The overall strategy of Tomba’s work is the ultimate destruction of any teleological readings of Marx’s early as well as later work. Instead, with Marx, we are supposed to look at history as forms of “geological layers” (177) in which all layers and perspectives ultimately appear as contemporary possibilities, insofar as all non- and pre-capitalist forms of production can no longer be interpreted as stages toward the capitalist mode of production (182). History is made up by many non-synchronous “temporal pathways” (3), the consequence of which is that former struggles and simple juxtapositions of historical elements and historiographical positions become impossible. For example, as Tomba argues, Marx “drew attention to a communist tradition that had been at work within the bourgeois revolutions, and which conflicted with them” (34, 56). As a consequence, the “practical materialist” “rewrites the past in order to release the revolutionary possibilities for the present” (40). Memory, then, no longer is something of the past, but, instead, something that functions within a present and unleashed new possibilities (43).
However, though even to the superficial reader it is clear that Marx’s development from his early writings, through the Grundrisse and Capital, up to his later historical research, points to a critique of teleology, Tomba does a marvelous job revealing the full complexities of and counter-tendencies in the development of capitalism, in the pre-capitalist mode of production, as well as in political developments. Similarly to scholars from the German Neue Marx Lektüre, Tomba implicitly presents a critique of much of twentieth century worldview Marxism that, as he puts it, operated with “a conception of the world that shared the same philosophy of history as that of the winners” (171), namely a determinist and linear vision of historical movement. But, with Tomba we not only learn to see history as counter-history (166), we also learn to understand the “counter-times of the workers’ struggle” (169). Moreover, Tomba shows how capital and value contain different temporalities and that the projection of a single temporality is itself a fetishization of time that comes into play with the perversion of all social relations into relations between things. The duality between use-value and value, however, is much more complex, as Tomba correctly argues, insofar as we find the time of labor, free time, time of surplus value, and time of necessary labor (137), all of which become intertwined with a plurality of exploitative practices and strategies and a plurality of its connected struggles about which Tomba wants us to think “in a historical-temporal multiversum” (156). full: http://marxandphilosophy.org.uk/reviewofbooks/reviews/2014/1019 _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
