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Time, Labor, and Social Domination

This is a rather repetitive book; this is a pity because the good stuff is mainly in the second half; the first part is devoted to attacking a ‘straw man’ called ‘traditional Marxism’; much that is claimed as ‘new’ here will be familiar to members of CSE and URPE; equally, as the book proceeds, genuinely original positions are evolved. For me, the great merit of Postone’s book is that he clarifies the methodological question of the relevance of Hegel’s dialectical logic for Marxism (for a not dissimilar view see Arthur, 1993). Everyone knows the cryptic remark about there being a ‘rational kernel’ to Hegel’s dialectic. Normally people think what is required is to put Hegel ‘back on his feet’ so that we can reach some commonsense materialist dialectic. However, what if the ‘rational kernel’ of Hegel’s dialectic were precisely its ‘idealism’! — ‘rational’ in the sense that it derives from the crazy world of capital’s own inversions of form and content. This intriguing possibility is explored here. According to Postone, ‘Marx suggests that a historical Subject in the Hegelian sense does indeed exist in capitalism’ namely capital, basing itself on abstract labour. In other words, Hegel grasped the contradictory social forms of capitalism but ‘not in their historical specificity’ (p.81). Thus: