The Illusion of History illusion of history: time and the radical political imagination

8. Science, Capital, Proles

164   8 Science, Capital, Proles Objectivity, Universality, and History: The Privileged Individual and His Privileged Science Despite Marx’s supposed position on the radical temporality of all individuals and ideas, Marx himself and the type of science he was forging were not subjected to such a limitation. In typical nineteenth-century style, Marx made his social scientist stand outside time and history. From this perspective much of Marx’s insistence on everything being embedded in time and history seems to be a way of depreciating the claims of his opponents . Timelessness is a branding iron used like a weapon to protect Marx and his claims from similar accusations. This begs the important question of where precisely the Marxist scientist, and the Marxian science itself, sit in relation to history. The best way to begin this quest is to look at Marx’s criticism of the Robinsonade and the theoretical purity of isolation. Albert Camus has noticed that the infeasibility of isolation as an adequate category for the scientific evaluation of man was a distinctively nineteenthcentury discovery. “To put economic determinations at the root of all human action is to sum man up in terms of his social relations . There is no such thing as a solitary man, that is the indisputable discovery of the nineteenth century.”1 He arrives at 1. Albert Camus, The Rebel, translated by Anthony Bower (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971), 167. Science, Capital, Proles   165 this after an allusion to Comte and the century’s urge for positivism, a stream in which he places Marx because of the similar theme of antitranscendence that they shared. With transcendence denied, the hopes of humanity spill horizontally across the social landscape. As we have seen, collapsing transcendence means embracing temporality, and this operation has two contradictory consequences. First, it prevents the possibility of that nexus point devoid of relations, the isolated man, the theoretical man, or as Marx described him, the Robinsonade. Isolation is that category that has led the human sciences down fruitless avenues and the category rejected by positivist and historical thinking. Second, the space occupied between time and eternity, the mythic vertical space denoted by the upward movement of transcendence, must be laid equally across the horizontal plane of society and time. In other words, these inverters of transcendence did not want to relinquish the universality that lay inherent in transcendence. The enlargement of the scope of Marx’s project and science is directly proportional to the universality of transcendence, and the more things that are dragged from the transcendent, the more they help to widen the worldwide ambitions of Marxism. This is the peculiar dynamic of Marxism, and to a degree the nineteenth century. The enlightening and redemptive powers of science unhinge the transcendent proclivities of metaphysics and its accompanying timelessness. In this climate, the isolated, relationless man as the touchstone of social, political, and economic thought dissipates. But the totalizing contour and universal form of metaphysics remain in the outlines of nineteenth-century human sciences. In the case of Marxism, the isolated man does not so much disappear as the object of the human sciences as he crosses the barricades of these sciences. The isolated man is no longer the observed entity of Marxist science; he is the protagonist. Disinterested awareness of historical necessity is his defining asset, because he is now the man sundered from time and history. While everything else sways to time and history’s push and pull, his mind remains untouched; retaining the objectivity, his science denies others and their ideas. Where the universality of social and economic laws was once guaranteed by observing a reduced, isolated, timeless, and relationless individual, it is now the province of the timeless and isolated mind of the Marxist scientist to observe universality. Marxism cannot relinquish the timelessness of the all-knowing mind. As Rosenstock-Huessy has pointed out, Marxism demands that the individual has a knowledge, foresight, and wis- 166  Karl Marx dom granted only to the whole of humanity. He writes, “Marxism tries to give to the knowing individual the power within society which united mankind has over external nature. That campaign is of worldwide significance . If it should be victorious, it would change the aspect of things. No country in the world could fail to adopt the government of the knowing .”2 To rephrase this insight by Rosenstock-Huessy in the terms of this study, Marxism is a movement that attempts...