Some thoughts on section III of Postone’s essay, The Current Crisis and the Anachronism of Value: A Marxian Reading.
Following on my last post, “What Postone thinks he can explain”, here Postone tackles the specificity of capitalist categories:
“Marx explicitly states in the Grundrisse that his fundamental categories are not transhistorical, but historically specific. Even categories such as money and labor that appear transhistorical because of their abstract and general character, are valid in their abstract generality only for capitalist society, according to Marx.”
Here Postone clarifies that the categories of Capital are not to be understood transhistorically, but only as they appear in the capitalist mode of production.
What does this mean?
In the case of the commodity, Postone explains, Marx “does not refer to commodities, as they might exist in many different kinds of societies.” In the capitalist mode of production the only real commodity immanent (native? peculiar?) to that form of society is labor power. While commodities might be produced in many different forms of society, labor power is the only commodity specific to capitalism.
Postone explains the significance of this specification of the commodity in its capitalist form, i.e., as labor power:
“Marx takes the term and uses it to refer to the most basic social relation of capitalist society, its fundamental form of social mediation and structuring principle. This form, according to Marx, is characterized by a historically specific dual character (use value and value). He then seeks to unfold the nature and underlying dynamic of capitalist modernity from the dual character of this basic structuring form, from the interactions of its constitutive dimensions. At the heart of his analysis is the idea that labor in capitalism has a unique socially mediating function that is not intrinsic to laboring activity transhistorically.”
The use value of labor power is that it is the sole source of value and surplus value; while the value of labor power is expressed in the wages paid for labor power. What labor in the capitalist mode of production produces, in first place, is the labor power of society, not yards of linen or coats. Under the capitalist mode of production labor is transformed from being simply a means to producing shoes, coats and linen to an activity that mediates [expands?] itself, i.e., to wage labor.
Wage labor is not labor as it is understood transhistorically; it is relentlessly self-expanding labor:
“In Marx’s mature works, then, the notion of the unique centrality of labor to social life is not a transhistorical proposition. Rather, it refers to the historically specific constitution by labor in capitalism of a form of social mediation that fundamentally characterizes that society. By unfolding this mediation, Marx tries to socially ground and elucidate basic features of capitalist modernity, such as its overarching historical dynamic.”
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As a side note, Postone gets bonus points here, I think. In my opinion he scores a direct hit on the Soviet mode of production. The one characteristic the Soviet mode of production definitely has in common with the West is that labor power was sold as a commodity. Postone has greatly simplified his problem here.
The Real Movement 
Off-topic but I hope you could give me a reply.
I’ve been following your blog on and off for a few years now. I find your applications of Marxian economics to the present quite interesting, and was wondering if you could recommend a reading list to better understand Capital?
I graduated from uni last year and my favourite course was this course in the history of economic thought. At this point I have forgotten most of the utilitarian marginal economics I had learnt while I can still remember at least the general outlines of Smith and Ricardo’s theories, including their earlier versions of the LTV. I didn’t study Marx in too much detail though, because I found the length of Capital rather intimidating and Marx’s language rather abstruse compared to Smith. The LTV still makes more sense to me than the utilitarian “subjective” value theory and I find your explanations of it in the present context quite illiuminating.
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The ten writers (works) I use most often in my study are the following:
1. German Ideology, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels
2. Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx
3. Capital (vols. 1-3), Karl Marx
4. Socialism, Utopian and Scientific, Frederick Engels
5. Time, Labor and Social Domination, Moishe Postone
6. Law of the Accumulation and Breakdown, Henryk Grossman
7. Marx’s Concept of Money: the God of Commodities, Anitra Nelson
8. Apotheosis of Money, Robert Kurz
9. Marx’s Theory of Price and its Modern Rivals, Howard Nicholas
10. Change the world without taking power, John Holloway
Marx is a difficult read, of course. But I see no way to avoid him. You might begin Capital by reading chapter 32 of volume 1, because in that chapter Marx explains how capital progressively abolishes itself in a concise summary.
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Has anyone ever accused you of being a bit dry? I am forced to engage in parody of moot, purely academic questions just commenting on topic.
This literally sounds like bitcoin capital expansion.
In fact, bitcoin seems to be the most perfect example of capitalism, divorced from subjective value and entirely based on LTV (the labor here would be the ledger computations on your graphics card or FPGA as a bitcoin worker, now purely a function of electricity and computing power time). As the value of any ledger and hash computing time plunges to zero, the massive inflation of the price of bitcoin, the product produced PURELY by labor time, skyrockets. Bitcoin just keeps going higher and higher, and not based on a lie as with other stock bubbles where there were expectations of a big sale number increase or discovery of a potential new resource or land title for the company.
Yet who could possibly argue that this bitcoin is intrinsically, transhistorically valuable? It is clearly a historically determined product of a fashionable computer trust system, a game. Like pokemon-go, remember how popular that was last year? Or was it the year before?
All I know is, I wish I would have invested 10 thousand dollars in January, to have a hundred thousand dollars today. I am living in the historical context of capitalism, so it is valid, IN EVERY SENSE, to me.
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A quick thing about specificity and strategy. The mode of activity not only affects us normatively — including how we might respond (?) — but in order to ‘overcome’ what are only definite relations, requires a definite response which is deleterious to the entire mode.
So Marx has two clear quotes about this I think:
“Even the method of plunder is determined by the method of production” (Intro to Critique of Political Economy”
and
“Capital is dead labour, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks. The time during which the labourer works, is the time during which the capitalist consumes the labour-power he has purchased of him.
If the labourer consumes his disposable time for himself, he robs the capitalist. ” (v.1 ch 10)
A lot of communist strategy has developed out of the outcome of such activity — which is still in accordance to its historically-specific character or, as you say, as a ‘native’ (immanent?) product. E.g. “worker’s movements” that do not seek to abolish the working class. Or ‘leftist’ organizations that begin with the normative response (?) of organizing, or bargaining, which is implicit in the form itself (as ‘commodity owners’). On the one hand, how they normatively respond (?) is an ‘advance’ beyond the limitations of organization under formal privileges (feudalism, slave society). On the other hand, how they don’t respond — re: “liberation is a historical and not mental act” — is just as telling (about bourgeois society).
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Yup. If you read my latest post, you will see that Postone blows up Leftism with the simple proposition that wages mediate all other social relations under capitalism. Wage labor has to go!
I hope Postone will make this clear in time. 🙂
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Yes. Leftism has decidedly fought the exact opposite way you fight capital.
Postone said this to a conclude a speech:
“The thrust of the critique of capitalism is to point toward the possibility of the overcoming of capitalism’s quasi-automatic, historical dynamic. Which means: towards the possibility that people could finally become the subjects of their own history. With the realization of that possibility, the critical theory would have lost its object and hence its own validity.”
It may be too self reflexively cute for its own good, but no Leftist organization I can think of is approaching the problem this way: by starting from what they currently know (and do) as disposable. Labor going away is already a difficult premise for leftists to understand. Add to that their decades of unsubstantiated theories and various ontologies they were certain of, and there’s a pattern of wanting to salvage everything (including their thoughts) besides the abstract character of capital that posits an ‘everything’ in the first place:
“The idea of use-value, or to put it another way, the idea that all objects are objects, is itself a form of universality that comes into being with capitalism. That doesn’t mean, however, that it is restricted to capitalism; because it can exist beyond capitalism. But in pre-capitalist society, all objects are not objects. Objects are very different. Different people can handle different objects. A peasant isn’t allowed to touch a sword. A man is not allowed to handle a basket. These aren’t objects. These are very much imbued with social position. The idea that everything is an object is related to the abstract dimension but it’s not identical to it. So it seems to me, that you have two forms of universality that are generated by capitalism. Whereas, most anti-capitalist thought sees only the one: the abstract” (ibid)
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*elbows cut into conversation
That speech ending by Postey,
the other objectification created by capitalism, aside from teh abstract, is the feudal one where all permissions were based on social status?
Is that capitalism or just feudalism, or is feudalism not a form of wage laboring, for god’s sake! The peasant doesn’t even own their own land mostly, they pay rent to work the land and even then give a share of crops/revenue to the landlord. Share croppers.
Who theorized that feudalism is NOT capitalism? Does anyone know? Name names.
Why do leftists not see wage labor as vanishing? I think the premise of most discussion is based on the phrase “take back the power” which is basically reactionary and nostalgic. It is difficult to imagine a future, however, where the great mass of people have not somehow been herded into pens like The Hunger Games, and are forced to play gladiators for the amusement of a super technologically labor-free elite. The idea that technical improvements to the mode of all forms of production will be so tremendous as to change even the basis of what it means to build a production center, is not credible to most leftists but seems like a utopia.
Oh sure, they say, technology WILL make labor redundant, but never THAT redundant. Given the current context where we are promised shiny new production improvements but then left waiting, year after year, makes truly total exppansion of capital that accompanies the demise of labor, seem like a vaporware marketing gimmick. Can you blame them?
Even the messaging from the nationalists like Trump seems overblown. We are losing jobs? Not at any rate we aren’t already used to. The future is here, and it isn’t as catastrophic as we had hoped.
Leftists are generally planning for the short term, which is why they are often getting into trouble, going to jail, getting hurt. The luxury of long term planning is you stay out of everybody’s way, the way Mr professor there, Moise Postone, does. See for example Jehu’sfriend on Twitter reporting, naively and hopefully, Postone’s unnecessarily wry humor in promising to “get back to” an email inquiry, right after he’s finished marking some term papers. Yeah, the revolution just had to wait for those term papers from some undergraduate pukes, to receive their B average for the class.
This is why the left thinks short term. People who know better and think long term, are too dispassionate and not action-oriented. The question of careerist bloggers and fraud academics aside, of course.
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