[Marxism] Moishe Postone: Rethinking the Critical Theory of Capitalism

[Angelus Novus <fuerdenkommunismus@xxxxxxxxx>]

"In a society in which the commodity is the basic
structuring category of the whole, labour and its
products are not socially distributed by traditional
norms or overt relations of power and domination ?
that is, by ?manifest social relations? as is the case
in other societies. Instead, labour itself replaces
those social relations, by serving as a kind of
quasi-objective means by which the products of others
are acquired. A new form of interdependence comes into
being, where people do not consume what they produce,
but where, nevertheless, their own labour or labour
product functions as a quasi- objective, necessary
means of obtaining the product of others. In serving
as such a means, labour and its product in effect
pre-empt that function on the part of manifest social
relations.
In Marx?s mature works then, the notion of the
centrality of labour to social life is not a
transhistorical proposition. It neither refers to the
fact that material production is always a precondition
of social life, nor should it be taken as meaning that
material production is the most essential dimension of
social life in general, or even of capitalism in
particular. Rather, it refers to the historically
specific constitution by labour in capitalism of a
form of social mediation that fundamentally
characterizes that society. On the basis of his
analysis of this form of mediation, Marx tries to
socially ground the basic features of modernity.
Labour in capitalism then, is not only labour as we
transhistorically and common-sensically understand it,
according to Marx, but is also a historically specific
socially mediating activity. Hence its
objectifications (commodity, capital) are both
concrete labour products and objectified forms of
social mediation. According to this analysis then, the
social relations that most basically characterize
capitalist society are very different from the
qualitatively specific, overt social relations, such
as kinship relations or relation of personal direct
domination, which characterize non-capitalist
societies. Although the latter kind of social
relations do continue to exist in capitalism, what
ultimately structures that society is a new underlying
level of social relations constituted by labour. Those
relations have a peculiar quasi-objective formal
character, and are dualistic: they are characterized
by the opposition of an abstract, general, homogeneous
dimension, and a concrete particular material
dimension, both of which appear to be natural rather
than social, and condition social conceptions of
natural reality. (I won?t elaborate here, but it seems
to me this would be the material basis for an analysis
of the dualisms that characterizes modern Western
thought.)

The abstract character of the social mediation
underlying capitalism is also expressed in the form of
wealth dominant in that society. Marx?s ?labour theory
of value? frequently has been misunderstood as a
labour theory of wealth: that is, a theory that seeks
to explain the workings of the market and prove the
existence of exploitation by arguing that labour, at
all times and all places, is the only social source of
wealth. Marx?s analysis is not one of wealth in
general any more than it is of labour in general. He
analyses value as a historically specific form of
wealth that is bound to the historically unique role
of labour in capitalism. As a form of wealth it is
also a form of social mediation. The social mediation
at the core of capitalism does not appear in Marx?s
analysis with the category of money ? it is there from
the beginning."

Full article:
http://www.principiadialectica.co.uk/blog/?p=48




      
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