The Historical Specificity of Capitalism, and Its Consequences: Reflections on Postone’s Reading of Marx and Marxism

Abstract

"Whether we think history has a definite logic of its own, or is merely the emergent quality of an irreducible contingency – it is usually taken as granted that it the same way in all its course. This is the case with some philosophers who argue against a conception of history as having an inherent logic. In this paper I present Postone’s critical reexamination of Marxian categories and argue that based on his project, we can criticize the presupposition of the “sameness” of history. For although there is no transhistorically valid “logic of history”, something like it is constituted by the functioning of capitalism’s elementary categories. Keywords: history, historical time, logic of history, capitalism, traditional Marxism, Moishe Postone"