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In conversation with Moishe Postone,

Conducted at the Carleton Idea Lab on September 12, 2012 via
Skype.

Silvia L. Lopez (S) : The first set of questions have to do with the Neue Marx Lektre.
Your book has been translated into Spain relatively recently (2007) and has gotten
a lot of attention, although in Europe, in general, the discussion of a new reading of
Marx has been going on since the sixties. Would you care to situate your own work
in relationship to the Neue Marx Lektre, especially in relation to the work of
contemporaries of yours, like Michael Heinrich or the late Robert Kurz? How do
you see your contribution as being different and what sets it apart from theirs?
What were the concrete social-political circumstances that led you to read and
theorize Marx anew?

Moishe Postone : When I first encountered Marx in the 1960s, I was very positively
impressed by the young Marx, the Marx of the theory of alienation. I regarded his
later critique of political economy as being hopelessly Victorian, a positivist tract
against the exploitation of workers. Like many people, including many Marxists, I
thought that Marx simply had worked out classical political economy more
consistently to demonstrate the existence and centrality of exploitation. While I
sympathized with this politically, it seemed to me to be too narrow to grasp the
central problems of contemporary society in a full and rich manner. I found the
work of the young Marx to be more adequate as a critique, but since I hadnt fully
understood the theory of alienation, regarded him mainly as a cultural critic. In that
sense, I viewed him as one of several important cultural critics, the difference being
that he was progressive while many of the others were conservative. What
fundamentally changed my understanding and proved to be a breakthrough,

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conceptually, was my encounter with the Grundrisse. I was particularly struck by
the well known sections of the manuscript that make it very clear that, for Marx,
the category of value is a historically specific category. That, for me, had enormous
implications. It was a key to understanding the mature Marx, a lever with which I
sought to lift the traditional understanding of Marx out of its moorings. I now
concluded that Marxs theory was fundamentally different than its traditional
Marxist understanding. For example, the idea that value is historically specific
meant, that overcoming capitalism did not mean the realization of value, as many
people had argued. Many understood value in a Left-Ricardian manner, that is, as a
category that demonstrates that the working class is the sole source of the creation
of social wealth (whereby wealth is understood transhistorically). A just society,
then, would be one in which that social wealth would belong to the class that
produces it. Such a society would represent the realization of value. However,
Marxs argument, that overcoming capitalism entails the abolition of value, implies
not only that the most fundamental issue is not that of the level remuneration of
workers for what they produce -- although this does remain an issue that certainly
has become significant again today -- but that it also cannot adequately be
conceptualized as the abolition of private ownership of the means of production.
Rather, the Grundrisse indicates that post-capitalism for Marx is post-proletarian.
This, however, renders the relation between reform and revolution even more
problematic. It no longer can be understood as one between reforms that seek to
ameliorate the condition of workers within capitalism and revolution that seeks to
overthrow capitalism by abolishing the bourgeoisie. Rather, the abolition of
capitalism requires as its sine qua non the abolition of proletarian labor. Reform,
then, must move in the direction of that goal. This opens up many new ways of
conceptualizing our current historical situation, including the rise of post-
proletarian movements. Nevertheless, it also poses serious political and conceptual

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difficulties, because there no longer is linear continuity between workers defending
their interests as workers and overcoming capitalism. The issue of the self-
abolition of the proletariat has become placed on the agenda historically. Yet, at the
same time, the gains achieved during the past 150 years by workers as workers are
being undermined.

S: Yes, if we think about the Frankfurt School in the 30s, they had already discarded
that third section of Lukcs' History and Class Consciousness about the agency of the
proletariat as a result of their confrontation with the social realities of their time
While they in someway retained Lukacs' enormous theoretical contribution about
rationalization and social mediation, they did not continue with the idea of the
proletariat as world historical subject. I would argue that already prior to the 60s,
and before the new readings of Marx came along, there was already a serious
question about the proletariat.

Moishe Postone : I agree. Members of the Frankfurt School sought to reformulate
the critical theory of capitalism so that it would be more adequate to the changed
conditions of the 20
th
century. Yet, I would argue, in trying to get beyond the
limitations of traditional Marxism, they retained some of its fundamental
presuppositions. As a result, although their approaches are crucially important,
they represent a kind of half-way house, theoretically. I argue that none of them,
really, accepted Lukcs notion of the proletariat as the world historical subject.
However, Horkheimer and Pollock, in trying to come to terms with the newer,
state-centric configuration of capitalism, continued to understand the most basic
contradiction of capitalism as one between the market and private property, on the
one hand, and labor, on the other. They then argued that the market and private
property had been, in effect, abolished with the rise of state capitalism. In other

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words, the contradiction of capitalism had been overcome. However, the
consequence was further domination rather than emancipation. Once that
happened, the universe became closed, for them. They no longer could see any sort
of contradiction pointing to capitalisms determinate negation. It seems to me that
the pessimism, on a fundamental level, of the Frankfurt School was not only a
function of the terrible circumstances that fascism was dominant in the 30s and
40s; nor was it simply a matter of losing faith in the proletariat. Rather, it was
rooted in an understanding of the changed structure of capitalism, as a result of
which, theoretically, they no longer could see a way forward. So they moved from
an analysis based on notions of immanent contradiction and determinate negation
to the argument that the object no longer could be completely grasped by the
subject, but exceeded its grasp. This understanding of the categories expressed
their view that they were not (or no longer) contradictory; the totality and the
categories grasping it had become one-dimensional. But this idea of an excess that
exceeds the concept, the idea of that which cannot be subsumed, doesnt point to
any idea of determinate negation. So I think that they had a theoretical foot in each
camp; they attempted to get beyond traditional Marxism, but remained trapped by
its presuppositions. I think theyre enormously important and Ive learned a great
deal from them as well as from Lukcs, but I think they never completely shed or
broke the conceptual shackles of understanding capitalism in terms of private
property in the market and or of understanding the commodity form as one-
dimensional, in terms of its value dimension alone. My work has sought to
reestablish the contradictory character of the categories without doing so in terms
of the market and private property.

S: That makes sense. They retained a concept of capitalism, while at the same time
they had understood that Lukcs formulations couldnt hold completely and that

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was in light, not only of the emergence of state capitalism, but also in light of the
rise of fascism and the rise of mass culture. In their social and cultural theory they
came to terms with that, but not in their theory of capitalism.

Moishe Postone : I think thats true. In some respects, Habermass work can be seen
as an attempt to get beyond what he also regarded as a theoretical dead end that
Critical Theory had reached. I dont agree with the path Habermas took in
attempting to get beyond that theoretical impasse. However, he was responding to
a real problem. Critical Theory was characterized by two central, interwoven,
dimensions. One was to come to grips theoretically with a changed world in ways
that were more adequate than orthodox Marxists attempts. At the same time they
emphasized Marxs idea that a critical theory has to be reflexive, that is, it has to be
able to account for the conditions of its own possibility. I think Habermas correctly
saw that, with its theoretical turn in the late 1930s, the Frankfurt School no longer
could account reflexively for critical theory itself. It could be argued that Habermas
developed his evolutionary theory of communicative action in order to overcome
the theoretical deficit and ground reflexivity. (I happen to think that returning to
Marx would have allowed for a more satisfactory response to this theoretical
dilemma.)

S: Yes, or perhaps he dispensed with it and transposed it to the realm of
intersubjective relations to avoid the apparent aporetic relationship between
subject and object that he perceived as a dead end. The ground shifted in
philosophically and in social-theoretical terms to simply an intersubjective realm. It
is in this sense that it is questionable to agree that he really was capable of
accounting for his own position. In some way, it was completely relative to that
intersubjective realm. The concept of ideology, for example, no longer played a role

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in Habermas because everything was based on that particular relationship between
subject and subject.

Moishe Postone: Im not saying that he successfully reestablished the grounds for
critique, but I think he was trying to do so with his notion of communicative action,
of intersubjectivity, as a realm separate from the systemic world. One of the many
problems I have with Habermas is with his insistence that critical theories before
him were bound to a subject-object paradigm, which he displaced with one that
focused on subject-subject relations. Marxs theory, however, as a theory of social
mediation, is also concerned with the subject-subject dimension. His category of
abstract labor refers to a historically unique function of labor in capitalism as a
socially mediating activity. When Marx argues that commodity-determined labor is
both abstract labor and concrete labor, he is arguing that labor in capitalism
uniquely mediates relations among people (abstract) as well as the relations of
people to nature (concrete). Habermass understanding of labor in Marxist theory,
however, misses this complex character, for it is a very orthodox Marxist
understanding of labor. Its really just concrete labor. (I am suggesting, in other
words, that returning to Marx would have allowed for a more satisfactory response
to the theoretical dilemma of reflexivity in critical theory.)

S: Eventually, he will have to develop some kind of normative grounds for it or all
his students will look for those normative grounds for a critical theoretical
intervention, but in terms of a theory of capitalism, he doesnt make progress in
any way.

Moishe Postone : No, not at all. Habermas doesnt help elucidate what happened in
the last four decades, since the crisis of the early 1970s. Interestingly enough, I

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think none of the major theorists of the 1970s and 1980s (who are very different
from one another) Habermas, Derrida, Foucault really illuminate what has
happened since the 1970s. It could be argued that they all were fixated on what we
could call Fordist capitalism, that is, on the large scale, bureaucratic structures
and technocratic ethos that characterized that configuration of capital. I find none
of them are illuminating today, which is one of the reasons its worthwhile to go
back to Marx.

S: Should we go back to the late 60s, early 70s, your discovery of the Grundrisse,
and your thinking about value?

Moishe Postone : My intention was to help reconstitute a critical theory of capitalist
modernity. As an aside, let me note that with regard to the issue of modernity, I
disagree with someone like Michael Heinrich, and agree much more with Lukcs,
Adorno, and Horkheimer. Capitalism isnt simply a mode of production, narrowly
understood, but structures a form of life that we sometimes characterize as
modernity, both in its subjective and objective dimensions. Habermas also doesnt
seem to grasp this. He seems to regard intersubjective communication in
modernity as self-grounding, while considering such communication in pre-
capitalist society as structural by political or religious forms. That is, he
understands the social molding of structures of communication when it takes the
overt forms it does in pre-capitalist societies. But he loses Marxs brilliant insight
that the form of social constitution in capitalism is such that what is socially
constituted -- for example, the individual doesnt appear social but, rather,
appears natural in the sense of being self-grounded and apparently
decontextualized. That is, Habermas doesnt see that its precisely the appearance of
being decontextualized that marks capitalist contextualization. In that sense,

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Habermass understanding of communicative rationality falls prey to a fetish form.
I think that Heinrich, too, views the critique of political economy much too
narrowly, as being just about production and economics. He loses the subjective,
cultural dimension of the categories. I think that is unsatisfying and unsatisfactory.
It is not the kind of theory we need.

S: Yes. In a way its almost a step back from Lukcs, who was already trying to read
Marx along with some kind of understanding of modernity. What about someone
like Robert Kurz? He became in the last decade someone who represented the
critique of value in similar ways to you, at least on a theoretical level. What do you
think about his contribution? And then there are a number of other people who
followed in his steps, in the groups Exit! and Krisis .

Moishe Postone : I think Kurzs untimely death is a serious loss. When I first
encountered the Krisis group I hadnt known about them and I dont think they had
known about me. And, yet, our work overlapped strongly, particularly with regard
to the critique of value and the critique of labor. I didnt fully agree with the way in
which Kurz posed the idea of crisis, that either one maintains capitalism will
collapse or one thinks that capitalism can continue indefinitely. I was not happy
with what I took to be a stark dichotomy. I also think my work is more open to, and
concerned with, issues of ideology, subjectivity, and consciousness than is Kurzs.

S: Could you elaborate a little bit on that?

Moishe Postone : Yes. I dont think his concern was as much to try to understand
changes in subjectivities that occur with changes in capital, with the ways one
could analyze them with reference to capital itself. I began to try to work this out

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with my work on anti-Semitism, where I tried to develop a non-functionalist theory
of that worldview in ways that are different from most so-called materialist
theories of subjectivity. My approach is much more related to Marxs theory of
fetish forms. Im not sure that the Krisis group, or Krisis and Exit!, are as concerned
with issues of subjectivity and fetish as I am, but this might be unfair on my part.
Certainly of all of the Neue Marx Lektre, there are the most parallels and overlaps
between their work and mine.

S: What was exciting for me as a Latin American when we discovered your work
and the work of Kurz and his followers, was that you were both independently
coming to similar conclusions about value in Marx. It corroborated for me a
rigorous reading of the late Marx on value. Orthodox Marxism was something that
was not going to contribute to that understanding. Perhaps it is not that these
readings of Marx coming out of Germany are not interested so much in ideology,
subjectivity, and consciousness, but I think the theoretical work is at such a level of
abstraction that there is really very little room to come up with a critical social
theory.


Moishe Postone : Im not sure about this. There was a period after I left Germany
that I had a much more developed sense of what was going on in Germany, so I am
not sure about this, but what could be the case is that many on the Left in Germany
who are most concerned with subjectivity remain fairly orthodox followers of the
Frankfurt school, particularly of Adorno. And I think that, like me, the Krisis and
Exit! people think that, for example, Adornos understanding of the critique of
political economy, as rich as it was, didnt go far enough. So it could be that within
the specific German context, they stayed further away from issues of subjectivity

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because the more orthodox Adorno followers were very concerned precisely with
that.

S: Yes, thats fair enough. Perhaps in some circles that was the case. But going back
to Adorno, in spite of its lateness or its historicity, Adorno was concerned with a
theory of subjectivity in mass culture.

Moishe Postone : Absolutely.

S: His attempts at coming up with a critical social theory very much resided at the
level of subjectivity, and there were reflections that departed very strongly from
more orthodox understandings of ideology and consciousness and emancipation
and in some way, maybe we can talk a little bit about not only just the limits of that
tradition, but where could it be taken from now. Would you go back to some of the
Frankfurt School, or is it something that is pretty much a historical moment in the
history of social and cultural theory and now we have to invent new ways of
understanding critical social theory? How do we think about subjectivity? My
impression from being in Germany recently is that many people on the left are very
much indebted to Foucault when it comes to thinking about subjectivity. I think
post-structuralism has made its way to Germany via the United States. I see very
little Frankfurt School left in Germany today. I am interested in hearing what you
think about these Adornian attempts that Habermas dismissed. In Theory of
Communicative Action he talks about the aporetic nature of Adornos standing with
regard to theorizing critical theory. It wasnt really even a critique of his
understanding of subjectivity. It was a critique basically of the incapacity to give an
account of his own position. But with that I think that the baby gets thrown out
with the bath water in terms of the attempts

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Moishe Postone : I agree completely, thats exactly the phrase that I was going to
use.

S: the attempts at on the ground working towards a critical social theory. So how
do you see your work, your rigorous work on Marx, related to the development of a
critical social theory today?

Moishe Postone : Im gathering from what youve just said that perhaps what I said
earlier could be subject to misunderstanding. I very much value the brilliant
attempts by people like Lukcs and Adorno -- with all of their differences -- to see
subjectivity as intrinsically related to social objectivity, as two dimensions of the
same thing, which cannot be grasped in terms of the base/superstructure model,
much less in terms of interests. For them, to use a different vocabulary, critical
cultural theory and critical social theory are intrinsically related. I think that is a
tremendously important insight that we shouldnt lose. As far as Foucault is
concerned, Ive never understood why people think Foucault had a theory of
subjectivity- there is no real subjectivity in Foucault. Moreover, Foucault certainly
did not account theoretically for the possibility of his own theory. That is, like
structuralism, post structuralism fails in terms of the issue of self-reflexivity. Of
course, those who adhere to such an approach will deny thats even an important
question. For me, however, the absence of self-reflexivity renders the theory
incoherent. I find it unfortunate that poststructuralism has spread in Germany as
well. In France, at least, one could argue that the dominant Marxism known was the
Marxism of the French Communist Party, which was, possibly, the most orthodox
party in the West. And, as far as I know, thats where Foucault learned his Marx.

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S: Yes. I think some of the more inadequate aspects of Foucault are that he cant
really account for the big historical changes and transformations he treats in his
writings.

Moishe Postone : There is not. I agree completely with you. Therefore, Im much
more sympathetic to Adorno and Lukcs. However, what I was trying to point
toward, also with my work on anti-Semitism, was an attempt to appropriate their
crucial insights about the interrelatedness of subjective forms and objective forms,
but to do so within a framework that rethought the nature of the objective forms
themselves. I wanted to appropriate the insights of Lukcs and Adorno and yet put
them on a different footing on the basis of a different reading of Marx. Does that
make sense?

S: Yes.

Moishe Postone : You raised something that I want to come back to, although it will
take us a little away from questions of subjectivity, Foucault, and Adorno. You
mentioned, with regard to Foucault, that he cant explain historical change. I find
that the question of history is one of the most performatively self-contradictory
aspects of Foucaults thought. On the one hand, he claims that history is contingent,
which is why he uses the word genealogy. Nevertheless, he writes book after book
that indicates a massive transformation occurring at roughly the main time, during
the early modern period of European history. Nevertheless, he does not
problematize the transformations he outlines. So what he says he is going to do and
what he does are two very different things. For me, one of the central arguments of
Marxs analysis is that what truly distinguishes capitalism is that it has an intrinsic

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historical dynamic. This is one of the reasons I disagree with those who focus too
much on circulation, which is, arguably, what Heinrich also does. It loses sight of
capitalisms non-teleological, complex, directional dynamic. Marx, in his mature
works, renders historically specific, not just categories like value and labor, but
history itself, in the sense of an intrinsic directional dynamic. If history, understood
as such a dynamic, is a historically specific feature of capitalism, it no longer applies
to the human species as a whole or to all societies, only to capitalism. But that
signifies that you no longer can take that dynamic for granted and, on that basis,
continue to argue questions of free will and determinism -- theological arguments
that are dressed up in the modern language of agency and structure. Rather, the
first question should be how can we explain, how can we ground, the extraordinary
dynamic of capital, a dynamic that generates a complex trajectory. It seems to me
that post-structuralism cant come close to addressing such issues.

S: Yes, there is no theory of capitalism but rather structural descriptions of the
workings of different institutions, whether its the prison or the mental asylum that
control and dominate populations, but theres no explanation those social
structures or institutions to the basic reality of capitalism at each particular
moment, since he seems to intervene at different moments in history, but theres
never a theory of why that happens, or what it relates to.


Moishe Postone : Right. And that in part is because theories of capitalism remain
implicitly understood as theories of exploitation and theories of property and
theories of unequal distribution of power and wealth. And the historical dynamic of
capitalism is seen as being a metaphysical assumption that comes from philosophy,
from Hegel, but isnt really part of the theory.

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S: Yes. That is a very interesting point. You bring up the question of wealth. I
understand perfectly the distinction between wealth and value. However, the
concern that emerges is about what kind of notion of political praxis would you
advance in light of this theorization, when wealth is still created, and wealth is still
unequally distributed. This does not take away from the theoretical understanding
or distinction between wealth and value, but there are implications for the
understanding of political praxis in your theoretical reflections. Would you
comment on that?

Moishe Postone : Thats a gigantic question, and I think it touches upon a gigantic
problem. I wish I had a very clear answer, which I dont think I have. But here again
there is overlap between myself and Kurz. If one goes back forty years, one of the
tacit assumptions made by many identity movements that developed, for example,
around issues of race, and gender, was that the kind of economic growth that
characterized the post-war decades would just continue. To use an American
metaphor, there was an expanding pie, and different groups demanded their share.
Those demands were not only economic and, in that sense, objective, but also
subjective: groups demanded recognition. I think one of the ways to view the
ongoing crises of the last forty years is that it no longer is clear that wage labor is
growing. This has modified the effects and consequences of many identity
movements who find themselves involved in struggles for a pie that no longer is
growing and, at times, is even shrinking. I know there are people who think that
wage labor continues to expand, elsewhere -- in China, for example, in India and
Bangladeshthat the jobs lost here have simply been displaced, moved elsewhere.
This is partially true. My understanding, however, is that technological change has
played a much more important role, and that, even in China, the growth of wage

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labor has leveled off. The epoch of accumulation, entailing the ongoing expansion of
proletarian labor might be drawing to an end. And we dont have imaginaries for
dealing with such a situation --- imaginaries in the sense of what another post-
capitalist society might look like, as well as in the sense of the politics required to
move in that direction. Earlier, it was conceptually easier to be a socialist in the
sense that the nature of the goal seemed relatively clear, that if we abolish private
property and had rational planning the result would be a much better society. And
it was thought that a radicalized working class would strive to realize that goal. At
issue were considerations such as the nature of extant power relations, and
questions as to how to help motivate workers to move in the direction of socialism.
If it is the case that capitalist society is coming into crisis today because its basis in
proletarian labor is being undermined, one is faced with very different problems.
And it raises the question of what it would mean to have a society no longer based
on labor. To use a not very good historical analogy: it used to be that the difference
between the Roman proletariat and the modern proletariat was that the modern
proletariat was a working class, unlike the Roman proletariat, who had to somehow
get by and who had to be pacified by bread and circuses. In a way, were entering a
situation where the proletariat is becoming more Roman, where superfluous work
is becoming structurally redefined as superfluous people. The precariat is one
example; I think gigantic slums in much of the world is another example. Perhaps
some anthropologist, studying people who eke out a living by picking garbage in
the dumps of Rio, might show us how such people manage to survive and also show
us that they have their own systems of meaning. But that sidesteps the major
question of the crisis of working society, for which we dont have an answer.

S: Yes, I think for one in every three persons in the world live in a slum, I mean, live
in a marginal community

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Moishe Postone : Im surprised its that low. I would have expected that its even
higher than that.

S: So thats that surplus population that cannot be incorporated into the production
process, although, you know, anthropologists have a way of connecting these
populations. I mean in Brazil in particular the connection between the slums and
the city is dynamic, people live in the slums but they work in the hotel service
industry, so the economies are tied in very particular ways

Moishe Postone : Yes. They are. Nevertheless, the situation is not like that in
Europe during an earlier phase of capitalism, when surplus population from the
land either went abroad or was absorbed into expanded factories. We do, of course,
have mass migration today, but its of a very different kind. I think the xenophobic
reactions to migrants on the part of so many people in metropolitan countries is,
among other things, not only a sign that these populations are hopelessly racist, but
is also a sign that theyre threatened precisely because they sense that there no
longer is the sort of expansion of the recent past.

S: Yes there isnt, if we look at unemployment figures in Spain for example, you
know close 45% of people between 18 and 25 are unemployed

Moishe Postone : Yes, the Spanish figures are unbelievable.

S: or a 23% general unemployment rate among working adults. How these
populations get reincorporated into a market economy in Spain remains a central
aspect of the crisis. If we look at the different European economies, Germany

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included, we see a process of disciplining populations into becoming a thousand
euro a month earners or to accept working for German programs at the rate of an
euro an hour while you collect unemployment, for example - these are all ways of
impoverishing populations who can no longer be incorporated into the labor force
in the ways in which they were when there was growth. If we look at the European
population in general, not just into the very concrete macroeconomic analysis of
the situation, we could think that the situation in Europe is in a way a small
laboratory, which confirms your own understanding of capitalism, in the sense that
value cannot continue to be valorized in the way it once was.

Moishe Postone : On that level, yes, absolutely. Its complicated on the surface by
the very peculiar structure of national sovereignty and common currency in
Europe. But underneath it, I think youre right. And although the newspapers, at
least in the United States, only refer to the prosperous north and the declining
south, there is a crisis in Germany as well, for example, for older people. The
cutbacks in Germany began decades ago with education. Education had been
expanded enormously in the late sixties the same thing happened in France -- and
then, with the crisis of the early 1970s, they stopped funding it. That was one of the
first things they cut, so that they could continue funding other social programs. But
recently the turn has been much more severe; there are many Germans who are
facing an old age of penury, which I think was unthinkable a generation ago.

S: Yes. Pension plans are being privatized so there will not be enough money, there
is no minimum wage in Germany, only in a few industrial different sectors they
have minimum wages, everything else is negotiated, so this sort of neoliberal
discipline that is being imposed by the troika now in other European countries,
happened in Germany willingly ten years ago. It is a country that has been

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subjected to those kinds of policies, which brings me to what you were talking
about before in terms of politics and economics in Europe and sovereignty and
nations where there is a subsumption of the political to the economic in Europe.
Governments no longer represent the will of the people in strictly formal terms, in
terms of their democracy definition, but they represent the interest of finance
capital, and in the last months, the crisis that has unfolded regarding the European
Central Bank and the buying of bonds in terms of making them general European
bonds that collectivize the debt, this is also a process of this moment of capitalism
in Europe, where there is not only an economic crisis but a political crisis in which
the political and the models of social democracy that Europe has enjoyed for the
last sixty years are being completely undermined by this subsumption. And I dont
know if you want to say something about that.

Moishe Postone : I agree with you. However, I think one of the problems is that
configuration of capitalism based on the primacy of the political turns out to have
been a phase of capitalism, rather than a long-term reformist solution. It lasted
longer in Europe than elsewhere, but I doubt whether we can return to that
configuration. At its high point, that configuration was tied to very strong national
organizations of economies that related to one another internationally. Today,
however, capital is increasingly supranational rather than international. It is above
the level of the nation-state. The nation state as a socio-economic-political unit has
become transformed and, as a national unit, has been in decline -- certainly in the
United States and in the UK -- for decades. That crisis is now hitting Europe in
increasingly manifest ways. It hit Europe later, because social democracy was that
much stronger in Europe. But even earlier, social democracy was being hollowed
out in ways that werent quite as evident as in the programs of Thatcher and
Reagan. But the crisis seems to be overtly general now and Europe seems to be

19
caught in a political economic double bind. The only way European countries can
operate effectively on the world stage is as Europe. Increasingly --even more than
during the Cold War national units such as France, Germany or Holland, would be
ineffectually small on the world stage. And yet, the politics of Europe seems unable
to move forward or backward right now.

S: I think it is as of now unclear what will happen. In these moments of crisis, the
rise of xenophobia and racism in general, targeting populations violently in Europe
seems to be on the rise, which brings me to your analysis of anti-Semitism and its
historical specificity in terms of a moment in capitalism during the period of
National Socialism. I would like to talk about your contribution to the study of anti-
Semitism and then to extrapolate in some way the ways in which methodologically
you went about that and how can we deal today with similar forms of xenophobia
on the basis of an analysis of capitalism.

Moishe Postone : OK. Where should we start?

S: Lets start with Adorno and Horkheimers chapter Elements of Anti-Semitism in
Dialectic of Enlightenment and go from there, since that seems to be such a
foundational text and also it inherits some of the objections that have been made
over decades to Dialectic of Enlightenment as a sort of trans-historical, universal
anthropological text that couldnt pass the test of time in terms of the specificity of
its historical analysis.

Moishe Postone : I think that Horkheimer and Adorno were completely correct to
put their finger on anti-Semitism as an ideology of world historical significance. As I
recall, their notion of anti-Semitism is very much tied to their idea that, with the

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rise of the post-liberal state, of state capitalism, the sphere of circulation becomes
less and less important. As a horizontal sphere, it is superseded by a vertical one, a
command economy, which becomes fused with the sphere of production, and
mediates itself. The Jews were associated with that sphere of circulation, which is
being superseded. I think there is an element of truth in their approach -- and I
hope Im not being unfair -- that is related to Hannah Arendts approach: the Jews
became superfluous, and as they became superfluous, they increasingly became
vulnerable and the object of hate. This approach basically takes Tocquevilles
account of the aristocracy and French Revolution and applies it to the Jews rather
than the nobility. Although I appreciate the attempts by Horkheimer and Adorno to
relate anti-Semitism to capitalism, I tried to present it in a somewhat different way
by using Marxs categories. I briefly analyzed the double character of the social
form Marx terms commodity and capital; they simultaneously are characterized
by an abstract dimension and a concrete dimension. This doubled character
appears externalized, as a material dimension (goods, labor) and as an abstract
dimension (money, the abstract imperatives and constraints of capital). Both
dimensions and their interactions are functions of the commodity and capital
forms, but this does not appear to be the case. The concrete dimension doesnt
seem to be part of the mediation. It seems to be something natural and material
that is mediated by something else, by money, for example, by the abstract
dimension. The abstract dimension appears to be completely separable from the
material dimension although they are intrinsically related. On the basis of this
analysis I tried to explain how it was that, in anti-Semitic ideology, workers and
industrial capitalists are seen as being in the same category. Both of them are
considered producers; that is, they are on the concrete side of the equation. The
object of such critique, then, becomes the abstract dimension money, finance
capital which is considered parasitic on the concrete dimension. The Jews became

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identified with the abstract dimension; they even are deemed responsible for it.
The reactionary ideal of the Volksgemeinschaft, of the healthy peoples community,
is that it can emerge if you get rid of the parasites, of the abstract dimension. In a
sense, the organic notion of the nation as well as of labor converge at this point. On
the basis of this analysis, I claimed that unlike many forms of racism and
xenophobia, anti-Semitism poses a danger for the Left, because it is apparently
anti-hegemonic. Ideas such as that Jews control and manipulate the world, indicate
that anti-Semitism is different from other forms of race hatred. Usually, racism is
directed against those who are deemed too concrete, not civilized enough, whereas
the Jews are too civilized. Theyre abstract and sap the vitality of nations. Within
the framework of this form of reactionary anti-capitalism, the world could become
a healthy place if only one could get rid of the Jews. In other words, anti-Semitism is
tied to an apparently emancipatory ideal: it becomes a displaced form of
revolution. I think thats what gives it great appeal and power. With this approach, I
tried to explain how one could possibly account for a program of complete
extermination. This is not a quantitative issue. The Nazis killed many people. For
example, they killed more Russians than Jews. But there was never a program to
kill all Russians. There were programs to kill as many Russian or Polish leaders as
possible, around whom resistance could crystallize. The rest were to be treated as
slaves. But the program with regard to the Jews was to exterminate everybody.
Whether they were labor slaves or not, ultimately they had to be exterminated. I
suggested this implied that the Jews must have been considered inordinately
dangerous, not inferior. My analysis of anti-Semitism, then, seeks to tie the
program of extermination to a particular form of reactionary anti-capitalism.

S: Is there a relationship with the way in which the extermination was carried out?
I mean there has been a lot written about the mechanical and industrial way in

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which the Jews were disposed of and exterminated. Is that in any way related to
your understanding of their personification of value? Or how does it relate to the
state of industrial capitalism at the time?

Moishe Postone : The extermination camps are often treated as perverse
institutions of capitalist production. I suggested they were its obverse. If a capitalist
factory is a site for the production of value (the abstract) that, however, necessarily
has to appear in concrete form, the camps like Auschwitz or Treblinka were anti-
factories they were sites that sought to destroy the abstract and recover the
concrete.

S: I see.

Moishe Postone : They sought to extract whatever use value they could from the
Jews: gold from their mouths, their hair for mattresses, for example. They
attempted to eradicate the abstract, the numbered individuals, while mining their
concrete bodies for use-value. It should also be noted, however, that, although the
death camps were an extremely important part of the exterminating machine, they
were only one form the program took. In the East about two million Jews were shot
by the Einsatzgruppen. They were not sent to camps. Although these two forms of
killing are quite different -- the anti-capitalist factory and the killing fields, what
they have in common is the idea of complete extermination. And I have tried to
argue that there are important differences between mass murder and
extermination; they require different explanations.

S: You mentioned earlier when talking about this, the danger for the left in terms of
understanding anti-Semitism and that historical moment, or its historical

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specificity, as an anti-capitalist revolt so to speak. And in the current crisis, there
are a number of anti-systemic revolts, anti-capitalist revolts going on in the world,
and I wonder if you have any comments to make with regard to the rise of those
revolts and the relationship that they could have to xenophobia or to other
reactionary forms of ideology.

Moishe Postone : I think many of them are nationalist, of course, in ways that are
both xenophobic and anti-Semitic. The reason I am using the word and is that the
two are not identical. On the one hand, many are xenophobic, as expressed, for
example, by "Islamophobia". Theyre xenophobic against the concrete other who is
entering their space, and in a sense, polluting society. The response is to raise
the walls, close the gates, keep them out. And at the same time, however, you have
variants that are also anti-Semitic in the sense that they are against mysterious
abstract forces that are undermining the nation. What makes it complicated is that,
sometimes, this takes the form of anti-Americanism. While the United States does
many things that are very bad, theres a difference between having a grounded
critique of what America does or identifying America with global capital. Theyre
not the same. And its become easy for a certain kind of reactionary anti-
globalization to simply identify America, or sometimes it is America and the Jews,
with globalization. I think this is true also of some forms of third-world nationalism
that I consider reactionary. I think the western Left, certainly the anti-Imperialist
Left, has been insensitive to this problem and has too frequently served to
legitimate reactionary regimes and movements as progressive.

S: I think in your analysis of anti-Semitism, by making the analysis of anti-Semitism
so grounded in the specific form of capitalism at a specific moment in time, it leaves
us with the question about the conditions that allow for the personification and

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identification of the abstract value today with other groups, not just Jews. I guess
what Im trying to say is, if I am faithful to the historicizing of your own
theorization in the 30s, how do I extrapolate to today? I mean, we couldnt really
read anti-Semitism in the same way, granted there is no extermination project
going on, so thats not being theorized today. But if the categories of discrimination
and xenophobia were insufficient to give an account of the extermination of the
Jews in Germany in the 30s, are they not useful categories today? How do we
recuperate some way of understanding the significant mechanisms that are
unfolding in Europe towards the personification and identification of minority
groups that are being targeted? How do we theorize xenophobia today?

Moishe Postone : I agree that xenophobia is a significant problem today and have
suggested that, in its current form, it is related to the general crisis of work-based
society. In general, I think competition (or perceived competition) especially for
jobs often has been an important factor in generating xenophobia. I also think,
however, that there is a resurgent anti-Semitism in the world today toward which
many also on the Left are indifferent or oblivious. I am suggesting, then, that we
should distinguish between xenophobia and anti-Semitism and be alert to both. I
dont distinguish them because I think one is worse than the other. Both are bad,
but they are bad in different ways. Even in the 1920s and 1930s, during the tidal
wave of anti-Semitism in Europe, there were very strong xenophobic reactions, also
against Jews. This is not identical with anti-Semitism; Im trying to distinguish the
two analytically. During this period nations began closing themselves off. The
United States, for example, which had welcomed immigrants for decades (which is
why there are so many millions of Italians, Eastern Europeans, and Jews in the
United States) closed access for such immigrants in 1923. This xenophobic and
racist reaction was one of the indirect conditions for the Holocaust: Jews could no

25
longer get out of Europe unless they were prestigious migrs. At the same time,
especially in the successor states to the Hapsburg and Romanov empires in Central
and Eastern Europe, there were nationalist/xenophobic battles among Ukrainians,
Poles, and Jews, Czechs and Germans, White Russians, Poles, and Ukrainians, each
group demanding their own exclusive community. So, given this background
situation, massive ethnic cleansing was, in addition to the Holocaust, among the
consequences of WWII. It has largely been forgotten in the West that over 20
million people were ethnically cleansed in Central and Eastern Europe in 1945-
1946, to make these nations more homogeneous. Interwar Poland was less than
50% ethnically Polish; there were very large Jewish and Ukrainian minorities. The
Jews were killed during the war and millions of Ukrainians and Poles were driven
from one area to another, as were the Germans. So, this exceedingly bloody period
was characterized both by murderous anti-Semitism and nationalist xenophobia.
With all the differences between then and now, it seems to me that today we are
witnessing an increase in both xenophobia and anti-Semitism. As in the interwar
period, xenophobia itself should be internally differentiated. On the one hand, there
is European xenophobia which, like the American variant after World War I, blames
immigrants and foreigners for undermining the nation. On the other hand, what we
are witnessing in Syria and Iraq is very similar to struggles in interwar Poland,
Czechoslovakia and, more recent Yugoslavia. In these cases, successor states to
multi-ethnic and multi-religious empires (Hapsburg, Romanov, Ottoman) are torn
apart by nationalist xenophobia. On the other hand, there has been a great increase
in anti-Semitism, as expressed, for example, by the notion that the United States is
in the hands of the Jews, both politically and economically, as well as in the spread
of forms of anti-Zionism that are essentially anti-Semitic. (Certainly not all forms of
anti-Zionism are anti-Semitic. This, however, does not obviate the fact that some
are indeed anti=Semitic.) In both cases, we are dealing with fetishized responses to

26
globalizing forces that seem to be beyond the control, not just of individuals, but
also of states and of parties.

S: This brings us back to the issue of the subsumption of the political to the
economic, where states serve the interests of finance capital, and they cease to
represent their populations and become political representatives of the interests of
capital.

Moishe Postone : I agree, but one of the many questions that we, as leftists, have to
understand is the demise of the Fordist-Keynesian synthesis in the West and the
command economies in the East. For a while it looked as if states had become the
states of their populations. We need to understand better what the limits of that
configuration were, because I do not think that we can return to it historically. A
great deal of literature in the 1950s and 1960s claimed that the basic social and
economic problems had been solved or were on their way to being solved; the key
had been found. This was spoken about differently in the West than in the
Communist world, but in both cases they were sure they had the key. If we dont
understand the crisis of the 1970s, which undermined that configuration in both
East and West, we wont understand what our options are now. I think we can
never go back to the United States in the decades following Roosevelt or Spain as
people dreamt it could be after Franco, or social-democratic Germany, for that
matter. But I am not a prophet, I can only call for more theoretical-political work.

S: Dont you think that materialist theories of the state I am thinking here of
Poulantzas, for example, were rethinking the state not as just a set of institutions
that stand autonomous from society, but as some kind of social relation needs to be
rethought again?

27

Moishe Postone : Yes, but I think that, retrospectively, there are some things that
can be seen more clearly than during the 1970s. What became clear in terms of the
long-range responses of states to the crises of the 1970s is that if they have to
choose between capital accumulation and the social welfare of their populations,
they will choose capital accumulation because otherwise they are going to collapse.
I think that we have to continue rethinking the relationship between capital and
the state. What the 1970s made very clear is that the state is not an independent
entity.

S : Exactly. So what forms, I know youre not a prophet, but what forms of political
imagination or political praxis do you envision, do you wish for, or would you put
your bets on in terms of

Moishe Postone : Well I wouldnt put my bets on any, to be honest. But there are
many different small initiatives, trying various approaches, that are important
because we are going to have to discover through peoples initiatives what works,
what unexpected limits are reached, etc. -- which then can provide us with ideas of
where we can go. One possibility, and this is going to sound very traditional, is that
even though there is a crisis of the laboring society, we can only really begin to
work out the contours of future possibilities by means of organizations that try to
move against or at least seek to diminish the enormous global discrepancies in
labor conditions, labor laws, and labor remuneration. China and Vietnam come to
mind, as do places like Bangladesh that basically has become a huge factory for the
production of clothes for the West under terrible conditions. And here we see how
nationalist ideologies that might have had a progressive dimension a generation
ago have become increasingly reactionary. The insistence on cultural specificity has

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been used by Third-World elites to justify political repression and cover up
extreme levels of exploitation. It could be that Im right or Kurz is right about the
end of the laboring society, but nevertheless the only way we will know is through
labor organizing itself. One promising beginning in the United States in the 1990s,
for example, was the anti-sweatshop movement, that highlighted working
conditions in various Third World countries. They would, for example, expose
conditions in factories producing for the American athletic shoe company, Nike,
which were located in Indonesia and Vietnam. The movement avoided falling into a
Cold War dichotomy according to which conditions in Indonesia were bad and
those in Vietnam were either ignored or justified. I think we have to recover a kind
of internationalism that was lost with World War I. The putative recovery of
Internationalism with the Third International was ideological; internationalism
really meant siding with one camp, which is different than internationalism. One
camp became immune from criticism, which had disastrous effects on critical
politics and thought. I think that some forms of anti-Imperialism recapitulate this
and have become ideologies of legitimation for repressive regimes and reactionary
movements. Among the things we have to fight against are forms of anti-
Imperialism that are becoming reactionary; we have to fight against them in the
name of progressive internationalism. I also think that we have to do so within a
framework that rethinks labor. I dont think we can glorify the miserable condition
of the precariat, and it seems to me that the way people try to create new
communities, in and of themselves that isnt going to be the solution. Nevertheless
it could begin to give us insight into how things could be different. I dont know
what it is like in Spain with regard to countercultural ideas, but in the United States,
certainly in the 1960s, along with the rise of an overtly political New Left, there
were also people who experimented with new forms of living. But for the most part

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their imaginary was a new form of living that separated itself from society. It
wasnt a model for the rest of society; it didnt try to be.

S: Yes, what I think is interesting with regard to Spain in terms of this new
imaginary that is different from the 60s, lets say, industrialized countries like the
United States, is that there is a self-reflexive awareness about the limits of labor
and this is not just because people have read, lets say Manifest gegen die Arbeit, or
you, or Kurz, but I think people in Spain, for example, have recourse to some of the
anarchist traditions and other forms of political praxis. In Spain today there are
barter communities, alternative currencies dozens of alternative currencies that
function in communities time banks, where unemployed people have come
together, start a bank of hours, people deposit hours. So if you grow vegetables, in
exchange, I take care of your elderly parents, whereby all activities are equal in the
exchange process. They are not private communes like they were in Germany or
they were in the United States, but they really function in the realm of the social, at
a local level, in small cities. These are conjectural forms of imagining a world
without money, a world without labor, because of the conditions where every 1 in
4 Spaniards is unemployed and they have to survive. Are these experimental forms
of living beyond labor?

Moishe Postone : Yes, I agree. For me, I hope that at least some people, looking at
these experiments, will also try to think of what might be viable on a larger scale.
Even if the world becomes divided into giant global blocks, which is a possibility (in
which case well be on the verge of World War III) we must attempt to find new
forms. Your examples show that the local level seems to be more promising. But
the real problem is how the local can be tied to the global. I dont mean that as
criticism. I mean it, however, as a problem that should be kept in mind.

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S: Yes. Moving back a little bit to the theoretical reflection, it has been a while since
your book came out in English; in Spain reading your work its a more recent
phenomenon work. Has there been time for you to reflect upon your contribution
to the reading of Marx since book was published? What would you see as the
theoretical challenges for the future, what would be some key elements towards
the reconstruction of a critical social theory on the basis of this new reading of
Marx?

Moishe Postone : One thing that I think is happening already, and I think it has to
happen more, is that we must focus more on capital and less on trying to find the
revolutionary subject. The project of locating a revolutionary subject first focused
on the working class and then became displaced by many onto various forms of
Third Worldism. I think that it would be important to leave that behind and try to
recover critical internationalism rather than the highly ideological forms of
nationalism that declare themselves internationalist. And this new internationalism
must try to deal with global capital in ways that soberly tries to understand
capitals development and the possibilities it generates (even if it undermines the
possible realization of those possibilities) rather than simply demonize it. I think is
extremely important, because although the Left is very sensitive to xenophobia,
and correctly so, it is less sensitive to reactionary forms of anti-finance or anti-
American or anti-Semitic ideologies. Those three are related to one another. I think
such fetishized forms of opposition ultimately weaken the Left and move it in the
direction of a fusion with movements I regard as being reactionary. We should
expunge from our political unconscious the notion of socialism in one country or in
one post-colony that has masqueraded as internationalism, and recover a form of
real internationalism that also seeks to wrestle with the end of laboring society.

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This is very modest on my part, because what I am trying to suggest is that the
theory gives us a guideline as to what we shouldnt do more readily than it gives us
a guideline as to what we should do. But avoiding what we shouldnt do is already
an important step in trying to wrestle with what we should do.

S: In terms of a cultural and social theory project for the left, we know the
limitations of the early Frankfurt School, but a tremendous part of their
contribution was to try to think mass culture and society in really concrete terms
by developing categories to come to terms with the social world under new
conditions. How do you see that being reconceptualized today, or what aspects of
the social-cultural theory of the Frankfurt School can be reactivated, if not with the
same vocabulary, with the same impetus and the same belief in the need to develop
a categorial apparatus to understand capitalist cultures and societies today?

Moishe Postone : When I reread the debate between Benjamin and Adorno on
mass culture in the 1930s, I find unfortunate the diremption between Benjamins
overly optimistic Brechtian understanding of mass culture as being the culture of
the masses and Adornos overly pessimistic reading of it entailing the total
subsumption of everything under value. People criticize Adorno because of his
attitude towards jazz and then mistakenly call him an elitist. I do think, however,
that there is a rational core to that criticism. What neither Adorno nor Benjamin
worked out was the double-sided character of mass culture. If, in the Work of Art
essay, Benjamin identified art form and class form in a manner that was too
affirmative, Adornos brilliant analysis of the structuring of mass culture by the
commodity form understood that form in terms of its value dimension alone.
Marxs analysis of the commodity and of capital, however, insists on their double-
sidedness. Capital isnt only something negative that has befallen human beings,

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but is at the same time enormously generative of possibilities that it itself
constrains. So its both very generative and very deforming. Frequently, it is
difficult for us to keep both moments in our mind. Too frequently in recent decades
we have witnessed a split between those who hypostatize popular culture and
regard every television show as a site of resistance, and those who regard anything
that is mediated electronically as being yet another example of domination. Yet, it
seems to me that we are going to have to try to understand the double sidedness of,
for example, the Internet. Again you either have people who hypostatize it as being
decentered and truly democratic, with no one controlling it the harbinger of an
emergent global civil society, and those who point out that everything is extremely
fractured, that there is no common discourse, that it is an echo chamber, and that
increasingly it is commercialized and used by corporations for their own ends. Our
task, in this case, is to analyze the emancipatory potential of these new forms of
electronic communication while, at the same time, uncovering the ways in which
they are not emancipatory. On that basis, we could consider if it were possible to
appropriate that emancipatory potential in ways that might separate it from its
extant form. The problem with capital is that it is double-sided. I think we have a
great deal of difficulty grasping it as both. But it seems to me that if we want to
know what the possibilities of the present really are, it has to be on the basis of the
present. The quasi-anarchists collectives or institutions in Spain that are springing
up that you mentioned can be regarded as signs of the growing superfluity of a lot
of people and, at the same time, as attempts by people to think beyond the present.
They are both at the same time. They cant be glorified as an alternative to
capitalism on the one hand; neither, however, should they simply be dismissed as a
symptom of capitalism.


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S: I agree with you, and I think it brings us to that central contribution of the
double-sided character of the commodity that you so well elaborate in your book,
and that if we were to extrapolate, perhaps this double-sided character of the
commodity and of capital to our own cultural and social analysis maybe we can
start somewhere. It has been wonderful to have the opportunity to be in
conversation with you. Is there anything else youd like to add?

Moishe Postone : Not that I can think of offhand. Such conversations are always
only beginnings. But it is good if they are beginnings. I thank you for this.