Description Contents Resources Courses About the Authors In this ambitious book, Moishe Postone undertakes a fundamental reinterpretation of Marx's mature critical theory. He calls into question many of the presuppositions of traditional Marxist analyses and offers new interpretations of Marx's central arguments. These interpretations lead him to a very different analysis of the nature and problems of capitalism and provide the basis for a critique of "actually existing socialism." According to this new interpretation, Marx identifies the central core of the capitalist system with an impersonal form of social domination generated by labor itself and not simply with market mechanisms and private property. Proletarian labor and the industrial production process are characterized as expressions of domination rather than as means of human emancipation. This reformulation relates the form of economic growth and the structure of social labor in modern society to the alienation and domination at the heart of capitalism. It provides the foundation for a critical social theory that is more adequate to late twentieth-century capitalism.
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Time, labor, and social domination 1 E A reinterpretation of
Marx's critical theory 4
1 Moishe Postone i The University of Chicago
CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS
4. Abstract labor
Requirements of a categorial reinterpretation The exposition
thus far has laid the groundwork for a reconstruction of Mam's
critical theory. As we have Seen, the passages of the Grundrisse
presented in Chapter One suggest a critique of capitalism whose
assumptions are very dif- ferent from those of the traditional
critique. These passages do not represent utopian visions that
later were excluded from Marx's more "sober" analysis in Capital
but are a key to understanding that analysis; they provide the
point of departure for a reinterpretation of the basic categories
of Marx's mature critique that can overcome the limits of the
traditional Marxist paradigm. My exami- nation of the
presuppositions of this paradigm has highlighted certain require-
ments such a reinterpretation must meet.
I have examined approaches that, proceeding from a
transhistorical notion of "labor" as the standpoint of the
critique, conceptualize the social relations char- acterizing
capitalism in terms of the mode of distribution alone, and locate
the system's fundamental contradiction between the modes of
distribution and pro- duction. Central to this examination was the
argument that the Marxian category of value should not be
understood merely as expressing the market-mediated form of the
distribution of wealth. A categorial reinterpretation, therefore,
must focus on Marx's distinction between value and material wealth;
it must show that value is not essentially a market category in his
analysis, and that the "law of value" is not simply one of general
economic equilibrium. Marx's Statement that in capitalism "direct
labor time [is the] decisive factor in the production of wealth,"'
suggests that his category of value should be examined as a form of
wealth whose specificity is related to its temporal determination.
An adequate reinterpretation of value must demonstrate the
significance of the temporal de- termination of value for Marx's
critique and for the question of the historical dynamic of
capitalism.
Related to the Problem of value is that of labor. As I have
shown, so long as one assumes that the category of value-hence, the
capitalist relations of pro- duction-are adequately understood in
terms of the market and private property, 1. Marx, Grundrisse:
Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, trans. Martin
Nicolaus
