(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” articulated by
traditional Marxism is today “unconvincing”, as “central planning” and
“state (or public) ownership”.
Everyone, today, can recognize a large swath of truth in some, perhaps
most of the above characterizations. Not too many people miss Stalin’s
Russia, Mao’s China or the “Third World socialist” regimes that
emerged from the period of decolonization, in which, along with the
largely defunct mass socialist and communist parties of Europe,
different variants of “traditional Marxism” had their heyday. Fewer
still look to surviving relics such as North Korea or Cuba. The most
radical elements of the 1960’s and 1970’s upsurge, from Socialism or
Barbarism in France, Eastern European “Marxist humanism” (Kolakowski,
the Yugoslav Praxis group), the Situationists, or the Italian
workerists mainly rejected these regimes as viscerally as they
rejected the (Keynesian) Labour and Social Democratic welfare states of
the 1945-1975 period.
But Postone’s critique goes much farther. For him, “traditional
Marxism” encompasses not merely the nearly forgotten ideologues of the
“planning state”, east, west or south, but many of the currents which
emerged from the 1950’s to 1970’s as a self-styled break with the
statist currents: Marx’s 1844 Manuscripts, Lukacs’ History and Class
Consciousness, the Frankfurt School’s critique of “instrumental
rationality”, and much of the Hegel renaissance. While these latter
developments undermined the old bone-hard “materialism” of
Stalinism and Social Democracy, they argued for a view of the working
class as an historical “subject” that was supposed to achieve the
“subject-object identical” with the existing productive apparatus. Not
good enough, in Postone’s view. These currents, strengthened by the
popularization of the 1840’s Marx and the recovery of the centrality of
the Hegel- Marx relationship, still agreed in important ways with
the less Hegelianized traditional Marxists about socialism as control
of the existing industrial apparatus, whether by nationalization and
planners or by workers’ councils (the latter being an apolitical
utopia, in Postone’s view). They still believed in the working class as
the revolutionary class. 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). Marx’s analysis is not about any
instrumental explanation of class “interests”. Postone sets out to
focus rather on “value, abstract labor, the commodity and capital”.
These latter are
“…categories of a critical ethnography of capitalist society taken from
within—categories that purportedly express the basic forms of social
objectivity and subjectivity that structure the social, economic,
historical and cultural dimensions of life in that society, and are
themselves constituted by determinate forms of social practice”. (p. 18)
Traditional Marxism, says Postone, has too often understood these
categories as purely “economic”. Postone’s rendition of Marx’s
“categorial analysis” asserts, rather, that value, abstract labor, the
commodity and capital are “determinative of social being within
capitalism”.Postone means to “dispense with evolutionary conceptions of
history and with the notion that human life is based upon an
ontological principle that ‘comes into its own’” (p. 20).
Much as I find Postone’s book vexing, I cannot deny that it is
provocative and important, above all important to critique. It forced
me to go back and verify what I thought I remembered from many
“canonical” texts. Far from falling into a predictable track, it
develops its argument with new turns almost up to the end of its 400
pages. It might be easy to summarize, as I have initially and briefly
attempted, but it is extremely difficult to summarize meaningfully.
Postone says he has grounded “this dialectic’s fundamental features on…
an abstract logical level” (p. 302) and he is certainly right about
that. But unlike the Grundrisse or Capital, wherein Marx employed a
dialectic of the abstract AND the concrete, moving from what Postone
calls Marx’s “categorial” unfolding of capital to historical material
and back, Postone mentions the “real existing world” only in the
briefest of passing nods. Grubbing in factory inspectors’ reports
or the immanent critique of contemporary “economics” is not what he is
about. One might be tolerant of this approach in light of the
high level of abstraction required by Postone’s argument; such a level
has its place. But Marx, unlike Postone, regarded communism as
the the “real movement that abolishes existing conditions” (German
Ideology), the “real movement unfolding before our eyes” (Communist
Manifesto), and was constantly taking pains to show the “real
movement”—the working-class movement, pace Postone—in its immanent
relationship to the “inverted world” of capital as he unfolded his
categories. Postone, by contrast, makes the most sweeping
judgements about the shortcomings of “traditional Marxism” and the
working class, but has next to nothing to say about where, or
even whom his “old mole” might be.
One rather quick way, albeit by a side entrance, into Postone’s
abstract universe is his discussion of “really existing socialism”, the
former Soviet Union and its progeny. Though not front and center in his
book, it is one constant presence underpinning the “traditional
Marxism” Postone wants to undo. After all, the question of “what went
wrong in Russia” still hovers over any discussion today of the “crisis
of Marxism”. Many of the “traditional Marxists” mentioned earlier
busted their chops on the question of the nature of the Soviet Union.
But while Postone’s ability to make use of the Grundrisse and Capital
is far superior to that of the typical Frankfurt Schooler, in his
discussion of “really existing socialism” (pp. 90-104) he relies
exclusively on the writings of Frankfurt School economist Friedrich
Pollock from the late 1930’s. Pollock called the Soviet system “state
capitalism” but was unable to discern the operation of the law of value
in its dynamic. Like virtually everyone in the apocalyptic late 1930’s
who attempted to critically understand the Soviet Union using Marxist
categories, Pollock found the newly-emergent system difficult to grasp.
He was hardly alone. Like many others, Pollock’s main frame of
reference on what constituted capitalism was 19th century liberal
capitalism, and not finding it in the Soviet Union, but not
finding “emancipation” either, Pollock concluded that the Soviet
system had abolished value in the Marxist sense, but had replaced
it with regimented bureaucratic planning, and not the triumph of the
working class. From this (Stalinist) experience and from fascism,
Pollock embraced a “pessimism” about any possible positive supersession
of capitalism, a pessimism that was taken over by the Frankfurt School
generally, Horkheimer and Adorno first of all. They are of course
welcome to their pessimism, and they had plenty of company in embracing
it at “midnight in the century”, as Victor Serge called those
years. But why, more than fifty years later, is Postone attempting to
overcome his own Frankfurt School lacunae with an exclusive focus on
what THESE people concluded about Stalinist Russia? In the same years
as Pollock, Lucien Laurat, Leon Trotsky, Max Schactman, and C.L.R.
James were attempting, within a Marxist framework, to understand
whether “really existing socialism” was a class or a caste society, and
of what type (“degenerated workers’ state”, state capitalist,
“bureaucratic collectivist”) ; a few years later, Raya Dunayevskaya
wrote her first article demonstrating the operation of the law of value
(a term, revealingly, that Postone never uses) in the Soviet Union.
After the Second World War, important further Marxist (or,
perhaps, “traditional Marxist”) contributions on the question of “state
capitalism” were written by James, Dunayevskaya, Paul Mattick,
Sr., Cornelius Castoriadis, Tony Cliff, Rita di Leo, Pierre Naville,
David Rousset, and Amadeo Bordiga (the early Kuron and
Modzelewski opted for the bureaucratic collectivist analysis, and
Hillel Ticktin developed a critique sui generis). These people and this
work do not exist for Postone and his academic interlocutors, so the
reader is left with Pollock’s (and Horkheimer’s, and Adorno’s)
pessimism over some major impasse of the seemingly main thread of
“traditional Marxism”. East Berlin 1953? Hungary and Poland 1956?
Poland 1970 and 1980-81, arguably setting the stage for the final
demise of “really existing socialism”? Since Postone believes
that the working class is not and was never Marx’s historical
“Subject”, none of these theoreticians or messy historical episodes
intrude into the “abstract logical level” of his dialectic.
Following his demonstration of how the Frankfurt School founders
got sidetracked by Pollock’s pessimism, grounded in “traditional
Marxism”, the sole post-World War II theoretician Postone considers
(and rejects) as representing a worthy attempt to overcome this
pessimism is Juergen Habermas, who gets thirty-five pages of critique
(he, too, is unable to fully free himself from traditional Marxism’s
belief in the working class). And the post-1945 work of
Castoriadis, James, Dunayevskaya, Panzieri, the early Tronti and the
early Negri, theorizing the postwar revolt against the assembly line in
France, Italy, Britain and the U.S.? And the consequences of that
revolt (from the 1955-1973 period) which (among other things) is the
historical moment that produced Postone, and against which the last 30
years of history must be understood as an extended counter-offensive by
capital?
Habermas gets thirty-five pages, but such empirical, “positivist”
considerations don’t make it onto Postone’s “abstract logical level”
and don’t merit even a mention. “Many interpreters”, he writes,
“have proceeded too quickly to the analytic level of immediate concrete
social reality” (p. 20); this is decidedly not Postone’s problem. His
corrective is instead to virtually ignore such reality.
Such criticism should not distract attention from
Postone’s serious merits. The core of his analysis is drawn from the
first part of vol. I of Capital, and Marx’s discussion of concrete
labor and abstract labor, the latter being the basis of value in Marx’s
sense. Postone thinks that “traditional Marxism” has misconstrued this
analysis, understanding “concrete labor” in a “physiological”
“transhistorical” sense that sees labor’s role as something that
existed prior to, and will exist after capitalism. What this
“traditional Marxist” confusion misses, according to Postone, is the
unique peculiarity of labor in capitalism, its “peculiarity”
(Eigentuemlichkeit) in constituting the totality of society (to use his
language), unlike labor’s role in any previous mode of production, and
something to be overcome, rather than glorified. Postone sees capital
as a set of “abstract social structures” which are “quasi-independent”
and which condition BOTH abstract and concrete labor,
In some sense it can be said that Postone’s book
comes down to a critique of most previous Marxists for not having read,
or integrated, the so-called “Unpublished Chapter Six” of vol. I of
Capital, which first became available only in the 1950’s, and only made
it as an appendix of vol. I in the new 1976 Ben Fowkes English
translation. In this (in fact remarkable) chapter, Marx analyzes a
“formal subsumption of labor by capital” in which commodity exchange
and then the entire capitalist valorization process invades and takes
over previous production processes; this characterizes the (17th and
18th century) phases of cooperation and manufacture. This is followed,
for Marx, by a “real subsumption of labor by capital”, the phase of
heavy industry, in which capital forges a technology appropriate
to itself, and reduces most labor to its completely interchangeable
form of “abstract labor”. In the Unpublished Sixth Chapter, Marx
is in effect saying that labor and technology in the phase of real
subsumption (sometimes called real domination) is not something to
which capitalist social relations are “extrinsic”, but rather that they
are themselves capitalist social relations. This being the case, a
“traditional Marxist” project of freeing this specifically capitalist
technology and the labor conditioned by it is in effect a capitalist
utopia, whereas true emancipation implies the critique and supersession
of both such technology and such labor.
About the latter, Postone is dead right. He lays the
foundation for a radical critique of existing technology as well
as of existing science as the “materialization of a social
relationship”.
If Postone had said only this, not to mention
elaborating it with some empirical material, his book would be
impeccable, though he might have mentioned authors such as the early
Jacques Camatte who were saying the same thing 35 years ago.
Unfortunately, Postone gets to the Unpublished Sixth Chapter only
halfway through the book (p. 182), and he seems unaware that a whole
literature, particularly in France, was going over much of the same
ground from the early 1970’s onward.
This perceptive core, however, is written over
with a number of other claims that are highly dubious. The most
important is his attack on the idea of the working class as “subject”,
the latter articulated by Lukacs first of all in the 20th century
process of “recovery” of the Hegel-influenced Marx. Postone at times
sounds almost like an Althusser with his talk of “quasi-independent”
“abstract social structures” which become a quasi-autonomous Subject.
Postone makes far too much of one passage in vol. I of Capital
(Capital, vol. I (1976) p. 255) in which Marx does call value the
“Subject”, but he rides roughshod over a whole different side of the
book, including passages of the selfsame Unpublished Ch. 6 (1).
That side is Marx’s analysis of the “inverted world” (verkehrte Welt),
which he takes over and transforms from Hegel and Feuerbach, and which
is a thread in his work from the 1844 Manuscripts to the Grundrisse and
Capital to Theories of Surplus Value. It is characteristic of Postone’s
presentation that when (p. 137) he quotes the famous “Trinity” passage
from the concluding part of vol. III, he quotes only:
“Capital-profit (or better still capital-interest) land-ground rent,
labor-wages, this economic trinity as the connection between the
components of value and wealth in general and its sources, completes
the mystification of the capitalist mode of production, the reification
of social relations, and the immediate coalescence of the material
relations of production with their historical and social specificity.”,
(pp. 968-969 of the 1981 Fernbach translation)
not indicating that the final part quoted ends in a colon, not a
period, and that it continues:
“the bewitched, distorted and upside-down world haunted by Monsieur le
Capital and Madame la Terre, who are at the same time social characters
and mere things.”
The original German says
“die verzauberte, verkehrte und auf den Kopf gestellte Welt wo Monsieur
le Capital und Madame la Terre als soziale Charakter und zugleich
unmittelbar als blosse Dingen ihren Spuk treiben” (Berlin 1975, p. 838)
where we see that Fernbach in turn has mistranslated the crucial
philosophical term “verkehrte” as “distorted” and not “inverted”,
thereby (inadvertently or not) burying the Hegel-Feuerbach allusion,
and even more remarkably, totally omits the phrase “ihren Spuk
treiben”, which the old English translation at least bothered to
render, not implausibly, as “do their ghost-walking” (New York 1967).
The absence, in Postone’s book, of attention to the
centrality of “inversion” (Verkehrung) in Capital and in Theories of
Surplus Value is another expression of the flawed character of his
book. Marx’s work is a phenomenology of the self-abolition of the
proletariat, the latter being the commodity form of labor power.
Postone is certainly right that “traditional Marxism” by and large did
not see this, and glorified the working class and the industry produced
by capitalism as a healthy substratum to be “freed” in “socialism”. But
that said, Marx’s focus was always on the self-emancipation of the
proletariat. What else were he and Engels doing in the First
International? What else shines through Marx’s writings on the Paris
Commune?
Remaining in his lofty (but admittedly
indispensable) realm of abstraction, seemingly oblivious to the
concrete history of the “real movement that abolishes existing
conditions” as the force which drives the evolution of its inverted
form, capital, Postone
only gets it half right. He makes capital the subject of history, and
fails to come up with a subject that will go beyond it.
Footnotes
1-Postone further seems unaware that Marx removed that very passage
from the French edition of vol. I of Capital under the impact of
the Commune, and the last edition of Capital Marx himself oversaw
personally. Most 20th-century readers outside the French-speaking world
know Capital from the 1890 4th German edition which was still the basis
of the new (1976) English translation.
This text is from the Break Their Haughty Power web site at
http://home.earthlink.net/~lrgoldner