Massimiliano Tomba

TL;DR: The authors rethinks key categories of Marx's work beyond any philosophy of history, showing how the plurality of temporal layers that are combined and come into conflict in the violently unifying historical dimension of modernity are central to Marx's thought.

Abstract: Insurgent Universality presents an intervention in current discussions on universalism, democracy, and property. It investigates other trajectories besides traditional ones of modernity and traces an alternative legacy for contemporary movements. This legacy exceeds the familiar juridical horizon of citizenship, individual rights, and the state by revisiting questions relating to power, democratic practices, and the modern conception of private property. Insurgent Universality investigates and displays alternative trajectories of modernity that have been repressed, hindered, and forgotten. These trajectories are not only embodiments of a radical hope and a new conception of universality that arose from insurgencies from below; they also alert us to possibilities in our present that have been underestimated or overlooked. Eventually, they show us alternative institutions by which to reshape our present. These experimental democratic practices and institutions are based on the pluralism of authorities instead of the monopoly power of the state. However, such an inquiry resists the utopian urge to clear the tables. Instead, the book examines more closely, and with a fresh perspective, those aspects of our intellectual inheritance that we have allowed to remain in the darkness. By doing this, Insurgent Universality aims to “decolonize” European history, offering an image of Europe that is not monolithic but, rather, composed of many layers and paths that have been repressed or forgotten. The aim of the book is to rebuild those roads not taken and bridge them with non-European trajectories and political experiments.

TL;DR: In this article, the combination of differentials of surplus-value works and why a representation of a plurality of historical temporalities synchronised by the temporality of socially-necessary labour is the most adequate image to comprehend it.

TL;DR: The authors investigates the way in which Marx combines different historiographical approaches in order to draft the possibility for both new forms of social relationship and a new anthropology, which is not the traditional unilinear and historicist paradigm and its idea of pre-modern, pre-capitalist and pre-political social forms does not help in understanding the interaction of different temporalities.

TL;DR: The authors analyzes the current crisis in terms of a conflict of temporalities, arguing that the pace of the economic temporality and its speed in decision making clashes with the temporality of the state and the slowness of the democratic process of decision making.