The Immanent Possibility of a New Social Order: A Note on Moishe Postone
Istvan Adorjan
The apparent stability of a capitalist “eternal present” raises a paradoxical question today. How can we account for its continuing persistence in spite of rapidly proliferating challenges, from the recent global financial crisis to the resurgence of militant ethno-nationalisms and, indeed, the gradual break-up of the neoliberal hegemonic consensus prevalent only a decade ago? In other words, why do we still experience a dearth of emancipatory alternative visions of a radically different future social order at a time when fewer and fewer people find everyday life in their societies bearable at all? What might be missing from so many forms of social discontent in our time that ultimately renders them either impotent or dangerously misguided and reactionary?
The late Moishe Postone tirelessly obsessed over this question, and one can use this analytical lens for reading his entire oeuvre, from his rigorous exegesis of Marx’s mature critical theory to his writings on anti-Semitism, the contemporary world, or the pitfalls of romantic resistance to neoliberal capitalism. Unlike many Marxists, who mistakenly identified the working class as the universal agent of revolutionary historical change by virtue of its uniquely “privileged” position, Postone dismissed this metaphysic. Instead, he argued that the fundamental structures and forms of mediation in capitalist society determine and shape all our thoughts and beliefs irrespective of class, which then reconstitute the structures of abstract, impersonal domination in practice too. At the same time, he pointed out that these very structures of domination lend themselves to one-sided, “fetishistic” misrecognition, which can then generate forms of resistance and critique that simply do not understand their object. The best example of this is modern anti-Semitism, which in his interpretation, conflates the abstract dimension of the commodity form, that is, value, with the concrete, if mystified, figure of the quasi-mythical, all-powerful Jew, and thereby projects the inchoate, irrational, destructive rage directed against the latter onto the illusory promise of overcoming the former.[1] Or, to take another example, various contemporary leftist movements may not be immune to the dangers of unreflexive Manichaeism either. In Postone’s view, such reductionist, dualistic worldviews are not based on an adequate grasp of the conditions of possibility for genuine change; rather, they merely express a profound sense of helplessness in the face of an essentially oppressive historical dynamic.[2]
In what follows, I shall try to elucidate through an example what Moishe Postone meant by an adequate grasp of the historical conditions of possibility for radical change, and why his insistence on this seemingly arcane, almost scholastic, issue is ultimately indispensable to anyone interested in such “old-fashioned” causes as the liberation of humankind. Let me begin with a brief quotation from his review of Derrida’s Specters of Marx. Taking issue with Derrida’s vague gesturing towards a wholly different future, Postone argued that no radical transformation of the present could be viable in the absence of a “historically immanent” critique of that present “regardless of the degree to which the historical actors may think they are undertaking a radical leap outside of history.” What this means, simply, is that the very “possibility of a fundamental transformation of the present is a determinate possibility,” generated in some way in and by the present, rather than being driven by some transcendent logic.[3] Thus, the overcoming of oppression in the present social order cannot be achieved ex nihilo by sheer revolutionary fiat. Against this voluntaristic illusion, whether in its discredited traditional guises, or in its more fashionable postmodern reincarnations, Postone upholds the painstakingly rigorous task of discovering and understanding the thwarted emancipatory potential in the here-and-now. The epistemology of the present lays the groundwork for the politics of the future.
His entire interpretation of Marx’s mature work rests on this basic premise. Unlike many self-professed “Marxists,” most of whom are unconscious Proudhonians, driven by moralistic indignation and passionate outrage at perceived injustices, Postone stayed true to the dialectical spirit of Marx’s insight that capitalism is both the best and the worst social formation in human history. Perhaps I can assume that “the worst” needs no further explanation in these pages, at least in view of the historical record of the last couple of centuries. So let me elaborate why Postone’s Marxian theory insists that capitalism holds out, though it also suppresses, the promise of “the best,” which must surely be surprising to anyone who has been exposed to dogmatic anti-Marxist clichés.
While the global spread of capitalism has undoubtedly entailed the universalization of nominally “free” wage labor, the intrinsic dynamic of “self-valorizing value” (Marx’s synonym for capital) gradually led to the paradoxical situation in which labor (as the sole source of new value, that is, “surplus-value” in Marxian terms) is becoming more and more superfluous due to increasing automation, advances in productivity, and scientific-technological development. For a long time, this process whereby machines supplant human labor in the production process was easily counterbalanced by the periodic emergence of new labor-intensive industries, which re-absorbed surplus labor; yet, this secular long-term trend inherent in capitalism has by now been sounding some alarms even in mainstream discussions and media. But this grim scenario of huge masses of people rendered superfluous by robots in the not-too-distant future is only dystopian within the limited and self-limiting horizon of capitalism. Postone suggests, by contrast, that a truly emancipated society might finally become possible for the first time in human history if we look at the potential self-abolition of labor from a different perspective.
Drawing on Marx’s conceptual distinction in the Grundrisse, Postone argues that the central contradiction of capitalism is in fact the one between “value” (as the necessary form of appearance of wealth in capitalism) and “material wealth,” and he argues further that the exponential growth of the latter could, in principle, satisfy all human needs and requirements if, and only if, it is separated from the tyranny of the former. Yet Postone is careful not to err on the side of the technologically-determined optimism so prevalent among the bien pensant liberal techies of Silicon Valley. After all, it only makes sense to talk of contradiction if we bear in mind that the possibility of overcoming capitalism is both intrinsically generated and at the same time thwarted by the blind forces of the historical dynamic that Postone describes with the metaphor of a “treadmill effect.”[4] Value, for Marx, “remains the determining form of wealth and social relations in capitalism, regardless of developments in productivity; however, value also becomes increasingly anachronistic in terms of the material wealth-producing potential of the productive forces to which it gives rise.”[5]
It is for this reason that Postone emphasized the importance of an adequate theoretical understanding of capitalism on the level of its fundamental categories and contradictions, including its self-negating progressive aspect. In order to break free from the endless cycle of insufficiently self-reflexive praxis and the protean capability of capital to reconstitute its “eternal present” under the surface of accelerating historical change, we must continue to heed Postone’s call for grounding our visions of a better future in “immanent” concepts adequate to the formidable objectivity of Capital. In the absence of such conceptual work, we can at best only repeat the mistakes of the past while the future will continue to elude our feeble grasp.
Istvan Adorjan is a social theorist based in Budapest.
[1] Moishe Postone, “Anti-Semitism and National Socialism: Notes on the German Reaction to ‘Holocaust,’” New German Critique 19 (1980), no. 1, pp. 97-115. Moishe Postone, “The Holocaust and the Trajectory of the Twentieth Century,” in Catastrophe and Meaning: The Holocaust and the Twentieth Century, ed. Moishe Postone and Eric Santner (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2003), pp. 81–114.
[2] Moishe Postone, “History and Helplessness: Mass Mobilization and Contemporary Forms of Anticapitalism,” Public Culture 18 (2006), no. 1, pp. 93-110.
[3] Moishe Postone, “Deconstruction as Social Critique: Derrida on Marx and the New World Order,” History and Theory 37 (1998), no. 3, p. 380.
[4] Moishe Postone, Time, Labor, and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marx’s Critical Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 287–306.
[5] Ibid., p. 197.
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