Moishe Postone: Capitalism, Temporality, and the Crisis of Labor

The current crisis has laid bare the contradictory and shaky character of contemporary capitalism. Yet the essentially inchoate responses to the crisis have dramatically revealed the absence of a robust conceptualization of post-capitalist society and, by implication, of a robust critique of capital. One result has been the continued hegemony of neoliberal discourses and policies. Moishe Postone seeks to fundamentally rethink the core categories of Marx’s critique of political economy in the fall 2015 Ellen Maria Gorrissen lecture. He argues that Marx’s mature critique of political economy, as elaborated in the Grundrisse and Kapital, provides the basis for a different critical theory of modernity with contemporary significance.

[@fredericchen8132]

Professor Postone was a truly ingenious scholar and a honest man. May him rest in peace.

[@jessefrazier6305]

You obviously a product of woke studies. Him laughing my ass off

[@zayayayya]

@@jessefrazier6305 wdym woke studies, why are you so dumb

[@atwarwithdust]

Critical theorists thought in terms of *structure* when we were supposedly ‘all Keynesians’ (Nixon) and thought in terms of *agency* when ‘the era of Big Government’ was supposedly over (Clinton), but failed to reflect on how their own critique mirrored the times. Four stages of capitalism: mercantilist, laissez-faire, state-centric, neoliberal. Orthodox Marxism “implicitly affirmed” state-centrism as poststructuralism “implicitly affirmed” neoliberalism. “Any attempt to recover historical agency by insisting on contingency in ways that deny or obscure the dynamic form of domination characteristic of capitalism is, ironically, *profoundly disempowering*.” You’re less free when you mistakenly think you’re free. There’s a “treadmill dynamic” at work - as *value* can’t keep up with the mass cheapening of use-values, as people’s lives become dominated by “homogenous, empty time” (Walter Benjamin).

[@zioniststraightedge]

This guy was rad. May his spirit not be forgotten.

[@waldezurbe]

starts at 12:28

[@vraikorrigan]

Thxs.

[@IzabelParis]

Thank you! that was interminable!

[@jakecarlo9950]

I just think this is great. Maybe I’m crazy. But it links up in my mind with Davids Harvey and Graeber, the first in the view of capital as a system of motion and relations rather than material and objects, and the latter in terms of the bullshittification of working life as capital’s logic creates superfluous populations where the proletariat had once been. Just a thought.

[@jakecarlo9950]

This is *great*! Thank you.

[@jacobh82]

Anyone know who is speaking here? (1:10:00)

[@jemandoondame2581]

He called Philip and he called him Moish, as if they are friends haha..

[@stavroskarageorgis4804]

And Socially Necessary Labor Time is uncomputable absent price-setting markets and general-purpose money (qua unit of account/measure).

[@moodyharvest]

Great string of words! What does it mean?

[@tenderinterval]

⁠​⁠​⁠​⁠​⁠@@moodyharvestI think he is saying that the self-reflexive quantification of socially necessary labor time is at the same time an index of the process of its generalization through quantity via currency (which is why it is self reflexive), markets, what have you, the usurpation of the possibilities it creates for itself that Postone discusses here unless i’m mistaken. Uncomputable because capitalism “loves to hide.” In a crude sense for the sake of illustration, you could visualize this as an example of the Hegelian move of quantity into quality.

[@jackrabbitz9]

That was a long introduction for an introduction. Seems like this guy regrets imposing his own rule.