Marx's Theory of Time and the Present Historical Moment

Abstract

The essay discusses Marx's understanding of time, as represented in his early political writings, in his Utopian vision of a society based on leisure, and most prominently in his critical economy, where paradoxes of time are responsible for the seemingly irrational self-generation of capital. In all these instances, Marx treats time as being finite, or eschatological (even if prosaic times, like the working day, are in question). It is because of this that there is always, in time, a need for a supplementary moment of completion—a catch for the salaried worker who needs to do extra work to finish what she or he has been doing, but also an infinite task for contemporaries. Thus, I show that Marx's analysis of temporality is close to Giorgio Agamben's theory of time, which he attributes to Saint Paul and Gustave Guillaume. This analysis is pertinent in our time, when there is a widepread sense of ideological exhaustion that coincides with an apotheosis of leisure. Both are not just signs of decadence, but symptoms of messianic work.