The Limits of Theory: Capital, Temporality, and History

This article examines the framework for historical inquiry provided by Marx’s Capital. The organizing assumption of the article is that Capital does not elaborate laws that are imminent in history and dictate its development and thus does not provide a theory of the history of capitalist development. Rather, it provides a historically specific conceptual framework and theoretical categories that are appropriate for the analysis of concrete historical relations of capital. In other words, Marx’s Capital does not explain history, rather it provides the conditions for critically reconstructing the history of capital. From this perspective, the conceptual structure of Capital is not directly applicable to historical reality, but rather provides a method for ordering the relation between analytical categories and the real historical phenomena that they represent. Its categories are grounded in history but only express historical relations indirectly. The article focuses on Marx’s method and the formation of concepts in Capital in order to call attention to its logical structure. It traces the conceptual movement from simple to complex determinations of capital in relation to the history of capitalist development. It delineates Marx’s expanded conception of capital as a complex, structured, totality that progressively specifies capital as a specific historical relation embracing the world market, wage labor, and diverse forms of unwaged commodity production. From this perspective, it interrogates the temporal (and spatial) dimensions implicit in the concepts use-value, world market, and wage labor. These diverse but interdependent and mutually formative temporalities bear an affinity to Braudel’s conception of plural time. They provide a bridge from the theoretical presentation of Capital to the theoretical appropriation and reconstruction of concrete processes and relations forming capitalism as a temporally and spatially complex historical system. Thus, Marx’s abstract conception of capital points toward comprehension of capitalism as a historical worldeconomy.