in conversation with moishe postone silvia l lopez 2012

8/11/2019 In Conversation With Moishe Postone Silvia l Lopez 2012

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In conversation with Moishe Postone,

Conducted at the Carleton Idea Lab on September 12, 2012 via

Skype.

Silvia L. Lopez (S) : The first set of questions have to do with the Neue Marx Lektüre.

Your book has been translated into Spain relatively recently (2007) and has gotten

a lot of attention, although in Europe, in general, the discussion of a new reading of

Marx has been going on since the sixties. Would you care to situate your own work

in relationship to the Neue Marx Lektüre, especially in relation to the work of

contemporaries of yours, like Michael Heinrich or the late Robert Kurz? How doyou see your contribution as being different and what sets it apart from theirs?

What were the concrete social-political circumstances that led you to read and

theorize Marx anew?

Moishe Postone : When I first encountered Marx in the 1960s, I was very positively

impressed by the young Marx, the Marx of the theory of alienation. I regarded his

later critique of political economy as being hopelessly Victorian, a positivist tract

against the exploitation of workers. Like many people, including many Marxists, I

thought that Marx simply had worked out classical political economy more

consistently to demonstrate the existence and centrality of exploitation. While I

sympathized with this politically, it seemed to me to be too narrow to grasp the

central problems of contemporary society in a full and rich manner. I found the

work of the young Marx to be more adequate as a critique, but since I hadn’t fully

understood the theory of alienation, regarded him mainly as a cultural critic. In that

sense, I viewed him as one of several important cultural critics, the difference being

that he was progressive while many of the others were conservative. What

fundamentally changed my understanding and proved to be a breakthrough,



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conceptually, was my encounter with the Grundrisse. I was particularly struck by

the well known sections of the manuscript that make it very clear that, for Marx,

the category of value is a historically specific category. That, for me, had enormous

implications. It was a key to understanding the mature Marx, a lever with which I

sought to lift the traditional understanding of Marx out of its moorings. I now

concluded that Marx’s theory was fundamentally different than its traditional

Marxist understanding. For example, the idea that value is historically specific

meant, that overcoming capitalism did not mean the realization of value, as many

people had argued. Many understood value in a Left-Ricardian manner, that is, as a

category that demonstrates that the working class is the sole source of the creation

of social wealth (whereby wealth is understood transhistorically). A just society,

then, would be one in which that social wealth would belong to the class that

produces it. Such a society would represent the realization of value. However,

Marx’s argument, that overcoming capitalism entails the abolition of value, implies

not only that the most fundamental issue is not that of the level remuneration of

workers for what they produce -- although this does remain an issue that certainly

has become significant again today -- but that it also cannot adequately be

conceptualized as the abolition of private ownership of the means of production.

Rather, the Grundrisse indicates that post-capitalism for Marx is post-proletarian.

This, however, renders the relation between reform and revolution even more

problematic. It no longer can be understood as one between reforms that seek to

ameliorate the condition of workers within capitalism and revolution that seeks to

overthrow capitalism by abolishing the bourgeoisie. Rather, the abolition ofcapitalism requires as its sine qua non the abolition of proletarian labor. Reform,

then, must move in the direction of that goal. This opens up many new ways of

conceptualizing our current historical situation, including the rise of post-

proletarian movements. Nevertheless, it also poses serious political and conceptual



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difficulties, because there no longer is linear continuity between workers defending

their interests as workers and overcoming capitalism. The issue of the self-

abolition of the proletariat has become placed on the agenda historically. Yet, at the

same time, the gains achieved during the past 150 years by workers as workers are

being undermined.

S: Yes, if we think about the Frankfurt School in the 30s, they had already discarded

that third section of Lukács' History and Class Consciousness about the agency of the

proletariat as a result of their confrontation with the social realities of their time

While they in someway retained Lukacs' enormous theoretical contribution about

rationalization and social mediation, they did not continue with the idea of the

proletariat as world historical subject. I would argue that already prior to the 60s,

and before the new readings of Marx came along, there was already a serious

question about the proletariat.

Moishe Postone : I agree. Members of the Frankfurt School sought to reformulate

the critical theory of capitalism so that it would be more adequate to the changed

conditions of the 20th century. Yet, I would argue, in trying to get beyond the

limitations of traditional Marxism, they retained some of its fundamental

presuppositions. As a result, although their approaches are crucially important,

they represent a kind of half-way house, theoretically. I argue that none of them,

really, accepted Lukács’ notion of the proletariat as the world historical subject.

However, Horkheimer and Pollock, in trying to come to terms with the newer,state-centric configuration of capitalism, continued to understand the most basic

contradiction of capitalism as one between the market and private property, on the

one hand, and labor, on the other. They then argued that the market and private

property had been, in effect, abolished with the rise of state capitalism. In other



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words, the contradiction of capitalism had been overcome. However, the

consequence was further domination rather than emancipation. Once that

happened, the universe became closed, for them. They no longer could see any sort

of contradiction pointing to capitalism’s determinate negation. It seems to me that

the pessimism, on a fundamental level, of the Frankfurt School was not only a

function of the terrible circumstances that fascism was dominant in the 30s and

40s; nor was it simply a matter of losing faith in the proletariat. Rather, it was

rooted in an understanding of the changed structure of capitalism, as a result of

which, theoretically, they no longer could see a way forward. So they moved from

an analysis based on notions of immanent contradiction and determinate negation

to the argument that the object no longer could be completely grasped by the

subject, but exceeded its grasp. This understanding of the categories expressed

their view that they were not (or no longer) contradictory; the totality and the

categories grasping it had become one-dimensional. But this idea of an excess that

exceeds the concept, the idea of that which cannot be subsumed, doesn’t point to

any idea of determinate negation. So I think that they had a theoretical foot in each

camp; they attempted to get beyond traditional Marxism, but remained trapped by

its presuppositions. I think they’re enormously important and I’ve learned a great

deal from them as well as from Lukács, but I think they never completely shed or

broke the conceptual shackles of understanding capitalism in terms of private

property in the market and or of understanding the commodity form as one-

dimensional, in terms of its value dimension alone. My work has sought to

reestablish the contradictory character of the categories without doing so in termsof the market and private property.

S: That makes sense. They retained a concept of capitalism, while at the same time

they had understood that Lukács’ formulations couldn’t hold completely and that



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was in light, not only of the emergence of state capitalism, but also in light of the

rise of fascism and the rise of mass culture. In their social and cultural theory they

came to terms with that, but not in their theory of capitalism.

Moishe Postone : I think that’s true. In some respects, Habermas’s work can be seen

as an attempt to get beyond what he also regarded as a theoretical dead end that

Critical Theory had reached. I don’t agree with the path Habermas took in

attempting to get beyond that theoretical impasse. However, he was responding to

a real problem. Critical Theory was characterized by two central, interwoven,

dimensions. One was to come to grips theoretically with a changed world in ways

that were more adequate than orthodox Marxists attempts. At the same time they

emphasized Marx’s idea that a critical theory has to be reflexive, that is, it has to be

able to account for the conditions of its own possibility. I think Habermas correctly

saw that, with its theoretical turn in the late 1930s, the Frankfurt School no longer

could account reflexively for critical theory itself. It could be argued that Habermas

developed his evolutionary theory of communicative action in order to overcome

the theoretical deficit and ground reflexivity. (I happen to think that returning to

Marx would have allowed for a more satisfactory response to this theoretical

dilemma.)

S: Yes, or perhaps he dispensed with it and transposed it to the realm of

intersubjective relations to avoid the apparent aporetic relationship between

subject and object that he perceived as a dead end. The ground shifted inphilosophically and in social-theoretical terms to simply an intersubjective realm. It

is in this sense that it is questionable to agree that he really was capable of

accounting for his own position. In some way, it was completely relative to that

intersubjective realm. The concept of ideology, for example, no longer played a role



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in Habermas because everything was based on that particular relationship between

subject and subject.

Moishe Postone: I’m not saying that he successfully reestablished the grounds for

critique, but I think he was trying to do so with his notion of communicative action,

of intersubjectivity, as a realm separate from the systemic world. One of the many

problems I have with Habermas is with his insistence that critical theories before

him were bound to a subject-object paradigm, which he displaced with one that

focused on subject-subject relations. Marx’s theory, however, as a theory of social

mediation, is also concerned with the subject-subject dimension. His category of

“abstract labor” refers to a historically unique function of labor in capitalism as a

socially mediating activity. When Marx argues that commodity-determined labor is

both abstract labor and concrete labor, he is arguing that labor in capitalism

uniquely mediates relations among people (abstract) as well as the relations of

people to nature (concrete). Habermas’s understanding of labor in Marxist theory,

however, misses this complex character, for it is a very orthodox Marxist

understanding of labor. It’s really just concrete labor. (I am suggesting, in other

words, that returning to Marx would have allowed for a more satisfactory response

to the theoretical dilemma of reflexivity in critical theory.)

S: Eventually, he will have to develop some kind of normative grounds for it or all

his students will look for those normative grounds for a critical theoretical

intervention, but in terms of a theory of capitalism, he doesn’t make progress inany way.

Moishe Postone : No, not at all. Habermas doesn’t help elucidate what happened in

the last four decades, since the crisis of the early 1970s. Interestingly enough, I



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think none of the major theorists of the 1970s and 1980s (who are very different

from one another) – Habermas, Derrida, Foucault – really illuminate what has

happened since the 1970s. It could be argued that they all were fixated on what we

could call “Fordist capitalism”, that is, on the large scale, bureaucratic structures

and technocratic ethos that characterized that configuration of capital. I find none

of them are illuminating today, which is one of the reasons it’s worthwhile to go

back to Marx.

S: Should we go back to the late 60s, early 70s, your discovery of the Grundrisse,

and your thinking about value?

Moishe Postone : My intention was to help reconstitute a critical theory of capitalist

modernity. As an aside, let me note that with regard to the issue of modernity, I

disagree with someone like Michael Heinrich, and agree much more with Lukács,

Adorno, and Horkheimer. Capitalism isn’t simply a mode of production, narrowly

understood, but structures a form of life that we sometimes characterize as

modernity, both in its subjective and objective dimensions. Habermas also doesn’t

seem to grasp this. He seems to regard intersubjective communication in

modernity as self-grounding, while considering such communication in pre-

capitalist society as structural by political or religious forms. That is, he

understands the social molding of structures of communication when it takes the

overt forms it does in pre-capitalist societies. But he loses Marx’s brilliant insight

that the form of social constitution in capitalism is such that what is sociallyconstituted -- for example, the individual – doesn’t appear social but, rather,

appears “natural” in the sense of being self -grounded and apparently

decontextualized. That is, Habermas doesn’t see that its precisely the appearance of

being decontextualized that marks capitalist contextualization. In that sense,



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Habermas’s understanding of communicative rationality falls prey to a fetish form.

I think that Heinrich, too, views the critique of political economy much too

narrowly, as being just about production and economics. He loses the subjective,

cultural dimension of the categories. I think that is unsatisfying and unsatisfactory.

It is not the kind of theory we need.

S: Yes. In a way it’s almost a step back from Lukács, who was already trying to read

Marx along with some kind of understanding of modernity. What about someone

like Robert Kurz? He became in the last decade someone who represented the

critique of value in similar ways to you, at least on a theoretical level. What do you

think about his contribution? And then there are a number of other people who

followed in his steps, in the groups Exit ! and Krisis .

Moishe Postone : I think Kurz’s untimely death is a serious loss. When I first

encountered the Krisis group I hadn’t known about them and I don’t think they had

known about me. And, yet, our work overlapped strongly, particularly with regard

to the critique of value and the critique of labor. I didn’t fully agree with the way in

which Kurz posed the idea of crisis, that either one maintains capitalism will

collapse or one thinks that capitalism can continue indefinitely. I was not happy

with what I took to be a stark dichotomy. I also think my work is more open to, and

concerned with, issues of ideology, subjectivity, and consciousness than is Kurz’s.

S: Could you elaborate a little bit on that?

Moishe Postone : Yes. I don’t think his concern was as much to try to understand

changes in subjectivities that occur with changes in capital, with the ways one

could analyze them with reference to capital itself. I began to try to work this out



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with my work on anti-Semitism, where I tried to develop a non-functionalist theory

of that worldview in ways that are different from most so-called materialist

theories of subjectivity. My approach is much more related to Marx’s theory of

fetish forms. I’m not sure that the Krisis group, or Krisis and Exit! , are as concerned

with issues of subjectivity and fetish as I am, but this might be unfair on my part.

Certainly of all of the Neue Marx Lektüre, there are the most parallels and overlaps

between their work and mine.

S: What was exciting for me as a Latin American when we discovered your work

and the work of Kurz and his followers, was that you were both independently

coming to similar conclusions about value in Marx. It corroborated for me a

rigorous reading of the late Marx on value. Orthodox Marxism was something that

was not going to contribute to that understanding. Perhaps it is not that these

readings of Marx coming out of Germany are not interested so much in ideology,

subjectivity, and consciousness, but I think the theoretical work is at such a level of

abstraction that there is really very little room to come up with a critical social

theory.

Moishe Postone : I’m not sure about this. There was a period after I left Germany

that I had a much more developed sense of what was going on in Germany, so I am

not sure about this, but what could be the case is that many on the Left in Germany

who are most concerned with subjectivity remain fairly orthodox followers of theFrankfurt school, particularly of Adorno. And I think that, like me, the Krisis and

Exit! people think that, for example, Adorno’s understanding of the critique of

political economy, as rich as it was, didn’t go far enough. So it could be that within

the specific German context, they stayed further away from issues of subjectivity



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because the more orthodox Adorno followers were very concerned precisely with

that.

S: Yes, that’s fair enough. Perhaps in some circles that was the case. But going back

to Adorno, in spite of its lateness or its historicity, Adorno was concerned with a

theory of subjectivity in mass culture.

Moishe Postone : Absolutely.

S: His attempts at coming up with a critical social theory very much resided at the

level of subjectivity, and there were reflections that departed very strongly from

more orthodox understandings of ideology and consciousness and emancipation

and in some way, maybe we can talk a little bit about not only just the limits of that

tradition, but where could it be taken from now. Would you go back to some of the

Frankfurt School, or is it something that is pretty much a historical moment in the

history of social and cultural theory and now we have to invent new ways of

understanding critical social theory? How do we think about subjectivity? My

impression from being in Germany recently is that many people on the left are very

much indebted to Foucault when it comes to thinking about subjectivity. I think

post-structuralism has made its way to Germany via the United States. I see very

little Frankfurt School left in Germany today. I am interested in hearing what you

think about these Adornian attempts that Habermas dismissed. In Theory of

Communicative Action he talks about the aporetic nature of Adorno’s standing withregard to theorizing critical theory. It wasn’t really even a critique of his

understanding of subjectivity. It was a critique basically of the incapacity to give an

account of his own position. But with that I think that the baby gets thrown out

with the bath water in terms of the attempts…



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Moishe Postone : I agree completely, that’s exactly the phrase that I was going to

use.

S: …the attempts at on the ground working towards a critical social theory. So how

do you see your work, your rigorous work on Marx, related to the development of a

critical social theory today?

Moishe Postone : I’m gathering from what you’ve just said that perhaps what I said

earlier could be subject to misunderstanding. I very much value the brilliant

attempts by people like Lukács and Adorno -- with all of their differences -- to see

subjectivity as intrinsically related to social objectivity, as two dimensions of the

same thing, which cannot be grasped in terms of the base/superstructure model,

much less in terms of interests. For them, to use a different vocabulary, critical

cultural theory and critical social theory are intrinsically related. I think that is a

tremendously important insight that we shouldn’t lose. As far as Foucault is

concerned, I’ve never understood why people think Foucault had a theory of

subjectivity- there is no real subjectivity in Foucault. Moreover, Foucault certainly

did not account theoretically for the possibility of his own theory. That is, like

structuralism, post structuralism fails in terms of the issue of self-reflexivity. Of

course, those who adhere to such an approach will deny that’s even an important

question. For me, however, the absence of self-reflexivity renders the theoryincoherent. I find it unfortunate that poststructuralism has spread in Germany as

well. In France, at least, one could argue that the dominant Marxism known was the

Marxism of the French Communist Party, which was, possibly, the most orthodox

party in the West. And, as far as I know, that’s where Foucault learned his Marx.



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S: Yes. I think some of the more inadequate aspects of Foucault are that he can’t

really account for the big historical changes and transformations he treats in his

writings.

Moishe Postone : There is not. I agree completely with you. Therefore, I’m much

more sympathetic to Adorno and Lukács. However, what I was trying to point

toward, also with my work on anti-Semitism, was an attempt to appropriate their

crucial insights about the interrelatedness of subjective forms and objective forms,

but to do so within a framework that rethought the nature of the objective forms

themselves. I wanted to appropriate the insights of Lukács and Adorno and yet put

them on a different footing on the basis of a different reading of Marx. Does that

make sense?

S: Yes.

Moishe Postone : You raised something that I want to come back to, although it will

take us a little away from questions of subjectivity, Foucault, and Adorno. You

mentioned, with regard to Foucault, that he can’t explain historical change. I find

that the question of history is one of the most performatively self-contradictory

aspects of Foucault’s thought. On the one hand, he claims that history is contingent,

which is why he uses the word genealogy. Nevertheless, he writes book after book

that indicates a massive transformation occurring at roughly the main time, duringthe early modern period of European history. Nevertheless, he does not

problematize the transformations he outlines. So what he says he is going to do and

what he does are two very different things. For me, one of the central arguments of

Marx’s analysis is that what truly distinguishes capitalism is that it has an intrinsic



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historical dynamic. This is one of the reasons I disagree with those who focus too

much on circulation, which is, arguably, what Heinrich also does. It loses sight of

capitalism’s non-teleological, complex, directional dynamic. Marx, in his mature

works, renders historically specific, not just categories like value and labor, but

history itself, in the sense of an intrinsic directional dynamic. If history, understood

as such a dynamic, is a historically specific feature of capitalism, it no longer applies

to the human species as a whole or to all societies, only to capitalism. But that

signifies that you no longer can take that dynamic for granted and, on that basis,

continue to argue questions of free will and determinism -- theological arguments

that are dressed up in the modern language of agency and structure. Rather, the

first question should be how can we explain, how can we ground, the extraordinary

dynamic of capital, a dynamic that generates a complex trajectory. It seems to me

that post-structuralism can’t come close to addressing such issues.

S: Yes, there is no theory of capitalism but rather structural descriptions of the

workings of different institutions, whether it’s the prison or the mental asylum that

control and dominate populations, but there’s no explanation those social

structures or institutions to the basic reality of capitalism at each particular

moment, since he seems to intervene at different moments in history, but there’s

never a theory of why that happens, or what it relates to.

Moishe Postone : Right. And that in part is because theories of capitalism remainimplicitly understood as theories of exploitation and theories of property and

theories of unequal distribution of power and wealth. And the historical dynamic of

capitalism is seen as being a metaphysical assumption that comes from philosophy,

from Hegel, but isn’t really part of the theory.



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S: Yes. That is a very interesting point. You bring up the question of wealth. I

understand perfectly the distinction between wealth and value. However, the

concern that emerges is about what kind of notion of political praxis would you

advance in light of this theorization, when wealth is still created, and wealth is still

unequally distributed. This does not take away from the theoretical understanding

or distinction between wealth and value, but there are implications for the

understanding of political praxis in your theoretical reflections. Would you

comment on that?

Moishe Postone : That’s a gigantic question, and I think it touches upon a gigantic

problem. I wish I had a very clear answer, which I don’t think I have. But here again

there is overlap between myself and Kurz. If one goes back forty years, one of the

tacit assumptions made by many identity movements that developed, for example,

around issues of race, and gender, was that the kind of economic growth that

characterized the post-war decades would just continue. To use an American

metaphor, there was an expanding pie, and different groups demanded their share.

Those demands were not only economic and, in that sense, objective, but also

subjective: groups demanded recognition. I think one of the ways to view the

ongoing crises of the last forty years is that it no longer is clear that wage labor is

growing. This has modified the effects and consequences of many identity

movements who find themselves involved in struggles for a pie that no longer is

growing and, at times, is even shrinking. I know there are people who think thatwage labor continues to expand, elsewhere -- in China, for example, in India and

Bangladesh—that the jobs lost here have simply been displaced, moved elsewhere.

This is partially true. My understanding, however, is that technological change has

played a much more important role, and that, even in China, the growth of wage



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labor has leveled off. The epoch of accumulation, entailing the ongoing expansion of

proletarian labor might be drawing to an end. And we don’t have imaginaries for

dealing with such a situation --- imaginaries in the sense of what another post-

capitalist society might look like, as well as in the sense of the politics required to

move in that direction. Earlier, it was conceptually easier to be a socialist in the

sense that the nature of the goal seemed relatively clear, that if we abolish private

property and had rational planning the result would be a much better society. And

it was thought that a radicalized working class would strive to realize that goal. At

issue were considerations such as the nature of extant power relations, and

questions as to how to help motivate workers to move in the direction of socialism.

If it is the case that capitalist society is coming into crisis today because its basis in

proletarian labor is being undermined, one is faced with very different problems.

And it raises the question of what it would mean to have a society no longer based

on labor. To use a not very good historical analogy: it used to be that the difference

between the Roman proletariat and the modern proletariat was that the modern

proletariat was a working class, unlike the Roman proletariat, who had to somehow

get by and who had to be pacified by bread and circuses. In a way, we’re entering a

situation where the proletariat is becoming more Roman, where superfluous work

is becoming structurally redefined as superfluous people. The precariat is one

example; I think gigantic slums in much of the world is another example. Perhaps

some anthropologist, studying people who eke out a living by picking garbage in

the dumps of Rio, might show us how such people manage to survive and also show

us that they have their own systems of meaning. But that sidesteps the majorquestion of the crisis of working society, for which we don’t have an answer.

S: Yes, I think for one in every three persons in the world live in a slum, I mean, live

in a marginal community…



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Moishe Postone : I’m surprised it’s that low. I would have expected that it’s even

higher than that.

S: So that’s that surplus population that cannot be incorporated into the production

process, although, you know, anthropologists have a way of connecting these

populations. I mean in Brazil in particular the connection between the slums and

the city is dynamic, people live in the slums but they work in the hotel service

industry, so the economies are tied in very particular ways…

Moishe Postone : Yes. They are. Nevertheless, the situation is not like that in

Europe during an earlier phase of capitalism, when surplus population from the

land either went abroad or was absorbed into expanded factories. We do, of course,

have mass migration today, but it’s of a very different kind. I think the xenophobic

reactions to migrants on the part of so many people in metropolitan countries is,

among other things, not only a sign that these populations are hopelessly racist, but

is also a sign that they’re threatened precisely because they sense that there no

longer is the sort of expansion of the recent past.

S: Yes there isn’t, if we look at unemployment figures in Spain for example, you

know close 45% of people between 18 and 25 are unemployed…

Moishe Postone : Yes, the Spanish figures are unbelievable.

S: …or a 23% general unemployment rate among working adults. How these

populations get reincorporated into a market economy in Spain remains a central

aspect of the crisis. If we look at the different European economies, Germany



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included, we see a process of disciplining populations into becoming a thousand

euro a month earners or to accept working for German programs at the rate of an

euro an hour while you collect unemployment, for example - these are all ways of

impoverishing populations who can no longer be incorporated into the labor force

in the ways in which they were when there was growth. If we look at the European

population in general, not just into the very concrete macroeconomic analysis of

the situation, we could think that the situation in Europe is in a way a small

laboratory, which confirms your own understanding of capitalism, in the sense that

value cannot continue to be valorized in the way it once was.

Moishe Postone : On that level, yes, absolutely. It’s complicated on the surface by

the very peculiar structure of national sovereignty and common currency in

Europe. But underneath it, I think you’re right. And although the newspapers, at

least in the United States, only refer to the prosperous north and the declining

south, there is a crisis in Germany as well, for example, for older people. The

cutbacks in Germany began decades ago with education. Education had been

expanded enormously in the late sixties – the same thing happened in France -- and

then, with the crisis of the early 1970s, they stopped funding it. That was one of the

first things they cut, so that they could continue funding other social programs. But

recently the turn has been much more severe; there are many Germans who are

facing an old age of penury, which I think was unthinkable a generation ago.

S: Yes. Pension plans are being privatized so there will not be enough money, thereis no minimum wage in Germany, only in a few industrial different sectors they

have minimum wages, everything else is negotiated, so this sort of neoliberal

discipline that is being imposed by the troika now in other European countries,

happened in Germany willingly ten years ago. It is a country that has been



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subjected to those kinds of policies, which brings me to what you were talking

about before in terms of politics and economics in Europe and sovereignty and

nations where there is a subsumption of the political to the economic in Europe.

Governments no longer represent the will of the people in strictly formal terms, in

terms of their democracy definition, but they represent the interest of finance

capital, and in the last months, the crisis that has unfolded regarding the European

Central Bank and the buying of bonds in terms of making them general European

bonds that collectivize the debt, this is also a process of this moment of capitalism

in Europe, where there is not only an economic crisis but a political crisis in which

the political and the models of social democracy that Europe has enjoyed for the

last sixty years are being completely undermined by this subsumption. And I don’t

know if you want to say something about that.

Moishe Postone : I agree with you. However, I think one of the problems is that

configuration of capitalism based on the primacy of the political turns out to have

been a phase of capitalism, rather than a long-term reformist solution. It lasted

longer in Europe than elsewhere, but I doubt whether we can return to that

configuration. At its high point, that configuration was tied to very strong national

organizations of economies that related to one another internationally. Today,

however, capital is increasingly supranational rather than international. It is above

the level of the nation-state. The nation state as a socio-economic-political unit has

become transformed and, as a national unit, has been in decline -- certainly in the

United States and in the UK -- for decades. That crisis is now hitting Europe inincreasingly manifest ways. It hit Europe later, because social democracy was that

much stronger in Europe. But even earlier, social democracy was being hollowed

out in ways that weren’t quite as evident as in the programs of Thatcher and

Reagan. But the crisis seems to be overtly general now and Europe seems to be



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rise of the post-liberal state, of state capitalism, the sphere of circulation becomes

less and less important. As a horizontal sphere, it is superseded by a vertical one, a

command economy, which becomes fused with the sphere of production, and

mediates itself. The Jews were associated with that sphere of circulation, which is

being superseded. I think there is an element of truth in their approach -- and I

hope I’m not being unfair -- that is related to Hannah Arendt’s approach: the Jews

became superfluous, and as they became superfluous, they increasingly became

vulnerable and the object of hate. This approach basically takes Tocqueville’s

account of the aristocracy and French Revolution and applies it to the Jews rather

than the nobility. Although I appreciate the attempts by Horkheimer and Adorno to

relate anti-Semitism to capitalism, I tried to present it in a somewhat different way

by using Marx’s categories. I briefly analyzed the double character of the social

form Marx terms “commodity” and “capital”; they simultaneously are characterized

by an abstract dimension and a concrete dimension. This doubled character

appears externalized, as a material dimension (goods, labor) and as an abstract

dimension (money, the abstract imperatives and constraints of capital). Both

dimensions and their interactions are functions of the commodity and capital

forms, but this does not appear to be the case. The concrete dimension doesn’t

seem to be part of the mediation. It seems to be something natural and material

that is mediated by something else, by money, for example, by the abstract

dimension. The abstract dimension appears to be completely separable from the

material dimension although they are intrinsically related. On the basis of this

analysis I tried to explain how it was that, in anti-Semitic ideology, workers andindustrial capitalists are seen as being in the same category. Both of them are

considered “producers;” that is, they are on the concrete side of the equation. The

object of such critique, then, becomes the abstract dimension – money, finance

capital – which is considered parasitic on the concrete dimension. The Jews became



21

identified with the abstract dimension; they even are deemed responsible for it.

The reactionary ideal of the Volksgemeinschaft , of the healthy people’s community,

is that it can emerge if you get rid of the parasites, of the abstract dimension. In a

sense, the organic notion of the nation as well as of labor converge at this point. On

the basis of this analysis, I claimed that unlike many forms of racism and

xenophobia, anti-Semitism poses a danger for the Left, because it is apparently

anti-hegemonic. Ideas such as that Jews control and manipulate the world, indicate

that anti-Semitism is different from other forms of race hatred. Usually, racism is

directed against those who are deemed too concrete, not civilized enough, whereas

the Jews are “too civilized.” They’re abstract and sap the vitality of nations. Within

the framework of this form of reactionary anti-capitalism, the world could become

a healthy place if only one could get rid of the Jews. In other words, anti-Semitism is

tied to an apparently emancipatory ideal: it becomes a displaced form of

revolution. I think that’s what gives it great appeal and power. With this approach, I

tried to explain how one could possibly account for a program of complete

extermination. This is not a quantitative issue. The Nazis killed many people. For

example, they killed more Russians than Jews. But there was never a program to

kill all Russians. There were programs to kill as many Russian or Polish “leaders” as

possible, around whom resistance could crystallize. The rest were to be treated as

slaves. But the program with regard to the Jews was to exterminate everybody.

Whether they were labor slaves or not, ultimately they had to be exterminated. I

suggested this implied that the Jews must have been considered inordinately

dangerous, not inferior. My analysis of anti-Semitism, then, seeks to tie theprogram of extermination to a particular form of reactionary anti-capitalism.

S: Is there a relationship with the way in which the extermination was carried out?

I mean there has been a lot written about the mechanical and industrial way in



22

which the Jews were disposed of and exterminated. Is that in any way related to

your understanding of their personification of value? Or how does it relate to the

state of industrial capitalism at the time?

Moishe Postone : The extermination camps are often treated as perverse

institutions of capitalist production. I suggested they were its obverse. If a capitalist

factory is a site for the production of value (the abstract) that, however, necessarily

has to appear in concrete form, the camps like Auschwitz or Treblinka were “anti-

factories” – they were sites that sought to destroy the abstract and recover the

concrete.

S: I see.

Moishe Postone : They sought to extract whatever use value they could from the

Jews: gold from their mouths, their hair for mattresses, for example. They

attempted to eradicate the abstract, the numbered individuals, while mining their

concrete bodies for use-value. It should also be noted, however, that, although the

death camps were an extremely important part of the exterminating machine, they

were only one form the program took. In the East about two million Jews were shot

by the Einsatzgruppen. They were not sent to camps. Although these two forms of

killing are quite different -- the anti-capitalist factory and the killing fields, what

they have in common is the idea of complete extermination. And I have tried to

argue that there are important differences between mass murder andextermination; they require different explanations.

S: You mentioned earlier when talking about this, the danger for the left in terms of

understanding anti-Semitism and that historical moment, or its historical



23

specificity, as an anti-capitalist revolt so to speak. And in the current crisis, there

are a number of anti-systemic revolts, anti-capitalist revolts going on in the world,

and I wonder if you have any comments to make with regard to the rise of those

revolts and the relationship that they could have to xenophobia or to other

reactionary forms of ideology.

Moishe Postone : I think many of them are nationalist, of course, in ways that are

both xenophobic and anti-Semitic. The reason I am using the word “and” is that the

two are not identical. On the one hand, many are xenophobic, as expressed, for

example, by "Islamophobia". They’re xenophobic against the concrete other who is

entering “their space”, and in a sense, “polluting” society. The response is to raise

the walls, close the gates, keep them out. And at the same time, however, you have

variants that are also anti-Semitic in the sense that they are against mysterious

abstract forces that are undermining the nation. What makes it complicated is that,

sometimes, this takes the form of anti-Americanism. While the United States does

many things that are very bad, there’s a difference between having a grounded

critique of what America does or identifying America with global capital. They’re

not the same. And it’s become easy for a certain kind of reactionary anti-

globalization to simply identify America, or sometimes it is America and the Jews,

with globalization. I think this is true also of some forms of third-world nationalism

that I consider reactionary. I think the western Left, certainly the anti-Imperialist

Left, has been insensitive to this problem and has too frequently served to

legitimate reactionary regimes and movements as “progressive.”

S: I think in your analysis of anti-Semitism, by making the analysis of anti-Semitism

so grounded in the specific form of capitalism at a specific moment in time, it leaves

us with the question about the conditions that allow for the personification and



24

identification of the abstract value today with other groups, not just Jews. I guess

what I’m trying to say is, if I am faithful to the historicizing of your own

theorization in the 30s, how do I extrapolate to today? I mean, we couldn’t really

read anti-Semitism in the same way, granted there is no extermination project

going on, so that’s not being theorized today. But if the categories of discrimination

and xenophobia were insufficient to give an account of the extermination of the

Jews in Germany in the 30s, are they not useful categories today? How do we

recuperate some way of understanding the significant mechanisms that are

unfolding in Europe towards the personification and identification of minority

groups that are being targeted? How do we theorize xenophobia today?

Moishe Postone : I agree that xenophobia is a significant problem today and have

suggested that, in its current form, it is related to the general crisis of work-based

society. In general, I think competition (or perceived competition) especially for

jobs often has been an important factor in generating xenophobia. I also think,

however, that there is a resurgent anti-Semitism in the world today toward which

many – also on the Left – are indifferent or oblivious. I am suggesting, then, that we

should distinguish between xenophobia and anti-Semitism and be alert to both. I

don’t distinguish them because I think one is worse than the other. Both are bad,

but they are bad in different ways. Even in the 1920s and 1930s, during the tidal

wave of anti-Semitism in Europe, there were very strong xenophobic reactions, also

against Jews. This is not identical with anti-Semitism; I’m trying to distinguish the

two analytically. During this period nations began closing themselves off. TheUnited States, for example, which had welcomed immigrants for decades (which is

why there are so many millions of Italians, Eastern Europeans, and Jews in the

United States) closed access for such immigrants in 1923. This xenophobic and

racist reaction was one of the indirect conditions for the Holocaust: Jews could no



25

longer get out of Europe unless they were prestigious émigrés. At the same time,

especially in the successor states to the Hapsburg and Romanov empires in Central

and Eastern Europe, there were nationalist/xenophobic battles among Ukrainians,

Poles, and Jews, Czechs and Germans, White Russians, Poles, and Ukrainians, each

group demanding their own exclusive community. So, given this background

situation, massive ethnic cleansing was, in addition to the Holocaust, among the

consequences of WWII. It has largely been forgotten in the West that over 20

million people were ethnically cleansed in Central and Eastern Europe in 1945-

1946, to make these nations more homogeneous. Interwar Poland was less than

50% ethnically Polish; there were very large Jewish and Ukrainian minorities. The

Jews were killed during the war and millions of Ukrainians and Poles were driven

from one area to another, as were the Germans. So, this exceedingly bloody period

was characterized both by murderous anti-Semitism and nationalist xenophobia.

With all the differences between then and now, it seems to me that today we are

witnessing an increase in both xenophobia and anti-Semitism. As in the interwar

period, xenophobia itself should be internally differentiated. On the one hand, there

is European xenophobia which, like the American variant after World War I, blames

immigrants and foreigners for undermining the nation. On the other hand, what we

are witnessing in Syria and Iraq is very similar to struggles in interwar Poland,

Czechoslovakia and, more recent Yugoslavia. In these cases, successor states to

multi-ethnic and multi-religious empires (Hapsburg, Romanov, Ottoman) are torn

apart by nationalist xenophobia. On the other hand, there has been a great increase

in anti-Semitism, as expressed, for example, by the notion that the United States isin the hands of the Jews, both politically and economically, as well as in the spread

of forms of anti-Zionism that are essentially anti-Semitic. (Certainly not all forms of

anti-Zionism are anti-Semitic. This, however, does not obviate the fact that some

are indeed anti=Semitic.) In both cases, we are dealing with fetishized responses to



26

globalizing forces that seem to be beyond the control, not just of individuals, but

also of states and of parties.

S: This brings us back to the issue of the subsumption of the political to the

economic, where states serve the interests of finance capital, and they cease to

represent their populations and become political representatives of the interests of

capital.

Moishe Postone : I agree, but one of the many questions that we, as leftists, have to

understand is the demise of the Fordist-Keynesian synthesis in the West and the

command economies in the East. For a while it looked as if states had become the

states of their populations. We need to understand better what the limits of that

configuration were, because I do not think that we can return to it historically. A

great deal of literature in the 1950s and 1960s claimed that the basic social and

economic problems had been solved or were on their way to being solved; the key

had been found. This was spoken about differently in the West than in the

Communist world, but in both cases they were sure they had the key. If we don’t

understand the crisis of the 1970s, which undermined that configuration in both

East and West, we won’t understand what our options are now. I think we can

never go back to the United States in the decades following Roosevelt or Spain as

people dreamt it could be after Franco, or social-democratic Germany, for that

matter. But I am not a prophet, I can only call for more theoretical-political work.

S: Don’t you think that materialist theories of the state – I am thinking here of

Poulantzas, for example, were rethinking the state not as just a set of institutions

that stand autonomous from society, but as some kind of social relation needs to be

rethought again?



27

Moishe Postone : Yes, but I think that, retrospectively, there are some things that

can be seen more clearly than during the 1970s. What became clear in terms of the

long-range responses of states to the crises of the 1970s is that if they have to

choose between capital accumulation and the social welfare of their populations,

they will choose capital accumulation because otherwise they are going to collapse.

I think that we have to continue rethinking the relationship between capital and

the state. What the 1970s made very clear is that the state is not an independent

entity.

S : Exactly. So what forms, I know you’re not a prophet, but what forms of political

imagination or political praxis do you envision, do you wish for, or would you put

your bets on in terms of…

Moishe Postone : Well I wouldn’t put my bets on any, to be honest. But there are

many different small initiatives, trying various approaches, that are important

because we are going to have to discover through people’s initiatives what works,

what unexpected limits are reached, etc. -- which then can provide us with ideas of

where we can go. One possibility, and this is going to sound very traditional, is that

even though there is a crisis of the laboring society, we can only really begin to

work out the contours of future possibilities by means of organizations that try to

move against or at least seek to diminish the enormous global discrepancies in

labor conditions, labor laws, and labor remuneration. China and Vietnam come tomind, as do places like Bangladesh that basically has become a huge factory for the

production of clothes for the West under terrible conditions. And here we see how

nationalist ideologies that might have had a progressive dimension a generation

ago have become increasingly reactionary. The insistence on cultural specificity has



28

been used by Third-World elites to justify political repression and cover up

extreme levels of exploitation. It could be that I’m right or Kurz is right about the

end of the laboring society, but nevertheless the only way we will know is through

labor organizing itself. One promising beginning in the United States in the 1990s,

for example, was the anti-sweatshop movement, that highlighted working

conditions in various Third World countries. They would, for example, expose

conditions in factories producing for the American athletic shoe company, Nike,

which were located in Indonesia and Vietnam. The movement avoided falling into a

Cold War dichotomy according to which conditions in Indonesia were bad and

those in Vietnam were either ignored or justified. I think we have to recover a kind

of internationalism that was lost with World War I. The putative recovery of

Internationalism with the Third International was ideological; internationalism

really meant siding with one camp, which is different than internationalism. One

camp became immune from criticism, which had disastrous effects on critical

politics and thought. I think that some forms of anti-Imperialism recapitulate this

and have become ideologies of legitimation for repressive regimes and reactionary

movements. Among the things we have to fight against are forms of anti-

Imperialism that are becoming reactionary; we have to fight against them in the

name of progressive internationalism. I also think that we have to do so within a

framework that rethinks labor. I don’t think we can glorify the miserable condition

of the precariat, and it seems to me that the way people try to create new

communities, in and of themselves that isn’t going to be the solution. Nevertheless

it could begin to give us insight into how things could be different. I don’t knowwhat it is like in Spain with regard to countercultural ideas, but in the United States,

certainly in the 1960s, along with the rise of an overtly political New Left, there

were also people who experimented with new forms of living. But for the most part



29

their imaginary was a new form of living that separated itself from society. It

wasn’t a model for the rest of society; it didn’t try to be.

S: Yes, what I think is interesting with regard to Spain in terms of this new

imaginary that is different from the 60s, let’s say, industrialized countries like the

United States, is that there is a self-reflexive awareness about the limits of labor

and this is not just because people have read, let’s say Manifest gegen die Arbeit , or

you, or Kurz, but I think people in Spain, for example, have recourse to some of the

anarchist traditions and other forms of political praxis. In Spain today there are

barter communities, alternative currencies – dozens of alternative currencies that

function in communities – time banks, where unemployed people have come

together, start a bank of hours, people deposit hours. So if you grow vegetables, in

exchange, I take care of your elderly parents, whereby all activities are equal in the

exchange process. They are not private communes like they were in Germany or

they were in the United States, but they really function in the realm of the social, at

a local level, in small cities. These are conjectural forms of imagining a world

without money, a world without labor, because of the conditions where every 1 in

4 Spaniards is unemployed and they have to survive. Are these experimental forms

of living beyond labor?

Moishe Postone : Yes, I agree. For me, I hope that at least some people, looking at

these experiments, will also try to think of what might be viable on a larger scale.

Even if the world becomes divided into giant global blocks, which is a possibility (inwhich case we’ll be on the verge of World War III) we must attempt to find new

forms. Your examples show that the local level seems to be more promising. But

the real problem is how the local can be tied to the global. I don’t mean that as

criticism. I mean it, however, as a problem that should be kept in mind.



30

S: Yes. Moving back a little bit to the theoretical reflection, it has been a while since

your book came out in English; in Spain reading your work it’s a more recent

phenomenon work. Has there been time for you to reflect upon your contribution

to the reading of Marx since book was published? What would you see as the

theoretical challenges for the future, what would be some key elements towards

the reconstruction of a critical social theory on the basis of this new reading of

Marx?

Moishe Postone : One thing that I think is happening already, and I think it has to

happen more, is that we must focus more on capital and less on trying to find the

revolutionary subject. The project of locating a revolutionary subject first focused

on the working class and then became displaced by many onto various forms of

Third Worldism. I think that it would be important to leave that behind and try to

recover critical internationalism rather than the highly ideological forms of

nationalism that declare themselves internationalist. And this new internationalism

must try to deal with global capital in ways that soberly tries to understand

capital’s development and the possibilities it generates (even if it undermines the

possible realization of those possibilities) rather than simply demonize it. I think is

extremely important, because although the Left is very sensitive to xenophobia,

and correctly so, it is less sensitive to reactionary forms of anti-finance or anti-

American or anti-Semitic ideologies. Those three are related to one another. I think

such fetishized forms of opposition ultimately weaken the Left and move it in thedirection of a fusion with movements I regard as being reactionary. We should

expunge from our political unconscious the notion of socialism in one country or in

one post-colony that has masqueraded as internationalism, and recover a form of

real internationalism that also seeks to wrestle with the end of laboring society.



31

This is very modest on my part, because what I am trying to suggest is that the

theory gives us a guideline as to what we shouldn’t do more readily than it gives us

a guideline as to what we should do. But avoiding what we shouldn’t do is already

an important step in trying to wrestle with what we should do.

S: In terms of a cultural and social theory project for the left, we know the

limitations of the early Frankfurt School, but a tremendous part of their

contribution was to try to think mass culture and society in really concrete terms

by developing categories to come to terms with the social world under new

conditions. How do you see that being reconceptualized today, or what aspects of

the social-cultural theory of the Frankfurt School can be reactivated, if not with the

same vocabulary, with the same impetus and the same belief in the need to develop

a categorial apparatus to understand capitalist cultures and societies today?

Moishe Postone : When I reread the debate between Benjamin and Adorno on

mass culture in the 1930s, I find unfortunate the diremption between Benjamin’s

overly optimistic Brechtian understanding of mass culture as being the culture of

the masses and Adorno’s overly pessimistic reading of it entailing the total

subsumption of everything under value. People criticize Adorno because of his

attitude towards jazz and then mistakenly call him an elitist. I do think, however,

that there is a rational core to that criticism. What neither Adorno nor Benjamin

worked out was the double-sided character of mass culture. If, in the “Work of Art”

essay, Benjamin identified art form and class form in a manner that was tooaffirmative, Adorno’s brilliant analysis of the structuring of mass culture by the

commodity form understood that form in terms of its value dimension alone.

Marx’s analysis of the commodity and of capital, however, insists on their double-

sidedness. Capital isn’t only something negative that has befallen human beings,



32

but is at the same time enormously generative of possibilities that it itself

constrains. So it’s both very generative and very deforming. Frequently, it is

difficult for us to keep both moments in our mind. Too frequently in recent decades

we have witnessed a split between those who hypostatize popular culture and

regard every television show as a site of resistance, and those who regard anything

that is mediated electronically as being yet another example of domination. Yet, it

seems to me that we are going to have to try to understand the double sidedness of,

for example, the Internet. Again you either have people who hypostatize it as being

decentered and truly democratic, with no one controlling it – the harbinger of an

emergent global civil society, and those who point out that everything is extremely

fractured, that there is no common discourse, that it is an echo chamber, and that

increasingly it is commercialized and used by corporations for their own ends. Our

task, in this case, is to analyze the emancipatory potential of these new forms of

electronic communication while, at the same time, uncovering the ways in which

they are not emancipatory. On that basis, we could consider if it were possible to

appropriate that emancipatory potential in ways that might separate it from its

extant form. The problem with capital is that it is double-sided. I think we have a

great deal of difficulty grasping it as both. But it seems to me that if we want to

know what the possibilities of the present really are, it has to be on the basis of the

present. The quasi-anarchists collectives or institutions in Spain that are springing

up that you mentioned can be regarded as signs of the growing superfluity of a lot

of people and, at the same time, as attempts by people to think beyond the present.

They are both at the same time. They can’t be glorified as an alternative tocapitalism on the one hand; neither, however, should they simply be dismissed as a

symptom of capitalism.



S: I agree with you, and I think it brings us to that central contribution of the

double-sided character of the commodity that you so well elaborate in your book,

and that if we were to extrapolate, perhaps this double-sided character of the

commodity and of capital to our own cultural and social analysis maybe we can

start somewhere. It has been wonderful to have the opportunity to be in

conversation with you. Is there anything else you’d like to add?

Moishe Postone : Not that I can think of offhand. Such conversations are always

only beginnings. But it is good if they are beginnings. I thank you for this.

in conversation with moishe postone silvia l lopez 2012

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