Measuring Postone
Value, Labor Power, and the Missing Commodity
(This is probably a multipart attempt to address a core concept of Moishe Postone’s book, Time, Labor and Social Domination: Superfluous Labor Time.)
I. The Promise
Moishe Postone’s Time, Labor, and Social Domination remains one of the most ambitious reinterpretations of Marx’s critique of political economy in the last half-century. Its central move is elegant and powerful: to read Capital not as a critique of class exploitation (the unequal distribution of value) but as a critique of value itself as a historically specific form of social mediation. Postone shifts the ground from the distribution of surplus product to the constitution of social necessity in alienated, quasi-objective form—the “Subject” that is capital.
At the heart of this reading is the category of the social division of time. Postone shows that Marx’s mature work can be understood as a dialectic of three temporal registers:
Socially necessary labor time (the alienated form of social compulsion under capitalism)
Superfluous labor time (the labor time capital demands that is, from the standpoint of developed productive forces, historically unnecessary)
Disposable time (the positive form of free time for the social individual, post-value)
This trajectory—from necessary, through superfluous, to disposable—is Postone’s great contribution. It recasts capitalism’s “contradiction” not as a mechanical breakdown (falling rate of profit) but as a growing historical non-necessity of its own fundamental measure. The system does not collapse; it becomes anachronistic. Value persists, but as a ghost: socially necessary in form, socially unnecessary in content.
The promise is immense. If correct, Postone offers a way out of the impasse of orthodox Marxism (determinist crisis theory) and anti-Marxist postmodernism (no totality, no critique). He gives us a determinate negation rooted in the immanent development of the categories themselves.
But the promise remains unfulfilled. And the reason, I will argue, lies in a single, fateful omission.
II. The Defect
Postone’s analysis centers on the commodity. His core contradiction is between value (abstract labor time) and use-value (material wealth). The development of productive forces, he argues, renders direct labor increasingly peripheral to the production of wealth, thereby making the value-form itself historically non-necessary.
But this framing contains a silent elision. For Marx, there is one commodity that is not like the others. One commodity whose consumption produces more value than it costs. One commodity that is the living source of new value, not merely a repository of dead labor. That commodity is labor power.
Postone mentions labor power. He distinguishes “necessary/superfluous” (society as a whole) from “necessary/surplus” (the class of immediate producers). But this distinction is precisely the problem. By subordinating the capital–labor relation to the commodity–commodity relation, Postone commits what we might call the error of abstraction displacement: he abstracts away from the specific mechanism of capitalist domination in favor of a more general—and, crucially, less critical—contradiction.
The defect can be stated simply:
Postone treats the commodity as the fundamental cell form of capitalism. But the living commodity—labor power—is the cell’s nucleus. Without centering labor power, the contradiction between value and use-value floats free of the class relation that alone makes it a contradiction at all.
III. The Consequences
This defect produces three interrelated problems in Postone’s edifice.
A. The Problem of Compulsion
If labor time is becoming historically superfluous, why does anyone still work? Postone’s answer is implicit: because the value-form persists, and the value-form requires the expenditure of labor time as its substance. But this is circular. It tells us that labor is compelled, not how or why the compulsion survives its own material obsolescence.
The missing mechanism, of course, is the purchase of labor power.
Workers must sell their capacity to labor because they have no direct access to the means of production. This is not a function of the commodity-form in general. It is a function of the unique character of labor power as a commodity: its value is determined by a social and historical minimum, but its use-value is the ability to produce value. Capital can therefore force the worker to perform labor that is materially superfluous because the worker has no alternative. The compulsion is not logical; it is existential.
Postone’s framework cannot explain persistence. It can only declare non-necessity.
B. The Problem of Agency
Who abolishes the value-form? For Marx, the answer is clear: the working class, through the abolition of wage labor. For Postone, the answer is vague: “people” who “appropriate what had been constituted historically as capital.” The “social individual” appears as the subject of disposable time, but this individual has no determinate social location. Is she a worker? A former worker? A citizen? A human being as such?
This vagueness is not accidental. By decentering labor power, Postone loses the antagonistic subject of capitalist society. The working class is not just one group among others. It is the group whose living activity is the substance of value and whose forced sale of itself is the linchpin of the entire system. Without the working class as the agent of negation, Postone’s “determinate negation” becomes indeterminate—a philosophical possibility without a political lever.
C. The Problem of Price
As we have seen, Postone’s treatment of the value–exchange-value relation is underdeveloped. He accepts that price is the phenomenal form of value, but he does not ask: what happens to this relation when labor power is the commodity in question?
If the value of labor power is falling (due to productivity gains in wage goods), but its price (wages) is determined by class struggle and social norms, then the relation between price and value for this particular commodity becomes the site of the most acute contradiction. Wages may be above or below the falling value of labor power—but neither stabilizes the system. Both reveal that the category “value of labor power” is losing its grounding.
Postone, focused on the commodity in general, misses this specificity. He treats all commodities as bearers of the same contradiction. But labor power is the commodity that makes capital out of capital. Without a theory of its peculiar price–value relation, the “superfluous labor” category remains abstract.
IV. The Necessary Correction
A revised “Measure of Postone” must not abandon his insights but integrate them with a renewed centrality of labor power. This requires three moves.
First, re-ground superfluous labor in the purchase of labor power. Labor becomes superfluous not when its product is abundant, but when the worker can be forced to perform it despite its material irrelevance. The category of “superfluous” must be understood as forced superfluity—labor that capital demands not because society needs it, but because capital needs the value-form to persist, and the value-form needs living labor as its substance.
Second, re-center class struggle as the medium of temporal contradiction. The social division of time is not a technical or philosophical category. It is the terrain of struggle over how long workers work, how much they are paid, and what counts as “necessary.” Postone’s distinction between necessary/superfluous (society as a whole) and necessary/surplus (workers) should not be a subordination but a dialectical identity in difference. The superfluous labor of society is the surplus labor of the working class, viewed from the opposite pole.
Third, re-theorize the value–price relation for labor power specifically. We need a category of the price anomaly: the situation where labor power’s price can no longer be coherently related to its value because the value-form itself is dying. This is not a failure of measurement but a crisis of measure. When the price of labor power oscillates wildly above and below any plausible “socially necessary reproduction time,” the system announces its own historical limit.
V. The New Measure
What, then, is the measure of Postone? It is the measure of a great insight partially realized. Postone saw that capitalism is ultimately a temporal contradiction: a system that measures wealth by labor time while ceaselessly destroying the necessity of that measure. This remains indispensable.
But the measure of Postone’s defect is his failure to see that the temporal contradiction is mediated by—and lived through—the purchase and sale of labor power. Labor power is not one commodity among others. It is the living arrow of time in the capitalist system: the point where past labor (constant capital) meets future labor (living labor), where necessity becomes superfluity, where value either dies or is reborn.
A corrected framework would therefore say:
Capitalism’s fundamental contradiction is not between value and use-value as properties of commodities in general. It is between the value of labor power (determined by socially necessary reproduction time) and the productivity of labor power (which renders that reproduction time historically trivial). This contradiction produces superfluous labor time—not as a philosophical category, but as the lived experience of the worker who works when there is no material need, because not working means starvation.
From this standpoint, the “social division of time” is not an abstract dialectic of the Subject. It is the division of a working day: between necessary labor (for the worker’s reproduction), surplus labor (for capital’s accumulation), and—emerging as a new historical possibility—refused labor (the conscious withdrawal of superfluous activity).
Disposable time, then, is not the gift of the Subject’s self-overcoming. It is the conquest of a class that refuses to perform labor that no one needs.
VI. Conclusion
Postone’s Time, Labor, and Social Domination remains a necessary text. It broke with economistic Marxism and offered a rich reading of Marx’s critique of value. But it is not a sufficient text. By displacing labor power from the center, it lost the mechanism, the agent, and the price-form of capitalist domination.
The new measure of Postone must therefore be a dialectical correction: affirm his insight into the historical non-necessity of labor time, but reground that insight in the forced purchase of labor power. Only then does “superfluous labor” become not an observation about productivity statistics, but a cry and a weapon.
In the end, Postone’s defect is the defect of all great critical theory that abstracts too far from the class relation: it sees the chains but forgets who wears them. The measure of his legacy will be whether future readers can put the worker back into the social division of time—not as a variable, but as the living contradiction that makes the measure move.
The article's claim is that Postone's great move — recasting the contradiction as value's growing anachronism (necessary in form, superfluous in content) rather than as mechanical breakdown — is vitiated by a single omission: he centers "the commodity in general" and the value/use-value contradiction while displacing labor power, the one commodity whose use-value is the production of value. From this alleged displacement the article derives three failures (compulsion, agency, price) and proposes a re-centering of labor power, class struggle, and a "price anomaly" for labor power, culminating in disposable time reconceived as a class conquest ("refused labor").
The parts the article gets right are worth conceding up front: capital as the alienated Hegelian Subject is Postone's reading, not a distortion; the necessary/superfluous/disposable triad is correctly identified; the anachronism framing is faithful; and the instinct that Postone is most vulnerable around his positive, emancipatory program is sound. That last instinct is the article's real asset. Everything else is where it goes wrong.
The claim that Postone treats "the commodity as the cell form" in opposition to labor power inverts his actual architecture. For Postone the commodity is the cell form precisely as the objectification of the double character of labor — concrete and abstract. Labor is not displaced from the cell; labor's duality is what the cell expresses. His whole quarrel with classical political economy (and with "Ricardian Marxism") is that they operated with an undifferentiated, transhistorical "labour" and so couldn't see that abstract labor — historically specific, socially mediating — is the substance of the form of domination. The cell is labor-determined through and through.
So the article's nucleus metaphor ("the commodity is the cell, labor power is its nucleus, and Postone forgot the nucleus") reverses the order of constitution. There is no value/use-value contradiction floating "free of the class relation" in Postone, because the value/use-value duality is derived from the concrete/abstract duality of commodity-producing labor in the first place.
The decisive textual refutation is Postone's own discussion of "class-constituting consciousness" (around p. 781). He explicitly thematizes labor power as a commodity — and argues that the consciousness arising from the worker's existence as seller of labor-power yields at most trade-union consciousness, while perception through the "capital fetish" (workers recognizing themselves as the producers of surplus value) yields, unmediated, "a communism of distribution." Far from omitting labor power, Postone places it at the center of an argument against making it the ground of negation. The article reads an absence where there is a developed, deliberate refusal.
But this isn't an omission or oversight. It's an expression of Postone's deep suspicion of class struggle as bound to the reproduction of the standpoint of labour rather than its overcoming, since the proletariat qua proletariat can only recognise itself and constitute itself as a subject by presupposing the very term that is at issue. (Inter alia, he also obviously suspects it of having an embedded antisemitic danger, for instance.)