Date: Mon, 10 Apr 1995 03:26:39 -0800 From: jones/bhandari <djones-AT-uclink.berkeley.edu> Subject: Postone In Ron's critique of Postone, he raises at least five different points which I list below. It must be immediately pointed out that Ron has seriously misrepresented Postone's treatment of Hegel; there is no attempt whatsoever to recover Marx's Hegelian idealist dimension (in the way for example that Raya Dunayevskaya attempts in Philosophy and Revolution). In demonstrating how capitalist social forms take on the attributes of the Hegelian Geist, Postone is able both (1) to show that what is rational in Hegel can be historically specified: "Marx implicitly argues that Hegel did grasp the abstract, contradictory social forms of capitalism, but *not in their historical specificity*" (81) (2)to clarify that Marx analyzed "capitalism in terms of a dialectic of development that is indeed independent of individual will and, therefore, presents itself as a logic. He investigates the unfolding of that dialectical logic as a real expression of alienated social relations which are constituted by practice and, yet, exist quasi-independently. He does not treat that logic as an illusion or simply as a consequence of insufficient knowledge on the part of people. As he points out, knowledge alone does not change the character of such relations. We shall see that such a logic of development, within the framework of his analysis, is ultimately a function of the social forms of capitalism and is not characteristic of human history as such." (76-77) This is very rich passage, which suggests some topics which Postone treats with care in different chapters, in particular (a)a historical specification of the Hegelian Geist the attributes of which capitalist and capitalist social relations only-- not the revolutionary class-- take on (note here Postone's emphasis on forms of social relations) (b)a demonstration that Marx's conception of capital, with its Hegelian form, is not reducible to a proof of exploitation (Postone's actual explanation of capital's "dialectic of labor and time" is of course not Hegelian but provided in an almost anthropological, and decidedly 'materialist', study of the peculiar social synthetic nature of labor itself in capitalist society, and (c) an analysis of the self-generation of alienated social relations by the practice of proletarian labor. Here are Ron's five criticisms, with mentions of where Postone deals with them. 1. Postone adds nothing new. Marx already explained the dynamic by which the value-creating substance, labor, is expelled from the production process. 2. Postone is only relevant insofar as he understands Marx's idealist/hegelian dimension. 3. At odds with Marx, Postone devalues the role of the proletariat in revolutionary change. 4. Postone only emphasizes the domination of the worker, ignoring the 40 civil war in production as the efficient cause of capital's search for relative surplus value; this logical category is itself only possible because of the transformation of reality by historical workers' struggles. 5. Postone critiques the ideal of freely associated labor, worked out in the Paris Commune, as a vestigal traditional Marxist belief in the possibility of conscious control of transparent social relations. Rakesh --- from list marxism-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu --- ------------------
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