Moishe Postone and the Vicissitudes of Abstraction

T he only task more difficult than writing a talk on the central role of abstraction in Moishe Postone’s remarkable oeuvre is trying to condense its argument into a mere 20 minutes, producing, as it were, an abstract of its essential points. My sole consolation is that any attempt to do so performatively exemplifies the impoverishment of human life caused by the process of abstraction that Moishe so powerfully lamented. A great deal has been written about his critique of that process—indeed, the literature on his work is no less robust today than it was when his magnum opus, Time, Labor, and Social Domination, was published a quarter century ago—and I do not want to squander my limited time doing what Moishe himself was so often forced to do: painstakingly rehearse the main argument of that book. Instead, I want to focus on the ways in which he conceptualized the antidote to what he saw as the twin tyrannies of abstract labor and abstract time and then finish with a few remarks defending the virtues of a certain version of abstraction, which I think Moishe would have shared. Still, a few quick points do have to bemade about his larger argument for those in the audience who do not have it at their fingertips. Moishe challenged what he disparagingly called “traditional Marxism” by rejecting the idea that a critique of capitalism can be made from the point of view of a transhistorical or ontological notion of unalienated labor, labor that is concrete rather than abstract. Nor can it be criticized from the point of view of production per se as opposed to inequitable distribution. Instead, it requires understanding that the duality of concrete and abstract labor is a function of the capitalist mode of production itself, which also generates the contrasting categories of value and wealth. Value is the objectification or reification of abstracted labor, in which the qualitative specificity of producing objects for use is transformed into the quantitative fungibility of commodified labor power