Abstract Knafo and Teschke’s 2020 article, ‘Political Marxism and the Rules of Reproduction of Capitalism: A Historicist Critique’, is an important contribution to the debate between structuralist and historicist interpretations of Marxism. As such, it presents important implications for how Marxism is presented in broader academic debates. My aim is to highlight the contribution of its radical historicism and its methodological emphasis on agency for questioning Eurocentric macro-narratives, through an engagement with the ways in which Marxism (and the problem of Eurocentric structuralism) is presented in Post- and Decolonial traditions. I end by drawing briefly upon examples from my previous work on Brazilian state-formation and development.

Karl Korsch identi es in Marx’s work what he calls “the principle of historical speci cation,” the way in which “Marx comprehends all things social in terms of a de nite historical epoch.” This work is concerned with this idea and its instantiation in contemporary social theory. With this paper I hope to show how the principle of historical speci cation has been interpreted within the Birmingham tradition of cultural studies, paying speci c attention to (1) the form of historical time implicit in the concept of a “conjuncture,” and (2) the logic of historical periodization that follows from a “conjuncturalist” approach to historical research. I argue that a conception of plural temporality is central to the mode of historical analysis associated with the Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies. In his 1937 essay, “Leading Principles of Marxism,” Karl Korsch identi es in Marx’s writing what he calls “the principle of historical speci cation,” describing it in this way: “Marx comprehends all things social in terms of a de nite historical epoch. He criticizes all the categories of the bourgeois theorists of society in which this speci c character has been effaced.” In the current work, I am concerned with this idea and its instantiation in contemporary social theory. In what follows, I look at the tradition of cultural studies associated with the Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) at The University of Birmingham, a tendency that is notable for its emphasis on historical and contextual speci city. With this paper, then, I show how the principle of historical speci cation has been interpreted within this tradition of cultural studies and draw attention to the theoretical premises that ground this interpretation. Following the work of Stuart Hall and Lawrence Grossberg, I argue that cultural studies not only takes historical speci cation as a kind of methodological precept, but, more fundamentally, takes historical speci city as itself the primary object of analysis. In presenting this argument, I pay speci c attention to (1) the form of historical time implicit in the concept of a “conjuncture” and (2) the logic of historical periodization that follows from a “conjuncturalist” approach to social research. Among other things, I suggest that cultural studies ought to af rm a notion of temporal multiplicity and reject any straightforwardly historicist account of time (that is, of time as linear, homogenous, and progressive). I argue for this by suggesting that there is a nonarbitrary relation between the abstract structure of a social formation and the form of historical time that is predicated of it. In doing this, I follow Althusser’s suggestion that a materialist philosophy of history is broadly committed to the proposition that how social existence is imagined and described conditions (in some strong sense) how history and historical time are imagined and described. In one respect, then, this paper is an attempt to bring the Althusserian critique of historicism into explicit relation with cultural studies’ practice of conjunctural analysis. 1 This paper is organized in two sections. The rst addresses the place of Korsch’s “principle of historical speci cation” in the Marxian tradition, suggesting several ways in which we may recognize readings of Marx that emphasize this principle. The second section focuses directly on theoretical work within cultural studies, especially on the work of Stuart Hall and Lawrence Grossberg. It looks in particular at how the concept of a “conjuncture” provides a theoretical foundation for the radically contextual form of social research associated with this tradition. 1. Marxism and historical speci city: an overview To foreground the principle of historical speci cation in one’s reading of Marx is, at its most basic, to assert two things: (1) Marx’s analysis is not aimed at uncovering universal laws of social development, but is —to one degree or another—limited in its historical scope

Abstract This paper offers a first analysis of the philosophy of history developed by Jian Bozan (1898–1968), the author of China's earliest comprehensive exposition of historical materialism. Despite his central importance for the establishment of professional historical studies in PRC, the existing studies neglect Jian's original contribution to the development of Chinese Marxism and his pre-war works in general, focusing solely on his participation in the debate over the relation between history and theory in the 1960s. The paper seeks to fill this lacuna by providing a critical account of Jian Bozan's understanding of historical laws, progress, the stages of history, human freedom and the class struggle. Jian's synthesis of historicism and historical materialism, which at a time was seen as an alternative to the Maoist view of history, was officially condemned during the Cultural Revolution and led to his premature death. However, this paper demonstrates that, following the public rehabilitation of the thought of Jian Bozan in 1978, it was his system that had an important impact on the historiography in Dengist China. Furthermore, the paper argues that Jian's approach to historical materialism brought many novelties in relation to the preceding Sino-Marxist views of history.

Karl Marx (German: [ˈkaʁl ˈmaʁks]; 5 May 1818 – 14 March 1883) was a German philosopher, social and political theorist, economist, and revolutionary socialist. He developed the theory of historical materialism, analyzing class struggle under capitalism and predicting the system's overthrow by the proletariat in favour of communism. Marx co-authored The Communist Manifesto (1848) with Friedrich Eng Like Tocqueville, who described a faceless and bureaucratic despotism with no identifiable despot, Marx also broke with classical thinkers who spoke of a single tyrant and with Montesquieu, who discussed the nature of the single despot. Instead, Marx set out to analyse "the despotism of capital". Fundamentally, Marx assumed that human history involves transforming human nature, which encompasses both human beings and material objects. Humans recognise that they possess both actual and potential selves. For both Marx and Hegel, self-development begins with an experience of internal alienation stemming from this recognition, followed by a realisation that the actual self, as a subjective agent, renders its potential counterpart an object to be apprehended. Marx further argues that by moulding nature in desired ways the subject takes the object as its own and thus permits the individual to be actualised as fully human. For Marx, the human nature – Gattungswesen, or species-being – exists as a function of human labour. Fundamental to Marx's idea of meaningful labour is the proposition that for a subject to come to terms with its alienated object it must first exert influence upon literal, material objects in the subject's world. Marx acknowledges that Hegel "grasps the nature of work and comprehends objective man, authentic because actual, as the result of his own work", but characterises Hegelian self-development as unduly "spiritual" and abstract. Marx thus departs from Hegel by insisting that "the fact that man is a corporeal, actual, sentient, objective being with natural capacities means that he has actual, sensuous objects for his nature as objects of his life-expression, or that he can only express his life in actual sensuous objects". Consequently, Marx revises Hegelian "work" into material "labour" and in the context of human capacity to transform nature the term "labour power". Marx's ideas have had a profound impact on world politics and intellectual thought, in particular in the aftermath of the 1917 Russian Revolution. Followers of Marx have often debated among themselves over how to interpret Marx's writings and apply his concepts to the modern world.…

limited way in which they do, is not understood by the historicist . What is the mechanism which makes “ ... rather to show that totalitarianism is typically based upon historicist and holist presuppositions, and of ... claims about historicism: The first is that the historicist does not, as a matter of fact, derive his ...

Marxism and the Revisionist Challenge George C. Comninel. lates into placing a preferred version of what Marx meant above historical ... fundamental overview of historical development is an expression , then Hobs- bawm's introduction must ... Historians generally—and Marxists in particular—have presented the revolution of 1789 as a bourgeois revolution: one which marked the ascendance of the bourgeois as a class, the defeat of a feudal aristocracy, and the triumph of capitalism. Recent revisionist accounts, however, have raised convincing arguments against the idea of the bourgeois class revolution, and the model on which it is based. In this provocative study, George Comninel surveys existing interpretations of the French Revolution and the methodological issues these raise for historians. He argues that the weaknesses of Marxist scholarship originate in Marx’s own method, which has led historians to fall back on abstract conceptions of the transition from feudalism to capitalism. Comninel reasserts the principles of historica

scientific and theoretical work, rather than a text of humanist economics or historicist prophecy. The book introduced the influential concept of "symptomatic Reading Capital (French: Lire le Capital) is a 1965 book about Karl Marx's Capital, written by the French philosopher Louis Althusser and his students Étienne Balibar, Jacques Rancière, Pierre Macherey, and Roger Establet. The book was first published in France by François Maspero. An abridged edition was published in 1968, and a complete English translation in 2016. Reading Capital is a key text R…