This essay will provide an overview of Moishe Postone’s key work Time, Labor, and Social Domination (1993) that according to its own claim presents a ‘fundamental reinterpretation’ of Marx’s mature economy-critical work, especially the central categories of Capital. In doing so, Postone’s critical reinterpretation relates to the theoretical interests and draws on the conceptual framework of critical theory. Postone’s work must therefore be situated within the tradition of critical theory itself, even if it is precisely Postone’s critical evaluation of some of its positions, developed from his reinterpretation of Marx, that qualifies him as a critical theorist in his own right.
In Time, Labor, and Social Domination, Postone rethinks the method as well as the object of Marx’s Critique against the background of so-called ‘traditional Marxism’ that has hitherto interpreted the fundamental Marxian categories either insufficiently or spuriously, leading to a truncated understanding not only of capitalism as a general social relation based on a historically specific mode of production, but also to a questionable interpretation of possibilities for its overcoming. Essentially, the book aligns positions of ‘traditional Marxism’ with critical theory by arguing that especially Friedrich Pollock and Max Horkheimer gave way to ‘pessimism’ due to their reliance on the framework of traditional Marxism’s interpretation of Marx’s central concepts.
After giving a brief outline of the formation of Postone’s thought in a short introductory biographical note, the essay will primarily discuss Postone’s major contribution to international Marxian research in value theory, Time, Labor, and Social Domination. Following the biographical note, the chapter is divided into three parts: the first part presents Postone’s method as that of ‘immanent social critique’, elucidating Postone’s intellectual heritage in the twentieth-century Hegelian Marxism of critical theory in Germany, and clarifying its usefulness for understanding Marx’s own intervention. The second part discusses Postone’s object of critique, namely the theoretical assumptions of traditional Marxism. Here the emphasis lies on: (1) the positive and ‘transhistorical’ role it ascribes to the notion of labour as the underlying general hypothesis; (2) its discussion of the object of Marx’s critique, capitalism, as a form of class society, rather than a form of society; (3) its emphasis on the notion of the market, private property and modes of distribution, as presented in Ricardian Marxism (Paul M. Sweezy, Maurice Dobb); and (4), in building on these assumptions, early critical theory’s understanding of capitalism’s basic contradiction in the ‘forces’ against the ‘relations’ of production, as presented in the works of Friedrich Pollock and Max Horkheimer. The third and final part shall present Postone’s own reconstruction of Marx’s central categories with special emphasis on the notions of abstract labour, the fetish-character of the commodity, and the difference between abstract and historical time and its ‘social-epistemological implications’.
For reasons of circumventing redundancies, Postone’s critique of Habermas and the chapter on ‘The Trajectory of Production’ will not be discussed separately, but rather mentioned within the context of the analyses directed at the critique of traditional Marxism and Postone’s reconstructive framework, respectively.
Moishe Postone studied at the University of Chicago in the 1960s where he became involved with the political left. Though he never aligned with self-avowed Marxist movements, such as the Maoists and the Trotskyites, the (often) emigré faculty members of the University of Chicago helped to shape his interest in modes of thought that attempted to grapple with the social and cultural dimensions in addition to the ‘purely economic’. Postone’s first encounter with Marx, in the ‘Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844’, left him with a sense of sensation while at the same time he discovered the works of the Frankfurt School. The greatest impact Postone received at that point was reading the Grundrisse (in translation). It also formed the basis for his dissertation proposal that was accepted by the University of Frankfurt in Germany where he enrolled as a doctoral student in the autumn semester of 1972. In Frankfurt, Postone worked closely with Adorno’s former associates and assistants, such as Oskar Negt and Alfred Schmidt, but also Jürgen Ritsert, Gerhard Brandt and Iring Fetscher, although his intellectual formation was distinctive: while Postone’s reading of the Grundrisse and Capital was strongly informed by his reading of texts from the critical theory tradition, he in turn re-read Adorno and Horkheimer through the lens of his new reading of Marx. In this sense, Postone’s theoretical incentive was indebted to a kind of ‘cross-fertilization’ of both readings. This allowed Postone, in the seminal Time, Labor, and Social Domination, to point towards a path for overcoming the antinomies of classical critical theory in a fundamentally different way than, for example, the attempt by Habermas.
Moishe Postone was Thomas E. Donnelley Professor of Modern History, co-director of the Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory and member of the Committee on Jewish Studies at the University of Chicago. He died aged 75 on the 19th of March, 2018.
Going back to Hegel’s claim that the ‘most difficult’ task is to unite judgement and comprehension in the matter’s ‘presentation’ (Hegel, 1986: 11), this essay will first try to elucidate the method of ‘immanent critique’ influenced by critical theory, especially Adorno’s approach, that structures Postone’s presentation in his reconstruction of Marx’s mature theory.
Against interpretations that limit Marx’s analysis and critique to a theory of material production, class structure or simply a ‘different’ kind of economics (‘critical’ economics included), Postone stresses that Marx’s theory understands not only the object of its critique – the historically specific form of production called ‘capitalist’, but also its own standard of critique – mediated by particular categories and concepts, as historically determinate. This enables this kind of critique to account for its conditions of possibility within its own social and historical context. Postone calls this kind of critical method ‘immanent social critique’ (1993: 87) and adopts this view of Marx’s method for his own criticism of what he terms ‘traditional Marxism’. It is crucial for Postone that ‘Marx’s theory is thought to grasp the relationship of theory to society self-reflexively, by seeking to analyse its context – capitalist society – in a way that locates itself historically and accounts for the possibility of its own standpoint’ (1993: 16). Only this approach can be called an ‘immanent’ critique in which the social dimension relates not only to the criticized object, (capitalist) society, but also to its subject as being socially and historically mediated by the fabric of the very society it criticizes. This standpoint reflects the theorem of the dialectical unity of method and object, or the judgement immanent to its object, as often invoked by Adorno (1976: 109, 117–18; 1993: 7–9).
The acknowledgement or demand of the criticizing subject’s own immanent standpoint opens a perspective to an evaluation of Marx’s Critique of Political Economy that emphasizes the relation of subject and object, positivity and negativity (affirmation and negation), universality and particularity, essence and appearance, content and form, substance and function, the dynamic and the static, as being an integral part of Marx’s categorial critique of political economy. The re-evaluation of these classical metaphysical topoi within the context of Marx’s categorial critique also provides a more fundamental approach to not only the critique, but also to how capitalist society can be efficiently overcome. Here, Postone’s understanding of the underlying structure of capitalist society as owing to the deeply inverted and reified structure of the capitalist mode of production, and yet presenting itself as rigid social objectivity, is eminent. It is only with this set of critical categories that as historically specific also address the historically specific Problemstellung of capital that theories of reification and fetishism of social relations can be adequately addressed. In other words, it is only within the self-reflexive standard of immanent social critique that the problem of the fetish-character of value, of social objectivity and subjectivity, and that of social mediation are expressed as the structural fundaments of capitalist society in their own right, so that their overcoming becomes a real possibility. Because the emphasis of the problem of social objectivity and subjectivity informs Postone’s basic assumptions, he hereby declares the first conceptual determinations of Capital – value, abstract labour, the commodity, and capital, in which the problem of subjective and objective social constitution is already expressed – as ‘fundamental categories’ of Marx’s analysis, and likewise of his own reinterpretation.
The emphasis of the historical specificity of Marx’s categories of value, (abstract) labour, capital, etc. not only provides a critique of the ‘naturalism’ inherent in both classical political economy and what Postone terms ‘traditional Marxism’ – it also provides the criticism of the idea that production in capitalism in some way or the other represents the interaction of humans and nature that constitutes a realm outside of capitalism itself and therefore also the standpoint of its critique. It also moves beyond a mere critique of exploitation: ‘the basic categories of Marx’s critique not only delineate a mode of exploitation. They also are temporally dynamic categories that seek to grasp modern capitalist society as a mode of social life characterised by quasi-objective forms of domination (commodity, capital) that underlie an intrinsic historical dynamic’ (Postone, 2004: 53–4). The emphasis on the historically specific in the immanent critical approach also formulates the conditions of how a socially valid and holistic critique can be conceptualized. Postone calls this approach a ‘negative critique’. A ‘negative critique’, resonating Adorno’s concept of ‘negative dialectics’, and in accordance with the presuppositions of immanent social critique as a holistic critical theory, ‘criticizes what is on the basis of what could be’ (1993: 64) while a ‘positive critique’ ‘criticizes what exists on the basis of what also exists’ (ibid.), a position that holds for the traditional Marxist view of labour as the standpoint of critique. The representatives of the traditional Marxist viewpoint, by de-emphasizing the historically specific role of labour as value-producing, abstract labour in the particular socio-historical constellation called ‘capitalism’ – hereby fatally underestimating Marx’s essential theoretical intervention of the dual character of labour in the capitalist mode of production – fail adequately to grasp the object of Marx’s critique, the form of value and its production in this kind of society, and the call for its abolishment. By making the value-based capitalist mode of production and the historically specific form of labour that creates value the object of his critique, Marx, in Postone’s view, ‘transformed the nature of the social critique based upon the labor theory of value from a positive to a negative critique’ (1993: 63). In contrast, traditional Marxism does not see abstract labour as the substance (or ‘content’) of value as the object of critique, but merely addresses a particular function (or ‘form’) of labour in capitalist society and therefore remains trapped in the positive critique from the standpoint of labour, instead of a negative critique of labour in capitalism. Traditional Marxism therefore has the character of ‘redemptive criticism’ [rettende Kritik] (although Postone never uses this term to characterize traditional Marxism). In the ‘positive/redemptive critique’ of traditional Marxism, therefore, the ‘essence’ of Marx’s analysis becomes an entity like a ‘(truly) human society’ that should be realized, instead of capitalism that should be abolished. What is therefore underlying the methodological standard of immanent social critique is a particular dialectic: precisely because the traditional critique points to an external essence (‘human self-fulfilment’, the ‘truly human society’), it remains positive. In contradistinction, Postone’s position of immanent social critique is a negative one: it calls for the overcoming of the very social and historical configuration within which it is set. In it, the ‘realizable “ought” that is immanent to the “is” and serves as the standpoint of critique’ (1993: 88). It must be conceptualized as the negation of the existing conditions.
At this point, the notion of immanent social critique must be reviewed against its theoretical background in Hegel’s metaphysics or logic that Postone identifies as one essential cornerstone of Marx’s (and consequently, his own) position. As indicated above, the emphatic use of Hegelian terminology and the themes of classic German idealism provide Postone with a solid basis to investigate the epistemological implications of his reinterpretation of Marx’s fundamental categories, like the commodity and capital, and the forms of obfuscation that accompany them. Hegel’s concepts like the idea, the self-moving subject, and also the concept [der Begriff] itself, here also deliver a rich source for re-conceptualizations of a theory of subjectivity as a theory of capital that arguably represents the main interest of Postone’s intervention at the level of method.
The basic assumption of Postone’s adaption of Hegel’s theory is that Hegel’s notion of Geist (or Subject/Substance, or Idea, or Begriff) finds its adequate expression in Marx’s notion of capital in his Critique of Political Economy. Like Hegel’s Geist, value becomes the ‘self-moving subject’ that subsumes the forms of appearance of social structures under its own logic, a logic for its own sake. It is ‘constituted by forms of objectifying practice’ (1993: 75), a practice that finds its expression in a determinate social reality it moulds according to its own inner structure (e.g. commodity exchange). ‘[Marx] investigates the nature of that social reality in Capital by unfolding logically the commodity and money forms from his categories of use value, value, and its “substance”’ (1993: 75), the particular form of labour in capitalism that produces (surplus) value, abstract labour. For this hypothesis, Postone finds textual proof in a crucial passage of the first volume of Capital in which Marx presents the transformation of money to capital, especially in Marx’s well-known conceptualization of value (not, as is often thought, capital) as ‘automatic subject’ (see Marx, 1976: 255–6). Yet, how can the adaptation of Hegel’s theory of subjectivity deliver a ground to a social critique that emphasizes the mutual mediation of the objective and subjective dimension of practice expressed in the notion of capital? Postone’s answer is that Marx’s move to conceptualizing Hegel’s Geist as the self-moving subject of value, entails a shift from the subject-object paradigm of classic epistemology to a social theory of consciousness (1993: 77). With the help of Hegel’s methodological-theoretical overarching architecture of the self-mediation of the identical subject-object –a Subject in the true meaning of the word, divested of and incorporated in its ‘own’ objectivity – Postone can reconceptualize the forms of really existing capitalist social relations as forms of both subjectivity and objectivity, implying and excluding one another. In this sense, the commodity form is not simply a social reality, expressed in a more or less arbitrary thing-like form, but as a social reality it already encompasses the fundamental social relations of production, namely in the notions of use value and value, of concrete and abstract labour, and both its fundamentally contradictory, yet mutually conditioning objective and subjective dimensions (which will be discussed in part three in more detail). However, Postone defies what could seem as a reformulation of the classic analysis of Georg Lukács’ essay ‘Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat’ in his pathbreaking History and Class Consciousness (1923). In fact, both regarding its method and its impetus, Postone’s understanding of Marx’s appropriation of Hegel’s method is quite different from its appropriation in Lukács. In his essay, Lukács has tried to demonstrate the insufficiency of the epistemological paradigm of the subject-object dualism associated with ‘bourgeois’ science. Hegel, in Lukács’ view, provides the antidote to this kind of thinking ‘in terms of finitude’ by not only overcoming the opposition of epistemological subject and object in the infinite ‘identical subject-object’ of the Geist, but, by delivering the conceptual means to ‘materialistically’ appropriate this identical subject-object to the object of history and historical emancipation, identifying it with the proletariat. The proletariat accordingly becomes the ‘identical subject-object’ of historical progress, and its emancipation by way of self-realization or Selbstbewusstwerdung is equal to that of mankind as such. Postone argues that Marx’s understanding of Hegel differs from Lukács’ interpretation in three essential aspects: first, as indicated above, Lukács’ argument relies heavily on a critique of capitalist society from the standpoint of labour, and with it, the glorification of the ‘labouring proletariat’ as the emancipatory force of history, instead of positing it precisely as the object of Marx’s critique. In consequence, Lukács’ interpretation remains confined to a ‘positive’ and redemptive critique. Second, Marx ‘suggests that a historical Subject in the Hegelian sense does indeed exist in capitalism, yet he does not identify it with any social grouping, such as the proletariat, or with humanity’ (1993: 75). Were this the case, the concept of the identical subject-object of history would not supersede the collective version of the bourgeois (economic) subject, ‘constituting itself and the world through “labor”’ (1993: 78). Rather, as preliminarily indicated before, this historical Subject is a strictly impersonal entity, namely value or capital itself as the fundamental social nexus [Zusammenhang] of capitalist society. Lukács therefore disregards the particular historically dynamic character of domination in capitalist society in which even class domination is encompassed within the logic of the capital relation necessarily obeying the law of valorization, and hence, of value (for a critique of Postone’s interpretation, see Feenberg, 1996). Third, in contrast to Lukács, Marx perceives of capitalist relations as the necessary constitutive of the modern subject, not as extrinsic to it. They ‘veil’ neither the ‘real’ social relations of capitalism (class relations) nor a ‘human essence’ attributed to the exploited class. To the contrary, there ‘is’ no real kernel to the existing mechanisms of social constitution other than those performed in capitalist practice. This critique indirectly also demonstrates Lukács’ misrepresentation of Marx’s theoretical intervention as belonging to the paradigm and discourse of ‘enlightenment’ critique. Here, mankind exists in the mode of ‘estrangement’ (rather than alienation as a specific from of estrangement) from its essence, the emancipative universal structure of rationality. The self-empowerment of the intellect, as expressed in Kant’s ‘Sapere aude’ – in Lukács’ terms, the Selbstbewusstwerdung des Proletariats –would serve as the death blow to authority, personified in the King or the capitalist class. Contrary to its anti-Kantian impetus, Lukács’ conceptualization is still embedded in the mode of enlightenment critique. To be sure, contrary to Kant, Lukács’ remedy would not be the well-formed and sound argument alone, but human practice aimed at self-emancipation.
What is furthermore essentially ‘Hegelian’ and to some extent ‘un-Lukácsian’ in this adaptation is Postone’s stress on contradiction that forms the underlying hypothesis for the possibility of immanent social critique. For Marx, as for Postone, the fabric of capitalist society is constituted on a fundamental social contradiction. For now, it should suffice to say that this social contradiction is already incorporated in the form of the commodity or the value form, the ‘economic cell form’ of bourgeois society (Marx, 1976: 90) and its aspect of use value and value that ‘characterizes its social universe’ (1993: 88). As such, it is not only historically specific to capitalist society, but the specific social dimension of the commodity, its value, refers to the totality of social relations that manifests itself in objective structures while being subjectively mediated. They find their realization in the inverted structures of fetishism that are both objectively valid and socially constructed in practice. The nature of the contradiction of the commodity form therefore points to the subjective and objective dimension of social mediation that can only be grasped from the standpoint of totality. This methodological approach allows Marx to conceptualize a theory ‘of the ways in which humans constitute structures of social mediation which, in turn, constitute forms of social practice’ (1993: 218). In this sense, Hegel’s ‘speculative identity’ of subject and object serves as the buttress for Postone’s interpretation of Marx’s notion of value and its necessary realization in modes of practice. Needless to say, Marx’s theory forecloses Hegel’s idealist standpoint. Postone, though aware of their essential difference, has probably not made clear enough how Marx’s difference from Hegel must also be understood in relation to the notion of ‘truth’. For Hegel, the concept reveals itself. At first, at the level of appearance, it is superficially true, while with the further distinctions it becomes false, before it becomes finally true ‘again’, but now as the concrete totality of all the previous determinations which are sublated in it, in the triple meaning of the word. For Marx however, understanding the operations of the capitalist system is not a question of the self-presentation of the concept at all. Quite to the contrary: what the concept and the concepts present [darstellen], has to be read against themselves, as the abyss between their appearance and their uncomprehended presuppositions, or their essence. Here is why his Critique of Political Economy presents itself as the critique of the mechanism taking place in the economic categories that in and out of themselves increasingly obscure the origin of (surplus) value in the exploitation of living human labour. The fetish-character that value takes on as a form in this dynamic points to a greater mystification instead of a greater approximation towards the Idea or truth, as in Hegel. Hence, for Marx, in a concept such as interest-bearing capital ‘the fetish character of capital and the representation of this capital fetish is … completed’ (Marx, 1981: 516). For Marx, the truth of what is will not come to appear – and precisely because of that, the presentation of the categories not only proceeds from the simple to the complex as in Hegel, but at the same time from the level of essence to that of appearance. This is also why Marx introduces his labour theory of value together with the presentation of the twofold character of labour right at the beginning of his Critique. That being said, while Marx and Hegel are fundamentally opposed in this regard, Postone is correct to highlight Marx’s indebtedness to Hegel’s methodological approach of critical immanence.
At the most general level, the basic objection against what Postone terms the traditional Marxist interpretation is that its critique of capitalism is one from the standpoint of labour instead of being a critique of labour in capitalism (see 1993: 5). The latter, as indicated above, entails a critique of the capitalist mode of production in its totality, whereas the former implies a transhistorical notion of labour as underlying Marx’s analysis in Capital. In this view, labour is endowed to provide the metabolism between humans and nature throughout human history, so that labour is seen to be in itself a worthy social practice and generally attributed with positive features. Postone rejects this ‘productivist paradigm’ on the grounds that Marx’s critique points to the historical specificity of the particular role of labour in capitalist society, namely, to be the substance of value whose (value’s) production and re-production is capitalist society’s only rationale. Postone’s emphasis on the historical and systematic specificity of value-producing labour in capitalism enables him to reinforce Marx’s crucial distinction of concrete, use-value-producing labour and abstract, value-producing labour to show that only the latter form of labour constitutes the kind of social nexus mediated by the value form that is characteristic for capitalism. Value, accordingly, as a historical determination specific to capitalist society expresses ‘both the determinate form of social relations and the particular form of wealth that characterize capitalism’ (1993: 44). This particular form of social wealth expressed in value, Postone argues, is contradictorily opposed to wealth expressed in use value, as in the ‘immense collection of commodities’ people may or may not use to satisfy their needs. In contrast, the form of production aimed at value, specific to capitalism, has substituted the meaningful coherence of social life directed at the satisfaction of needs (concrete wealth) with the production of abstract wealth directed at abstract wealth itself.
According to Postone, traditional Marxism not only conflates what Marx calls ‘crucial to an understanding of political economy’ (Marx, 1976: 132), namely the character of social production aimed at use value with that of value, but underestimates the significance of his critique. In this sense, influential Marxist economist Paul Sweezy’s intervention is centred around the notion of the distribution of value, instead of delivering a critique of its production. It therefore remains on the traditionalist standpoint of a positive notion of labour that identifies the market as the ‘self-regulatory’ instance that demonstrates the efficacy of the law of value. He thus maintains that isolated workers ‘are, in fact, working for each other’ (Sweezy, 1969: 27) which not only assumes that the goal of this kind of production is use value, but that the market distributes the goods so that a ‘general equilibrium’ (Sweezy, 1969: 53) can be maintained. In his critique, Postone claims that ‘The law of value, according to Sweezy, then, is an attempt to explain the workings of the self-regulating market, which implies that value is a category of distribution alone, an expression of the non-conscious, “automatic”, market-mediated mode of distribution in capitalism’ (Postone, 1993: 45). The tenet of Sweezy’s critique remains at the level of the non-overt vs the overt relations of production whereas value and the labour it creates remain historically unspecific and are exempt from Sweezy’s critique. If, however, value were only a category of the mode of distribution, ‘the labor that creates that wealth would not differ instrinsically from labor in noncapitalist formations’ (Postone, 1993: 45), even if the relations of production were mediated in an ‘overt’ way.
Another way to inaccurately perceive of Marx’s theory of value from the standpoint of labour is the discussion of its social and/or private character. Apart from Sweezy, Postone specifically refers to Vitali Vygodski and Ernest Mandel who both – notwithstanding their difference over the centrality of private property to capitalism – suppose that the social character of labour in capitalism is ‘indirect’ and, as such, only validated through the market (Vygodski, 1973: 54; Mandel, 1971: 98). The goal of Marx’s value theory would be to show that in a non-capitalist society, like socialism, private and individual labour would be ‘directly’ social and need not rely on an ex-post validation through market mechanisms that obscure labour’s directly value-producing properties (Mandel, 1971: 97). Postone argues that this view of the ‘indirectly’ social labour in capitalism, misrepresents Marx’s understanding of the character of private and social labour that, contrary to these views, does not ‘specify an extrinsic difference’ (1993: 46), but is conceptually derived from the crucial difference between abstract and concrete labour. With the terminological convention of his early Critique of Political Economy where ‘exchange-value’ and ‘value’ are still synonymously used, Marx contends in the Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859) that ‘[t]he labour which expresses itself in exchange-value is presupposed as the labour of the isolated individual. It becomes social by assuming the form of its immediate opposite, the form of abstract generality’ (Marx, 1970: 34, quoted in Postone, 1993: 47). According to Postone, the relation between private and social labour cannot be adequately grasped in the critique of mediation (viz. the market) from the standpoint of immediacy (‘direct social labour’), the latter of which a socialist society would purportedly realize. The point of Marx’s understanding of the character of labour in capitalism is the mutual conditionality and simultaneity of its private and social character. Labour in capitalism, directed at the production of (surplus) value, is privately expended labour [privat verausgabte Arbeit], conditioned by the particular social nexus expressed in value, which itself is conditioned by the existence of the expenditure of private labour. As such, this kind of labour is directly social. Even more, because of its double character, for Marx, ‘it is only in capitalism that labor also has a directly social dimension’ (1993: 48). The truncated understanding of the meaning of ‘social’ in the traditional views leads to an interpretation from the standpoint of labour: ‘[Marx’s characterization of labour] refers not to the difference between the “true”, transhistorical “essence” of labor and its form of appearance in capitalism, but, rather, to two moments in capitalism itself’ (1993: 47). Because value constitutes the social nexus in capitalism, labour in the mode of its production is directly social.
In the following, the general critical interventions against critiques from the standpoint of labour will be addressed in some of its specific forms.
In Postone’s analysis, traditional Marxism has often emphasized the meaning of capitalism as a class society in which the dominant, capitalist class, lives off the wealth produced by the exploitation of the labouring or working class. While this is not in itself wrong, Postone laments that this view departs from the standpoint of totality that an imminent social critique can provide. By understanding capitalism not as a form of society, but a form of class domination, traditional Marxism also brackets what is specific to capitalism and fundamentally distinguishes it from all previous forms of social formation: its form of abstract and impersonal social domination by value and capital itself, the ‘abstract form of wealth’. The bourgeois class, too, is not exempt from this form of domination (while, being caught in the fetishism of its self-understanding, it must protect its implementation). This has also problematic consequences for the projections of a future, noncapitalist society (‘socialism’) in which domination and exploitation shall be overcome. In the traditional view, it is not labour itself – as wage labour – that must be abolished, but its unfree, ‘fettered’ condition of existence. Consequently, for Postone, the interpretation of capitalism as class society sees the ‘possibility of theoretical and practical critique … in the gap between the ideals and the reality of modern capitalist society, [not] in the contradictory nature of the form of social mediation that constitutes that society’ (1993: 67), and thus remains positive and external. The traditional critique takes off ‘from an already existing structure of labor and the class that performs it. Emancipation is realized when a structure of labor already in existence no longer is held back by capitalist relations and used to satisfy particularistic interests but is subject to conscious control in the interests of all’ (1993: 66). The working class or proletariat, thus glorified, should not be abolished, but merely emancipated from its particular social rank as the oppressed class. The ‘dignity of production’ is therefore hypostasized onto future (and past) societies. Along these lines, traditional Marxism also positively refers to industrial production as the site in which ‘the worker’ can instantiate his/her labour to ‘come to its own’ and unfold its potential. Labour is proclaimed as the locus of self-realization of not only the working class, but mankind as such. This progressivism of traditional Marxism also uncritically adopts the view that a social reproduction process, the capitalist one included, must be based on use value. Hence, this position often views demands for a top-down re-distribution of wealth, understood as the expression of use value, as an adequate critique of capitalism. At the same time, the intrinsically structural relation between the abstract form of wealth in value, exploitation, and their historical specificity remains unthematized. The positive, redemptive critique of capitalism is also reflected in traditional Marxism’s false attribution of a ‘right’ consciousness to the proletariat, as opposed to the ideology or ‘false consciousness’ of the bourgeois class. Immanent social critique in contrast perceives of the ‘inverted’ structure of capital, as a social relation, as a totality from which the labouring class cannot be exempted: the fetish-character of value is not one exclusively reserved for the bourgeois class or political economists. This is why the standpoint of labour is not antagonist to capitalist relations, but one of its inherent components. Indeed, ‘the standpoint of capital and wage labour is the same’ (Bonefeld, 2004: 113. For a critical discussion of Postone’s view, see also Bonefeld, 2004).
In this regard, Postone discusses a more pertinent question: why is it that labour in capitalism is perceived as a transhistorical force of the self-realization of mankind? His answer is that the particular form of labour in capitalism, abstract labour, delivers in and out of itself its appearance as transhistorical, and hence, use value-producing. This point shall be elaborated in the overview of Postone’s own reconstruction of Marx’s categories in part three.
Another critique of capitalism from the standpoint of labour is that of a specific form of traditional Marxism, namely the Ricardian Marxism notably represented in Paul Sweezy and Maurice Dobb that Postone locates in their emphasis on the market, the significance of the notion of private property, and the modes of distribution. The crucial objection to this reading of Marx is that in its basic assumptions, it hypostatizes convergences between Marx and classical political economy, especially David Ricardo, instead of seeing Marx as a predominant critic of Ricardo, his labour theory of value, and the emphasis on distribution (for the detailed critique of Ricardo, see Marx, 1973: 557–64 and Marx, 1989: 9–208). According to Postone, the alleged common features of Marx’s and Ricardo’s theory include (a) the normative critique of nonproductive social groupings (land owners in Ricardo, capitalists in traditional Marxism), (b) the identification of labour or the ‘labourer’ with the general interests of society, as expressed in Ricardo’s transhistorical labour theory of value (see Ricardo, 1911: 5), (c) the critique from the standpoint of labour as a quasi-natural point of view and its evocation of social ontology, and (d) the moralistic critique in the name of justice, reason, universality, and nature. Also the positive evaluation of industrial production is a convergence between the traditional view of Marx and Ricardo, exemplified in Ricardian Marxism.
Like Sweezy, Dobb views value as a ‘market category’. It indicates that ‘a system of commodity production and exchange can operate of itself without collective regulation or single design’ (Dobb, 1940: 37, quoted in 1993: 49–50) and positively refers to Adam Smith’s classic idea of the ‘unseen’ or ‘invisible hand’. For Dobb, Marx’s law of value and the idea of classical economists are however not to be conflated: the classics ‘had not provided a historical critique of capitalism itself’ (Dobb, 1940: 55, quoted in 1993: 50). This became Marx’s task. However, what the classical political economists, notably Smith and Ricardo, purportedly provided for Marx’s analysis, was a positive theory of production that implied a normative critique of the nonproductive, consuming class – the owners of landed property. Dobb’s understanding of social critique, according to Postone, is therefore ‘a critique of non-productive social groupings from the standpoint of production’ (1993: 50). For Dobb, consequently, both Smith’s and Ricardo’s classical labour theory of value (see Smith, 1846: 13 and Ricardo, 1911: 5) served as the vantage point for Marx’s own labour theory of value that he refined in terms of a critical weapon against both of the ‘unproductive classes’, the owners of landed property and the bourgeoisie. As for differences between Smith and Ricardo, it should be briefly mentioned that while Smith attacked the ‘unproductive’ land owners, he still believed that rent constitutes one of the three ‘sources of revenue’, next to labour and capital. Ricardo departed from this view to question that ‘the appropriation of land, and the consequent creation of rent, will occasion any variation in the relative value of commodities independently of the quantity of labour necessary to production’ (Ricardo, 1911: 33ff.) This ‘refinement’ of Smith’s and Ricardo’s value theory was purportedly expressed in the category of surplus value. Here, Dobb argues, Marx goes beyond Smith and Ricardo to show that profit is not a function of capital, but of labour alone, to include the bourgeois class in his criticism. This allegedly enabled Marx to predominantly criticize how the products of labour, based on the private ownership of the means of production, are distributed. ‘Social domination is treated as a function of class domination which, in turn, is rooted in “private property in land and capital”[Dobb: 78]. Within this general framework, the categories of value and surplus value express how labor and its products are distributed in a market-based class society’ (1993: 53). Dobb’s misrepresentation of Marx’s intervention then, in Postone’s view, is a double one: neither does Marx attack the ‘unproductive classes’ from the standpoint of the ‘productive’ ones, nor does he attack the ‘non-overt’ operations of the mode of distribution, i.e. the market and the existence of private property, from the perspective of an ontological and quasi-natural notion of ‘labour’ that embodies the general interests of society. The crucial difference between classical political economy and Marx’s critique is, rather, the critique of labour specific to the capitalist mode of production. In the latter, labour is neither the positive standpoint from which to attack class domination, nor can be endowed with the dignified status of a ‘social ontology’. At this point, Postone’s critique of Ricardian Marxism could be extended to more recent Proudhonist reinterpretations of Marx’s work, notably those of Karatani Kōjin, that also stress the distributive or ‘consumption’ side of reproduction with its strong emphasis on the allegedly ‘emancipatory’ potential of use value against value (see Karatani, 2014. For a critique of this view, see Lange, 2015).
The consequences of the theoretical proximity between traditional (Ricardian) Marxism and classical political economy also fall back onto traditional Marxism’s projections of a future society. If the critique of domination in capitalism relies predominantly on a positive, transhistorical notion of labour, then its moralistic dimension is equally evoked. Hence, the traditional critique is directed against ‘unjust’ modes of distribution in the name of the ‘particular’ interest of the bourgeois class. In a quasi-natural understanding of labour, then, all the ‘articifical fetters’ of capitalism (the market, private property) should be abolished. A society that most adequately grasped human essence would then be one in which labour can develop its natural forces unobstructedly. In short, it would be ‘socialist’. The dialectic of this moralistic dimension of the critique consists in the hypostatization of ideals that themselves are products of the social configuration that shall be overcome. Especially the opposition between abstract universality and concrete particularity as that of nature and artificiality, critically evaluated by Postone, ‘is not one between ideals that point beyond capitalism and the reality of that society; rather, as an opposition, it is a feature of that society and is rooted in its labor-mediated mode of social constitution itself’ (1993: 67). This, however, is a problem of the epistemological dimension of the critique in its social constitution. The positive, external critique of traditional Marxism neglects to undertake its self-reflection on the specific historical conditionality of its ‘ideals’ projected onto a future, noncapitalist society.
In the next and final part, on the ‘fallacies of Traditional Marxism’, the epistemological self-reflection becomes a prevalent condition to examine critical theory’s regress towards pessimism. It is expressed in Max Horkheimer’s politico-theoretical assumptions sharing parallels with Ricardian Marxism’s reductionist interpretation.
Beyond the more obvious targets of what Postone terms ‘traditional’ Marxism, he also, probably more counter-intuitively, critically evaluates the political theory of critical theory, especially that of Friedrich Pollock and Max Horkheimer. For reasons of space, the critique of Pollock will only be briefly taken up, to pay more attention to Horkheimer whose later position was largely influenced by that of Pollock.
At the core of two articles Pollock published in 1932 and 1933 (Pollock, 1932, 1933) stood the theory of state capitalism: the reassessment of the political in Marxist terms in which, with the rise of the interventionist state in the wake of the Great Depression in the early 1930s, ‘the political sphere has superseded the economic sphere as the locus of both economic regulation and the articulation of economic problems’ (Postone, 1993: 90). The theoretical framework behind this assessment is informed by understanding the basic contradiction of capitalism – nota bene: one that leads to its demise – as one of the forces of production (Produktivkräfte, i.e. industrial production) and the relations of production (Produktionsverhältnisse, i.e. private ownership of the means of production, class relation, the market, etc.). Providing a prognostic viewpoint, Pollock assumes that this basic and growing contradiction would lead to the abolishment of the present economic form while being able to give room for state capitalism, expressed in planned economy. Political power would gradually determine and reconfigure the economic sphere, and a conscious, yet possibly authoritarian control of society would become a reality. Postone’s main criticism is that the economic categories, i.e. profit, become subspecies of political concepts, i.e. power, and that the concept of capital remains unconsidered as a category of social critique. Furthermore, if the market and private property characterize the relations of production of capitalism, and these are abolished with state capitalism, then this form cannot be characterized as capitalist. While Pollock’s understanding of the basic contradiction of capitalism, formulated along the lines of the forces and the relations of production, was rendered inadequate by the development of twentieth-century capitalism, Postone argues that Pollock has himself failed to reconceptualize it (1993: 104) and remained in its discursive framework.
Directly influenced by Pollock’s views on the basic contradiction between the forces and the relations of production to form capitalism’s basic contradiction, Horkheimer takes a ‘pessimistic turn’ (Postone, 1993: 104). In its adequate contemporary form, according to Horkheimer, the Critique of Political Economy has been superseded by the critique of politics, the critique of ideology, and the critique of instrumental reason. These vantage points form the cornerstones of critical theory. The first, not yet pessimistic expression of this refiguration of social critique as defining critical theory, was Horkheimer’s programmatic essay ‘Traditional and Critical Theory’ (1937). While, in Postone’s view, Horkheimer’s position is an ‘epistemologically sophisticated version of traditional Marxism’ (1993: 108), the standpoint of critique, however, still remained within the framework of viewing capitalism’s basic contradiction in the one between the forces and relations of production. However, in contrast to traditional vulgarizations of identifying labour sans phrase with a state of human nature ‘come onto its self’, Horkheimer critically indicates its opposition to ‘nature’ and labour’s propensity for nature’s domination. But according to Postone, Horkheimer failed to criticize the particular form of labour in capitalist societies, only questioning the mode of its organization and application (1993: 108). This blind spot paradigmatically led to Horkheimer’s opposition between human activity and the ‘waste’ of labour power and human life (Horkheimer, 1972/2002: 204, quoted in 1993: 106), or his insistence that human development is arrested, fragmented, and alienated by the market and private property. Like the traditionalist view, Horkheimer’s early analysis suggests an emancipation of, but not from, labour (in support of this view, see also Horkheimer, 1972/2002: 213, 218). Notwithstanding these underlying assumptions, Horkheimer’s early understanding of social critique is largely in compliance with Postone’s own method of immanent critique. In ‘Traditional and Critical Theory’, Horkheimer, in accordance with Postone’s characterization of immanent social critique, ‘uncovers the growing discrepancy between what is and what could be’ on the basis of the intrinsic contradictions of a society grasped as a totality (1993: 107). In that sense, Horkheimer’s programmatic proposal for critical theory is still embedded in an optimistic vision of possibilities for critiques of the dominant form of society as well as overcoming it.
According to Postone, however, this early view gave way to an increasing pessimism, reflected in ‘The Authoritarian State’ (1940). Note that Postone’s diagnosis is founded on the unreflected traditionalist Marxist assumptions in Horkheimer, namely that the contradiction between the forces and the relations of production is one between a general positive evaluation of the development of human labour in its typically industrialist phase and the ‘fetters’ or ‘limits’ imposed on it by the market and private property (as for Postone’s different view of the basic contradiction in capitalism, see the final part of the essay). What is new in ‘The Authoritarian State’ however is a deeply ambiguous attitude towards the emancipatory potential of the forces of production. Adhering to Pollock’s state theory of conscious planning that may take authoritarian forms, Horkheimer realized that with the rise of national socialism and fascism, the inherent contradictions of capitalism did not only lead to a state capitalist form of planned economy, but came to be realized in the repressive state. With the development of the forces of production, ‘the state has become potentially anachronistic’ and ‘must become more authoritarian, that is, it must rely to a greater degree on force and the permanent threat of war in order to maintain itself’ (Horkheimer, 1978: 109–11; Postone, 1993: 110–11). Horkheimer maintains that the basic contradiction of capitalism is superseded in the repressive state, but in such a way that its outcome is an even more disastrous one: no longer are the relations of production putting ‘fetters’ on the emancipatory potential of labour the greatest obstacle to human emancipation, but the political itself has turned against human life in its immediacy. It is, indeed, a more vital and fundamental contradiction than the capitalist one. The forces of production, freed from market and private property, now turn against emancipation itself to consolidate the authoritarian system. In its pessimistic conclusion: the repressive state system and emancipatory socialism share the same material basis (1993: 111, see also Horkheimer, 1978: 114). With this ‘turn to a pessimistic theory of history’ (1993: 112), Horkheimer now reconceptualizes his views of the revolution, of human emancipation, and of a future society – instead of reconsidering his own conceptual presuppositions, as Postone suggests (for a critique of Postone’s view, see Abromeit, 2011: 420ff.). In Horkheimer’s new view of revolution, two moments complement each other: that of historical necessity and the ‘voluntaristic’ spontaneity of freedom (Horkheimer, 1978: 107). Labour is no longer viewed as the source of emancipation, nor is it a ‘bearer’ of human emancipation at all: the necessity of historical progress has no longer chosen a formidable role for labour in its course. At the same time, he has nothing to put in its place, except for the ‘act of will against history’ (Postone, 1993: 112). Moreover, Horkheimer now grasps the totality of capitalist society not as an internally contradictory and specific system of production, but affirmatively, identifying it with ‘the absolute’. ‘Horkheimer reverses his earlier position: “labor” and the totality, which earlier had been the standpoint of the critique, now become the grounds of oppression and unfreedom’ (1993: 114). In this sense, also the character of the critique changes from the emphasis on human emancipation to a ‘disjunction’ of the concept (i.e. the Absolute, as grasped in Hegel and appropriated by Horkheimer for his view of society) and actuality. In sum, by not reconsidering the basic traditional Marxist views even after the ‘basic contradiction’ explained in that way had been superseded in the authoritarian state, Horkheimer embarks on historical pessimism in which only the relation between the concept and reality becomes thematic and the potential of immanent social critique of his early critique is left unrealized.
A similar diagnosis, Postone argues, can be made for Habermas who shares the premise of a traditional understanding of labour, and yet ‘attempts to limit the scope of its social significance’ (1993: 120). Habermas, leaving the crucial difference between abstract and concrete labour unthematized, understands the category of value as a quasi-natural, transhistorical, and technical category of wealth. His interpretation therefore reduces Marx’s critique of the social relations of production in capitalism to a critique of its particular aspects that are not only wrongly attributed, but also failing to grasp it as a self-reflexive and historically specific critique of capitalist society in its totality (Postone, 1993: 230–4). (For a critical discussion of Postone’s critique of Habermas, see Kim, 2014. For an elaboration of Postone’s critique of Habermas, see Elbe, 2017.)
The final section takes a brief overview of Postone’s own reconstruction of Marx’s central categories that form the latter part of Time, Labor, and Social Domination, insofar as they have not already been made clear in the critical discussion of the traditional Marxist standpoint.
For Postone, the crucial conceptual and real distinction of value and use value in the commodity form, functions as the interpretative template to analyse the character of abstract labour, social domination, and time in capitalist society. Abstract labour has been a widely contested concept in the history of the scholarly reception of Marx’s Capital. Not least, because in its first definition, provided at the outset, Marx had given a explanation inviting misunderstanding, namely that abstract labour was the ‘expenditure of human labour power, in the physiological sense’ (Marx, 1976: 137). This naturalist view, even if Marx never uses it again throughout the three volumes, would, however, contradict what we have seen so far, namely that abstract labour is a purely social category, and specific only for the capitalist production mode. Postone here adheres to I.I. Rubin’s interpretation that both value and abstract labour are ‘determined social forms of production’ and that Marx had no physiological concept of abstract labour at all (Rubin, 1972: 135, quoted in 1993: 145). Why, then, does Marx invite the reader to believe it is? Postone’s argues that this first conceptualization was no ‘mistake’ of Marx’s, but a deliberate methodological move that delivers its own informative content. This argument requires a closer look.
As we have previously seen, Marx’s critique of political economy as a categorial critique of bourgeois economy targets the increasing mystification or the fetish-characteristic forms of value manifesting themselves in the categories of the commodity, money, capital, wage, price and profit, interest-bearing capital, rent, the sources of revenue, and so on. For Postone, this categorial critique not only serves to ‘reveal’ the essence of abstract labour in its inverted forms of appearance in these categories, as e.g. Lucio Colletti maintains (1972, 89–91, quoted in 1993: 147) with the objective to ‘defetishize’ the world of commodities (1993: 147), but to show that abstract labour itself constitutes a total ‘social mediation’ that simultaneously provides its own forms of appearance as transhistorical, ontological, and hence, physiological. After all, it appears as though capitalist production is organized in a way to satisfy needs on the level of consumption. It appears as though the goal were material, concrete wealth that is only faultily distributed. The social mediation however that is presupposed for capitalist production to appear that way is bracketed from this view. For Postone, therefore, the relation between the essence of value in abstract labour and its appearance in its fetish-characteristic forms is a necessary one: ‘the essence must be of such a quality that it necessarily appears in the form that it does. Marx’s analysis of the relation of value to price, for example, is one of how the former is expressed and veiled by the latter’ (1993: 166). The categories of essence and appearance, in accordance with Postone’s theory, are not to be understood as ontological, but as historical categories directly related to the ‘specific social function of labor’ (1993: 167). Postone’s critique therefore is not so much directed at Colletti’s objective of ‘defetishization’, but, rather that ‘defetishization’ alone does not deliver the means to understand the ‘mediating function’ of abstract labour and value (1993: 167). In order to present abstract labour’s mediating function, then, Marx chose to present and critically examine the fetishized forms such as its physiological function, in order to deliver an immanent critique of it in his succeeding analysis. (For a critique of Postone’s undeclared usage of this original interpretation by Helmut Brentel, see Elbe, 2008: 243–4.) The mediating function of abstract labour therefore lies with its social and objective forms of expression that hitherto constitute the object of Marx’s critique in the three volumes of Capital. It does not lie in its metabolic function to mediate human activity and nature, understood as a transhistorical and ontological process, as initially understood. Yet, ‘[the] appearance of labor’s mediational character in capitalism as physiological labor is the fundamental core of the fetish of capitalism’ (1993: 170).
Postone’s conceptualization of abstract time demands a preliminary closer look at some fundamentals of Marx’s value theory. As is well known, Marx determines the substance of value as ‘abstract human labour’ and the measurement of value that determines its magnitude in ‘the quantity of the “value-forming substance”’, measured by its duration ‘on the particular scale of hours, days, etc.’ (Marx, 1976: 129). However, since the value of a product may then rise with greater unskilfulness and laziness of an individual producer, Marx introduces the notion of socially necessary labour time to give a more exact definition of the measure of value:
Socially necessary labour-time is the labour-time required to produce any use-value under the conditions of production normal for a given society and with the average degree of skill and intensity of labour prevalent in that society … What exclusively determines the magnitude of the value of any article is therefore the amount of labour socially necessary, or the labour-time socially necessary for its production. (Marx, 1976: 129)
For Postone, the ‘quantitative’ side of value –its expression in labour time and consequently in money and exchange ratios – has dominated the traditional discourse over the qualitative one, introduced by Rubin and others in the 1920s, to designate the specific social form or coherence that value creates. Postone however claims that even the determination of the magnitude of value entails a qualitative determination of the relation of labour, time, and social necessity. Value, understood in terms of its measure in time, becomes the defining moment of capitalist totality that impresses its ‘norm’ on the social relations. As a non-consciously operating social objectivity, it ‘expresses a quasi-objective social necessity with which the producers are confronted’ (1993: 191). Hence, Marx’s famous sarcastic statement that ‘in the midst of the accidental and ever-fluctuating exchange relations between products, the labour time socially necessary to produce them asserts itself as a regulative law of nature. In the same way, the Law of Gravity asserts itself when a person’s house collapses on top of him’ (Marx, 1976: 168).
Postone’s intervention consists in demonstrating how, with the historical emergence of the capitalist mode of production, ‘time’ becomes a social category. It loses its previous contingent, natural and concrete dimension and becomes a socially determinate and abstract-general category that structures the social nexus in the form of abstract domination. Note that this understanding refines the one previously stated, namely that the capitalist mode of production is solely oriented towards abstract wealth in value. It shows how both social objectivity and subjectivity mutually constitute the conditions on which the adherence to abstract time emerged, expressed in the objective forms of value. As a part of this process, abstract time changed the social function of human labour, while the latter increasingly oriented towards the demands of the new form of time. In other words, capitalist society organized itself in such a way that it is no longer the concrete and particular labour time required to produce an individual commodity that determines its value – in other things, there is no such thing as ‘individual value’ – but always a ‘general social mediation’, expressed in socially necessary labour time. Strictly speaking, this ‘socializing’ [vergesellschaftende] function of time became one of the constitutive elements of value itself. Socially necessary labour time then functions as the mediator of moment and totality, of the particular and the abstract-general, to relate the productive activity of concrete labour and the socially mediating activity of abstract labour. The opposition of the use value and the value dimension of the commodity is consequently mediated through abstract time (or socially necessary labour time) as the one condition to generate a social coherence in capitalism. It is through the quasi-objective abstract temporal measure of social wealth that abstract time becomes a ‘new time-form’ – new as against pre-capitalist social formations. While this essay cannot go into Postone’s historical analysis of the shift from concrete to abstract time, it should suffice to say that this new, adequately capitalist time form, oriented towards value production, has stripped off the cyclical perception of time in pre-capitalist, use-value-oriented social formations. Here, as often presumed, time was distinguished by seasonal cycles, or day and night, accommodated to the natural rhythms of life and (mostly) agrarian reproduction. When productivity changed its paradigm from quality to quantity with the rise of modern production techniques, etc., and it was practically possible to produce everything at any given time in any given space, the natural conditions of reproduction were dispensed with. The new paradigm of production required an independent framework of time that was ‘uniform, continuous, homogenous, “empty”’ (1993: 202) and in that sense quite close to Newton’s theory of absolute time that ‘flows equably without relation to anything external’. A theory that tellingly has been developed in the wake of the capitalist relations of production in the late seventeenth century (Newton quoted in Heath, 1936: 88, quoted in Postone, 1993: 202). The new time paradigm also included acceleration. Since, as Postone argues, ‘each new level of productivity, once it has become socially general, not only redetermines the social labor hour but, in turn, is redetermined by that hour as the “base level” of productivity’ (1993: 289), humans and their labour become part of a treadmill effect of production.
With the ‘tyranny’ of abstract time, Postone’s understanding of the basic contradiction in the capitalist mode of production can now be revealed. As shown in the previous discussion, it does not consist in the contradiction of the forces with the relations of production, but more fundamentally in the concept of value itself: while abstract time is the standard of measurement in value, increased productivity resulting from the application of new techniques and innovation, lowers the time – and hence, the value – necessary to produce commodities in the average. The paradigm of abstract wealth in value and the paradigm of ever-increasing productivity, both vital for capitalist production, cancel each other out – and yet, capitalism cannot exist without both. In Marx’s own words: ‘Capital itself is the moving contradiction, in that it presses to reduce labour time to a minimum, while it posits labour time, on the other side, as the sole measure and source of wealth’ (Marx, 1973: 706). The concept of production of relative surplus value in which we can see ‘not only how capital produces, but how capital itself is produced’ (Marx, 1976: 280), developed in Volume I, captures this predicament from which he also develops one aspect of crisis in capitalism. (Discussed as the ‘Law of the Tendency for the Rate of Profit to Fall’ in part three of Volume III of Capital, Marx, 1981: 316–78.)
Towards the end of Time, Labor, and Social Domination, Postone presents the concepts of ‘historical time’ and ‘abstract time’ as the fundamental categories of the dialectic of capitalist production. The ‘treadmill effect’ or pattern is entailed by both categories insofar as the dialectic of value and use value here unfolds its grip on the production process. Rather than viewing the dialectic of value and use value simply as a problem of the commodity in atemporal, logical terms, Postone attempts to reconfigure it towards its temporal dimension. With this conception, Postone can effectively argue against conceptions of the ‘materiality’ of use value being distorted by value that remain on a purely logical hypothesis. He can also substantiate his previous contention that overcoming capitalism would involve overcoming both the form of growth and of production (labour) in capitalism, and not only the market and private property. Both abstract and historical time interact in a specific historical dialectic that, itself, generates a form of domination.
Here, Postone’s analysis diverges in part from the clear conceptualizations of ‘immanent social critique’, applied to his understanding of the value form. In somewhat unmediated fashion, the category of ‘space’ is suddenly introduced – while its contribution to the explanatory power of the concept of historical time somehow remains in the dark: ‘Although the measure of value is time, the totalizing mediation expressed by “socially necessary labor time” is not a movement of time but a metamorphosis of substantial time into abstract time in space, as it were, from the particular to the general and back’ (1993: 293). The only pertinent distinction between abstract and historical time, then, is that the former is a movement in time, while the latter is a movement of time. The explanatory objective of this distinction, however, remains obscure, or does, in any case, not move beyond the conceptual distinctions of his previous analysis. This becomes problematic especially against the background that both concepts designate capitalist time forms. As for the probable motive to introduce this concept, in this latter part of his analysis, Postone seems to incorporate philosophical classic dualisms (abstract–concrete, time–space) to give further proof of the holistic nature of his own interpretation, while it seems that the theoretizations of concepts such as space and historical time have not received the analytical treatment needed for such an attempt. (For a critical discussion, see Osborne, 2008: 19.)
All in all it must be stated, however, that since its first publication in 1993, Moishe Postone’s reinterpretation of Marx’s Critique of Political Economy has set new standards in the discourse of the critique of capitalism in aligning itself with the methodological approach of immanent social critique of critical theory. In addition to being a philosophically and historically well-informed and seminal theoretical intervention in the study of Marx’s work, it has set the standard for a critical theory of society adequate for the twentieth century.
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