation of materialism; human beings produce their world in their inter-

7 ‘In human terms, the energy of creation is extended and made manifest in and through the
Praxis, that is the total activity of mankind, action and thought, physical labour and know-
ledge. … The Praxis is where dialectical materialism both starts and finishes’. Lefebvre 2009,
p. 100.
8 As for one of Marx’s cardinal anthropological concepts, Heller indicates that ‘the elaboration
of the category of value “need” is the work of the young Marx. In his maturity this category is
already a given point of departure: he does not consider it necessary to analyse it anew. Nev-
ertheless, it frequently appears later on, in a direct and open form’. Heller 1976, p. 38. On the
thesis of Marx’s epistemological break, Althusser 2005. On Marx’s trajectory as a dialectical
construction, Lefebvre 1948.

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history with social ontology 21

actions between themselves and with nature.9 In this conception, as Lefebvre

explains,

only the human being and their activity exist. And yet everything happens
as though humans had to deal with external powers which oppress them
from outside and drag them along. Human reality – what humans them-
selves have made – eludes not only their will but also their consciousness.
They do not know that they are alone, and that the ‘world’ is their work.
(Here we are using the word ‘world’ to signify the coherent, organised,
humanised world, not pure, brute nature).10

Praxis is thus the foundation of Marx’s general ontology11 and, like concrete
labour – which is regularly characterised by Marx as the expenditure of human
brains, muscle, nerves and bones – is a material and singular process of trans-
formation. The intertwining between diverse individual praxes, leading to un-
expected effects (‘they do this without being aware of it’),12 produces history as
a consequence. This is clear in the 18th Brumaire, where Marx famously affirms
that:

humans make their own history, but they do not make it just as they
please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves,
but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted
from the past. The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a night-
mare on the brain of the living.13

In the introduction of this book we mentioned how Lefebvre and Bourdieu

construct their respective theories on the production of social space and time

9 Marx 1976a, pp. 3–5. On Marx’s productivism, Baudrillard 1975; on Marx’s relation to
Romanticism, Löwy and Sayre 2002, pp. 88–98.
10 Lefebvre 1991, p. 167. Here and below I have changed the words ‘man’ and ‘men’ for ‘human
being’ and ‘humans’, a substitution that does not alter the conceptual content of this pas-
sage but eliminates an outdated sexist expression.
11 ‘The onto-formative process of human praxis is the basis for the possibility of ontology, i.e.,
for understanding being. The process of forming a (socio-human) reality is a prerequis-
ite for disclosing and comprehending reality in general. Praxis as the process of forming
human reality is also a process of uncovering the universe and reality in their being’. Kosík
1976, p. 139. On praxis as the cornerstone of Marx’s philosophy, see Osborne 2006, pp. 23–
32; Lefebvre 2000b, pp. 33–55; Echeverría 2011; Grüner 2005; Sánchez 2003, pp. 127–208.
12 Marx 1976b, pp. 166–67. On labour as bodily expenditure, Marx 1976b, pp. 134, 164, 274–5,
643, 717.
13 Marx 1979a, p. 103.

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22 chapter 1

by developing these concepts already inherent in the Marxian ontology of

praxis.14 The former theorist, in particular, systematises the relation between
production and praxis, explaining how human beings produce their spaces and
times through their praxes in relation to their already existing spatio-temporal
conditions. First, he stresses the doubled sense of Marx’s concept of produc-
tion: in the restricted sense it refers to the specific economic labour-process,
while in its broader, ontological sense it encompasses the results of human
activity.15 Second, in the latter sense and referring specifically to the production
of space, Lefebvre creates a three-moment dialectic, where spatial practices
produce representations of space – mental conceptions – and representational
spaces – the lived spaces. Hence, the process of production produces both sub-
jects and objects,16 and does so by producing space-times at both subjective
and objective levels.
With Kant, it is convenient to recall that in their most abstract sense, space
and time cannot have a concept as all their definitions are self-referencing.
The Kantian differentiation between these intuitions as outer and inner sense,17
however, is not acceptable from a dialectical perspective, because the process
of their social production implies that both space and time each have objective
and subjective dimensions. Social times and spaces are not only ideal (con-
ceived) conditions of praxis, but actual forms of worldly organisation (both
subjective and objectively).18 They are objectifications, though not of the same
kind as the objects that are usually thought to fill them. Social times and

14 Whereas, in the context of his philosophy of nature, Hegel indicated that ‘space and time
first attain actuality in motion’, social time and space are produced by human praxis. Hegel
1970a, p. 239.
15 Lefebvre 1997, pp. 68–72. According to The German Ideology, for example, ‘this mode of
production must not be considered simply as being the reproduction of the individuals.
Rather it is a definite form of activity of those individuals, a definite form of expressing
their life, a definite mode of life on their part. As individuals express their life, so they are.
What they are, therefore, coincides with their production, both with what they produce
and with how they produce. Hence what individuals are depends on the material condi-
tions of their production’. Marx and Engels 1976b, pp. 32–3.
16 ‘Praxis encompasses both material production and “spiritual” production, the production
of means and the production of ends, of implements, of goods and of needs’. Lefebvre
1991, p. 237. About the triad systematised in Lefebvre’s concept of the social production of
space: Lefebvre 1997, pp. 38–9.
17 ‘Time can no more be intuited externally than space can be intuited as something in us’.
Kant 1998, p. 174.
18 This organisation sets limits to praxis, with death being its ultimate negation. As indic-
ated above about Bourdieu’s studies on social times, this temporalisation is mediated by
the social place of the subject: the existential time of an immigrant subproletarian and
that of a salaried professional are quite different from one another.

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history with social ontology 23

spaces are both material and formal, concrete and abstract, real and imagin-
ary (réel-fictive) and indeed, as Lefebvre maintains, they can be separated only
through abstraction; in his words, ‘time is distinguishable but not separable
from space.’19 Social space is always already temporalised, just as social time is
always already spatialised, and only through an operation of abstraction can
they be distinguished as two different axes of the organisation of the social
world.
Since in experience times and spaces are plural, the problem of how to total-
ise them is the starting point for Marx’s approach to history. Although some
authors have held that this spatio-temporal plurality is insurmountable,20 if
we adhere to Marx’s conception of human praxis we find that the production
of spaces and times is always already social, and hence necessarily related to
a historical totalisation.21 At this point, it is useful to bring Sartre’s concept of
totalisation to our attention, in order to account for the spatio-temporalisation
of history. Sartre notes that the structure of history is ultimately founded on
that of individual praxis. In his words, ‘the entire historical dialectic rests on indi-
vidual praxis in so far as it is already dialectical, that is to say, to the extent that
action is itself the negating transcendence of contradiction, the determination
of a present totalisation in the name of a future totality, and the real effective
working of matter’.22
In this sense, individual and history are not external to each other; while
praxis is historically determined, history is the combined product of collective
praxes, which brings results that are different from the intentions of each indi-

19 Moreover, as he writes in the same passage, ‘phenomena which an analytical intelligence

associates solely with “temporality”, such as growth, maturation and aging, cannot in fact
be dissociated from “spatiality” (itself an abstraction)’. Lefebvre 1997, p. 175.
20 Braudel, like Ricoeur and Koselleck, holds this position: ‘Our problem now is to imagine
and locate the correlations between the rhythms of material life and the other diverse
fluctuations of human existence. For there is no single conjuncture: we must visualise a
series of overlapping histories, developing simultaneously. It would be too simple, too per-
fect, if this complex truth could be reduced to the rhythms of one dominant pattern. It is
impossible to define even the economic conjuncture as a single movement given once and
for all, complete with laws and consequences’. Braudel 1973, p. 892.
21 In the Grundrisse, for example, he affirms that ‘all production is appropriation of nature
on the part of an individual within and through a specific form of society’, and the theor-
ised social totalisation should thus substitute the ideological centrality of the individual in
previous political economy. Throughout these drafts, Marx demonstrates once and again
the historical character of the individual, against the assumption of bourgeois political
economists of it as an immediate, atomistic entity. Marx 1973, p. 87. On this ontology of
relations, see Balibar 2014, pp. 27–33.
22 Sartre 2004, p. 80.

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vidual. Since praxis is not conceivable without its corresponding social spaces
and times, the latter are conditions for production both in the social-historical
and transcendental sense. Although Sartre insists on the temporal character of
the totalisation produced by praxis, it is more accurate to conceive praxis in
relation to both space and time, because human action is both conditioned by
pre-existing actual space-times and projected upon an ideal spatio-temporal
order. Sartre’s concept of totalisation would thus not necessarily exclude space,
but gains in depth by taking this dimension into account.
Hence, each individual praxis is already historically conditioned within a
certain range of spatio-temporal possibilities, and it is through them that dis-
continuity or continuity, production or reproduction, is generated in respect
to the established social structure – therefore eventually changing the very
conditions which initially made them possible. These conditions determine
the possible processes of spatio-temporal production, whose combination pro-
duces history:

the social structure and the state are continually evolving out of the life-
process of definite individuals, however, of these individuals, not as they
may appear in their own or other people’s imagination, but as they actu-
ally are, i.e., as they act, produce materially, and hence as they work under
definite material limits, presuppositions and conditions independent of
their will.23

This production is well exemplified in Capital, where Marx argues that the dif-
ference between the worst of architects and the best of bees lies in the former’s
capacity to conceive the results of the labour-process before having done it:
human work is purposeful activity which requires an object upon which to
act and the instruments to do it. This teleological feature implies that an ideal
future is always present in labour, just as much as the past is, and this is the case
both through the labour’s objective conditions and through the references to
such a future that exist in the mind of the labourer.24 Thus, the mentally pro-
jected result of the work of the architect presupposes a temporal path, but also
an image, and hence a conceived space – an operation of cognitive mapping, as
we have noted previously with regards to Jameson.

23 Marx and Engels 1976b, pp. 35–36.

24 Marx 1976b, p. 284. Harootunian observes that ‘Marx was … 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 non-contemporaneity indi-
viduals must always confront in their daily lives’. Harootunian 2015b, p. 24.

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history with social ontology 25

We should observe that the conceived space-times of praxis are mental pro-
jections from the point of view of a subject in a determinate social place in a
concrete form of society;25 human praxis produces the world, but does so as a
part of the social-natural totality it modifies. Then, it is also convenient to note
that once the process of construction has been undertaken, social space and
time are transformed through collective action. During the construction pro-
cess, besides obviously changing the physical space, the building modifies the
distribution of social times within itself and the adjacent social spaces with
which it interacts. Likewise, at a broader level, a social formation is a combin-
ation of social space-times whose structuring processes exceed the intentions
of their producers.26
Thus, collective praxes produce the practico-inert as their objectification,
which in turn becomes the condition for new praxes, in a movement of total-
isation, detotalisation and retotalisation. This process of spatio-temporally pro-
ducing a social totalisation is dialectical in the measure that the partial praxes
constitute the latter as a whole, and in consequence dialectics is necessary in
order to render such totalisation intelligible.27 A proper explanation should
then take into account all the general social conditions that make a specific
praxis possible, the framework that allows for its emergence and development.
Since knowledge is itself a conceived retotalisation of the real process of total-
isation, a materialist analysis of history should thus explain social processes in
such a manner that it shows their spatio-temporal organisation as part of the
logic of their functioning.
This leads us to the concepts by which Marx accounts for the products of
praxis. In his conception, individual praxes are processes that produce mater-
ially singular objectifications,28 but the latter respond to other levels of social
life as particulars through the forms of their respective objectifications. Form
is a quite generic concept that encompasses objects (Objekte) of very differ-
ent levels of complexity: Marx refers to forms, for example, as moments of the

25 ‘The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political
and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence,
but their social existence that determines their consciousness’. Marx 1987a, p. 263. See also
Heller 1984, p. 3.
26 Marx’s metaphor of a social formation as social metabolism adequately portrays the
spatio-temporal character of different forms of society, each with its rhythms of circu-
lations, development and exchanges with its environment. Schmidt 2014, pp. 76–93.
27 Sartre 2004, p. 66 and pp. 90–4.
28 Heller distinguishes between objectification as the production of an object and objectiva-
tion as the re-creation of the praxical subject. Both aspects are indissolubly linked. Heller
1984, pp. 47–8.

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value-form (simple, total, general and money form), as concepts corresponding

to social appearances, and as whole societies.29 A form can be a determination
of other forms, therefore, and should never be substantialised.
Forms have an existence beyond that of the objectifications from which they
emerge, but their contents change according to the changes in the totalisa-
tions where they take place. Hence, Marx affirms that under a new totalisation,
forms from earlier social organisations can remain as ‘stunted’, ‘travestied’ or
‘caricatured’. Slavery in the Americas is an example of the adaptation of an
ancient social relation that acquires new characteristics under a new mode
of production – in this case, capitalism. Likewise, emerging forms can impose
themselves over older ones while maintaining the older contents, as registered
by Marx’s concept of subsumption: ‘even economic categories appropriate
to earlier modes of production [e.g., commercial and finance capital, ggq]
acquire a new and specific historical character under the impact of capitalist
production’.30
But while the generality of the concept of form is useful because it is applic-
able to all historical contexts, further precisions need to be made in order to
grasp the specific historical mediations between objectifications and the par-
ticular totalisations which condition them. Marx’s criterion of totalisation lies
in the specific processes of production as the condition of possibility for all
human activity, because humans have to organise themselves socially in order
to satisfy their needs and survive. As Sartre indicates, ‘the essential discovery
of Marxism is that labour, as a historical reality and as the utilisation of par-
ticular tools in an already determined social and material situation, is the real
foundation of the organisation’.31 The key totalising concept for Marx is hence
the mode of production.
In his 1859 Contribution, Marx proposes that a mode of production has three
fundamental levels: the economic structure (the totality of the relations of pro-
duction), the legal and political ‘superstructure’ (Überbau; édifice in J. Roy’s

29 Marx 1976b, pp. 138–62; p. 677 and p. 682; Marx 1973, pp. 471–514.
30 Marx 1976b, p. 950; Marx 1973, pp. 105–6. As for Marx’s views on modern slavery, see below,
1.3.
31 Sartre 2004, 152. As opposed to the Robinsonades of political economy in his lifetime,
Marx repeatedly argues for the necessity of departing from the social character of the
human being, who is by nature not merely gregarious but political, i.e., a producer of spe-
cific social relations. See Marx 1973, p. 84, Sartre 2004, pp. 122–52, Basso 2012, pp. 142–50
and also Jameson 2002, pp. 85–88. Moreover, Marx states that the standpoint of the isol-
ated individual only became possible with the development of capitalist social relations
in eighteenth-century Europe. Marx 1973, pp. 83–5.

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Marx-approved translation in French),32 and the forms of social consciousness

arising from the latter – the legal, political, religious, artistic and philosophical
forms ‘in which people become conscious of this conflict [between material
productive forces and property relations] and fight it out’.33
In order to avoid interpretations that substantialise these levels – like, most
notably, that which comes out of so-called ‘orthodox Marxism’ – it is useful to
understand them, as Collier suggests, as strata with different causal hierarch-
ies in the same totalisation. Following critical realism, a stratum is an object-
ive system of generative mechanisms, i.e., ways-of-acting of objects and rela-
tions which, given certain conditions – usually other mechanisms – generate
determinate events. Specific social generative mechanisms not only play their
role in regards to the contradictions in their social totalisations, but can them-
selves generate contradictions, as in the case of the commodity form.34 Each
stratum relies on lower strata, but has its own rules; for instance, the biological
stratum emerges from the stratum studied by chemistry, which in turn emerges
from that explained by physics. The lower strata enable the functioning of the
higher ones, but also, as Collier argues, ‘each emergent stratum will effect alter-
ations in the entities governed by the stratum from which it emerged, which
would not have been effected had the new stratum not emerged.’35
From a broad perspective, each society as a social metabolism36 develops
from definite biological conditions which in turn presuppose definite geo-
graphical conditions. However, this is not a geographical determinism, because

32 See Silva 2009, pp. 101–2. Silva argues that Marx’s scarce use of the terms Basis, Überbau
and Superstruktur – as opposed to his constant appeal to a concept like ökonomische Struk-
tur – suggests that they are strictly illustrative metaphors that should not substitute for
properly explanatory concepts. Silva 2009, pp. 99–101.
33 Marx 1987a, p. 263. Marx’s characterisation of these forms of consciousness as ‘ideological’
is problematic, since it suggests either a functional (non-dialectical) approach or a wide
concept of ideology, different from his use of this concept as false consciousness. These
forms of consciousness are also explained as forms of appearance in Marx 1976b, pp. 675–
82.
34 ‘Each category in Capital defines a determination of a social form, and each determina-
tion specifies a real mechanism at work in the capitalist mode of production’. Smith 1997,
p. 190. On the theory of strata, see Sayer 1992, pp. 104–5; Collier 1998. On the critique of
‘orthodox Marxism’ see, among others, Jameson 2002, pp. 17–25.
35 Collier 1998, pp. 263–64. As Sayer affirms, ‘while we don’t have to go back to the level of
biology or chemistry to explain social phenomena, this does not mean the former has
no effect on society. Nor does it mean we can ignore the way in which we react back
on other strata, for example through contraception, medicine, agriculture and pollution’.
Sayer 2000, p. 13.
36 Besides Schmidt 2014, see Foster 2000, pp. 141–77. On the natural-historical character of
the human being and society, see also Osborne 2006, pp. 33–44. Marx’s studies on chem-

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human adaptations to the same natural environment, albeit limited by the con-
ditions of the latter, are open to different possible kinds of organisation.37 It is
also important to note that the theory of social stratification suggests that the
higher strata emerge from the pre-existing lower strata, and hence the times
of the former are always longer than those of the latter, and their spatial range
is also wider.38 In this sense, Braudel’s consideration of geography as a struc-
ture developing at a very longue durée may be understood as a complement to
Marx’s multi-layered conception of society: under the stratum where the con-
tradiction between the forces and relations of production exists, is the stratum
of geographical conditions.39
Interpreting Marx from this stratified conception, the economic structure
would be the condition of possibility for the stratum of the legal and the polit-
ical (in their widest sense), and the forms of social consciousness constitute a
higher stratum. Every praxis contributes to the production of different strata at
the same time, since mechanisms are composed by aspects of praxes and not by
types of praxes,40 and since the mechanisms in each stratum have their respect-
ive space-times, a single praxis produces several space-times, corresponding
to the different strata it produces through its objectifications. Consequently, a
single geographical-chronological unit has several different overlapping social
space-times. Thus albeit mediately related to one another in a process of total-
isation, economic, political and cultural spaces and times in the same particu-
lar society are distinct and respond to different mechanisms.41

istry, recently analysed in the light of their coming publication in the second edition of
the Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe (mega2), further demonstrate his efforts to think the
relation between nature and society. Saito 2014.
37 Bhaskar illustrates this non-reductive position with the example of the writing of a pen:
while this operation does not violate any of the laws of physics, they don’t directly define
what is written, and therefore cannot explain it qua writing. Bhaskar 2008, p. 105.
38 Although the rules for the combination of atoms are universally valid, life only emerges
under certain conditions, i.e., in particular space-times. See Sayer 1992, pp. 118–21; Bhaskar
2008, pp. 168–70.
39 When developing his theory of social space based on Marx, Lefebvre distinguishes three
kinds of spaces, corresponding to three different ontological levels: physical, social and
mental spaces. This division – which does not exclude further internal divisions – can
be addressed as consisting of three different strata of reality. Lefebvre 1997, pp. 11–14. On
geographical conditions as a longue-durée stratum, see Braudel 1982, pp. 25–54.
40 See Collier 1998, pp. 266–7. In this sense, it would not be accurate to speak of merely eco-
nomic praxes, but of praxes that have economic implications among others. The commod-
ity, for example, is not merely an economic form, but also exists as a legal and ideological
form.
41 As Osborne indicates, ‘different objects of study, within the same empirical space, will
require different primary levels of socio-spatial totalisation (locale, province, nation, fed-

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history with social ontology 29

As an example of this, a school lecture takes place in a classroom and under

a schedule, and is expected to enhance the students’ abilities through the cul-
tural and ideological activity of education. But this implies a differentiated
legal status between students and teacher, where each have distinct rights and
responsibilities, and is also an economic activity where the teacher gets paid
and the students can attend the class because they do not have to engage in
labour themselves – at least not during the school time. The same collective
activity thus has effects at the same time on different strata of social life, with
each stratum having a different spatio-temporality. The space-time of the lec-
ture in terms of education is produced in the classroom and refers to a regional,
national or transnational culture – to which it also contributes. The juridical
space-time of the lecture depends under most Western-based educational sys-
tems on the state- and national legal framework, while its economical space-
time is ultimately the world market – albeit through the mediation of a national
currency and market.
But Marx’s famous paragraph in the Contribution also suggests a ‘horizontal’
coexistence of systemic forms in a stratum: they do not directly condition each
other, but develop independently because each one responds to different rules.
In a particular society, for example, art and religion may not follow the same
mechanisms, but are conditioned by the same strata under them.42 Such com-
plexes of forms – which are themselves forms – correspond with what Lukács
refers to as spheres of objectification (e.g., economy, law and art), whose hetero-
geneity in relation to each other in Marx’s ontology, the author of the Ontology
of Social Being argues, is given by the relation between their respective teleolo-
gical projects and materialities.43 However, his interpretation completely over-
looks the spatio-temporal aspects of the uneven development of such spheres –
aspects that, I have argued, are inherent both in the project and in the materi-
ality of the objectification.
The stratum of economic production conditions the emergence of all social
objectifications, but the forms in the latter can adapt to transformations in
the conditions of the lower strata. Indeed, the observable plurality of social
space-times has to do with the heterogeneity of forms as mechanisms with dif-
ferentiated rules and histories; the uneven spatio-temporal development of a

eration, region, space of flows) which will subsequently require mediation at other levels.
Hence the potential structural disjunctions between, for example, the economic, political
and cultural histories of any particular territoriality. Totalisation is a re-territorialising as
well as a re-temporalising process’. Osborne 2000, p. 17.
42 On ‘vertical’ and ‘horizontal’ explanation, see Collier 1994, pp. 42–51.
43 Lukács 1978, pp. 124–7.

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particular form of society is the necessary corollary of the different means and
modalities of the praxical transformation of the world.44 The example in the
Grundrisse about the uneven development of ancient forms of art and law in
respect to modern material production is therefore better comprehended as a
case of differential times of particular forms in western Europe. Marx already
approaches other cases of this kind of uneven spatio-temporal development in
his early writings, when he compared the situation of politics and philosophy in
England, France and Germany, as well as the disparities between correspond-
ing spheres – such as the intellectual and the productive – in other nations.45
Forms are determined partially by their place in respect to the social total-
isation, but their space-times do not necessarily correspond directly with those
of the modes of production where they develop; the history of a form is defined
through the interaction between its internal and external determinations –
the classic dialectical relation between part and whole.46 The forms in a soci-
ety, hence, are possible due to the conditions of economic production, but
they are ‘vertically’ and ‘horizontally’ mediated by their situation in the three
strata of society. Hence, in capitalist societies philosophy and agriculture, e.g.,
have quite different functions and respond to mechanisms differently from one
another; their spatio-temporal differences are also easily observable.
Overall, the interactions of diverse praxes ultimately lead to uneven social
totalisations.47 Since each mechanism has its own spatio-temporal tendencies
(e.g., the current conflict between global scale economy and national scale
politics, and their respective space-times, as conceptualised by Sassen), a con-
crete society functions as the organisation of multiple social spaces and times;
social totalisation is mediated by the spatio-temporal production of spheres
and their relations with one another. Such development is, therefore, uneven
not only between spheres, but also within each sphere: a social mechanism,
given that it is based on unequal relations, produces contradictory outcomes

44 See Heller 1984, pp. 47–113. See also Heller 1990, pp. 48–60.
45 Marx 1973, pp. 109–11; Marx 1975, pp. 175–87; Marx and Engels 1976b, pp. 74–5 and pp. 81–3.
46 See Kosík 1976, pp. 17–32.
47 ‘Praxis also reveals itself as a totality. We would maintain that the idea of totality derives
from praxis. However, this totality never appears to be other than fragmentary, contradict-
ory, and composed of levels, of contradictions on differing levels, and of partial totalities.
How do we reach totality, i.e., society itself from within? Precisely, via these partial totalit-
ies and levels which cross-refer to each other, and via these fragments which presuppose
a whole and which necessitate the concept of a whole of which they are the evidence and
the elements, but not the entirety. Fragmented in one sense but already total in another,
every act of thought or social effectiveness refers to the totality via the other levels. It
reveals a total praxis, and points the way towards it’. Lefebvre 2002, p. 237.

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history with social ontology 31

in space and time in a single moment. In this sense, as Marx argues, the most
simple formulation of the production of capital consists of the double process
of C-M-C (the point of view of the labour force) and M-C-M’ (the point of view
of capital). These formulae entail the unequal distribution of the outcomes of
the process, as well as the unequal spaces and times of its sides.48
Finally, I think a clarification about the relation between praxis and labour –
concepts often conflated in the Marxist tradition – should be made, espe-
cially since Marx elaborates his mentioned example of the architect’s activ-
ity in order to specifically conceptualise labour. Petrović indicates that Marx
repeatedly opposes praxis – or self-activity, as he calls it from The German
Ideology onwards – to labour, having characterised the latter in his 1844 Manu-
scripts, specifically, as ‘the act of alienation of practical human activity’.49
Hence this opposition, as the Yugoslavian philosopher stresses, implies that
praxis is the non-alienated form of human activity, but overall, his account of
the concept of praxis suggests that Marx did not fully develop this concept.
However, other passages in Marx’s early work conceptualise praxis as the
generic form of human activity. Thus, in his 8th Thesis on Feuerbach Marx
affirms that ‘all social life is essentially practical. All mysteries which lead the-
ory to mysticism find their rational solution in human practice and in the com-
prehension of this practice’.50 Since Marx considers class societies, and partic-
ularly capitalism, as early as 1844, as inherently alienating, in this formulation
praxis encompasses alienated as well as non-alienated activities. Moreover,
Marx’s central claim that the organisation of production fundamentally struc-
tures society would not be possible in this 8th Thesis if Marx’s concept of
human practice did not include labour.
The relation between praxis and labour would not then be one of opposi-
tion, but rather that between genus and species, and the passages where they
appear as opposed would refer strictly to alienated labour, not because the lat-
ter is a different and independent category to praxis, but because it is a specific
case of praxis transformed into a limitation of the possibilities of its agents.51
Accordingly, labour – whether alienated or not – would be a specific, although
fundamental, modality of praxis. Due to his consideration of economic produc-
tion as the totalising criterion of social relations, Marx gave priority in his work
to the dialectical development of the concept of labour. His purpose was not

48 Harvey’s theory of capitalist space is based on the consequences of this fundamental

Marxian formulation. See Harvey 2009.
49 Petrović 1991, p. 437.
50 Marx 1976a, p. 5.
51 On alienation as a negation of praxical possibilities, see Lefebvre 2001, pp. 160–1.

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primarily to formulate a social theory tout court, but a theory of the capitalist
mode of production, whose explanation implied other, more general categor-
ies of social being and history. This movement from the abstract concept of
praxis to the more concrete concept of labour, nonetheless, did not mean the
elimination of the former or of other specific kinds of praxes.52
Hence Lukács considers that labour is for Marx the most basic form of social
practice and its model because it ‘is the underlying and hence the simplest and
most elementary form of those complexes whose dynamic interaction is what
constitutes the specificity of social practice’, albeit, for this very reason, ‘it is
necessary time and again to point out that the specific features of labour should
not be transposed directly to the more complicated forms of social practice’.53
According to Lukács, although the structure of every social practice would have
the structure of labour at its core, the former cannot be reduced to the latter.
The Hungarian philosopher dovetails with Engels’s The Role of Labour in the
Transition from Ape to Man about the historico-genetic pre-eminence of labour
in the process of humanisation, but argues that teleology – labour’s key ontolo-
gical category, that through which the human agent posits a new objectivity – is
the fundamental feature which labour transposes onto every social practice.54
It should be noted, against Habermas’s claim that Marx’s concept of praxis
is framed within the limits of instrumental reason, that the teleological char-
acter of praxis does not imply the calculation, constant search for efficiency
and inversion of means and ends that characterises instrumental reason in
Horkheimer’s classic account.55 Lefebvre, on the other hand, has argued that
for Marx human production encompasses both the domination of nature and
the appropriation by the human being of their own conditions of existence,
thus separating praxis from poiêsis,56 but this distinction, albeit useful, was not
developed by Marx. In his concept of praxis, both of these components form a
dialectical unity which – as part of Marx’s Romantic heritage – prevents it from
being just a productivist or utilitarian category.
In any case, the model character of labour should not be highlighted at
the expense of that of praxis, as is done, for example, in Carol Gould’s clas-
sic study on Marxian anthropology and social ontology. This author maintains
that, for Marx, it is labour that creates time, quoting the famous Grundrisse pas-

52 Agnes Heller develops a systematic account of social praxes, from the point of view of
their objectifications, in Heller 1984.
53 Lukács 1980, p. 59.
54 Lukács 1980, p. 3.
55 Habermas 1987, pp. 25–42; Horkheimer 2013, pp. 1–40.
56 Lefebvre 2002a, p. 26.

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history with social ontology 33

sage stating that ‘labour is the living, form-giving fire; it is the transitoriness of
things, their temporality, as their formation by living time’.57 However, it would
seem to us here that Gould unjustifiably generalises this assertion at the most
abstract level of social being, when it is actually located within a paragraph
that deals specifically with the objectifications of labour, and not with all social
products.58
For Marx, each society has to organise its time – or, more precisely, its avail-
able praxical times – ‘in order to achieve a production adequate to its overall
needs’.59 Yet while the temporal organisation of production (in the narrow eco-
nomic sense) is fundamental to this organisation, it cannot be deduced from
this that the time of every social practice is reducible to the time of labour. The
latter has a social priority over other kinds of praxes because it is the means
by which human beings overcome necessity in order to survive, but the other
praxes also temporalise (and spatialise) the social world.

1.2 Historical Being, Historicity and Categories

The differentiality of spaces and times in a form of society becomes even more
complex when considered in relation to the transformations (or apparent stati-
city) that it undergoes, and how the people in it think and act in relation to
them, in spite of not having, as individuals, a direct experience of them. Accord-
ingly, the negation of praxis – the Marxian foundation of social being, as argued
in the previous section – marks the transition from social being to historical
being: while the expectancy of death spatio-temporalises praxis and shapes
social being, the actuality of death is the condition of possibility for the idea
of history. In The German Ideology, before introducing his more abstract con-
ceptualisation and methodology for the study of societies, Marx affirms that
history can be described as ‘nothing but the succession of the separate genera-
tions, each of which uses the materials, the capital funds, the productive forces
handed down to it by all preceding generations’.60 The problematic relation of

57 Marx 1973, p. 361. Gould 1980, pp. 56–68.

58 See Gould 1980, pp. 59–64. Again, labour is a condition of possibility for other praxes, but
not their essence; the preeminence of labour in the human struggle against necessity
should not obfuscate the plurality of praxes in every social organisation. Furthermore,
the conflation of labour and praxis can unnecessarily lead to politically productivist and
theoretically economistic implications.
59 Marx 1973, p. 173.
60 Marx and Engels 1976b, p. 50. Likewise, for Hegel, death marks the transition from the
singular to genus, from natural being to spirit. See Hegel 1970b, pp. 210–13.

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the living with the dead is a recurring topic in Marx’s writings throughout his
life, be it as a burden for political imagination or as the alienating force of dead
versus living labour, to mention two famous examples.61
In this sense, history constructs the spatio-temporal unity broken by death
by presenting collective agents as its protagonists, usually defined by geo-
graphic criteria. As Osborne argues, the transcendental horizon of history lies
in the transgenerational unity of the human – a feature that shows the inher-
ent utopianism of the concept of history.62 This unity implies not only how to
think about history, but also how to act in history since, as Lukács points out,
‘social practice always unfolds in a mental environment of ontological concep-
tions’.63 The construction of this unity, however, takes different paths – as we
will see especially in the cases of World-History and Marx’s mature concept of
history in the last section of this chapter – through different spatio-temporal
configurations.
Ricoeur deals with the construction of this unity by drawing especially from
Koselleck’s theory of historical temporalities, which according to the German
author are based on the relations between the past as a space of experience and
the future as a horizon of expectation: one of his most important contributions
has been the demonstration of the divergence between the temporality of the
Ancien Régime – where the future was expected not to differ from the past –
and the one emerging in the last decades of the eighteenth century in western
Europe – which, initially from the standpoint of progress, thought the future
as distinct from the past. This temporalisation, Ricoeur argues, belongs to the
fundamental level of the ontology of historical existence (what he calls the
historical condition), an ‘unsurpassable mode of being’.64 Therefore, temporal

61 Marx 1979a, pp. 99–197; Marx 1976b. As Tomlinson argues, following Sartre, Heideggerian
being-for-death provides a philosophically fruitful temporalisation for the teleological
dimension of Marxian praxis. Tomlinson 2015, pp. 78–96. Along with this temporalisation,
however, there is the spatialisation of the body, with its growing, ageing and exchanges
with its environment, without whose consideration we run the risk of reducing the human
subject to an abstract conscience. See Lefebvre 1997, pp. 169–76.
62 Osborne 2013, pp. 193–94. In the same vein, Bloch indicates that ‘precisely the generations
pass away; in endless sedimentations they lie above one another everywhere, shrunken
together, and … the functional problem persists: who or what lives life as a whole life,
as the broad, historical life granted to humanity as a whole?’ Bloch 2000, pp. 256–7. The
emphasis is from the original.
63 Lukács 1980, p. 59.
64 Ricoeur 2004, p. 343. On the historical emergence of historicity, Koselleck 2004, pp. 255–75.
Hartog calls these relations between past, present and future regimes of historicity. Hartog
2012.

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history with social ontology 35

configurations underpin historical thinking and all phases of historical invest-

igation; the ontology of history should thus be seen as part of an ontological
hermeneutics.
However, and as will be explained in the next chapter, while I consider that
this differentiation of the levels of knowledge (albeit incomplete) is valid, Ric-
oeur’s disavowal of the possibility of historical knowledge reflecting upon itself
and its conditions of validity seems formalistic and de-historicised, and ulti-
mately inconsistent with the very bases of the modern historical condition.65
The categories of space of experience and horizon of expectation – and their
modern disassociation – are constructed by Koselleck at the level of histori-
ography, by recourse to the comparison between two different historical tem-
poral configurations – a comparison that has only became possible from the
vantage point of the historical condition of the Neuzeit. Given this character-
istic of Koselleck’s argument, it is quite odd for Ricoeur to claim that historical
investigation is incapable of contributing to the ontology of historical exist-
ence: on the contrary, the latter would require a dialectical approach between
the levels of historical knowledge. In line with this critique, the main problem
in Ricoeur’s formulation is its neglect of the material conditions underlying
this specific ontology – an aspect that is closely related to the de-spatialised
character of his philosophy of history.66
Indeed, the unity of human experience – its existence as a collective singu-
lar – has only become a regulative idea of historical thinking with the world-
wide expansion of capitalism; the historical condition analysed by Ricoeur is
founded on specifically capitalist social relations.67 Koselleck himself demon-
strates that the separation of space from history is a product of the late eight-
eenth century, and Lefebvre argues that the detachment of space from time – a
central feature of abstract space – has only been able to fully develop under
capitalist conditions.68 This separation conceals the necessary relations be-
tween temporal and spatial categories; it is possible to think of a social process

65 Ricoeur 2004, p. 333. Osborne finds this problem in Koselleck’s formulation of this cat-
egorical opposition – the source from where Ricoeur draws the bases of his ontology of
historical existence. Below I will revisit his critique of this conception of historical time.
See Osborne 2013, pp. 190–211; and also, Osborne 2013, pp. 69–70.
66 This limitation in Ricoeur’s philosophy of history has been examined and criticised in
detail by Dussel. Dussel 1996, pp. 214–30.
67 This neglect of space by Ricoeur and Koselleck goes in hand with the deterritorialising
tendencies to which Marx referred with his image of the ‘annihilation of space by time’.
Marx 1973, pp. 107, 524, 539.
68 Koselleck 2001, pp. 93–111; Lefebvre 1997, p. 175.

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in exclusively temporal terms, but only on the condition of implicitly presup-

posing a space with constant characteristics. Likewise, merely spatial accounts
always assume a certain type of social time.
The supposedly de-spatialised approach in the phenomenological tradition
is therefore unable to historicise its ontology of history. In contrast, one of the
foundations of Marx’s method is the thesis that the modern concept of his-
tory – ‘history as world history [is] a result’69 – emerges with the expansion of
capital, which

drives beyond national barriers and prejudices as much as beyond nature

worship, as well as traditional, confined, complacent, encrusted satisfac-
tions of present needs, and reproductions of old ways of life. It is destruct-
ive towards all of this, and constantly revolutionises it, tearing down the
barriers which hem in the development of the forces of production, the
expansion of needs, the all-sided development of production, and the
exploitation and exchange of natural and mental forces. But from the fact
that capital posits every such limit as a barrier and hence gets ideally bey-
ond it, it does not by any means follow that it has really overcome it.70

This passage highlights the historical conditions that gave rise to both world-
history and to the ideal spatiality of capitalism – the space of the world market.
As for the latter aspect, it implies that the relation between experience and
expectation is temporal, but also in the same measure historically and concep-
tually spatial – as the metaphors of these Koselleckian concepts suggest. Just
as the accumulation of capital functions on the base of an ideally infinite and
continuous temporality, it assumes a tendentially global and commodified spa-
tiality (an abstract space, as conceptualised by Lefebvre):71 when considered
historically, the apparently formal relation between the space of experience

69 Marx 1973, p. 109. As Harootunian indicates, ‘it was capital’s logic that made possible his-
tory, 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’. Harootunian 2015b, p. 26. See also Tomlinson 2015, pp. 134–
82.
70 Marx 1973, p. 410. The italics are from the original.
71 For capitalism, the world market would be ‘the conclusion, in which production is posited
as a totality together with all its moments, but within which, at the same time, all contra-
dictions come into play. The world market then, again, forms the presupposition of the
whole as well as its substratum’. Marx 1973, pp. 227–8. Lefebvre 1997, pp. 229–91.

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history with social ontology 37

and the horizon of expectation is revealed as driven by the spatial expansion

of capitalist social relations.
Marx’s ontology of history and its particular categories are themselves open-
ly historical, and their historical condition of possibility is the accumulation of
capital, which has given form to the configuration of space-times upon which
the modern historical condition relies (both objectively and subjectively).72
Historicity thus not only refers to a context defined by a singular geograph-
ical space and chronological time, but to the social-natural relations that pro-
duce and are themselves produced by concrete social times and social spaces
responding to definite generative mechanisms; and since it is an operation that
seeks to apprehend the concrete, historicisation cannot separate time from
space.
For Marx, the relation between the unity of human experience and the plur-
ality of singular space-times is mediated by the mode of production – the
proper historical totalisation. The mode of production is hence the basic dis-
continuity in history, organising the diverse forms of society according to the
interactions between human praxes and their material conditions, rather than
to a predetermined pattern of evolution. In this sense, as Jameson argues, the
approach to temporally, culturally – or, we can add, spatially – distant social
artifacts consists, first of all, not in a relationship between a personal reading
and an individual text (or, more generally, a source), but in ‘the confrontation
of two distinct social forms or modes of production’.73
In this regard, Marx states that

even the most abstract categories, despite their validity – precisely be-
cause of their abstractness – for all epochs, are nevertheless, in the spe-
cific character of this abstraction, themselves likewise a product of his-
torical relations, and possess their full validity only for and within these
relations.74

72 Along these lines, Osborne indicates that ‘today, the contemporary (the fictive relational
unity of the spatially distributed historical present) is transnational because our modern-
ity is that of a tendentially global capital. Transnationality is the putative socio-spatial
form of the current temporal unity of historical experience’. Osborne 2013, p. 83. In a sim-
ilar line, see Martineau, 2016, and on the historical character of ontology in Marx, see
Lukács 1980, pp. 62–3.
73 Jameson 2008a, p. 478. While I agree with this essay about the necessary character of this
mediation, it is not sufficient for a concrete (properly historicised) analysis: the critique
of a historical source demands – once its legitimacy is verified – the consideration of the
specific social conditions of the production of the source: the classic Marxian ideological
critique. See Chapter 3, below.
74 Marx 1973, p. 105. Adorno has correctly pointed out that, ‘in Marx, who, of course, came

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Thus, the historicity of the categories means for Marx, on the one hand, on
the side of the object, that the forms to which these categories refer should
be considered in the context of their corresponding form of society. Only then
do they have explanatory validity: abstract categories like labour or population
are not useful for the analysis of particular social processes unless they are con-
ceptualised in relation to their respective form of society. On the other hand,
this historicity implies that the categories through which a form of society is
comprehended are themselves a product of objective social conditions, and
hence the theoretical approach is always rooted in the society where it is for-
mulated.75
An apparent paradox thus arises: Marx’s hermeneutics relies on the discon-
tinuity of the modes of production, each of which generates its own cultural
forms in order to deal with their relations with their social space-times, but at
the same time this formulation is a product of a particular mode of production:
capitalism. Since Marx insists on the realist character of his method, this poses
a difficulty that does not exist for non-realist philosophies of history, like those
created by Nietzsche or Heidegger. Hence Marx accounts for the historicity
of his own theory – and consequently, of its ability to explain other historical
formations – in two manners, which we may call, in broad terms, evolutionist
and abstractionist.
The first stance, sustained in the Grundrisse by an argument about the valid-
ity of the categories of capitalism for the explanation of the formations which
led to that mode of production, using the famous image of the anatomy of the
ape being comprehensible through the study of human anatomy,76 is problem-
atic for at least two reasons. First, given that this argument assumes one line of
development among others (the one that led to nineteenth-century Western
European capitalism), it excludes the possibility of explaining modes of pro-
duction that do not belong to the pre-history of capitalism, and hence possess
a radical alterity that disavows the unity of human experience that underpins

from Hegel, the categories used are not only so-called systematic categories developed
from concepts, but are always also, and intentionally, historical categories’. Adorno 2000,
p. 144.
75 As Schmidt affirms, for Marx human beings ‘grasp the objectively existing laws of nature
through, and by means of, the historical forms of their practice’. Schmidt 2014, p. 126. This
does not mean, however, that categorical apparatuses can be reduced to their social con-
text without mediations, as will be explained later in this chapter.
76 Marx 1973, p. 105. In spite of the problems indicated here about the evolutionist line of
argumentation, it should be kept in mind that Marx criticised teleological illusions already
since the time of The German Ideology and maintained that position until his final years,
as can be observed in his correspondence with Vera Zasulich and the narodniki.

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history with social ontology 39

Marx’s concept of history. Second, this reasoning is not capable of explaining

properly pre-capitalist formations either, since the dialectical transition from
one mode of production to another is not only a process of gaining new determ-
inations, but also of losing others.77
Also against this evolutionist vein in the Grundrisse, Grüner argues that,
although the introduction to this text claims that the study of bourgeois society
provides key elements for the analysis of its previous formations, in these very
drafts the development of the categories in non-capitalistic societies responds
to particular conditions of their social totalisations – which cannot be directly
deduced from capitalism. The primacy of use-values in pre-capitalist econom-
ies, for example, decisively transforms categories as basic as labour, and makes
it impossible to understand these categories from the point of view of modern
formations without major changes.78
The second explanation of the historicity of Marx’s approach follows the
path of abstraction, and is also present in the Grundrisse. As quoted above,
Marx indicates that the most abstract categories are valid for all social form-
ations, and in this same line, argues that

all epochs of production have certain common traits, common character-

istics. … Some determinations belong to all epochs, others only to a few.
{Some} determinations will be shared by the most modern epoch and the
most ancient. … There are characteristics which all stages of production
have in common, and which are established as general ones by the mind;
but the so-called general preconditions of all production are nothing more
than these abstract moments with which no real historical stage of pro-
duction can be grasped.79

Hence, instead of characterising less and more developed social forms in a his-
torical continuum – an approach more appropriate to the World-history of the
Enlightenment – historicisation can proceed by abstracting from the categories
of the capitalist mode of production into the most general preconditions, valid
for every mode of production. In this case, the analytical primacy of capital-

77 Hegel points out that Aufheben (to sublate) ‘equally means to means “to keep”, “to preserve”,
and “to cause to cease”, “to put an end to”. Even “to preserve” already includes a negative
note, namely that something, in order to be retained, is removed from its immediacy and
hence from an existence which is open to external influences’. Hegel 2010, pp. 81–2.
78 Grüner 2015. For a critique of this evolutionist line, see also Sayer 1987, pp. 126–30.
79 Marx 1973, pp. 85, 88. The braces in this citation are from Martin Nicolaus, the translator
of this edition.

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ism does not reside in being the most ‘advanced’ mode of production, but in its
condition of being a mode of production based on abstraction.80 This approach
implies that abstract transhistorical categories guide a Marxian ontology of the
modes of production, even as they must acquire concreteness – through empir-
ical research, we can infer – in order to explain a social formation properly. Thus
the most abstract categories provide the basic framework for the intelligibility
of any social formation.81
The validity of trans- or meta-historical categories in Marxism is often a mat-
ter of controversy; recently, Postone in particular insists on the notion that
Marx’s conception of history is strictly limited to capitalism and thus lacks the
categorical capacity for the analysis of non-capitalist societies. However, this
position not only contradicts the existence of a rich tradition of Marxist his-
toriography about non-capitalist formations,82 but also ignores the numerous
cases where Marx refers to such formations from the standpoint of his materi-
alist conception of history. Joseph Fracchia correctly points out that, for Marx,
transhistorical and abstract categories are ‘the foundation for the construction
of historically specific categories’, and provide a standpoint for the critique
of social forms.83 The basic categories of this kind, he indicates, are concrete
labour, use-value and material wealth, which are rooted in human corporeal-

80 ‘We can think abstractly about the world only to the degree to which the world itself has
already become abstract’. Jameson 2002, p. 51.
81 In this line, Jameson affirms that ‘the Marxian concept of a mode of production is essen-
tially a differential one, in which the formulation of a single mode of production (as, for
instance, Marx’s own model of capital) at once structurally projects the space of other
possible modes of production by way of Difference, that is, by a systematic variation in
the features or semes of any given initial mode. This is the sense in which each mode of
production structurally implies all the others’. Jameson 2008a, p. 477. The interpretation
based on abstraction, however, does not think of the categories of the different modes of
production as elements of a possible combination (as the Althusserians did), but as the
most basic framework upon which each specific mode of production should be apprehen-
ded, both conceptually and empirically.
82 In words of Postone, ‘the Marxian theory should be understood not as a universally applic-
able theory but as a critical theory specific to capitalist society. It analyses the historical
specificity of capitalism and the possibility of its overcoming by means of categories that
grasp its specific forms of labour, wealth and time’. Postone 2003, p. 5. Some of the dis-
cussions about relevant marxist historiography are reviewed and developed in texts that
have been important to the present investigation: Banaji 2011; Anievas and Nişancioğlu
2015; Harootunian 2015b.
83 Fracchia 2004, p. 128. See also Sayer 1987, pp. 126–49. Echeverría has further developed
the thesis of the natural form as normative criterion against the capitalist primacy of the
value-form. See Echeverría 2014, pp. 24–38.

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history with social ontology 41

ity,84 but which are abstracted from their concrete relations in capitalism.
It is initially through the transhistorical categories, those dealing with the
most abstract social forms as determinations belonging to all epochs, that we
can grasp the unity of human experience, however heterogeneous in its diverse
spatio-temporal particular forms. Hence, the Marxian ontology of history func-
tions at this level by thematising common traits in different modes of produc-
tion, which we might think of as a sort of ‘backbone’ of all ‘social metabol-
isms’. The abstraction which underpins this ontology of history has its historical
conditions of possibility, as mentioned above, in the world-wide expansion of
capitalism, but also in the development of abstraction within capitalist social
relations. In this sense, the tension between the unity of human experience
and the particularity of the different modes of production sets the conditions
that make this transhistorical abstraction possible, in a similar manner to the
concept of value which, as Marx indicated, ‘is entirely peculiar to the most
modern economy, since it is the most abstract expression of capital itself and
of the production resting on it’.85
In this argument, the historically modern condition forms a dialectical unity
with its underlying socio-historical processes (and the development of their
space-times, both actual and tendential), hence making an opposition between
a substantial and analytical philosophy of history useless. The philosophy of
historical knowledge and the philosophy of history therefore necessarily imply
each other; likewise, historical processes and historiography are not separated
by an unbreachable chasm – as assumed by both neo-Kantian and Nietzschean
philosophies of history. This unity does not imply an idealist closure for histor-
ical thought, since for Marx, dialectical methodology must be able to incorpor-
ate the determinations of reality as new categories.86 This realist character of
Marx’s theory of history, as will be noted in the next chapter, involves know-

84 Fracchia 2004, pp. 127–8, 138. Such considerations – essential to his materialist concep-
tion of history – lead Marx to state, for instance, that ‘the Middle Ages could not live
on Catholicism, nor could the ancient world on politics. On the contrary, it is the man-
ner in which they gained their livelihood which explains why in one case politics, and in
other case Catholicism, played the chief part. For the rest, one needs no more than a slight
acquaintance with, for example, the Roman Republic, to be aware that its secret history is
the history of landed property’. Marx 1976b, p. 176.
85 Marx 1973, p. 776. Marx’s explanation of Aristotle’s inability to reach the concept of value
is another illustrative example of his thesis of the historicity of the categories. Marx 1976b,
pp. 151–2.
86 Osborne indicates that this approach, which he characterises as immanent, avoids the
circularity of the transcendental method by relying on specific historiographical con-
tents, and hence its validity is continually subject to historical contingency. Osborne 2010,
pp. 35–6.

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ledge of relations between diverse generative mechanisms, in order to explain

particular historical cases. But it is necessary to first clarify how Marx conceives
the spatio-temporal development of social forms at the largest scale.

1.3 From World-History to Spatio-Temporal Complexity

Marx’s overall vision of human development – following the unity of the human
experience posed by the modern concept of history – needed to account for the
global and regional diversity of social forms, and in this sense it went through
two phases, with the 1856–7 Grundrisse marking a turning point between them.
Although Marx’s basic ontology of social being did not go through major trans-
formations after the mid-1840s, the Grundrisse is where Marx establishes the
ground for his spatially and temporally complex conception of history. As for
his earlier conception, there is indeed an implicit unilinearity that underpins
his formulations about history, in texts like The German Ideology, the Commun-
ist Manifesto and his articles on India for the Daily Tribune, which is indebted
to the world-history (Weltgeschichte) of the Enlightenment.
As Koselleck demonstrates, German philosophers elaborated their Enlight-
enment conception of world-history in the late eighteenth century, in order to
replace the existing universal history (Universalhistorie) which they deemed to
be a simple aggregate of a few historical facts serving as an auxiliary science for
theology and philology. Against this, Schlösser affirmed in 1785 that the study
of world-history leads one ‘to think the main transformations (HauptVerän-
derungen) of the human genus (MenschenGeschlecht) and its environment in
order to get to know the reasons for their present state’.87 World-history would
therefore be a general, totalising history, that would bring the multiplicity of
particular histories together into a collective singular.88
The diverse versions of world-history in the eighteenth and nineteenth cen-
turies, however, did not live up to their claims of thinking the generality of
human development. Due to a barely concealed Eurocentrism, these narratives
justified Western Europe’s dominance over the rest of the globe by conceiv-
ing the history of the world as a unilinear path led by their allegedly more
advanced civilisation. The emergence of the conception of world-history went

87 Cited in Koselleck 2010, p. 100. This edition is a partial translation of the entry ‘Geschichte’
in volume 2 of the Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe.
88 Koselleck 2010, pp. 101–4; also Ricoeur 2004, pp. 298–305. Besides the economic process
of capitalist expansion, the elaboration of world-history was made possible by the cent-
ralisation of information in imperial archives, as Chapter 3 of this book describes.

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history with social ontology 43

hand in hand with the notion of historical progress, especially in texts from
the French Enlightenment philosophers Turgot, Condillac and Condorcet, but
also in some of Kant’s most famous political essays. These authors share the
vision of Europe as the driving force of ‘progress’, and thereby condone coloni-
alism.89
In line with this conception, a division of history into successive stages
became widespread within European intellectual circles. In the second half
of the eighteenth century the French physiocrat Turgot, and Scottish moral
philosophers like Adam Ferguson, Adam Smith and John Millar, proposed a
succession of four stages, from nomadism to the urban societies of their days,
defining trade as the most important factor in the development to the last,
more complex kind of society.90 This series of transformations, which is presen-
ted as an analysis of history, implies a hierarchy where the last stage – ‘modern
Western European civilisation’ – is the standard from which the others are to
be judged, and to which they are to be subjected. In this sense, Guha criticises
Hegel’s version of successive stages in history, according to which the higher
principle prevails over the lower, the West over the East.91
Leaving aside the political implications of world-history as an apology for
colonialism, this conception contributed little to historical knowledge. Its
methodology of inferring wide spatio-temporal conclusions from a quite lim-
ited number of – often unjustifiably – selected sources eventually came into
contradiction with the development of its critical method, which called for
a growing specialisation. The vagueness of world-history had little to offer to
the explanation of specific historical processes; it is, as Guha argues, ‘a view of
history that allows all the concreteness to be drained out of the phenomena
which constitute the world and its historicality’.92 World-history is indeed the
reference par excellence of what analytical philosophers call speculative philo-
sophy of history – a mode of interpreting history through a priori criteria, with
no empirical rigour at all.93
This tradition of world-history is the context from which Marx and Engels
begin their theoretical work on history. For them, the bourgeois world was on
the verge of creating a fully integrated system, in which the development of the
most advanced historical epoch – capitalism – would destroy the isolation of

89 Iggers, Wang and Mukherjee 2008, p. 31.

90 Meek 1977, pp. 18–32; Iggers, Wang and Mukherjee 2008. See also Berry 2013, pp. 32–65.
91 Guha 2002, p. 43.
92 Guha 2002, p. 2. On the specialisation of the historical discipline, see Koselleck 2010, p. 105.
93 Walsh 1960, pp. 9–28.

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separate nationalities, turning history into world-history by integrating them

‘by intercourse and by the natural division of labour arising as a result’.94 Con-
sequently, the Manifesto argues that

the need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the
bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe. It must nestle every-
where, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere. … The bour-
geoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by
the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the
most barbarian, nations into civilisation. The cheap prices of its commod-
ities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls,
with which it forces the barbarians’ intensely obstinate hatred of foreign-
ers to capitulate. It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt
the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it
calls civilisation into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In
one word, it creates a world after its own image.95

The world market not only gives production and consumption in every coun-
try a cosmopolitan character, but produces a global culture beyond old local
and national limits: a world literature. The underlying assumption in the early
Marxian version of world-history is that the expansion of capitalism (as the
most advanced stage) imposes a single spatio-temporal totalisation upon the
multiple space-times of its coeval societies with less productive modes of pro-
duction. Insofar as this conception considers that the world is already homo-
genised by the expansion of capitalism, there is only one social class that can
fully realise the emancipatory potentialities of capitalism: hence, as the Mani-
festo famously affirms, ‘the proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains.
They have a world to win’.96
Since the development of capitalism on the world-scale is here a condition
for the communist revolution, colonialism was justified as a necessary stage on
the way towards a classless society, thus appearing as a necessary evil.97 This is

94 Marx and Engels 1976b, p. 51. About The German Ideology, see Carver and Blank 2014.
95 Marx and Engels 1976a, pp. 487–8.
96 Marx and Engels 1976a, pp. 488, 490, 519. In The German Ideology, ‘the proletariat can
only thus exist world-historically, just as communism, its activity, can only have a “world-
historical” existence.’ Marx and Engels, 1976b, p. 49.
97 See Osborne 2006, pp. 110–21. Post- and de-colonial authors have written abundantly
about texts from this phase in Marx’s production, to which they often imply that his whole
oeuvre is reducible. Said 2003; Lander 2006, pp. 209–43. Some replies from Marxist authors
include: Parry 2004; Bartolovich and Lazarus 2002.

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history with social ontology 45

exemplified by Marx’s writings in the early 1850s about India, in which he cel-
ebrated the destructive effects of railroads and industry on ancient institutions
like the caste system, which from his point of view fettered the potentialities of
the Indian people, but also by Engels’s 1849 remarks about the annexation of
previously Mexican territories by the United States.98
The early Marxian view of the development of history is a socialist (and cer-
tainly more complex) version of the four-staged world-history of the Scottish
Enlightenment and the French physiocrats, which, as Meek observes, was a
materialist conception of history as well.99 John Millar’s formulation is repres-
entative of this conception, according to which

development should be regarded as proceeding through four normally

consecutive socio-economic stages, each based on a particular ‘mode of
subsistence’, namely, hunting, pasturage, agriculture, and commerce. To
each stage there corresponded different ideas and institutions relating
to both property and government, and in relation to each, general state-
ments could be made about the state of manners and morals, the social
surplus, the legal system, the division of labour, and so on.100

Althusser’s well known criticism of expressive totality (disregarding its validity

as a criticism of Hegel) is aimed at this stagist conception of history of which
texts like The German Ideology and the Manifesto partake – although the French

98 Marx 1979b, p. 221. Regarding Marx’s writings about India, see: Habib 2002; Ahmad 1994,
Chapter 6. At that time Engels asked the question: ‘Is it perhaps unfortunate that splen-
did California has been taken away from the lazy Mexicans, who could not do anything
with it? That the energetic Yankees by rapid exploitation of the Californian gold mines
will increase the means of circulation, in a few years will concentrate a dense population
and extensive trade at the most suitable places on the coast of the Pacific Ocean, create
large cities, open up communications by steamship, construct a railway from New York to
San Francisco, for the first time really open the Pacific Ocean to civilisation, and for the
third time in history give world trade a new direction? The “independence” of a few Span-
ish Californians and Texans may suffer because of it, in some places “justice” and other
moral principles may be violated; but what does that matter compared to such facts of
world-historic significance?’ Engels 1977, pp. 365–6.
99 See Meek 1967, pp. 34–50.
100 Meek 1977, p. 19. Scholars like Robert Brenner and Ellen Meiksins Wood – probably the
best known proponents of the school currently known as Political Marxism – have insisted
on Marx’s debt to this conception of history in his pre-Grundrisse writings, specifically
emphasising the influence of the Smithian model of development. This influence can be
observed especially in the predominance that these texts assign to urban development in
the transition from feudalism to capitalism: they affirm that the larger towns were the sites

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Marxist does not address them in his critique. The stagist view of history sup-
poses that any moment in history can be intellectually abstracted as a whole
from the rest – through an essential section – and the relations between all its
elements will express their internal essence by this operation. When an essen-
tial section is taken out of a totality, each of its parts expresses the social totality:
they are contemporary. In Marx’s early conception of history, this contempor-
aneity is defined by the contradiction between forces of production and forms
of intercourse.101
Thus the stagist vision of history presupposes homogeneity within a determ-
ined stage, but it also presupposes homogeneity between the stages: a con-
tinuum. Although it would be exaggerated to reduce Marx’s early conception of
space-time to a formalised, quantitative vision – as in Althusser’s other aspect
of his criticism of expressive totality – his conception of modes of production
ultimately does hold that levels of productivity are a transhistorical criteria on
the world-historical scale. As a result of this, stagism makes it impossible to
grasp historicity, and instead obfuscates the plurality of social forms in a mode
of production, along with their contradictions and agents.102
For all its epistemological and political limitations, it is important to indicate
that this conception, as Marx reiterated, is not deterministic in a narrow sense:
even in the case of his famous article on India, he affirms that the Indians will
only benefit from the innovations introduced by the British when the prolet-
ariat emerges in Great Britain as the ruling class, or when the Indians themselves
overthrow English domination. The Manifesto – ultimately a political document
in the imminence of the Revolutions of 1848 – predicted the triumph of the
proletariat, but also insisted on the need for the workers to organise them-
selves into a revolutionary party. Even if the conditions were favourable for the
working class, the outcome of the class struggle depended on their political
praxis.103
However, the Grundrisse signal Marx’s rejection of the world-historical con-
ception and outlines his more definitive conception of history. As previously

of nascent capitalism and of the first elements of the bourgeoisie. Marx and Engels 1976b,
pp. 69–70; Marx and Engels, 1976a, p. 485. Wood 2010, pp. 86–7; Brenner 1977, pp. 25–7.
101 Althusser and Balibar 2009, p. 105. Jameson argues that in Althusser’s critique ‘Hegel’ is a
codename for Stalinism. Jameson 2002, pp. 13–21. Marx and Engels 1976b, pp. 74–5.
102 Harootunian argues that an implicit stagism is persistent even in strong recent readings
of Marx, such as in Negri, Backhaus and Postone. Harootunian 2015b, pp. 68–9.
103 Marx and Engels 1976b, 50; Marx 1979b, p. 221. While the diagnosis of bourgeois society
begins the argument in the Manifesto, the discussion of the most effective socialist polit-
ical organisation and the argument in favor of communism constitute its conclusions.

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history with social ontology 47

indicated, while there are still some problematic evolutionist assertions in

these pages (particularly those related to his analogy of ape and human), the
decisive moment of transition towards a science of multi-spatial and multi-
temporal totalisations occurs in these drafts. Kevin Anderson, for his part,
argues that with the introduction of the Asiatic mode of production in the
Grundrisse, Marx abandons the unilinearity of his earlier texts – a change of
perspective that coincides with a more hostile attitude from Marx towards cap-
italism, and a more nuanced assessment of non-capitalistic forms.104 Bensaïd
also highlights the Grundrisse as the introduction of a new way of writing his-
tory, breaking from the speculative notion of a universal History, towards the
notion of uneven development between spheres of social activity. This entails a
critique of progress and a deepening of the relationship between chance and
necessity in history. Although Marx does point to some kinds of uneven devel-
opment in his earlier writings, it is only from the Grundrisse on that he explores
its implications for history in a systematic manner, introducing the notion of
non-timeliness.105
In the Grundrisse, for example, Marx affirms that

when an industrial people producing on the foundation of capital, such

as the English, e.g., exchange with the Chinese, and absorb value in the
form of money and commodity out of their production process, or rather
absorb value by drawing the latter within the sphere of circulation of their
capital, then one sees right away that the Chinese do not therefore need
to produce as capitalists. Within a single society, such as the English, the
mode of production of capital develops in one branch of industry, while
in another, e.g. agriculture, modes of production which more or less ante-
date capital.106

Thus a more ‘productive’ mode of production does not necessarily eliminate

others coexisting with it; Marx’s new conception allows us to understand com-

104 Anderson 2010, pp. 154–63. Dussel arrives at a similar conclusion about the Grundrisse
in the 1980s: he argues that these drafts mark the moment in which Marx articulates his
definitive discourse, useful for the analysis of the peripheral Latin American formations.
Dussel 1985, pp. 12–13.
105 Bensaïd stresses Marx’s 1843 treatment of the non-contemporaneity of economic, political
and philosophical development in England, France and Germany. Bensaïd 2002, pp. 20–
4. On the discussion about the terms and concepts of contemporaneity, synchronicity and
timeliness, see Osborne 2015, pp. 39–48.
106 Marx 1973, p. 729.

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binations under a dominant form. The complexity of the concrete social form-
ations should be totalised by first determining the specific kind of production
which predominates over the rest and ‘whose relations thus assign rank and
influence to the others’, but then also has to deal with the subordinated forms
that it turns into ‘stunted’ or ‘travestied’ forms.107
In the section in the Grundrisse about precapitalist formations, also known
as the Formen, Marx deals with modes of production from their point of view as
forms of appropriation.108 These forms are not mere analytical constructs, but
abstractions from actually existing historical societies. Moreover, they are not
chronologically successive stages, but have coexisted side by side; in this new
conception of history, forms replace stages, making it impossible to conceive
a single linear course of world-history. In this respect, the difference with the
famous sequential treatment of the four modes of production in the 1859 Con-
tribution109 stands in contrast to the more theoretical interest of the Grundrisse,
rendering this sequence a statement on the particular historical process of
Western Europe alone.110
The Grundrisse propose three kinds of precapitalist forms of appropriation:
the communitarian (of which there are two varieties: the primitive and the
‘oriental despotic’, encompassing more specific cases such as the Asian, Mex-
ican, Peruvian, Slavonic, etc.), the ancient Greco-Roman and the Germanic
form – each one of them producing its particular space-times, as we will learn
in the next chapter. These forms, according to Marx, share the characteristic
of the production of use-values, an example being that the ancient Greeks and

107 Marx 1973, pp. 107 and 105–6. On the prevalence of production as a criterion of totalisation,
see Basso 2013, pp. 434–5; Musto 2010, pp. 10–15.
108 Each form of appropriation is determined by a different mode of production, the latter
being the proper criterion of totalisation. Marx points out that ‘the original unit between
a particular form of community (clan) and the corresponding property in nature … has
its living reality in a specific mode of production itself, a mode which appears both as a
relation between the individuals, and their specific active relation to inorganic nature, a
specific mode of working (which is family labour, often communal labour)’. Marx 1973,
p. 495.
109 ‘In broad outline, the Asiatic, ancient, feudal and modern bourgeois modes of production
may be designated as epochs marking progress in the economic development of society’.
Marx 1987a, p. 263. Although translated as ‘epochs marking progress’, progressive Epochen
can simply mean ‘successive epochs’ (in the sense of Progression), which would be consist-
ent with Marx’s reiterated critique of the ideology of ‘progress’ (for which Marx uses the
term Fortschritt). It is also convenient to observe that there is quite a difference between
an ‘epoch’ and a ‘stage’, as it is frequently interpreted. Marx 1961, p. 9.
110 This position is maintained, among others, by Hobsbawm and Basso. Hobsbawm 1965,
p. 38. Basso 2013, pp. 332–4.

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history with social ontology 49

Romans did not care about which kind of property creates greater wealth, but
about which creates the best citizens.111
As Wood notes, Marx’s portrayal of these forms is based on principles im-
manent to each one,

and not by some impersonal transhistorical law of technological improve-

ment or commercial expansion … One way of characterising what Marx
has done, already in the Grundrisse, is to say that he has replaced teleology
with history – not history as mere contingency, nor history as a mechan-
ical succession of predetermined stages or a sequence of static structures,
but history as a process with its own causalities, constituted by human
agency in a context of social relations and social practices which impose
their own demands on those engaged in them.112

Harootunian maintains that Marx consolidated this conception of history in

the mid-1860s through the concept of formal subsumption, which allowed him
to theoretically ‘grasp the refractions of specific forms’ by which (absolute)
surplus value is generated for capitalism from production relations that are
not immediately capitalist.113 Marx uses this concept to explain the means by
which capitalism takes over an available, already existing labour process and
modifies it by making work more intensive, extending its duration, making it
more continuous, or subjecting it to the direction of a capitalist: under formal
subsumption, technological changes are not introduced to the labour process,
and valorisation is produced by the exaction of absolute surplus value.114
Harootunian’s characterisation of the role of the Marxian concept of real
subsumption, however, has been criticised for its conflation of this concept with
a ‘completion’ of capitalism and hence to deny this form for the analysis of
non-European societies.115 Since Harootunian’s own analyses draw upon the

111 Marx 1973, p. 487. Against this thesis, Banaji has argued that even in Marx’s times, sources
on Roman history preclude the characterisation of pre-capitalist modes of production as
natural economies. Banaji 2011, pp. 7–8.
112 Wood 2010, pp. 88, 90. Lawrence Krader highlights Marx’s arguments against unilinearism
as well, in his introduction, Krader 1974, pp. 1–85.
113 Harootunian 2015b, p. 8. Dussel indicates that the chapter where the concept of subsump-
tion was developed was written in 1864. Dussel 2001, p. xxxii.
114 Marx 1976b, p. 1021. Tomba identifies a third kind of subsumption in Marx, besides formal
and real: the intermediate or hybrid forms of subsumption, which are forms of surplus-
labour extorted by means of direct coercion. Tomba 2013a, pp. 148–50.
115 See Osborne 2016, p. 50. Also, against the Negrian conception of real subsumption under-
lying Harootunian, see Sáenz de Sicilia 2016, pp. 199–200.

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concept of hybrid subsumption in order to complement its formal counter-

part,116 it is indeed arguable that the consideration of capitalism as a structur-
ally heterogeneous totalisation does not preclude other forms of subsumption,
but on the contrary calls for a more nuanced analysis of the modalities that
labour relations actually assume.
This conceptual discourse about subsumption coincides with the first years
of the International Workingmen’s Association – founded in 1864 – which
Scaron defines as the experience that decisively helped Marx to get rid of polit-
ical and theoretical elements inconsistent with his own internationalism.117
The development of his concept of abstract labour in the first volume of Cap-
ital (1867), on the other hand, allowed him to ‘synchronise’ the diversity of the
global without turning it into an abstract universality. This anti-Eurocentric
approach only deepened in the period before Marx’s death. In this manner, his
exchanges with the Russian populists during the 1870s and early 1880s, as well
as his readings about India, allowed him to gain solid knowledge about the Rus-
sian rural commune and other peasant forms.118
Indeed, García Linera, referring to Marx’s notebooks on Kovalevsky, says
that this interpretation is useful for understanding the history of the Bolivian
peasantry not only as a result of the colonisation and oppression of its local
communities by other nations, but also and especially by other forms of pro-
duction:

in his annotations he demonstrates, as he had previously done (in the

Grundrisse), that the subjugators can let the ancient mode of produc-
tion survive, subjecting it to tributes and promoting certain changes in
its relations of distribution and control of surpluses, as did the Romans,
Turks and Englishmen in their colonies and, as I think, happened in the
communities in our Andean high plateau, at least in some cases until
the selloff of community lands in the 1880s, and in general until the 1952
Revolution.119

116 He does so in his presentation of Lenin’s The Development of Capitalism in Russia. Har-
ootunian 2015b, pp. 79–93.
117 Scaron 1972, pp. 7–9.
118 See Tomba 2013a, pp. 144–50. On the resulting contemporaneity as a living disjunctive unity
of multiple times through abstract labour, see Osborne 2013, pp. 79–84. On the late Marx,
Shanin 1983, pp. 3–39.
119 García Linera 2015, pp. 114–15. Marx’s dramatic change in his political stance on European
colonisation in his articles of 1853 can be observed in different fragments of Capital, e.g.,
in Marx 1979b, p. 473 and Marx 1981, p. 451.

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history with social ontology 51

As a result of these theoretical developments, history cannot be conceived

anymore as a confluence of the multiplicity of social space-times into a single
(relatively) homogeneous organising principle. Marx’s conception of the capit-
alist mode of production is, unto itself, not simple: spatio-temporal contradic-
tions, overlaps and gaps are constitutive of this social organisation. But when
we pass from the logical consideration of the capitalist mode of production to
the historical analysis of capitalism, history is revealed as an even more com-
plex topography of social forms, producing times and spaces in tension with
capital’s ideal conditions of accumulation – what Tomba, following Bloch, calls
a multiversum and Quijano characterises as the historical-structural heterogen-
eity of capital.120
Consequently, Banaji has called for a more complex conception of the
modes of production, one that assumes different possibilities in which a mode
of production can be historically configured, albeit dismissing the concept of
a social formation.121 While coinciding with this exhortation to think about
modes of production in a way which would be impossible from a stagist per-
spective, this position nevertheless runs the risk of conflating the logical and
the historical aspects of this concept – a distinction to be expanded in the next
chapter. If we must in any case differentiate between a genus (e.g., capitalism)
and its variations (e.g., peasant-labour or slave-labour capitalism), why should
we keep the same term for both levels of analysis?
In a social formation, this process of spatio-temporal production is best
grasped by the concept of uneven and combined development – a concept fam-
ously developed by Trotsky122 – where unevenness is inherent to the mode of
production (e.g., generating wealth and poverty in the same movement), and
combination is produced by the subsumption of specific labour processes and
industries under a dominant mode of production from which they have not
emerged. The concrete analysis of a social formation should account for how
the multiplicity of times and spaces set up a field of contradictions: different
kinds of oppression and exploitation are made visible by this conception, as
are its victims and its beneficiaries.
The conception of uneven and combined development, as Anievas and Niş-
ancioğlu indicate,123 subverts and transcends the stagist conception of history,

120 As regards to the capitalist mode of production at the logical level, this has been developed
with detail in Tombazos, Time in Marx. On world-scale synchronisation, see Tomba 2013a.
For a discussion of this approach, see Osborne 2015, pp. 39–48. Quijano 2014, pp. 285–327.
121 Banaji 2011, pp. 22–3.
122 Trotsky 1959. See Joel Wainwright 2013, pp. 371–91.
123 Anievas and Nişancioğlu 2015, pp. 54–5.

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rejecting the notion that Western European history is a normative criterion

from which other regional or local historical trajectories are to be judged. With
the Grundrisse Marx opens the possibility – later theoretically developed in
the 1860s – of conceiving history as a spatio-temporally complex totalisation
of social forms; and with this conception of history the last traces of linearity
and Eurocentrism give way to the materiality of human activity, which, with its
determinations and contingencies, thus claims its central role.

Epilogue

When, in their early work, Marx and Engels claim that they knew only the sci-
ence of history, their concept of history was far from the disciplinary limits then
established in the intellectual division of labour. In line with this concept, Marx
is a historian in a very particular manner: his conception is profoundly histor-
ical in the same measure as his vision of historical knowledge is profoundly
conceptual.124 The historical science, as he conceives it, is thus not external
to the historical processes, just as the empirical and the conceptual are not
external to each other.
Consequently, space and time are not external to Marx’s dialectic, but inher-
ent (both as a condition and a consequence) to the totalising character of the
human praxis. Ernst Bloch’s words at the beginning of this chapter – whatever
the limitations of his philosophy of time125 – capture the spatio-temporal com-
plexity of Marx’s concept of history, especially in regards to his theoretical
developments since 1857. This conception broke away from the prevailing per-
spective of historical unilinearity by considering societies as forms rather than
stages, and by insisting that social totalisations are products of human agents in
specific social conditions. For Marx, a form of society, no matter how abstractly
considered, is constituted by simpler forms (whose dynamics can be accounted
for by generative mechanisms, in the terms of critical realism) that have their
own space-times and are totalised by the conflictual relations between forces
and relations of production.
Hence, in this conception, the science of history is not confined to the study
of past deeds, but thematises the coexistence of different social space-times
(with different scales and ways of functioning) in a single physical context.
Social times and spaces are produced in history as a consequence of collective
social praxes, which means that each social form – as a totalisation – is consti-

124 See Grüner 2005.

125 See Osborne 2015, pp. 42–7.

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history with social ontology 53

tuted by its own configurations of space-time, rather than a simple sequence

of past, present and future on a homogeneous topography. Thus, Bensaïd has
indicated that in Marx’s concept of history,

construed as ‘backwardness’ in relation to an imaginary temporal norm,

anachronism ends up imposing itself not as a residual anomaly, but as an
essential attribute of the present. Non-contemporaneity is not reducible
to the immaterial unevenness of its moments. It is also their combined
development in a novel historical space-time.126

Subsumption, under its various modalities, is the mechanism that integrates

non-capitalist relations of production into the spatio-temporal network of
global capitalism, totalising the socio-historical heterogeneity through abstract
labour. By grasping this process as a geopolitical (spatio-temporalised) totalisa-
tion, Marx’s conception of history avoids the trap of an abstract pluralism while
at the same time arguing for the ultimate unity of human history – itself forged
by the expansion of capitalism. In this sense, the consideration of space and
time, ultimately derived from the spatio-temporalising character of the human
praxis, are fundamental for the understanding of the uneven development of
societies, since these categories help to make visible the unequal organisation
and distribution of their praxes and products.
Following Marx, each form of society has a hierarchy of strata, with its own
generative mechanisms, causalities and contradictions, which account for the
diverse spaces and times in a social totalisation. Consequently, a historical con-
juncture cannot be reduced to a single principle: in the Marxian method, each
stratum is enabled by the lower ones, but its rules are not directly defined by
them. Totality cannot function as a dialectical category unless it acknowledges
mediations.
Far from speculative philosophies of history, Marx’s social ontology has pro-
ductive implications for historical knowledge. It opens the possibility for the
explanation of particular social processes and phenomena through the decis-
ive concept of mode of production – the foundation of his theory of history.
Since Marx’s method looks for real social forms in order to organise the cat-
egories, space and time are indispensable for his epistemology of history, and
thus provide criteria for the next phases of historical research: theory, archive
and presentation. But each of these phases has its own specificities, while at
the same time, as argued above, maintaining a dialectical relationship with the
level of ontology.
126 Bensaïd 2002, p. 24.

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 chapter 2

Theory, Models and Explanation

… one of those fascinating combinations of continuity of the dis-

continuous, of simultaneity of the nonsimultaneous, of recognition
of the unknown – that challenge the historian’s interpretive abilit-
ies …1

…
What is perhaps even more important for the Marxist theory of his-
tory is the question of uneven development.2

∵
The phase of theory addresses the problems of the concepts and categories
used in order to later organise the documentary data into causal explanations.
The existence of this phase in Marx’s approach to history, as Cohen indicates,
marks the crucial difference in respect to Hegel’s: while a philosophy of history
provides an interpretation of a social phenomenon, a theory of history (which
is based on the former) explains its inner dynamics.3 The function of a theory
is to provide an explanation of the object it studies.
In turn, the nature of explanation, according to Ricoeur, resides in answer-
ing the question ‘why?’, through a variety of uses of the connector ‘because’,
and hence this operation has a direct relation with the problems of causation.
Causal explanation is inherent to historical research, however unconscious a
historian may be about this: historians are not simply narrators – although
they necessarily are – because they also have to justify why they consider that
the factors that sustain their explanations are better than others. They have to
argue for the ‘causal skeletons’ that hold together their explanations.4

1 Echeverría 2010, pp. 125–6.

2 Lukács 1978, p. 118.
3 Cohen 1978, p. 27.
4 Ricoeur 2004, pp. 181–2. Ricoeur 1984a, p. 186.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2022 | doi:10.1163/9789004499911_004

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theory, models and explanation 55

In this sense, Mary Fulbrook indicates that a theoretical framework for his-
torical explanation – or what she calls, following Kuhn, a paradigm – encom-
passes elements such as:
– a framework of given questions and puzzles
– presuppositions about what to look at: the constitution of the ‘subject’ of
enquiry; a set of analytical concepts for ‘describing’ the character of past
worlds
– presuppositions about what to look for (clues, also known as ‘sources’): and
an associated set of methodological tools and concepts through which to
capture and analyse the ‘evidence’
– a notion of what will serve to answer the question
– a notion of the principal purpose(s) of historical reconstructions, and hence
of appropriate forms of representation for different types of audience.5
As this chapter argues, whereas some of these elements are more typical of
other moments of historical knowledge, theory has an undeniable role in
determining them. In specific regards to Marx’s theory, Eric Hobsbawm stresses
the importance of his conceptualisation of societies as systems of relations
between human beings, where the relations of production and reproduction
are decisive. In his words, Marxism

insists, first, on a hierarchy of social phenomena (such as ‘basis’ and

‘superstructure’), and second, on the existence within any society of in-
ternal tensions (‘contradictions’) which counteract the tendency of the
system to maintain itself as a going concern. The importance of these
peculiarities in Marxism is in the field of history, for it is they which allow
to explain – unlike other structural-functional models of society – why
and how societies change and transform themselves: in other words, the
facts of social evolution.6

Although Hobsbawm’s appreciation of the importance of the relation between

basis and superstructure may be exaggerated in respect to Marx’s theory,7 his
overall exposition rightly emphasises the idea that the fundamental aim of this
theory is the explanation of historical transformation through the analysis of
systems of social relations.

5 Fulbrook 2002, p. 34.

6 Hobsbawm 1998, 196.
7 In contrast Lefebvre, for example, argues in favour of an investigation primarily based on the
category of social formation, which allows one to grasp the complexity of social activity better

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56 chapter 2

In this chapter, following a critical realist epistemological approach, I exam-

ine the role which spatio-temporal elements play in Marx’s historical explana-
tions, and their utility in establishing a methodological framework such as that
described by Fulbrook. To this end, the first section addresses abstraction as the
foundation of Marx’s methodology, and the implications this has for historical
theory. The distinction between levels of abstraction allows for the distinction
between the mode of production and the social formation, which is necessary
for historical explanations. In consequence, the second section analyses the
place Marx gives to spatio-temporal categories in his treatment of modes of
production, and the final section analyses the role of spatio-temporal elements
in some of Marx’s particular case studies.

2.1 Abstraction and Method

Since history is a product of the combination of the collective praxes into a

totalisation, dialectical explanation primarily refers to how the conditions of
the internal relations of such totalisation – with its tendencies and counter-
tendencies – make a particular phenomenon possible and give sense to it.
The very intelligibility of history, as argued in the previous chapter, depends
on properly apprehending this dialectic. The Marxian approach to historical
explanation can thus be broadly described through what Tilly calls system
explanations, which ‘consist of specifying the place of some event, structure, or
process within a larger self-maintaining set of interdependent elements, show-
ing how the event, structure, or process in question serves and/or results from
interactions among the larger set of elements’.8
Totalisation is thus the cornerstone of Marx’s theory of history and its cor-
responding methodology. Given the ontological priority of production in social
life, the mode of production is the criterion of such socio-historical totalisa-
tion,9 and abstraction plays the fundamental methodological role in appre-
hending this basic structure of a society. This can be observed in Figure 1 below,
where Dussel summarises the path proposed in the Grundrisse from imme-
diacy to abstraction. In Hegelian fashion, the introduction to the Grundrisse
argues that it is necessary to depart from the apparent immediacy of social
phenomena by abstracting their basic determinations, in order to arrive at

than the basis-superstructure model, particularly since the latter frequently leads to mech-
anistic interpretations. Lefebvre 1991, p. 52.
8 Tilly 2006, p. 569.
9 Marx 1973, pp. 89–90.

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theory, models and explanation 57

more concrete concepts which can theoretically recreate the dynamics of the
social totalisation. Abstracting the basic determinations of a particular form of
society, Marx indicates, leads ‘towards a reproduction of the concrete by way
of thought’.10 He emphasises that these abstractions are not just mental con-
structs, but that they correspond to the structures of the reality inquired into;
the task of science is thus to grasp real relations and not just ‘balance’ concepts
dialectically. In Marx’s words, ‘what is at issue here is not a set of definitions
under which things are to be subsumed. It is rather definite functions that are
expressed in specific categories’.11 Thus abstraction should not lead to a realm of
heuristic fictions, as proposed by Neo-Kantian methodologists – most notably
Max Weber.12
Looking at Figure 1, after the process of abstraction between a. and c., the
concrete totality ‘in general’ – moment 4 – totalises the abstracted concepts
into a mode of production, and establishes its necessary relations with its own
fundamental spatio-temporal determinations. This totality is concrete – ‘con-
creteness is, first of all, precisely the universal objective interconnection and
interdependence of a mass of individual phenomena, unity in diversity, the unity
of the distinct and the mutually opposed rather than an abstract unity’13 – but it
needs to ‘return’ to particularity through the corresponding categories, in order
to explain what Dussel calls the ‘historical concrete totality’ (moment 6), or the
level of the social formation. Drawing from Capital, Dussel states that the rela-
tion between moments 4 and 6 is exemplified by how the concept of ‘capital in
general’ explains bourgeois society.14
In terms of Bhaskar’s critical realism, this method outlined by Dussel starts
with the empirical, observable social phenomena and, by abstracting from

10 Marx 1973, p. 101.

11 Marx 1978, p. 303. The emphasis is mine. See also Marx 1973, p. 90.
12 See Weber 1949. As I maintain below, this feature of Marx’s epistemology has important
consequences for his use of theoretical models.
13 Ilyenkov 2008, p. 88.
14 Dussel 1985, p. 54. Dussel’s figure is also useful insofar as it relates theoretical with non-
theoretical activity, and thus raises the question of the historicity and politics of theory.
In class societies, social theories and their methods are themselves part of an epistemic
struggle and as such imply class positions, which in Marx’s case is openly done from
the position of the dispossessed classes. Hence, as Marx indicated, ‘in the theoretical
method, too, the subject, society, must always be kept in mind as the presupposition’. Marx
1973, p. 102. For the sake of clarity, this book deals with this political aspect of historical
knowledge in the fourth chapter. For the rest of this chapter I will treat the theoretical-
methodological aspects of Marx’s approach to history without overt reference to their
politics.

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(4) Constructed (concrete) totality (abstract totality)

‘in general’
d
c

(3) Abstract determinations (5) Explanatory categories

(defined ‘concepts’) (ad) (ad)

b e

(2) Full representation (6) Explained historical

(chaotic totality) concrete totality

a f
(B) conceptual world’

(A) ‘real world’

(1) The concrete (7) Known reality
(existing) real

a: representation abc→: dialectical ‘ascent’

b: abstraction def→: categorical ‘explanation’ (return)
c: synthesis ad: abstracted determination
d: explanatory return
e: explanatory return
f: explanation of reality (scientific knowledge)
figure 1 Moments of method in the Grundrisse
source: dussel 1985, pp. 49–50

them, constructs the mode of production as a real structure that serves as the
foundation for the explanation of the actual social formations and conjunc-
tures. Actuality is hence not the same as reality: the real is the domain of the
possible, which is only actualised under certain conditions. This conception
of knowledge is summarised in Table 1.15 The generative mechanisms – which,
as argued in the previous chapter, are forms in action – constitute the domain
of the real, which is not directly observable, nor is it reducible to the actual

15 Bhaskar 2008, pp. 56–7. On the relations between reality, possibility and actuality, also see
Lefebvre 2002, pp. 193–206.

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theory, models and explanation 59

table 1 Domains of reality

Domain of Domain of Domain of

real actual empirical

Mechanisms ✓
Events ✓ ✓
Experiences ✓ ✓ ✓

source: bhaskar 2008, p. 56

events that such mechanisms generate. Or as Marx puts it, ‘all science would
be superfluous if the form of appearance of things directly coincided with their
essence’.16
Since the empirical is the realm par excellence of the pseudo-concrete
(which does not mean that it totally obfuscates reality),17 abstraction is neces-
sary so as to determine how the forms, qua mechanisms, operate behind par-
ticular processes. This operation determines their functioning under a lim-
ited number of necessary interrelated categories, and excludes conditions con-
sidered as contingencies, which are not a part of the mechanisms analysed,
but of other mechanisms.18 From this abstract totality, necessary relations –
which were previously not apparent – give way to categories accounting for
them (moment d in Figure 1). In this sense, the process of abstraction described
in the Grundrisse intends to determine the mode of production as a closed sys-
tem, from which necessary consequences can be deduced – such as the general
law of capitalist accumulation in Capital.19 These laws register inner tenden-
cies within a mode of production and should not be mistaken for laws beyond
modes of production, as Marx repeatedly emphasises (particularly in his well-
known letter to the Russian populists).20

16 Marx 1981, p. 956.

17 The path of abstraction is the process of breaking with the pseudo-concreteness of every-
day perceptions, as described by Kosík 1976, pp. 1–32.
18 For example, when explaining the composition of capital, Marx indicates that ‘in a general
analysis of the present kind, it is assumed throughout that the actual conditions cor-
respond to their concept, or, and this amounts to the same thing, actual conditions are
depicted only in so far as they express their own general type’. Marx 1981, p. 242.
19 Marx 1976b, pp. 794–802. Broadly, Bhaskar considers a closed system as one ‘in which
a constant conjunction of events obtains; i.e., in which an event of type a is invariably
accompanied by an event of type b’. Bhaskar 2008, p. 70.
20 See Marx 1989b, vol. 24, pp. 196–201.

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Indeed, the fundamental aim of the Marxian method is to determine the

laws within the abstract level of the particular modes of production.21 Hence,
as Harootunian argues, methodological necessity obliges Marx to start from
the presumption of capitalism as a closed system, and to deal with other forms
only after establishing its basic structure. The society portrayed in Capital, com-
prised of only capital and labour, is a real mechanism (specifically a mechanism
of mechanisms: a form composed from other, more elementary, forms), and
thus helps as a means of understanding more complex actual historical forms
by considering formal subsumption besides real subsumption.22
The examination of modes of production as closed systems can thus lead to
the formulation of abstract spatio-temporal models – whose most basic charac-
teristics would be the determinations of scale, configuration and rhythm – that
help to explain the actual development of concrete social formations. From a
realist perspective, the possibility of constructing models relies on the distinc-
tion between the real and the actual. Max Weber and Neo-Kantianism correctly
conceived models as conceptual constructions that cannot be found empiric-
ally, but whereas the epistemology of transcendental idealism supposes that
the necessity of a generative mechanism is imposed on the pattern of events
by the researcher and hence considers models as ideas belonging strictly to
the subjective realm, Marxian critical realism maintains that mechanisms exist
independently of actual events, and hence that causal relations cannot be
inferred directly nor refuted by observation alone. Therefore, the fact that mod-
els are imagined does not mean that they are imaginary, just that they are
abstractions from actual conditions.23
Models are useful for social research because they allow it to approach new
cases on the basis of already established knowledge. It is not necessary to go
through the entire process of abstraction and synthesis of the mode of produc-

21 See Marx’s ‘Postface to the Second Edition’, in Marx 1976b, pp. 100–2.
22 Harootunian 2015b, pp. 67–8; see also the criticism of Harootunian’s privileging of formal
subsumption, above, in 1.3. However, against Harootunian’s tendency to comprehend
modes of production as ‘ideal types’, we should recall that modes of production are real
mechanisms and not heuristic fictions; Haldon appropriately argues that a mode of pro-
duction is not ‘an a prioristic construct within a series of such constructs generated in the
abstract and against which historical data can be measured, but on the contrary a set of
relations generated and generalised out of actual historical examples’. Haldon 1993, p. 41.
23 See Bhaskar 2008, pp. 45–7 and pp. 145–6. In this conception, as Sayer notes, ‘scientific
“laws” are therefore not understood as well-corroborated, universal empirical regularit-
ies in patterns of events, but as statements about mechanisms’. Sayer 1998, p. 124. Under
the Neo-Kantian conception, on the other hand, models in historical explanation are a
product of scientific imagination, which carries the historian’s mind into the range of the
possible. Ricoeur 2004, p. 182. See also Rose 2009.

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theory, models and explanation 61

tion in order to explain a social formation with characteristics that suggest that
an already known mode of production underpins its social dynamics. Marx-
ist social scientists – Marx himself included – have always used models in
order to seize new social forms and, as we will see below, in Marx’s theory
not only modes of production function as models,24 but so do other simpler
social forms and processes of social transformation. Naturally, the researcher
should be cautious about assuming too much from a model and not being
sufficiently aware of the particular conditions of the formation – which even-
tually could show the model to be inappropriate for the newly-approached
case.
Whatever their complexity, models are derived from closed systems, and
spatio-temporal models in particular are constructed on the basis of the laws
of the modes of production. A mode of production thus produces (equally
abstract, but also real) space-times that can be theoretically apprehended
through their corresponding models. As for their application, since the laws
inferred from the mode of production assume a closed system, they do not
necessarily lead to the same expected results when applied to an open system,
with other mechanisms at work. Because of this, Collier argues that

for a law to be true, it must hold when the mechanism it designates works
unimpeded – i.e. in a closed system. And for a law to be useful, it must con-
tribute to explaining events in open systems in which that mechanism is
operating alongside others.25

The study of an open system then consists of relating different mechanisms at

work in an actual situation. Hence after establishing how the mode of produc-
tion works at the abstract level, Marx’s method demands what Dussel (in the
path from 5 to 6 in Figure 1) calls the explanatory return, which refers to the
creation of the social formation for the explanation of a particular, concrete
material society. These levels correspond to the distinction that Bhaskar estab-
lishes between the two basic moments of science:

the moment of theory, in which closed systems are artificially established

as a means of access to the enduring and continually active causal struc-

24 Witold Kula’s model of the Polish economy between the sixteenth and eighteenth centur-
ies as a particular case of feudalism is one of the best examples of a model approach in
the Marxist theory of social formations. See: Kula 1976.
25 Collier 1994, p. 43.

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tures of the world; and the moment of its open-systemic applications,

where the results of theory are used to explain, predict, construct and dia-
gnose the phenomena of the world.26

This differentiation between closed and open systems is hence the basis for the
distinction between modes of production and social formations and, as both
kinds of systems are real, their difference depends on their respective levels of
abstraction. We can observe the levels of abstraction in the Marxian concep-
tion of history in Figure 2 below – a modified version of Sayer’s interpretation
of the Marxian levels of abstraction.27 The first two levels serve as the matrix
making historical knowledge conceptually possible, and refer to Marx’s onto-
logy of history, analysed in the previous chapter.
The higher levels of abstraction contain more general concepts, with fewer
determinations. The higher the level, the broader the scope of phenomena it
accounts for, and the less it can account for their specificities. Hence Level 1, the
most abstract in historical knowledge, encompasses the foundations of histor-
ical materialism: categories of social being, praxis, nature, etc. Level 2, on the
other hand, deals with the most basic conditions and relations necessary for
every form of social organisation.28 Sayer characterises it as the realm of tran-
shistorical claims (e.g. teleology of labour, social relations of production) and,
although he dismisses the importance of the concept of mode of production,29 it
is at this level where the theory of this fundamental Marxian concept belongs.
Levels 3 and 4 refer to a particular mode of production (e.g. capitalist, feudal)
and deal, respectively, with categories abstracted from empirical data and from
other theories, and with the mechanisms inferred from them (e.g. law of value,
general law of capitalist accumulation). Since production is the criterion for the
totalisation of the form of society for Marx, it is wrong to consider the mode of
production only in the terms of its economic foundation; the mode of produc-
tion is the totality of both foundation and ‘superstructure’.30 Following another

26 Bhaskar 2008, p. 118.

27 Sayer 1998, p. 129.
28 See McLennan 1982, pp. 45–65.
29 Following Banaji, Sayer concludes that the modes of production ‘are not limited in terms of
possible forms of interlocking combinations of relations and forces of production as was
originally thought’, and hence ‘the concept of a mode of production can be inadequate
both as an abstract or a concrete concept’. Sayer 1998, p. 126. Nonetheless, Marx’s method
does call for totalisation on the base of production, and Banaji himself does not abandon
this concept, but indicates paths in order to make it more complex, while warning against
formalistic uses of it. See Banaji 2011, pp. 45–101.
30 For example, Lange affirms that a mode of production – defined as an ensemble of the

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 theory, models and explanation 63

+ abstract 1. Foundations of Historical

Materialism
↓
(Theory of modes 2. Transhistorical Claims
of production)
↓
3. Historically Specific ←
Abstractions of Neces-
sary/ Internal Relations
(Theory of a Mode
↓
of Production)
4. Tendencies/Mechanisms ← Contingently-Related
Operating Source/in Virtue Source / Knowledge Conditions:
of Necessary Relations Conceptual ← Concepts and Theses
↓ Criticism from other Theories /
(Explanation of a 5. Synthesis of Tendencies ← ← Empirical Data
Social Formation) and Conditions
↓
+ concrete 6. Conjunctures ←
figure 2 Levels of abstraction in historical knowledge
source: based on sayer 1998, p. 129

metaphor, the economic foundation is the skeleton, but not the whole organ-
ism; the forms of political organisation and ideology are as much a part of the
mode of production as the forces and relations of production – albeit refer-
ring to different strata of causality. Marx’s planned project of conceptualising
the state, foreign trade and world market beyond his analysis of Capital would
have also belonged to these levels of abstraction.31
The tendencies and conditions in the mode of production are synthesised
in Level 5, with new sources that are incorporated on top of the framework
of mechanisms from the previous level – it is the explanatory return once the
mode of production has been constructed. This step marks the transition from
a closed to an open system. This synthesis forms concrete concepts (e.g. Marx’s

relations and forces of production – becomes a social formation when we consider it in

relation to its corresponding superstructure. According to our reasoning in the previous
chapter, this position conflates strata of causality and levels of abstraction. Lange 1963,
pp. 15–45.
31 See Rosdolsky 1989, pp. 10–56. Matters of gender – insofar as they refer to the conditions
of social reproduction – are also a part of this level and hence internal to the modes of
production. See Vogel 2013, pp. 133–82.

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concept of Bonapartism from his 18th Brumaire, stemming from the particu-
larities of the development of the French state) that help to explain an actual
social formation, though these concepts can eventually become useful as mod-
els to explain other formations as well.
The social formation is then the most concrete form of society, understood
through the mode of production prevailing in it, but also in relation to other
social forms and relations that do not emerge from it. At the level of the social
formation, social forms which were considered contingent at the level of the
mode of production are understood in relation to it. Based on a methodological
paragraph in Capital on the theme of ground-rent, the Venezuelan philosopher
Ludovico Silva points out that while the scientific procedure leading to modes
of production purifies social knowledge from what Marx calls ‘adulterations
and blurring admixtures’, the concept of a social formation explains them as
actual ‘modes of existence’ of the mode of production.32
The concept of a social formation, as argued in the previous chapter, intro-
duces complexity in the theory of history through the combination of social
forms that do not develop from the prevailing mode of production, but coexist
or eventually adapt to it. Responding to the growing importance of imperialism
in the first decades of the twentieth century, Luxemburg and Trotsky theorise
about the necessity of capitalism to expand at the expense of non-capitalistic
modes of production, whose inner development is therefore modified. Trot-
sky’s History of the Russian Revolution systematises this idea through the law of
uneven and combined development, which seeks to account for the uneven-
nesses in the logic of development in a single mode of production, while also
observing the effects of the combination of modes of production in each of
them.33
This conception not only spatialises capitalism – at both the world- and
local-scales of central and peripheral formations – but also implies a critical
(non-homogeneous, multilinear) conception of historical time. Historicisation
should hence account for this complex spatio-temporal topography and the
social struggles that shape it. However, since the classics – by Marx, Lenin,
Luxemburg, Trotsky – elaborate their theories in relation to the expansion of

32 Silva 2009, p. 137. Marx’s observations on ground-rent appear in Marx 1981, p. 762.
33 Luxemburg 2003, pp. 328–9; Trotsky 1959, pp. 2–3. Although Trotsky uses evolutionary lan-
guage when formulating this concept (by referring to ‘advanced’ and ‘backwards’ societies,
especially), his work does not depend on a conception of unilinear development, and is
most productive at explaining structural heterogeneity in capitalism. See Anievas and Niş-
ancioğlu 2015, pp. 54–63. For Marx, as indicated in the previous chapter, this capacity of
capitalism to profit from non-capitalist relations of production is realised through the dif-
ferent modalities of subsumption.

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theory, models and explanation 65

capitalism, there is controversy as to whether or not the concept of uneven

and combined development is applicable to non-capitalist formations. In this
regard, Anievas and Nişancioğlu argue for the use of this concept in order to
explain the origins of capitalism by indicating that, more than a theory in itself,
uneven and combined development is a methodological fix that allows social
researchers to examine historical totalisations from different vantage points –
just like Marx does with the different social forms of capital.34 In any case,
the Grundrisse repeatedly exemplify the heterogeneity of social forms in non-
capitalist modes of production.35
Reservations also apply to the concept of social formation as a combination
(or articulation, in the Althusserian formulation)36 of modes of production.
Although Banaji’s criticism of the concept of social formation can lead to the
conflation of the real and the actual,37 his distinction between the idiom mode
of production as a social and technical labour process and as an epoch of pro-
duction helps to clarify this issue:38 the notion that a social formation combines
different modes of production under a dominant mode of production is then
best understood as a process in which a totalising form of production (a mode
of production in the second sense) subsumes labour processes (modes of pro-
duction in the first sense) from previous modes of production (here again in the
second sense). This interpretation is consistent with Marx’s explicit conceptu-
alisation of subsumption as a subordination of labour processes,39 as well as
with Banaji’s own valuable contributions to the theory of modes of produc-
tion.
Since his early writings Marx observes that older forms adapt to the pre-
vailing totalisation process, which ‘on the one hand, continues the traditional

34 Anievas and Nişancioğlu 2015, pp. 60–1. Indeed, Marx plays with historical forms taken
from different contexts and subject to different conditions (e.g. his comparison of Japan’s
feudalism with that of the European Middle Ages), similar to how his economic writings
compare the possible outcomes of forms when the related variables are changed (e.g.
when he draws conclusions from the possible arithmetical relations between the times
of the working period and of circulation in respect to prices), an approach that is quite
common in the second volume of Capital. Marx 1978, pp. 334–68; Marx 1976b, pp. 876,
878.
35 Some social groups not only developed in the ‘interstices’ (or ‘pores’) of the prevailing
modes of production – like the Jews in feudal formations – but so did some complete
societies – like the Phoenicians and Carthaginians – thus forming a regional system of
dependency of some formations on others. Marx 1973, p. 223.
36 Balibar 2009a, pp. 231–2; see also, Amin 1976.
37 Banaji 2011, pp. 22–3, 92. Also, see above, 1.3.
38 Banaji 2011, pp. 50–2.
39 Marx 1976b, pp. 1019–34.

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activity in completely changed circumstances and, on the other, modifies the

old circumstances with a completely changed activity’.40 Marx demonstrates
that social forms which transcend more than one mode of production – such as
money – do so by adapting to the conditions of the different prevailing modes
of production,41 but he also refers to other forms not directly belonging to the
stratum of production as cases of the uneven development of social spheres.
His remarks on the validity of the antique Roman law and Greek art are per-
haps his most famous examples of this non-contemporariness of social forms,
but many other cases testify to Marx’s spatio-temporally complex conception
of history.42
The sixth level, that of the conjuncture, refers to the analysis of a specific
social process from the point of view of the multiple social mechanisms that,
relative to the main mode of production, determine its situation and develop-
ment. It therefore focuses on a particular event or actor within a social form-
ation. In this sense, the history of a form – e.g. of a city, an institution, class
or a singular person – belongs to this conjunctural level, and its explanation
is formulated from the perspective of the actual form, in relation to its cor-
responding social totalisation. The analysis of the conjuncture thus allows us
to observe the movement of diverse mechanisms at work in a social forma-
tion in relation to a specific form. Bhaskar indicates that most events within an
open system are conjunctures of at least two mechanisms whose combination
produces effects that cannot be known ex ante and thus are not deductively
predictable.43 When applied to a present situation it can, however, be a means
for a social agent (a party, labour union, etc.) to project possible outcomes in
order to accomplish an effective political intervention.44
These levels maintain a relation with the empirical domain through their
interactions with notions, concepts and theses from other theories, as well as
with empirical data. Sayer’s original figure includes among these contingently-

40 Marx and Engels 1976b, vol. 5, p. 50.

41 Besides the above referenced passages in Capital Volume iii on the history of merchant’s
and usurer’s capital, Marx explains in the Grundrisse the functional changes of money
under guild conditions and under capitalism, relating those changes to the separation of
working people and the means of production. Marx 1973, pp. 504–6. In these drafts, Marx
also indicates that when relations from pre-capitalist forms of society are transposed to
the bourgeois society, they become ‘developed, or stunted or caricatured forms’. Marx 1973,
p. 106.
42 Marx 1973, pp. 109–11. See also Lukács 1978, pp. 125–32. Bensaïd 2002, pp. 7–93.
43 Bhaskar 2008, p. 119.
44 Gallardo 1990. About the concept of conjuncture, see also Koivisto and Lahtinen 2012,
pp. 267–77.

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theory, models and explanation 67

related conditions every kind of circumstance potentially affecting the process

of socio-historical knowledge; in contrast, our modified figure limits those con-
ditions to the specifically epistemological. Contingent conditions of a different
kind (e.g., class and gender struggle, as he mentions, or ecological problems, we
can add) not only affect Levels 3, 5 and 6, but also the most abstract levels;45
yet this refers to conditions which affect the production of knowledge from
without, and thus are not properly methodological conditions. By limiting the
figure to internally epistemological criteria, such contingent conditions only
encompass concepts from other theories, empirical data, and notions implicit
in observation.46
Consequently, the contingency of these conditions in Figure 2 is logical
but not methodological: the social researcher chooses sources and theoretical
interlocutors according to the research problems to be addressed – and the
problems are themselves oriented by theory. Additionally, an intermediate step
of source/conceptual criticism has been added in the figure between the levels
of abstraction and the contingently-related knowledge conditions, by which
the empirical is called upon to enrich the theoretical components. This is cru-
cial because, as Sayer indicates, the role of deduction in the movement between
levels of the diagram is rather limited; aside from the movement from Levels 3
to 4, such movement requires the addition of historical – contingent – inform-
ation.47
Hence, Marx’s method consists in ‘the unfolding, exposing and “complicat-
ing” of contradictions, the unfolding of the thing by way of contradictions’,48
rather than the reduction to an abstract principle or homogeneous field. This
method of starting from the abstract and advancing to the more concrete is
exemplified by Capital’s basic architecture: the commodity, as the basic unit of

45 This is the case of the transition in Marx from a unilinear to a multilinear conception of
history: it is an issue of the ontology of history (Level 2 in Figure 2) that evolves from his
own concepts and theoretical problems, but in relation to historical and political condi-
tions such as anti-imperialistic struggles and the formation of the International Working-
men’s Association, as indicated in Section 1.3. above.
46 Since observation is always loaded with concepts or notions, such conditions are both
of an empirical and conceptual kind. Hence, albeit not explicit in the methodological
remarks in the Grundrisse, Marx’s method implies the critique of concepts and sources. It
is hard to exaggerate the importance of this operation, since it is the necessary mediation
that allows the abstract concepts to become concrete through the input of new empirical
data, and hence to make them able to account for the specific social forms being analysed.
The particularities of this archival phase belong to the next chapter.
47 Sayer 1998, p. 130.
48 Kosík 1976, p. 16.

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the capitalist economy, starts out as a quite abstract form, but the deployment
of its internal relations and the addition of new determinations render the con-
cepts more concrete with the successive moments of the method. As a result of
this, the concept of commodity is more complex in Capital Volume iii than it
is in the first chapter of Volume i; it also develops into different, more specific
forms.
If we are to attend to the possibilities of Figure 2, instead of following only
one line, as Sayer does for the sake of clarity, its shape looks more like a root:
as the abstract forms become more concrete, different and new forms arise.
Hence, the step from 2 to 3 potentially leads to several different modes of pro-
duction (in 3 and 4), each of which – e.g., slavery, feudalism, capitalism – can
develop into several different social formations in the steps from 4 to 5. Nat-
urally, the real existence of such modes of production and social formations
would depend on historical rather than merely logical conditions.
As regards the possibility of constructing models on the basis of the different
levels of abstraction, we should note that beyond the modes of production –
the historical scheme par excellence, according to Vilar49 – concepts abstrac-
ted from social formations and conjunctures serve Marx’s analyses of diverse
contexts. For example, Marx’s analysis of Bolívar is tainted by his concept of
Bonapartism, which leads to his harsh criticism of South America’s Liberta-
dor,50 and he is not writing metaphorically when he compares the Roman plebs
with the poor whites in the southern states during the U.S. Civil War: in both
cases he observes common forms in different social formations.51 But this is
also true for longue-durée historical processes: in particular, as we will see, ‘so-
called primitive accumulation’ has both a specific historical and general model
character – although Marx does not consider the latter as a universally neces-
sary path to capitalism.
In all of these cases, Marx finds certain mechanisms which could be used as
models in contexts other than those of the social phenomena being analysed.
In particular, spatial and temporal models – e.g. Lefebvre’s abstract space and
Sassen’s medieval spatio-temporal assemblage52 – help to clarify the tenden-
cies that produce unevenness in the development of the diverse social organ-
isations and the social relations and activities in them. In this light, Braudel’s
assessment of Marx as the first author ‘to construct true social models, on the

49 Vilar 1999, p. 70.

50 Marx 1982b, vol. 18, 219–33. Also, see below, 3.2.
51 Marx 1984e, pp. 40–1.
52 Lefebvre 1997, pp. 229–91; Sassen 2008, pp. 31–73.

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theory, models and explanation 69

basis of a historical longue durée’53 can be treated as an accurate description of

the Marxian methodology.
Since space and time are transhistorical categories that acquire concreteness
through successive levels of abstraction,54 the heuristic use of spatio-temporal
models should take the actual spatio-temporal conditions into account when
applied to an open system – i.e., at the levels of the social formation and of the
conjuncture. As Braudel argues, if the historian avoids the temptation to treat
the kind of models elaborated by Marx as universally valid explanations, they
would be indispensable as the basis for a more complex explanation of histor-
ical processes:

if they were put back within the ever-changing stream of time, they would
constantly reappear, but with changes of emphasis, sometimes overshad-
owed, sometimes thrown into relief by the presence of other structures
which would themselves be susceptible to definition by other rules and
thus by other models.55

Thus, when Braudel rightly indicates the need of ‘putting back’ these models
into the stream of time, he is referring precisely to Marx’s method of returning
from the abstract to the concrete; it is the step from real mechanisms as models
in a closed system to the explanation of an open, actual system. The models are
to be contrasted with the particular conditions of the social formation; socio-
historical knowledge is achieved by placing the mechanisms proposed by the
models into tension with historical particularities – i.e. other mechanisms.

53 Braudel 1982b, p. 51. Braudel’s concept of model is further clarified in this book, pp. 38–
47; pp. 122–5 (in respect to Otto Brunner); pp. 141–9 (about Sauvy); and pp. 193–5 (about
Toynbee). Also, in Braudel 1973, 418–61.
54 Social times and spaces are both objectivations and conditions of possibility of all other
objectivations – and of all collective activity – and hence essential forms of the organisa-
tion of material social life. In a dialectical approach, different categories overlap without
identifying with each other, revealing different aspects of a same object of study. Capital
presents numerous examples of this: the simple, relative, general and money forms account
for different moments of the value-form, while the transformations of capital – itself a
form of value – are explained through categories such as constant and variable, fixed and
circulating, industrial, commercial and money-dealing capital. Since social time and space
are both material and formal, real and imaginary, it is important to keep in mind that
these categories do not substitute for other transhistorical categories, but are necessary
determinations of the organisation of a socio-historical totalisation. This consideration
is important in order to avoid both economism and spatial or temporal fetishism. Marx
1976b, pp. 138–54; vols. ii and iii.
55 Braudel 1982b, p. 51.

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Finally, it is important to recall that, although each social mechanism pro-

duces its own social space-time, it is analytically useful to separate space from
time and vice versa in order to clarify different aspects of the social forms. Marx
argues that the method of calculating necessary and surplus labour can be
‘transferred from the spatial sphere, in which the different parts of the com-
pleted product lie side by side, to the temporal sphere, in which those parts are
produced in succession’.56 In this sense, abstraction can lead to models that
emphasise either time or space in order to explain different aspects of the pro-
cess of social totalisation.

2.2 Modes of Production and Spatio-Temporal Models

Braudel’s argument for Marx’s use of models leads to the question of how
space and time specifically help to conceptualise modes of production. While
in this section I concordantly argue for the importance of social theory for these
categories and the use of spatio-temporal models, it is clarifying to start by
addressing objections against their validity at this level of abstraction. Sayer
voices such an objection, concluding that what can be said in advance about
space – although his discussion is directed against theories of space such as
those by Lefebvre, Harvey and Soja, the logic of his argument includes social
time as well – is inevitably vague because most social processes have a degree
of ‘spatial flexibility’. He articulates this position with the following statement:

for capital accumulation to occur, capital needs to be accessible to a

labour force, and labour markets have spatial constraints created by the
time and expense of linking up dispersed workers and jobs. Nevertheless,
this doesn’t say much about space, nor could it be expected to say much
more, for the variety of spatial configurations which meet this constraint
is considerable. Which spatial forms do eventuate will depend on a host
of contingently-related processes.57

According to Sayer, social space (and time) are then only useful for the analysis
of open systems, and of little use for the explanation of mechanisms in closed
systems. Social space and time, we can therefore rephrase, are necessary at the
level of social formations – and from the perspective of the conjuncture – but

56 Marx 1976b, p. 332.

57 Sayer 1992, p. 149. See also Sayer 2000, pp. 108–30.

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not for the knowledge of the modes of production. Ironically,58 this position
does not take into account the characteristics of the levels of abstraction in
the mode of production, instead judging the explanatory possibilities of space
at the level of the mode of production by the standards of the more concrete
level of the social formation. Since the ‘modes of production are only a definite
totality of historical laws of motion’59 their spaces and times do not describe a
social form in its actual historical-geographical concreteness, but are tenden-
cies of such a complex mechanism. Between the contentless abstractions at the
level of the transhistorical categories and the most concrete level of the actual
social formations, the space-times of the modes of production are tendencies
like any other in a mode of production.60
In order to argue for the pertinence of space and time in Marx’s theory of the
modes of production, I will now turn to the three basic spatio-temporal determ-
inations mentioned in the introduction: scale, configuration and rhythm. The
first has to do both with space and time, while the other two primarily refer,
respectively, to space and to time. These determinations are the fundamental
features of the spatio-temporal models in Marx’s work; Capital and the Grund-
risse provide key examples.
We can clearly observe Marx’s use of predominantly spatial models in his
pages on pre-capitalist forms of appropriation,61 which he refers to through
three conceptual constructs: the Asian or oriental despotic form (the most
developed among the first communitarian forms), the ancient Greco-Roman,
and the Germanic form. Characterised as fundamentally territorial, space ap-
pears as their central organising category, while in contrast to his treatment
of capitalism, their temporal characteristics are not developed in detail. Each
of these forms entails a different scale and configuration for its corresponding
social space, which Marx especially defines through the relations between city
and countryside:

58 Castree attributes Sayer’s stance to the latter’s ‘failure to engage the question [of space] to
dialectics in any sustained way’. Nonetheless, Sayer’s own reflections on abstraction and
method might have led him to a position that conceives of space in a way similar to Har-
vey’s (which Sayer opposes). Castree 2002, p. 208.
59 Banaji 2011, p. 60.
60 On the concrete universality of the tendencies in a mode of production: Ilyenkov 2008,
pp. 223–89.
61 Marx 1973, pp. 471–514. Marx’s treatment in this passage coincides with Braudel’s affirma-
tion that ‘spatial models are the chart upon which social reality is projected, and through
which it may become at least partially clear; they are truly models for all the different
movements of time (and specially for the longue durée), and for all the categories of social
life’. Braudel 1982b, p. 52.

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the Germanic commune is not concentrated on the town; by means of

such concentration – the town as center of rural life, residence of the
agricultural workers, likewise the center of warfare – the commune as
such would have a merely outward existence, distinct from that of the
individual. The history of classical antiquity is the history of cities, but
on cities founded on landed property and agriculture; Asiatic history is a
kind of indifferent unity of town and countryside (the really large cities
must be regarded here merely as royal camps, as works of artifice erected
… over the economic construction proper); the Middle Ages (Germanic
period) begin with the land as seat of history, whose further development
then moves forward in the contradiction between town and countryside;
the modern [age] is the urbanisation of the countryside, not ruralisation
of the city as in antiquity.62

While the Asiatic and ancient forms are both spatially concentrated, their spa-
tial configuration is quite different because of the lack of difference in the
former between town and countryside – which leads to self-sustained villages –
and the hierarchisation in the latter, where the city depends on the production
of rural wealth. In contrast, the spatial fragmentation of the Germanic form
leads to more egalitarian relations between households within it. Hence, only
the ancient form would have a core-periphery configuration similar to that pro-
duced by capitalist uneven development, but it would not possess the predom-
inance of an urban economy, as in capitalism. The spatial scale for each form is
also determined by its respective economic totality: the ensemble of villages in
the Asiatic form,63 the city-countryside territory for the ancient forms,64 and
the household for the Germanic form. Capitalism, on the other hand, is the

62 Marx 1973, p. 479. In Capital, Marx also stresses the historical importance of these spatial
conflicts: ‘the foundation of every division of labour which has attained a certain degree
of development, and has been brought about by the exchange of commodities, is the sep-
aration of town and country. One might say that the whole economic history of society is
summed up in the movement of this antithesis’. Marx 1976b, p. 472.
63 Since in this form cities are not autonomous from villages and are insufficiently differ-
entiated from each other, except in terms of size, it has no need for roads (it could be
considered practically a ‘nodeless space’), a feature that ‘locks them into their closed-off
isolation and thus forms an essential moment of their survival without alteration’. Marx
1973, p. 525; also pp. 472–4.
64 In this form, the city as a centre (with its officials) exists as an organism, independently of
the houses that make it up; Marx, notably, overwrites the geometrical term (Zentrum) on
top of ‘seat’ (Sitz). Marx 1973, p. 474. For a recent critique of this characterisation of Greek
and Roman societies, see below, 3.2.

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first mode of production that relies on indefinite expansion in order to exist.65

Spatial scale and configuration are therefore generated by these forms as social
mechanisms, and are not arbitrary elements introduced by the researcher.
Marx proposes different kinds of political organisation for each one of these
pre-capitalist forms of appropriation, in relation to their respective spatio-
temporal models: the Asiatic form, where self-sustained villages combine agri-
culture and manufacture, cities emerge only in advantageous places for ex-
ternal trade or where the head of state – as incarnation of the higher com-
munity, and responsible for war and religion as well as for the administration of
the communal reserves and infrastructure – and his satraps exchange their sur-
plus product for labour. The Asiatic, like the ancient form, implies warfare as an
essential condition, in order to relate to other communities competing for the
appropriation of soil. As for the latter form, another spatial element is central
to the particular cases of Athens and Rome: the organisation of clans eventu-
ally leads from ancestry (whose extreme case is the caste systems) to locality as
their founding principle. This eventually leads to a partition of the countryside
into districts and villages, which do not depend on blood relations.66
Finally, since the Germanic form is composed of independent households
separated in the forest by long distances, its existence is guaranteed by the
bond with the other households with which they form a tribe; the commune
exists only as the coming-together of the individual landed proprietors. The
social space produced by this form of appropriation is more fragmented than
those produced by Asiatic or ancient forms; since the Germanic households
are self-sustaining, they can be studied in relative independence from their
coming-together. The agriculturist is not a citizen, and the commune only
exists because of the independent clans’ need for war, religion and adjudic-
ation. Marx hence finds a necessary relation between the space produced by
forms of appropriation and their respective political organisation, even if the
latter is only indicated in the broadest terms. This relation is not contingent,
but internal to the functioning of the mode of production, of which the polit-
ical stratum is a part.67

65 ‘As the sole predominant forms of an epoch, the conditions for capital have to be develop-
ed not only locally but on a grand scale’. Marx 1973, pp. 505–6. See also Marx 1973, pp. 227–8;
Pradella 2014.
66 Marx 1973, pp. 491, 478. The centralising feature of the Asiatic mode of production was
later explored by the historian Karl Wittfogel through his concept of ‘hydraulic societies’.
Wittfogel 1963.
67 Marx 1973, pp. 483–4. As Anievas and Nişancioğlu affirm in their criticism of Haldon
and Berktay, a mode of production cannot be considered without its ‘superstructure’: ‘by
defining a mode of production in terms of an economic basis distinct from a political

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As for time,68 although there is a plurality of spans in each mode of pro-

duction,69 their overriding temporal scale is for Marx the longue-durée: each
of them evolves for several centuries before eventually facing a crisis or fad-
ing away.70 The contradictions in the analysed forms are far outweighed by
their inherent tendency towards stability: Tomba correctly notes that Marx
tries to emphasise the element of invariance in them, in contrast with capital-
ism’s dynamism.71 Nonetheless, they have different rhythms of transformation
and decline. The older modes of production are the most stable: the Asiatic
form – with its supplementation of agriculture with manufactures – is espe-
cially durable, while the ancient is more dynamic and therefore more prone to
crisis; the development of productive labour – through manufacture – and con-
sequently of exchange, dissolves this mode of production and its correspond-
ing communes. However, the preservation of the ancient commune, with its
transformation of villages and landscapes, slowly leads to the destruction of its
own conditions.72 Since Marx argues that less independence of the individual
in relation to the commune leads to more stability of the form of appropriation,
the Germanic form, which later gives rise to feudalism, is the least durable form
of commune.73

superstructure, … they exclude the very social relations that make such exploitation an
historical possibility, as conjuncture and contingent specificities that lie outside of the
“mode of production”’. Anievas and Nişancioğlu 2015, p. 97.
68 Since the Formen deal with the specific problem of the conditions leading to the separ-
ation between the human subject and land, Marx does not refer to other times in these
forms of appropriation, e.g. those of other spheres.
69 Marx exemplifies temporal differentials in capitalism with an analogy to the human
physiology: ‘in the human body, as with capital, the different elements are not exchanged
at the same rate of reproduction, blood renews itself more rapidly than muscle, muscle
than bone, which in this respect may be regarded as the fixed capital of the human body’.
Marx 1973, p. 670.
70 Banaji 2011, pp. 87–92. The longue durée encompasses the apparently immutable elements
of geology as well as other structures with much shorter time spans; its defining feature
is its persistence over several generations. Among these structures, Braudel also mentions
biological and mental frameworks. See Taylor 2012, pp. 35–64.
71 Tomba 2013a, p. 71. Through a quite different path, Koselleck agrees with Marx’s vision of
precapitalist temporalities: it is only since the eighteenth century when historical change
became an everyday notion in Europe, displacing the until-then predominant idea of cyc-
lical history as magistra vitae. Koselleck 2004.
72 Marx 1973, p. 474; pp. 493–5. Interestingly, this passage relates spatial change with subject-
ive transformation: while changing their world, the producers develop new ideas, powers,
needs, language, social relations, etc.
73 Marx 1973, pp. 486–7. Dussel highlights that in the Grundrisse slavery is a secondary form
derived from the ancient form, as is feudalism in relation to the Germanic form. Dus-
sel 1985, pp. 238–40. About the differences between the Germanic and the feudal modes

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Hence the development of productive forces beyond the needs of human

reproduction dissolves these communal forms. This is especially true regard-
ing population: while capitalism requires its growth and spatial concentration
(the need for surplus labour and the consumption of commodities), in these
other modes of production such growth leads to systemic problems. There-
fore, the emergence of slavery and serfdom – except in the Asiatic form –
modifies the forms of appropriation and marks their decline.74 In these cases,
the growth in the importance of marginal forms leads to the negation of the
main mode of production. This is the case with the ancient Romans, among
whom

the development of slavery, the concentration of land possession, ex-

change, the money system, conquest etc., although all these elements up
to a certain point seemed compatible with the foundation, and in part
appeared merely as innocent extensions of it, partly grew out of it as mere
abuses.75

The corruption of these modes of production thus eventually leads to their

exhaustion. Again referring to the ancient Romans, the Grundrisse argues that
the massive explosion of money – acquired through the plundering of neigh-
bours – in their social formation replaced the existing community, because
money as the general form of wealth is the community itself, and does not tol-
erate competition.76 The pre-capitalist modes of production analysed by Marx
are organised and limited by the natural cycles; the barriers to production help
to protect and stabilise them.77 In this line, Lefebvre argues:

societies built on a (relatively) stable but stagnant base are destined to

be balanced in a static way. In this very stagnation they demonstrate
an extraordinary ability to resist and to persist. The cohesion of primit-

of production, see Wood 2010, pp. 83–5; also, Tomba 2013b, pp. 396–7. Amin and Haldon
include feudalism within the wider category of tribute-paying modes of production. Amin
1976; Haldon 1993.
74 Marx 1973, pp. 539–40; pp. 495–6; p. 493.
75 Marx 1973, p. 487. This is also the case in the search for wealth as an end in itself, which
drove peoples like the Carthaginians, Phoenicians, Jews and Lombards in their interac-
tions with ancient and medieval societies where exchange value did not determine pro-
duction. Marx 1973, pp. 253, 858, 223.
76 Marx 1973, p. 223. The same occurs with manufacture, which also relies on the exchange
of surplus products. Marx 1973, p. 494.
77 Marx 1973, p. 545.

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ive communities removes them from the historicity which could shatter
them from without, and from the ‘incidental’ history which would destroy
them from within.78

The capitalist mode of production follows a very different dynamic in terms of

space and time. If Marx’s precapitalist modes of production are fundamentally
conceptualised in spatial terms, with capitalism time returns with a vengeance:
the dissolution of the former modes of production goes hand-in-hand with
Marx’s famous formulation of the annihilation of space by time. This process is
made possible by the commodification of soil,79 leading to the predominance
of the urban, and a transition to a reterritorialised (Deleuze and Guattari), con-
tradictory space (Lefebvre).80
While the Manifesto already indicates that modern industry established
the world market, the Grundrisse expands upon the spatial contradictions
involved in this process. The space of capitalism is world-scale because, given
the national limits, capitalist production cannot exist without foreign trade,
but the tearing down of national barriers is not an uncontested process. Firstly,
because this expansion entails the conquest of the whole planet as the neces-
sary realisation of capital’s inherent tendencies; and secondly, because capital
has to create the physical conditions of exchange – the means of communica-
tion and transport – without which massive commercial traffic is impossible.
Capital requires its space not only to be world-wide, but interconnected.81
Capital totalises world space, but it does so in a structured manner, through
historically produced articulations (or nodes, to use Castells’s terms). Histor-
ically, this means that spatial routes have been built and controlled by certain
states or companies with the means to do so, and this condition has led to the

78 Lefebvre 1991, p. 317. The non-accumulative character of these formations thus implies the
prevalence in them of ‘a time scale made up of intertwined cycles’. Lefebvre 1991, p. 319.
79 ‘Men have often made man himself into the primitive material of money, in the shape of
the slave, but they have never done this with the land and soil. Such an idea could only
arise in a bourgeois society, and one which was already well developed. It dates from the
last third of the seventeenth century, and the first attempt to implement the idea on a
national scale was made a century later, during the French bourgeois revolution’. Marx
1976b, p. 183.
80 Capital produces a stage ‘in comparison to which all earlier ones appear as mere local
developments of humanity and as nature-idolatry’. Marx 1973, p. 410. See also Deleuze and
Guattari 1983, pp. 222–40; Lefebvre 1997, pp. 292–351. These theorisations were admittedly
inspired by the Grundrisse.
81 Marx and Engels 1976a, pp. 485–6. Marx 1973, pp. 409–10, 280, 524–5. See also Marx 1978,
p. 546.

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development of some spaces at the expense of others. Marx demonstrates that

different markets are spatially distributed both within and without national
borders; for example, money in a country is concentrated in a single location,
while the other regions develop product or raw material markets according to
their place in the division of labour.82 It should be highlighted that the patterns
of unevenness are inherent to the development of capitalism at the local as well
as the international level.
Space in capitalism is thus developed in an uneven and combined fash-
ion: geographical unevenness due to the unequal distribution of the products
of human labour is inherent to the capitalist mode of production, while the
combination with other modes of production under expanded reproduction
takes place through the various modalities of subsumption.83 This sets the
foundations for the development of the uneven configuration of the world-
system: control over the conditions of spatial specialisation and the circu-
lation of capital leads to the consolidation of the geographical relations of
center-semiperiphery-periphery theorised by Wallerstein and revised by Cas-
tells.84
Castells’s theorisation of the network society helps to shed light on Marx’s
conception of capitalist space-times by underlining the rhythms of transform-
ation in the spatial configurations of capitalism. This mode of production
produces a hierarchised space, but the neoliberal deregulation of capital mar-
kets, or ‘globalisation’, has shown that the socio-economic morphologies are
currently more fluid than they used to be in previous stages of the capitalist
world-economy, and hence has relativised the relations between centre, semi-
periphery and periphery (which could be comprehended as hubs of different
densities). The annihilation of space by time is a process of abstraction (in
the sense of Lefebvre’s abstract space), and thus makes pertinent the use of

82 Marx 1973, p. 280.

83 Marx demonstrates that there is discontinuity and eventual contradiction between the
space-times of the national and the international economies. Marx 1973, pp. 410–11, 280.
Sassen’s spatio-temporal assemblages are constructed on this tension of the inbetween his-
torical time-spaces; every analysis of space or time in a capitalist formation should have
this contradiction as its point of departure. Sassen 2008, pp. 378–98.
84 Wallerstein 1974, pp. 349–50; Castells 2010, pp. 440–8. Dussel interprets the section on
money in the Grundrisse as the moment when Marx introduces the problem of depend-
ency (albeit not its concept) and the concrete world market into his theory of capitalism.
Dussel also argues that, according to Marx, uneven development and dependence are
inherent to value – a position he shares with Pradella’s more recent account of Marx’s
theory of globalisation. Dussel 1985, pp. 104–5; Pradella, 2014.

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highly formal concepts such as Castells’s nodes, hubs and flows.85 This fluid-
ity of the spatial configuration of the world-system space is explained through
Marxian concepts by Harvey, according to whom the contemporary prevalence
of finance capital over the other moments in the metamorphoses of capital –
production or merchant capital – promotes ‘the sort of hypermobility and “flit-
ting around” of capital that has characterised capitalism over the last few dec-
ades’.86
Until recently, the transformations in the spatial configuration of the world-
system have been a matter for the longue-durée approach,87 but newer con-
ditions in the flows of capital have forced researchers to reconsider the time-
scale as not geographically fixed.88 In this sense, the Wallersteinian model of
centre-semiperiphery-periphery is useful to underline asymmetries of power
and resources, but under the light of the current hypermobility89 – and par-
ticularly now with the internet – it should be considered as a concrete histor-
ical spatio-temporal form of Castells’s more abstract theorisation of nodes and
hubs.
The Marxian theory of capitalism articulates multiple coexisting social
times, a consequence of the multiple mechanisms that structure this mode of
production. This is not only due to social forms from previous modes of produc-
tion and other ‘antediluvian’ economic elements subsumed by capital, but is
also, as Marx argues, due to very productive processes of capitalism expressing
differences in respect to one another: ‘the simultaneity of the different orbits of
capital, like that of its different aspects, becomes clear only after many capitals
are presupposed. Likewise, the course of human life consists of passing through
different ages. But at the same time all ages exist side by side, distributed among

85 Castells 2010, pp. 443–5.

86 Harvey 2013, p. 40.
87 Besides Wallerstein’s aforementioned The Modern World-System, see also: Arrighi 2002;
Braudel 1973.
88 This implies, as Sassen shows, that the material conditions for the circulation of the
various kinds of flows should also be considered in order to explain the concrete spatio-
temporal assemblages.
89 Referring to the concrete historical development of neoliberalism, Harvey indicates that
since the 1970s the increasing geographical mobility of capital ‘was in part facilitated by
the mundane but critical fact of rapidly diminishing transport and communications costs.
The gradual reduction in artificial barriers to movement of capital and of commodities,
such as tariffs, exchange controls, or, even more simply, waiting times at borders (the aboli-
tion of which in Europe had dramatic effects) also played an important role. … This greater
openness to capital flow (primarily US, European, and Japanese) put pressures on all states
to look to the quality of their business climate as a crucial condition for their competitive
success’. Harvey 2007, p. 92.

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different individuals’.90 At a more specific level, even within a single process of

production, there are several different times at stake, depending on their mater-
ial qualities and the technologies with which they operate.91
However, the turnover cycles of capital are the driving force of all spatio-
temporal processes in a capitalist formation. And just as national borders con-
stitute barriers to the spatial expansion of capital, interruptions in the circuit
of capital (time of production plus time of circulation) are barriers for cap-
ital’s reproduction; the optimal space-time of capital is continuous and homo-
geneous.92 Since the efficiency of capitalist accumulation is heightened by
shortening turnover times, individual capitalists are driven to overcome every
spatio-temporal obstacle; the contemporary social hypermobility of capital is
an effect of this tendency.93 Hence,

while capital must on one side strive to tear down every spatial barrier to
intercourse, i.e. to exchange, and to conquer the whole earth for its mar-
ket, it strives on the other side to annihilate this space with time, i.e. to
reduce to a minimum the time spent in motion from one place to another.
The more developed the capital, therefore, the more extensive the mar-
ket over which it circulates, which forms the spatial orbit of its circulation,
the more does it strive simultaneously for an even greater extension of the
market and for greater annihilation of space by time.94

90 Marx 1973, p. 639. On the ‘antediluvian’ elements: Marx 1973, pp. 105–6; Marx 1981, pp. 444–
5.
91 ‘The various elements of fixed capital in a particular investment have differing lifespans,
and hence also different turnover times. In a railway, for example, the rails, sleepers, earth-
works, station buildings, bridges, tunnels, locomotives and carriages all function for dif-
ferent periods and have different reproduction times, and so the capital advanced in them
has different turnover times’. Marx 1978, p. 248.
92 Thus, according to Capital, ‘the circuit of capital proceeds normally only as long as its vari-
ous phases pass into each other without delay. If capital comes to a standstill in the first
phase, M-C, money capital forms into a hoard; if this happens in the production phase, the
means of production cease to function, and labour-power remains unoccupied; if in the
last phase, C’-M’, unsaleable stocks of commodities obstruct the flow of circulation’. Marx
1978, p. 133. See also, Marx 1978, pp. 183–4, 219. The relevance of finance capital is promoted
by the temporal discontinuities inherent to the materiality of capitalist production. Com-
mercial capital, on the other hand, seeks to deal with the problems of faster circulation.
These are crucial sections in Capital dedicated to the metamorphoses of capital and its
circuits. Marx 1978, pp. 109–229; Marx 1981, pp. 566–73.
93 See especially Marx 1973, pp. 533–5; also p. 634, pp. 543–5.
94 Marx 1973, p. 539. On the reach and limitations of this metaphor, see Massey 2005, pp. 90–
99.

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The gradual overcoming of these barriers produces what Harvey character-

ises as the processes of spatio-temporal compression, derived from the accel-
eration of turnover times.95 The annihilation of space by time may thus better
be understood as a structural tendency in capitalism, rather than as a fait
accompli. Sassen’s theorisation of the inbetween therefore encompasses the
contradictions specifically generated from the relations between national and
global markets – which Marx would have presumably explained in his treat-
ises on competition and the world market96 – as well as the mechanisms of
subsumption necessary to incorporate non-capitalist production into the cap-
italist world market. The concept of the inbetween can thus be considered as
the dialectical counterpart to the annihilation of space by time: it highlights
the dynamics of historical spatio-temporal barriers, politically, technologically
and at the level of production relations, rather than their mere ‘overcoming’.
Marx’s considerations on social space and time are in this sense decisively
marked by the role of political organisation – and of the state specifically, in the
case of capitalism. This reinforces our previous indication about the necessity
to assume political forms as part of the mode of production. Harvey’s reading of
Capital Volumes ii and iii shows how the functioning of capitalism, albeit ulti-
mately depending on surplus value, also relies on the state’s investment in basic
social conditions. Among the latter is the construction of infrastructure, the
enforcement of laws, funding for education and health care, etc.; these belong
to the secondary and tertiary circuits of capital, which traditionally depend on
the state.97
Because each mechanism generates its own spatio-temporal tendencies, a
mode of production, as a complex mechanism, produces different, hierarch-
ically totalised space-times. Marx’s Capital discusses the production ‘founda-
tions’ upon which the upper strata of the capitalist mode of production emerge,
as a totalisation that serves as the fundamental criterion of periodisation.
However, he also outlines some elements about the kinds of political organisa-
tion that emerge from this stratum: in particular, the state – which can assume

95 Marx 1973, pp. 516–23. On the spatio-temporal problems of circulation, see Dussel 1985,
pp. 251–65.
96 According to Dussel, the concept of ‘dependency’ would have been elaborated by Marx
in his treatises on competition between capitals, through the concept of ‘total national
capital’. Regarding the latter concept, Dussel indicates that ‘the existence of the “national
fact” in no way denies dependency, nor vice versa. Both exist: one as the partial substance
(the nation), the other as the connection in competition (and therefore, explaining the
transfer of surplus value from one “nation” to another, nothing more and nothing less)’.
Dussel 2001, p. 262.
97 Harvey 1989, pp. 61–6.

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many historical contents – is shown as a necessary product of capitalist rela-

tions98 that generates its own social spaces and times different from those of
production, but related to them through diverse mediations and, eventually,
through direct contradictions. The territorial spatio-temporal logic of the state
thus comes into conflict with the transnational tendencies of capital – the
world market being capital’s immanent and predominant spatial tendency.
It is thus convenient to conclude, against Sayer’s position, that the explan-
ation of the development of a social form requires its spatio-temporalisation
in respect to the mode of production. Under capitalism, in particular, such
explanation locates the form within systemic cycles (the Kondratieff waves
especially), and in relation to centre-semiperiphery-periphery configurations
as well as the alternating scales of the world- and regional- (especially national)
markets. These considerations are necessary in order to explain uneven and
combined development in the capitalist mode of production, but are not
necessarily valid for other modes of production, whose mechanisms call for
other spatio-temporal models.99

2.3 Space-Time in Historical Explanation

A mode of production determines a set of laws, but their concrete functioning

occurs in contexts where other mechanisms interfere with them, generating
the processes and events that constitute actual history. In this sense, Marx’s
theory of capitalism as a mode of production, as Echeverría observes, estab-
lishes the conditions of possibility of corresponding actual historical realities,
and yet the explanation of particular cases in capitalist societies requires the
consideration of other historical conditions.100 Thus when analysing specific
cases, the development of the specific states and their international economic
relations are fundamental for Marx’s explanation; his concept of a ‘mode of

98 Jessop 1982, pp. 1–31.

99 Pierre Vilar mentions Juglar and Ancien Régime cycles as examples of non-capitalist sys-
temic cycles. See Vilar 1999, pp. 98–105.
100 Echeverría 1995, p. 112. As Wacquant indicates, ‘societies grow not as structural types but
as social formations plunged in specific natural and sociohistorical environments. This
requires that the analyst curtail the span of attention to definite geo-temporal ensembles;
this is exactly what Marx does in his own historical studies’. Wacquant 1985, p. 35. In a
similar manner, Wallerstein’s characterisation of historical capitalism – as opposed to the
abstract, theoretical explanation of capitalism – illustrates the difference between the
levels of the mode of production and the social formation at the world-system scale. Wall-
erstein 2011, pp. 18–19.

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production’ does not exhaust his theory of history, but is rather its necessary
point of departure. His analyses of particular cases suggest elements that he
might have included in his theory of history, had he seen his plan of the theor-
isation of the modern world to fruition.
In any event, like the scientific objects of meteorology, evolutionary biology
and geology, actual history is an open system, and causality in it is more com-
plex than in a closed system; its capacity to predict events is much more limited
than in a closed system. This is not due to any flaw in this scientific approach,
but to its very object: its mode of explanation is a posteriori, through the incor-
poration of other mechanisms, along with those that are central to the theory –
that of a mode of production in Marx’s case. Thus the analysis of social form-
ations necessarily entails a degree of contingency which does not exist in the
more abstract level of the mode of production.101
Marx argues, for example, that capitalist production developed earliest in
Italy, but the revolution in the world market at the end of the eighteenth cen-
tury destroyed the Italian commercial supremacy, reversing that process with
an unprecedented impulse towards small-scale cultivation.102 The case in Cap-
ital shows that the existence of capitalist relations based on a dispossessed
labour force does not guarantee on its own the development of capitalism; here
the emergence of a new world-system largely aborted northern Italy’s ongoing
path of production. This adequately illustrates Sayer’s assertion that

the same mechanism can produce different outcomes … according to its

spatio-temporal relations with other objects, having their causal powers
and liabilities, which may trigger, block or modify its action. Given the
variety and changeability of the contexts of social life, this absence of reg-
ular associations between ‘causes’ and ‘effects’ should be expected.103

In his analyses of specific formations and conjunctures, Marx starts by relat-

ing empirical agents – groups or individuals – with the classes and fractions of
classes that register the contradictory tendencies around the processes of pro-
duction; each generative mechanism has its own spatio-temporal tendencies,
but has to adapt to the concrete conditions of the context where it actually

101 See Grüner 2005, pp. 24–5; also, Lukács 1978, p. 103. On the unpredictability of open sys-
tems: Bhaskar 2008, pp. 118–26. Gaddis also calls attention to this feature of history shared
with the historical natural sciences. Gaddis 2002, pp. 35–52.
102 Marx 1976b, p. 876.
103 Sayer 2000, pp. 15–16.

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develops.104 This allows Marx to move between the empirical and the real, and
thus to account for the actuality of the conjuncture in a concrete manner, in
which space and time play an essential role. In these analyses, struggles for and
against the state have particularly clear spatio-temporal determinations that
are intimately related to the stratum of economic production. The Marxian
analyses of the U.S. Civil War, the Paris Commune, and ‘so-called primitive
accumulation’ are emblematic of this conception.
These cases have different delimitations: while the primary space of the ana-
lysis of the Commune is the city of Paris, the articles on the Civil War occur
basically in the territory of the United States, and the specific locus of Capital’s
explanation of the origins of capitalism is the English countryside. As for their
temporal delimitations, the first takes place in the lapse of around two months,
while the conflict between Union and Confederacy lasted for four years – of
which Marx’s writings refer to the first two. ‘So-called primitive accumulation’,
on the other hand, develops between the last third of the fifteenth century –
with the first mass evictions from common lands – and the last decades of the
eighteenth century – with the advent of large scale industry.105
However, each of these processes cannot be explained by following these
delimitations alone; on the contrary, Marx’s conception of spatio-temporal dif-
ferentiality becomes clear in his treatment of particular cases. Since the explan-
ation of an open system implies the relation between several mechanisms –
each of which, as we have already seen, produces its own spatio-temporal
dynamic of scale, configuration and rhythm – these analyses highlight the mul-
tiplicity of social spaces and times needed in order to approach a historical
process.
For instance, since The Civil War in France deals with a political event, the
short duration of punctual events and individual figures play a more important
role here than in other of his works. However, while the main events happen in
Paris, they are not comprehensible without reference to the Franco-Prussian
war and the National Assembly (‘The Assembly of the Rurals’) in Bordeaux;
Marx’s explanation of the rise and fall of the Commune resorts to the French
and European scales. In terms of temporal scale, in this piece Marx emphas-

104 The last chapter of Capital Volume i, on the colonies, gives another example of this medi-
ation of mode of production and spatio-temporal singular conditions: the availability of
land for European settlers in the colonies prevented the formation of a surplus labour
force, and hence the development of capitalist accumulation and concentration. Capit-
alist dispossession had to be promoted through direct coercive rather than indirect eco-
nomic means. Marx 1976b, pp. 931–40.
105 Marx 1976b, pp. 878, 922.

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ises the historical geography of state power in France – a two hundred year
process of centralisation – as the background for the short time span of most
of the writing, and he relates the transformations in this political process with
the power shifts between social classes in this period, which in turn refer to the
space-times of the stratum of production.106 The French conjuncture of 1848–
50 is a constant reference, especially in order to indicate the changes during
the twenty years of Bonapartian rule. Marx analyses this conjuncture extens-
ively in Class Struggles in France and his 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, and
probably the lack of a deeper economic and class analysis in The Civil War in
France is due to Marx’s implicit reliance on those previous works.
While the main spatio-temporal approach in this pamphlet was short-scale,
the longue-durée and transcontinental scale prevails in Capital’s explanation of
the origins of capitalism, where Marx relates four intertwined processes: first,
the revolution in the form of appropriation of land into a regime of private own-
ership, which generated an early proletariat and the ascent of capitalist farm-
ers; second, the emergence of a state that privileged capitalist interests through
coercion and economic policies, and that especially benefited the rise of non-
agricultural capitalists; third, the imposition of colonialism on the world scale.
Finally, the fourth is a shorter process – it took place during slightly more than
one century – which Marx summarises briefly: the agricultural revolution.
These processes responded to different mechanisms, and thus their space-
times differed from each other in terms of scales, spatial configurations and
rhythms; Marx’s account of ‘so-called primitive accumulation’ seeks to explain
the English case, but in order to do so it shifts spatially from that territory to
the world market, noting the discontinuity and contradictions between the
national and the international scales. Moreover, his explanation of the origins
of capitalism indicates a profound and violent reconfiguration of social times

106 Marx argues that centralisation had been fundamental in the struggle against feudalism
in France, but the state evolved into a parasitic entity with ‘ubiquitous organs of stand-
ing army, police, bureaucracy, clergy and judicature – organs wrought after the plan of a
systematic and hierarchic division of labour’. Marx 1986, p. 328. While generating national
debt and heavy taxes, the state apparatus concentrated in Paris became increasingly a site
of patronage and an engine of class despotism, especially after 1830, when the capital-
ists took the government from the class of landlords. Thus, through a highly asymmetrical
production of its national space, Paris had become a centre of accumulation of political
and economic power at the expense of the rest of the country: France was an epitome of
uneven development. This was of course also an accumulation in terms of infrastructure.
Thus Marx as puts it about the burning of buildings during the retreat of the Communards:
‘the Commune knew that its opponents cared nothing for the lives of the Paris people, but
cared much for their own Paris buildings’. Marx 1986, p. 351; see also pp. 329–30.

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and spaces both in Western Europe and its colonies,107 leading to the com-
plex geography of centres and peripheries – based on asymmetrical flows of
wealth – that characterises the modern world-system108 and without which the
establishment of wage relations would have not been possible.
Thus, the four-century period between the first laws of expropriation and
the industrial revolution created the conditions for the emergence of several
fractions of the capitalist class in England: there was a wealthy class of capital-
ist farmers – tenant farmers who hired waged-labourers to work in those lands
and paid a part of the surplus product to their landlord – by the end of the six-
teenth century. Non-agricultural capitalists, on the other hand, consolidated as
an economic force in a much less gradual way than their rural counterparts,
but also appealed to more complex mechanisms in order to achieve it. They
drew from ancient forms of capital – usury and merchant’s capital – and new
production methods in manufacture, but also developed a combination of new
state policies destined to benefit them as a class: colonial rule, national debt,
the modern tax system and system of protection. By the end of the seventeenth
century England had implemented this combination.109 Hence, this period of
formation of an English capitalist class took around two centuries, a period that
set the basis of the modern national state-system. In addition to this, the legis-
lation for the expropriation of peasants that started in the fourteenth century,
encompassing laws against vagabondage, against trade unions and for the reg-
ulation of wages (to the benefit of capitalists), clearly outlined the state as a
central agent in the service of capitalist transformation.
The agricultural revolution, in turn, emerged in the last third of the fifteenth
century and extended over most of the sixteenth, thanks to ‘the revolution in

107 The colonial system was essential in Marx’s explanation of the origins of capitalism,
because the colonies were markets for the metropolitan manufacturers, to which they –
through looting, enslavement and murder – provided products (among them, the metals
necessary for a money-driven economy) that generated capital. As Marx writes, sarcastic-
ally, ‘these idyllic proceedings are the chief moments of primitive accumulation’. Marx
1976b, p. 915. On the historical necessity of capitalism to exploit labour in the colonies as
well as in the central economies, see Grüner 2015; also Anievas and Nişancioğlu 2015.
108 The implementation of the colonial system went in hand with the consolidation of the
territory of the Western European national states. The subordination of the colonies –
through such means as the international credit system and metropolitan protectionism,
when not simply through open violence – implied the competition between the strongest
economic and military powers, and the definition of clear national boundaries. In this
sense, Sassen argues that in Europe the concept of a territorial state was alien to the
Middle Ages, and only came to be a well-established type of political organisation dur-
ing the 1600s. Sassen 2008, pp. 41, 61–3.
109 Marx 1976b, pp. 905–7, 915.

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property relations on the land … accompanied by improved methods of cultiv-

ation, greater co-operation, a higher concentration of the means of production
and so on, and because the agricultural wage-labourers were made to work at
higher level of intensity’.110 The processes of the commodification of soil and
labour force – and, with them, of space and time – were decisively accelerated
due to these technical transformations.
Marx makes it clear that he does not consider ‘so-called primitive accumu-
lation’ as a universally necessary pattern of transition to capitalism, but does
find that it was a model for the explanation of the emergence of this mode
of production in the Western European countries,111 especially in France and
the Netherlands. Indeed, Marx finds common legislation, policies and imperial
behaviour between the English élites and their French and Dutch counter-
parts.112 In this sense, this section of Capital develops a historical case study
of the origins of English capitalism, but also points towards an abstract model
of large-scale social transformation in which uneven development is a con-
stitutive characteristic. In this measure, the abstraction from Marx’s (theo-
retically-based) empirical explanation – which is not merely deducted from
the internal laws of a mode of production – also helps to explain other cases.113
Marx’s analyses of the U.S. Civil War provide a yet more complex treatment
in terms of spatio-temporal forms; beyond the analysis of a conjuncture, as

110 Marx 1976b, p. 908.

111 In the French edition of Capital, the last modified by Marx, he clarifies this position: ‘the
basis of this whole development is the expropriation of the cultivators. So far, it has been
carried out in a radical manner only in England: therefore this country will necessarily play
the leading role in our sketch. But all the countries of Western Europe are going through the
same development, although in accordance with the particular environment it changes its
local color, or confines itself to a narrower sphere, or shows a less pronounced character,
or follows a different order of succession’. Translated and quoted by Anderson 2010, p. 179.
See also Marx’s ‘Letter to Otechestvenniye Zapiski’ Marx 1989b [presumably written in
November 1877].
112 The comparative history of these national cases (as open systems) would hence reveal the
efficiency of the mechanisms described by this model as abstracted from its original Eng-
lish reference. About comparative history – a central project for history as a science in the
twentieth century – see Bloch 1928, pp. 15–50.
113 Based on these mechanisms of capital accumulation, Rosa Luxemburg maintains that
capitalism requires the dispossession of resources from non-capitalist modes of produc-
tion as much as it needs the exploitation of its own working class; according to her model
of capital accumulation, an ‘outside’ – controlled through imperialistic militarism – is
structurally necessary for capitalism. Parting from this thesis, David Harvey argues that
‘so-called primitive accumulation’ is inherent to the structure of capitalism, which per-
manently seeks to turn common and public property into capital assets. Luxemburg 2003,
pp. 432–3; Harvey 2003, pp. 137–82.

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in his analysis of the Commune, he elaborates a study of the social formation

taking place in the United States. Blackburn indicates that for Marx this Civil
War had three causes, all due to the need of the territorial expansion of the
South: the exhaustion of their soil for agriculture; the need to keep their veto
power in the Senate, which implied the minting of new slave states to match the
new ‘free’ states; and the existence of a numerous class of restive young whites,
which could generate domestic problems if they were not to find an external
outlet.114 With this multi-causal explanation, Blackburn tries to evade accusa-
tions of economism often formulated against Marx, who in any case explicitly
denies that the war was motivated by the conflict between a protectionist and
free trade system.115
However, we should observe – if we are not to unnecessarily consider Marx’s
analysis completely separated from his theory of history – that the three causes
correctly indicated by Blackburn do not have the same explanatory import-
ance. From this point of view, the basis of the conflict has to do with soil as
means of production. Marx suggests that:

The cultivation of the southern export articles, cotton, tobacco, sugar, etc.,
carried on by slaves, is only remunerative as long as it is conducted with
large gangs of slaves, on a mass scale and on wide expanses of a naturally
fertile soil, which requires only simple labour. Intense cultivation, which
depends less on fertility of the soil than on investment of capital, intelli-
gence and energy of labour, is contrary to the nature of slavery. Hence the
rapid transformation of states like Maryland and Virginia, which formerly
employed slaves in the production of export articles, into states which
raise slaves to export them into the deep South. … As soon as this point is
reached, the acquisition of new Territories becomes necessary, so that one
section of the slaveholders with their slaves may occupy new fertile lands
and that a new market for slave-raising, therefore for the sale of slaves,
may be created for the remaining section.116

The territorial problem was hence due to the struggle of two different spatio-
temporal configurations of capitalist production as a conflictual unity within
the United States,117 both with a tendency to expansion, but differing in regard

114 Blackburn 2011, p. 9.

115 This position was originally quite popular in The Economist and other London-based
newspapers. Marx 1984e, pp. 32–3.
116 Marx 1984e, pp. 39–40.
117 Marx 1984c, pp. 43, 50; Marx 1984a, p. 60.

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to the relations between labour and capital – each represented a different

mode of exploitation.118 Since production under slave labour could only exploit
the soil for relatively short lapses of time, open conflict was then a matter of
time: the imminence of the exhaustion of their available soil precipitated the
outburst of Southern hostilities when the presidential elections – along with
the ongoing development of free labour in the Northwestern states – proved
adverse to the interests of slave-holders.119
Marx uses these abstract spatio-temporal models in order to explain the sin-
gular, contingent geography of the United States and its specific political and
demographical conditions. However, in his explanation the abstract spatio-
temporal tendencies of capitalism have to adapt to the actual geographical con-
ditions of the territory of the United States. The latter are particularly import-
ant to him, in order to demonstrate why slavery was not strongly supported in
the border states. He finds that there is a relation between the number of slaves
and number of free persons in respect to the political attitude about slavery:
the bigger the proportion of slaves in a state, the stronger its tendency towards
slavery.120 In turn, this refers, as he notes, to a correlation between highlands
and free labour, and between lowlands and slavery:

the two lowlands separated by the mountainous country, with their vast
rice swamps and far-flung cotton plantations, are the actual area of slav-
ery. The long wedge of mountainous country driven into the heart of
slavery, with its correspondingly clear atmosphere, an invigorating cli-
mate and a soil rich in coal, salt, limestone, iron, ore, gold, in short,
every raw material necessary for a many-sided industrial development,
is already for the most part free country. In accordance with its physical
constitution, the soil here can only be cultivated with success by free small
farmers. Here the slave system vegetates only sporadically and has never

118 Against the narratives of modernisation and progress that criticise slavery in terms of
‘backwardness’, Marx insists on the capitalist nature of modern slavery, noting that such
barbarism was the condition for the achievements of capitalist civilisation. Marx 1982a,
pp. 101–2; Marx 1973, pp. 224, 513. Banaji argues that modern slavery was a specific mode
of exploitation within capitalism; he concludes that ‘the slave-plantations were capitalist
enterprises of a patriarchal and feudal character producing absolute surplus-value on the
basis of slave-labour and a monopoly in land’. Banaji 2011, p. 71.
119 According to Marx, on the other hand, had the North not contained the expansion of
slavery, the latter would have ended up swallowing the Northern industry, and reducing
its working class to helotry. Marx 1984c, p. 50; Marx 1985, p. 416.
120 Marx 1984c, pp. 45–8.

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struck root. In the larger part of the so-called border states, the dwellers
of these highlands comprise the core of the free population, which sides
with the North if only for the sake of self-preservation.121

The South, in particular, due to its lack of industry and its concentration of
land for extensive agriculture meant for foreign trade, developed a spatial con-
figuration without big urban centres: ‘In densely populated and more or less
centralised states there is always a center, with the occupation of which by the
enemy the national resistance would be broken. … The slave states, however,
possess no such center. They are sparsely populated, with few large towns and
all these on the seacoast’.122 This meant that for the South the most important
means of communication was the railway, rather than the highways, which in
military terms made them more vulnerable if the Unionists took control of a
couple of strategic points. In such a case, the Confederacy would be torn in two
incommunicable camps.123
Marx’s explanation of the causes and development of the U.S. Civil War thus
prioritises the spatio-temporal conditions of economic production,124 but also
recognises the determinate role of politics and the military – the latter espe-
cially based on Engels’s studies – as generating mechanisms with their own cor-
responding spatio-temporal scales and dynamics. Moreover, this explanation
has its ultimate reference in the world scale, in the conflict between national
sovereignty and world market. Marx notes that the effects of the North Amer-

121 Marx 1984c, p. 44. The emphasis is mine.

122 See Marx and Engels 1984, p. 193. This configuration without big urban centres implies a
strong concentration of resources with luxury consumption by the slave-holders, which
substitutes for the consumption by slaves; the urban economic centres needed by the
Southern system were located in the Northern states and in Europe – hence the import-
ance of the railways. Marx 1973, pp. 434, 528. This is the reason why Marx considers that
the South could not be said to be a country on its own, sealed off from the North: while the
latter had achieved a certain level of self-sufficiency due to its industrial development, its
slave-holding counterpart depended on the wage-based capitalism of its neighbour and
from abroad. As Marx affirms some years before the war, ‘if … the Negro states were isol-
ated, then all social conditions there would immediately turn into pre-civilised forms’.
Marx 1973, p. 224. See also Marx 1984c, p. 43.
123 Marx and Engels 1984, p. 194. This came to happen when the Northern army took hold
of New Orleans, which isolated West Louisiana, Texas, Missouri and Arkansas from the
Confederate government. Marx 1984f, pp. 201, 205.
124 In their private correspondence, Marx argues with Engels that these conditions would
prevail in the outcome of the War in favour of the North, over the military conditions that
at the time of this exchange tended toward the South. He concludes: ‘It strikes me that
you allow yourself to be influenced by the military aspect of things a little too much’. Marx
1985, p. 416.

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ican conflict were felt in the whole capitalist world-system: the cotton shortage
from the United States could not be replaced by British industry with Indian
cotton, due to the lack of means of communication and transport in India,
and to the bad conditions of its peasant working force. It would have taken
years before India could produce as much cotton as provided by the United
States.125 The consequent rising price of this product seriously affected Brit-
ish textile production, a problem further aggravated by the contraction of the
Indian and Chinese markets. Marx’s analysis indicates that while during the
first year of the war in the U.S., British exports around the world – except for
Italy – declined, the French imports grew considerably, as did the imports from
the Union.126 A British military intervention – championed for some time by a
part of the London press – might have changed the course of the war in favour
of the South, but was dismissed due to the British dependency on Northern
grain, the importance of investment in the Northern states (Marx also notes
the importance of English letters of credit in the commerce of the United States
with China and Australia), and the very high expenses of such a war.127
Marx’s analysis of this case is thus particularly interesting because it reveals
two different – interdependent yet competing – kinds of capitalist spatio-
temporal development, and situates them in their specific geographical condi-
tions. Once again, the formation of the world market is of the greatest import-
ance for capitalist spatio-temporal development, but it is not merely a register
of abstract social relations: material conditions such as topography or the
decreasing fertility of the soil are determinants for its concrete functioning.
Marx hence provides a complex explanation of the U.S. Civil War through
several spatio-temporal planes (natural-geographic, economic, political, mil-
itary), each with its own rhythms and configurations, and at both the national
territory- and world-scales. This explanation relies on a combination of social
forms which, although in general oriented towards the accumulation of capital,
cannot be reduced to one single abstract mechanism.128

125 Marx 1984d, p. 56. Indeed, Marx later affirms that in India, ‘as a result of the great demand
for cotton after 1861, its production was extended at the expense of rice cultivation in some
otherwise thickly populated districts of eastern India. In consequence, there arose local
famines, because, owing to deficiencies in the means of communication, and hence the
absence of physical links, failures of the rice crop in one district could not be compensated
by importing supplies from other districts’. Marx 1976b, p. 473.
126 Marx 1984c, pp. 18–9 and Marx 1984g, pp. 63–5.
127 Marx 1984h, p. 111; Marx 1984i, pp. 128–9; Marx 1984j, p. 132; Marx 1984k, pp. 231.
128 In capitalism, such combination is ultimately achieved through subsumption, by which
the labour-times of the different forms of production are synchronised – ultimately
through universal clock-time. As elaborated in the first chapter, this is a central position

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Epilogue

For Marx, historical explanation entails a dialectic between the abstract and
the concrete, where the abstract models help one to grasp particular histor-
ical processes. This is not, however, a one-way process of knowledge, since the
explanation of the latter in turn provides new concepts and models that con-
tribute to theory at a more abstract level. There is a return from the abstract
to the concrete, but the latter also opens the way for new abstractions that
broaden the knowledge of social forms – and eventually, provide approaches to
their transformation. Hence, against interpretations that downplay Marx’s ana-
lyses of actual historical conjunctures, as Grüner says, ‘those historical studies
are not mere applications of a previously finished general theory on a particu-
lar case. On the contrary, each “case study” helps to advance the theory, to open
new fields of knowledge for it and to provide new modes of production of such
knowledge’.129
The consideration of determinations through spatio-temporal models intro-
duces more precision into the elements for historical explanation enumer-
ated by Fulbrook: it redefines the problems and questions posed to historical
research, as well as the concepts and methods required to answer them. It
highlights the need to organise existing sources according to different spatio-
temporal processes in a formation, but also to assure the representation of such
sources in it. Ultimately, it leads to forms of representation adequate to explain
a complex totalisation.
As Tilly indicates, historical analysis should consider ‘that space-time con-
nections define social processes and that social processes operate differently
as a function of their placement in space and time’.130 Time and space are
hence indispensable for social explanation due to their function as indexes of

of Harootunian’s theory of historical time in his Marx After Marx (although, as noted
above, he overemphasises the role of formal subsumption), Harootunian 2015b, pp. 55–
72. On universal clock-time, see Martineau 2016, pp. 107–62. In turn, Martineau draws on
Tomba’s interpretation of Marx, according to which, ‘in the world-market, the capitalist
mode of production encounters traditional and unwaged forms of production, which are
not specifically capitalist, and are inserted into the capitalist market in hybrid forms of
subsumption. In this way, patriarchal forms of exploitation and new forms of slavery not
only coexist with high-tech production, but also combine with it’. Tomba 2013a, p. 168. See
also above, 1.3.
129 Grüner 2005, p. 24. The risk of not thinking the relation between the abstract and the con-
crete in a dialectical manner is to incur what Banaji calls bad theory, the ‘substitution of
purely theoretical explanations for historical research and/or recourse to a theory that is
itself simply a string of abstractions’. Banaji 2011, p. 8.
130 Tilly 2006, p. 568.

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the singularity of the studied case; the concrete analysis of a formation should
determine the specific physical space and chronological time of the processes
analysed – otherwise, we are not dealing with history.131 Hence, as a historical
event, it is firstly imperative to locate the first battle of the Civil War of the
United States in Fort Sumter, South Carolina, on 12 April 1861, before relating it
to other historical events and processes.
But beyond this purely formal criterion, historical explanation should ac-
count for the diverse social spaces and times as mechanisms with their own
dynamics and active conditions in social relations. Thus, in order to explain the
causes and consequences of the Civil War of the United States, as we have seen,
it is necessary to take into account aspects such as the differences between the
forms of capitalist exploitation in the Southern and the Northern states as well
as the cycles of electoral politics in the country. The consideration of spatio-
temporal models accounting for the diverse mechanisms thus contributes to
Marxian historical explanation by helping to organise social relations in a par-
ticular formation, and by indicating hypothetical patterns of social activity and
transformation derived from them. Marx’s historical explanations are therefore
always multi-temporal and multi-spatial, and they ultimately refer the percept-
ible social conflicts, through diverse mediations, to specific class antagonisms
and modes of production in the particular formation.
The spatio-temporal development of the concrete social formations, as open
systems, should be explained from the interactions and tensions of several
forms, among which unforeseen elements (whose incidence is often seen as
contingent) should also be taken into account.132 Marx’s explanation priorit-
ises the strata of economic production and secondarily that of the political,
incorporating other spheres according to the kind of social form he specifically
analyses – his analysis of the Commune, for example, is particularly situated
within the realm of politics. Every mode of production has inherent spatio-
temporal tendencies, which are actually deployed according to other relevant
mechanisms in the social formation.

131 This delimitation comes up in the title or subtitle of every historiographical writing, but
can be implied by other textual means. We can consider this formal element as a tran-
scendental condition of historiography.
132 ‘[World history] would, on the other hand, be of a very mystical nature, if “accidents”
played no part. These accidents themselves fall naturally into the general course of devel-
opment and are compensated again by other accidents. But acceleration and delay are
very dependent upon such “accidents”, which include the “accident” of the character of
those who first stand at the head of the movement’. Marx, ‘Letter to Kugelman, 17th April
1871’, in Marx 1989a, p. 137.

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The differentiation between levels of abstraction is thus methodologically

fundamental. Accordingly, spaces and times become more concrete in the dia-
lectical process of knowledge, corresponding to the level of totalisation to
which they refer. The consideration of uneven and combined development –
which is clarified by the spatio-temporal models – is then indispensable for
the explanation of an actual social formation and its conjunctures. Moreover,
this consideration has decisive implications for the phases of documentary
research and historiographical representation.

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In Marx’s Archive

He regards it as his task to brush history against the grain.1

…
In general terms, we keep few pieces, those that we insert into a
wider argument. But this rejected archive is not absent: it goes with
us, beats under the text because it has convinced us about many
things.2

∵
In the epistemology of history, the documentary phase encompasses the oper-
ations required in order to transform a historical source into documentary
evidence;3 it thus provides the most basic criteria for the epistemic validity
of a historiographical interpretation.4 As Ricoeur argues, this phase deals not
only with the selection and criticism of sources but also with the evaluation of
the truth or falseness of the facts constructed and established by the historian,

1 Benjamin 1999, p. 257.

2 Caimari 2017.
3 Ricoeur uses the expression documentary proof ; however, documentary evidence is epistemo-
logically more accurate, given the more definite sense of the former expression. If the estab-
lishing of a fact is indicative (but not conclusive) of the occurrence or non-occurrence of an
event, evidence better describes the relation between them, since – unlike the term proof –
it leaves open the possibility of the eventual refutation of the fact. Ricoeur 2004, pp. 176–
80.
4 This is precisely the reason why Hayden White suspends the consideration of this phase, opt-
ing instead for a formalistic approach where historians and philosophers of history share a
common ground: ‘in consideration of such thinkers, I will moot the issue of which represents
the most correct approach to historical study. Their status as possible models of historical rep-
resentation or conceptualisation does not depend upon the nature of the “data” they used to
support their generalisations or the theories they invoked to explain them; it depends rather
upon the consistency, coherence and illuminative power of their respective visions of their
historical field’. White 2014, p. 4.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2022 | doi:10.1163/9789004499911_005

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which should be ‘capable of being asserted in singular, discrete propositions,

most often having to do with the mentioning of dates, places, proper names,
verbs that name an action or state’.5
Hence, source criticism is one of the cornerstones of historical knowledge.
Yet although modern historians have always been aware of the active role of
sources – this even includes the traditional methods of criticism of historians
allegedly limiting their research to ‘bare facts’6 – it is particularly social histor-
ians in the twentieth century who have grappled with the implications of the
social production of sources. In this line, the great medievalist Jacques Le Goff
points out that

the document is not a stagnated commodity from the past; it is a product

of the society that has manufactured it according with power relations
between forces. Only the analysis of the document as such allows the col-
lective memory to recover it, and the historian to use it scientifically, that
is, with full awareness of its causes.7

However, the predominantly institutional character of the documents calls not

only for the awareness of each of the documents used, but also of the criteria
by which those documents have been produced and preserved: the criticism
of the archive – conceived as an epistemological and methodological moment
rather than a passive collection of documents – is then the first step in this
phase. Since dialectics does not assume that phenomena reveal reality imme-
diately, but considers them as sediments and artifacts of the social praxis of
humankind themselves,8 the critique of the conditions of production of empir-
ical data is an essential part of the process of knowledge in which such data
partakes. Yet historical sources are even more complicated, because they are
phenomena that refer to other phenomena; they pertain to the realm of the
empirical, albeit in an indirect manner, as traces of the actual processes that
have taken place.
Although Marx’s methodological considerations stress the role of theory,
his approach to sources available to him reveal his method of criticism at the
documentary phase. This treatment is necessary in order to produce reliable
information for the different levels of the abstraction of historical knowledge.
Historical sources – and primary sources in particular – are the material from

5 Ricoeur 2004, p. 178.

6 Langlois and Seignobos 1904.
7 Le Goff 1991, p. 236.
8 Kosík 1976, p. 6.

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which singular facts that integrate the realm of the empirical are elaborated,
and this realm is necessary in order to know the actual processes and eventu-
ally the real mechanisms at work in a social context. In this sense, independent
of which theories are used to question the sources, the limits of the archive –
with its temporal and spatial determinations – are the limits of the possible his-
toriographies based on it. Theory defines the kind of sources to be sought and
the questions posed to them, but the sources cannot be reduced to the former;
as Sayer states, the fact that observation is theory-laden does not mean that it
is unilaterally determined by theory.9 This point is fundamental to Marx’s doc-
umentary critique.
The examination of this phase of Marx’s conception of history in this chap-
ter starts with a general description of his archive and method of source cri-
ticism – including his critique of ideology in the sources. The second section
deals with several Marxian concepts and historical interpretations – his treat-
ment of pre-capitalist modes of production and the Asian mode of production
specifically, as well as his piece on Simón Bolívar – that have been accused of
Eurocentrism, in order to clarify in what measure such spatio-temporal bias is
attributable to Marx’s theory, or to his archive.
Finally, the third section addresses historical processes analysed by Marx –
the Paris Commune in The Civil War in France, the U.S. Civil War, and ‘so-called
primitive accumulation’ – from the standpoint of more recent historiography,
in order to examine the spatio-temporal explanatory possibilities of Marxian
theory in light of more recent sources. Moreover, the productive use by these
new explanations of different spatio-temporal operations for the examination
of these cases (spatial analysis and internal displacement of focus, spatio-
temporal scale shifting) contributes, as well, to the thesis in this book about
the necessity of considering space and time in the formulation of historical
explanations: that is, as indispensable mediations of every social totalisation.

3.1 Documentary Critique and Critique of Ideology

Marx is well aware of the spatial and temporal determinations of his theoretical
activity, and specifically the ramifications of doing research in London, rather
than in Germany or France:

9 Sayer 1992, p. 73. This irreducibility of the empirical to theoretical claims contradicts the relat-
ivist thesis of the incommensurability of paradigms. In this line, Adorno argues that there is
a surplus in the object that cannot be reduced to the identity of the concept. Adorno 2004,
pp. 183–86; see also Sayer 1992, pp. 65–71.

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in marx’s archive 97

The enormous amount of material relating to the history of political eco-

nomy assembled in the British Museum, the fact that London is a conveni-
ent vantage point for the observation of bourgeois society, and finally the
new stage of development which this society seemed to have entered with
the discovery of gold in California and Australia, induced me to start again
from the very beginning and to work carefully through the new material.10

Although it is unlikely that Marx planned to stay in London for the rest of his
life,11 it was nonetheless a privileged place to investigate the development of the
capitalist mode of production at his time. As Anderson remarks, not only was
Marx in the only properly industrial capitalist economy, but also in the heart
of the world’s largest empire, from which he could be relatively well informed
about non-Western societies and colonialism. As the economic and political
centre of the British Empire, which produced huge amounts of paperwork and
collected objects from all over the world, London was by then also a centre
of information. Richards argues that this accumulation of data played a cent-
ral role in the ideology of the Empire during Victorian times; institutions like
the Royal Geographic Society, the Royal Society, the Royal Asiatic Society and,
of course, the British Museum – all of them based in London – constituted an
entire epistemological complex in the imperial mythology: an imagined imper-
ial archive.12
However, since Marx’s concept of history is not that of a ‘past’ left behind
in unilinear time, his sources were not limited to the conventional archives.
His analyses of current affairs required more recent sources, and thus funda-
mentally relied on an older, non-centralising institution: the postal service. This
system was an important means for the circulation of information and know-
ledge, through which Marx kept himself informed about current events like
the Paris Commune,13 and which allowed him to obtain pamphlets, newspa-

10 Marx 1987a, pp. 264–5.

11 Against Marx’s image as a political refugee forced to live in London, Karatani has argued
that he was pardoned in Germany in the 1850s, but chose to stay for research reasons.
However, this claim is not sufficiently sustained, nor explains why – as Sperber notes –
Marx was making plans to return to Germany as late as 1861. Karatani 2003, pp. 135–6;
Sperber 2013, p. 243.
12 Anderson 2010, p. 1; Black 2000. Richards 1993, pp. 14–15.
13 ‘What comforts me is the nonsense which the petite press publishes every day about my
writings and my relations with the Commune; this is sent to me each day from Paris. It
shows that the Versailles police is very hard put to it to get hold of genuine documents. My
relations with the Commune were maintained through a German merchant who travels
on business between Paris and London all the year round’. Marx 1989c, pp. 150–1.

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pers – whole or in cuts – and books from different countries, especially from
Europe. Newspapers were particularly important for the flow of information,
and London was a privileged hub for this kind of material.14 Private venues in
London collected information from countries and regions abroad; during the
U.S. Civil War, for instance, Marx attended a place called the ‘American Coffee-
house’, where he had access to newly arrived periodicals from the United States.
This proved to be important because, according to him, the British papers often
suppressed useful information about the war.15
However, the seat of the Empire also had its limitations as a vantage point,
the most obvious being the spectre of Eurocentrism – now a commonplace
accusation against Marx by scholars in post- and de-colonial studies16 (and an
issue I address in the next section). At this point, I have argued that the Marxian
conception of history as a decentred, multi-temporal and multi-spatial totalisa-
tion is incompatible with such ideological constructs. But did Marx’s archive
prevent him from overcoming them?
An examination of Marx’s historical sources is a useful starting point to
address this matter. In his more historiographical texts, he cites three kinds
of sources: books, official reports, and newspapers.17 These kinds of sources,
however, serve different functions in Marx’s explanation of historical processes,
especially with regard to temporality. Most of the longer-term processes – espe-
cially modes of production – are constructed on the basis of already exist-
ing historiography (that Marx reinterprets by conceptually problematising it),
while processes from the point of view of shorter-term temporalities – con-

14 ‘Besides railways and steamboats, the electric telegraph contributed decisively with the
acceleration of circulation in the nineteenth century press: dispatches began to be sent
routinely by wire to London newspapers from provincial centers or from abroad by means
of press agencies such as Reuters (1851), the Press Association (1868) and the Central News
Association (1870)’. Wiener 2015, pp. 212. Marx and Engels often exchanged newspapers
via mail, although from their correspondence it appears that Marx, in London, was better
situated than Engels, in Manchester, who more often asked Marx for these materials.
15 Marx 1985a, p. 305; Marx 1985b, p. 429. About the British press, see King 2007.
16 Chakrabarty 2000, pp. 47–71; Lander 2006, pp. 209–43. See below, 3.2.
17 Specifically, the main sources in this section are those which deal with the explanation
of particular spatio-temporal cases in Capital, Grundrisse, The Civil War in France, and
Marx’s articles on the U.S. Civil War. The English language edition of the mecw provides
a list of these sources: ‘Index of Quoted and Mentioned Literature’, in Marx and Engels
1984b, pp. 430–44; Marx and Engels 1986a, pp. 741–59; Marx and Engels 1986b, pp. 568–76;
Marx and Engels 1987, pp. 564–5; Marx and Engels 1996, pp. 818–52; Marx and Engels 1997,
pp. 540–6; Marx and Engels 1998, pp. 920–32. Other historical manuscripts are very occa-
sionally referenced, as in the case of the eccentric note on the Duchess of Orkney. Marx
1976b, p. 884.

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junctures, particularly – generally utilise testimonies, reports and newspapers.

Official sources, which often contain statistical information, also allow Marx to
address diverse social situations in specific moments, from the point of view of
national territories.
Regarding the processes of expropriation in Capital’s chapters on ‘primitive
accumulation’, Marx cites mostly British authors – which is to be expected in
a historical analysis centred on the development of English capitalism – and a
notable part of his secondary sources constitute the latest available research,
published after 1850. When he quotes other European historians, he does so
to indicate similar processes in neighbouring territories, hence observing a
common logic of capitalism beyond the particular conditions in each. The
section on precapitalist formations in the Grundrisse, on the other hand, is
largely based on Niebuhr’s Römische Geschichte (second edition, 1827), espe-
cially in regards to the ancient and Germanic forms of appropriation. This
three-volume book is abundant with ethnographical details, and for decades
was an unavoidable study on the matter, especially due to its thorough criticism
of sources, to which Ranke – the founder of modern documentary criticism –
was openly indebted.18 Marx also cites Dureau de la Malle’s Économie politique
des Romains (1840), another book detailing around a thousand years of Roman
civilisation. The availability of studies based on a considerable amount of data
from primary sources, comprising several centuries, facilitates the observation
of broader tendencies and the construction of more abstract models – particu-
larly modes of production. Large aggregates of data from sources are essential
for the method of abstraction, whereas an insufficient amount may lead to
models of strictly anecdotal validity. The higher the level of abstraction of the
conceptual totality to be constructed, the more ‘serialised’ the utilised sources
should be.
While testimonies and narratives of singular events are more important
when analyses deal with shorter conjunctures, when Marx considers longer
spans of time he also addresses punctual events, incorporating them into the
less observable long-term processes.19 The testimonies of ancients like Juvenal,
Cicero and Cato are used to illustrate and explain structures in the Formen

18 Iggers 1968, pp. 65–6.

19 Although in his letters Marx affirms the use of testimonies in some of his analyses, for
example regarding the cases of the U.S. Civil War and Paris Commune, he did not cite
them due to the format in which these studies were written – and also to protect his inter-
locutors, as in the case of the Parisian events of 1871. On Marx’s and Engels’s unpublished
sources, see Thompson 2000, pp. 42–3.

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section of the Grundrisse, while those of Thomas More, Francis Bacon and
Edmund Burke, among others, help to elaborate Marx’s histories of commerce,
finance and the privatisation of land ownership. Testimonies such as these are
regularly used by Marx as illustrations that help to make the effects of wider
social tendencies more representative.20
As opposed to testimonies, which usually account for singular events, offi-
cial reports enable one to determine patterns, because they are composed and
archived precisely in order to address situations of a similar type; they not
only help to illustrate a process, but to find spatial and temporal tendencies
in it.21 The production of these kinds of sources grew as the state assumed
new functions of social control over the population, eventually giving rise to
the science of statistics.22 The censuses of the United States in 186023 and of
England and Wales in 1861 allowed Marx to differentiate the spatial tendencies
within the respective national cases. His interpretation of these tendencies in
each of the regions of the United States (North, South, Intermediate and North-
western states) regarding the contradictions between slave and salaried labour
was based on the first census, while the second one was a main source for his
analysis of the labour force in Capital’s chapter on the general law of capitalist
accumulation, along with the reports on the state of public health and statistics
for agriculture in Ireland.24
In this use of official reports, Capital followed in the steps of Engels’s 1845
The Condition of the Working Class in England. Along with the aforementioned
reports on public health, other documents by commissioners and inspectors
dealt with the situation of transportation, agriculture, banking, child labour,
etc. Most of the official reports cited in Capital are British, with occasional
counterparts from the United States, France and Germany. Temporally, most

20 On the role of testimony for historiography, Ricoeur 2004, pp. 161–6; also Osborne 2013,
pp. 190–201.
21 The use of series of quantitative data is one of the most important methodological con-
tributions of twentieth-century social history, particularly in the fields of economic and
demographic history. Burke 1990, pp. 74–9.
22 The very concept of population is a product of this process. Foucault 2004; and Foucault
2009.
23 The editors of volume 19 of the Collected Works indicate that Marx obtained this census’s
data through a publication by the British newspaper The Times. See Marx 1984b, p. 45 foot-
note a.
24 This chapter of Capital is particularly attendant to space, both at the level of the differ-
ences between industry and agriculture in the British counties, and at the lived experi-
ences of the working class.

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of these documents are contemporary with Marx’s writing of Capital – the late
1850s and 1860s – with the exception of reports on factories, from which he util-
ises data from the 1840s for his chapters on the working day and in the fragment
on the cotton crisis in Volume iii.
While Marx occasionally cites French, Dutch or German official publica-
tions, he generally uses these sources in order to compare them with the Brit-
ish documents that are overwhelmingly prevalent in his analyses, from which
he presents the history of English capitalism as representative of the Western
European path to capitalism. Among the publications of legislative acts, the
1810 edition of the English Statutes of the Realm is particularly important for
Marx’s account of the laws against the expropriated between the sixteenth and
nineteenth centuries. This source reveals the tendency of the British élites to
respond with increasingly violent repression of the problems created by the
dispossession of the peasantry, but it does not show the concrete implementa-
tion of the laws in different regions and conjunctures. Therefore, and especially
in terms of space, the section on ‘primitive accumulation’ deals in a general
fashion with these processes in Britain.
Finally, Marx constantly draws upon periodicals in his writings. The Eco-
nomist is an ubiquitous interlocutor in his oeuvre, as a source both of data to
be reinterpreted and explanations to be refuted. On the other hand, although
cited in Capital – where they especially served as illustrations – newspapers
for mass consumption were, as mentioned before, particularly important for
Marx’s analyses of then-current situations and of short-term processes. Unsur-
prisingly, the editors of the volumes of the Collected Works corresponding to
Marx’s analyses of the U.S. and French civil wars find numerous references to
the press in the respective countries during these conjunctures. These sources
were not made explicit by Marx due to the original formats of these publica-
tions: newspaper articles in the case of the U.S. Civil War, and a pamphlet in
the case of the Paris Commune.
The variety of kinds of sources in Marx’s writings are indicative of the dif-
ferentiality of times in his approach to the processes he analyses; even in his
smaller-scale studies, Marx combines different spatial and temporal scales in
order to explain concrete conjunctures. Sources possess their respective levels
of abstraction, and the predominance in a text of a certain kind of source
depends on the principal scale of the historical process to be analysed – news-
papers do not usually interpret longue-durée processes, for example – as well
as the moment of their issue. Analytical studies of particular conjunctures and
historical periods, for example, take more time to get edited and published and
hence are not useful as main sources when addressing events currently in pro-
gress.

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In any case, the balance of Marx’s sources shows an overwhelming majority

of Western European – and particularly British – authors published in the nine-
teenth century. This is understandable given the intellectual world in which
Marx works, but of course suggests a spatio-temporal bias for the formulation
of his theory and analyses of social formations. Since Marx’s method does not
pretend to speak for the subaltern, but does intend to demonstrate how the
logic of capitalistic production creates subalternity – basically, but not exclus-
ively, class oppression – the critique of sources is fundamental to the kind of
history Marx is writing. Moreover, most of his sources are apologia for capital-
ism,25 hence making it indispensable for him to read through their omissions,
distortions and involuntary confessions; his treatment of sources follows the
systematic process of the critique of ideology, representative of an hermen-
eutics of suspicion.26 And just as a substantial part of Capital’s method con-
sists in indicating the inner contradictions of bourgeois political economy – its
immanent critique27 – his treatment of sources confronts the document with
the class standpoint of its author. This procedure does not assume the mere
falsity of the document’s content, but sheds new light on it.
Hence one of the strategies Marx follows is to criticise the insufficiency of
the interpretations of these authors in relation to the information within their
own expositions. His Ethnographic Notebooks, where he engages in a reading
of texts from several Western European observers of peripheral societies, is a
clear example of this kind of criticism. In his notebooks on Phear’s book, Marx
mocks this author’s affirmations that the social structure of the villages in West
Bengal is feudal and that the ‘private family’ is the basic unit in ‘Indoaryan’ soci-
eties.28 The latter thesis had also been assumed by Henry Maine (from whom
Phear draws some of his information in order to build his prototypes of ‘Aryan’
villages), who sought to justify the imposition of capitalist private property in
India. Marx is especially critical of Maine, indicating that his conclusions are

25 In Marx’s lifetime, documents from popular classes and other subaltern social sectors were
quite limited, a limitation that led researchers of popular cultures in the twentieth century
to the formulation of oral history.
26 Ricoeur 1970, pp. 32–7. Grüner explains that ‘Marx starts by accepting the “text” of bour-
geois political economy as a partial truth and then questions its “silences” and inconsist-
encies. … Marx produces his own theory, his own critical interpretation of capitalism … by
constructing upon those “voids” of classical economy’. Grüner 2005, p. 30.
27 Antonio 1981, pp. 330–45. Echeverría argues that Capital’s method of critique of polit-
ical economy corresponds to what Ginzburg calls an ‘evidential paradigm’, a reading that
reveals what is hidden through the observation of a text from the point of view of its symp-
toms. Echeverría 2003–4, pp. 29–34.
28 Marx 1974b, pp. 256, 281.

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drawn from the wrong theoretical assumptions – such as considering the state
as an autonomous entity in relation to society – and are rather soft on the clergy,
lawyers and higher classes.29
Marx also regularly criticises one of his most important sources of statistical
information, The Economist, by deconstructing its analyses of data. He states
about an article in late 1861:

from statistics given as to the population and the area of the United States,
he [the writer of the article] arrives at the conclusion that there would be
room enough for the establishment of at least seven vast empires, and
that consequently, ‘the dream of universal dominion’ ought to be ban-
ished from the hearts of the Unionists. The only rational inference which
The Economist might have drawn from its own statistical statements, viz.,
that the Northerners, even if they liked to do so, could not desist from
their claims without sacrificing to Slavery the vast States and Territories
‘in which Slavery still lingers, but cannot maintain itself as a permanent
institution’ – this only rational conclusion he successfully contrives not
even to touch upon.30

Remarks like these criticise the inconsistency of the conclusions by relating

them to the subject position of the authors. Although Marx often dismisses
authors by simply questioning their intelligence, when he criticises authors
that he respects, such as Smith or Ricardo, he relates their limitations to their
class positions.31 This kind of criticism is related to what Langlois’s and Sei-
gnobos’s Introduction to the Study of History – the manual of ‘positivistic’ his-
toriography par excellence – called negative internal criticism, where the good
faith and accuracy of the authors are evaluated.32 However, while these French
historians reduce this aspect of criticism to the possibility of superficial cognit-
ive or moral problems such as ‘error or mendacity’, Marx’s critique departs from
a conception where knowledge is mediated by the subject’s conditions. Hence

29 Krader 1974, p. 32; Marx 1974a, 326–30.

30 Marx 1984a, p. 60.
31 We can see the contrast between Marx’s creative insulting and his historicising criticism
in his description of Bentham as a ‘genius in the way of bourgeois stupidity’, on the one
hand, and his comments on Aristotle’s inability to conceive labour as a universal measure
and on Franklin’s definition of man as a tool-making animal, on the other. Marx 1976b,
pp. 759, 151–2, 444.
32 Burke 1990, pp. 6–11. Langlois and Seignobos 1904, pp. 155–90. Since Marx very rarely
worked with archival sources, he did not need to do external criticism of his sources –
the procedures ensuring the legitimacy of the document.

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not all knowledge is accessible to any one person, and Marx is especially attent-
ive to the ideological closures at work in discourses about capitalism.
Marx’s other strategy is to stress the social contradictions admitted in texts
by his theoretical and political adversaries, and then elaborate on them. In
regards to this approach, Ginzburg indicates that ‘reading historical testimon-
ies against the grain, as Walter Benjamin suggested – that is, against the inten-
tions of the person or persons producing them (even if those intentions must
of course be taken into account) – means supposing that every text includes
uncontrolled elements’.33 These elements are precisely what allows Marx to
formulate his historical analyses as what would later be called counterhistor-
ies, against interpretations of history that legitimise the existing relations of
exploitation and domination.34
Thus, at the beginning of his analysis about the origins of capitalism, Marx
says he quotes Thomas B. Macaulay’s History of England ‘because as a system-
atic falsifier of history he minimises facts of this kind [the expropriation of
peasants] as much as possible’.35 In the same fashion, his use of official reports
about the situation of the working class in England takes advantage of their
condition as instruments of state policy, which makes them unlikely to be
sympathetic towards socialism. Similarly, he used official reports in order to
describe the disastrous results of the British policies that led to the 1866 fam-
ine in India.36
One of the sources Marx uses in order to document the abuses of the
European powers during the colonial expansion is Stamford Raffles’s History
of Java, where this former British lieutenant-governor of Java describes the
corruption and cruelty of Dutch colonialism. But Marx, backed by William
Howitt’s Colonisation and Christianity, argues that this violence was constit-
utive of the colonial system and thus common to all the colonisers. Further-
more, he maintains that capitalists behave in the colonies as they would, if they
had the chance, in their mother countries; Capital thus affirms that the merit
of Wakefield’s theory of colonisation lies in showing the truth about capitalist
relations in the metropolitan countries.37
As indicated before, Marx is aware of the spatial and temporal determin-
ations of his sources, and his critical reading is thus a basic part of his his-
toriographical interpretations. However, the ideological critique of sources is

33 Ginzburg 2012, p. 4.
34 Tomba 2013b, 408.
35 Marx 1976b, p. 877.
36 Marx 1978, p. 218.
37 Marx 1976b, pp. 916–17; 932.

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a merely negative form of knowledge (because it tells one about the limita-
tions of the source, but does not provide positive knowledge in its place), and
working mostly with secondary sources led to inevitable limitations, given the
state of the historical knowledge in Marx’s period. When he did research based
on secondary sources, Marx cross-checked them, as can be seen in his reading
of Maine, in which Marx corrects some of the data of this author by refer-
ence to authors like Strange, Morgan and Niebuhr, both for documentary and
theoretical reasons. The obvious problem with this approach was its ultimate
dependence on observations that could not be directly refuted – an archive
rather than a source problem. As Wood has indicated, some of Marx’s histor-
ical observations are quite wrong, ‘for reasons having less to do with his own
shortcomings than with the existing state of historical scholarship at the time
of his writing’.38

3.2 The Imperial Archive and the Limits to Interpretation

Indeed, we can clarify the reach of Marx’s theory and method by examining
some of his particular analyses in terms of the conditions of his archive. Marx
deliberately analyses most non-capitalist societies from the point of view of
his study of capitalism; as Wood states, his ‘discussion of precapitalist forms
is, after all, part of a discussion of capital’.39 Basso argues that, because of this
preeminence of capitalism as the point of reference for pre-capitalist forms,
Marx investigates them in a non-critical manner, but Basso’s argument is inac-
curate: the method in the Grundrisse turns to the analysis of previous modes of
production explicitly in order to explain capitalism, and consequently Marx
is aware of the possibility of obfuscating the differences and specificities of
each individual pre-capitalist mode of production.40 Against this methodolo-
gical possibility, Marx repeatedly acknowledges the diversity of pre-capitalist
modes of production.41
However, the limited availability of sources leads Marx to an incorrect eval-
uation of the relevance of pre-capitalist modes of production, especially in
the Grundrisse: he overestimates the representative power of the ‘classical’ or

38 Wood 2010, p. 79. See Karl Marx 1974a, pp. 285–336.

39 Wood 2010, p. 80.
40 Basso 2013, p. 338. Sartre develops some of the implications of this method, which he calls
regressive-progressive. Sartre 1963.
41 See Banaji 2013, p. 131.

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‘ancient’ mode of production, while on the other hand is unable to develop

an accurate theory of the Asiatic mode of production, which remains a resid-
ual category for non-European forms whose history was largely unavailable to
Marx and Engels. Hobsbawm’s judgment on the sources of Marx’s pre-capitalist
forms of appropriation in the Grundrisse is indeed quite conservative: while he
finds Marx’s and Engels’s knowledge of classical antiquity and the European
Middle Ages good and their knowledge of the rise of capitalism outstanding,
their knowledge of the ancient and medieval Middle East is unimpressive. On
the other hand, he considers (wrongly) that they are well informed about India,
but not about pre-history, pre-Colombian America or Japan, and know virtually
nothing about Africa.42
Wood’s evaluation of Marx’s theory of pre-capitalist social formations, under
the light of current research, is even less positive. The formations called ‘Ori-
ental’ or ‘Asiatic’ in the Formen predominated in ancient civilisations, although
not particularly in Asia, while recent scholarship and archaeological discov-
eries, on the other hand, have determined that the ‘ancient’ form was not
prevalent in Greek or Roman societies – or anywhere else.43 And beyond its
insufficiency to explain the transition to feudalism, the Germanic type has an
essential problem: the sources available to Marx about these peoples are Greco-
Roman, and present a distorted and often mythologised version of the German
tribes, exaggerating the individualism and equality within them – archaeology
suggests that the thesis of the isolated households is incorrect, and that there
were considerable inequalities of wealth between their members.44
Marx’s theory of pre-capitalist forms has thus been seriously challenged by
the development of scholarship after a century and a half of groundbreaking
archeological discoveries and the emergence of other new sources. The Asiatic
mode of production is the most polemical within this theory, particularly after
Said’s intervention in Orientalism: although Marx’s formulation of this mode of
production entails the disavowal of a Eurocentric unilinear conception of his-
tory, Orientalism emphasises the ideological connotations of such a construct.

42 Dunn 2011, p. 123. Banaji 2011, p. 349. Spivak interprets the formulation of the pre-capitalist
forms in the Grundrisse as ‘an attempt to fit historical presuppositions into a logical mold’.
Spivak 1999, p. 81. Hobsbawm 1965, p. 26.
43 Wood 2010, pp. 80–3. Also against Marx’s conception of the spatial morphology of the
ancient forms of appropriation, recent scholarship argues that there were crucial differ-
ences between the centre-and-periphery model of cities in the Roman world and the more
locally differentiated cities in the less unified Greek world. Scott 2013, pp. 9–10.
44 Wood 2010, pp. 83–5. In spite of this, the Germanic form has numerous features in com-
mon with the peasant mode of production. See Wickham 2005, pp. 536–9.

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While Said’s interpretation of Marx is far from rigorous,45 it begins a long dis-
cussion in post- and de-colonial studies about the validity of Marx’s conception
of history.
Marx bases his 1853 remarks (and arguably those in the Grundrisse) about
land property in Indian communities on François Bernier’s description of
seventeenth-century Mughal India,46 while references to this region in Marx’s
work from the 1860s (Theories of Surplus Value, Capital Vol. i and the drafts
of Capital Vols. ii and iii) especially rely on Richard Jones’s writings on Ori-
ental societies. This utilitarian political economist, disciple of Bentham and
Ricardo, uses Bernier’s account of India, but adds the idea that the craftsmen
of the imperial court were unproductive labourers – a feature that explains the
alleged lack of dynamism in the oriental cities – and extends his typology to
Oriental countries more generally.47
As indicated in the previous chapter, the expression ‘Asiatic mode of produc-
tion’ is first coined by Marx in his 1859 A Contribution to the Critique of Political
Economy, but is elaborated on in the Grundrisse as a communitarian form of
appropriation. The main features of this mode of production – which Marx
never systematises – are: 1. a self-sufficient network of rural communities, pro-
ducing both food and handcrafts and supplying surplus to the central authorit-
ies (who managed water resources and public works); 2. a despotic bureaucracy
or caste that centralises power for political and military purposes; and 3. the
collective ownership of land, productive property, and ‘hydraulic’ works.48
Drawing on empirical research, different authors have denied the validity
of each of these features; this is particularly the case for India, the country
which this mode is primarily supposed to explain. In this vein, Banaji main-
tains that the insufficiencies of the ‘Asiatic mode of production’ are due to
Marx’s dependence on English sources which, for instance, exaggerate the isol-

45 Ahmad 1994, pp. 159–219.

46 O’Leary insists that in his first articles on India, Marx uncritically reproduces the fea-
tures of Bernier’s descriptions, which had a specific political motivation: to convince Col-
bert – Louis xiv’s finance minister – to dissuade the king from declaring all French land
as royal property; in order to do this Bernier relates India’s alleged economic decline to
the Mughals’ disdain for private property. In spite of this, as O’Leary observes, the ‘three
interrelated features of Hindustan as described by Bernier – monarchical ownership of
all the land, a service nobility and parasitical cities – provided the core of the “empir-
ical” assumptions upon which the future models of oriental society would be built by
occidental political economists’. O’Leary 1989, p. 57. On Bernier’s impact on Marx’s early
writings on India: Lindner 2010, pp. 29–31.
47 O’Leary 1989, pp. 106–18, 78. Jones 1852, p. 61ss.
48 McFarlane 2005, pp. 284–5.

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ation and self-sufficiency of the Indian villages, a ‘stereotyped formula’ which

is recycled from one report to another. Additionally, the existence of a class
of powerful landed proprietors in the cases of the Mughal, Byzantine and Tang
empires, as opposed to Marx’s position that the Asiatic despot was the exclusive
proprietor and autarkical ruler, are further proof of the invalidity of the ‘Asiatic
mode of production’.49
O’Leary, one of Marx’s harshest critics, even argues that Marx prioritises
second hand stereotypes over the careful reading of administrative sources and
Bernier’s originals, and points out that a close reading of Bernier shows several
important inconsistencies with Marx’s main narrative. He also indicates that
during the writing of the Grundrisse Marx wrote a piece acknowledging the
existence of intermediate landed proprietors in India, which he then ignored
until the 1870s. O’Leary concludes that Marx uses his sources selectively, ignor-
ing contrary evidence in his source materials;50 hence the limitations and over-
all inadequacy of the concept of the Asiatic mode of production is not primarily
a consequence of limitation of sources, but of Marx’s criteria for selecting the
appropriate data in his sources.
There is no doubt, as Ahmad confirms, that this is a serious error of judg-
ment on Marx’s part, ‘a theoretical error and a violation of the very materialist
method which he did more than anyone else to establish in the sciences of the
social as such’.51 And yet, it is also clear that it was not possible for Marx to
construct an alternative model from fragments and contradictory versions; the
only alternative to this cul de sac would have been to do empirical research dir-
ectly, or wait for new, more consistent scholarship to be written. Marx chooses
to construct his Asiatic model on the basis of feeble evidence and is wrong – at
least as regards the generality of Asian societies.52
Although by the 1860s Marx arrives at a position where neither capitalism
has a centre nor history an exclusive path of development, he does not re-
evaluate his previous research on Asian societies until the 1870s, when he does

49 Habib 2002, pp. 14–58; Zingarelli 2016, pp. 31–2. Banaji 2011, pp. 17–19. The author quotes
Dumont’s analysis of nineteenth-century English administrative literature in India.
Dumont 1966, pp. 67–89.
50 O’Leary 1989, pp. 262–7 and 103–4.
51 Ahmad 1994, p. 241.
52 Of course, the generalisation of a mode of production for the totality of Asia cannot
be sustained rigorously. However, the prominent Egyptologist and methodologist Ciro
F.S. Cardoso argues that the Asiatic mode of production adequately explains ancient soci-
eties such as the Egyptian. Zingarelli argues for this thesis, while Wood, on the other hand,
includes Minoan and Mycenaean Greece – along with the ancient empires of Asia – within
this model. Zingarelli 2016, pp. 27–76; Wood 2010, pp. 81–2.

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so through his readings of Morgan and Kovalevsky, having by then learned

to read Russian and studied peasant societies extensively.53 O’Leary concedes
that Marx changes his mind about these matters in the late 1870s ‘as a res-
ult of reading the latest history and anthropology’ but – not surprisingly – he
scarcely comments about this phase of Marx’s work: it does not support his
claim according to which ‘Marx abused his sources when analysing Indian his-
tory’.54 By then, in contrast to his previous uncritical reception of authors such
as Bernier and Jones, Marx systematically criticises the colonial bias of the
existing sources.55 However, he did not systematise these enquiries.
Bolívar y Ponte, Marx’s encyclopedia entry on Simón Bolívar, is also regu-
larly presented as an example of Marx’s alleged Eurocentrism. Interestingly, the
English, French, German and North American encyclopedias Marx used when
preparing for this piece presented openly favourable opinions of Bolívar, as
does one of Marx’s three cited sources – John Miller’s Memoirs. Marx’s negative
depiction proceeds from two of Bolívar’s former officials: Hippisley – a colonel
who left Bolívar’s army after it experienced financial problems – and, partic-
ularly, Ducoudray-Holstein, a general who, along with a considerable section
of the Independence army, stopped recognising the authority of the ‘Liberator’
after the defeat at Ocumare in 1816.56
But the most striking feature of this article is the absence of Marx’s histor-
ical materialist method. His account is that of a traditional ‘bare facts’ historian:
he focuses on notable military events, mentions the big names and factions in
politics, and places a lot of attention on Bolívar’s personality. There is no explor-
ation of social and geopolitical relations. Scaron points out that Marx missed
the opportunity to use The Memoirs of General Miller as a source about race
relations and social classes in New Granada, but the same could even be said
of Ducoudray-Holstein’s more vitriolic book.57 Thus this article does not even
attempt to go beyond the level of the pseudo-concrete; Bolívar y Ponte is as un-
Marxian a historical interpretation as one could possibly get.
So why does Marx go against most of the sources available to him and why
does he not apply his materialist method when dealing with Bolívar? There is

53 Shanin 1983, pp. 1–94.

54 O’Leary 1989, pp. 124, 87.
55 Lindner 2010, p. 36.
56 Marx 1982b, 219–33. Draper 1968, p. 70. It is understandable that these countries tended
to favour the dissolution of the Spanish empire. Hippisley 1819, pp. 426–50. Masur 2008,
pp. 258–60.
57 Scaron 1972, pp. 12–13. See especially the introduction to Ducoudray-Holstein 1831, pp. vii–
lxx.

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a huge logical leap in interpreting Marx’s anti-Bolivarism as Eurocentrism.58

Independently of how one evaluates Bolívar’s fight for the independence of
South America, such interpretation assumes that Bolívar was somehow repres-
entative of the whole population of that subcontinent, rather than a wealthy
New Grenadian creole. For his part, Aricó does not consider that Marx’s pos-
ition is due to Eurocentrism, but hypothesises that Hegel’s concept of ‘non-
historic peoples’ colours Marx’s approach to the events of the Independence.59
Since the events in this narrative appear as contingent, their outcome certainly
suggests that chance, rather than military and political skill, favoured Bolívar’s
success. In Aricó’s version, the Eurocentric residues in this piece thus do not
come from Marx’s documentary sources, but from the Hegelian philosophy of
history.
This account is problematic, since in the Grundrisse – one to two years before
the Bolívar entry – Marx had already started his attempts to explain forms of
community which did not necessarily have a state (the Hegelian criterion of
historical rationality), as in the case of the Germanic form. Why would Marx
return to a form of Hegelian speculation when there were already empirical
sources from which he could draw? O’Leary argues that Marx’s main influence
when thinking about Asia in the 1850s was the empirically-oriented accounts
of the utilitarian political economists, rather than the tradition of political the-
ory and typology from Aristotle to Hegel,60 and it is arguable that Marx breaks
away from Hegel in a materialist direction precisely through the critique of the
kind of reasoning behind a concept like ‘non-historic peoples’, a concept that
underpins Hegel’s speculative philosophy of history.
Aricó’s hypothesis, like those that openly accuse Marx of Eurocentrism and
anti-Latin American bias,61 misses a basic textual and contextual aspect of this
piece. The revision of other biographical entries (including those regarding
other characters in Latin American history) in the New American Cyclopaedia
reveals that the treatment Marx gave to Bolívar went by the standards of this
publication. The format of the entries called for a traditional historiograph-
ical approach: it is undeniable that contingency prevails in Marx’s narrative,
but this is also true of every other biographical entry written by Marx in this

58 Examples of this stereotyped approach can be found in Roque Baldovinos 2007, pp. 843–6;
and Güendel 2011, pp. 98–100.
59 Aricó 2014, pp. 58–63.
60 O’Leary 1989, p. 81.
61 On the contrary, Marx’s condemnation of European interventions in 1861 in Mexico and
1865 in Jamaica, for instance, are unequivocal. See Marx 1984h, pp. 71–8; and Marx 1987b,
198–9.

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volume. This lack of historical materialist explanation is evident for example

in the entry on Robert Blum,62 one of the ‘martyrs’ of the 1848 German revolu-
tion that Marx explains in the Manifesto as a class conflict. Aricó’s hypothesis
attributing the absence of class struggle in the entry to an assumption by Marx
of the lack of rationality of Latin American formations during their wars of
independence thus shows itself to be false.
Marx’s penchant for gossip in the Bolívar entry can also be observed, for
instance, in those about the German- and British-born generals Bennigsen and
Beresford,63 and was probably seen by the editors as making the reading more
pleasant in light of the numerous dates and names of battles. In this sense,
although Marx is completely responsible for his evaluation of Bolívar, the kind
of approach in this entry has to do more with editorial interests than with
Marx’s own philosophical positions. Due to its isolation in Spanish language
editions from other entries,64 a tradition within Latin American scholarship
has exaggerated the importance and singularity of this article in Marx’s oeuvre.
Draper’s interpretation of Marx’s antipathy to Bolívar seems to be the most
balanced among the commentators on this piece. Draper argues that Marx
does not deny the ‘progressiveness’ and legitimacy of the independence move-
ment led by Bolívar, but criticises him because of his authoritarianism, which
reminds him of Louis Bonaparte. Hence, Draper concludes, ‘Marx remains, to
this day, one of the few champions of the democratic aspirations for which the
northern South Americans fought against their “Liberator”. He does not accept
the rationalisations for dictatorship, which have not changed much in a cen-
tury and a half’.65
Although under quite different circumstances, in the cases both of the Asi-
atic mode of production and the entry on Bolívar, Marx chooses to contradict
some of his sources, relying on others instead. These choices lead to a bad
model for explaining Asian societies and to a very limited account of an import-
ant historical figure. However, since Marx did not follow his method when
writing Bolívar y Ponte, the first is arguably more problematic in theoretical
terms. Marx does sketch the concept of an ‘Asiatic mode of production’ over

62 Marx 1982c, pp. 80–2.

63 Marx and Engels write about Bennigsen: ‘his excessive passion for the fair sex at that time
made more noise than his warlike exploits’. Marx and Engels 1982a, p. 76; about Beresford,
Marx and Engels 1982b, pp. 289–90.
64 Aricó and many after him read Bolívar y Ponte through Scaron’s compilation of Marx and
Engels’s fragments dealing with Latin America, his Materiales para la historia de América
Latina.
65 Draper 1968, p. 77.

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a long time.66 While these cases have Eurocentric elements, this is not due to
Marx’s method and theoretical positions, but in spite of these positions.
Moreover, it is worth recalling that Marx’s accounts of non-European eco-
nomic forms were not exoticising: as for the imagery of the Indian peasant
starving next to a thriving bull – often depicted as a sign of superstition and
backwardness – Marx uses the explanation that it is more difficult for those
economies to replace an ox than a man, and this was thus rational behaviour
in terms of the survival of the community. He applies the same criterion when
he addresses the practice of ‘widow burning’ in India, which he explains in
relation to the interests of the priests, rather than for cultural reasons – the
properly orientalist account of such traditions.67 Marx’s Hegelian awareness
of the historical determination of his own conditions of knowledge (and, as
stated, of the biases in his sources) leads him to ground his project of a sci-
ence of history on the method of abstraction – which opens the possibility of a
spatio-temporally multilinear history – rather than on an evolutionist scheme.
As argued in section 1.2. above, historical diversity is to be understood from this
abstract anthropological unity as a point of departure. From the basis of this
unity, Marx emphasises the historical specificities of different social forms, as
can be seen in his critical remarks about Phear’s and Maine’s articles on India,
where he insists on the necessity of not imposing European concepts, such as
feudalism and state, on other formations.68
Marx’s archive limits his possibilities for interpreting societies spatially and
temporally far away from him, but it also provides him with opposing views and
sometimes contradictory versions, between which he sometimes does not have
enough empirical criteria to decide with certainty. Due to his central interest
in the study of capitalism, non-capitalist societies are not of primary interest
to Marx during most of his lifetime. And just as his analyses of pre-capitalist
formations are subordinated to the study of capitalism, his attention and time
management trend towards the latter as well. Marx worked for many years to

66 As Sayer affirms, ‘we quite rationally place considerable weight upon theoretical claims
and we are obliged to take their refutation seriously. Conversely, we neither place much
confidence in claims about contingent matters nor worry much if they are refuted’. Sayer
1992, p. 144.
67 Marx 1978, p. 314. Marx 1974a, pp. 325–6. Ironically, post-colonial studies exoticises Indian
cultural difference as a radical alterity to Western Europe. For a Marxist critique of the
postcolonial turn in authors like Guha and Chakrabarty, see: Chibber 2013; and especially
Kaiwar 2015.
68 Marx 1974b, pp. 256–7; Marx 1974a, pp. 326–30. On the contrary, Marx does find it appro-
priate to characterise the Japan of his day as ‘feudal’. Marx 1976b, p. 878.

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establish the basis for a new, materialist conception of history, and tried to
apply it accordingly, but his personal limitations (economic difficulties, fre-
quent illness and relatively early death) and the priority of the study of the cap-
italist mode of production prevented him from developing a definitive version.
Naturally, the research derived from a philosophical and scientific conception
cannot depend on the work of a single person. In this sense, further historical
investigations productively draw from Marx’s theory and evaluate his specific
hypotheses under the light of new sources.

3.3 Beyond Marx’s Archive

The development of historical and social scientific research after Marx has
regularly led to the re-evaluation of his explanations, and attention to the
spatio-temporal elements opened by new sources has proven to be particularly
fruitful for enriching the mechanisms at play in the cases that Marx analyses.
Since space and time are (ontologically) fundamental in the organisation of
the social totalisations, attention to their development should lead to a better
understanding of the specific conjunctures, as exemplified in the next pages
through discussions of ‘so-called primitive accumulation’ and the civil wars
in France and the United States. Furthermore, as indicated in the previous
chapter, such revisions are important not only for the specific explanations
they offer, but also for the advancement of the theory itself – especially through
the formulation of models.
The United States Civil War is probably the most studied among the spe-
cific processes analysed by Marx, and since his explanation heavily depends
on social spaces and times, it is particularly useful to approach it in relation
to recent studies. While the idea of the inevitability of the conflict due to the
expansionist character of the South – Marx’s fundamental thesis about the
cause of the conflict – was widely accepted until the late 1920s, Craven’s and
Ramsdell’s analyses challenge this position, arguing that the Southern eco-
nomy had more flexibility and capacity to reform itself than had been previ-
ously presumed, and thus that there were alternatives to the war. Following this
revisionist line, Runkle concludes that while Marx is probably right to state that
slavery needed to spread in order to survive, the exhaustion of the soil avail-
able for slavery was far from imminent, and hence the conflict could have been
avoided.69

69 Genovese 1989, p. 243. Runkle 1964, p. 136.

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Similarly, while Genovese agrees with the revisionists that the advent of
the war was not triggered by an immediate crisis of land scarcity, he also
demonstrates that even reforms to the slave system depended on its expan-
sion. However, he argues that a peaceful solution to the contradiction between
the North and South would have been impossible due to the psychology of the
slaveholding ruling class: the defence of slavery was for the slaveholders the
defence of their honour and dignity.70
In any case, contrary to the widespread assumption in this literature, an
emphasis on culture or politics as the immediate cause of the war does not
exclude Marx’s interpretation based on the conditions of production as the
framework for this conflict. Following the stratified conception of history
described in Section 1.1., culture and politics mediate and help to negotiate
the basic conflict at the level of production. The prospect of the scarcity of
land could have determined the actions of the agents long before its actual
advent. In this sense, in favour of Marx’s explanation (albeit not referencing
him), Foner argues that beliefs that limiting the expansion of slavery would
lead to its extinction were common in the United States from the 1840s. Among
others, Foner cites one of the editors of the New York Tribune, Horace Greeley,
who affirmed in 1856 that ‘to restrict Slavery within its present limits is to secure
its speedy decline and ultimate extinction’.71 According to Ransom, ‘observers
outside the South uniformly viewed the cotton kingdom as eagerly seeking new
land. By the 1850s this view had become an obsessive fear’.72
The tension rose to an unsustainable level for the Southern élite with the
election of the anti-slavery candidate Abraham Lincoln. The cycles of federal
(electoral) politics, not the actual exhaustion of slave-state soil – a thesis Marx
never makes – was then the immediate cause for the declaration of secession in
the South, though the contradiction between two competing forms of capitalist
accumulation determined the interests of those at war. This complementarity
of economic and political dimensions is highlighted by Ransom, whose general

70 Genovese convincingly argues that the Southern economy needed to expand to the newer
territories of the Union, and that Mexico, the Caribbean and Central America would also
be under threat of becoming slave territories. Genovese 1989, pp. 247, 249–50; also 269–
70. Thus, the Marxian claim that pirate expeditions to these countries was favoured by the
White House under Pierce and Buchanan is not only backed by empirical evidence, but
also by structural explanation. Marx 1984e, pp. 37–8.
71 Quoted in Foner 1995, p. 116. As this journal was Marx’s main source of information about
the United States, it is arguable that he based his interpretation of the Secession process
on points of view such as Greeley’s.
72 Ransom 1989, p. 59.

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explanation of the causes of this war coincides with Marx’s, but renders Marx
more concrete by delving into the role of western lands in this contradiction.
Based on the economic reconstructions of the prices of slaves and exported
cotton, Ransom argues that the opening of the western settlements was detri-
mental to the interests of slave-holders:

had there been no western land, the price of cotton would not have fallen,
and the value of slaves would have been greater … Restricting settlement
of western lands would have increased rents for slave-holders, and the
political debates and votes on homesteading and the Graduation Act in
the 1840s and 1850s suggest that both slave-owners and landowners in the
South realised this.73

In Ransom’s interpretation, the Southern slaveholders wanted to expand, but

did so especially in order to acquire not land, but territory, i.e., to gain polit-
ical influence that would let them have more control over the prices of slave
labour and land. In this explanation, as in Marx’s, the problem of the overpop-
ulation of ‘poor whites’ is another important element for Southern expansion,
although its growth was lower than that in the North. Ransom concludes that
even if the South had been able to expand to Cuba and Central America – a
very optimistic scenario for Southern interests, given their repeated failed mil-
itary attempts to do so – and hence to temporarily solve the problem of ‘poor
white’ overpopulation, their domestic political problems would have persisted
unless new slave states could be minted.74
Ransom’s analysis thus leads him to consider the impact of the recently-
settled western territories on the economic and political conditions in the
United States as the central cause of the outbreak of war.75 Although formu-
lated in terms of prices and profit – phenomenal and highly mediated forms
of value and surplus value, from Marx’s perspective – this economic analysis
is nevertheless compatible with Marx’s explanation (which Ransom does not
cite), based on the contradiction between two opposing regimes of capital-
ist exploitation within a single social formation.76 With this displacement,

73 Ransom 1989, pp. 55, 57.

74 Ransom 1989, p. 60. On the history of the Southern attempts to seize Central American
and Caribbean territories, see May 2002.
75 Although Marx does consider the role of the Northwestern territories in his interpretation,
he does not interpret them as the decisive element for the U.S. Civil war, as Ransom does.
See above, 2.3.
76 Banaji contends that plantations were ‘commodity-producing enterprises characterised

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Ransom’s explanation presents the incorporation of the western territories two

decades before the War as the spatio-temporal transformation that ultimately
led to the crisis of the North-South contradiction.
On the other hand, for the Paris Commune, Marx’s use of newspapers and
letters as sources for The Civil War in France contrasts with the approaches since
the 1960s that have clarified aspects such as the composition of the Parisian
labour force and the social base of the communards, through the use of ‘serial-
ised’ sources – such as censuses and secondary elaborations – that have allowed
them to transcend impressionistic reconstructions of the conjuncture.77 More
recently, the analyses by Gould and Harvey highlight the importance of the
social-spatial organisation of Paris in the development of this event. Also, while
Marx’s class analyses about 1848 France are only implicitly referenced in his
Civil War in France, and his contextualisation of the Commune prioritises the
history of the state,78 these recent authors analyse both events as part of the
historical development of the Second Empire.
Serial sources would have allowed Marx to elaborate a more precise analysis
of this conjuncture and to avoid some theoretically vague formulations about
this event. For example, Marx states that the proletarians of Paris had taken
over the direction of the city, and consequently depicts the Commune as a
‘working men’s Government’, and the Communards as ‘plain working men’ and
proletarians,79 but Tombs, based on Rougerie’s analysis in 1964 of the statistics
and court records of captured insurgents, affirms that the communards ‘were
skilled workers; they were fairly evenly spread over the age-range 20–40 …; and

by speculative investments … in the production of absolute surplus-value on the basis

of landed property’. This form of enterprise thus differs from the classic capitalist form
of enterprise, in that the former is compatible with a constant composition of capital,
and hence with stagnant or declining levels of labour productivity; in sum, ‘the slave-
plantations were capitalist enterprises of a patriarchal and feudal character producing
absolute surplus-value on the basis of slave-labour and a monopoly on land’. Banaji 2011,
pp. 69, 71. Italics in the original.
77 The printed sources of this piece have been established by the editors of the Marx and
Engels Collected Works, thanks to Marx’s own notebook with newspaper excerpts on the
Commune from 18 March to 1 May 1871. Marx and Engels 1986c, pp. 665–7. For the classics
of the ‘serial’ approach, see Rougerie 2004; Rougerie 1964.
78 Written as a political communication from the International Workingmen’s Association,
very shortly after the fall of the Commune, the basic methodological problem of The Civil
War in France is that the more abstract levels of its social analysis are absent or implicit,
and its brief history of state centralisation does not account for the complexity of the class
struggle in 1871 Paris. Marx, pressed to publish this document, does not elaborate beyond
the immediate level of the conjuncture, and even then remained within the political (or,
more precisely in this case, state-) stratum.
79 E.g., Marx 1986, pp. 334, 336.

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they worked mostly in long-established and small-scale Paris craft industries’.80

While this does not refute Marx’s account of the process – his concept of pro-
letariat does not exclude skilled workers, nor is it limited to the labour force
of big industries – it better captures the social base of the movement and its
possibilities.
In this sense, Roger Gould’s spatial approach significantly refines the explan-
ation of this conjuncture. Through the analysis of a range of documents from
post-Commune trials against presumed Communards, Gould concludes that
community was more decisive than class in the organisation and mobilisation
of the Commune, and that the Commune was thus fundamentally a movement
for municipal liberties. He argues this by establishing neighbourhood networks
and solidarities as the main criterion for the organisation of the Communard
battalions – even sometimes in conflict with the orders from the central com-
mand of the Paris National Guard. Also, his analysis suggests that class was a
more significant factor in the centre of Paris than in the peripheries, where the
Commune had stronger support. In addition to this, Gould locates solidarit-
ies between working- and middle-class neighbours by analysing a sample of
civil marriage records from four adjacent Parisian districts (arrondissements)
in 1869.81
As previously argued, Gould’s opposition between class and social space –
specifically addressed by him through the category of community – simplifies a
multi-level historical relation in which concrete spaces do not directly express
the abstract class structure.82 Also, against Gould’s argument about trans-class
solidarities, Harvey indicates that while the differentiation between workers
and small owners was at the time porous, the fact that workers aligned with
‘respectable’ witnesses such as lawyers, doctors or other local notables for a
rather uncommon ritual does not demonstrate the existence of solidarities
between members of different classes. Ultimately, even if that had been the
case, such trans-class solidarities do not deny the primary class divide: it is
dubious, Harvey writes, that bankers and financiers, landlords, merchant capit-
alists, industrialists or other members of the bourgeoisie turned up as witnesses
in Gould’s data.83

80 Tombs 1999, p. 111. Writing about the elected members of the Commune, Edwards con-
siders that ‘what is striking is how small a number came from the new heavy industries
that had grown up on the outskirts of Paris’. Edwards 1973, p. 28. This makeup of the
Commune’s leading body is consistent with Harvey’s indication that Haussmann’s urban
reforms had by 1870 deindustrialised Paris. Harvey 2005, pp. 162–3.
81 Gould 1995, pp. 175–87, 81–90.
82 On the relations between real and actual space-times, see above, Chapter 2.
83 Harvey 2005, p. 237. Against Gould, Harvey argues that concubinage, rather than mar-

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Besides his reservations about the inferences drawn from the records of civil
marriages, most of Gould’s evidence on the importance of spatial proximity,
neighbourhood institutions and the arrondissements as vectors of solidarity,
are, as Harvey indicates, consistent with his own Marxian explanation of the
changes in the Parisian space relations from the point of view of the accumula-
tion of capital, particularly the impact of the urban reforms under Haussmann
as producing ‘a city in which the circulation of capital became the real imperial
power’.84
For all its nuances, it is impossible to ignore the relations between politics
and spatial class segregation in Paris. While Rougerie, based on the 1872 census,
describes the districts of the Eastern periphery as predominantly inhabited by
workers and day labourers (ouvriers, journaliers),85 Harvey notes that these dis-
tricts – where radicals, socialists and revolutionaries led the numerous public
meetings and the bourgeois reformers were banned – were crucial in the agita-
tion that led to the Commune. The analysis of the elections of March 1871, with
a notoriously high voter turnout and overwhelming support in the East for the
Commune – as opposed to the low number of voters and contrary voting tend-
ency in the West – corroborate this tendency.86
The Commune thus faced challenges from without the city – the Versailles
and Prussian armies – as well as from some of its own districts. But things
were complicated even among the Communards, for there were discrepancies
as to the political and economic transformations that were sought.87 Marx’s
explanation in The Civil War in France, by focusing on the social and symbolic
opposition between Paris and Versailles, thus underestimates the social contra-
dictions and political disagreements within Paris and among the leaders of the
Commune.88 Hence, the spatial composition of the city reveals conflicts and
solidarities that help explain the development and outcome of this process.

riage, was the norm for working-class couples, except when they looked for social mobility.
Harvey 2005, p. 237. Rougerie, on the other hand, has questioned the representability of
Gould’s sample for being too small. See Rougerie 2004, pp. iv–v.
84 Harvey 2005, pp. 108–9; see also 239.
85 Rougerie 2004, pp. 17–19. Merriman indicates that these districts not only received work-
ers from the centre of Paris displaced by Haussmann’s reforms, but also became home to
newcomers from the provinces. Merriman 2014, pp. 7–8.
86 Harvey 2005, pp. 234, 296. See Rougerie 2004, p. 144.
87 ‘Conspiracies against the Commune were afoot from the beginning. Within a couple of
weeks, anti-Communard organisers began to distribute armbands (brassards) – conser-
vative rallying marks that were at first white, the color of the Bourbons, and later tricolor –
in conservative neighborhoods. Those who had them awaited the day they could come
into the open and crush the Commune’. Merriman 2014, p. 72; also p. 79.
88 Perhaps Marx’s later (better) knowledge of these internal conflicts led to this sceptical

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In addition to the operations of displacement and analysis in the two previ-

ous cases, the widening of scale is a third spatio-temporal strategy allowed by
new sources. This is indeed the path followed by Alex Anievas and Kerem Niş-
ancioğlu’s recent book that addresses the decades-long debate between Bren-
ner and Wallerstein about the origins of capitalism. While the latter insists that
the accumulation of surplus secured the existence of a world-economy on the
global scale, Brenner affirms that capitalism fundamentally began with new
agrarian class relations that emerged in late medieval and early modern West-
ern Europe.89
Anievas and Nişancioğlu, on the other hand, maintain that the origins of
capitalism ‘can only be understood in international or geopolitical terms, and
that this very “internationality” is constitutive of capitalism as a historical mode
of production’.90 Unlike Wallerstein’s world-systems theory, these authors
emphasise the role of the modes of production in the dynamics of the geopol-
itical system from which capitalism emerged; and they do this by analysing this
world-system from the point of view of its uneven and combined development.
Against Brenner, How the West Came to Rule argues that the conception of cap-
italism as necessarily tied to a single form of exploitation obfuscates the many
forms on which actually existing capitalist social relations and labour regimes
have thrived.91
Accordingly, they argue that the changes in the sphere of production that led
to ‘classic’ English capitalism are not properly explicable without the consider-
ation of complex transcontinental political and economic relations. England’s
very isolation, which is central to Brenner’s thesis of the Anglo-centred ori-
gin of capitalism, is shown by Anievas and Nişancioğlu to be a product of the
Habsburg-Ottoman conflict: while Christian continental Europe was in ten-
sion with the Ottomans in the Southeast and the Mediterranean, Northwestern

evaluation ten years after the publication of The Civil War in France: ‘aside from the fact
that this was merely an uprising of one city in exceptional circumstances, the majority of
the Commune was in no sense socialist, nor could it have been. With a modicum of com-
mon sense, it could, however, have obtained the utmost that was then obtainable – a
compromise with Versailles beneficial to the people as a whole. The appropriation of the
Banque de France alone would have rapidly put an end to the vainglory of Versailles, etc.,
etc’. Marx, ‘Letter to Nieuwenhuis, 22 February 1881’, in Marx 1992, p. 66. Emphasis in the
original.
89 See Wallerstein 1974; Aston and Philpin 2002; Denemark and Thomas 1988, pp. 47–65. This
debate is regularly assumed to be a prolongation of the debate between Sweezy and Dobb
about the transition to capitalism. See Wood 2002, pp. 35–43.
90 Anievas and Nişancioğlu 2015, p. 2.
91 Anievas and Nişancioğlu 2015, pp. 30–1.

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Europe had the margin to develop ‘the peculiar fusion of interests among the
landed nobility, capitalist tenants and the state in England, which proved cru-
cial to the success of the English ruling class in enclosing land’.92 Moreover,
How the West Came to Rule concludes that territorialised state sovereignty – a
co-constitutive process with capitalist social relations in Europe – developed
through the conflict between Amerindians and Europeans. Later the Atlantic
triad of American land, African slave labour and English capital made the over-
coming of English agrarian capitalism through the Industrial Revolution pos-
sible.93
The internalist conception of the origins of capitalism – along with the
strictly typological concept of capitalism – is thus shown to be insufficient in
order to account for the historical development of this mode of production.
Marx’s own explanation exposes the centrality of colonialism in this develop-
ment94 and hence the necessity of a longue-durée, world-scale approach. This,
however, has only been possible through the existence of a vast quantity of rel-
atively recent studies in the social and economic history of the Mongol and
Ottoman empires, as well as the Americas and Africa between the fifteenth
and seventeenth centuries. In this sense, Anievas’s and Nişancioğlu’s archive
(of secondary sources) is strikingly more diverse in geographical terms than
Wallerstein’s, enabling them to formulate a more systemic and non-Eurocentric
account of the origins of capitalism than Wallerstein and Brenner. Crucially,
analyses of peripheral social formations by Marxist scholars Irfan Habib, Jairus
Banaji, John Haldon and Halil Berktay, among others, offer empirical data and
explanations which dovetail with this book’s spatially and temporally uneven
explanation that clarifies the conditions of production of diverse formations,
not by comparison between them as isolated cases, but through their relations
within a complex, decentred totality.
The recent investigations of the modes of production at work in the Mongol,
Spanish and Ottoman empires, and their impact on European formations, thus
allow an expansion of the temporal and spatial scopes of Marx’s explanation

92 Anievas and Nişancioğlu 2015, p. 120.

93 ‘Not only did the widened sphere of circulation implied by the transatlantic triangular
trade offer numerous opportunities to British capitalists to expand their domain of activ-
ities, but the combination of different labour processes across the Atlantic enabled the
recomposition of labour in Britain through the Industrial Revolution. The development
of the productive forces – and the real subsumption of labour under capital as such – was
thus built on the exploitation of a transatlantic subaltern class made up of Amerindians,
African slaves and Europeans’. Anievas and Nişancioğlu 2015, p. 275. See also Anievas and
Nişancioğlu 2015, pp. 139–41, 158–62.
94 See above, 2.3.

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of the origins of capitalism. But as we have already observed, the same is the
case with his discussions of the U.S. Civil War and the Paris Commune: Marx’s
accounts not only have considerable influence on these discussions, but schol-
ars following Marxian theory and method continue to develop more consistent
and detailed historical explanations, drawing on newly available sources. This
operation of confronting Marx’s theories with new sources allows us to con-
ceive of a Marx whose theories and explanations can benefit from demographic
and agrarian history, in a dialectic that either makes his formulations more con-
crete or refutes them. This is the necessary alternative to the ‘bad theory’ that
Banaji criticises.95
Research on the conjuncture – the most concrete level of a socio-historical
totality – can thus have important implications for the more abstract levels.
Marx’s was not a top-down methodology where the more abstract concepts
remain unchanged, but a conception of knowledge in which the (critically
treated) empirical data helps to shape the concepts. Systematic temporalisa-
tion and spatialisation contributes to the knowledge of relevant mechanisms
for the explanation of actual historical formations, but also to the clarification
and reformulation of the concepts and theories at more abstract levels, as has
been observed in the spatio-temporal operations in the processes in this sec-
tion: an expansion of scale in the case of ‘so-called primitive accumulation’, a
displacement of focus to a specific area in the case of the U.S. Civil War, and an
analysis of the spatial-demographic composition of the city in the case of the
Paris Commune.

Epilogue

Since the theoretical construction of modes of production – as historically-

specific abstractions of necessary/internal relations – relies on the accuracy
of the information about their social conditions as much as on the theoret-
ical framework, the criticism of sources and archives is essential for historical
explanation as conceived by Marx. In this sense, besides the traditional modes
of source criticism, ideology critique is Marx’s original manner of ‘brushing
history against the grain’ in order to reveal the social – and among them, the
spatio-temporal – determinations of the sources. However, like other kinds
of criticism, ideology critique only provides a negative knowledge that can-
not substitute for the availability of valid sources. Sources are often grasped as

95 Banaji 2011, pp. 7–8.

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providing the empirical foundations for historical research, but it is necessary

to see them in equal measure as limits to historical interpretation.
In contrast, prominent Marxist authors like Lukács and Hobsbawm minim-
ise the role of sources in Marx’s conception of history. In History and Class
Consciousness, the former proposes that:

let us assume for the sake of argument that recent research had disproved
once and for all every one of Marx’s individual theses. Even if this were to
be proved, every serious ‘orthodox’ Marxist would still be able to accept
all such modern findings without reservation and hence dismiss all of
Marx’s theses in toto – without having to renounce his orthodoxy for a
single moment. Orthodox Marxism … refers exclusively to method.96

Similarly, Hobsbawm suggests that

the general theory of historical materialism requires only that there

should be a succession of modes of production, though not necessarily
any particular modes, and perhaps not in any predetermined order. Marx
thought that he could distinguish a certain number of socio-economic
formations and a certain succession. But if he had been mistaken in his
observations, or if these had been based on partial and therefore mis-
leading information, the general theory of historical materialism would
remain unaffected.97

Although both authors explicitly formulate these theses as a reductio ad absur-

dum reasoning and do not back them, by separating theory and method from
historical content these positions are nonetheless formalist,98 and thereby dis-
tort Marx’s dialectical conception of knowledge. While Lukács protects the
foundations of historical materialism (Level 1 in Figure 2) against empirical
knowledge, Hobsbawm does the same for the general theory of the modes of
production (Level 2 in Figure 2). As observed above, while the differentiation of
levels of sociohistorical knowledge is necessary, this does not prevent abstract
concepts and theories from being reassessed by knowledge at the more con-
crete levels.

96 Lukács 1971, p. 1.
97 Hobsbawm 1965, pp. 19–21.
98 As regards to the critique of methodologism in History and Class Consciousness, see Rose
2009, Chapter 1.

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Marx’s explanations of specific processes bear the mark of the conditions of

their writing and of the archives at the time. In this sense, while he contrib-
utes substantial historical knowledge, his theory and method for social ana-
lysis transcend his biographical and archival limitations through the work of
numerous researchers after him, particularly in the case of non-Western and
non-capitalist formations. This is possible because – contrary to visions that
portray his conception of history as a closed system – for Marx historical know-
ledge calls for periodical discussion and eventual reformulation on the basis of
the new state of knowledge, as he did time and again during his lifetime in his
practice as a researcher.
As seen in this chapter, Marx devolves into Eurocentric interpretations in
the cases of the Asiatic mode of production and his biography of Bolívar, when
he does not follow his own critical method and theory. However, we have
also observed that the Marxian-based consideration of social spaces and times
enables the clarification of some of the problems he addresses through a more
limited and sometimes contradictory archive. In this sense, Marx’s critical read-
ing of Western sources since the writing of the Grundrisse and the 1857 wars in
India and China shows a growing awareness on his part of the social spatio-
temporal determinations of his archive, ultimately enabling him to reject colo-
nialism and develop an internationalist form of politics incompatible with the
evolutionist, Eurocentric, and world-historical assumptions that prevailed dur-
ing his lifetime.

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 chapter 4

Narrative as Presentation

Without such temporal-spatial expression, even abstract thought

is impossible. … Every entry into the sphere of meaning is accom-
plished only through the gates of the chronotope.1

∵
Ricoeur describes the third epistemological moment in his philosophy of his-
tory, the representative phase, as ‘the putting into literary or written form of
discourse offered to the readers of history’.2 This phase is not limited to the
writing of historiography, but refers to the narrative, rhetorical or imaginative
elements that constitute its literary form, and are present all along the process
of research; the intertwined character of the phases of historical knowledge
should, in any case, prevent us from isolating form from content in socio-
historical research.3
Although an exaggerated emphasis on literary form has led to a trend in the
philosophy of history to conceive of narration as the sole determining factor
of socio-historical research, to consider narrative form as a prison-house of
historical knowledge,4 such excesses should not minimise the importance of
analysing how history is presented through historiographical discourses. The
‘representative’ phase has its own particularities, which do not simply ‘mirror’
the processes in the previous phases, and awareness of the textual mediations
of historical discourses undeniably enriches our understanding of the ontology
and epistemology of history.
From a critical realist conception of historical knowledge such as Marx’s,
narrative form should correspond to the structure of the object of knowledge.
Since space and time are inescapable categories for the explanation of his-
torical processes, narrative must account for the complexity of their relations

1 Bakhtin 1981, p. 258.

2 Ricoeur 2004, p. 136.
3 Ricoeur 2004, pp. 234–6.
4 Arguments for such a ‘postmodern history’ are championed, to name two examples, by Jen-
kins 2003 and Ermarth 1992.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2022 | doi:10.1163/9789004499911_006

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narrative as presentation 125

in its subject matter, and hence be able to express the uneven and combined
development of a particular social formation through the prism of a concrete
conjuncture. The problem of historiographical narrative is thus aesthetic –
rhetorical and narratological – but primarily it is epistemological and, as will
be argued, political. Specifically, in order to explain historical processes from
a narrative vantage point, Marx’s conception of history implies a narrative
form which makes possible the spatio-temporal explanation of the hierarchy
of causalities between social mechanisms.
Since history is not reducible to historiography, the thematisation of this
phase grapples with the relations between them, showing the ontological and
epistemological foundations of the processes of the textualisation and nar-
rativisation of history. Although, particularly since the 1920s, there have been
rich and substantive discussions by Marxist authors – most notoriously Lukács,
Bloch, Benjamin, Brecht and Adorno – concerning the problems of aesthetic
and literary form, the prevalence in historiography of the cognitive over the
aesthetic suggests a different field for its corresponding narrativity.
In the Marxian conception of history, this necessity of an epistemological
mediation of the relation between history as res gestae and historiography
as historia rerum gestarum introduces the problem of historical representa-
tion as a problem of the presentation of the results of the research. Properly
spatio-temporalised research requires a narrative form capable of accounting
for these dimensions of its subject-matter. In Tomba’s words:

Global society, whose proper name is the world-market, requires a histori-

ographical paradigm that is adequate to the combination of a plurality
of temporal strata in the violently unifying historical dimension of mod-
ernity. The postmodernist juxtaposition of a plurality of historical times,
where forms of peasant-slavery exist alongside high-tech production in
the superannuation of the dualism between center and periphery, not
only explains nothing, but is obfuscatory. The mosaic of temporalities
and forms of exploitation, even when it speaks of inter-relation, poses the
diverse times as being in a state of reciprocal indifference, when the real
problem is their combination by means of the world-market’s mechan-
isms of synchronisation.5

Following Tomba, this chapter looks at problems of Marx’s conception of

space-time in historiographical presentation, in particular through the rela-

5 Tomba 2013a, p. xiv.

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tion between narrativity and chronotopes. In the following pages I argue that
the latter is the narrative element that makes history intelligible as a total-
isation. The first section thus problematises Marx’s concept of presentation
(Darstellung) from the perspective of Ricoeur’s theory of the double dimen-
sion of narrative: the configurative and the episodic dimensions, referring to
the synchronic and the diachronic, respectively. This allows us to criticise Hay-
den White’s narrativism from a realist and materialist theory of narrative based
on Marx’s theory of history and his historiographical writings.
The second section analyses Marx’s poetics of space-time in distinct modes
of production in terms of its metaphors and tropes, showing the relation
between the configurative dimension and the explanation in history at the
level of closed systems. Finally, the last section analyses the narrative aspect of
Marx’s studies of specific conjunctures, and how the chronotope makes differ-
ent emplotment options possible. In this sense, the chronotope at the episodic
dimension, as I will argue, is the element that most evidently relates the cognit-
ive, aesthetic and political aspects of historiography and historical knowledge.

4.1 Presentation, Chronotopes, Narrative

We can take Marx’s distinction between method of inquiry and method of

presentation as the starting point for the discussion about representation and
narrativity in historical discourse. In the postface to the second edition of
Volume i of Capital, its author indicates that

of course, the method of presentation must differ in form from that of

inquiry. The latter has to appropriate the material in detail, to analyse its
different forms of development and to track down their inner connection.
Only after this work has been done can the real movement be appropri-
ately presented. If this is done successfully, if the life of the subject-matter
is now reflected back in the ideas, then it may appear as if we have before
us an a priori construction.6

In general, the distinction between the methods of inquiry and presentation

corresponds to that between the moments of the second and the present
chapter of this work;7 therefore, the clarification of the concept of presenta-
tion is indispensable at this point, in order to understand how Marx conceives

6 Marx 1976b, p. 102.

7 In a similar manner, Ankersmit distinguishes between historical research (Geschichts-

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what philosophers of history often call the ‘problem of representation’ and its
implications for space-times in historical narratives. His depiction of the rela-
tion between the two methods asserts that the presentation should properly
explain the mechanisms that determine its object of study; the appearance of
necessity in the presentation thus comes from adequately grasping how the
object of study works, and is therefore not imposed on the object. As Kosík
maintains, ‘the presentation is an explication of the thing precisely because it
presents the thing in its necessary internal development and unfolding’.8 Fur-
thermore, Derek Sayer indicates that in Marx’s presentation the succession of
forms, as the ascent from the abstract to the concrete, follows the order of the
hierarchy of conditions of possibility.9
In contrast with positions that assume a chasm between history as a chaotic
thing in itself and historiography as an operation of ultimately arbitrary assign-
ment of sense upon the former, the starting point of this dialectical approach
is a triadic perspective where history has to pass through the mediation of
a theoretical-methodological process in order to attain its proper intelligib-
ility. Thus, the presentation does not seek to merely represent history as it
happened – as in the most disingenuous version of realism, typically criticised
by neo-Kantian or Nietzschean conceptions – but to show the results of the
conscious, active production of knowledge. The relation between history and
historiography is hence not aporetic,10 but mediated by a historically determ-
ined praxical process.
Marx does not engage the past as the sole object of his science of history, but
constructs different spatialised temporalities in relation to the corresponding
mode of production; indeed, his above reference to his method of presentation

forschung) and historical writing (Geschichtsschreibung), where the former ‘deals with the
selection, interpretation and analysis of historical sources and with how this analysis may
help us explain causally (or otherwise) what the evidence has taught us about the past’,
and in the latter ‘the results of historical research are integrated into a historical narrat-
ive or representation. … The problems encountered at the level of the establishment of
historical fact – both practical and theoretical – are essentially different from the task of
integrating these facts into a unified historical text’. Ankersmit 2012, p. 60.
8 Kosík 1976, p. 16.
9 ‘The commodity is analysed before money, and money before capital, the first form in
either pair being a condition of the second; the concept of value is developed before that
of surplus-value, and that of surplus-value before those of its transmuted forms (profit,
rent, interest) for the same reason’. Sayer 1979, p. 101.
10 Ricoeur contends that it is in the representative phase ‘that the major aporias of memory
return in force to the foreground, the aporia of the representation of an absent thing that
occurred previously and that of a practice devoted to the active recalling of the past, which
history elevates to the level of a reconstruction’. Ricoeur 2004, pp. 136–7.

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refers to his theory of the capitalist mode of production, and thus to the level
of closed systems. However, Marx’s concept of ‘presentation’ calls for greater
precision in order to address more concrete levels, and to do this, it is neces-
sary for it to address the problems of narrativity. Narration is thus accountable
for the contingency inherent to open systems – i.e. social formations and con-
junctures – as combinations of different mechanisms. As I will argue, narration
necessarily completes presentation in order to explain actual history.
In this discussion about the relation between history and narrativity, it is
important to examine the premises of one of the most important Marxist the-
ories of narrative: Jameson’s The Political Unconscious. He affirms that

history is not a text, not a narrative, master or otherwise, but that, as an

absent cause, it is inaccessible to us except in a textual form, and that our
approach to it and to the Real itself necessarily passes through its prior
textualisation, its narrativisation in the political unconscious.11

History as an absent cause, he indicates, refers to the mode of production as the

synchronic system of social relations as a whole. Jameson takes this thesis from
Althusser, who argues that Darstellung is the ‘concept whose object is precisely
to designate the mode of presence of the structure in its effects, and therefore
to designate structural causality itself’.12 In his interpretation, presentation is
not a re-presentation because there would not be an outside cause which the
former would express; the structure is nothing outside its effects.13 Thus, for
instance, value does not represent labour because, as Hartley comments, ‘it
is nothing but the retroactive process of this presentation of abstract human
labour in the value-form’.14
In Jameson’s quote, therefore, history as an absent cause is an inner limit
to narrative discourse, rather than an outside referent. The problem with this
approach is that, if it is to maintain itself within the coordinates of the Marxian
conception, it needs a ‘positive’ theory of history – this is precisely what Jame-
son elaborates through his discussion of the mode of production. The absent
cause has to be theorised beyond its textual presentation; hence, it is the polit-
ical unconscious rather than history that is immanent in textualisation and
narrativisation as their effects. The theory of history would then belong to a
dialectic of the objective, which would be the complement of the dialectic of

11 Jameson 2002, p. 20.

12 Althusser and Balibar 2009, p. 208. See also Jameson 2002, p. 21.
13 Althusser and Balibar 2009, p. 209.
14 Hartley 2003, p. 120.

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the subjective in The Political Unconscious.15 The use of the concept of ‘absent
cause’ thus does not dissolve the categories of essence and appearance – as
Althusser wants – but transposes their dialectical relation to the social total-
isation, beyond the realm of symbolisation (which is nonetheless necessary in
order to grasp it).
As regards the problem of the relations between explanation and presenta-
tion, it is productive to return to Ricoeur’s theory of time and narrative – and in
particular his distinction between the episodic and configurative dimensions
of narrative. The former is constituted by events and moves forward in a linear
representation of time and, in accordance with the events in an open system
not being deductively predictable,16 its function is to aggregate contingencies
and peripetheia that lead to a conclusion that is not logically present in the
previous premises.17 The configurative, on the other hand, ‘transforms the suc-
cession of events into one meaningful whole which … makes the story follow-
able. … The configuration of the plot imposes the “sense of an ending” … on the
indefinite succession of incidents’.18 In other words, the configurative dimen-
sion sets the conditions of possibility of the narrative within the diegetic universe,
including its spaces and times. We should therefore not univocally relate space
to the configurative and time to the episodic, since both dimensions of nar-
ration have spatial and temporal components. Rather, the configurative and
episodic correspond, respectively, to the synchronic and diachronic, which are
analytical approaches and not ontological categories.19
The narrative configuration should not be conflated with fiction (nor does
narrative, as will be argued, substitute explanation), although some authors
in the narrativist line perpetuate this misunderstanding.20 Such a position, as

15 Jameson 2002, pp. 21, ix.

16 Bhaskar 2008, p. 119. See also above, 2.1.
17 Ricoeur 1984a, pp. 66–7.
18 Ricoeur 1984a, p. 67.
19 Andrew Sayer indicates that geography’s concern for space provides this discipline with
a stronger orientation towards the configurational dimension, but this should not be
assumed on the basis of an equation between space and synchronicity (as this author
implies), since, analytically speaking, there are synchronic times as well as diachronic
spaces. Sayer 2000, p. 143. On the temporality of the synchronic, see Jameson 2012, pp. 79–
80.
20 Thus, Carr for example affirms that ‘history unavoidably contains elements of fiction’ – an
inaccurate assertion, since it is not clear whether those elements necessarily make history
fictional (not claiming to be true) or they are just common in both history and fiction. This
author leans towards the first option, but the ambiguity of such a formulation is sympto-
matic of the confusion created by assuming fiction to be a synonym for narrative. Carr
2014, p. 200.

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Ricoeur argues, makes it impossible to differentiate historiography’s claims to

truth from the lack of them in literary fiction,21 and hence obfuscates the spe-
cific epistemological aspects of both historiography and fiction. Narrative is not
an exclusive quality of fiction (in which the suspension of disbelief is assumed),
but a fundamental feature of historiography: the fact that both share narrative
features does not dissolve the differences between these genres and their rela-
tions to reality.
Through an interesting hypothesis – which lamentably, and typically in
this philosopher, ignores space – Ricoeur suggests that the plot of a histori-
ographical narration, as ‘a synthesis of the heterogeneous, embracing inten-
tions, causes, and accidents,’22 integrates the Braudelian moments of the struc-
ture, the conjuncture and the event. Therefore, while the episodic dimension
refers to the short-time span, the configurative deals with the long-time of
structures – and with the time of the conjuncture we could add, since Ricoeur
and Koselleck at first mention this intermediate scale but then ignore it – hence
referring this narrative relation to endurance and efficacy as well. This hetero-
geneous synthesis, whose literary form is the plot, has thus both explanatory
and narrative functions.23
In this case, narrative allows the interplay of scales and consequently the
differentiation and hierarchisation of space-times – including the mechanisms
that set them in motion. This characteristic is epistemologically fundamental
because, as we have noted,24 the lower the stratum of history, the larger the
spatio-temporal scale in which it functions (e.g., the scale at which the rela-
tions of production function is larger than that of the political transforma-
tions). In Ricoeurian terms, narrativity cannot substitute the modes of explan-
ation/understanding, but can account for the causal relations that the latter
establish – a position consistent with the Marxian conception of the relation
between inquiry and presentation. Moreover, this narrative interplay can be

21 ‘This equating of narrative configuration and fiction, of course, has some justification inas-
much as the configuration act is … an operation of the productive imagination, in the
Kantian sense of this term. Nevertheless, I am reserving the term “fiction” for those liter-
ary creations that do not have historical narrative’s ambition to constitute a true narrative.
If we take “configuration” and “fiction” as synonyms we no longer have a term available to
account for the different relation of each of these two narrative modes to the question of
truth’. Ricoeur 1984b, p. 3.
22 Ricoeur 2004, p. 246.
23 Ricoeur indicates that the synthesis of the heterogeneous in historiography brings ‘coordin-
ation between multiple events, or between causes, intentions and also accidents within a
single meaningful unity’. Ricoeur 2004, p. 243.
24 See above, 1.1.

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productively approached through the concept of chronotope as the narrative

counterpart to the spatio-temporal models that help to explain historical pro-
cesses.
However, Mikhail Bakhtin’s original formulation of this concept is problem-
atic: while for him the chronotope is ‘the place where the knots of narrative
are tied and untied’, and ‘it can be said without qualification that to them
belongs the meaning that shapes narrative’,25 he admits that his use of it was
only a first attempt to investigate time and space in literature. Thus, his essay
Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel does not engage in the defin-
ition and development of the concept, but rather applies it to narratives from
different historical contexts (Greek and chivalric romance, ancient biography,
Rabelaisian novel, etc.). This leads to a vague and open concept, to which fur-
ther determinations have to be given in order to make it empirically operational
and theoretically pertinent.
His initial reference to Einstein and his consequent call to treat space and
time as narratively inseparable suggest that the chronotope constructs a
world – an ‘ultimate perceptual horizon’26 – where these categories are not
simply formal markers, but act in their unity as active agents of the narrative,
rather than a form external to its contents. This aspect is nonetheless under-
developed in Bakhtin’s work, in which the chronotope appears assimilated
to a diegetic space-time (road, castle, salon, etc.) supposed to condense and
articulate the relations of characters and objects in the narrative. He analyses
the kinds of space-times necessary for each kind of narrative, but the char-
acteristics he finds are related to contents alone, not explained in terms of
form.27
Since narrative is the means by which language allows the subject to grasp
space-times, the rhetorical construction of the chronotope – its literary form
in general – should be at least as important as its explicit contents; narratology
can hence productively contribute to a more concrete concept and character-
isation of the chronotope. Although Hayden White’s narratological approach
to historiography may initially seem far from the scope of the chronotope,
it becomes essential to it if we endorse Gaddis’s interpretation, according to
which

25 Bakhtin 1981, p. 250.

26 Jameson 2002, p. 98. On the construction of the world in a phenomenological sense, see
the first chapter of Part Two in Husserl 1982, pp. 51–62.
27 See for example his characterisation of the chronotope in the travel novel. Bakhtin 1981,
pp. 103–4.

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writing about ‘emplotment’ and ‘formist, organicist, mechanistic, and

contextualist’ modes of explanation, what he’s [White’s] really describ-
ing is the historian’s liberation from the limitations of time and space:
the freedom to give greater attention to some things than to others and
thus to depart from strict chronology; the license to connect things dis-
connected in space, and thus to rearrange geography.28

Clearly, such liberation from chronology and geography needs certain limits,
since the historiographical chronotope should present the spatio-temporalised
explanation of real structures – a necessity that will lead us to differentiate
between a configurative and an episodic dimension in the chronotope. How-
ever, Gaddis correctly points out the centrality of emplotment in the construc-
tion of the chronotope; the latter should thus be approached through the inter-
play of the configurative and episodic dimension in the text and, to the extent
that historiographical presentation aspires to explain the logic of the social
mechanisms, the chronotope should refer to the spatio-temporal models that
account for the social forms it refers to: it should account for its scales, spatial
configurations and rhythms.
White argues that the deep structural forms of the historical imagination
correspond with the four basic tropes for the analysis of language: metaphor,
metonymy, synecdoche and irony. These tropes, he believes, underpin every
possible historiographical style (a singular combination of modes of emplot-
ment, argument and ideological implication),29 and are the basic elements of
this kind of narrative. However, they are pre-narrative, and therefore already
present in the (synchronic) configurational dimension of the emplotment,
independently of its episodic dimension. As such, tropes complement the
abstract concepts that configure the spatio-temporal tendencies at the level
of the presentation of modes of production.
Literary figures form part of the analogical grammar of theories, which is
‘the indispensable stock of metaphors, analogies, models etc., available to a
field of inquiry or theoretical approach which helps to generate hypotheses
and solutions … and lend the approach plausibility’.30 As such, they should not
be considered external to theoretical activity; on the contrary, improving the
metaphors used by science is an essential task for its development.31 Hence,

28 Gaddis 2002, pp. 19–20.

29 White 2014, pp. 29–30.
30 ‘Grammar’, in Hartwig (ed.) 2007, pp. 2007, 223–4.
31 Sayer 2000, p. 78. See also Sayer 1992, pp. 62–65; and Bhaskar 2008, p. 194.

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insofar as theories account for the functioning of generative mechanisms, their

tropes should be adequate for their explanation.
Theories thus have a tropological facet, but the conditions they set are only
tendencies to be fulfilled or contested by the contingent narrative events in the
episodic dimension. Although White attributes emplotment to the theoretical
moment, his differentiated treatment of historians and philosophers of history
suggests that this realisation is secondary for the latter: while he analyses the
works of historians through the criterion of emplotment, those of philosoph-
ers are primarily characterised through their prevailing tropes.32 Following the
characterisation of tropes in Metahistory,33 a metaphorical construction then
represents a space-time through another one, while through metonymy the
chronotope as a whole is built into the projection of one of its parts. A syn-
ecdochical operation would integrate two or more space-times into a single
chronotope, while irony calls the possibility of the specific chronotope into
question.
Some previously mentioned cases in this investigation are useful to exem-
plify the construction of space-times through tropes. A relation between two
different objects, metaphor is revealed by Castells’s use of computers and
information science as a model for the analysis of the space-time of globalisa-
tion, mentioned in the introduction. When Marx speaks about Versailles and
Paris in his The Civil War in France, he does so in a metonymical way, in general
(though not always) assuming, for the sake of exposition, that each of them
function coherently, as a unitary actant. However, as this example shows, for
Marx this operation needs to be complemented. The opposition between these
symbolic cities is an example of a synecdochical construction, where the parts
are integrated into a qualitatively different whole: as symbols of the oligarchy
and the working class, respectively, they configure France during this con-
juncture as a contradictory field of struggle. Finally, Jameson’s description of
Gehry’s house in Santa Monica is a good example of an ironic chronotope: the
juxtaposition of heterogeneous spaces, and Jameson’s own indications about

32 Michelet, Ranke, Tocqueville and Burckhardt are characterised through their respect-
ive romantic, comic, tragic and satirical emplotments, respectively; Marx, Nietzsche and
Croce are characterised, respectively, by their use of metonymic, metaphoric and ironic
tropes.
33 White 2014, pp. 30–7. It is important to recall that there are several other theories with
different definitions and numbers of tropes. On this theme, see Jameson, ‘Figural Relativ-
ism; or, the Poetics of Historiography’, in Jameson 2008a, pp. 169–70. White’s fondness for
four-fold classifications, as is also the case in his theory of genres of emplotment, can be
traced back to the Kantian transcendentalism underlying his philosophy. See Ankersmit
2009, pp. 34–53.

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1. a, b, c, d, … n
2. A, b, c, d, … n
3. a, B, c, d, … n
4. a, b, C, d, … n
5. a, b, c, D, … n
figure 3 Events and narrative causality
source: white 1985, 92

the incommensurability of the experiences in them, suggest the impossibility

of totalising into a coherent narrative.34 The cognitive mapping of this post-
modern space-time is thus inherently ironic.
But if the individual tropes and concepts are at the basis of the chrono-
tope in the configurational dimension, the relation between causes and effects
only actually emerges with the sequence of events in the episodic dimension.
White explains this through a chronological-syntactical arrangement – presen-
ted above in Figure 3 – where the capitalised letter shows the privileged status
of the event in terms of its explanatory force (this should not be confused with
a configurative moment; it involves decisive change through a new event).
According to this figure, Series 1 is a chronicle – a mere sequence without a
proper explanation – while in Series 2 the decisive factor happens in the begin-
ning, thus configuring a deterministic narrative. Series 5, where the last is the
determining event, corresponds to an eschatological or teleological account,
exemplified by White through Augustine’s City of God and Hegel’s Philosophy of
History. In order to account for a history beyond (apparently) isolated facts, an
event should here be understood in the wider sense – that is, not as an atomistic
fact, but as the depiction of a synchronic moment in the narrative.35
Figure 3 therefore shows different possibilities of causal structuration in a
narrative. However, it follows a unilinear chronological path which is clearly
incompatible with the spatio-temporal dynamics of Marx’s conception of his-
tory. In this sense, Harootunian praises White’s (occasional) use of the concept
of chronotope because it substitutes the linearity of the historical period for a
multidimensional image of history.36 While agreeing with this criticism of uni-
linearity, it is fair to suggest that although the episodic dimension tends to the
linear representation of time, narratives do not necessarily have to be unilin-
ear; on the contrary, they can tell a story from different, complementary and

34 Jameson 1991, pp. 108–29.

35 White 1978, pp. 92–3. About historical events as narrative events, see Ricoeur 1984a,
pp. 208–25.
36 Harootunian 2015a, pp. 146–9. See also White 2010, pp. 237–46.

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even contradictory points of view. Examples of this abound in literature and

films, e.g. Waters’s novel Fingersmith and Cunningham’s The Hours, as well as
the films Rashomon and Pulp Fiction by Kurosawa and Tarantino, respectively.37
Chronotopes and emplotment are thus not mutually exclusive; rather, a
complex chronotope sets the conditions for a complex and multilinear emplot-
ment. Such a story can adopt different strategies of emplotment and combine
them under a main line of narrative development. For example, forms of tragic,
romantic or comic emplotment can easily coexist under the primacy of satire;
the novel does this regularly, as Bakhtin indicates, characterising it as a hybrid
form that

orchestrates all its themes, the totality of the world of objects and ideas
depicted and expressed in it, by means of the social diversity of speech
types and by the differing individual voices that flourishes under such
conditions. … These distinctive links and interrelationships between ut-
terances and languages, this movement of the theme through different
languages and speech types, its dispersion into the rivulets and droplets
of social heteroglossia, its dialogization – this is the basic distinguishing
feature of the stylistics of the novel.38

Historical narrative has no need to be any less complex than this, as any reader
of Hobsbawm’s classic trilogy on the ages of Revolution, Capital and Empire, or
Braudel’s Mediterranean, would testify. In its simplest manner, the chronology
of events in a process of uneven development can be described through Fig-
ure 4, where d and d’ correspond to two different events with a common cause
and in the same chronological moment, while e and e’ share the latter but each
of them develops in a different line.
The written narrative is expressed through a single line, but it also has textual
devices that account for the complexities of times and spaces. For example, as
long as this structure is properly explained and the space-times are well differ-
entiated, the order of the narrative can be: a, b, C, d, e, f, d’, e’, f’; or it can be d,
e, f, d’, e’, f’, a, b, C; or C, d, e, f, d’, e’, f’, a, b.; etc. The chronological and narrative
order are not necessarily the same order: e.g. when the latter is expressed by

37 Ricoeur 1984a, p. 67. Pulp Fiction, for example, consists of several short stories that,
although narrated in a non-linear order, consist of events and characters relating to each
other that make up a common narrative universe. As for Rashomon, which presents dif-
ferent versions of a crime according to different characters in the story, see Redfern 2013,
pp. 21–36. These films are hence examples of non-linear narratives.
38 Bakhtin 1981, p. 263.

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d, e, f
1. a, b, C<
d’, e’, f’
figure 4 Events in a narrative of uneven development

a detective story, the explanation of the hidden details of the traumatic event
in the past is delivered at the end, or as the development of the causes lead-
ing to an event that appears at the beginning of the tale. It is also important
to observe that, although Figure 4 is simplified for the sake of clarity, each line
refers to a space-time with its own rhythms and directionalities (cyclic, linear,
etc.).
The episodic dimension introduces discontinuities into the space-times of
the narrative by indicating the transformations of the configurative dimension:
whenever there is change in these spatio-temporal conditions, a re-configur-
ative moment appears in the story. The adequate presentation of spatio-tem-
poral models (with their scales, spatial configurations and rhythms) thus de-
pends on the configurative dimension, but the transformations of the chro-
notope are developed in the episodic dimension. Marx’s theory and socio-
historical analyses provide examples of the relations between chronotopes and
spatio-temporal explanation.

4.2 Poetics of Theory

While historiography requires the integration of both the configurative and

episodic dimensions of narrative, social theory dwells in the former; in this
sense, synchronic explanation is pre-narrative. In Marx’s case, the level of the
mode of production is then the central problem to be examined through the
configurative dimension. Although studies about literary forms and metaphors
in Marx’s work have been around since at least the 1970s, investigations about
these aspects of Capital have flourished in the last decade.39
Theological and teratological metaphors are highlighted as constituting a
structure that provides additional depth to Marx’s explanation of capitalism: in
this sense, McNally convincingly contends that Marx establishes a new, radical
poetics in which the monstrous plays a central critical role, and Dussel, closer to

39 On Marx’s poetics in general: Silva 1975; Prawer 1978; Dussel 1993; Wolff 1988. On Capital
especifically: McNally 2012; Jameson 2014; Roberts 2017; Pepperell 2010. I would like to
thank Alex Fletcher for this reference.

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the theology of liberation, reinterprets Marx’s critique of commodity fetishism

as a critique of idolatry – thus Marx’s ‘metaphorical theology’ is negative and
fragmentary, but explicitly anti-fetishist. These interpretations are not mutu-
ally exclusive, as we can infer from Roberts’s analysis of Volume i of Capital,
in which he finds both Christian religious imagery and monstrous mythology
from Dante’s Inferno; moreover, he argues that Volume i shares its literary form
with this aspect of the Divine Comedy. Whether this form of representation
affects Marx’s conceptual and substantive understandings is a further problem
which the rest of this chapter tackles.40
The most influential interpretation of Marx’s philosophy of history from the
standpoint of literary form, White’s Metahistory, differentiates ‘grammar’ from
‘syntax’: while the former organises the data of history into the concepts of
base and superstructure, the latter deals with their rules of transformation, and
ultimately with the Utopian narrative of the successive modes of production
leading to communism. In this interpretation, Marx’s ‘grammar’ is metonymic,
but his ‘syntax’ is synecdochic, which in terms of emplotment means that the
former tends to be tragic, and the latter tends towards comedy. Furthermore,
the imageries in each would be mechanistic and organicist modes of argument-
ation, respectively.41
Metahistory’s reading of Marx contrasts with the argument of this work. In
regards to what White calls ‘grammar’, I maintain that the ‘base’ does not work
mechanically on the ‘superstructure’ but, as a lower stratum, acts as a condi-
tion of possibility of the latter. As for the order of the ‘syntax’, by assuming
that the Marxian conception of history was already established by The Ger-
man Ideology – around 1845 – White incorrectly assumes a de-temporalised and
de-spatialised version of Marx’s philosophy of history, whereby history is a con-
tinuum.42 In opposition to such continuity, this investigation argues that Marx
breaks from the world-historical, unilinear narrative in the second half of the
1850s.
We should then examine this matter in more detail in order to adequately
understand the construction of Marxian chronotopes. Let us first return to
Marx’s analysis of precapitalist modes of appropriation in the Grundrisse, in
which we originally find ‘the natural unity of labour with its material pre-
suppositions’, such that the worker ‘relates to the objective conditions of his

40 McNally 2012, pp. 115–16; Dussel 1993. Harvey’s critique of Roberts accepts the existence
of this form, but argues that it does not have an influence on the theoretical contents of
Marx’s Capital. See Harvey 2017.
41 White 2014, pp. 310–11.
42 White 2014, p. 303.

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labour as to his property’.43 The clan community is the presupposition for the
communal appropriation of land and other conditions for subsistence. In its
earliest form, there is a balance between community and earth, the latter being
‘the great workshop, the arsenal which furnishes both means and material of
labour, as well as the seat, the base of the community’.44
Although Marx constructs the chronotopes for modes of production mainly
through abstract terms related to geometry and movement, he uses metaphors
to supplement his explanations. As for these, childhood- and animal-related
terms are common in Marx’s depiction of the communitarian forms. The char-
acterisation of Greek antiquity as an infantile stage already appears in Marx’s
praise of classic art in the introduction to the Grundrisse. On the other hand,
the recurrence of terms derived from Tier or Herde (for instance, Herdswesen:
herd-like existence and Menschenpack: human pack) insists on the closeness of
these forms to animality. Marx characterises these forms as a unity of humans
between themselves and with nature – a plenitude that contrasts with the
isolation required and promoted by capitalism, where individual workers are
deprived of their objectivity. In contrast with these forms, the capitalist mode
of production is metaphorised as a complete emptying-out, and with the reli-
gious connotations of a sacrifice of the human end-in-itself. The separation
(Loslösung) of workers from land and property thus leads to the agglomeration,
the stockpiling (Anhäufung, rather than Akkumulation) of workers and instru-
ments at particular points.45
But it is not capitalism that threatens the precarious balance of these other
forms of property and production. While Marx downplays their internal con-
tradictions, he sees the development of their forces of production as the factor
which leads to their dissolution (Auflösung). Dissolution is the permanent
threat to these communitary forms, and as such it appears constantly under
both its noun and verb forms in the pages dedicated to the forms preceding
capitalism in the Grundrisse. Since the Asiatic form is the oldest, its unity is
stronger: its members cannot be separated from their land, because they are
‘rooted to the spot, ingrown’ ( festgewachsen). Again, a metaphor related to
nature appears as a temporal marker of an earlier moment. The possibility of

43 Marx 1973, p. 471.

44 Marx 1973, p. 472.
45 On geometry and movement, see above, 2.2. On the animal-related terms: Marx 1973,
pp. 110–11, 488, 496, 497; Marx and Engels 1983, pp. 44–5, 396, 404. On the unity of pre-
capitalist societies: Marx 1973, pp. 495–6. On the ‘emptying out’ in capitalism: Marx 1973,
p. 488; Marx and Engels 1983, p. 396. On separation and stockpiling: Marx 1973, pp. 512, 508;
Marx and Engels 1983, pp. 419, 415.

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the dissolution of the communitarian form emerges from its own tendency
towards separation (of agriculture from manufacture, of individuals from prop-
erty). The master-servant relation appears then to ferment the original forms
of property and production.46
Marx’s rhetorical construction of communitary modes of production is
based on a periodisation that permanently relates them with capitalism. Inso-
far as these modes of production are conceptualised in opposition to their
posterity – they are characterised as forms which precede capitalist produc-
tion – their whole construction contains an implicit narrative, given by their
inner tendencies. Childhood and animality are temporal metaphors that refer
to stages before adulthood and humanity, hence implicitly depicting capital-
ism as a more developed form: this metaphorics is related to the evolutionist
line in the introduction to the Grundrisse, according to which the anatomy of
the human explains that of the ape.47
In this sense, the spatiality of the communitary forms in the Formen is based
on the opposition between unity and separation, wherein the former means
an equitable spatial distribution of the resources – even undifferentiated, as in
the case of the Asiatic form – in opposition to the unevenness of capitalism,
where labour processes and social wealth are concentrated in places different
from one another. Likewise with the pre-capitalist temporalities: their cycles of
reproduction should repeat once and again, lest they succumb to nature or turn
into non-communitary forms. The fragility of the unitary forms thus has tragic
features; indeed, their dissolution comes in terms of a hybris, an excess that
threatens the balance of their reproduction. This comes with the development
of particular interests and relations of domination: with the master-servant
relation particular groups substitute for the communitary unity, and thus the
principium individuationis prevails over unity, just as Nietzsche describes the
decline of ancient tragedy.48
Concerning the metaphors about capitalism, Dickman asserts that in the
first volume of Capital Marx

reaches backward into the Greek mythology of the Cyclopses, to describe

monster machines, like a gigantic hammer that even Thor could not
wield; and into Hindu mythology, to allude to the proletariat being crush-
ed beneath the wheels of the chariot of Juggernaut. He digs deep into

46 On dissolution: Marx 1973, p. 495; Marx and Engels 1983, p. 403. On ferment: Marx 1973,
p. 501; Marx and Engels 1983, p. 408.
47 See above, 1.2.
48 Nietzsche 1993.

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the grave of the occult, conjuring vampires and werewolves, that suck the
blood of workers and devour their flesh. Along with the occult, there is the
alchemist’s retort, into which lead is transformed into gold. He employs
the imagery of the processes of nature: the biological metabolism of man
and the physical world; the metamorphosis of the larva in a chrysalis, to
emerge as a butterfly. There are nature’s flora and fauna: the body with
its members, organs and cells; the nut and its kernel, spider and its web,
honey bee and its hive. There is the world of machinery, like the clock-
work with its cogs and wheels. And man is crippled by this same machine,
consumed by it; and is transformed, himself, into a machine for the pro-
duction of surplus-value. … Our fetishism of commodities is compared to
an ancient tribe’s creation of a fetish to worship as a god. And finally there
is the metaphor of war, beginning with the class struggle between the
working class and the capitalist class that lies at the heart of capitalism.
There are its battles and armies; its barrack-like discipline; its unending
list of working-class casualties.49

These metaphors describe a world of destruction, where constant transform-

ation is the rule. Destruction of labour power, raw materials and even com-
modities – through consumption or the waste of goods for which there is no
demand – is correlated with production. Capitalism thus appears as a negative
force and production as a process of destruction: while metaphors of nature
prevail in the fragments about pre-capitalist social forms, capitalism is asso-
ciated with the monstrous, especially with werewolves and undead creatures,
and alienation appears both as a separation and as an inversion.50 In the lat-
ter case, prosopopoeia – personification – functions as the literary figure that
accounts for the power of social products over their producers, with commod-
ity fetishism being the most notorious example. There, not only are the char-
acters merely personifications of economic relations, but inanimate objects
appear to evolve grotesque ideas and intentions of their own.51 The use of this

49 Dickman 2014.
50 About production as destruction, see Jameson 2014. About the monstrous in the first
volume of Capital, see McNally 2012, p. 109. Silva convincingly argues that Marx’s construc-
tion of syntactical structures through the inversion of terms is meant to show the unity of
opposites in their reciprocal relations. Hence, for example, the young Marx argues that as
the dominion of private property begins with the property of land, in late feudalism it is
land that inherits the firstborn son rather than the opposite. Silva 1975; Marx and Engels
1988, p. 63.
51 Marx 1976b, p. 179; pp. 163–4.

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trope corresponds to a theoretical stance that criticises a world where imper-

sonal forces act as if they were subjects.
Inversion is itself a temporal concept,52 and since capital is a process rather
than a thing, the basis of the valorisation of value is described through images
that capture the passage of matter from dispersal to solidity: labour power thus
moves from its original fluid state to value as a coagulated state, a congealed
mass of human labour. Jelly (Gallerte) and ‘crystals of this social substance’
(Kristalle dieser ihnen gemeinschaftlichen Substanz) are other terms with which
Marx refers to value in Capital, thus referring to production as a process of
transformation into a solid state:53 the results of alienated relations achieve a
stability that, in light of the continuous transformation of the world by capit-
alism, is only ever relative.
As argued in the second chapter, Marx provides a much more temporalised
account of capitalism than the other, earlier modes of production. In this sense,
while the stability of the other modes depends on their lack of development in
order to avoid dissolution, in Volume i of Capital, as Jameson indicates, the verb
to extinguish (auslöschen) describes a permanent temporal condition of capit-
alism; separation and expansion, on the other hand, characterise its space.54 As
Harvey productively interprets it, the metaphor of the annihilation of space by
time in the Grundrisse illustrates the spatio-temporal compression due to cap-
ital’s tendency to accelerate its turnover cycles, while indicating the destructive
character of capitalist production.55
Marx thus constructs the chronotope of capitalism through conceptual and
metaphoric language, as an unstable stability and as an uneven field of forces
where capital is concentrated and centralised among fewer proprietors, while
growing masses of people (including capitalists who lose to larger-scale cap-
ital) are pauperised. In his words, ‘capital grows to a huge mass in a single
hand in one place, because it has been lost by many in another place’.56 This
image relies on the conception of movement, and beyond its metaphoric func-
tion – after all, ‘hands’ is not to be taken literally – it describes a landscape of

52 Temporal in the sense that it supposes that the inverted situation is not immediate, but a
product of social relations. However, such inverted states are not opposed to pre-existing
states of plenitude, but refer strictly to the negation of human praxical possibilities. See
above, 1.1.
53 Marx 1976b, pp. 142, 128; Marx and Engels 1962, p. 52. As Leslie explains, Marx uses the
image of crystallisation with a precise chemical sense, from which he draws an analogy
between the social and chemical world. Leslie 2016.
54 Jameson 2014, pp. 93, 110.
55 Harvey 1991.
56 Marx 1976b, p. 777.

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an uneven distribution of resources in a geographical space: capital as a move-

ment between ‘places’ – be they cities (e.g., industrial to financial-based cities),
regions or countries. These centre-periphery relations produce an uneven and
unequal chronotope.57
Capital does not focus on the growing wealth of successful capitalists, but
on the growing misery of those directly and indirectly (i.e. unemployed work-
ing people) exploited. In Volume i, the literal transcription of testimonies from
factory inspectors and medical reporters serves as a literary realist strategy,
turning bureaucratic documents into vivid accounts of how the tendencies of
capitalism destroy the immediate conditions of working people – and espe-
cially their bodies. The consequences of the labour processes and the condi-
tions for their reproduction are therefore presented at the scale of the phenom-
enal experience, not only as abstract problems; descriptions of illness, degrad-
ation and death abound in its pages. Regarding the consequences of capitalism
on English agricultural labourers, Marx quotes:

‘Sutherland … is commonly represented as a highly improved county …

but … recent inquiry has discovered that even there, in districts once fam-
ous for fine men and gallant soldiers, the inhabitants have degenerated
into a meagre and stunted race. In the healthiest situations, on hill sides
fronting the sea, the faces of their famished children are as pale as they
could be in the foul atmosphere of a London alley’.58

Hence Marx’s poetics of modes of production is irreducible to a metonymical

operation, since the latter cannot, on its own, account for the contradiction and
uneven development that structure his chronotopes. Moreover, even if we were
to accept White’s (wrong) mechanistic interpretation of the relation between
base and superstructure, this relation is secondary in respect to the logic of the

57 Marx also observes processes of displacement – now referred to as ‘gentrification’ – as

structural effects of the capitalist production of space: ‘ “improvements” of towns which
accompany the increase of wealth, such as the demolition of badly built districts, the erec-
tion of palaces to house banks, warehouses etc., the widening of streets for business traffic,
for luxury carriages, for the introduction of tramways, obviously drive the poor away into
even worse and more crowded corners’. Marx 1976b, p. 812.
58 Marx 1976b, pp. 380–1. Regarding the inadequate conditions of housing, Marx quotes: ‘ “in
its higher degrees it [i.e. overcrowding] almost necessarily involves such negation of all
delicacy, such unclean confusion of bodies and bodily functions, such exposure of animal
and sexual nakedness, as is rather bestial than human. To be subject to these influences is
a degradation which must become deeper and deeper for those on whom it continues to
work”’. Marx 1976b, p. 813.

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value-form and the world it produces. Although Metahistory contributes useful

tropological and narratological elements for the analysis of social theory and
historiography, its account of Marx’s literary forms is insufficient.
The interpretation of Capital as an ironic text is more challenging. Pepperell
and LaCapra develop interesting analyses of this matter, the former, in partic-
ular, considering that the sole intent of this book is to disclose the inconsisten-
cies of bourgeois political economy and to deconstruct the Hegelian category
of totality – which she defines rather arbitrarily as a metaphor – through the
use of parody. For Pepperell, Marx’s theory of value is a parody in which Marx
‘intends the argument not to be taken seriously’.59
If this interpretation were correct, the object of Capital would be political
economy rather than capitalism. This contrasts with numerous affirmations
from Marx about how his book unveils the functioning of the mode of produc-
tion based on capital, and sidesteps the epistemologically realist dimensions
of his work on political economy. That Marx considers that knowledge in a his-
torical moment is conditioned by the ‘limitations of the practical experiences
available to members of his society’,60 does not invalidate such knowledge, but
situates it as a product of determined conditions – as is already the case in
Hegel’s philosophy. Following this line it is arguable, against Pepperell’s anti-
foundationalist interpretation, that historicisation itself necessarily relies on
an ontology, and that in capitalism labour plays the role of praxis in Marx’s
ontology of social being: Capital not only explicates positive dimensions of cap-
italism, but is also based on ontological assumptions.
In any case, the tropology of the configurative dimension is only a prelimin-
ary element of the narrative chronotope, whose inner tendencies – as part of
the analogical grammar for the explanation of the mechanisms in question – it
helps to characterise. The presentation (Darstellung) of the chronotope at the
configurative level requires the episodic dimension in order to develop a prop-
erly historiographical narrative. It is the in episodic that the problems of peri-
odisation and emplotment, as well as the relations in historiography between
the epistemic, the political and the aesthetic, are productively clarified.

59 LaCapra 1983; Pepperell 2010, p. 79. In contrast, Tomba characterises the poetics of Cap-
ital as a sort of estrangement effect (Verfremdungseffekt): ‘the literary style of Capital, its
metaphors and its sarcasm are functional to the change of perspective that is able to dis-
orient; to render foreign what is familiar’. Tomba 2013a, p. 122. Similarly, McNally analyses
how the concept of the fetishism of commodities ironises the stereotype of superstitious
non-European societies by indicating the superstition behind the everyday functioning of
capitalist economy. McNally 2012, pp. 126–7.
60 Pepperell 2010, p. 90. On Marx’s realism, for example, Marx 1978, p. 303; Marx 1973, p. 90.
See above, 2.1.

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4.3 Emplotment as Politics

As argued in the second chapter, the explanation of an actual individual social

form requires the consideration of the various mechanisms at work in its devel-
opment. Even as different strata and spheres have observable tendencies, the
interaction between them – each with its own space-times – produces unpre-
dictable outcomes. In historiographical narrative, this contingent character of
actual history thus requires the episodic dimension to account for the devel-
opment of the process as story. A narrative explanation is thus one that retro-
spectively accounts for the contingencies of a historical process while relating
them to the generative mechanisms that help to explain such development.
As Jameson indicates, class struggle is Marx’s central narrative device;61 in
the analysis of specific conjunctures, however, this conflict is embodied by
empirical actors, which in the actual situation means that it has determinations
beyond those directly linked to the stratum of forces and relations of produc-
tion – however determinant these factors may in the last instance be. While in
his interpretation of the Paris Commune Marx identifies the struggle between
the bourgeoisie and the working class as a form of the conflict between Ver-
sailles and Paris, his analysis of the U.S. Civil War is built on the opposition of
two capitalist forces based on different forms of exploitation: slave versus wage
labour, South versus North.
Collective actants – impersonal and supra-personal characters – thus unite
heterogeneous social groups. ‘The South’ in the context of the Civil War encom-
passes for Marx the slave-owners and ‘poor whites’ – but not the slaves – while
‘the North’, in turn, refers to industrial capitalists as well as the salaried work-
ing class. Paris and Versailles symbolise spaces led by opposing social classes,
although each of them is not on its own. These actants, named here after their
geographical referents, are metonymical constructions insofar as they reduce
plurality to one of its parts – both in the sense of the leading social force and
their belonging to a space. The characters in the narrative of ‘so-called prim-
itive accumulation’ are more diffuse, but since these chapters account for the
birth and tribulations of the working class, they would therefore constitute a
sort of Gothic tale of horrors for the populations enduring dispossession.
Marx’s narrative thus depends on a double tropic operation: it integrates
the social actors through metonymy, but this integration has meaning only to
the extent that they are part of a wider conflict where the whole is different
than the addition of its constituent parts. In The Civil War in France, his praise

61 Jameson 2010, p. 550.

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of the independent and empowered Parisian communard women accompan-

ies his scorn of the cocottes and their protectors, which symbolised the old
world championed by Versailles. The old French state appears as a parasitic
creature62 and, again, the opposition between life and death arises in this text:
the Assembly of the Rurals is ‘the representative of everything dead in France,
propped up to the semblance of life by nothing but the swords of Louis Bona-
parte. Paris all truth, Versailles all lie: and that lie vented through the mouth of
Thiers’.63
The same consideration of contradictory unity is made explicit in Marx’s
work on the U.S. Civil War: in spite of what their differences might suggest,
the North and South, he warns, cannot be considered as separate countries,
because they competed for the same territories. The only way one could sur-
vive is if it vanquished the other,64 a situation that inevitably unified them and
made separation an implausible solution to their conflict. As with his narrat-
ive of the Commune, Marx’s analyses of the war in the United States ultimately
define their chronotope by reference to the state-form – albeit in necessary ref-
erence to the world market. The abstract chronotope of the capitalist mode of
production guides these accounts, and their specific spatio-temporal narrative
characteristics are developed on top of it. Centre-periphery spatial configura-
tions, to name an example, are common in both cases, but they now appear
as concrete historical conditions that configure the (episodic) development of
the conjuncture.65
While the chronotope of ‘so-called primitive accumulation’ is specifically
the world market, this narrative focuses on the consequences of this expansion
on British territory. The medieval English state is a central actor in this process,
through the action of different successive kings and their legislations for the
dispossession of the immediate producers from their soil. The metaphors Marx
uses here are not only monstrous but brutal; the history of this expropriation,

62 Marx 1986, p. 341. When Marx writes about the ‘heroic, noble and devoted’ women of the
Commune who ‘give up their lives at the barricades and on the place of execution’ (Marx
1986, p. 350), it is impossible not to recall the pétroleuses who resisted the occupation from
the Versailles army. See Thomas 2007. Also, Linton 1997, pp. 23–47; Eichner 2004. On the
state as parasite: Marx 1986, p. 328.
63 Marx 1986, p. 342.
64 Marx 1984a, p. 60.
65 In this sense, the level of a social formation functions at the configurative dimension,
while the conjuncture does so at the episodic dimension. Albeit pertaining to different
levels of abstraction, both the mode of production and the social formation work in a
synchronic manner, i.e., on the basis of mechanisms that follow certain rules – while the
episodic dimension accounts for changes in such mechanisms.

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he indicates, ‘is written in the annals of mankind in letters of blood and fire’.66
Accordingly, this part of Capital echoes numerous testimonies abounding in
details about the consequences of this process of ruthless enslavement, plun-
der, murder and torture on the bodies of the expropriated in Great Britain and
around the world. Moreover, Marx ironises abundantly by recalling bourgeois
humanitarian and religious commonplaces about capitalism and its origins.67
The account of the origins of capitalism is structured by the explanation of
the different processes and agents that led to the consolidation of that mode of
production in England and Northwestern Europe. Unlike texts like The Class
Struggles in France and the 18th Brumaire, which kept a more linear narrat-
ive, the section on ‘so-called primitive accumulation’ proceeds by separating
each of the processes – each with different spatio-temporal determinations,
but protagonised by Western European forces – that unveil ‘the secret of prim-
itive accumulation’ – precisely the name of the first chapter of this section.
Although the explanation focuses on English capitalism as its final result, the
spatio-temporal differentiality of the account suggests paths to peripheral cap-
italism (as in the Americas and Southeast Asian colonies) as well: it is a multi-
linear narrative – perhaps Marx’s most complex account of an actual process.
Narratively, The Civil War in France follows a more linear episodic order, with
the first section explaining the immediate political context after the Franco-
Prussian war that defines the characters, both collective and individual (with
several pages dedicated to Thiers in particular), while the second refers to
the uprising of Paris against the National Assembly. The third, in turn, does
a brief flashback in French political history in order to explain the changes set
in motion by the Commune. The fourth closes the narrative, drawing conclu-
sions from the defeat of the Parisian forces, especially by Prussian intervention:
as a small scale narrative, the role of this foreign army in a critical moment is
the decisive element for the outcome of this conflict. The closing paragraphs,
referring to the solidarity of the International Workingmen’s Association with
the Commune, and the support of other European governments with Thiers’s
counterrevolution, project the opposition between Paris and Versailles as a syn-
ecdoche to the whole of Europe.
On the other hand, the ongoing character of Marx and Engels’s writings
about the Civil war in the United States and their publication in newspapers
during the years of 1861 and 1862 led to a corpus that was never unified by

66 Marx 1976b, p. 875.

67 For instance, after describing the devastation and depopulation in Java by the Dutch, Marx
concludes: ‘That is peaceful commerce!’ Marx 1976b, p. 916.

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these authors into a single piece. Even so, they all amount to a coherent narrat-
ive, where some of the articles have a more long-scale structural (narratively
configurative) character, and function as the backbone for others that focus
on more specific themes – the shortage of cotton, electoral or military events,
for example. Hence, Marx’s articles in Die Presse on 25 October and 7 Novem-
ber 186168 establish the configurative chronotope from which he and Engels
develop other narratives – on military, commercial or electoral matters, among
others – related to this theme. These premises of the narrative set up its final
outcome (which had not yet arrived at the time when these articles were writ-
ten: although Lincoln’s election was the event that unleashed the tensions
between the slave- and wage-labour regimes, Marx considers that the same
conditions that produced the war long before it started would lead to the vic-
tory of the North), even when military events suggested the contrary.
Hence, in the Marxian construction of chronotopes at the configurative
dimension, metonymy and synecdoche are mutually necessary, although not
in the sense that White argues: the metonymical ‘grammar’ is not, according
to our considerations, a phase of a synecdochical ‘syntax’ that articulates the
modes of production one after another.69 This unity of opposites in histori-
ography corresponds to what Jameson, inspired by Aristotle, characterises as
destiny, which leads to recognition of the Other: the moment of taking sides
in this oppositional narrative, which in turn generates political confrontation.
His third figure, that of the Absolute, refers to historical experience as the total-
isation of History as system and as event, which in narrative terms entails the
problem of the construction of the chronotopical totalisation – the experience
of globalisation is the central reference in Jameson’s essay.70
In these terms, the diversity of Marx’s narrative choices can be understood
as defined by such taking sides, which makes the subject position explicit in the
otherwise seemingly impersonal theoretical analysis of the conjuncture.71 A
significant part of the narrative form depends on the delimitation of the space-
times of the story: even in the fairytale form, for instance, the formula ‘and they
lived happily ever after’ represses the necessity of the death of the characters by

68 Marx 1984e, pp. 32–42 and Marx 1984c, pp. 43–52.

69 White 2014, p. 310.
70 Jameson 2010, pp. 475–612.
71 Bourdieu’s distinction between position and position-taking is here especially useful: each
subject (qua habitus) occupies a position within their social field, but through their prac-
tices can assume different options in regards to the contradictions in such a field. Thus,
the habitus has an initial disposition towards certain attitudes and practices, but eventu-
ally can take distance from them. Bourdieu 1996, pp. 231–4.

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closing the narrative before such existential ends arrive.72 It is hence useful to
recall Jameson’s affirmation that periodisations are ‘representational choices
which can neither be proven nor falsified, which correspond to starting points
in the void, without presuppositions, or in other words that they can be false
but never true, and that they can only be motivated politically but not by the
“facts”’.73
Let us assess this position by examining some of Marx’s narratives. In them,
the fortune of the oppressed classes defines the tone and style: thus, in spite
of the bloody repression by the reactionary forces against the Commune, Marx
suggests that the conflict between the Old and the New will continue, and that
socialism will eventually be able to overcome this contradiction: he thus avoids
a tragic closure of this narrative. Certainly, the same events described in a dif-
ferent manner can serve as the basis for other narrative forms – for example
depicting the rise and fall of the Commune through a comic form where an ori-
ginal order is restored after a temporal disruption. Eventually, a shift of scale in
the periodisation would allow a happy ending for either of the two conflicting
narratives: in the short scale, the restoration of the pre-Commune order is a
triumph for the bourgeoisie, but in the large scale, by considering the possible
expropriation of the expropriators as a reappropriation by the community, the
happy ending would be for the proletarians. Yet it is also arguable that Marx
might formulate this possibility not merely because of narrative means, but
because in his work the mechanisms that generate class struggle have not been
exhausted, and thus the massacre of the Communards does not mark the end of
the political conflict in Europe, in spite of constituting an important episode
of it. Theory sets limits to historical narrative, which is hence not exclusively
determined by the political point of view of the narrator.
Since historiography always deals with the history of … (of a city, an indi-
vidual, a social class, an institution, etc.), its periodisation depends on the con-
crete development of the historiographical object – what Danto indistinctly

72 This importance of delimitation in narrative is also exemplified by an anecdote from Žižek

about religious film censorship in the former Yugoslavia. In his account, by cutting some of
the references to Christ in Ben Hur and ending the film shortly after the main character’s
triumph in the horse-race, the censor completely changed the meaning of the movie –
for the better: ‘although undoubtedly he had not the slightest notion of the tragic exist-
entialist vision, he made out of a rather insipid Christian propaganda piece an existential
drama about the ultimate nullity of our accomplishments, about how in the hour of our
greatest triumph we are utterly alone. And how did he pull it off? He added nothing: he
brought about the effect of “depth”, of a profound existential vision, by simply mutilating
the work, by depriving it of its crucial parts’. Žižek 1994, pp. 127–28.
73 Jameson 2014, p. 76.

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calls a temporal whole and temporal structure74 – whose story it tells. Against
the Althusserian epistemology at the base of Jameson’s appreciation of period-
isation, a Marxian realist perspective would not depend on the a priori consti-
tution of a theoretical object – in (a false) opposition with the reception of the
latter75 – but would research the mechanisms at work in the specific spheres
of an object and their relation with the social formation where it exists. Oth-
erwise, Marx’s periodisations in The 18th Brumaire and The Civil War in France,
which are not directly based on the development of the productive forces but
on the shifting balances of power in the state and politics, would have to be
considered merely polemical formulations rather than explanations of actual
processes, and would have no relation with the theory of history or that of cap-
italism in particular.
However, a specific historiographical object can be periodised differently,
according to the aspect that the narrative explanation wants to emphasise. For
example, the account of a city will vary whether the interest is focused on its
architectural, economic, political or demographic aspects. The reception of the
reference (the particular city, in this case) is the first moment in the methodo-
logical construction of the object, which should not only synthesise its internal
determinations and diverse mechanisms, but also its relation with the complex
totalisation in which it develops: in Marxian historiography, the object always
plays a role in regards to the respective mode of production.76 In any case, the
problem of reference is not simply ideological; a theory which cannot account
for the empirical – i.e. relate the latter to its abstract categories – cannot be
considered a scientific approach. A historiographical object hence consists of
several interrelated forms whose apprehension helps to make it more concrete
and better explain it. When Marx deals with Paris in The Civil War in France, he

74 ‘Any term which can sensibly be taken as a value for x in the expression “the history of x”
designates a temporal structure. Our criteria for identifying a, if a be a value of x, determ-
ines which events are to be mentioned in our history’. Danto 2007, p. 167; also p. 248.
75 Jameson’s quoted stance above follows Balibar’s in Reading Capital, according to which
‘the determination of the objects of these histories must await that of the relatively
autonomous instances of the social formation, and the production of concepts which will
define each of them by the structure of a combination, like the mode of production. We
can predict that these definitions, too, will always be polemical definitions, i.e., they will
only be able to constitute their objects by destroying ideological classifications or divisions
which benefit from the obviousness of the “facts”’. Balibar 2009b, p. 281. On theoretical
apriorism, also Balibar 2009b, p. 279.
76 This is also true about longue-durée objects that transcend more than one mode of produc-
tion. Thus Marx sketches histories of ‘antediluvian’ forms such as money and commercial
capital, in Volume iii of Capital, Marx 1981.

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does it primarily from the point of view of the political mechanisms at work in
that conjuncture, and this perspective leads the narrative, marking its defining
turning points and limiting the possible forms that the story can take.
As a spatio-temporal operation, periodisation refers to the transformations
of the narrative space-time through the narrative sequence: beyond the con-
figurative chronotope – which was addressed in the previous section – there
is an episodic chronotope which accounts for the narrative as a whole. Such
an episodic chronotope sets the conditions for the emplotment, by determin-
ing not only the spatio-temporal conditions of the narrative (as defined by the
spatio-temporal models for social explanation), but its delimitations as well. In
a narration, the configurative chronotope can go through one or several trans-
formations, or through none at all, but there is always an episodic chronotope
as far as there is a narrative spatio-temporal delimitation.
In this sense, the periodisation of the military conflicts in the United States
and Paris might seem to be obvious if we take for granted that the respective
beginnings and endings of open hostilities between the sides were necessarily
the beginnings and endings of the stories. But the conditions for the emer-
gence of these wars nonetheless predate them (and in the case of the Com-
mune, the substantive social conflict was not solved with the war), and hence
Marx extends their respective chronotopes beyond the narrated events. Marx’s
account of the U.S. Civil War starts with the bombardment of Fort Sumter near
Charleston in 1861, but the configurative chronotope which frames the conflict
goes back to the distribution in 1787 of states dedicated to slavery, and to the
negotiations about this matter in 1820, 1854, and 1859.77 The constant struggles
between the two blocs of states for the appropriation and formation of new
states – whose reasons Marx explained78 – conform to the chronotope through
which this author narratively explains this war. Thus, the chronotope period-
ises, but is not limited to the events included within its own periodisation.
Marx’s chronotopes are always structured on the basis of a conflict, with
uneven social relations leading to uneven development: Paris and the rest of
France at the end of the war with Prussia, and the North and South in the
United States after Lincoln’s election, configure the chronotopes in the respect-
ive narratives, with the accumulation of capital as the ultimate background
of these processes. On the other hand, the chronotope of ‘so-called primitive
accumulation’ – delimited by the expanding world market between the thir-
teenth and eighteenth centuries – is reconfigured through the depiction of the

77 Marx 1984e, p. 35.

78 See above, 2.3.

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violence deployed in order to separate workers from their means of subsist-

ence, and thus narrates the origins of the chronotope of capitalism. At the end
of this section of Capital the original configurative chronotope has undergone
a transformation into another, with class struggle at its base. In these cases,
chronotopes are determined in order to explain the mechanisms behind the
historiographical objects – here, conjunctures.
Having stressed the epistemological component of historiographical narra-
tion (against Jameson’s claim that periodisation is a merely representational
problem, thus downplaying its cognitive dimension), it is nonetheless imper-
ative to state – with Jameson’s argument about the role of the Other in nar-
rativity – that side-taking is a necessary component of narrative, and that this
is unavoidable due to the subject-matter of historiography: fractured societies
cannot be neutrally described since, as Horkheimer argues, their conceptual-
isation always assumes a position within the field that it seeks to explain.79
Partiality in historiography is thus inevitable, both because of the inherently
political character of social theory – as observed in the relation between the
conceptual and non-conceptual in Figure 1 – and because of the very essence
of narrative: whereas abstract conceptualisation can barely conceal its political
side-taking, narration cannot at all.
Social explanation – which in historiography requires a narrative form – is
dependent on a subject position towards the formation it references.80 In this
sense, Marx and Engels’s project of a scientific socialism implies that action can
be inferred from analysis: the interpretation of the world should be the basis
for its transformation, as his eleventh thesis on Feuerbach famously claims. The
concept of an explanatory critique – which maintains the possibility of a unity

79 See Horkheimer 1982, pp. 188–243. In a similar line, Sayer affirms that ‘realism does not
require some kind of denial of “subjective” influences or standpoints and researchers’
social context. On the contrary, it requires us to examine those standpoints so as to guard
against forms of projection and selection which misrepresent our objects. Realist social
science requires reflexivity’. Sayer 2000, p. 53.
80 In a piece written in the late 1970s, Jameson argues that a properly Marxist hermeneutic
should address history as the confrontation of two distinct social forms or modes of pro-
duction (that of the historian and that of his subject-matter). While he indicates that the
individual character in the reading of a culturally or temporally distant artifact should not
be dismissed, he nonetheless ignores the class mediation in this relation, thus opposing
two modes of production as if they were monolithic units. Moreover, Jameson’s dismissal
of the concept of ‘social formation’ weakens the possibility of a concrete historicised
approach to objects from artifacts different than researchers’ contexts. Jameson 2008b,
pp. 451–82 (especially pp. 475–80). As we will learn, Jameson himself provides a more
productive explanation of the production of narratives through his critique of White’s
formalism.

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152 chapter 4

of facts and values in social enquiry81 – is at the crux of Marx’s epistemology.

The historical character of historiography as a social discourse – that is, its con-
dition as a product of human praxis in a concrete social formation – defines it
not only as a cognitive and aesthetic but as a political problem as well. For Marx,
narrative explanation is therefore necessarily an explanatory critique.
Marx’s account of ‘so-called primitive accumulation’ serves as an example
of explanatory critique. Its very name is an ironic – even sarcastic – gesture
to Adam Smith’s theory of the origins of capitalism, which Marx replaces with
another explanation that, based on an array of sources, shows the barbarism
necessary for the emergence of the mode of production based on capital – a
narrative explanation which is possible by making the point of view of the dis-
possessed visible. The explanation of the human costs generated by the mech-
anisms of capital accumulation is possible by approaching the social totality
from its underside; this explanation is thus at the same time a critique formu-
lated from the perspective of those who have not profited from these processes
of dispossession.
As a socially produced discourse (form of praxis), the tropes and emplot-
ment in a historiographic narration are conditioned by the side-taking implicit
in the chronotope. Narrative is neither simply a logical nor aesthetic act: it
is produced by a subject and thus implies an ideological closure.82 Jameson’s
historicised critique of White’s narrative formalism, following a case study by
Greimas, argues for the necessity of the consideration of the social conditions
underlying the utterance of the narratives: although there are different logical
possibilities for the utterance of a discourse, its real possibilities are limited by
the social position of the utterer. Therefore, he argues that ‘what is missing [in
White’s method] is the mechanism of historical selection – that infrastructural
limiting situation – to which it falls, out of the complete logical possibilities,
to reject those that cannot empirically come into being in that determinant
historical conjuncture’.83

81 ‘Values play a role not only in the choice of problems to investigate, but also in the adop-
tion of strategies that specify the kinds of theories to pursue, the kinds of concepts they
will deploy, the kinds of possibilities they are capable of identifying, and various method-
ological matters that concern the procuring of relevant evidence’. Lacey 2007, p. 199.
82 Considered as praxis, social scientific explanation already-always entails both cognitive
and evaluative elements. In this sense, when approached from a dialectical perspective,
the discussion of whether or not values can be inferred from facts is redundant: this is not
a problem of logic, but of the pragmatics of discourse. See Edgley 1998, and Bhaskar 1998,
pp. 395–408 and pp. 409–17.
83 Jameson 2008a, p. 168. Greimas’s example analyses a Lithuanian folktale where a single
actant could have logically united the functions of a father and priest, but this variant was

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narrative as presentation 153

The 18th Brumaire indeed relies on numerous satirical resources, and The
Civil War in France has an epic tone. In both cases, mechanisms are explained
in order to account for the conjuncture, but the narratives have different forms,
because the approach to the events precludes some of the possible emplot-
ments for a concrete narrator. A socialist narrator can tell the story of a failed
revolution as a tragedy or as a coming-of-age tale, but her political perspective
would make it quite difficult, if not impossible, to frame such a theme under
the overall form of a comedy – unless it was a satire, which is not properly a
comedy. Even so, satire would have been an odd choice of emplotment for the
narration of a process like the Paris Commune, one that ended with the mas-
sacre of thousands of working-class people. Far from this, Marx’s (theoretically-
justified) chronotopical opening of this narrative – with the possible future of
a triumphant working class – avoids concluding the account of this political
experience with a pessimistic message.
The chronotopical operation which enables certain emplotments thus relies
on the explanation of the mechanisms at work in the analysed historiograph-
ical object, but is also a political intervention in its own right. Temporalisations,
as Osborne maintains, open different political possibilities in relation to capit-
alism84 and – specifically in the case of historiography – the chronotope opens
the possibility for appropriations of historical experiences from different social
positions in struggle. Therefore, narrative explanation always implies taking a
stand in the struggle for memory, wherein the narrative spatio-temporalising
resources are essential.
The materialist analysis of historiographical narratives should then account
for this imbrication of the cognitive, political and aesthetic, with the chro-
notope articulating these aspects. Narrativity thus completes the role of (syn-
chronic) presentation in Marx’s dialectic by accounting for actual history; there
can be no explanation of an open system without an account of the contin-
gency inherent to the complexity of the interaction of mechanisms in a given
social formation. This is the reason for Marx’s affirmation that ‘reflection on the
forms of human life, hence also scientific analysis of those forms, takes a course
directly opposite to their real development. Reflection begins post festum, and
therefore with the results of the process of development ready to hand’.85

precluded in the Catholic context – where the tale was produced – due to the mandate of
priests’ celibacy.
84 Osborne 2010, pp. 200–1; see above, Introduction. Also, Davis 2008.
85 Marx 1976b, p. 168. Hence also, as Jameson has pointed out, in Marxism ‘the concept of
historical necessity or inevitability is … operative exclusively after the fact’. Jameson 1971,
p. 361.

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154 chapter 4

Epilogue

In his preface to The Class Struggles in France, Grüner observes how ‘in this
intensely narrative Marx, with his elegant and at moments relentlessly ironic
style, we find all the theoretical and reflexive power of Capital and the Grund-
risse, as well as the irresistible seduction of the great writer’.86
Indeed, Marx’s writings about actual historical processes demonstrate that
although structural explanation and narrative are different from each other,
they are not – as historians and philosophers of history held during the twen-
tieth century – mutually exclusive. On the contrary, narrative is the necessary
means to seize the transformations of the diverse social mechanisms and their
interactions in space and time; metaphors and other tropes are a substantial
part of the formulation of scientific theories, as is literary form, additionally,
for their application to actual contexts. The account of each mechanism is the
problem of presentation, but its development in an actual formation is a mat-
ter of narrativity; narration thus completes presentation. In this sense, it is clear
from the consideration of the levels of abstraction in Marx that – in history –
narrative does not have to substitute for explanation, but can be, as with Marx’s
case studies, a kind of explanation based on several synchronicities: the narrat-
ive explanation of a conjuncture.
Although the linguistic turn in the philosophy of history elevated tropo-
logy and emplotment to the status of the only significant element of historical
discourse – a concept that would substitute that of historical knowledge – a nar-
rative explanation should first of all account for the real mechanisms and their
transformations in the analysed social formation. Historiographical narrative
should show how the hierarchised combination of the diverse mechanisms
lead to particular consequences. Yet beyond this epistemological considera-
tion, contents from sources cannot simply be fit into any previously assumed
narrative form for pragmatic reasons: literary form has its own (historical) polit-
ical mechanisms that set the rules for their use by social agents based on their
subject positions.
However, as Tomba contends in the quote cited at the beginning of this
chapter, the complexity of the relations between subject positions cannot be
apprehended by simply juxtaposing their standpoints without a previously
projected order. Guha, for example, argues for breaking from the coherence
and linearity he affirms are inherent to narrativity, and which he claims ‘dic-

86 Grüner 2005, p. 4. Emphasis in the original.

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narrative as presentation 155

tates what should be included in the story and what is left out’.87 Disruption
and ‘making a mess of its plot’ is the way in which a new historiography would
become multi-voiced, though the precise form resulting from this disorder is
hard to predict. Consequently, finding an order in this presumed chaos would
be a relapse into ‘the regime of bourgeois narratology’88 whose main narrative
is that of the unilinearity of historical development and Eurocentric progress.
Such a merely negative – or rather nihilistic – approach is not only wrong in
its simplification of narrativity to unilinearity, but by disavowing coherence, it
disallows the explanation of its complex and contradictory object. Moreover, it
relies on a problematic conception of history that takes memory as its model.89
Jameson interprets similar positions in political terms:

I suspect, indeed, that there are only a finite number of interpretive pos-
sibilities in any given textual situation, and that the program to which
the various contemporary ideologies of pluralism are most passionately
attached is a largely negative one: namely to forestall that systematic
articulation and totalisation of interpretive results which can only lead
to embarrassing questions about the relationship between them and in
particular the place of history and the ultimate ground of narrative and
textual production.90

This finite number of interpretive options is thus bound, as mentioned, with

the narrative forms available for each subject position in relation to the con-
tradictions in a determined social formation. The chronotope encompasses
periodisation, but is more complex than this: through both its configurative
and episodic dimensions, it articulates the epistemological, the political, and
the aesthetic in historiography, making explicit through tropes and emplot-
ment the side-taking which social theories tend to keep implicit.
Marx does not fully develop the implications of his theory of history for his
historiography. However, since the presentation should make intelligible the
functioning of the social totalisation, it is clear that a chronotope construc-
ted on the basis of contradiction is necessary in order to explain the spatio-
temporal dynamic of contradictory societies. Furthermore, while the concept
of history implies the integration of the multiplicity of human experience into
a single narrative, it is arguable that a totalising narrative is the necessary liter-

87 Guha 2009, p. 316.

88 Guha 2009, pp. 316–17.
89 Osborne 2013, pp. 190–6.
90 Jameson 2002, p. 16.

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156 chapter 4

ary form for the totalising actual social form par excellence which is capitalism.
In this sense, Marx’s narrative of ‘so-called primitive accumulation’ as well
as his account of the worldwide effects of the U.S. Civil War are examples of
how narration can rely on different subplots and present them in a multilinear
manner. At the same time, they show that narrative can be the means for the
explanation of the complexity of the relations between processes in different
space-times – even as it acknowledges its own side-taking.

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 conclusions

Towards a Politics of Spatio-Temporal Totalisation

If, then, today we detect a stagnation in our movement as far as these

theoretical matters are concerned, this is not because the Marxist
theory upon which we are nourished is incapable of development or
has become out-of-date. On the contrary, it is because we have not
yet learned how to make adequate use of the most important mental
weapons which we had taken out of the Marxist arsenal on account
of our urgent need for them in the early stages of our struggle. It is
not true that, as far as practical struggle is concerned, Marx is out-
of-date, that we had superseded Marx.1

…
Always historicize!2

∵
The analysis of Marx’s work in this investigation has demonstrated, in the spirit
of Luxemburg’s epigraph, that the explanatory possibilities opened by Marx’s
conception of history are still far from exhausted. Politically and scientific-
ally productive concepts and approaches emerge from both his theoretical and
conjunctural writings – although Marx does not thoroughly develop the meth-
odological issues and implications in the latter. Vilar’s characterisation of his-
torical research based on Marx’s conception as an ongoing project – an histoire
en construction3 – is therefore accurate; to the extent that his work is read and
adapted in accordance with diverse and changing historical circumstances, the
precision of its concepts and overall reach of its theory will continue to grow.
In this sense, the expansion of the capitalist world market since the 1990s,
commonly known as ‘globalisation’, makes the consideration and development
of the Marxian categories of social space and social time – which are not just

1 Rosa Luxemburg, quoted in Aricó 2014, p. 7.

2 Jameson 2002, p. ix.
3 Vilar 2011, pp. 47–80.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2022 | doi:10.1163/9789004499911_007

George García-Quesada - 978-90-04-49991-1
158 conclusions

formal indicators but active, determinant elements in the development of his-

torical forms – necessary in order to account for such a complex, multilinear
process. Their elaboration by recent Marxist and post-Marxist authors thus
responds to the need to account for the complexities of this reconfiguration of
the world-system. Marx was one of the first theorists of globalisation; its later
development also, in turn, throws light on his views on capitalism.
But, in addition to this historical condition, such proliferation of analyses
based on the categories of social time and social space are explained at the
most abstract level through Marx’s concepts of praxis and totalisation (read
through Lefebvre and Sartre), which lead to the conclusion that space and
time are both necessary dimensions for the organisation of the social world
and of our thoughts about it. A social totalisation is always mediated by space
and time, and the consideration of these categories therefore enhances our
knowledge about a particular social form. The Marxian operation of histor-
icising does not consist in the mere location of a social phenomenon within
geographical and chronological coordinates, but rather explains it in relation
to the concrete totalisation wherein it takes place. Historicisation is not just a
formal operation (although this is a necessary preliminary moment), but refers
a social phenomenon to its corresponding social structure.
This work has argued for the importance of a realist reading of Marx –
a necessary perspective in times when the (usually anti-Marxist) intellectual
field of the philosophy of history has little relevance for social and historical
research4 – that examines his contributions to the different moments of his-
torical knowledge: the ontology of history and the epistemological phases of
theory, archive and presentation.5 From this realist point of view, the process
of totalisation in the world corresponds with knowledge as a process of re-
totalisation that renders the former intelligible; ontology and epistemology
form part of a dialectical unity.
As forms through which the world is organised and categories that help to
explain it, social space and social time traverse all the ontological and epi-
stemological moments. At the most abstract level – the ontology of history
and social being – such forms are produced by the combinations of individual

4 Ironically, current philosophers of history like Carr and Ankersmit continue to dismiss dia-
lectics and Marx’s philosophy of history by referring to stereotypical Cold War depictions by
authors like Walsh and Mink. See Ankersmit 2012, pp. 14–16; Carr 2014, 103–4.
5 For Haldon, ‘historical materialism, while embedded within the philosophical terrain of a
realist materialist epistemology, is less a philosophy itself than it is an empirical theory’. Hal-
don 1993, p. 26. However, it is misleading to assert this primacy of ‘empirical theory’, given
the ontological framework that underlies the epistemological phases, as observed in the first
chapter.

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towards a politics of spatio-temporal totalisation 159

praxes, and are explained by generative mechanisms in different strata and

spheres of social life. Marx’s method of totalisation, based on social forms
rather than stages, is outlined in the Grundrisse, but is developed and consolid-
ated through his theoretical and political approaches to non-Western European
countries – ultimately leading to his view of the ‘Russian path’ to socialism,
without previous capitalist development. On the other hand, the concepts of
‘subsumption’ and ‘abstract labour’, elaborated in the 1860s, are central to the
explanation of the historical expansion of capital, and are necessary in order to
theoretically relate the diverse times and spaces in this process of uneven and
combined development.
This ontology of multilinear history thus enables us to account for the
diverse forms of human organisation through the theory of history – provided,
of course, that such forms are duly studied in their specificity. The concept of
history – which ultimately assumes the unity of human experience – entails
the interplay between different levels of abstraction and concreteness, where
real mechanisms are abstracted from the social phenomena, but then explain
the latter concretely through concepts and models constructed in the process
of abstraction. Such mechanisms have spatio-temporal tendencies – which can
be synthesised into spatio-temporal models – whose consideration is necessary
in order to explain the particular organisation of actual social formations. Ele-
ments of these spatio-temporal models are found in Marx’s conceptualisations
of modes of production, which thus allow better, more accurate explanations
of the activities and transformations in each of these forms.
The ontological difference between mode of production and social forma-
tion therefore allows us to grasp the relations between the levels of abstraction
in a totalisation, where a mode of production is abstract but real, whereas a
social formation is actual: it is more concrete, with more determinations to
explain. Epistemologically, to the extent that modes of production – qua mech-
anisms – are closed systems, their outcomes are necessary, but insofar as social
formations – qua open systems – develop in relation with other mechanisms,
a certain level of contingency is always present in history. Marx’s characterisa-
tion of the pre-U.S. Civil War southern states, for example, discloses a capit-
alism that developed on the basis of geographic and demographic conditions
very different from those in Northwestern Europe. The analysis of capitalism
at the level of the mode of production is thus necessary, but insufficient in
attending to the particular formations where it prevails; thus, a properly spatio-
temporalised explanation must account for the diversity of the modalities of
the expansion of capitalism by relating it to other mechanisms.
Regarding the documentary phase, by undertaking his work in London Marx
had a huge amount of sources from which to elaborate his theories and ana-

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160 conclusions

lyses of specific cases. However, this imperial archive had the drawback of its
own conditions of possibility: its sources were produced in asymmetrical social
relations, and thus tended to reflect the dominant class, gender and colonial
positions of their times. Marx was very conscious of bourgeois ideology in
his sources and denounced the violence of colonialism behind the ‘civilising’
claims of his Western European sources, but the critique of ideology is a neg-
ative procedure that cannot substitute for the positive contents of the sources,
and thus the spatio-temporal bias of Eurocentrism in his archive was a perman-
ent problem for Marx’s research – a major drawback of working on some issues
mostly with secondary literature.
Thus, while he does not hold an exoticising view of non-European societ-
ies, his archival limitations lead him to the problematic theory of ‘the Asiatic
mode of production’, which Marx abandons when new scholarship in the 1870s
showed that Indian communities followed other patterns of social develop-
ment. Research by authors based on sources unavailable to Marx, but following
his theory and method (e.g. the work of Eric Williams, John Haldon, Jairus
Banaji, and Chris Wickham), accounts for non-Western and non-capitalist
formations, and shows Marx’s post-Grundrisse materialist conception of his-
tory to be non-Eurocentric. In this line, I have argued that recent literature
clarifies and makes some of Marx’s explanations of historical processes more
accurate by drawing on operations such as spatial-demographical analysis (as
in the composition of the Commune), the displacement of focus to peripheral
processes (such as the role of the Western territories in the crisis that led to
civil war in the United States) and the widening of spatio-temporal scales (to
explain the origins of capitalism). Social spatio-temporalisation thereby proves
to be a productive avenue to more nuanced and accurate historical explana-
tions.
Operations such as these are possible when we consider the concrete pro-
cesses as totalisations whose contradictions can be explained through the same
concepts. It is then only partially true when Ricoeur states that in changing
scales one sees different things: indeed, this change brings different phenom-
ena to light, but it does not refer to different objects, as he affirms, contrasting
historical to architectural, optical and cartographical scale – a problem with
both ontological as well as epistemological implications. Ricoeur’s opposition
between microhistory and macrohistory6 too quickly dismisses the possibility
of shifting from one scale to the other in an investigation, which we have seen
is a characteristic of Marx’s analyses. Without this interplay of scales, there is

6 Ricoeur 2004, pp. 215–16.

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towards a politics of spatio-temporal totalisation 161

always the risk of not accounting properly for the relations between agency
and social structure, which is precisely one of the strengths of the concept of
history as a totalisation.
Finally, this investigation has maintained that the presentation of histor-
ical knowledge should integrate the synchronic explanation of abstract real
mechanisms and the diachronic account of the results from these mechan-
isms’ manifestations in actual formations (which necessarily entail contin-
gency). Marx considers the explanation of a social process to be not just a
re-presentation, but a presentation of results produced by the mediation of
theory. This presentation, he indicates, should show the necessary in the move-
ment of the form, in a manner that makes it appear as an a priori construction.
Yet this concept of presentation must incorporate narrative in order to explain
actual historical processes. In Ricoeur’s theory, therefore, the synchronic and
diachronic modes of explanation are related, respectively, to the configurative
and episodic dimensions of narrative.
The reconstruction of Bakhtin’s concept of chronotope, through Hayden
White’s theory of tropes and Ricoeur’s narratology, provides us with the appro-
priate totalisation for the historiographical narrative. While tropes and con-
cepts lie at the base of the configurative chronotope, the episodic dimension
of the chronotope relies particularly on emplotment – which is directly related
to the periodisation established by the chronotope. In historiographical nar-
rative, the form of emplotment must be non-linear in order to account for
the complexity of the actual historical processes. The novel as characterised
by Bakhtin, as opposed to the premodern genres analysed in Metahistory as
models of emplotment, thus appears as the literary form closer to the needs of
narrative explanation required by Marx’s conception of history.
Insofar as historiography has authority in the struggle for collective memory
between conflicting social agents, the historiographical chronotope is closely
defined by the subjects that formulate it – not every literary figure or form is
possible for a specific subject when referring to a particular kind of process
or event. The formulation of the chronotope is then an action of side-taking
by a subject that narratively articulates the cognitive, the political, and the
aesthetic, although the first prevails to the extent that the primary function
of historiography in a realist conception is to account for the mechanisms at
work in a historical process. The aesthetic aspect of the historical narrative
contributes to its political efficacy, as Marx well knew when he wrote his depic-
tion of France in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte as a satire, thus
undermining the legitimacy of that reactionary government, or when he wrote
(with Engels) the Manifesto in an epic tone, calling the proletariat to the revolu-
tion.

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162 conclusions

Marx formulates his conception of history within the social conflicts of his
day and his and Engels’s view of scientific socialism: his approach seeks to
explain history such that the working classes can have more clarity and con-
trol over their own social conditions. Historical research and historiography
thus contribute in at least two complementary directions to the struggle of the
oppressed: on the one hand, by elaborating a knowledge – through the analysis
of the conjuncture – that helps to transform the power relations where they
are subaltern; on the other, by producing a memory from their perspective that
motivates them into the transformation of their conditions.
Historical knowledge cannot isolate itself from its own historical conditions;
even its most abstract level, the ontology of historicity, emerged with the devel-
opment of capitalism and its antagonisms. This aspect enables us to highlight
a final, and fundamental, difference between Marx’s and Ricoeur’s respective
ontologies of history: while the former researches history as a means for polit-
ical emancipation, the latter, in contrast, considers that the primary function
of history is the remembrance of and homage to our dead. Thus although Ri-
coeur characterises historical research as both a scientific and literary discip-
line, his perspective is ultimately ethicist: an approach that dissolves social con-
flict into an abstract Otherness. The Marxian conception, on the other hand,
by conceiving history primarily through – or rather as – contradiction, asserts
the inherently political – besides scientific and literary – character of histori-
ography.7
The critical character of Marx’s approach is enriched by its spatio-temporal-
isation that makes the asymmetrical relations, dynamics and distributions of
the social agents visible: in contrast with Ricoeur’s ethicism above indicated, it
prioritises the recognition of the vanquished ‘enslaved ancestors’ and the viol-
ences they endured,8 while equally drawing continuities with current conflicts.
Marx’s conception of history as an ongoing process, constituted by a diversity
of space-times, points to its transformation – which a conception of history
that deals exclusively with the past does not.
The conception of history as a complex totalisation would then be capable
of identifying the diversity of social actors and potential resistances to capital-
ism, as well as possible solidarities at the local and the global scales. Following
the politics of such a properly spatio-temporalised totalisation, labour has the
potential for emancipation, but it is not limited to the wage-labour relation;
besides the traditional industrial working class, peasants and other subaltern

7 Ricoeur 1990, pp. 118–19. On the opposition between ethics and politics, see the critique of
Dussel’s Levinasian Marx in Bosteels 2012, pp. 299–310.
8 Benjamin 1999, p. 260.

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towards a politics of spatio-temporal totalisation 163

classes resisting imperialism, for example, have the potential to develop altern-
atives to capitalism. Marx’s late interest in the Russian communes testify to the
anti-capitalist possibilities of this kind of social organisation, but this can be
said about his positions on Ireland and the anti-colonial rebellions in India
and China as well. In this sense, the recent attention to Marx’s conjunctural
writings – sometimes described as ‘journalistic’ – have allowed us to observe
this political line of reasoning, often obfuscated in the history of Marxism but
necessary in order to think alternatives beyond capitalism in our globalised
world-system.
The philosophical and theoretical potential of Marx’s concept of history is
then best realised by putting it in dialogue with current problems, as Luxem-
burg states. This investigation has argued that the ‘best Marx’ for the production
of critical knowledge of history is the one whose conception – at the ontolo-
gical, theoretico-methodological and presentational levels – empowers us to
shed light on the heterogeneity of historical processes through an integrative
and spatio-temporalised totalisation, rather than a reductive perspective. This
knowledge can then serve to think the development of capital in a more con-
crete and accurate manner, and act politically in consequence. If this work has
contributed to this conception, it can thus claim to have helped, however mod-
estly, to advance both the field of the philosophy of history and the politics of
emancipation based on Marx’s work.

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George García-Quesada - 978-90-04-49991-1
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Index
Abstraction 6, 7, 10, 18–20, 23, 23n19, 37, Baldovinos, Roque 110n58
39–41, 48, 56–70, 71, 71n58, 77, 86, 91, Balibar, Étienne 23n21, 46n101, 65n36,
91n129, 93, 95, 99, 101, 112, 121, 145n65, 159 128n12, 128n13, 149n75
Adorno, Theodor 37n74, 96n9, 125 Banaji, Jairus 6n12, 40n, 49n111, 51, 51n121,
Africa 106, 120, 120n93 62n29, 65, 65n37, 65n38, 71n59, 74n70,
Agamben, Giorgio 8, 8n15 88n118, 91n129, 105n41, 106n42, 107,
Ahmad, Aijaz 45n98, 107n45, 108, 108n51 108n49, 115n76, 116n76, 120, 121, 121n95,
Althusser, Louis 20n8, 40n81, 45, 46, 160
46n101, 65, 128, 129, 149 Banque de France 119n88
(with Étienne Balibar) Reading Capital Bartolovich, Crystal 44n97
128n12, 128n13, 149n75 Basso, Luca 26n31, 48n107, 48n110, 110, 105,
American Coffeehouse 98 105n40
Americas 26, 120, 146 Baudrillard, Jean 20, 21n9
Amin, Samir 65n36, 75n73 Ben Hur 148n72
Ancien Régime 34, 81n99 Bengal 102
Anderson, Kevin 3, 3n5, 47, 47n104, 86n111, Benjamin, Walter 94n1, 104, 125, 162n8
97, 97n12 Bennigsen, Levin von August 111, 111n63
Andes 50 Bensaïd, Daniel 47, 47n105, 53, 53n126,
Anievas, Alex 18, 19n6, 40n82, 51, 51n123, 66n42
64n33, 65, 65n34, 73n67, 74n67, 85n107, Bentham, Jeremy 103n31, 107
119, 119n90, 119n91, 120, 120n92, 120n93 Beresford, William 111, 111n63
(with Kerem Nişancıoğlu) How the West Berktay, Halil 73n67, 120
Came to Rule 119, 120 Bernier, François 107, 107n46, 108, 109
Ankersmit, Frank 5n9, 126n7, 127n7, 133n33, Berry, Christopher J. 43n90
158n4 Bhaskar, Roy 7, 28n37, 28n38, 57, 58n15,
Antonio, Robert J. 102n27 59, 59n19, 60n23, 61, 62n26, 66, 66n43,
Aricó, José 110, 110n59, 111, 111n64, 157n1 82n101, 129n16, 132n31, 152n82
Aristotle 41n85, 103n31, 110, 147 Black, Barbara 97n12
Arkansas 89n123 Blackburn, Robin 87, 87n114
Arrighi, Giovanni 78n87 Blank, Daniel 44n94
Asia 47, 48, 48n109, 71, 72, 73, 73n66, 74, 75, Bloch, Ernst 17n1, 34n62, 51, 52, 86n112, 125
96, 106, 107, 108, 108n52, 110, 111, 123, Blum, Robert 111
139, 146 Bolívar, Simón 68, 96, 109, 110, 111, 123
Assembly of the Rurals 83, 145 Bonaparte, Louis 111, 145
Aston, T.H. 119n89 Bonapartism 68, 84
Athens 73 Bordeaux 83
Augustine 134 Bosteels, Bruno 162n7
City of God 134 Bourdieu, Pierre 8, 9n17, 10, 10n20, 21,
Australia 90, 97 22n18, 147n71
Braudel, Fernand 6, 11, 11n21, 23n20, 28,
Backhaus, Hans-Georg 46n102 28n39, 68, 69, 69n53, 69n55, 70, 71n61,
Bacon, Francis 100 74n70, 78n87, 130, 135
Bakhtin, Mikhail 15, 124n1, 131, 131n25, 135, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean
135n38, 161 World in the Age of Philip ii 135
Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Brecht, Bertold 125
Novel 131 Brenner, Robert 45n100, 46n100, 119, 120

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184 index

British Empire 97, 98 Davis, Kathleen 153n84

British Museum 97 De Certeau, Michel 6
Brunner, Otto 69n53 De Condillac, Étienne Bonnot 43
Buchanan, James 114n70 De Condorcet, Nicolas 43
Burckhardt, Jacob 133n32 Deleuze, Gilles 76, 76n80
Burke, Edmund 100 Denemark, Robert A. 119n89
Burke, Peter 100n21, 103n32 Die Presse 147
Byzantine Empire 108 Dickman, Mark 139, 140n49
Dilthey, Wilhelm 4
Caimari, Lila 94n2 Dobb, Maurice Herbert 119n89
California 45n98, 97 Draper, Hal 109n56, 111, 111n65
Cardoso, Ciro F.S. 108n52 Duchess of Orkney 98n17
Caribbean 114n70, 115n74 Ducoudray-Holstein, H.L. 109, 109n57
Carr, David 14n30, 129n20, 158n4 Dumont, Louis 108n49
Carthage 65n35, 75n75 Dunn, Stephen P. 106n42
Carver, Terrell 44n94 Dureau de la Malle, J.B. 99
Castells, Manuel 11, 11n22, 76, 77, 77n84, 78, Économie politique des Romains 99
78n85, 133 Dussel, Enrique 4n7, 35n66, 47n104, 49n113,
Castree, Noel 71n58 56, 57, 57n14, 58, 61, 74n73, 77n84,
Catholicism 41n, 153n83 80n95, 80n96, 136, 136n39, 137n40,
Cato 99 162n7
Central America 114n70, 115, 115n
Central News Association 98n14 Echeverría, Bolívar 4n7, 21n11, 40n83, 54n1,
Chakrabarty, Dipesh 98n16, 112n67 81, 81n100, 102n27
Charleston 150 Edgley, Roy 152n82
Chibber, Vivek 112n67 Edwards, Stewart 117n80
China 16, 44, 47, 90, 123, 163 Egypt 108n52
Christ 148n72 Eichner, Carolyn J. 145n62
Christianism 148n72 Einstein, Albert 131
Chronotope 15, 124, 126, 131–38, 141–45, 147, Engels, Friedrich 3, 18, 22n15, 24n23,
150–53, 155, 161 30n45, 31, 33n60, 43, 44n94, 44n95,
Cicero 99 44n96, 45, 45n98, 46n100, 52, 66n40,
Cohen, Gerald A. 54, 54n3 76n81, 89n122, 89n124, 98n14, 98n17,
Colbert, Jean-Baptiste 107n46 99n19, 100, 106, 111n63, 116n77, 138n45,
Cold War 158n4 139n46, 140n50, 141n53, 146, 147, 151, 161,
Collier, Andrew 27, 27n34, 27n35, 28n40, 162
29n42, 61, 61n25 The Condition of the Working Class in Eng-
Confederacy 83, 89, 89n123 land 100
Craven, Avery 113 The Role of Labour in the Transition of Ape
Croce, Benedetto 133n32 to Man 32
Cuba 115 England 30, 46, 47, 47n105, 50, 83, 84, 85,
Cunningham, Michael 135 86, 86n111, 100, 101, 104, 107, 108n49,
The Hours 135 109, 119, 120, 142, 145, 146
Cyclopses 139 Enlightenment 3n6, 39, 42, 43, 45
Ermath, Elizabeth D. 124n4
Daily Tribune 42 Eurocentrism 14, 16, 51, 96, 98, 106, 109, 110,
Dante 137 112, 120, 123, 155, 160
Divine Comedy 137 Europe 26n31, 30, 34, 38, 42, 43, 48, 49,
Danto, Arthur C. 17n2, 148, 149n74 50n119, 52, 65n34, 74n71, 78n89, 83n,

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85, 85n108, 86, 86n111, 89n122, 98, 99, Gould, Roger 116, 117, 117n81, 117n83, 118,
101, 102, 106, 110n61, 112, 112n67, 119, 120, 118n83
120n93, 143n, 146, 148, 159, 160 Graduation Act 115
Explanation 2, 3, 4n7, 5, 6n13, 7, 8, 12, 14, 16, Great Britain 46, 90, 98, 98n, 99, 100, 100n,
19, 25, 29n42, 32, 38, 39, 41n85, 43, 53, 101, 102, 104, 111, 120n93, 145, 146
54–93, 96, 98, 98n17, 101, 111–15, 117, 118, Greece 48, 66, 71, 72n64, 106, 106n43,
120–22, 124, 125, 129, 130, 132–36, 138, 108n52, 131, 138, 139
143, 144, 146, 149–56, 159–61 Greeley, Horace 114, 114n71
Greimas, Algirdas Julius 152, 152n83
Ferguson, Adam 43 Grüner, Eduardo 2n1, 4, 4n7, 21n11, 39,
Feuerbach, Ludwig 151 39n78, 52n124, 82n101, 85n107, 91,
Fletcher, Alex 136n39 91n129, 102n, 154, 154n86
Foner, Eric 114, 114n71 Guattari, Félix 76, 76n80
Form 2, 4–8, 19, 20, 20n8, 22, 22n15, 23n21, Güendel, Hermann 110n58
25–33, 37–42, 46–53, 54, 56, 58–66, Guha, Ranajit 13, 14, 14n28, 43, 43n91,
67n46, 68, 70–75, 78, 79n92, 80, 81, 84– 43n92, 112n67, 155n87, 155n88
86, 89n122, 90–92, 99, 105–07, 110, 112,
114, 115, 116n76, 119, 123–128, 130–132, Habermas, Jürgen 32, 32n55
135–140, 142, 144, 145, 147–56, 158, 159, Habib, Irfan 45n98, 108n49, 120
161 Habsburg Monarchy 119
Fort Sumter 92, 150 Haldon, John 60n22, 73n67, 75n73, 120,
Foster, John Bellamy 27n36 158n5, 160
Foucault, Michel 6, 13, 13n27, 17, 18n3, Harootunian, Harry 24n24, 36n69, 40n82,
100n22 46n102, 49, 49n113, 49n115, 50n116, 60,
Fracchia, Joseph 4n8, 40, 40n83, 41n84 60n22, 91n128, 134, 134n36
France 30, 45, 47n105, 64, 76n, 84, 84n, 86, Marx After Marx 91n128
90, 96, 100, 101, 103, 107n46, 109, 113, Hartley, George 128, 128n14
133, 145, 146, 150, 161 Hartog, François 34n64
Franco-Prussian war 83, 146 Hartwig, Mervyn 132n30
Franklin, Benjamin 103n31 Harvey, David 2, 2n4, 8, 9, 9n17, 9n18, 11,
Freud, Sigmund 1n1 31n48, 70, 71n58, 78, 78n86, 78n89, 80,
Fulbrook, Mary 18n3, 55, 55n5, 56, 91 80n97, 86n113, 116, 117, 117n80, 117n83,
118, 118n83, 118n84, 118n86, 137n40, 141,
Gadamer, H.G. 14n30 141n55
Gaddis, John Lewis 82n101, 131, 132, The Condition of Postmodernity 9n18
132n28 Haussmann, Georges-Eugène 117n80, 118,
Gallardo, Helio 66n44 118n85
Gallie, W.B. 6n13 Heidegger, Martin 34n61, 38
García Linera, Álvaro 50, 50n119 Hegel, G.W.F. 1, 22n14, 33n60, 38n74, 39n77,
Gehry, Frank 9, 10n19, 133 43, 45, 46n, 54, 56, 110, 112, 134, 143
Genovese, Eugene 113n69, 114, 114n70 Philosophy of History 134
German Idealism 20 Science of Logic 1
Germany 30, 47n105, 48, 71, 72, 73, 74, Heller, Agnes 20n8, 25n25, 25n28, 30n44,
74n73, 96, 97n11, 99, 100, 101, 106, 32n52
106n43, 106n44, 109, 110, 111 Hinduism 139
Ginzburg, Carlo 6, 12, 12n24, 13, 13n27, Hippisley, Gustavus 109, 109n56
102n27, 104, 104n33 Historiography 1, 3–7, 13–15, 17, 35, 40,
Gothic 144 40n82, 41, 92n131, 96, 98, 100n20,
Gould, Carol 32, 33, 33n57 103, 124–127, 130, 130n23, 131, 136, 143,

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Historiography (cont.) 147–49, 151–53, 155, Kondratieff, Nikolai 81

161, 162 Koselleck, Reinhardt 14n30, 23n20, 34,
Hobsbawm, Eric 48n110, 55, 55n6, 106, 34n64, 35, 35n65, 35n68, 36, 42, 42n87,
106n42, 122, 122n97, 135 42n88, 43n92, 74n71, 130
Age of Revolution: Europe 1789–1848 135 Kosík, Karel 21n11, 30n46, 59, 59n17, 67n48,
Age of Capital: 1848–1875 135 95n8, 127, 127n8
Age of Empire: 1875–1914 135 Kovalevsky, Aleksandr 50, 109
Horkheimer, Max 32, 32n55, 151, 151n79 Krader, Lawrence 49n112, 103n29
Howitt, William 104 Kugelman, Ludwig 92n132
Colonisation and Christianity 104 Kuhn, Thomas 55
Husserl, Edmund 131n26 Kula, Witold 61n24
Kurosawa, Akira 135
Iggers, Georg G. 43n89, 43n90, 99n18 Rashomon 135, 135n37
Ilyenkov, Ewald 57n13, 71n60
India 14, 16, 42, 45, 45n98, 46, 50, 90, Labrousse, Ernest 6
90n125, 102, 104, 106, 107, 107n46, 108, LaCapra, Dominick 143, 143n59
108n49, 109, 112, 112n, 123, 160 Lacey, Hugh 152n81
Industrial Revolution 120, 120n Lahtinen, Mikko 66n44
International Workingmen’s Association 3, Lander, Edgardo 44n97, 98n16
50, 67n45, 116n78, 146 Lange, Oskar 62n30, 63n30
Ireland 16, 100 Langlois, Charles V. 95n6, 103, 103n32
Italy 82, 90 (with Charles Seignobos) Introduction to
the Study of History 103
Jamaica 110n61 Latin America 4n7, 47n104, 110, 111, 111n64
Jameson, Fredric 6n14, 8, 9, 9n17, 9n18, Lazarus, Neil 44n97
10n19, 14, 14n29, 15, 24, 26n31, 27n34, Le Goff, Jacques 95, 95n7
37, 37n73, 40n80, 40n81, 46n101, 128, Lefebvre, Henri 8, 8n15, 9n17, 10, 11, 20n7,
128n11, 128n12, 128n13, 129n15, 131n26, 20n8, 21, 21n10, 21n11, 22, 22n15, 22n16,
133, 133n33, 134n34, 136n39, 140n50, 23, 23n19, 28n39, 30n47, 31n51, 32,
141n54, 144, 144n61, 147, 147n70, 147n71, 32n56, 34n61, 35, 35n68, 36, 36n71,
148, 148n73, 149, 149n75, 151, 151n80, 55n7, 56n7, 58n15, 68, 68n52, 70, 75, 76,
152n83, 153n85, 155, 155n90, 157n2 76n78, 76n80, 77, 158
The Political Unconscious 128, 129 The Production of Space 8
Japan 65n34, 78n89, 106, 112n68 Lenin, Vladimir 50n116, 64
Java 104, 146n67 The Development of Capitalism in Russia
Jenkins, Keith 17n2, 124n4 50n116
Jessop, Bob 81n98 Leslie, Esther 141n53
Jews 65n35, 75n75 Levi, Giovanni 12, 12n24
Johnson, Richard 2n3 Lévinas, Emmanuel 162n7
Jones, Richard 107, 107n47, 109 Lincoln, Abraham 114, 147, 150
Juggernaut (Mythological creature) 139 Lindner, Kolja 107n46, 109n55
Juvenal 99 Linton, Marissa 145n62
Lithuania 152n83
Kaiwar, Vasant 112n67 Lombardy 75n755
Kant, Immanuel 22, 22n17, 43, 130n21, London 87n, 90, 96, 97, 97n11, 98, 98n14,
133n33 142, 159
Karatani, Kojin 97n11 Los Angeles 9
King, Ed. 98n14 Louis xiv 107n46
Koivisto, Juha 66n44 Löwy, Michael 21n9

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Lukács, György 29n43, 32, 32n53, 32n54, 34, The Class Struggles in France 3n, 4, 84,
34n63, 37n72, 54n2, 66n42, 82n101, 122, 146, 154
122n96, 125 Theses on Feuerbach 20, 31
History and Class Consciousness 122, Theories of Surplus Value 107
122n98 (with Friedrich Engels)
Ontology of Social Being 29 Collected Works 100n23, 116n77
Luxemburg, Rosa 64, 64n33, 86n113, 157, Manifesto of the Communist Party 19, 42,
157n1, 163 44, 45, 46, 46n103, 76, 111, 161
The German Ideology 22n15, 31, 33, 38,
Macaulay, Thomas B. 104 42, 44n94, 44n96, 45, 137
History of England 104 Marxism 2, 4, 8, 27, 27n34, 40, 45n100, 55,
Maine, Henry 102, 105, 112 122, 153n85, 158, 163
Manchester 98n14 Massey, Doreen 9n17, 79n94
Martineau, Jonathan 8, 9n17, 10, 37n72, Masur, Gerhard 109n56
91n128 May, Robert E. 115n74
Maryland 87 Mbembe, Achille 13, 14, 14n28
Marx, Karl McFarlane, Bruce 107n48
18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte 3n6, McLennan, Gregor 62n28
21, 64, 84, 146, 149, 153, 161 McNally, David 136, 136n39, 137n40, 140n50,
A Contribution to the Critique of Political 143n59
Economy 26, 29, 48, 107 Meek, Ronald R. 43n90, 45, 45n99
Bolívar y Ponte 109, 111, 111n64 Merriman, John 118n85, 118n87
Capital 1, 3, 24, 27n34, 50, 50n119, 57, Merryman, Peter 9n17
59, 60, 72n62, 63, 64, 65n34, 66n41, Mexico 45, 45n98, 48, 110n61, 114n70
67, 68, 69n54, 71, 72, 79n92, 80, 80n, Michelet, Jules 133n32
82, 83, 83n104, 84, 86, 86n111, 98n17, Middle Ages 41n, 65n, 72, 85n, 106
99, 100, 100n24, 101, 102, 102n27, 104, Middle East 106
107, 126, 136, 136n39, 137, 137n40, 139, Millar, John 43, 45
139n39, 140n50, 141, 142, 143, 143n59, Miller, John 109
146, 149n76, 151, 154 The Memoirs of General Miller 109
Class Struggles in France 3n6, 4, 84 Mink, Louis 158n4
Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of Missouri 89n123
1844 31 Mongol Empire 120
Ethnographic Notebooks 102 More, Thomas 100
Grundrisse 2, 3n6, 15, 19, 23n21, 30, 32, Morgan, Lewis Henry 105, 109
38, 39, 42, 45n100, 46, 47, 47n104, 48, Mode of production 2, 8, 12, 19, 16, 22n15,
49, 50, 52, 56, 58, 59, 65, 66n41, 67n46, 25n25, 27n34, 32, 37–40, 44, 46, 47,
71, 74n73, 75, 76, 76n80, 77n84, 98n17, 48n109, 49n111, 50, 51, 51n120, 53, 56–
99, 100, 105, 106, 106n42, 107, 108, 110, 66, 71–82, 83n104, 86, 86n113, 91n128,
123, 137, 138, 139, 141, 154, 159, 160 92, 96, 97, 105–111, 113, 119, 120, 123,
Letter to Kugelman, 17th April 1871 92n132 127, 128, 136, 138, 143, 145, 145n65,
Letter to Nieuwenhuis, 22th February 1881 146, 149, 149n76, 151n80, 152, 159,
119n88 160
Letter to Otechestvennye Zapiski 86n111 Model 11, 12, 32, 40n81, 45n100, 54, 55, 56,
Materiales para la historia de América 56n7, 57n12, 60–81, 86, 86n112, 86n113,
Latina 111n64 88, 91, 92, 93, 94n4, 99, 106n43, 107n46,
The Civil War in France 3, 83, 84, 96, 108, 108n52, 111, 113, 131, 132, 133, 136, 150,
98n17, 116, 116n78, 119n88, 133, 144, 146, 155, 159, 161
149, 153 Mughal Empire 107, 107n46, 108

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Mukherjee, Supriya 43n89, 43n90 Paul, Herman 17n2, 18n3

Musto, Marcello 48n107 Pepperell, Nicole 136n39, 143, 143n59,
143n60
Narrative 3, 6, 6n13, 12, 13, 14, 14n30, 15, 18, Peru 48
42, 88n118, 99, 108, 110, 124–56 Petrović, Gajo 31, 31n49
National Assembly 83, 146 Phear, John Budd 102, 112
Negri, Antonio 46n102, 49n115 Philpin, C.H.E. 119n89
Neo-Kantianism 41, 57, 60, 60n23, 127 Phoenicia 65n35, 75n75
Netherlands 86, 101, 146n67 Pierce, Franklin 114n70
New American Cyclopaedia 3, 110 Poland 61n24
New Granada 109, 110 Popper, Karl 18
New Orleans 89n123 Postone, Moishe 40, 40n82, 46n102
New York 45n98 Pradella, Lucia 73n65, 77n84
New York Tribune 114 Prawer, S.S. 136n39
Nicolaus, Martin 39n79 Praxis 7, 10, 11, 15, 19, 20–33, 52, 53, 62, 95,
Niebuhr, Berthold G. 99, 105 143, 152, 152n82, 158
Römische Geschichte 99 Pre-Columbian America 106
Nietzsche, Friedrich 38, 41, 127, 133n32, 139, Press Association 98n14
139n48 Prussia 118, 146, 150
Nieuwenhuis, Ferdinand Nomela 119n88
Nişancıoğlu, Kerem 18, 19n6, 40n82, 51, Quijano, Anibal 51, 51n120
51n123, 64n33, 65, 65n34, 73n67, 74n67,
85n107, 119, 119n90, 119n91, 120, 120n92, Rabelais, François 131
120n93 Raffles, Stamford 104
North (Northern states in the US Civil war) History of Java 104
88, 88n119, 89, 89n122, 90, 92, 114, 115, Ramsdell, Charles W. 113
116, 144, 145, 150 Ranke, Leopold von 99, 133n32
North America 89, 109 Ransom, Roger L. 114, 114n72, 115, 115n75, 116
Redfern, Nick 135n37
Ocumare de la Costa 109 Reuters 98n14
O’Farrel, Clare 18n3 Ricardo, David 103, 107
O’Leary, Brendan 107n46, 107n47, 108, Richards, Thomas 13, 14n28, 97, 97n12
108n50, 109, 109n54, 110, 110n60 Ricoeur, Paul 5, 5n10, 5n11, 6n13, 7, 13n26, 14,
Osborne, Peter 4, 4n8, 14, 14n29, 15, 18n4, 14n29, 15, 23n20, 34, 34n64, 35, 35n65,
21n11, 27n36, 28n41, 29n41, 34, 34n62, 35n66, 35n67, 42n88, 54, 54n4, 60n23,
35n65, 37n72, 41n86, 44n97, 47n105, 94, 94n3, 95n5, 100n20, 102n26, 124,
49n115, 50n118, 51n120, 52n125, 100n20, 124n2, 124n3, 126, 127n10, 129, 129n17,
153, 153n84, 155n89 129n18, 130, 130n21, 130n22, 130n23,
Ottoman Empire 119, 120 134n35, 135n37, 160, 160n6, 161, 162,
162n7
Pacific Ocean 45n98 Memory, History, Forgetting 5
Paris 83, 84n106, 97n13, 99n19, 116, 116n, 117, Roberts, William C. 136n39, 137, 137n40
117n80, 118, 118n, 133, 144, 146, 149, 150 Marx’s Inferno 137
Paris Commune 3, 83, 84n106, 87, 92, 96, 97, Romanticism 21n9, 32
97n13, 99n19, 101, 116, 116n77, 116n78, Rome 48, 49, 50, 66, 68, 71, 72n64, 73, 75, 99,
117, 117n80, 118, 118n87, 119n88, 121, 144, 106, 106n43
145, 145n62, 146, 148, 150, 153, 160 Rosdolsky, Roman 63n31
Paris National Guard 117 Rose, Gillian 60n23, 122n98
Parry, Benita 44n97 Rougerie, Jacques 116n77, 118, 118n83, 118n85

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Rovatti, Pier Aldo 18n4 Soja, Edward 8, 9, 9n, 11, 70

Roy, Joseph 26 Sophocles 1n1
Royal Asiatic Society 97 Oedipus Rex 1n1
Royal Geographic Society 97 South (Southern states in the US Civil war)
Royal Society 97 87, 88, 89, 89n122, 89n124, 90, 92, 114,
Runkle, Gerald 113, 113n69 114n70, 115, 115n74, 116, 144, 145, 150
Russia 50, 59, 109, 159, 163 South America 68, 110, 111
South Carolina 92
Sáenz de Sicilia, Andrés 49n115 Spain 45n98, 109n56, 120
Said, Edward 44n97, 106, 107 Sperber, Jonathan 97n11
Orientalism 106 Spivak, Gayatri 106n42
Saito, Kohei 28n36 Stalinism 46n101
San Francisco 45n98 Statutes of Realm 101
Sánchez Vásquez, Adolfo 21n11 Stoler, Ann 13, 13n25
Santa Monica 9, 133 Strange, Sir Thomas 105
Sartre, Jean Paul 11, 23, 23n22, 24, 25n27, 26, Subsumption 19, 26, 49–51, 53, 60, 60n22,
26n31, 34n61, 105n40, 158 64n33, 65, 77, 80, 90n128, 120n93, 159
Sassen, Saskia 10, 11, 12, 12n23, 68, 68n52, Sutherland 142
77n83, 78n88, 85n108 Sweezy, Paul Marlor 119n89
Sauvy, Alfred 69n53
Sayer, Andrew 7, 27n34, 27n35, 28n38, Tally Jr., Robert T. 9n17
60n23, 62, 62n27, 62n29, 63, 66, 67, Tang Empire 108
67n47, 68, 70, 70n57, 71n58, 81, 82, Tarantino, Quentin 135
82n103, 96, 96n9, 112n66, 129n19, Pulp Fiction 135, 135n37
132n31, 151n79 Taylor, Peter J. 74n70
Sayer, Derek 39n78, 40n83, 127, 127n9 Texas 45n, 89n123
Sayre, Robert 21n9 The Economist 87n115, 101, 103
Scaron, Pedro 50, 50n117, 109, 109n57, The Times 100n23
111n64 Thiers, Louis Adolphe 145, 146
Schlösser, Friedrich Christoph 42 Thomas, Kenneth P. 119n89, 145n62
Schmidt, Alfred 18n5, 25n26, 27n36, 38n75 Thompson, Paul 99n19
Scotland 43, 45 Thor (Nordic God) 139
Scott, Michael 106n43 Tilly, Charles 56, 56n8, 91, 91n130
Second Empire 116 Tocqueville, Alexis de 133n32
Seignobos, Charles 95n6, 103, 103n32 Tomba, Massimiliano 1n1, 2, 7, 49n114,
Senate 87 50n118, 51, 51n120, 74, 74n71, 75n73,
Shakespeare, William 1n1 91n128, 104n34, 125, 125n5, 143n, 154
Hamlet 1n1 Tombazos, Stavros 51n120
Shanin, Theodor 50n119, 109n53 Time in Marx 51n120
Silva, Ludovico 4n7, 27n32, 64, 64n32, Tombs, Robert 116, 117n80
136n39, 140n50 Tomlinson, George 34n61, 36n69
Smith, Adam 43, 45n, 103, 152 Totalisation 2, 4, 10, 11, 12, 14–16, 18, 19, 20–
Smith, Tony 27n34 33, 37, 39, 42, 44, 47, 48, 48n107, 50, 52,
Social Formation 4, 4n7, 7, 8, 12, 16, 25, 53, 56, 57, 62, 62n29, 65, 66, 69n54, 70,
25n26, 33, 38–40, 47n104, 48, 51, 55n7, 76, 80, 91, 93, 96, 98, 113, 126, 129, 134,
56–58, 60–71, 75, 76n78, 77n83, 79, 82, 147, 149, 155, 156, 157–163
83n100, 87, 91–93, 99, 102, 106, 111, 112, Toynbee, A.J. 69n53
115, 120–123, 125, 128, 145n65, 149–55, Trotsky, Leon 51, 51n122, 64, 64n33
159–161 History of the Russian Revolution 64

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Turgot, A.R.J. 43 Walsh, W.H. 17n2, 43n93, 158n4

Turkey 50 Wang, Edward 43n89, 43n90
Waters, Sarah 135
Uneven (and Combined) Development 1, Fingersmith 135
7, 11, 29, 30, 36n69, 47, 51, 53, 54, 64–68, Weber, Max 57, 57n12, 60
72, 77, 81, 84n106, 86, 93, 119, 120, 125, West Louisiana 89n123
134, 135, 139, 141, 142, 150, 159 Westin Bonaventure 9, 10n19
Union 83, 89, 90, 103, 114n70 White, Hayden 15, 17, 17n2, 18, 94n4, 126,
United States 3, 45, 78n89, 83, 87, 88, 90, 92, 131, 132, 132n29, 133, 133n33, 134, 134n35,
98, 100, 103, 113, 114, 114n, 115, 146, 150, 134n36, 137, 137n41, 137n42, 142, 147,
160 147n69, 151n80, 152, 161
US Civil War 3, 68, 83, 86, 89, 90, 92, 96, 98, Metahistory 17, 133, 137, 143, 161
98n17, 99n19, 101, 113, 115n75, 121, 144, White House 114n70
145, 146, 150, 156, 159 Wickham, Chris 106n44, 160
Wiener, Joel H. 98n14
Vattimo, Gianni 18n4 Williams, Eric 160
Venezuela 64 Wittfogel, Karl 73n66
Versailles 97n13, 118, 119n88, 133, 144, 145, Wolff, Robert Paul 136n39
145n62, 146 Wood, Ellen M. 45n100, 46n100, 49, 49n112,
Victorian Era 97 75n73, 105, 105n38, 105n39, 106, 106n44,
Vilar, Pierre 68, 68n49, 81n99, 157, 157n3 108n52, 119n89
Virginia 87 World-History 34, 39, 42, 43
Vogel, Lise 63n31
Yugoslavia 148n72
Wacquant, Loïc 81n100
Wainwright, Joel 51n122 Zasulich, Vera 38n76
Wales 100 Zingarelli, Andrea 108n49
Wallerstein, Immanuel 11, 11n22, 77, 77n84, Žižek, Slavoj 148n72
78, 78n87, 81n100, 119, 119n89, 120
The Modern World-System 78n87

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