"Postone's perspective, on the contrary, is a "critique of labor in
capitalism", and "suggests that the working class is integral to capitalism
rather than the embodiment of its negation" (p. 17). (Didn't Herbert
Marcuse in One-Dimensional Man, say the same thing 40 years ago, with less
theoretical heavy-lifting than Postone?) Postone's interpretation of "Marx's
material critical theory" argues that "what the Marxist tradition has
generally treated affirmatively is precisely the object of critique in
Marx's later works" (p. 17). "
http://home.earthlink.net/%7Elrgoldner/postone.html
(Author's Note: The following is more a "probe" , intended to spark
discussion of an important if flawed book, than a comprehensive review.)
The Critique of Pure Theory:
Moishe Postone's Dialectic of the Abstract and the Abstract.
Brief Review of:
Moishe Postone. Time, Labor and Social Domination. A reinterpretation of
Marx's critical theory. Cambridge UP 1993 (2003 reprint)
Loren Goldner
"Karl Marx was first of all a revolutionary."
(Frederick Engels, Highgate Cemetery graveside speech, 1883)
"The total movement in this form of appearance. Finally, those three (wage,
ground rent, profit/interest) sources of revenue of the three classes of
landlords, capitalists and wage laborers-the class struggle as conclusion,
into which the movement and the dissolution of all this shit resolves
itself."
(Marx to Engels, 4/30/1868)
In this important but slightly maddening book, Moishe Postone spends a lot
of time demarcating his outlook from what he calls "traditional Marxism".
This traditional Marxism, in Postone's rendition, seems to encompass
virtually every self-designated Marxist from the death of Marx onward. In
fact, Postone mentions almost no one who has escaped from "traditional
Marxism". Hilferding, Lukacs, I.I. Rubin, Sweezy, Maurice Dobb, Ronald Meek,
Joan Robinson, Ernest Mandel, Henryk Grossmann, Oskar Lange, G.A. Cohen,
Lucio Coletti, Horkheimer, Adorno, Friedrich Pollock, Alfred Sohn-Rethel,
Marcuse and Habermas all come in for their licks. Others, less ensconced in
the academic universe to which Postone addresses himself, from Lenin,
Trotsky and Luxemburg by way of CLR James and Raya Dunayevskaya (who
published the first English translations of the 1844 Manuscripts in their
mimeographed militant newsletter in 1947), to Amadeo Bordiga, Jacques
Camatte or Guy Debord, barely merit a nod, or none at all.
What is this "traditional Marxism"? It focused excessively on "private
ownership", the "market", and "distribution". It had a "transhistorical"
view of labor, seeing labor both before and after capitalism in terms that
are only appropriate for capitalism, thereby repeating classical political
economy's "eternalization" of capitalist social relations. It saw Marx as a
completion of the labor theory of value of Smith and Ricardo, rather than a
radical break with that theory; it talked of "political economy" rather than
the critique of political economy (Marx's sub-title for Capital).
Traditional Marxism criticized capitalist society "from the standpoint of
labor", as if labor were something "extrinsic" to capitalism, rather than
critiquing the "constituting" role of labor as something unique to
capitalism, and something to be abolished. "Traditional Marxism", for
Postone, imagined its task to be that of freeing industrial production from
capitalist social relations rather than seeing industrial production itself
as a capitalist social relationship. It overemphasized, for Postone, "class
struggle" and exploitation as the core of Marx's critique. It advocated the
emancipation of the proletariat rather than the dissolution of the
proletariat. In some instances, it had a Feuerbachian understanding of man
in capitalism as alienated from an essence to be realized in socialism. It
saw capitalism strictly as nineteenth-century liberal capitalism, based on
the market and private property, and was thus unable to adequately critique
"real existing socialism" (what some of us called Stalinism). It
over-emphasized the anarchic (for Postone, market-driven) side of
capitalism, and argued that atomized individuals would finally be "socially
mediated" in socialism, in contrast to capitalism. Traditional Marxism saw
its goal as a new form of "distribution" in a society still ruled by wage
labor, value, and commodity production. It understood the proletariat as the
"universal class" which "comes to itself" in socialism. It imagined
socialism as something whereby the working class would "reappropriate"
something of which it had been "expropriated". Traditional Marxism was
unable to deal with the growing importance of scientific knowledge in the
capitalist production process. It saw history as linear. It focused on
"crisis" but did not "address qualitative historical changes in the identity
and nature of the social groupings expressing discontent and opposition" (p.
13). The "socialism"
