Remembering Moishe Postone

Abstract

labor is the encompassing form of social mediation that dominates and informs the unequal and alienating social relations of capitalist society. Its abstract economizing logic has not only powered the contradictory dynamics of modern society but shaped its modes of thought, its conceptions of worth, and the textures of its social life. In Moishe’s striking metaphor, capitalism has put modern society on a temporal treadmill. Capitalism is engaged in an endless pursuit of value, the highly abstract form of wealth unique to it, which is derived solely from the exploitation of commodified labor. This pursuit requires capitalists to constantly invest inmore efficient means of production to stay abreast of their competitors, which means that labor— the unique source of value under capitalism—is progressively replaced by advanced machinery. This in turn progressively reduces the value yield of investments. Capitalism, returning to the treadmill metaphor, must run ever faster simply to remain in place. Thus, in capitalist societies, the output of material wealth grows, but labor becomes increasingly superfluous and the abundance of material wealth fails to improve general well-being. This interpretation of capitalism seems to describe aptly the dynamics of the increasingly unequal world that capitalism has wrought in the past several decades. But Moishe’s reinterpretation of Marx has implications beyond this stark description of capitalism’s material life. The shift from questions of property relations and class to questions about the abstraction of social life enriches Marxism’s implications for the analysis of cultural matters. Moishe’s reading of Marx has undoubtedly been influenced by his embrace of the cultural revolt that was so prominent during his and my youth and early adulthood in the 1960s and 1970s. Moishe’s thought has a definite resonance with the concerns of Herbert Marcuse’s cultural critique of capitalism and the desire for a cultural liberation from capitalism’s deadening clutches—a theme that was pervasive in the 1960s revolts. Moishe’s analysis of capitalism, with its focus on advancing abstraction and its contradictory effects, sheds a revealing light on modern history. The advances of mathematical and scientific thinking ever since the late sixteenth century, the rise of literacy and scholarly production, the growing sophistication of technology, the increasing freedom from determination by birth and tradition—all of these can be seen as consequences and instances of capitalism’s abstracting force. But capitalism’s abstract dynamic also has negative consequences—the repeated undermining of what passes for truth, the constant decay or obsolescence of skills and competences, the sense that one is constantly subject to forces beyond one’s control, the Remembering Moishe Postone | 163 disorientation and personal alienation that accompanies constant change. For better and for worse, in Marx and Engels’s splendid phrase from the Communist Manifesto, “all that is solid melts into air.” The essential dynamic of modernity pairs liberation with alienation and the celebration of freedom with the regret of loss. Moishe developed this perspective brilliantly in his discussions of anti-Semitism. He insisted on the specificity of modern anti-Semitism, which is distinct from the long-standing religious-based Christian prejudice against Jews. In the latter decades of the nineteenth century, a new concept of the Jew emerged: the Jew as embodying a power that is intangible, abstract, malign, unlimited, and universal, destructive of the health of other peoples and societies. Moishe argues that this abstract and conspiratorial conception of the Jews is, fundamentally, a fetishistic form of anticapitalism, one that blames the Jews for the abstract and uncontrollable features of capitalist development. Modern anti-Semitism artificially splits off “healthy” concrete industrial and agricultural labor, which the Nazis regarded as “German,” from destructive and out-of-control abstract financial capitalism, coded by the Nazis as “rootless,” “cosmopolitan,” and “Jewish.” Modern anti-Semitism, Moishe argues, must be understood as structured by the fundamentally dichotomous forms of appearance of modern capitalism, rooted in the duality of the commodity as, simultaneously, a concrete use value and an abstract exchange value. This analysis of anti-Semitism has obvious applications beyond the specific problem of Nazism and anti-Semitism. It helps to make sense of the various forms of populism and politicoreligious fundamentalism rife in the contemporary world of runaway neoliberal capitalism. Moishe accomplishedmuch but, like most important intellectuals, left much unfinished. There is hope that more completed or drafted essays, or texts of public lectures, might be found in Moishe’s extensive Nachlass. Moishe was a first-class academic pack rat who left behind three offices piled high with books and papers—a large study in the University of Chicago Library, a history department office, and an office at the 3CT, not to mention a study in his apartment. The process of sorting through these papers, so that they may eventually be placed in the University of Chicago archives, has already begun. We at Critical Historical Studies hope to be able to find among his papers something sufficiently finished to publish in the journal— 7. Marx and Engels, Manifesto, 37. 8. Postone, “Anti-Semitism,” 104–14, and “Holocaust,” 88–96. 9. Moishe himself has extended this form of analysis in a number of articles and chapters. A prominent recent example is Moishe Postone, “History and Helplessness: Mass Mobilization and Contemporary Forms of Anticapitalism,” Public Culture 18, no. 1 (2006): 93–110. 10. I use the apt German term for Moishe’s papers, Nachlass, which literally means “left behind.” 164 | CRITICAL HISTORICAL STUDIES FALL 2018 as a token of our appreciation of all that Moishe has meant for us as a friend, an inspiring intellectual presence, and a hardworking colleague on the journal. We grieve our loss, but we celebrate Moishe’s life and works and remain grateful for his friendship and his example. His influence, both personal and intellectual, will long outlast his lifetime.