Abstract

The essays deals with the reading of Marx entailed in Harry Harootunian's book "Marx after Marx" in relation to the question of how to build a historical understanding of the global present. By assuming as central the Marxian category of formal subsumption, Harootunian illustrates how it is possible to understand capital both as global and as internally differentiated, by means of a tense relationship between the present and its pasts. Through Harootunian's critical assessment of Chakrabarty's analysis of abstract labor and history the essay underlines the need to gain a temporal rather than a spatial understanding of global capitalism.