The Coexistence of Technologies: Marx

Abstract

This chapter discusses Karl Marx's brief comment on the second edition of Capital in 1837. In his comment, Marx presents an archipelago of singular times, a montage of anachronisms, and of clashing modes of production that become unstable as to their own identity, arranged in a vacillation of influences and contagions, mutual interruptions, and infections that make any presupposition of a present unviable. The chapter affirms the case for self-complacency of each singular time mentioned by Marx with respect to a specific present and as regards to the endogenous categories of self-understanding. It explains Marx's words on how the political economy remains a foreign science in Germany when he wrote the second edition of Capital. Marx emphasizes that the living soil from which political economy springs was absent in Germany and had to be imported from England and France as a ready-made article.