#postone

[weil-weil-lautre]

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

[hazardous-waste-containment]

[Fascism] offers to its followers not the prospect of returning to the idyll of a pre-modern society [..], but rather of advancing towards a new order, one consonant with the dynamism of the modern world, yet able to purge it of the social, political, economic and spiritual malaise which liberal and socialist versions of modernisation have purportedly brought about.

Roger Griffin, “Staging the Nation's Rebirth”

Norman Mailer, defending neo-romanticism (and sexism) in The Prisoner of Sex, wrote that Hitler spoke of blood, to be sure, but built the machine. The point is that, in this form of fetishized “anticapitalism,” both blood and the machine are seen as concrete counter-principles to the abstract. The positive emphasis on “nature,” on blood, the soil, concrete labor, and Gemeinschaft, can easily go hand in hand with a glorification of technology and industrial capital.

Moishe Postone, “Anti-Semitism and National Socialism”

[edwad]

In Marx's analysis, social domination in capitalism does not, on its most fundamental level, consist in the domination of people by other people, but in the domination of people by abstract social structures that people themselves constitute. Marx sought to grasp this form of abstract, structural domination­ — which encompasses, and extends beyond, class domination — with his categories of the commodity and capital. This abstract domination not only determines the goal of production in capitalism, according to Marx, but its material form as well. Within the framework of Marx's analysis, the form of social domination that characterizes capitalism is not ultimately a function of private property, of the ownership by the capitalists of the surplus product and the means of pro­duction; rather, it is grounded in the value form of wealth itself, a form of social wealth that confronts living labor (the workers) as a structurally alien and dom­inant power.

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

[freuds-cokedealer]

Particular aspects of the extermination of European Jewry by the Nazis remain inexplicable so long as anti-Semitism is treated as a specific example of a scapegoat strategy whose victims could very well have been members of any other group. The Holocaust was characterized by a sense of ideological mission, by a relative lack of emotion and immediate hate (as opposed to pogroms, for example), and, most importantly, by its apparent lack of functionality. The extermination of the Jews seems not to have been a means to another end. They were not exterminated for military reasons or in the course of a violent process of land acquisition (as was the case with the American Indians and the Tasmanians). Nor did Nazi policy toward the Jews resemble their policy toward the Poles and the Russians which aimed to eradicate those segments of the population around whom resistance might crystallize in order to exploit the rest more easily as helots. Indeed, the Jews were not exterminated for any manifest “extrinsic” goal. The extermination of the Jews was not only to have been total, but was its own goal—extermination for the sake of extermination—a goal that acquired absolute priority.

No functionalist explanation of the Holocaust and no scapegoat theory of anti-Semitism can even begin to explain why, in the last years of the war, when the German forces were being crushed by the Red Army, a significant proportion of vehicles was deflected from logistical support and used to transport Jews to the gas chambers. Once the qualitative specificity of the extermination of European Jewry is recognized, it becomes clear that attempts at an explanation dealing with capitalism, racism, bureaucracy, sexual repression, or the authoritarian personality, remain far too general. The specificity of the Holocaust requires a much more determinate mediation in order even to approach its understanding.

The extermination of European Jewry is, of course, related to anti-Semitism. The specificity of the former must be related to that of the latter. Moreover, modern anti-Semitism must be understood with reference to Nazism as a movement—a movement which, in terms of its own self-understanding, represented a revolt. Modern anti-Semitism, which should not be confused with everyday anti-Jewish prejudice, is an ideology, a form of thought, that emerged in Europe in the late nineteenth century. Its emergence presupposed earlier forms of anti-Semitism, which had for centuries been an integral part of Christian Western civilization. What is common to all forms of anti-Semitism is the degree of power attributed to the Jews: the power to kill God, to unleash the Bubonic Plague, and, more recently, to introduce capitalism and socialism. Anti-Semitic thought is strongly Manichaean, with the Jews playing the role of the children of darkness. It is not only the degree, but also the quality of power attributed to the Jews that distinguishes anti-Semitism from other forms of racism. Probably all forms of racism attribute potential power to the Other. This power, however, is usually concrete, material, or sexual. It is the potential power of the oppressed (as repressed), of the “Untermenschen.” The power attributed to the Jews is much greater and is perceived as actual rather than as potential. Moreover, It is a different sort of power, one not necessarily concrete.

What characterizes the power imputed to, the Jews in modern anti-Semitism is that it is mysteriously intangible, abstract, and universal. It is considered to be a form of power that does not manifest itself directly, but must find another mode of expression. It seeks a concrete carrier, whether political, social, or cultural, through which it can work. Because the power of the Jews, as conceived by the modern anti-Semitic imagination, is not bound concretely, is not “rooted,” it is presumed to be of staggering immensity and extremely difficult to check. It is considered to stand behind phenomena, but not to be identical with them. Its source is therefore deemed hidden—conspiratorial. The Jews represent an immensely powerful, intangible, international conspiracy. A graphic example of this vision is provided by a Nazi poster depicting Germany—represented as a strong, honest worker—threatened in the West by a fat, plutocratic John Bull and in the East by a brutal, barbaric Bolshevik Commissar. Yet, these two hostile forces are mere puppets. Peering over the edge of the globe, with the puppet strings firmly in his hands, is the Jew. Such a vision was by no means a monopoly of the Nazis. It is characteristic of modern anti-Semitism that the Jews are considered to be the force behind those “apparent” opposites: plutocratic capitalism and socialism. “International Jewry” is, moreover, perceived to be centered in the “asphalt jungles” of the newly emergent urban megalopoli, to be behind “vulgar, materialist, modern culture” and, in general, all forces contributing to the decline of traditional social groupings, values, and institutions. The Jews represent a foreign, dangerous, destructive force undermining the social “health” of the nation.

Modern anti-Semitism, then, is characterized not only by its secular content, but also by its systematic character. Its claim is to explain the world—a world that had rapidly become too complex and threatening for many people. 

Moishe Postone, Anti-Semitism and National Socialism

[fuckyeahdialectics]

It is noteworthy that, compared to the situation after the collapse of liberal capitalism in the late 1920s, the worldwide crises and dislocations associated with this newest transformation of capitalism have precipitated little critical analysis undertaken from a position that points to the possible overcoming of capitalism. This can be interpreted as an expression of theoretical uncertainty. The crisis of state-interventionist capitalism indicates that capitalism continues to develop with a quasi-autonomous dynamic. This development therefore demands a critical reconsideration of those theories which had interpreted the displacement of the market by the state as signifying the effective end of economic crises. However, the underlying nature of capitalism, of the dynamic process that, once again, manifestly has asserted itself, is not clear. It no longer is convincing to claim that "socialism" represents the answer to the problems of capitalism, when what is meant is simply the introduction of central planning and state (or even public) ownership.

Postone, M. (1993). Time, Labor, and Social Domination. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. p.14

[hazardous-waste-containment]

What is common to all forms of anti-Semitism is the degree of power attributed to the Jews: the power to kill God, to unleash the Bubonic Plague, and, more recently, to introduce capitalism and socialism. Anti-Semitic thought is strongly Manichaean, with the Jews playing the role of the children of darkness. It is not only the degree, but also the quality of power attributed to the Jews that distinguishes anti-Semitism from other forms of racism.

Moishe Postone, “Anti-Semitism and National Socialism”

[weil-weil-lautre]

The debate between Cartesianism and Newtonianism is that for Descartes, everything had to touch everything else. With Newton, there’s action at a distance. Similarly, for Foucault, everything is always touching everything else. You have people deciding on the disciplines, and the disciplines are molding the people. There are breaks, but they’re unmotivated. It’s brilliant description… I guess by my language I’m already giving away what I think. My question is: why are the disciplines suddenly a plausible way of organizing things? For control, sure, but there’s been social control before. It didn’t have that form. Why does it take on that form? It doesn’t begin, in his own account, in one place and then diffuse outward. But it begins roughly in the same historical period, in Hamburg, in Amsterdam, in Paris, England, then Philadelphia… what’s going on? Who’s educating the educators? It’s pretty easy to tie it to a kind of Marxian tradition, but that’s not Foucauldianism. The way in which he introduces capitalism is, I think, beside the point because it doesn’t occur to him that the mode of rationalization he describes itself has to do with capitalism. In Foucault, you’ve got property, you’ve got these warehouses, so the question of the relation of crime to society changes. They’re not invalid points. But the idea that operating everything according to an increasingly mathematical metric, that that has a great deal to do with capitalism as a quantitative form, isn’t there.

Moishe Postone

[weil-weil-lautre]

To the degree we choose to use 'indeterminacy' as a critical social category, then, it should be as a goal of social and political action rather than as an ontological characteristic of social life. (The latter is how it tends to be presented in poststructuralist thought, which can be regarded as a reified response to a reified understanding of historical necessity.) Positions that ontologize historical indeterminacy emphasize that freedom and contingency are related. However, they overlook the constraints on contingency exerted by capital as a structuring form of social life and are, for this reason, ultimately inadequate as critical theories of the present. Within the framework I am presenting, the notion of historical indeterminacy can be reapportioned as that which becomes possible when the constraints exerted by capital are overcome. Social democracy would then refer to attempts to ameliorate inequality within the framework of the necessity imposed structurally by capital. Although indeterminate, a postcapitalist social form of life could arise only as a historically determinate possibility generated by the internal tensions of capital, not as a 'tiger's leap' out of history.

Moishe Postone, “History and Helplessness: Mass Mobilization and Contemporary Forms of Anticapitalism,” Public Culture 18:1 (2006)