Against the Transhistorical

Both orthodox political economy and its so-called heterodox varieties have almost universally failed to properly grasp Marx’s theory of value; in other words, they have almost universally understood it incorrectly. Aside from some notable exceptions within Marxist scholarship itself, value (Wert) has been treated as if it were an economic category analyzable on classical political economy’s own terms, rather than as the historically distinct and logically necessary form of social mediation, the critique of which requires the displacement of political economy’s standpoint itself. This is not simply an error but rather a symptom of a categorical confusion: confusing the historically contingent with the transhistorical, naturalizing capitalist forms of social mediation as if they were necessary conditions for any social form of reproduction whatsoever. Wertform (value-form) is the historically specific social form through which social mediations of the metabolism (Stoffwechsel) between humans and nature takes place. Far from being simply a form that facilitates price-setting or surplus expropriation, for example, the value-form - as the confusingly abstract and awkward text of Marx’s first chapters of Capital makes painstakingly clear - is a distinctively social form. From this it follows that value cannot be treated as if it were transhistorical, as if it were part of the fabric of every society that expends labor and exchanges commodities. To do so would be to naturalize it, and Marx’s method was one of immanent critique, of which it was designed to subvert.

It is against this backdrop of theoretical ossification that the intervention of Moishe Postone - elaborated with systematic rigor in Time, Labor, and Social Domination (1993) - really has its full critical impact. Postone’s central and most provocative claim is essentially a double one: first, that the standard reading of Marx - what Postone calls ‘traditional Marxism’ - distorts the nature of value by considering it as a category representing the exploitation of a transhistorically constructed labouring subject by capital, rather than as a form through which labour itself, as a socially mediating activity, forms the special domination typical of capitalist modernity; and second, that the proper target of Marxian critique is not the bourgeois distribution of labour’s fruits - the unequal allocation of surplus value - but labour itself in so far as it operates, under capitalism, as the primary medium of social synthesis, the mechanism through which individuals are linked to an ever-expanding and even more autonomous social totality. This reformulation brings consequences of the most fundamental kind: it displaces labour from its traditionally affirmative place within emancipatory discourse and redefines it as a historically specific and ultimately fleeting form of social mediation whose abolition, rather than its liberation or “realization”, forms the true horizon of emancipatory possibility.

The present essay(s) is/are going to rebuild Postone’s theoretical intervention over four main axes: (1) a recapitulation of the value-form problematic as it occurs in classical political economy and in the orthodox Marxist tradition, with special attention given to the limits inherent in dealing with value as a price-determining or distributional category; (2) an exposition of Postone’s reframing of value as a historically specific form of social mediation, attending carefully to his account of abstract labor, the reversal of the subject-object relation and the temporal logic of capitalist domination itself; (3) an analysis of the critical-theoretical implications of Postone’s reframing - especially those as they bear on the question of what one should negate in any adequate emancipatory politics; and (4) an assessment of the methodological and political stakes of the Postonean intervention itself within the broader field of contemporary Marxian theory.

Classical political economy, from Smith through Ricardo, was primarily concerned with determining the exchange value itself - and its working method was to explain prices by referring to the labor time actually present in commodities - a method that, despite having some analytical advantages within its own context, continually abstracted from the very specifically social form in which labor presented itself as a value-creating force. Ricardo’s labor theory of value particularly dealt with the magnitude of value as the main subject of theoretical attention, while relegating the question of the form of value - the question of why labor appears as value itself, why the products of labor take on the commodity form - to the status of a self-evident presupposition rather than a theoretical problem requiring immanent explanation. This Ricardian legacy was passed on, largely unexamined, into the dominant strands of the Marxist tradition, producing a theoretical framework within which the primary opposition of capitalism was seen as the opposition between the bourgeoisie - which appropriates surplus value - and the proletariat - which produces it; a framework in which value itself remained, at its deepest level, a transhistorical category indicating the expenditure of human labor itself, with capitalism distinct from other modes of production mainly because of its particular distribution of those products of labor itself.

Marx’s very own analysis in Capital, however, is determined by a systematic divergence from the Ricardian problematic - one that the orthodox tradition has persistently failed to appreciate in all its depth. The category of abstract labor (abstrakte Arbeit) - which isn’t, as is quite commonly supposed, merely a conceptual abstraction carried out by the theorist, but a real abstraction (reale Abstraktion, in Alfred Sohn-Rethel’s formulation) executed within the exchange process itself - marks the point at which Marx’s analysis decisively surpasses that of classical political economy; because abstract labor isn’t merely labor regarded in abstraction from its concrete, use-value-creating specificity, but labor to the extent it has been rendered equivalent and commensurable through the social process of exchange, labor whose expenditure is confirmed not by the immediate gratification of need itself but by its recognition within a system of generalized commodity exchange. Commodity fetishism (Warenfetischismus), accordingly, doesn’t signify a mere ideological mystification superimposed upon a transparent social reality; it signifies, rather, the real and objective inversion whereby social relations between persons take on the form of relations between things - an inversion which isn’t dependent on false consciousness but is structurally produced by the commodity-form itself. The value-form, in this light, is not an economic category augmented by ideological distortion; it is a social form that organizes the totality of social reproduction in a manner that is structurally opaque to its very participants themselves.

Postone’s key contribution lies in insisting that the value-form really should be seen as more than just a part of the economic “base” on which cultural and political “superstructures” are built - but as the basic shape of social mediation itself under capitalism - the way through which the work of individuals is socially combined and through which the entire fabric of social life is structured and reproduced. The base-and-superstructure dichotomy - which has served as a major framework for the Marxist tradition - is, from Postone’s point of view, a sign of the very theoretical confusion he wants to overcome; it implies a split between “the economic” and other areas of society that is itself a historically specific outcome of capitalist modernity - a split that critical theory needs to explain rather than repeat. Value, according to Postone, is the form in which all the work of society - what Marx calls gesellschaftlich notwendige Arbeit (socially necessary labor) - is spread around and managed; and the most important feature of this form is that it acts behind the scenes of social agents, as a very quiet and almost objective pressure that gets imposed upon individuals not directly through politics or law but through the hidden coercion of market relationships. As value mediates the reproduction of society, it establishes a form of control that is, paradoxically, quite impersonal and without a subject: no individual capitalist, no class, controls the system overall; the system controls its own participants itself.

Central to Postone’s reconstruction is the notion of what he refers to as the ‘reversal of the subject-object relation’ - a formulation quite heavily influenced by the Hegelian logic of Umkehrung (inversion) and the Marxian account of capital as ‘value in motion’ (sich verwertender Wert). Under capitalism, quite to the contrary, the situation is perfectly inverted: labor - or rather, abstract labor crystallized into value - really becomes the active subject of the social process, while actual living labor, the concrete activity of real human individuals, gets reduced to the status of an object, a mere carrier (Träger) of value-creation. Capital, in Marx’s formulation, is ‘dead labour that, vampirically, lives only by sucking living labour’, and this very image of lifeless autonomy captures something quite fundamental about the Postonean account: value, when put into motion as capital, develops an independence from the plans and desires of any specific agent and subjects the entire social realm to its very own reproductive logic - the logic of accumulation, of the growth of surplus-value (Mehrwert), of what Marx calls the Verwertungsprozess (valorization process).

In opposition to the transhistoricalising tendency which will treat labor as a permanent and universal medium of human self-realisation (a tendency evident not only in orthodox Marxism but also in certain strands of philosophical anthropology), Postone insists very forcefully on the radically historically specific nature of the capitalist social form itself. The mediation of social life through value is not the necessary outcome of any imaginable mode of organised social production - it’s rather the contingent and historically limited result of a specific set of social relations - relations in which labor power has become a commodity, in which the products of labor circulate as commodities and in which the reproduction of social life is subordinated to the imperative of valorisation. This insistence on historical specificity is not simply a methodological nicety - it’s the condition of possibility of a truly immanent critique: only in so far as capitalist social forms are grasped as historically specific - as what Hegel would call ‘determinate negation’ - can they be seen as genuinely transformable, open to ‘supersession’ rather than simply to reform.