On 27-Oct-09, at 7:52 PM, Mike Beggs wrote:
> People here might be interested that the University of Tokyo Center
> for Philosophy has just published a little book of Moishe Postone's
> recent lecture series online.
>
> http://utcp.c.u-tokyo.ac.jp/publications/2009/06/history_and_heteronomy_critica/index_en.php
>
> It's been billed as "easier than reading Time, Labour and Social
> Domination..." (http://leniency.blogspot.com/2009/10/postone-online.html
> )
>
As I've pointed out before (e.g. http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/pipermail/lbo-talk/Week-of-Mon-20090223/003034.html) , Postone is blind to the idea of "dialectic" as "the higher dialectic of the conception" and thus to the fact that Capital is an analysis of capitalism in terms of this "higher dialectic", i.e to the fact that the analysis embodies the following ideas:
“Reason has always existed, but not always in a reasonable form. The critic can therefore start out from any form of theoretical and practical consciousness and from the forms peculiar to existing reality develop the true reality as its obligation and its final goal." http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1843/letters/43_09.htm
The starting point of Capital is the claim that:
"The wealth of those societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails, presents itself as 'an immense accumulation of commodities,' its unit being a single commodity. Our investigation must therefore begin with the analysis of a commodity."
In particular, its starting point as a "critique of political economy" is classical political economy's treatment of the exchange value of a "commodity" as objectified "labour", Marx's critical appropriation of the idea including his own treatment of "wage labour" as a real "abstraction" in the sense specified in the passage from the Grundrisse text on "the method of political economy", i.e. treated as an "abstraction" that is only real within social relations consistent with the degree of "integral development" constituting the "labour" of those whose relations they are as the historically specific "labour" of "civilized people who apply themselves to everything."
These capitalist forms of "wealth" and "labour" are forms of "estrangement", where "estrangement" has the developmental meaning embodying "the higher dialectic of the conception" that Marx also credits to Hegel:
"The outstanding achievement of Hegel’s Phänomenologie and of its final outcome, the dialectic of negativity as the moving and generating principle, is thus first that Hegel conceives the self- creation of man as a process, conceives objectification as loss of the object, as alienation and as transcendence of this alienation; that he thus grasps the essence of labour and comprehends objective man – true, because real man – as the outcome of man’s own labour. The real, active orientation of man to himself as a species-being, or his manifestation as a real species-being (i.e., as a human being), is only possible if he really brings out all his species-powers – something which in turn is only possible through the cooperative action of all of mankind, only as the result of history – and treats these powers as objects: and this, to begin with, is again only possible in the form of estrangement." http://www.marx.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/hegel.htm
Thus "wealth" as "an immense collection of commodities" constitutes the "estrangement" of the capitalist that identifies the motives of the capitalist as "passions" in Hegel's "higher dialectic of the conception" sense, i.e. in the sense that "produces out of this negative a positive content and result".
"The self-valorization of capital - the creation of surplus-value - is therefore the determining, dominating and overriding purpose of the capitalist; it is the absolute motive and content of his activity. And in fact it is no more than the rationalized motive and aim of the hoarder - a highly impoverished and abstract content which makes it plain that the capitalist is just as enslaved by the relationships of capitalism as is his opposite pole, the worker, albeit in a quite different manner." ("Results of the Immediate Process of Production" 1863-1866 Marx, Appendix to Capital, vol. I, Penguin ed., pp. 989-90)
This Hegelian sense is specified in the following passage from the Grundrisse (the work on which Postone bases his own interpretation) connecting both this "estranged" concept of "wealth" and the "estrangement" that constitutes wage-labour with the development of the true "wealth" from which both are "estranged", the true wealth realized in "the rich individuality which is as all-sided in its production as in its consumption, and whose labour also therefore appears no longer as labour, but as the full development of activity itself, in which natural necessity in its direct form has disappeared; because a historically created need has taken the place of the natural one":
"Surplus value in general is value in excess of the equivalent. The equivalent, by definition, is only the identity of value with itself. Hence surplus value can never sprout out of the equivalent; nor can it do so originally out of circulation; it has to arise from the production process of capital itself. The matter can also be expressed in this way: if the worker needs only half a working day in order to live a whole day, then, in order to keep alive as a worker, he needs to work only half a day. The second half of the labour day is forced labour; surplus-labour. What appears as surplus value on capital's side appears identically on the worker's side as surplus labour in excess of his requirements as worker, hence in excess of his immediate requirements for keeping himself alive. The great historic quality of capital is to create this surplus labour, superfluous labour from the standpoint of mere use value, mere subsistence; and its historic destiny [Bestimmung] is fulfilled as soon as, on one side, there has been such a development of needs that surplus labour above and beyond necessity has itself become a general need arising out of individual needs themselves—and, on the other side, when the severe discipline of capital, acting on succeeding generations [Geschlechter], has developed general industriousness as the general property of the new species [Geschlecht]—and, finally, when the development of the productive powers of labour, which capital incessantly whips onward with its unlimited mania for wealth, and of the sole conditions in which this mania can be realized, have flourished to the stage where the possession and preservation of general wealth require a lesser labour time of society as a whole, and where the labouring society relates scientifically to the process of its progressive reproduction, its reproduction in a constantly greater abundance; hence where labour in which a human being does what a thing could do has ceased. Accordingly, capital and labour relate to each other here like money and commodity; the former is the general form of wealth, the other only the substance destined for immediate consumption. Capital's ceaseless striving towards the general form of wealth drives labour beyond the limits of its natural paltriness [Naturbedürftigkeit], and thus creates the material elements for the development of the rich individuality which is as all-sided in its production as in its consumption, and whose labour also therefore appears no longer as labour, but as the full development of activity itself, in which natural necessity in its direct form has disappeared; because a historically created need has taken the place of the natural one. This is why capital is productive; i.e. an essential relation for the development of the social productive forces. It ceases to exist as such only where the development of these productive forces themselves encounters its barrier in capital itself." http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/grundrisse/ch06.htm
This "rich individuality" embodies the true "wealth" elaborated elsewhere in the Grundrisse as follows:
"what is wealth other than the universality of individual needs, capacities, pleasures, productive forces etc., created through universal exchange? The full development of human mastery over the forces of nature, those of so-called nature as well as of humanity's own nature? The absolute working-out of his creative potentialities, with no presupposition other than the previous historic development, which makes this totality of development, i.e. the development of all human powers as such the end in itself, not as measured on a predetermined yardstick? Where he does not reproduce himself in one specificity, but produces his totality? Strives not to remain something he has become, but is in the absolute movement of becoming? In bourgeois economics -- and in the epoch of production to which it corresponds -- this complete working-out of the human content appears as a complete emptying-out, this universal objectification as total alienation, and the tearing-down of all limited, one-sided aims as sacrifice of the human end-in-itself to an entirely external end. This is why the childish world of antiquity appears on one side as loftier. On the other side, it really is loftier in all matters where closed shapes, forms and given limits are sought for. It is satisfaction from a limited standpoint; while the modern gives no satisfaction; or, where it appears satisfied with itself, it is vulgar." http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/grundrisse/ch09.htm
So it's Marx's appropriation of Hegel's "higher dialectic of the conception" that explains his claims that "the growing domination of capital" is
"the estrangement which is growing and therefore hastening to its annulment. This is indeed the only way in which that which exists affirms its opposite." http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/needs.htm
This 1844 claim is repeated in the following 1877 claim, both claims being elaborated in the Grundrisse passages I've just quoted:
“the historic tendency of [capitalist] production is summed up thus: That it itself begets its own negation with the inexorability which governs the metamorphoses of nature; that it has itself created the elements of a new economic order, by giving the greatest impulse at once to the productive forces of social labour and to the integral development of every individual producer.” (Letter from Marx to Editor of the Otyecestvenniye Zapisky 1877) http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1877/11/russia.htm
This "higher dialectic of the conception" is an essential aspect not only of Marx's analysis of capitalism but of his "historical materialist" understanding of history as a whole as "different" "dialectically" related "educational" "stages in the development of the human mind". i.e. as different stages in the development and actualization of "self-conscious reason". of "freedom". This development also "annuls" religious "self-estrangement".
"As soon as Jew and Christian recognize that their respective religions are no more than different stages in the development of the human mind, different snake skins cast off by history, and that man is the snake who sloughed them, the relation of Jew and Christian is no longer religious but is only a critical, scientific, and human relation. Science, then, constitutes their unity. But, contradictions in science are resolved by science itself." http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/jewish-question/
In its analysis both of history and of capitalism as a stage in this history it is "the business of science", as Marx understands it, "to bring the specific work of the reason, which is in the thing, to consciousness." http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/pr/printrod.htm
All this is missing from Postone's interpretation of Marx's relation to Hegel, an interpretation summarized in this lecture:
"The Subject and Social Theory: Marx and Lukács on Hegel" http://utcp.c.u-tokyo.ac.jp/publications/2009/06/history_and_heteronomy_critica/index_en.php
Ted