Critical Race Theory & Marxism: Temporal Power

Abstract

This Essay on modern progress spins out of Marxism a theory of time about which Marxism itself has remained largely unconscious. Marxism is a theory of the already-taken. Critical Race Theory has as its animating spirit, its haunt, a related—but up until now only latent—temporal theory of the already-taken. The unconscious, we learn from psychoanalysis, does not know time; it is timeless. The authority of law comes to us from this same time out of mind. The four corners of this Essay’s theory of the already-taken are Marxism, Critical Race Theory, psychoanalysis, and jurisprudence. The already-taken is the unconscious of law.