5 Bidet Capital

CONTINENTAL THOUGHT & THEORY: A JOURNAL OF INTELLECTUAL FREEDOM
Capital as read by Moishe Postone: Alchemy or Astrology?
Volume 1 | Issue 4: 150 years of Capital

55-71 | ISSN: 2463-333X
Capital as read by
Moishe Postone:
Alchemy or Astrology?
Jacques Bidet
Abstract: Moishe Postone’s book Time, Work, and Social Domination (1993) is
intended to be a Hegelian interpretation of Marx’s Capital. Capital is the great subject
that moves itself under the impulse of value. Its “movement” is related not to class
relations nor to the market, which is supposedly external to labour, but rather to the
temporal constraint inherent in a dialectic proper to value, one that binds everybody
to an infinite process of abstract labour. This reign of value destroys the concrete
world of use values, and Postone argues that this will be the case until we become
aware of the contradiction between what capitalist society is and the possibilities it
opens. According to the author, such an exposition interprets Capital more on the
basis of its rough draft, Grundrisse, as opposed fifteen years of re- elaboration which
followed. The following discussion is based on confusions regarding the main
Marxian concepts of labour, domination, value, valorization, abstract, and
production.
Key words: Postone, capital, value, dialectic, abstract labour,

abstraction, surplus-value, domination
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How Marx argued regarding the abolition of the market is well known. He
emphasized that in large industrial firms it is no longer the market that prevails but an
alternative rationality founded on organization: not the a posteriori rebalancing of
supply and demand, but an a priori which fits together the means and the ends.
Since inter-capitalist competition always tends toward concentration, one could
envision that there would ultimately be only one firm per branch. Of course, this
tendency would always remain subject to counter-tendencies. Still, it announced a
possible end of capitalism. Workers are “more and more numerous, instructed and
organized by the process of production itself,” as Marx puts it in the penultimate
chapter of volume one its real conclusion. They would eventually appropriate the
whole of the means of production, and thus would engage in an organized economy
as planned by all citizen-producers. This is certainly what revolutionaries of the
twentieth century understood. The division between socialists and communists was
in part due to disagreements on this very topic. In the West, at least, it is true that
both sides were rather pragmatic. In the eyes of “orthodoxy,” however, the capitalist
market, historically, had to give way to the communist organization of the “associated
producers,” and private ownership of the means of production would be overthrown
by their collective appropriation. This was the pivotal point regarding the concept of
“revolution”. However, over the course of the decades, the market turned out to be an
indispensable element of rationality in a complex economy. The Soviets tried in vain
to integrate this into “socialism”; the Chinese succeeded, but only by bringing about,
at the same time, capitalism… We will not dwell on this historical sequence here, but
instead on the theoretical-philosophical debates about Marx’s conceptualization that
developed in this context and that are still continuing to this day.
Postone in relation to the Marxisms of the second half of the

twentieth century.
Against the backdrop of this issue in the history of Marxism, a return to Capital took
place in the 1960s. Within this conceptual framework, the relation between the
market and socialism could only be analysed on the basis of the relations between
the market and capitalism. Here one can agree that this was not just a matter for
specialists nor a matter for insiders or erudite. What was at stake was determining
whether the market and capitalism could be dissociated from each other: more
specifically, if a non-capitalist use of the market could be made. Obviously, this
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entailed a whole host of political, legal, cultural, etc. problems. It is certainly difficult to
mobilize Marx in favour of the market… Except if one notes his discussion at the
beginning of Capital, in a first section, which is dedicated to the logic of commodity
production and its rationality, distinguishes this logic from a proper capitalist logic.
From here on it is a matter of determining how, in this theory, the relationship
between the market and capital, should be understood: that is how is the
“transformation,” Verwandlung, from one to the other, is understood through the
course of Marx’s discussion. “Dialectical” analyses, in vogue in Marxism at that time,
tended to interpret it in terms of a relation of continuity and immanence. In a rather
“orthodox” way these interpretations favoured the idea that the abolition of capital
presupposed the abolition of the market. This question takes on a more “dramatic”
allure when, at the neoliberal era, commodification without limits was embraced.
Paradoxically, within Marxism itself, a new discourse also appeared which founded
the contradictions of capitalism as residing in the market categories themselves:
namely within the relationship between use value and value. The considerable
reception that this view continues to receive in philosophical Marxist circles today
suggests that it deserves careful attention.
In fact, although this is one Marxist approach among others, none, to my
thinking, succeeds in responding to the questions left open by Marx. Economists are
readily content with the idea, certainly present in Marx, that when one passes from
the analysis of the market to that of capital one proceeds from a more abstract level
to a more concrete, more “determined” one. Philosophers – at least, on a standard
reading that one can find even in the wake of Althusser – imagine that Marx begins in
his first section with the “surface” of relations of production, more precisely, with
relations of exchange among individuals in the market, before getting to the
“essence,” to the relation of class exploitation discussed in section three which is
dedicated to the proper capitalist process of production, that is, surplus value. The
distinctive feature of the “dialectical” current, which is notably found in the works of
Helmut Reichelt (1970) and Hans-Georg Backhaus (1997) focuses on “value,” which
is also found, albeit differently in Robert Kurz’s, Neue Wertkritik and Christopher
Arthur’s, New Dialectic. In my opinion, there are three difficulties with this trend: firstly,
it becomes impossible to apprehend the rationality of the market (within its limits);
secondly, the logic proper to capitalism tends to get dissolved into an enigmatic
dynamic of value; and lastly, the pathologies inherent in organization (those of
“socialism”) get conflated with those of the market.
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Moishe Postone is today one of the emblematic figures of this approach, which he
takes to an extreme. At the beginning of the 1980s he made an astonishing
discovery: Great Subject of modern history is not “Proletariat,” as one might have
thought, but “Capital,” the great Whole which both moves itself and within which we
are moved. This paradigm, which he attributes to Marx, allows him to reveal the logic
of a capitalism which takes hold of our lives and our time, involving them in a
productivism without limit, always accelerating toward a horizon of “abstract value”
ignoring the use values that constitute any reasonable life. In my opinion, if Postone’s
work merits our attention, it is because it displays – as if enlarged with a
philosophical magnifying glass – the political disarray among Marx’s inheritors in
front of the all-encompassing power of neoliberalism. Presenting his doctrine as a
simple “interpretation” of Capital, Postone takes on a humble posture of an exegete
who has no criticism to make of the master. He expresses “Marx’s thought”: a
rhetorical stratagem that is only made possible by the authority that Marx enjoys until
today. To be clear, only a meticulous conceptual decoding can reveal the nature and
function of the transmutations which are covertly made by Postone. In this
investigation, I will highlight Capital’s theoretical framework, setting aside my critics
of it. Ultimately the point here is less to criticize Postone than, doing so, to reinvest
and question Marx’s work.
Postone’s general approach and his theoretical-political objectives
Lukács – an essential reference for Postone – frees us, he says, from “traditional
Marxism,” which understood capitalism essentially in terms of class relations,
structured by private ownership of the means of production and a economy and
“relations of domination (…) in terms of class domination and exploitation.”(Postone
2009, 7). He shifts “the center of gravity of the critique of capitalism” to the “salient
features” of the twentieth century: not exploitation, but rather, market reification. He
changes the emphasis from surplus value to value itself. In this way, he furnishes us
with a critique of capitalism that is “much larger and more profound” (Postone 2011,
64-5). However, Postone calls for a reversal of Lukács’s schema. This is because, in
truth, the Great Subject is not the Proletariat but Capital (Postone 1993, 80sq). This is
what Hegelian Spirit, der Geist, refers to: this totality, this ‘substance’ that moves itself
and is ‘subject’, “causa sui”, self-grounding, self-mediating, and objectified”. Marx
supposedly provided us with a historical interpretation of it (Postone 1993, 156-7).
Postone, in fact, surreptitiously plunges us into an entirely different theoretical
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universe, no longer that of class relations, but of a productive and oppressive Great
Whole. This form “of abstract, impersonal domination,” he writes, is not (ultimately)
grounded in any person, class or institution “. “Society, as the quasi-independent,
abstract, universal Other that stands opposed to the individuals and exerts an
impersonal compulsion on them” (Postone 1993, 158-9). This constraint is not so
much that of exploitation, but rather, it is first and foremost that of “value”. How
should this formulation be understood?
Marx, as we know, wanted to establish that capitalism is not reducible to the
exchange relations that it presupposes. He defines capital as a process of
“valorization” that is realized in a process of exploitation, leading to an accumulation
of surplus value. Postone attributes to value itself the logic of self-valorization that
Marx attributes to capital. For Postone, capital is nothing other than the supreme
realization of value. The decisive concept is thus that of “value,” an abstract quantity,
supposedly the product of an “abstract time,” and existing only to increase itself.
Overcoming capitalism would thus no longer be realized by the abolition of
exploitation, private property and the capitalist market but by, ultimately, by the
abolition of “value” itself. This can certainly seem consistent with what Capital
teaches us: value, being a market category, would disappear once the market is
“abolished” and socialism is established. But, according to Marx, within this new
social logic it would still be necessary to settle the question of the time required for
production; because, he said, “every economy is an economy of time”. Thus, the
problem of time would become “more urgent than ever”. For Postone, by contrast, it
is this temporal constraint itself that must be abolished. For him, socialism will
change nothing about it. Ultimately, it is the tyranny of an “abstract time”, which is the
result of an “abstract labour,” that must be abolished.
Postone understands value and capital in terms of each other, as in a
dialectical relationship. Value only realizes itself into surplus value. It “is not
essentially a market category” (Postone 1993, 123): it can only be grasped on the
basis of capital, in which it realizes itself. Correlatively, the historical dynamic of
capitalism is nothing more that of value. It implements the “law of value” that,
according to him, consists in “the interaction of value and material wealth, abstract
labour and concrete labour” (Postone 1993, 291). Value “prefigures” capitalism’s
central trait: “it needs to accumulate permanently” (ibid.). It is thus the true “social
mediation”. It forms the very “substance” of the “alienated social relations under
capitalism”. And “as social mediation, value is constituted by (abstract) labour alone”
(Postone 1993, 195). It is, in Postone’s interpretation, "a form of wealth whose
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specificity is to be connected to its temporal determination” (Postone 1993, 123).

Because “its magnitude […] is a function only abstract labour time” (Postone 1993,
195). Under capitalism, an abstract time an abstract time thus wields an increasing,
ceaseless domination over individuals. The metaphor used for this is that of the
treadmill, one on which our entire existence unfolds.
The central object of sociological analysis is thus that “abstract labour” that is
supposedly particular to capitalism. For Postone what is specific to “labour under
capitalism” are not things like private property, commodities, the market, competition,
and social institutions, all of which are “extrinsic to labour itself” (1993, 124). This is
what Postone calls “structure”: or, to his way of thinking, abstract labour’s domination
within the commodity and over concrete labour. This structure is marked – because
of the system’s tendencies – by an increasing disequilibrium such that ultimately
“proletarian labor becomes increasingly superfluous from the standpoint of the
production of material wealth, hence, ultimately anachronistic; yet it remains
necessary as the source of value. (Postone 1993, 356). By contrast, the production of
use value is predicted to occur outside of labour, thanks to the development of the
science and technology. Postone thus envisions the increasing marginalization of the
labour he refers to as “proletarian” (ibid.). The proletariat, ultimately, far from being
the antithesis of capitalism, is in reality rigorously “an essential element of it” of it.
“Proletarian labor does not fundamentally contradict capital”. Militant actions “do not
point to the overcoming of capitalism. They represent capital-constituting, rather than
capital transcending, forms of action and consciousness.” (Postone 1993, 370-371).
As for “those elements of women's movements and minority movements that have
struggled for equal rights, (they) should not be understood as a development that
points beyond capitalist society.”. They only extend “the universalistic principles of
bourgeois society to larger segments of the population” (Postone 1993, 369).
Let’s get to critique
Marxists have obviously not failed to voice objections to Postone’s view. For them it is
surprising to see notions of class, state, the struggle of the working class and other
social forces disappear, only to be replaced by a purely structural dynamic, a
“structure” reduced to value and which abandons any “socialist” project. Despite all
this, however, Postone has become the representative of an emancipated Marxism,
rising like a phoenix. His discourse has appealed to militant expectations, while
academic commentaries have credited him with a mysterious ability to shed light on
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the “times” we are living in. In fact, those confusions that are concentrated in his work
can be found, to different degrees, in the various problematics referring to
“reification,” “alienation,” “loss of meaning,” “general intellect,” “cognitive capitalism,”
“productive capitalism,” and “the commons” – so familiar and rich in many
respects. This accounts for why critique of Postone is frequently so indecisive. It is
thus not perhaps without interest to try to read him more closely.
Postone uses a curious interpretative method: explaining the text actually
published by Marx, Capital, on the basis of its first draft, Grundrisse. In between this
and Capital were fifteen years of corrective elaborations, inventions, and re-
workings. By ignoring all this – setting Marx up as a tutelary figure, always identical
to himself – Postone believes he is able to situate his remarks within the
philosophical paradigm of the “great self-moving Subject” driven by value. Crucial
concepts like exploitation, reproduction, inter-capitalist competition, and
accumulation are completely overlooked. Of course, in principle Postone does not
forget exploitation, etc. He just adds – tirelessly – that one cannot “confine oneself” to
these concepts: “value” has to be analysed more deeply. Using the same trick
throughout his work, he ostentatiously acquiesces to statements found within
Capital. He supposedly takes over Marx’s entire “chemistry”. But he does so in the
manner of an alchemist who possesses its deeper truth, or in the manner of an
astrologer who knows a bit of astronomy. He is not wrong for wanting to take things
from a higher perspective: but the problem becomes how to do so.
In fact, Postone’s discourse only fits into the Marxian framework – that is
supposedly so important to him (linked to his invention, “traditional Marxists”) –under
cover of a number of confusions that are hidden within pseudo-concepts generally
attributed to Marx. These can only be cleared up – and it seems to me that this is
only very partially considered by Postone’s critics – if one keeps in mind the rigorous
Marxian distinction (unfortunately, rather overlooked) among the three levels of
abstraction which govern the whole project of Capital :
(L1): Labour (and social labour) in general. Here, Marx ultimately gave up
dealing with this topic in an introduction – like the one found at the beginning of the
Grundrisse. However, it nevertheless does appear at different moments, as in the
famous text on the “production of use values” in chapter five of volume one, in
contrast to “the production of surplus value”.
(L2): The logic of commodity production (or market production), discussed in
section one of volume one, which is not reducible to a problem of “circulation,” as
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philosophers who comment on this work tend to believe. It is at this level that value is
conceptualised and this concept is never modified throughout the rest of the work.
(L3): The logic of the capitalist commodity discussed in section three of
volume one, in which labour force the role of a commodity. It is at this level, that of
the “production of surplus-value,” that capital is defined, and that is what the rest of
the work is about.
With this in mind we will now engage in an epistemological exercise: let’s
wager that clearing up Postone’s confusions will allow us to better understand the
nature of Marx’s approach, its own rationality within its limits. And let’s also bet that
we’ll be in a better position to discern what it is possible, or not, to do with the body of
concepts and the theoretical constructions that it/Marx leaves as a legacy to all
those who come after him.
Confusions regarding level L1, labour in general.
On the one hand, Postone considers he can understand the particularity of capitalist
society (L3) without referring, by contrast, to generalities, to traits that we encounter
in every society (L1). We know that for Marx, the labour which produces commodities
(L2) has two “sides,” Seiten. As “concrete labour” it produces use values. As “abstract
labour,” that is, “expenditure of labour power” (or labour force, the other translation of
Arbeitskraft) whatever the form of the object may be, it creates the value of the
commodity, which is actualized in the exchanges on the market. But, to his way of
thinking, concrete labour and abstract labour are, in themselves, the two constitutive
traits of labour in general (L1). What is proper to commodity production (L2) is that
the relation between the two “sides” is actualizing itself in the market form, that is in
terms of “value”. This value is not a function of their utility, but of the socially
necessary time for producing them under the conditions of commodity production:
competition and variations in the relationship between supply and demand.
Socially necessary time, Marx said, is one that involves a physiological
expenditure. This is indeed a general trait (L1), but it is one that takes on particular
characteristics in commodity production (L2). “Physiology” does not only refer here to
the fatigue common to human beings when they are working. Marx analyses this
question first, at level L2, in terms of the social constraints (intensity, productivity) that
the market as such exercises on bodies at work; and further, at level L3, he considers
the psycho-physiology of the salaried workers of the capitalist factory, and the
biopolitics present within it. Postone, taking up Rubin’s (economistic) view, thinks that
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the “physiological” does not have a place in political economy. He relegates it the
field of anthropological generality, without any concern for what it becomes in
capitalism. In fact, he represses it. Significantly, he surreptitiously modifies Marx’s
terminology: he replaces regularly “expenditure of labor force” with “labor time
expenditure” (Postone 1993, 26, 34, 190, 194). He prefers “labor power” to labor force”.
He displaces the biopolitical body entailed here out of play – that is, the daily
biopolitics of the class struggle: between those who “spend” their labour force and
those who “consume” it, as Marx says.
On the other hand, he makes “labour” (elsewhere: “value” which is not
however the same thing…) into “the general social mediation” (Postone 1993, 227). In
modern society, “labour mediates itself” (Postone 1993, 225) and it assures
“mediation,” the social relation between all people as well as between all elements of
social networks. This would not have been the case before. Marx poses the question
of “mediation” entirely differently in Grundrisse. Labour, he explains, is not a
mediation: it needs “mediations”. In order for it to exist as social labour, “there must
naturally be mediation,” Vermittlung muss natürlich stattfinden. And, he adds, there
are two rational mediations: the market and organization, die Organisation. These
are, in fact, two very old configurations of mediation that over the course of time take
on historically particular forms. When these mediations are taken in consideration we
pass from L1 to L2. Capital begins with the study of the market mediation (section
one). He then arrives at organizational mediation when he analyses the division of
labour in manufacture and in society, chapter 14. In contrary to Marx, Postone, by
defining the market as “external to labour” and labour as the universal “mediation”
under capitalism, goes down an obscure path. He prevents himself from considering
the two inter-individual “mediations” of the market and organization, on whose basis
alone an analysis of the class structure proper to modern society (which is based on
the instrumentalization of these two mediations) can begin.
Ultimately, this relation of labour to time, this “temporal determination” of
labour that Postone claims he would like to abolish is, in reality, not at all proper to
capitalism (L3), to the market, or to value, as he puts it (L2). It defines quite simply
“labour in general” (L1) as a specific activity: labour aims to produce its result, a use
value, in the least amount of time, or by spending as little labour force as possible. All
economy is an “economy of time,” as Marx says. This is unlike artistic, romantic,
religious, or playful activities. Of course, this time constraint can only exist as a
socially determined constraint – as an “economy”. Postone would like to deliver us
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from them. One can certainly be liberated from labour by working less, and
differently. But one cannot save labour, make it “free”, by delivering it from time.
Confusions regarding level L2, commodity production
Postone does not take into consideration the rationality of the market. Marx presents
the relation between use value and value as a “unity,” Einheit, of “contrary” elements,
Gegenteile, that are “counterparts” of each other (MEW 23/221 and 70, CAP I/197 and
70). “Commodity production” (L2) is, as is well known, a “mode of rational
coordination of labour on a social scale”. It is in this respect that it plays a “mediating”
role, as one sees in chapter one of volume one. The commodity (or market) form of
production based on competition among private producers, is one of the ways,
necessarily constraining, to deal with the constraint of cooperation inherent to
“social” labour. This is the market way (L2) of producing use values (L1). It pre-exists
capitalism, in different degrees and different places. And it is what forms the rational
background of capitalism – a limited rationality that Marx attributes to competitive
market relations.
This is certainly how economists understand it (beginning with Sweezy who is
criticized by Postone) when they consider this “abstract” level where the market is not
yet specified in its capitalist determination. They obviously do not see this as a simple
problem of “circulation” or “distribution,” as Postone would have it. They see, at the
heart of Marx’s theoretical discussion an analysis of the logic of commodity
production taken in “abstraction” (L2): Marx, in this sense, claims to be going “from
the abstract to the concrete,” when he passes from L2 to L3, from the market to
capital, within the theoretical exposition.
Marx insists on this point as pivoting his discussion in the conclusion of
chapter five. Marx insists on this point in the conclusion of chapter five, which is the
pivot of his discussion. He expressly distinguishes, on the one hand (L2) the “process
of the formation of value,” Wertbildungprozess, or the “process of commodity
production” (Productionsprozess von Waren), which is the object of section one,
from, on the other hand (L3), the “valorization process” Verwertungsprozess, or the
“process of capitalist production,” kapitalischer Produktionsprozess (MEW 23/211,
CAP 1/197), the object of section three (which is the kernel of the rest of the work).
Concrete, or useful, labour, he explains, gets connected in very different ways to
“value” in L2 and to “surplus value” in L3. This distinction is extremely important.
Postone neutralizes this approach “from abstract to concrete,” from L2 to L3, with the
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dialectical idea that L2 can only be understood on the basis of L3. Certainly, capital
L3 “posits” (produces, universalizes) the market L2 as its presupposition. But it does
not define its terms. It can only “transform” them: capital can use the logic of the
market in a “determinate” (capitalist) context because labour force appears therein
as a commodity. But, in order to understand the relation between the market and
capital, they first have to be distinguished, and additionally, the market, the market
logic of production, needs to be understood on its own terms.
By not dwelling on this rational moment of the market (which, as Marx shows,
becomes a fetishistic madness once it is transformed into a “natural order”), Postone
understands the composition of the “opposed” elements that constitute commodity,
use value and value, immediately as a contradiction. It is here that we get to the
heart of the confusion that dominates Postone’s entire work: the confusion of the
market with capitalism.
Confusions regarding levels L2 of the market and L3 of capitalism
Confusion regarding the Mechanical Clock. A particularly funny chapter in this

respect is one about the invention of the clock and its appearance in belfries and
cathedrals in European cities during the 13 century. Postone thinks he can connect
th
this novelty to the historical emergence of commodity production as subjected to the

tyranny of time. He refers to historians, such as G. Duby who, in fact, connect this
novelty with the appearance of capitalist production. But, for Postone, it’s all the
same thing: in ancient China “the notion of productivity, in the sense of output per
unit time, was unknown” (Postone 1993, 219). He seems to forget that, since the
appearance of large scale commodity production – let’s say, for the millennia, as
historical research is showing us more and more – producers of commodities have
had a precise idea of the “socially necessary time” required not only for the
production of their merchandise but also for the constraints and consequences
resulting from it. They did not wait for clock towers. In order to illustrate his concept
of “value”, Marx never needed to look for“industrial” examples: in the multiple
examples he gives in the first chapters of Capital, he refers it to the times of weavers
and carpenters. Postone is confused here about the emergence of a form of
production that is tendentially capitalist and more generally a new productive
temporality, that is correlative to the modern relation of class. In fact, the mechanical
clock came to give rhythm to and order the “abstract” time of an emergent
modernity, in which were found, alongside civil and religious celebrations, wage
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labour of workshops, warehouses, worksites and services of all kinds. It gave

marching orders not to commodity production, but – as Marx moreover noted in
Capital – to a (proto)capitalist production which was at the center of a new style of
life. Church bells did not sound the hour of value, but of surplus value.
So back to the idea of the “treadmill”. Although Postone does not want the
physiological to play a role in the theoretical, the treadmill which suggests a tension
of all the muscles is a pure concentration of “physiology,” of an “expenditure of labour
force” in time, not only a “use of time”. However, for Postone the coercion involving
time that he wishes to illustrate is not to be understood as that of capitalist
individuals who, as Marx says, “consume” the labour force that the workers are
spending. Rather, it emanates from the coercive “structure,” which is, to his way of
thinking, value itself, which requires its valorization. Here, the producers will no longer
need to ask who the exploiters are, because what exerts this (irresistible) constraint is
“the structure,” which is surprisingly defined on the basis of the supposed
contradiction between value and use value.
Confusions regarding what is “abstract” and what is “productive”
The “contradictions” that Marx attributes to capital, Postone assigns to value, which,
as we have seen, he erroneously turns into the essence of capitalism; because, for
him, everything is already contained in value whose nature is to enhance itself. To his
way of thinking “exploitation and domination are integral moments of commodity-
determined labor” (Postone 1993, 160). For him, the “abstract” logic of capitalism,
which Marx attributes to the relation of exploitation, follows from a primary logic,
which would be that of “value,” which thus “structures” society under the heading of
an “abstract time” – that of abstract labour. This way, he confuses the abstraction L1
(present in L2), which is that of abstract labour, as correlative to concrete labour,
productive of use value, and the abstraction L3, which is that of surplus value,
abstract wealth and indifferent to use value. "The abstraction of “abstract labour”
belongs to the logic of the market: various products of any (concrete) kind can be
exchanged with various others. Abstraction of the concreteness, the concrete nature
of the different commodities. Postone is not the only philosophical commentator to
be confused about this; and this is why critiques of his work are often so faltering.
One cannot, however, make a greater error regarding Marx’s theory.
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Confusion about contradiction: It is true that Marx only arrived at a satisfying

formulation very gradually. It is in the second edition of Capital that he achieves this
aim by means of a final clarification. What he treats as a contradiction is not the
relation between use value and value but the relation between use value and surplus
value. Capitalist production is certainly a production of use values (L1) and also of
commodities (L2) but it is a production oriented towards profit, or surplus value (L3),
which comes into contradiction with use value (L1). The “contradiction” of capitalism
resides here and not in value itself. It is capitalist production (and not commodity (or
market) production as such) that is destructive to use value, because it is indifferent
to the consequences for humans and nature. Such is Marx’s ecological argument,
which is, albeit implicitly, the foundation of a critical ecology. In the capitalist class
relation (L3), the market form (L2) comes to be instrumentalized and oriented toward
destructive effects. The market as such is a rational mode of social coordination; but,
when it comes under the command of capitalist logic, it becomes an irrational one.
In my opinion, Marx’s discussion is not entirely satisfying because from this
instrumentalization it does not follow that the market or value must be abolished, but
rather that this rational instrument (and its counterpart, the organization, as well)
must collectively be reclaimed – which is a matter for democratic class struggle. But
Marx, at least, distinguishes very clearly the (market) logic of value from the (capital)
logic of surplus value.
Confusions about the term “productive”: Postone spontaneously adopts a
formulation that is only found once in Marx in an “unpublished chapter,” a text, in fact,
that he ultimately did not include in Capital: “production for production”. This
expression is particularly deceptive because it conflates under one and the same
heading production in the three senses – L1-L2-L3 – that are distinguished in Capital;
making it into one and the same thing. The pertinent question is to know which ones
could produce real use values in L1 sense (which that would be, among other things,
ecologically sound) without “production of surplus value” in L3 sense, that is, by
tearing commodity production in L2 sense away from the logic of class. If this is
conceivable in principle it is because “production” is not in itself production of surplus
value. Surplus value is not the “overproduct” as such (of material, of use value), it is
an “overproduct” in which capitalists have property rights. The beneficiaries of this
right possess an “abstract” power, i.e. one that can be used in all possible ways.
When competitors threaten them with disappearance, they are pushed to use it in
such a way that they obtain always more of it, regardless of social and ecological
use values. As Marx explains, in chapter five of volume one, it is capitalist production
67
as such that is the production of surplus value. Of course, modern production has
not exclusively a form of capitalist market production. It is, in part, “administered”
(state managed). This does not entail, however, that it escapes the “logic of
abstraction” entirely, nor any class logic. But there is no sense in conflating the three
senses of the word “productive,” which is what happens when one speaks of
“production for production”. The analytic work that leads to the political and
economic investigations begins with the distinction among these three terms, L1, L2,
and L3.
Confusion regarding value and “surplus value”
In addition to this, as a codicil, the recurring misinterpretation according to which

capital must produce always more “value,” but does not succeed in doing so
because more value cannot be produced in the same amount of time. This is the
pseudo-paradox of the treadmill. What is indicative of the rationality of capitalist
commodity production (limited, as it may be) is here surprisingly transformed into a
contradiction. This transformation is entirely irrelevant to Marx’s thinking. Capitalists
tend to reduce the value of each commodity by producing it within a shorter period
of time and by doing so they are not trying accumulate more and more “value” but
actually more “surplus value”. The production of surplus value is the production of a
power over what is produced, i.e. over the means of production and labour forces
that can be purchased from selling the product. The theory of surplus value is about
the constitution of social power. Those who receive only enough to reproduce
themselves as wage earners, are deprived of this power. Capitalists, by contrast, are
able to reproduce and enlarge their abilities to dispose of more labour forces for
more profit. Wage earners acquire a property that is not power: they acquire goods
to consume, freely chosen by them, thanks to the abstraction of money (of value)
that they receive in wages. By contrast, capitalists acquire a property that is a power,
which they can use freely in order to make others work for profit: this is the
abstraction of capital (of surplus value). The theories of value and of surplus value
allow us to understand how class powers and strategies are formed and organised
in capitalist society. Analysing a production of “value” on the basis of “abstract
labours taken together” (and again the plural here is a little epistemological monster)
supposedly forming a “general social mediation” (Postone 1993, 152) does not.
68
Confusion regarding what explains and what is to be explained
“The market, competition, class relations” do not explain everything, Postone likes to
repeat. The explanation for the frantic course of our destiny is to be found in a “law of
value” which is of a “dynamic” nature (Postone 1993, 290-291). The “temporal
dimension of value” realizes itself in capital, which exhausts us by making us
produce more in the same amount of time. Marx’s explanation is the inverse of this:
capitalists are in competition with each other for the maximum amount of profit, in a
war of all against all (here we can add that the “competent managers” are also in
competition and also pushed to grandeur and excess). This leads to not only a
maximum of exploitation but also to an incessant search for higher productivity –
Postone sees this as an effect of an “ceaseless motion,” “intrinsically connected to
the temporal dimension of value” (Postone 1993, 270), to its inner drive, to what
makes it “the core” of an “intrinsically dynamic” social form (Postone 1993, 269). Marx
attributes the modern historical “dynamic” to the form of “surplus-value-form, that is,
to capital, and not to the market, nor to the category of value as specific to it. From
Marx’s perspective, hundreds of generations of artisans and peasants both produced
for a market (one part of their production) and experienced the necessity of
producing “according to value” without this “dynamic” that is, in fact, a proper effect
of capitalism. The treadmill is an effect of capital, not of value and it is an effect of
capital on “abstract labour,” as an expenditure of labour force. Not the inverse.
Confusion regarding the notion of “immanent critique”
Postone wishes to develop an alternative to “traditional Marxism” which he

generously depicts as a voluntarist and productivist evolutionism which counts on a
proletarian class. He puts forth, by contrast, a “critique immanent to the object”,
“intrinsic”. This is namely, the emergence of a “critical consciousness,” internal to
capitalist society: a new form of “subjectivity” (Postone 1993, 64-5). He is counting on
a historical dialectic that makes more and more manifest the contradiction between
what capitalist society “is” and what it “ought” to be (Postone 1993, 88). The point
remains unclear. Actually, if there is in “capitalism” and in general modern society an
“immanent critique,” a practical auto-critique, it is not simply because, faced with so
many contradictions, consciousness is just pushed toward critique. At least, this view
is rather far removed from Marx’s approach. See the penultimate chapter in Book
69
One: with the concentration of production within large modern firms, the industrial
workers will get more and more numerous, educated and united by the very process
of production, so more able to conceive and achieve the overthrow of capitalism.
Both more conscious and more powerful. That was, as known, the hypothesis. And it
is this which contemporary Marxists try to translate into post-industrial terms.
It is surprising that Postone does not refer to the famous page of the Critique of
the Gotha Program where Marx evokes, beyond a first communism that mobilizes
and pays equally all the labour powers, a “second phase,” a virtual one, in which,
thanks to the progress of productive science, one would see the end of coerced
labour and the rise of free time. This is really the horizon towards which Postone
turns: labour would in this sense disappear. “Although an economy of time would
remain important, this time presumably would be descriptive.” (Postone 1993, 379).
Marx certainly does not say how one gets to such a “second phase”. But he holds
that one can only work towards the first through a process of class struggle.
However, no such thing for Postone: he invites his reader to rely on a historical
dynamic inherent to a “law of value” increasing in power and nuisance up to the
point where it abolishes itself thanks to critical consciousness. Nothing more is said
of the relations of force that could lead to this result, or to hinder it. And it is this which
prevents him from dealing with an emancipatory strategy.
Translated by Ed Pluth
References
Arthur, Ch. 2004. “Subject and Countersubject.” Historical Materialism 12(3): pp.93-102.
Backhaus, H.-G. 1997. Dialektik der Wertform. Untersuchungen zur Marxschen Ökonomiekritik,
Freiburg i. Br.: ça-ira-Verlag. [1970].
Bidet, J. 2007. Explication et Reconstruction du Capital. Paris: PUF.
—. 2001. L’État-monde/ Paris: P.U.F.
—. 2014a. Foucault avec Marx. Paris: La Fabrique.
—. 2014b. “Misère de la philosophie marxiste, Moishe Postone lecteur du Capital.”
Période, http://revueperiode.net/misere-dans-la-philosophie-marxiste-moishe-postone-lecteurdu-
capital.
—. 2016. Marx et la Loi Travail, Le corps biopolitique du Capital. Paris: Les Éditions sociales.
Bonefeld, W. 2004. “On Postone’s Courageous but Unsuccessful Attempt to Banish the Class
Antagonism from the Critique of Political Economy.” Historical Materialism 12(3): pp.103–124.
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Structure of the Concept of Capital in Karl Marx] Frankfurt: Europäische Verlagsanstalt.
71

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CONTINENTAL THOUGHT & THEORY: A JOURNAL OF INTELLECTUAL FREEDOM

Capital as read by Moishe Postone: Alchemy or Astrology?

Volume 1 | Issue 4: 150 years of Capital

Key words: Postone, capital, value, dialectic, abstract labour,

Postone in relation to the Marxisms of the second half of the

Postone’s general approach and his theoretical-political objectives

specificity is to be connected to its temporal determination” (Postone 1993, 123).

Let’s get to critique

Confusions regarding level L1, labour in general.

Confusions regarding level L2, commodity production

Confusions regarding levels L2 of the market and L3 of capitalism

Confusion regarding the Mechanical Clock. A particularly funny chapter in this

this novelty to the historical emergence of commodity production as subjected to the

labour of workshops, warehouses, worksites and services of all kinds. It gave

Confusions regarding what is “abstract” and what is “productive”

Confusion about contradiction: It is true that Marx only arrived at a satisfying

Confusion regarding value and “surplus value”

In addition to this, as a codicil, the recurring misinterpretation according to which

Confusion regarding what explains and what is to be explained

Confusion regarding the notion of “immanent critique”

Postone wishes to develop an alternative to “traditional Marxism” which he

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