means effort, endeavor, impulse, inclination, tendency, undertaking striving; in early philosophies of psychology and metaphysics, is an innate inclination of a thing to continue to exist and enhance itself
The importance of Marx in this connection is that, no doubt for the first time since Spinoza’s conatus (‘effort’), the question of historicity (or of the ‘differential’ of the movement, instability and tension within the present which are carrying it towards its own transformation) is posed in the element of practice