Moishe Postone


Moishe Postone was a Canadian historian, philosopher and political economist. He was Professor of History at the University of Chicago, where he was part of the Committee on Jewish Studies.

Career

Moishe Postone, son of a Canadian rabbi, received his Ph.D. from University of Frankfurt in 1983.
His research interests included modern European intellectual history; social theory, especially critical theories of modernity; 20th-century Germany; antisemitism; and contemporary global transformations. He was co-editor with Craig Calhoun and Edward LiPuma of Bourdieu: Critical Perspectives and author of Time, Labor and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marx's Critical Theory. He was also co-editor with Eric Santner of Catastrophe and Meaning: The Holocaust and the Twentieth Century, a collection of essays that consider the meaning of the Holocaust in twentieth-century history and its influence on historical practice. Postone's work has had a large influence on the anti-Germans.
He was originally denied tenure by the University of Chicago's Sociology Department, sparking a great deal of public resentment from graduate students whom he had been involved in teaching. He was later granted tenure by the History Department.
Postone was the Thomas E. Donnelley Professor of Modern History and co-director of the Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory.

Death

Postone died on 19 March 2018.

Capitalism as a historical specificity

A heterodox Marxist

In 1978, Postone started a critical analysis on Marx's theory of value. However, his most distinguished main work, Time, Labor and Social Domination, was published in 1993.
In his works he proposed a fundamental reinterpretation of Karl Marx's critique of political economy, focusing on Marx's original concepts value, capital and labour. Inspired by heterodox Marxist thinkers such as Isaak Rubin, Roman Rosdolsky, etc., and certain authors of the Frankfurt School, for example Alfred Sohn-Rethel, who remained marginal to that school, he shows that the assumptions of the 'pessimistic turn' of Horkheimer were historically rather than theoretically founded. Postone interprets critical writings on Marx's economics, especially in its Capital 1 edition, and Grundrisse, as the development of a social-mediational theory of value.

Marx's ''Capital'': a critique immanent to its purpose

Postone thought that in writing the 'Grundrisse' Marx concludes that adequate critical theory must be completely immanent to its purpose. The criticism cannot be taken from a point of view external to its object, but must appear in the mode of presentation itself. Das Kapital is so structured, for Postone, with a surface level immanent to political economics discourse and a deeper layer that grounds this discourse, which makes it particularly difficult to interpret. Indeed, precisely because of the inherent nature of the format Marx uses, the object of the critique of Marx has often been taken as the standpoint of this criticism. For example, not only is the categories of exchange value historically specific to the capitalist period, but also value's basis, the capitalist form of wage labour, must also be historically specific, and does not apply conceptually to other periods. The methodological sections of the Grundrisse clarify therefore not only Marx's presentation, but other sections make explicit that the categories of capital such as value and exchange-labour, are historically specific to the capitalist social formation. The so-called labour theory of value is not a theory of the material wealth created by labor but is in a parallel manner also seen when looked at transhistorically as "human metabolism with nature." Precisely because it is not structured immanently, the 'Grundrisse' provides a key to read Capital. This is the key to the reinterpretation of the work of mature Marx, with which Postone works.

Against the traditional critique of capital from the standpoint of labour

Starting in this demonstration of the historically specific character of what Marx critiques, Postone then provided a new critical theory that attacks the very essence of capitalism: the form of labour specific to the capitalist social formation. Indeed, in non-capitalist societies, work is distributed by overt social relations. An individual acquires goods produced by others through the medium of undisguised social relations. Work activities derive their meaning and are determined by personal relationships, openly social and qualitatively specific. But in a capitalist social formation, "the objectification of labor is the means by which goods produced by others is acquired; we work to acquire other products So someone other than producer that uses the product - the producer, it serves as a means for acquiring work products from other producers. It is in this sense that a product is a commodity. It is both use-value for each other and medium of exchange for the producer. This means that the work has a dual function; on one hand, it is a specific type of work that produces goods individuals to others, but on the other hand, the work, regardless of its specific content, is the producer of means to acquire the products of others. This feature of the work, which is specific to the social life in capitalism, is the basis of modern socialization, is called "abstract labor." In the functioning of these new social relationships, labour under capitalism is no longer an external activity to capitalism. It is the foundation of capitalism, and so it is the labour that must be abolished.

"Commodity fetishism"

It appears increasingly today that the new concept of "commodity fetishism," which has nothing to do with a hoax of consciousness, is the central part of the intellectual heritage of Marx. "Commodity fetishism" is not a misrepresentation, nor an exaggerated adoration, of goods. The "fetish" instead is to be referred to the structure of the commodity. It is then a theory of "objective fetishism" or radicalized, that is to say, so long as value, the goods and money, society is actually governed by the self-movement of created things themselves, and not by the subjective manipulation of the ruling classes. The subjects are not men, but it is rather their objectified relationships that are at the heart of socialization under capitalism. Fetishism, Postone notes, must be analyzed "in terms of the structure of social relations constituted by forms of praxis and its seizure by objectifying the category of capital. The Subject for Marx, like Hegel is so abstract and can not be identified with any social actor whatsoever ". This is the world where abstract labour becomes the social bond, social mediation that mediates itself, reducing actual work to a simple expression of abstract labor. Abstract labor is then the source of alienation. The self-moving subject, Spirit, Geist, is misrecognized in Hegel, it is described by Marx as Capital and its self-valorization. It is not, Postone suggests, similar to Lukacs' use of Hegel, wherein the proletariat are identified as Spirit, for then spirit would be labour not emancipation.
It is from this concept that we can build a radical critique of the commodity, money, value, labor and politics, that is to say, a critique that is not limited to describing the struggles around management and distribution, the "class struggle" as traditionally understood, but recognizes that these categories themselves are problematic: they are specific only to capitalist modernity, and are responsible for its destructiveness and self-destructiveness. Pointing out that the market is a mere mechanism of distribution, and so secondary to the core of capitalism, allows Postone to broaden the historical scope of Marx's theory so that it can, with equal validity, be applied to what was the USSR. In the USSR the main difference was that instead of a market handling distribution it was planners; however, the abstract exchange of labour, which is the core of capitalism for Postone, was as it was in the West.

Modern antisemitism and the destruction of the abstract

In his 1986 article, "Anti-Semitism and National Socialism", Postone developed new thinking on modern antisemitism, and particularly on National Socialist ideology. Postone saw antisemitism as a major element in the development of a socio-historical theory of consciousness determined by social forms that are subjected to socialization under capitalism. What is said about modern antisemitism may also describe a trend of vulgar anti-capitalism that seeks the personification of the elements of capitalism that are so hated. Postone showed that modern antisemitism is very different from most forms of racism and Christian antisemitism; it differs from them because it casts a huge global invisible power of international Jewry, the idea of a global conspiracy that is intrinsic to modern antisemitism.
Postone analyzed antisemitism against the Marxian notion of the dual character of the commodity category. And he observed that the characteristics that antisemitism attributes to Jews are the same as for value: abstraction, invisibility, automation, impersonal domination. Postone argued that the form of socialization under capitalism makes it possible to separate the concrete. This opposition between the concrete and the abstract, determined by social forms, pervades all forms of subjectivity, and thus helps to understand a central feature of the National Socialist ideology, because this ideology was not fundamentally anti-modern and it would be wrong to label it as such. It is true, Postone argued, that Nazism claimed to defend the peasantry and craftsmanship, but it also valued modern technological and industrial production. Nazism was rather a vulgar form of anti-capitalism. The rejection of the bourgeoisie and its values is present in Nazism, but Postone saw Nazi ideology as the affirmation of the concrete dimension - which includes technology and industrial production, as well as the peasantry and manual labor - as the heart of healthy social life, organic, contrasted to the abstract dimension represented by finance capital. The abstract is instead rejected - and it is personified by the Jews. Postone analyzed the figure of the Jew in modern antisemitism as the embodiment of abstract value, and extermination camps as a misbegotten notion of a "factory" to destroy value.

Publications

; Books
; Articles and chapters