Moishe Postone’s Deepened Interpretation of Marx’s Value Theory: Capital

Abstract

In this chapter, Rockwell considers Moishe Postone’s affirmation of the contemporary relevance of Marx’s value theory as an immanent critique of Marcuse’s analysis of Capital. Postone elaborates the implications of the temporal categories Marx introduces in the earliest pages of Capital. Marx’s concept of socially necessary labor time is a category of the social totality, and Postone determines totality as such as specific to capitalism. Postone emphasizes Marx’s immanent presentation of forms, abstract to concrete, from commodity, through money, to capital. Appreciation of relative surplus value, the trajectory of production, from simple cooperation, through manufacturing, to machinery and large-scale industry, affords a view of post-capitalist society as an appropriation of historical time, or the possibility of controlling one’s labor instead of being controlled by it.