#moishe postone

[weil-weil-lautre]

Interview with Moishe Postone. On Marx, Value, and History, deutsche UT, Abend zu Postone 2/3

[nietp]

I find it a bit condescending how multiple people have responded to the “i do not dream of labor” post by basically going “oh yeah? yet you still love to do x and y, which is labor, you just hate it because you hate capitalism” or by implying that saying you hate labor means that you don’t want to be involved in your community (??) or worse affirming “actually you do dream of labor”. Again and again people who id as anti-capitalist are using this gotcha to prove to people that labor is actually a central and absolute necessity, by pointing out that wow, people say they hate labor AND YET! they still enjoy doing stuff and admit that doing stuff is a necessity. It’s not difficult to understand that people are, in fact, aware that they enjoy doing stuff, helping others, being useful, creating things, and yet they are also extremely aware that there is a difference between all that and labor. “People will say they don't dream of labor and say they want to keep a garden” yeah, because I don’t consider it labor when i tend to vegetables, just like i don’t consider making tea when i wake up, making a cake, sewing clothes, taking care of someone who’s sick, listening to my friend’s problems, or sweeping the floor, “labor”. First, you know perfectly well that in the sentence “i do not dream of labor”, the word labor refers to the form labor takes under capitalism (see the question OP was answering: “dream job?”), and not your idealized version of what labor could be. Secondly, even if you want to pretend that labor has a “true” transhistorical form that people could actually be dreaming about, and that the labor we know today is just a skewed version of it because of capitalism, people still do not have to aspire to labor and they are entitled to centering their lives around other ideas and activities. You’re arguing that people saying they do not dream of labor haven’t examined its relationships to capitalism closely enough, but on the contrary: labor is central to our lives and to the maintenance of society because of capitalism, and that doesn’t mean that everything that would be central in our lives in a non-capitalist existence should be called labor. Labor does not have to be central to a communist society, labor doesn’t have to subsume every activity and social relation. And yes, you can try to rehabilitate the concept of labor by imagining what labor could mean in a non-capitalist future, but that doesn’t mean people who recognize how tied that concept is to capitalism and are not interested in rehabilitating it as something that is centrally constituting our society or an ideal future one and are not aspiring to it, are wrong and clueless. And like if you need academic sources on this read Postone or at least read this article.

Far from considering labor to be the principle of social constitution and the source of wealth in all societies, Marx's theory proposes that what uniquely characterizes capitalism is precisely that its basic social relations are constituted by labor and, hence, ultimately are of a fundamentally different sort than those that characterize noncapitalist societies. [...]

"Labor" here has become the ontological ground of society - that which constitutes, determines, and causally controls social life. If, as traditional inter­pretations maintain, labor is the only source of wealth and the essential consti­tuting element of social life in all societies, the difference among various societies could only be a function of the different ways in which this regulating element prevails - whether in a veiled and "indirect" form or (preferably) in an open and "direct" form. [...] In other words, when "labor" is taken to be the trans­historical essence of social life, mystification necessarily is understood as fol­lows: the historically transitory form that mystifies and is to be abolished (value) is independent of the transhistorical essence it veils ("labor"). Demystification, then, is understood as a process whereby the essence openly and directly appears. [...] We shall see that labor is indeed socially constituting and determining, according to Marx, but only in capitalism. This is so because of its historically specific character and not simply because it is an activity that mediates the material interactions of humans and nature. What theorists such as Hilferding attribute to "labor" is, in Marx's approach, a transhistorical hypostatization of the specificity of labor in capitalism.

[...] Finally, because labor, in this view, constitutes the relationship between humanity and nature, it serves as the standpoint from which the social relations among people can be judged: Relations that are in harmony with labor and reflect its fundamental significance are considered socially ''natural.'' The social critique from the standpoint of "labor" is, therefore, a critique from a quasi-natural point of view, that of a social ontology. It is a critique of what is artificial in the name of the "true" nature of society. The category of "labor" in traditional Marxism, then, provides a normative standpoint for a social critique in the name of justice, reason, universality, and nature. [...]

A noncapitalist society is not con­stituted by labor alone. Positions that do not grasp the particular function of labor in capitalism, at­tribute to labor as such a socially synthetic character: They treat it as the transhistorical essence of social life. Why labor as ''labor'' should constitute social relations cannot, however, be explained. Moreover, the relationship we have just examined, between appearance and essence, cannot be elucidated by such critiques from the standpoint of "labor." As we have seen, such interpre­tations postulate a separation between forms of appearance which are historically variable (value as a market category) and a historically invariable essence ("la­bor"). According to such positions, while all societies are constituted by "la­bor," a noncapitalist society would presumably be directly and overtly so constituted.[... ] Social relations constituted by labor can never be overtly social, but necessarily must exist in objectified form. By hypostatizing the essence of capitalism as the es­sence of human society, traditional positions cannot explain the intrinsic relation of the essence to its forms of appearance and, therefore, cannot consider that a hallmark of capitalism may be that it has an essence.

[...] In considering the category of concrete labor, I noted how the abstract general social mediation that structures capitalist society also gives rise to this other form of generality; activities and products that may not be deemed similar in other societies become socially organized and classified as similar in capitalism- for example as varieties of (concrete) labor or as spe­cific use values.

Moishe Postone, Time, Labor, and Social Domination

“Capitalism, according to Marx, is characterized by the fact that its fundamental social relations are constituted by labor. Labor in capitalism objectifies itself not only in material products–which is the case in all social formations–but in objectified social relations as well. By virtue of its double character, it constitutes as a totality an objective, quasi-natural societal sphere that cannot be reduced to the sum of direct social relations and, as we shall see, stands opposed to the aggregate of individuals and groups as an abstract Other. In other words, the double character of commodity-determined labor is such that the sphere of labor in capitalism mediates relations that, in other formations, exist as a sphere of overt social interaction. It thereby constitutes a quasi-objective social sphere.6″

Postone’s analysis of abstract labor, and his call to abolish rather than affirm it, is not based on a utopian notion that a post-capitalist society will require no concrete human activity. Rather, Postone’s argument is a critique of labor in capitalism as a form of social mediation. To abolish abstract labor, then, means to abolish the distinction between “work” and “not work.” [...]

“The material foundation of a classless society, according to Marx’s exposition in the Grundrisse, is a form of production in which the surplus product no longer is created primarily by direct human labor. According to this approach, the crucial question of socialism is not whether a capitalist class exists but whether a proletariat still exists.11″

Postone’s analysis, then, reaches deeper than overt class domination into the “domination of people by their labor.”12

[...] “Marx’s analysis of the trajectory of the capitalist process of production does not point toward the possible future affirmation of the proletariat and the labor it performs. On the contrary, it points toward the possible abolition of that labor.14″

Avery Minnelli, The Tyranny of Time: Moishe Postone’s Immanent Critique

[rosswolfe]

Alan Milchman (1940-2021)

. Was sad to learn that Alan Milchman, better known in ultraleft circles as Mac Intosh of Internationalist Perspective, passed away on Friday (I was told by someone close to him that it was okay to publicly share his name). I don’t know enough details about his life to really write a proper obituary. But I’m told that IP plans to release a statement about his passing, so I will be sure to link to…

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[affirmation--negation]

As I noted in discussing the Grundrisse, overcoming capitalism, for Marx, would entail neither a new mode of distribution based on the same industrial mode of production nor the abolition of the productive potential developed in the course of the past centuries. Rather, the form as well as the goal of production in socialism would be different. In its analysis both of universality and of the process of production, then, the Marxian critique avoids hypostatizing the existent form and positing it as the sine qua non of a future free society, while also avoiding the notion that what was constituted in capitalism will be completely abolished in socialism. The two-sided quality of the process of alienation signifies, in other words, that its overcoming entails the appropriation by people—rather than the simple abolition—of what had been socially constituted in alienated form. The Marxian critique differs from both abstract rationalist and romantic critiques of capitalism in this regard. Moishe Postone, “Time, Labor, and Social Domination.”

[perkwunos]

In order to save what Adorno considered the thrust of Marx’s critique, he pushed aside the political–economic dimension of the categories and claimed that the concept of class is at the center of the critique of capitalism (Adorno 2003: 97). In the new phase of capitalism, class domination continues to exist but—and this is crucial—it no longer is rooted in political–economic social forms…

With the historical emergence of monopoly capitalism, then, the critique of class has become a critique of direct social domination separate and separable from political–economic forms. And this form of domination, according to Adorno, is transhistorical. That is, in this essay [“Refections on Class Theory”], Adorno identifed Marx’s analysis of the system of abstract domination that dominates both the bourgeois class and the proletariat with the sphere of circulation in liberal capitalism (Adorno 2003: 104). He, in effect, treated Marx’s analysis of that system by means of the categories of commodity and capital as referring to a relatively brief historical interlude. (The category of capital simply drops out.) Consequently, he saw the emergence of (apparently) direct, concrete domination in “monopoly capitalism” as casting a light on the centrality of class domination to history as a whole (Adorno 2003: 94). It is, in a sense, a reemergence of the form in which social domination has existed transhistorically (with the anomalous exception of liberal capitalism). …

…

Although he had relegated political economy to the episode of liberalism, Adorno now sought to locate a transhistorical “kernel” of political economy which he then tied to transhistorical class domination: the “[e]conomic [i.e. market capitalism] is a special case of economizing” (Adorno: 2003, 99,100). That is, Adorno sought to expand the critique of political economy in a way that renders valid transhistorically what he took to be at its core—class domination and “economizing.”

Related to this transhistorical level of analysis, Adorno implicitly tied the (transhistorical) character of domination to a theme from Freud’s metapsychological writings (Freud 1989)—that of self-preservation, both on an individual level and that of society based on domination (Adorno 2003: 104–5)—which played an important role in Dialectic of Enlightenment.

…

… Adorno’s critical emphasis on transhistorical domination and, relatedly, on “economizing” as one of its central features, overlapped with Horkheimer’s transhistorical critique of “labor.” Together—fused in the notion of “instrumental reason,” in the inextricable link between social domination and the domination of nature—they provided the underlying theoretical basis for Dialectic of Enlightenment.

Moishe Postone, Critical Theory and the Historical Transformations of Capitalist Modernity

[howieabel]

Marx's notion of alienation and of the contra­diction of capitalism indicates that his analysis seeks to grasp the course of capitalist development as a double-sided development of enrichment and im­poverishment. It implies that this development cannot be understood adequately in a one-dimensional fashion, either as the progress of knowledge and happiness, or as the "progress" of domination and destruction. According to his analysis, although the historical possibility that the mode of social labor could be enriching for everyone emerges, social labor has actually become impoverishing for the many. The rapid increase in scientific and technical knowledge under cap­italism does not, therefore, signify linear progress toward emancipation. Ac­cording to Marx’s analysis of the commodity and capital, such increased knowledge — itself socially constituted — has led to the fragmentation and emp­tying of individual labor and to the increasing control of humanity by the results of its objectifying activity; yet it has also increased the possibility that labor could be individually enriching and that humanity could exert greater control over its fate. This double-sided development is rooted in the alienated structures of capitalist society and can be overcome. Marx's dialectical analysis, then, should not in any way be identified with the positivist faith in linear scientific progress and in social progress, or in the correlation of the two.

Moishe Postone, Time, Labor, and Social Domination (1993)

[viablesystem]

Korsika: Professor Postone in your groundbreaking monograph Time, Labor and Social Domination you provide us with an in depth rereading of Marx’s critique of political economy. Could you reflect on the evolution of your thought. On the events and theoretical traditions at the University of Chicago and later on in Frankfurt, that motivated you to devote yourself to this seminal project?

Postone: When I was student at the University of Chicago, I was caught between two interests and intentions, theoretically. Although I regarded myself very much as a person of the Left, it seemed to me that Marxism had too much in common with positivism, on the one hand, and nineteenth century notions of progress, on the other. I was much more impressed at the time by conservative critiques of modernity. I thought they grasped problems of modernity more fully than did Marxism. That was in part because we had, at Chicago at the time, many émigré scholars who had fled Nazi Germany. They brought with them a whole range of intellectual discourses that criticized various forms of positivism from various directions, that I found very powerful.

[x]

[zwischenstadt]

We need to theorize totality because we live in a political-economic system, neoliberalizing capitalism, that is oriented towards totalization- that is, the planetary extension of the commodity form, no matter what the social, political or environmental consequences.  Now, obviously, this totality is not a homogenizing one; it is, as Lefebvre recognized, global (or general), hierarchical and fragmented.  It is premised upon, and in turn intensifies, differentiation across contexts, and it is always mediated through political institutions, politico-cultural identities, social struggles, and so forth.  But, while deciphering specificity, contextuality and the local are important tasks, so too is grasping the totalizing context in which such apparent 'particularities' are embedded- the 'context of context'... We need a theory that can grapple with both sides of this dialectic.  Approaches that veer too far in one or the other direction- structuralism or contextualism- will lose analytical traction in relation to the tricky problems and transformations we are trying to understand.  The issues at stake here are not going to be illuminated effectively through a metaphysical debate about whether or not the world is a totality.  Rather, the key problem is how to understand the historical specificity of the worldwide economic and environmental system in which we are embedded, how it is evolving, its contradictions and crisis tendencies, and the possibilities for gaining some kind of ration, collective, democratic control over the structural forces and political-economic alliances that are currently appropriating and transforming the conditions for our common planetary life.  A theory of totality is only needed under circumstances in which an historical social system exists that totalizes itself; this is a key lesson I learned years ago from Moishe Postone.

Neil Brenner, Critique of Urbanization: Selected Essays

I’m not wild about Moishe Postone but I think I get what Brenner means here