To be is always to be in time. The question is how to be, and in what time?
Time is not one. There are many forms of time, just as there are many forms of living. Is time a scale? Do we live by time as a measure of accomplishment, of plans for the future? Is time a rhythm of living? Is it a cycle? Is it time on a clock, time in the cycle of the moon?
Time is the plane for difference in space. All of life perceives, carries forms of subjectivity. Movement is across time, flux in substance is possible through the plane of temporality.
Labor acts through time, subjecting beings to the perception of a laboring subjectivity through their transformation. Labor is the temporality of life realized, the creation of historical time. As Adam and Eve realize mortality, finitude, and through the Fall, labor realizes the irreversible accumulation of time known as history. In class society, the aim of labor becomes the production of surpluses — the subordination of nature to the end of the dominating social subject. This places time above nature, which decays in the face of the passage of time or the ‘progress’ of labor in recreating the world in the image of laboring subjectivity. Thus life is truly being-towards-death. It is an experience of linear time towards finitude.
Class society marks the birth of death as a central dilemma of life, as the possibility of final oblivion. Being is haunted by Nothing — it may try to wield Nothing to define its own contours, subordinating it, but Nothingness is a disintegrative force. Nothingness is the curse of flux, contingency, and mortality in imperial Being.
Contrarily, communalist ways of life tend to perceive universal subjectivity or perspective in life.¹ All things perceive, all things live, all things are related. To die is not oblivion, but to change. Death in permanence is not possible here, as life is not organized along the lines of linear time as in class society. The problem of mortality and immortality is introduced by linear time, by time as an accumulation of history. We cannot know what death is, as living subjects. We only know what death means to us as we live, not what it is to die.² But death in permanence is only possible when nature is an object to us. Dying is ‘returning’ to nature, to the earth. To die is to lose subjectivity, to lose one’s negativity, to become a pure object. Fear of death is fear of the limits of the subject. It is the subject’s fear of its own impermanence.
The individuation of humanity across l historical time means living under the shadow of accumulated dead labor and one’s own final death. Subjectivity looks to the past as an accumulation of dead time, as a weight building up of the products of labor. The production of surpluses by labor, aspiring to ever increase the scale of social labor as a whole, expands the reach of laboring subjectivity in the world. The mass of past labor grows across each generation, facilitating the illusion of linear progress through the illusion of a linear growth in accumulated labor and knowledge as the product of such labor. Dead labor dominates living labor, imposing the linearity of time on the scale of capital accumulation. Thus time becomes the measure of life. Time is the laboring of life to continue to maintain the past in an endless modality of expression.
Capital can incorporate near infinite experiences of actual, living labor in its form, and can be realized in equally near infinite activities. In its abstractness it is the unity of many things, it becomes the transcendent subjectivity ordering all subjectivities. Capital accumulation is the ultimate meaning which endless meaninglessness is produced in the name of.³ We are not free to embrace the meaninglessness of life as a form of freedom, as a rejection of domination in the name of some aim. Rather, manifold activities are subordinated to the needs of capital.
Capital becomes the measure of all things in the place once occupied by the limited horizon of the ‘human.’⁴ Everything is dead matter, a dead object in the face of the universal subjectivity of capital which sets the entire world to work reconfiguring itself into its capital-image. As Karl Marx said in the Poverty of Philosophy (1847):
“Therefore, we should not say that one man’s hour is worth another man’s hour, but rather that one man during an hour is worth just as much as another man during an hour. Time is everything, man is nothing; he is, at the most, time’s carcass.”⁵
Our lives are lives on a single, universal scale of time. The times of the whole world are united into the single time of the accumulation of the general capital, composed of all of the capitals in the world. For the first time in history, through death and destruction, capital created a single World. Capital realized the universality of history, so that many histories can now be written and accumulated as so many histories of The World. Capital is a bad universal, the densest society in history which is at the same time only indirectly society. It is society mediated by commodities. This temporal scale is Eurocentric, as the continuity of history centers around the accumulation of Western capital and the project to recreate the world along Western lines.⁶ Capital’s origins are manifold, infinite even, but they are an accumulation monopolized in Western hands.⁷
Decolonial critique has correctly recognized the despotism of linear time as Western, or Euro-bourgeois.⁸ The experience of life as being thrown into the world, as linear progress, as the history of civilization is the domination of the capitalist mode of production.⁹ Linear time is the permanence of death, it is the accumulation of death. Capital acts in a spiral moving outward, but can never succeed in closing fully the circuits of accumulation. It depends on the exteriority of living labor, of the colonized to accumulate new capital, although it aims to be a closed system of exchange. Because it fails to become a closed totality, it fails in constituting itself as a permanent civilization. Capital is doomed in the very scale of linear historical time which it configures the world in the track of.
Linear time is a characteristic of class society (‘civilization’) which haunts its very rulers. The Epic of Gilgamesh, one of the earliest recorded stories in history, is itself a story of an Uruk king confronting the mortality of linear time. When Marduk put order into the cosmos, abolishing the indeterminate, measureless chaos of Tiamat, great mortals like Gilgamesh found themselves facing their own finitude. The Egyptian Old Kingdom text, Maxims of Ptahhotep, reveals this dilemma of mortality and insecurity as well. This consciousness is similarly evident in the Akkadian Dialogue of Pessimism, a story entailing the mockery of a slave master’s attempt to find security amidst mortality and flux.
All of these ancient texts counsel moderation, balance, and measure in rulership. For most of the history of class society, such advice could usually be followed (though rulers were haunted perpetually by atrophy and decay). State societies like Egypt and China lasted for generations, establishing a relative continuity of time. Capital, however, cannot stomach such counsel. The calling of accumulation exists in tension with the calling of social organic unity. The priority of capital is not the continuity of a dynasty, not the harmony of society under the aegis of a ruler, not even the personal status or consumption of capitalists. It is simply to secure and expand accumulation, under pain of death.
Thus the human beings living under capital find their aspirations frustrated. One must either adjust to accumulation in ethic, or develop a strategy to confront it. Some embrace the accumulation of capital as the heart of life, tying their value and the values of others to the valorization of capital. They consider life a grind, a war of all against all, the survival of the fittest. This is living life as linear time, as a little quantity of years one has to ‘earn’ a big quantity of money. One should live life so that, by the end of the little quantity of years, one feels satisfied with the capital generated out of the dead, wasted time of their entire lifetime.
Others try and find breathing room by turning inwards. They try to make their own meaning in life in spite of it all, or even try to subordinate the demands of production and consumption in their everyday lives to some life-project. This is especially characteristic of pop-existentialism. This industry does not necessarily tell its consumers that everything is peachy, but it does tell them that they can make individual choices that transform themselves and their lives without ever having to ask about the fundamental transformation of social relations themselves.
These attempts at solutions ultimately fail at high points of crisis, even as they’re designed to address the everyday crises of capitalist production. The demand to grind is especially ridiculous when there are no jobs available, and the advice to make your own meaning is laughable when the possibilities of life are limited by the absence of money in your bank account. For some, it becomes evident that there is a need for another response. This is a question of civilization. Our relationship to our life and times must change.
What seems like the most obvious response is to escape history. Linear, historical civilizations already posit ‘savage’ outsiders as beyond history and time. Where there’s a ‘historical people,’ there’s always a ‘people without history.’ History in the linear sense is imperial. From The Records of the Grand Historian by Sima Qian to The Philosophy of History by G. W. F. Hegel, universal history is always written as an exclusion. What is defined as within the universal lineage and progress of history also defines what is outside of history, what is non-historical.¹⁰
Thus, to those living within linear civilizations, it seems that the only outside to history is the ‘original innocence’ preceding history. The Fallen seek to return to the Garden of Eden. Hesiod’s Works and Days posits a freedom enjoyed by the ‘noble savages’ of the world, a trope continuing through Tacitus, Ibn Khaldun, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and beyond.¹¹ It seems that if we wish to leave the accumulation of time, we must instead become content with placid Being. The perennial source of life must be returned to. This response has taken many forms in history, whether the anarchist Romanticism of William Morris, Gustav Landauer, and Fredy Perlman or the fascist primordialism of René Guénon, Martin Heidegger, and Julius Evola.
This approach is, however, a regression to myth. There is no original foundation which we can return to. The outside is defined by the colonizing force of the inside. Today, the outside is more than anything an illusion. It is more appropriately an underside, exploited to define the universality of the imperial inside.¹² Disalienation cannot depend on an original wellspring, a central core of life. The desire for solid foundations is a desire of domination. It is the desire of subjectivity to subject the world to itself, conscious or unconscious. To face the accumulated tragedy of history means working through it. It means shifting the winds of time, flying through the infinity of life’s relations towards freedom. It means redeeming history, ensuring that the misery of time is not for naught. Only the victims of history birthing a free universal society out of the very agony of their radical bondage to the world offers the chance of redemption.¹³
Communism must break through history, not seek the non-historical beyond. To re-establish a harmonic experience of life and time, we must build a universal community. We cannot return to the past. Euro-bourgeois colonialism have subordinated the entire world to the global capitalist mode of production, to a single world-system. To defend the values of communalist ways of life, there must be social revolution within and against the entire capitalist civilization. The encounter of communalism with its oppressors in the “civilizing” colonizers is the occasion in which these societies to crafted a universalizing philosophy. This has been recognized by Viola Cordova (Jicarilla Dindéi), Taiaiake Alfred (Kanien’kehá:ka), and others when they teach that a Pan-Indigenous idea of philosophy and identity across the many distinctions of people-place specific “tribal” cosmologies only becomes possible in contrast to the worldview and way of life of the invaders.¹⁴
The revolt against colonial universality with decolonial universality opens the universal potentials of “communalism,” which is exactly the point of Aimé Césaire and Frantz Fanon who said they do not aspire to return to the precolonial situation exactly as it was but to realize its ethics in a new, universal situation.¹⁵ In communalism, possibilities are limited by the limited scale of wealth. Wealth not in the sense of commodities, but the accumulation of possibilities. Production of things, of objects is also the realization of the possibilities immanent within them.
Capital accumulates seemingly infinite possibilities in the form of commodities, but they are unrealizable for the majority of capitalist subjects. The accumulation is for its own sake, for the outward spiraling of capital. Capital is universal in its abstractness, incorporating far more than communities, but is only indirectly social. Capital is directly antagonistic to all principles of sociality which are incompatible with the directive of accumulation, either tolerating what remains or transforming it in its own image.¹⁶ Communism is the universal form of communalism, founded on the universalizing form of wealth that capital has built. But it can only become so if it respects and learns from the continuing ethics of communalism, rather than living and breathing the capitalist form of wealth.
Communism must refuse myth and Romance. Communism must take the meaninglessness of life far further than capital — into a rejection of the imperial logic of utility. Subjectivity cannot be free until it recognizes its outside, until it refuses the hopeless pursuit of identifying the world with itself. Life must be an end in itself. Marx predicted communism as a civilization wherein labor would be an end in itself, no longer a misery suffered for the reproduction of life but a free expression of life.¹⁷ For labor to be a free expression of life, it must also be labor which does not reduce life to a mere object of itself. Labor cannot posit a dead object as the receptor of the active, laboring subject. It must recognize subjectivity, activity in all of life. Labor must be understood as aspiring towards harmony, understanding with the world. Communist wealth will be the wealth of the infinity in all things. There are endless vistas in all of life, all things have immanent within, between, and through them the infinity of possibilities.
Communist labor will be a free relationality with the earth, with others, with time, with the self. All things must be understood as an infinity of finitude. This means a transformation of our times. Time cannot be the measure of life, the despotic scale on which life is lived. But we also cannot abolish time, just as we cannot abolish history. Time must instead become a tool, a measuring instrument like a thermometer or a pressure gauge. Not something which represents, defines, or dominates, but something which facilitates the rational self-organization of labor. As Marx told us, time should become a means for the society of cooperating producers to manage the total labor available to them.¹⁸ Merely a means of planning and self-regulation, not a measure of life.
Communism is, to be fair, a narrative of linear time. Universal history has prepared the conditions of our redemption — in the eyes of critics like Vine Deloria Jr. (Íŋyaŋ Woslál Háŋ), Russell Means (Oglála Lakhóta Oyáte), Fredy Perlman, or John Mohawk (Onödowá’ga:’), this simply appears as a more perfected form of the imperial-historical way of life.¹⁹ Communism is certainly a product of this life, but it is within and against it. Communism embraces the rootlessness of capital in order to work across the networks of dependency and bondage, to unite the wretched of the earth. This unity of the working classes, homeless in the capitalist earth, aims to create a universal homeland. It is cosmopolitanism which claims loyalty to life itself rather than to any Blood and Soil.
But this loyalty to life is only an aspiration which must be realized in history. Humanity is not an origin or foundation, but something which must be created by realizing history as the history of freedom’s emergence. This can only be the case when we accuse history, refusing to be complacent with its blood-soaked march. The universal community of life can only be built from the ashes of the universal suffering dealt upon us by capital — the culmination of class society. To realize freedom through history, we must wrestle tirelessly with it as Jacob wrestled with the angel.
