ABSTRACT
This chapter outlines a theoretical issue that pervades the rest of the book, namely how one should understand modern attempts to draw on the past to criticize the present. Some would contend that when people appeal to the past as a conceptual resource to show the limits of capitalist modernity and point to a different future, they are engaging in a romanticism that could be dangerous and even lead to fascism. Moishe Postone expresses this argument while drawing on Marx’s analysis of the fetishism of commodities. He contends that Romantic critics of capitalism fetishize a pristine past, which is a politically dangerous fiction. Harry Harootunian has recently focused on Marx’s concept of formal subsumption to counter Postone’s reading and argue that Marx allows for a politics of the past. This chapter develops Harootunian’s argument about a possible politics of the remnant, the past in the present, while also suggesting that we return to Marx’s general theory of how capitalism makes another type of society possible by constant technological development, which tends to make proletarian labor and capitalism itself obsolete. This chapter thus synthesizes two perspectives on time which inform the various chapters to come.
