Wesleyan University

Time, Labor and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marx's Critical Theory by Moishe
Postone
Review by: Joseph Fracchia
History and Theory, Vol. 34, No. 4 (Dec., 1995), pp. 355-371
Published by: Wiley for Wesleyan University
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2505407 .
Accessed: 21/06/2014 07:44

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .
http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of
content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms
of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

Wiley and Wesleyan University are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to History
and Theory.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 188.72.127.168 on Sat, 21 Jun 2014 07:44:16 AM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
 REVIEW ESSAYS 355

OF MARX'SCRIT-
A REINTERPRETATION
TIME, LABORAND SocIAL DOMINATION:
ICALTHEORY. By Moishe Postone. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University
Press, 1993. Pp. xii, 424.

An exhausted smile is bound to appear on the reader's face - a smile tinged

with a degree of irony ranging, according to the reader's position, from the
sympathetic to the sardonic -upon confronting at the end of this thorough
(occasionally excessively so), complex, and superb analysis of Marx's "mature
critical theory" the author's emphatic reiteration that his work is "preliminary"
(394). However, in order to understand Moishe Postone's undertaking and its
rich implications, the reader must acknowledge its preliminary character. The
work is preliminary in a double sense: as "a work of theoretical clarification
and reorientation on a fundamental logical level" that intends "to provide as
coherent and powerful a reinterpretation of the categorial foundations of the
Marxian theory as possible" (394); and as a work that intends to outfit Marx's
theory for the exploration of the ever-changing character of contemporary
capitalism and of its social and cultural forms.
Postone's goal, then, is to reconstitute Marxist theory as a vital intellectual
force by reconstructing Marx's own theory. It is a work of exegesis without
apology, based on the conviction that the value of Marx's own insights was
not interred at the recent burial of Marxism. That deceased "traditional
Marxism," as Postone calls it, had in any case outlived its usefulness and is
wholly inadequate to the theoretical challenges presented by later capitalism.
He insists, however, that an understanding of Marx cannot be predicated on
the theories and politics of his followers, and that the current validity of Marx's
theoretical endeavors can only be determined by reading Marx without
Marxism. His goal, therefore, is to return to the source and rethink "the central
categories of Marx's critique of political economy," in order to "separat[e]
conceptually, on the basis of Marx'sanalysis, the fundamental core of capitalism
from its nineteenth-century forms" (3). On this basis Postone "hope[s] to lay
the foundation for a different, more powerful critical analysis of the capitalist
social formation, one adequate to the late twentieth century" (3). An ambitious
undertaking -but one whose best justification is to be found in the results and
implications of this skillful reconstruction of Marx's critique.
Postone regards the Grundrisse (1857-1858) as the point of Marx's departure
into maturity, hence as the starting point of his own analysis. He pauses only
in a few footnotes and parenthetical remarks to discuss the relation between the
"early"and "mature"Marx. He rejects the either/or distinction of Althusser's
insistence on an unbridgeable rupture between the early "philosophical" and
the mature "scientific"Marx as well as the "humanist reaction to structuralist
objectivism" which ignores some fundamental changes in Marx's later works
(74n). Though he finds both change and continuity in Marx's maturation, de-
fining the aspect of Marx's "mature"theory resides in the degree of historical
specificity of its categories.

This content downloaded from 188.72.127.168 on Sat, 21 Jun 2014 07:44:16 AM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
356 REVIEW ESSAYS

Marx's early works are identifiable by their "transhistorical"categories (74n).

Though many of the early concerns and categories persisted into his late works,
these attained their mature form only when "Marx clearly developed a histori-
cally specific social critique based upon an analysis of the specificity of labor
in capitalism" (138n). Having in the Grundrisse supplanted his earlier, transhis-
torical notion of labor with an analysis of its specifically capitalist constitution,
Marx was then able to go beyond a critical or radical political economy and
to define "the general strategic intent of [his] categorial analysis" (21). This
intent, only fully realized in Capital, was to perform an immanent "critique
of political economy," to "uncover [the] unexamined, historically specific social
basis" of all of its categories (56).
On the basis of this fundamental distinction, Postone develops in the first
of the book's three parts his critique of "traditional Marxism." Under this
category he surprisingly but, given his analytical purpose, persuasively sub-
sumes Second International, Soviet, and "Western"Marxism. He argues that
these apparently antithetical Marxisms share a common analytical foundation,
characterized by their shared use of transhistorical and ontological categories,
in particular the category of labor. In conceiving labor as a transhistorical and
ontological constant, traditional Marxism left unquestioned the socially specific
constitution of production and assumed the neutrality of technology, which it
treated as the progressive improvement of the instrumental efficiency of a uni-
versal labor process. Conceived in this manner, labor is the productivist motor
that drives the history of all societies through the various stages of a uniform
evolutionary dialectic.
Traditional Marxism is thus best understood as radical political economy.
It "interprets[Marx's]categories as those of distribution (the market and private
property) and identifies the forces of production in capitalism with the (indus-
trial) process of production;" and it "depends ultimately on the identification
of Ricardo's notion of labor as the source of value with that of Marx" (54).
The crucial difference, of course, is that traditional Marxism speaks not from the
standpoint of capital, but from the radical standpoint of labor and, accordingly,
insists that the end of history comes one stage beyond that conceived by the
political economists.
Caught within the horizon of political economy, however, traditional Marx-
ism's somewhat limited vision of the future focuses on "only" the elimination
of capitalist property relations and market distribution, while overlooking and
leaving untouched the nature of work. In this way Postone exposes the Second
International and Soviet brands of traditional Marxism as both ending up in
"productivist"visions of emancipation; though they differed over tactics, they
agreed that a post-capitalist future would follow the emancipation of the given
forces of production from capitalist relations of production. Thus Second Inter-
national optimism about capitalism's automatic evolution into socialism and
Soviet communism as a kind of party-directed electrification plus the elimina-
tion of private property can be seen as flip sides of the same traditionalist coin.

This content downloaded from 188.72.127.168 on Sat, 21 Jun 2014 07:44:16 AM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
 REVIEW ESSAYS 357
The "pessimistic turn" of the next generation of "traditional Marxists," the
Frankfurt School theorists, becomes explicable in the light of its ancestry.
Postone acknowledges their valuable contributions to the analysis of culture and
their valiant attempt to develop a Marxist analysis of "post-liberal"capitalism.
Having inherited, however, an interpretation of Marx's theory as a critique
of capitalism from the standpoint of labor, and having witnessed the alleged
abandonment by the Western proletariat of its historical mission, the Staliniza-
tion of the Soviet Union, and the unexpected staying power of Western capi-
talism, Frankfurt School theorists increasingly viewed capitalism and, with it,
Marxism as a one-way, dead-end street, above which their Critical Theory
hovered, preserving an ultimately unrealizable promesse de bonheur. And in
a chapter on the most noted descendant of the Frankfurt School, Postone
explains Jirgen Habermas's rejection of Marx as actually a rejection of tradi-
tional Marxism. Habermas accepted his theoretical mentors' traditional inter-
pretation of Marx, yet wanted to escape their pessimism. He thus concluded,
correctly, that traditional Marxism's standpoint of labor was the dead-end; and
in developing his theory of communicative action, he turned his back on a
theory, if not a theoretical tradition, that, as Postone reconstructs it, still has
much to offer.
Before pursuing Postone's reconstruction of Marx's theory, it is worth
pausing to consider his critique of traditional Marxism. His critique is largely
heuristic: in differentiating Marx from Marxism, he clears away theoretical
obstructions to a new reading of Marx and, in so doing, he provides an anticipa-
tory description of his own standpoint. Nevertheless, the sweeping character
of his category "traditional Marxism" might be disturbing. It is easy, for ex-
ample, to be skeptical about what might seem to be making fellow travellers
out of Marxisms as diverse as the reductionist Soviet version and the innovative
Western theoretical tradition. Intellectual historians, moreover, will legiti-
mately ask why Marx's followers persistently mistook him for a radical political
economist,' and, inversely and equally intriguing, why Marx alone was able
to escape the horizon of political economy. Postone's point, however, is not
to write an intellectual history of Marxism; and though he might sometimes
be too hasty in wielding the category "traditional Marxism," he does not insist
that its various forms are identical. His point is rather that the varieties of
traditional Marxism, despite their various conclusions about politics, culture,
and/or the future, share a common starting point which precludes an under-
standing of the depths of Marx's critique of capitalism and the radical character
of his vision of socialism.
Having established, to borrow loosely Foucault's term, the two epistemes
of Marxism, Postone moves in the latter two parts of the book "toward a
reconstruction of the Marxian critique." He argues that Marx rejected transhis-
torical and ontological categories, and the evolutionary and productivist dia-

1. Martin Jay asks this question in his review of Postone's book, "Marx after Marxism," New
German Critique 60 (Fall 1993), 186.

This content downloaded from 188.72.127.168 on Sat, 21 Jun 2014 07:44:16 AM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
358 REVIEW ESSAYS

lectic they entailed, and constructed instead historically specific categories com-
mensurate with the historical specificity of his object of analysis. Rather than
treat capitalism as a phenomenal manifestation of a universal labor process,
characterized by private ownership of the means of production and the market
form of distribution, Marx's critique sought to grasp the historical specificity
not only of the form of distribution, but also, and more fundamentally, of
"the forms of wealth, labor, and production in capitalism" (57) in order ulti-
mately "to illuminate the nature of capital and its intrinsic dynamic" (139).
In the opening sentence of Capital Marx defines the historically specific form
of wealth in capitalist societies. That form, of course, is the commodity, "the
essential category at the heart of capital" (139). Having thereby laid out the
instruments for his critical operations, Marx's first step was to perform an
anatomical analysis of the commodity. The result of this analysis is two-fold:
it exposes the dual character of the commodity as use value and exchange
value, and establishes the latter as simply "value"and therewith as the defining
characteristic of the commodity; and it exposes the dual character of com-
modity-producing labor as concrete and abstract labor, again with the latter
as the defining characteristic. In Marx's own estimation, this analysis of the
historically specific and dual character of commodity-producing labor is "the
whole secret of the critical conception" and the basis upon which "all under-
standing of the facts depends" (cited in Postone, 55, 57).
As Postone elaborates this "secret," Marx's insistence on the need to begin
his critique with an analysis of the historical specificity of the commodity as
the capitalist form of wealth and of commodity-producing labor enabled him
to move beyond "a social critique that proceeds from the standpoint of 'labor,'
a standpoint that itself remains unexamined" and that "remains within the
bounds of the capitalist formation" (57). This, as we have seen, was the perspec-
tive and problem of traditional Marxism. Marx, however, began his analysis
with a careful examination of the commodity and grasped it as a historically
specific form of wealth that presupposes a historically specific form of labor.
With this as his starting point, Marx was able to move to a social critique "in
which the form of labor itself is the object of critical investigation" (57). This
approach ultimately enabled him to expose capitalism as a form of social domi-
nation based on its own peculiar constitution of labor.
To do so, Marx proceeded from his discovery of the dual character of the
commodity and of the (wage) labor that produced it and then explained how
the value of commodities is determined. If the measure of material wealth in
the form of use values is "concretelabor," that is, the specific skills and activities
that went into their making, the measure of the value of commodities is "abstract
labor," the temporal duration of labor regardless of its concrete attributes.
Taking his cue from Marx's statement that in capitalism "direct labor time [is
the] decisive factor in the production of wealth," Postone concludes that Marx's
"category of value should be examined as a form of wealth whose specificity
is related to its temporal determination" (123).

This content downloaded from 188.72.127.168 on Sat, 21 Jun 2014 07:44:16 AM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
 REVIEW ESSAYS 359
The measure of abstract labor and therefore of the magnitude of a commod-
ity's value is time. Only through their reduction to the common denominator
of abstract labor measured in time can qualitatively distinct products be ex-
changed as commodities, their value ratio being determined according to the
differences in the quantity of time that went into their production. Since, how-
ever, time can be measured in various ways, it is necessary to specify exactly
what kind of time is involved in measuring value. It is not "concrete time"
which is a "function of events" (201) and which is thus "individual and contin-
gent," varying according to the differing skills, tools, and work-rates of different
people. Rather, it is "abstracttime," divided into "equal, constant, nonqualita-
tive units" and constitutingn] an independent framework within which motion,
events, and action occur" (202). Such a framework allows for the determination
of value in terms of a quantity of time that is not "individual or contingent,
but social and necessary." As Marx defines it, "socially necessary labour-time
is the labour-time requiredto produce any use-value under the prevailing socially
normal conditions of production and with the socially average degree of skill
and intensity of labour" (190). In this manner a commodity's value is determined
"objectively" as the socially necessary labor time required to produce a given
product -an "objective" criterion to which all producers must conform if they
are to receive the full value of their labor time (191).
Through the establishment of such "objective" measures and standards,
which presuppose the universality of the commodity form for both the products
of labor and concrete labors, capitalism constructs historically specific and
unique forms of social mediation and social domination. To illuminate these
forms, Postone follows Marx's analysis, developed most clearly in the Grund-
risse, of the difference between non-capitalist and capitalist social formations.
In the former, "the social distribution of labor and its products is effected
by a wide variety of customs, traditional ties, overt relations of power, or,
conceivably, conscious decisions," by, in short, "manifest social relations" (149-
150). The uniqueness of the capitalist societies, by contrast, lies in the absence
of such overt means of allocating concrete labors among the society's members.
In this void, labor itself, abstractly conceived, becomes a "social determina-
tion" (145), and "constitutes a social mediation" (149). The universality of the
commodity form compels individuals to produce and exchange commodities
in order to survive. The purpose of one's labor is not to consume one's own
products, but to acquire goods produced by others. Thus individuals approach
each other as owners of commodities to be exchanged and through whose
exchange social relations among them are established. Since the measure of
the value of those commodities is the socially necessary labor-time required
for their production, abstract labor is itself the mediator between individuals:
abstract labor is "the function of labor as a socially mediating activity" (150).
As the measure of the social value of their commodities, abstract labor becomes
the measure of the social value of individuals who are reduced to mere personifi-
cations of the kind and value of the commodities they possess -the main distinc-

This content downloaded from 188.72.127.168 on Sat, 21 Jun 2014 07:44:16 AM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
360 REVIEW ESSAYS

tion being between those who can buy the labor-power of others and sell labor
products and those who have nothing to sell but their labor-power in order to
procure labor products to satisfy their needs. The mediation of social relations
by abstract labor thus results in a system of mutual (though unequal) social
dependence among individuals that Postone defines as "a determinate sort of
social whole-a totality" (151).
This totality, in which social relations are established through commodity
exchange and hidden by the commodity fetishism that gives them the reified
appearance of relations among things, is characterized by a unique form of
social domination. Where abstract labor, measured and exchanged according
to the "objective" criterion of abstract time, is the socially mediating activity,
the multi-dimensionality of human being is reduced to the single dimension of
labor-power - what Postone refers to as the domination of people by their labor
(68). Herein lies, according to Postone, Marx's mature concept of alienation.
This alienation is not that of human beings from some a priori essence as in
the 1844 Manuscripts. Rather, it is a historically specific consequence of the
capitalist constitution of labor, and it consists of the impersonal "domination
of people by abstract structures that people themselves constitute" (30, 158-
166). The universality of commodity production and the mediation of social
relations by abstract labor creates a "society"that assumes the form of a "quasi-
independent, abstract, universal Other that stands opposed to the individuals
and exerts an impersonal compulsion on them" (159). The unique, "abstract"
form of capitalist domination is thus the necessary consequence of a social
formation in which abstract labor is the measure of value-the social logic of
the labor theory of value.
Having established the "quasi-objective"nature of social domination in capi-
talism and the consequent reduction of human beings to value-producing ap-
pendages of value, Postone takes up in the intriguing third part of the book
the issue of capital's "directional dynamic." As a social form consisting of
quasi-independent structures that exert an impersonal compulsion on people,
capital expropriates and usurps the human attributes of "agency" and growth
(269). Animated by abstract labor and driven by the need constantly to expand,
capital "is a category of movement . . . 'value in motion"' (269). Through its
consumption of labor-power, capital is the self-valorizing "agent" of its own
growth which follows a "trajectory"that Postone explains in terms of a "dialectic
of labor and time."
To illuminate this dialectic, Postone focuses on Marx'sanalysis of the shifting
focal point of the valorization process. Though (absolute) surplusvalue is expro-
priated simply through the capitalist employment of wage labor, the competitive
nature of capitalism demands its ever more efficient expropriation. To meet
this demand, capital concentrates on the extraction of relative surplus value
whose increase depends on intensifying the labor process such that it yields
more surplus value per unit time. The means to this end entail, and evolve from,
simple capitalistically organized cooperation, through the ever more detailed

This content downloaded from 188.72.127.168 on Sat, 21 Jun 2014 07:44:16 AM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
 REVIEW ESSAYS 361
division of labor, to the form most appropriate to the concept of capital: the
unceasing development of the means of production, of constant capital in the
form of technology. Through these means, the unrelenting need to extract
relative surplus value more efficiently leads to the constant increase in the pro-
ductivity of labor and, concomitantly, to the constant decrease in the socially
necessary labor time required for a commodity's production.
At each stage of relative equilibrium, some enterprise will inevitably devise
a new technology that temporarily gives it an advantage in the race for surplus
value. The technological advantage translates into an ability to produce com-
modities in less than the socially necessary amount of abstract labor time; for
a short time this artificially enhances the value of those commodities. As the
technology spreads throughout the economy, however, the competitive field
levels out and the process begins again. At each stage, furthermore, the effect
is cumulative in both scale and rate. Since at each stage the amount of constant
capital is higher than at the previous one, the result is a decrease in the rate
of extracting surplus value despite an increase in the quantity of surplus value
extracted. This necessitates enormous increases in productivity, in the scale of
capitalist operations, for incremental increases in surplus value (31 1). Ironically,
but logically, the increase in the scale of production is accompanied by an
acceleration of the rate of turnover of technology (31 1)- especially as competi-
tive pressure leads to the increasingly systematic use of applied science in the
development of "labor-saving devices."
In this manner the demand to increase the extraction of relative surplus value
fosters economic growth. This growth appears to be linear, consisting of a
succession of stages, each marked by a step in the evolutionary improvement of
technology. This apparently linear growth, however, is driven by, and remains
within, the process of extracting surplus value. Consequently, Postone looks
into the effect this growth has on the valorization process, on the dialectic of
labor and time.
Viewed not superficially in terms of technological development and produc-
tivity, but at the fundamental level of valorization, the "peculiarity"of capital's
growth reveals itself as a "treadmill effect" (289). The constant need to increase
the extraction of relative surplus value thus forces capital to produce more and
more, faster and faster, which leads to its accelerating succession of "great
leaps forward" in the form of the accelerating "transformation of the technical
and social conditions of the labor process" (283). But these leaps forward always
returncapital to the starting point: "Increasedproductivity increases the amount
of value produced per unit time-until this productivity becomes generalized;
at that point the magnitude of value yielded in that time period, because of
its abstract and general temporal determination, falls back to its previous level.
This results in a new determination of the social labor hour and a new base
level of productivity" (289).
The treadmill effect of capital's dialectic of labor and time thus requires an
interminable "dialectic of transformation and reconstitution": the continual

This content downloaded from 188.72.127.168 on Sat, 21 Jun 2014 07:44:16 AM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
362 REVIEW ESSAYS

and accelerating transformation of the technical and social conditions of the

labor process changes "the socially general levels of productivity and the quanti-
tative determinations of socially necessary labor time, yet these changes reconsti-
tute the point of departure" (289-290). This dialectic of transformation and
reconstitution defines capital's paradoxical development that is "at once dy-
namic and static. It entails ever rising levels of productivity, yet the value frame
is perpetually reconstituted anew" (299). The apparently linear character of
economic growth and the constant transformation of technology and social
life, in short, is the necessary cyclical or "treadmill"form of capital's self recon-
stitution and of the perpetuation of its forms of domination.
It is in this sense that capital as "agent"makes its own history. In the process of
satiating its expanding need for surplus value, capital's metabolic rate becomes
hyperactive. Each stage in the accelerating succession of technological and social
orders constitutes a beat of concrete, historical time. These beats, however,
and the apparently qualitative transformations they represent, are simply those
of the ever-quickening pulse of capital's own reconstitutive dialectic, at the
heart of which is the dialectic of abstract labor and abstract time. Describing
the measure of this pulse, Postone writes: "a feature of capitalism is a mode
of (concrete) time that expresses the motion of (abstract) time"; it is a "mode
of concrete time . . . [that] can be considered historical time, as constituted by
capitalist society" (293). The beats of capital's historical time, the recognizably
distinct moments of capital's evolution, are thus exactly that: moments of capi-
tal's history constituted by its own value-driven productivist logic.
In his concluding chapter Postone traces the directional dynamic, the trajec-
tory, of the historical time of capitalism. He argues that the unending treadmill
of transformation and reconstitution intensifies capital's fundamental contra-
diction. In contrast to traditional Marxism, Postone locates this contradiction
not in a class struggle between bourgeoisie and proletariat, nor in the contradic-
tion between a universal form of labor and the particular market relations of
distribution resulting from private ownership of the means of production, but
in the mode of production itself. That fundamental contradiction is "ultimately
one of a contradiction between the potential of the species-general capabilities
that have been accumulated, and their existent, alienated form as constituted
by the dialectic of labor and time" (360). As technological capacity is developed
to maximize the extraction of relative surplus value, the amount of direct labor
time required to produce material wealth decreases. In this way capital's own
history points beyond itself toward a social form in which people would no
longer be "mere workers" dominated by their own labor. Yet, the valorization
process necessarily continues to depend on the extraction of surplus value in
the form of labor time. Thus, capital's own dialectic renders it increasingly
obsolete and points to its own possible "determinate negation" in a social form
in which human relations and production are not mediated by abstract labor.
But in contrast to those traditional Marxists who anticipated the great "Klad-
deradatsch," Postone sees no immanent brake on the capitalist treadmill: "the

This content downloaded from 188.72.127.168 on Sat, 21 Jun 2014 07:44:16 AM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
 REVIEW ESSAYS 363
movement of capital is without limit, without end" (269). If its determinate
negation is not effected by political action and the radical restructuring of the
social relations of production, capital will endlessly transform and reconstitute
itself and, in so doing, continue to render itself increasingly anachronistic. Thus
the trajectory of capitalism is, in mathematical terms, analogous to a hyperbola
that ever approaches, but never crosses its axes; or, in Hegel's terms, a socio-
economic manifestation of the "bad infinite."

As Postone himself recognizes, his reconstruction of Marx's categorial analysis

does not answer the question of its contemporary validity. By showing, however,
that capital's own logic entails the constant transformation and reconstitution
not only of the productive order, but also of the social order, forms of subjec-
tivity, and, by implication, cultural forms, he does indicate how his "prelimi-
nary" reconstruction of Marx's analysis of capital might provide the basis for
investigating several contemporary problem complexes. For example, he offers
his approach as a means of illuminating "the possible relation between the
development of capital and the nature and development of other large-scale
bureaucratic institutions and organizations of postliberal capitalist society"
(286). Similarly, his dialectic might provide a way of examining cultural forms
such as the hypertrophy of commodity fetishism in contemporary consumer
capitalism and postmodernism as the cultural logic of later (if not "late")capi-
talism.
To critics who insist that various historical developments have ushered in a
qualitatively distinct "postcapitalist" era and/or "postmodern" condition in
which Marx has been rendered anachronistic, Postone shows not only that
Marx's analysis of capital anticipates such developments, but also that they are
still, and essentially, well within the historically specific province of capital. In
so doing, he implies that it is overly hasty to insist on a historical rupture based
on the emergence of new technologies or postmodern cultural forms. Postone
does not deny the significance of these new developments; he simply refuses
to view new technologies or cultural forms as the sole criteria for historical
periodization and thus to see in their emergence a historical rupture or disconti-
nuity. Instead, as indicated above in the discussion of historical time, the crucial
question in periodizing contemporary history is that of the reign of capital:
are social relations still constituted by the sale and purchase of the commodity
labor-power (regardless of whether that labor-power is employed in an indus-
trial factory or an "information factory") and by capitalist valorization? Is
historical time still constituted by capital's dialectic of labor and time? If so,
then talk of a culturally determined historical rupture is not only premature,
but it also prematurely dismisses a most important critique of capitalist valoriza-
tion and its implications for the analysis of cultural forms.2

2. An example of such a dismissal is Mark Poster's The Mode of Information (Chicago, 1990).
Following Lyotard, Baudrillard, and others, Poster insists on a kind of historical rupture through
which capital's valorization process has been superseded by computer technology and "the mode
of information" (128-129)-more generally, the age of "big science" (141)-as the constitutive
factor of social relations in a postmodern era. These have eliminated the proletariat and, in so

This content downloaded from 188.72.127.168 on Sat, 21 Jun 2014 07:44:16 AM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
364 REVIEW ESSAYS

Though we must await the next volumes of Postone's work for such social
and cultural studies, his argumentation in this volume has rich implications
for the exploration, at the level of production, of the nature of contemporary
capitalist domination and of the meaning of emancipation. Perhaps the most
important consequence concerns the issue of "productivism." By delineating
the specifically capitalist construction of labor as endless drudgery that serves
the continual expansion of capital, Postone defends Marx against a variety of
later critics who see his theory as a glorification of "Promethean"productivism
and of humans as "makers."3Postone raises (what should be) the obvious point
that people already "make" their worlds, and he insists that Marx's point was
to question the conditions and direction of this making (383). Marx's discussion
of production is thus an analysis of a critical fact of social life. And his goal,
in contrast to that of both political economy and traditional Marxism, was not
to praise Prometheus, but to free Sisyphus, to abolish the Sisyphean labor
constituted by capital whose interminable pursuit of surplus value demands
the productivist reduction of people to "mere workers." In thus rescuing Marx
from his own productivist friends and from critics of his alleged productivism,
Postone adds another dimension to Marx's quip that he was not a Marxist.
Postone's elaboration of the specifically capitalist constitution of the labor
process and of one-dimensional forms of work also explores the depths of
Marx's concept of immiseration. He points to Marx's linking of the capitalist
degradation of work to attacks on workers' physical and mental well-being.
He thus implies that immiseration must be conceived not (only) as a quantitative
question of the relative standard of living, but (also) in terms of corporeal
immiseration that includes both workplace attacks on workers' health and the
enforced atrophy of their manifold capacities and potentials. By exposing the
link between productivism, the degradation of work, and corporeal immisera-
tion, Postone provides a more fundamental way of examining what is often
loosely referred to as "post-industrial"technology and the "post-Fordist"work-

doing, have rendered Marx a relic of the "modern period" that Poster "posits" as "the age of
liberal politics with a socialist opposition" (130). Such approaches to historical periodization are
technologically determinist-as though they were adding to Marx's aphorism that "the windmill
gives you feudalism, the steam engine capitalism" the further step that the computer gives you
post-modernism. Postone, however, shows that Marx's aphorism must be taken with a grain of
salt. Moreover, he shows not only that the still dominant valorization process unifies historical
periods which seem incommensurate when defined in techno-cultural terms, but also that it is
perfectly in keeping with the logic of capital's own history to give rise to recognizably distinct
techno-cultural phases. Finally, Postone's discussion of the link between technological change and
the valorization process provides the basis for a critical analysis of the social, that is, capitalist,
development and application of "big science"-without reducing them to capitalist epiphenomena.
3. For variations on this theme, see: Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialektik (Frankfurt, 1975),
241-242; Martin Heidegger, "Letter on Humanism," in Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings (New
York, 1977); Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago, 1958); Kostas Axelos, Alienation,
Praxis and Techne in the Thought of Karl Marx (Austin, 1976), 198; Agnes Heller, "Paradigm
of Production: Paradigm of Work," Dialectical Anthropology 6 (1981); Stanley Aronowitz, The
Crisis in Historical Materialism (New York, 1982), 29, 47; Anson Rabinbach, The Human Motor
(Berkeley, 1992), chapter 3.

This content downloaded from 188.72.127.168 on Sat, 21 Jun 2014 07:44:16 AM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
 REVIEW ESSAYS 365
place. His analysis counters the view of critics who insist that new technology
has transformed the workplace and requires a significant level of education
and skill that renders irrelevant Marx's and, later, Harry Braverman'scritiques
of capitalist deskilling and degradation of work.4 In showing that the current
design of technology and jobs is not neutral, but subordinated to the capitalist
telos of producing surplus value, Postone reminds us that however sophisticated
workers' training may be, repetitive, mind-deadening jobs that use only a por-
tion of their capacities can still be created. To borrow from the titles of two
recent books: the "brave new workplace" (Robert Howard) is the site where
''computers are turning the office of the future into the factory of the past"
(Barbara Garson). And as Robert Karasek and Tores Theorell have shown,
such jobs, combined with workers' lack of control over their work, result in
an inordinately high rate of heart disease caused by workplace-induced stress.5
Postone thus shows that the critique of immiserating work must not limit itself
to technology and training, but focus fundamentally on the capitalist constitu-
tion of jobs.
Postone's analysis of Marx's critique of capitalist productivism also links up
to, and links to each other, two other areas of crucial concern today. By exposing
capital's specific design and application of technology for the maximization
of relative surplus value, he lays the foundation for a critique of the social
constitution of technology and for critical speculation about alternative goals
and forms of technology-a task taken up recently by Andrew Feenberg in
Critical Theory of Technology.6 Related to this, Postone shows that Marx's
elaboration of capital's accelerating need for enormous increases in productivity
results in "the accelerating destruction of the natural environment" (311) and
thus points to themes currently explored in the journal Capitalism, Nature,
Socialism. He suggests, in short, that the development of technological forms
is mediated by socially constituted forms of human interaction with nature and
that both must be rethought together.
These elements of Postone's reconstruction of Marx's critique of capitalism
point to new ways of thinking about socialism that reject traditional Marxism's
glorification of labor. These can perhaps best be summarized in terms of Post-
one's interpretation of the well-known passage in the third volume of Capital,
where Marx discusses the realms of necessity and freedom. Many critics contrast
this discussion with the familiar passage in the German Ideology where Marx
envisions the end of the division of labor when an individual will be able to
hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, and so on. In contrast to this idyllic
vision, the distinction between the realms of necessity and freedom in Capital
appears to be Marx's capitulation to the inevitable drudgery of work accompa-

4. For a recent example, see Paul Piccone, "Scapegoating Capitalism," Telos 97 (Fall, 1993), 92.
5. Robert Howard, Brave New Workplace (New York, 1985); Barbara Garson, The Electronic
Sweatshop: How Computers Are Transforming the Office of the Future into the Factory of the
Past (New York, 1988); Robert Karasek and T6res Theorell, Healthy Work: Stress, Productivity,
and the Reconstruction of Working Life (New York, 1990).
6. Andrew Feenberg, Critical Theory of Technology (New York, 1991).

This content downloaded from 188.72.127.168 on Sat, 21 Jun 2014 07:44:16 AM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
366 REVIEW ESSAYS

nying the inevitable advance of technology and, compared to his earlierposition,

his subdued and relatively feeble hope for an increase in leisure time. Postone,
however, interprets the distinction in Capital between the realms of necessity
and freedom on the basis of a comparable, but brief and easily overlooked
passage in the Grundrisse.7Chastising Fourier (and toning down his own earlier
utopianism), Marx insists that "work cannot become play." But he also insists
that the realm of necessary work can be fundamentally altered and made ful-
filling and life-enhancing rather than meaningless and "crippling of mind and
body." From the perspective of the Grundrisse, then, a much different meaning
of Marx's discussion of necessity and freedom emerges that is by no means a
capitulation. As Postone explains, Marx's discussion of the two realms must
be read as an acknowledgment of an inevitable realm of necessary production
for the satisfaction of needs and as an insistence on the possibility that "associ-
ated producers can control their labor rather than being controlled by it," that
the "alienated social necessity" of capitalism -its "quasi-naturalsocial compul-
sions" including its "runaway productivity and the increasing fragmentation
of labor"-can be overcome (23, 381-382).
The overcoming of capitalism's "alienated social necessity" entails, of course,
not only the theoretical rethinking of all the above-mentioned issues that Marx
directly addressed and of many others that can at least be partially addressed
through his work, but also the political activity that is to bring about the practical
reorganization of society. Because so many generations of traditional Marxists
were preoccupied, often obsessed, with a search for the Subject of revolutionary
politics (the proletariat and/or its substitutes and catalysts), finding one has
virtually become the sine qua non of Marxism. Those looking for Postone's
Subject will no doubt be disappointed by his apparent lack of concern for this
quest.8 Indeed, because he relegates the bourgeoisie and the industrial prole-
tariat to the era of "liberal"capitalism and does not systematically address the
class structure of contemporary capitalism, one might conclude that he dis-
misses the concept of class. The easy explanation of this attitude is that, strictly
speaking, these are issues that fall outside the purview of a work conceived as
"preliminary"and concerned with "fundamental theoretical clarification" (19).
A deeper response, however, is that Postone's "Marx without Marxism" pre-
cludes an understanding of both class and oppositional politics in traditional
Marxist terms.
Though Postone dismisses the traditional Marxist notion of the class structure
of capitalism as a factory-owning bourgeoisie confronting an industrial prole-
tariat, he does not dismiss the concept of class. Instead, he provides the basis
for rethinking class structure by explaining how capital's own self-perpetuating
dialectic has rendered irrelevant traditional Marxism's position on class. As
discussed above, Postone's elaboration of capital's transformative and reconsti-
tutive dialectic implies the inevitable transformation and reconstitution of class

7. KarlMarx, Capital(Hammondsworth, Eng., 1981), III, 820; Grundrisse(London, 1973), 712.

8. See, for example, Martin Jay's review, cited above in note 1, 189.

This content downloaded from 188.72.127.168 on Sat, 21 Jun 2014 07:44:16 AM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
 REVIEW ESSAYS 367
and class relations. For the proletariat, the bastion of traditional Marxism,
this means the emergence of a working class that can no longer be limited to
industrial proletarian labor. Nevertheless, though it needs new content, the
concept of class is still adequate to describe those still subject to the dialectic
of labor and time. In this way, Postone's analysis implies the need to retain,
and the means to rethink, the category of class as classes themselves are redefined
by capital's own dialectic.9
This remaking of the class structure of capitalism has consequences for oppo-
sitional politics. The decline of the traditional proletariat, combined with what
Postone has exposed as the "quasi-objective," "impersonal" form of capitalist
domination, renders obsolete the traditional Marxist notion of class struggle
waged by an objectively defined revolutionary Subject that fits essentialist or
ontological criteria. Postone does offer a preliminary sketch of "major forms
of socially constituted critique and opposition" to capitalism, including the new
social movements (392), and one can assume that he will take up this issue in
the next stage of his reconstruction. But he seems to view the political role of
theory in a more modest light. Theory's political role is limited to (the still
important tasks of) exposing capitalism's contradictions and changing forms
of exploitation, defining the politically possible in historically specific terms,
locating in capital's fissures possible sources of opposition, and articulating
possibilities of common cause among disparate oppositional groups. But he
refuses to join the dangerous theoretical game played by traditional Marxism,
often with disastrous consequences, the game, that is, of sanctifying the Subject
and/or its substitutes. And it is precisely this refusal that enabled him to open
the way for a critical employment of Marx's insights in the investigation of a
wide variety of contemporary issues and political possibilities.

In turning now to my one area of disagreement, my point is not at all to contest

Postone's reconstruction of the categorial logic of Capital. It is, rather, to raise
an issue that, though marginal to his analysis of Capital, is essential to his
methodology and, more generally, to historical theory: the intersection of the
synchronic study of the capitalist mode of production and the diachronic dimen-
sion necessary to the determination of capitalism's historical specificity. On
this issue I am not sure whether his work is preliminary enough.
Marx can be read in many ways: Althusser read Capital as a philosopher;
Postone clearly reads it as a social theorist, which helps explain his definition of

9. As David McLellan argues, Marx in a long chapter entitled "Results of the Immediate Produc-
tion Process" (originally intended for inclusion in the first volume of Capital) had long since
anticipated the disappearance of the traditional bourgeoisie and proletariat and the employment
of proportionally fewer workers in immediate production. See McLellan, Karl Marx: His Life and
Thought (New York, 1973), 350). Since there have been so many claims recently that new technology
and/or the skills it requires have rendered irrelevant not just the traditional bourgeois-proletarian
scheme, but also the concept of class itself, it is probably worth recalling that for Marx class is
a category of social relations; class is not determined in any immediate sense by technology nor
by its requisite skills, but in terms of the social relations of production.

This content downloaded from 188.72.127.168 on Sat, 21 Jun 2014 07:44:16 AM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
368 REVIEW ESSAYS

Marx's maturity as commencing no earlier than the Grundrisse. I read Capital,

however, as a work of social theory made possible by the historical theory on
which it is based. From this perspective I would raise the following question:
What happens when we define Marx's "mature theory" as beginning with a text
that Postone completely neglects, but in which Marx develops, in my view, his
"mature" conception of history, namely the German Ideology? This is not
simply a matter of intellectual biography or textual exegesis, nor of a defense of
one's own discipline. It is a very fundamental methodological question involving
what Bertell Ollman describes as the different levels of generality in Marx's
various uses of categories - a question that also involves the relation between
social theory and historical theory. 10
In his methodological reflections on the nature of Marx's categories, Postone
establishes an either/or situation: either categories are transhistorical and onto-
logical, the consequence of which is a teleologically driven theory of inevitable
historical evolution; or they are determinate and historically specific as, in
Postone's view, Marx constructed them. Wanting understandably to avoid the
former, Postone goes to the opposite extreme. But the major consequence for
historical theory of his categorial imperative is either to relegate it to the status
of untenable universalizing or to render it impossible. I would argue, however,
that the lack of historical theory results in a degree of historical shortsightedness
whose consequences become visible at the margins of his analysis; and I would
argue that these problems can be corrected only by "transhistorical"reflection.
One consequence of this historical shortsightedness is a kind of "fuzziness"
of vision that obscures the transhistorical dimension of several of his key catego-
ries. For example, Postone is able to criticize the specifically capitalist constitu-
tion of labor as abstract labor and material wealth as value only through the
employment of categories (for example, nonalienated, concrete labor, use value,
material wealth) that transcend the boundaries of capitalism. Here it is precisely
the "transhistorical" dimension of the latter categories that enables him (and
Marx) to differentiate or, better, not to conflate the production of value with
the production of material wealth, to recognize the historical discreteness of
the capitalist constitution of labor, and to expose capital's historically specific
contradictions. Thus, Postone effectively uses transhistorical (though not onto-
logical) categories -a procedure which I think is correct and justifiable. The
problem is that his methodological discussion denies such categories any va-
lidity.
What is needed to avoid this problem is a third option -one that covers the
dual need for "transhistorical" and historically specific categories. My con-
tention is that Marx rejected the mutually exclusive choice of either transhistor-
ical, ontological categories or historically specific categories and developed in-
stead transhistorically abstract categories as a necessary prelude to the
construction of historically specific categories.

10. See Bertell Oilman, Dialectical Investigations (New York, 1993), 53-67.

This content downloaded from 188.72.127.168 on Sat, 21 Jun 2014 07:44:16 AM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
 REVIEW ESSAYS 369
In support of this contention I would point to a little-heeded but methodologi-
cally crucial section in the German Ideology that immediately precedes Marx's
well-known discussion of the "prerequisites"of history and that explains the
methodological value and limits of that discussion. These prerequisites, Marx
insists, are not successive stages, but "moments" of all human life and they
include: material needs (food, shelter, and so on) and the need to produce in
order to satisfy those needs; the development of means of production to facili-
tate the productive process; reproduction; and forms of consciousness. Under-
lying all is the assumption of their inevitably social character. If read linearly, as
stages, these results of Marx's transhistorical reflection appear as a productivist
dialectic whose motor is the steady improvement of the means of production,
in which case the German Ideology would appear as a slightly more materialist
version of the transhistorical dialectic Marx described in the 1844 Manuscripts.
Marx's own insistence that they should not be understood in this manner, how-
ever, combined with the immediately preceding methodological discussion, pro-
vides the crucial qualifications.
In that discussion Marx explains that such transhistorical reflection is neces-
sary to determine the "prerequisites"of history and what he would later call
the "guiding threads"1 of historical analysis. But, he cautions immediately,
the highly abstract character of these "most general results" of transhistorical
reflection prevent them from providing "a recipe or grid" for the historically
specific understanding of any particular social form. Such reflections are useful,
even necessary, for orientation and the differentiation between social forms;
but without concrete analyses of social forms in their historical specificity, they
have "absolutely no value."12
These comments about the prerequisites of history and the guiding threads
of historical study aid in clarifying the nature of his construction and application
of categories. The assumptions Marx makes about the prerequisites indicate
what categories are requisite for the concrete historical analysis: categories such
as needs, use value, labor, mode of production, means of production, as well
as social organization and cultural form. At this level of transhistorical reflec-
tion, the categories, like the prerequisites, are abstract enough to be common
to all societies and thus able to serve as guides to approach the analysis of a
given social form; yet the abstract character of these assumptions and categories
prevents them from grasping any social form in its historical specificity.
There are two necessary and complementary steps in the move from transhis-
torical reflection to the analysis of a given social form. It is necessary to construct
the historically specific constellation of categories, to grasp its historically spe-
cific form of social mediation or its "inner bond."13As Postone shows, the
socially mediating "inner bond" in capitalism can be explicated in the purely

11. Marx, Introduction to the Critique of PoliticalEconomy in Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert
Tucker (New York, 1978), 4.
12. Marx, German Ideology in Marx-Engels Reader, 155.
13. Marx, Capital (New York, 1977), I, 102 (translation altered).

This content downloaded from 188.72.127.168 on Sat, 21 Jun 2014 07:44:16 AM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
370 REVIEW ESSAYS

"economic" concept of abstract labor. For pre-capitalist societies, however, in

which the political sphere (the Greek polls) or the religious sphere (the Catholic
Church in European feudalism) is so inextricably intertwined with the economic
that the latter cannot be so neatly isolated, the task of delineating the form of
social mediation is much more complex; and historical time in such societies
is not constructed on the basis of a purely economic logic .14Nevertheless, regard-
less of how diffuse it may be, the first step of a historical materialist analysis
of a given social form is to grasp the inner bond which structures social relations
and the material reproduction of the society. This first step necessarily entails
a second one consisting of the determination of the historically specific form
of the categories. For capitalist society this means to depict, as Postone does
throughout his analysis, labor as abstract labor, time as abstract time, material
wealth as value, and so on. The move from transhistorical reflection to the
analysis of a social form in its historical specificity is thus a move from transhis-
torically abstract categories which delineate the pieces of the puzzle to histori-
cally specific categories and the particular form of mediation which puts the
pieces together.
This methodological discussion in the German Ideology signifies, in my view,
Marx's first step into maturity (and, apparently in his own view since he later
pointed to this work as the site of his own "self-clarification""5).Here he devel-
oped the theoretical basis for a materialist science (Wissenschaft) of history
that ultimately enabled him to delineate the historically specific attributes of
capitalism and to develop appropriately specific categories for his critique. The
emphasis on the dual need for transhistorically abstract and historically specific
categories is thus fundamentally linked to the definition of Marx'smature critical
theory. Rethinking these issues from the perspective of the German Ideology
opens onto the historical plane, onto the diachronic materialist conception of
history that made possible the synchronic, yet historically specific critique of the
capitalist mode of production. Rethinking in this manner the relation between
historical theory and social critique would, I think, help to clear up the slight
degree of fuzziness at the margins of Postone's analysis. Postone's separation
of Marx's critique of capital from that of traditional Marxism opens new ave-
nues for analyses of contemporary capitalism. So too might the separation of
Marx'smaterialist conception of history from traditional Marxism'stranshistor-
ical, evolutionary dialectic, and an understanding of the transhistorical, yet
abstract dimension of his categories open new approaches for historical-
materialist analyses of non-capitalist social formations.
In his "Concluding Considerations," where he re-emphasizes the preliminary
character of his project, Postone restates his intent "to provide as coherent and
powerful a reinterpretation of the categorial foundations of the Marxian theory
as possible" (394). With the qualifying revision of this statement to read: "the

14. See Capital I, 176n, and the chapter in the Grundrisse on "Forms which Precede Capitalist
Production," 471-514.
15. Marx, Introduction to the Critique of Political Economy, in Marx-Engels Reader, 5.

This content downloaded from 188.72.127.168 on Sat, 21 Jun 2014 07:44:16 AM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
 REVIEW ESSAYS 371
Marxian theory of capitalism," I think he has succeeded brilliantly. In his at-
tempt to "render plausible the notion that [Marx's] theory could serve as the
basis for a powerful critical social theory of the contemporary world," he does
not claim to have gone beyond the preliminary work of theoretical clarification
(394). Nevertheless, as indicated above, his preliminary work on the logical
level certainly can serve as a theoretical prologue to contemporary studies in
various areas. Finally, Postone claims only to have transformede] fundamen-
tally the terms with which the question of the adequacy of Marx's categorial
analysis must be posed" (394). Considering the countless works on Marx, this
is no small claim. Considering Postone's achievement, however, it is a well
justified claim. Had this book been written some twenty years ago, when the
discussion of Marx's work was more current, he [Marx] might have been spared
some of the cliched charges of essentialism levied at him in the meantime (and
Postone might have been spared the need so often to reiterate his points). Be
that as it may, these "untimely meditations" make a case that should not be
ignored for the timeliness of Marx's critical theory.

JOSEPH FRACCHIA
University of Oregon

WORLD HISTORIANS AND THEIR GOALS: TWENTIETH-CENTURY ANSWERS TO

MODERNISM. By Paul Costello. DeKalb, Illinois: Northern Illinois University
Press, 1993. Pp. x, 315.

Most historians do not write world history, and the general public is more likely
to hear about those who do than to read them. Nevertheless, they often acquire
fame and prestige, enjoy significant sales of their books, and see their generaliza-
tions and suggestive terminology frequently cited by more narrowly specialized
professional historians, most often disparagingly. These accounts, in short,
seem to meet some need, suggesting that conceptions of how the history of the
world has unfolded are intricately interwoven into Western culture, ready to
fire away in the synapses of our thought about civilization and change. In that
tradition, world history offers the framework for a continuous narrative, one
that starts with the pulse of civilization beating to the rhythm of riparian agricul-
ture along the Tigris and Euphrates, then moves through the classical world
and across two millennia until Europe's power and influence extend across the
globe. The civilizations not in this direct line, however much admired, are
presented initially as separate stories but differ most from the main narrative
in always coming to an end, each giving way to the next until all become part
of the world the West has won.

This content downloaded from 188.72.127.168 on Sat, 21 Jun 2014 07:44:16 AM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions