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.
Compulsion. The charge that Postone's account is circular ("labor is compelled because value persists, and value requires labor") and that the "missing mechanism" is the purchase of labor power, gets the dialectic exactly backwards. Postone's non-circular mechanism is the treadmill — the dialectic of transformation and reconstitution (pp. 289–91, 347). Increased productivity redetermines the social labor hour; once generalized, value yielded per unit time falls back to base level, so the necessity of expending labor time is structurally reconstituted rather than superseded. This is what explains the very thing the article says Postone cannot explain: why labor remains compelled despite its material obsolescence. And crucially, Postone derives this at the level of the magnitude of value — by his own statement, "before the category of surplus value and the wage labor–capital relation have been introduced." The article's preferred mechanism (no access to means of production) is the traditional account of compulsion, which Postone doesn't deny but subsumes and deepens into impersonal, quasi-objective domination. The article mistakes a deeper account for a missing one.
Agency. Here the article touches something real — but mislabels it, and the mislabeling matters for exactly the exegesis-vs.-immanent-critique distinction. Postone does not lose the proletariat as antagonistic subject through an oversight. He deliberately rejects it, on principled grounds: labor in capitalism "far from being the standpoint of Marx's critique, is its object." The proletariat is "the necessary basis of the present under which it suffers… the object of history," and emancipation points to the abolition of proletarian labor, not its realization. So when the article writes that the vagueness of the "social individual" is "not accidental," it is right about the symptom and wrong about the cause: the indeterminacy isn't a residue of displacing labor power, it's the consequence of a load-bearing commitment — that you cannot make the agent of negation the bearer of the substance to be negated without collapsing back into affirmative, traditional Marxism.
I think legitimate version of this objection would be something like this: the asymmetry between the rigor of Postone’s negative critique and the underdetermination of the his supposedly positive program. In some of the texts and few of his interviews Postone concedes that he can only "allude" to the relation between working-class struggles and the overcoming of capitalism and of course that is an obvious lacuna in his whole legacy - a quip that the likes of Chris Cutrone and his Platypus cadres have confronted the honourable professor multiple times - but this absence of the ‘positive program’ is about the role of particular-substantial political mediation and transition, not about a forgotten category. I think your article would be much stronger if it pressed there: not "you omitted the agent" but "your principled refusal of the labor-standpoint leaves the passage from anachronism to abolition without a determinate bearer." Or maybe we just disagree on the formulation/framing of the same issue in essence, I’m not sure.
Price. This I think is the weakest section and largely a non-objection. Postone brackets the transformation problem and price determination by design — his is a qualitative analysis of the value form, not a quantitative theory of magnitudes; he repeatedly flags (e.g., the footnote at p. 290) that he is deliberately not addressing the structure/action, value/price mediation. The proposed "price anomaly / crisis of measure," with wages "oscillating wildly above and below" the value of labor power, is undertheorized: if the value form is "dying," the article owes us what magnitudes the price is supposedly oscillating around, and it doesn't say. This is a traditional concern (value of labor power, wage determination by class struggle) dressed as a novel category, and it engages Postone on terrain he explicitly declined rather than showing that the terrain he chose fails on its own terms.
The fatal issue is that the "correction" reasserts labor-ontology — the very position Postone diagnoses as the core of traditional Marxism. The article wants to keep the anachronism-of-value thesis and make proletarian labor "the living contradiction that makes the measure move," the substance of value and the agent of negation. Postone's whole wager is that these are incompatible. If labor is the substance and the standpoint, then post-capitalism is the realization of labor (a "communism of distribution," the universalization of the working class — which, as he notes, implies the universalization of capital, e.g., in the state form), and you lose the abolition of value and the disposable-time conclusion you were trying to keep. The article saws off the branch it sits on: it cannot have disposable-time-as-class-conquest while installing labor as the living arrow of value, because the anachronism thesis requires labor to be the object of critique, something to be abolished, not the ground from which critique is launched.
There's also a quieter slippage your own prior reading is tuned to catch. The article naturalizes labor power as "the living source of new value," "the living arrow of time," treating its value-producing character as a quasi-ontological constant — the eternal nucleus. But for Postone (following his Marx) the value-producing character of labor is itself historically specific, not a property of living labor as such. Treating it as the trans-historical substance that merely takes a capitalist form is a version of the same substrate-plus-form move that reproduces the error Postone targets — labor as "'the' labour," Arbeit sans phrase, the "phantom" abstraction. The article reintroduces precisely the figure Postone built the book to dissolve.
As an extension, it's self-undermining: its corrective premise is incompatible with the Postonean conclusion it claims to preserve. As a critique, it lands exactly one valid blow — the underdetermination of the positive/transitional program — but (a) that point is among the most widely registered objections to Postone, not novel, and (b) the article misattributes it to a categorial omission rather than to the principled commitment that actually generates it, which weakens it as immanent critique. Two of its three "consequences" (compulsion, price) rest on misreadings the text directly contradicts.
The most charitable and accurate description is that this isn't a critique of Postone at all but a refusal of him — a sophisticated reassertion of traditional Marxism that declines his central reinterpretation while borrowing its rhetoric. Read that way it's coherent and even forceful: someone who simply rejects the claim that labor is the object rather than the standpoint of critique can write all of this. But it should announce itself as that rejection. By dressing a refusal of Postone's framework as an internal correction "affirming his insight," it generates a performative contradiction — keeping the anachronism thesis with one hand while reinstating, with the other, the labor-ontology that makes that thesis unstateable. The closing line gives the game away: "put the worker back into the social division of time… as the living contradiction." Postone's entire argument is that doing so is what prevents you from seeing value as historically superfluous in the first place.
absolutely take your time mate, I admire your work a lot and it was actually your own texts in your blogs that agitated my interest in Postone’s & Kurz’s works, so this response was definitely written in good faith and with great appreciation of your own line of thought. I’m glad you found this interesting, will be waiting for the feedback for sure!
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.)
My humble suggestion is that it might instead be the unemployed or surplus pop who have to redeem disposable time by constituting themselves politically in some fashion.
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.
Compulsion. The charge that Postone's account is circular ("labor is compelled because value persists, and value requires labor") and that the "missing mechanism" is the purchase of labor power, gets the dialectic exactly backwards. Postone's non-circular mechanism is the treadmill — the dialectic of transformation and reconstitution (pp. 289–91, 347). Increased productivity redetermines the social labor hour; once generalized, value yielded per unit time falls back to base level, so the necessity of expending labor time is structurally reconstituted rather than superseded. This is what explains the very thing the article says Postone cannot explain: why labor remains compelled despite its material obsolescence. And crucially, Postone derives this at the level of the magnitude of value — by his own statement, "before the category of surplus value and the wage labor–capital relation have been introduced." The article's preferred mechanism (no access to means of production) is the traditional account of compulsion, which Postone doesn't deny but subsumes and deepens into impersonal, quasi-objective domination. The article mistakes a deeper account for a missing one.
Agency. Here the article touches something real — but mislabels it, and the mislabeling matters for exactly the exegesis-vs.-immanent-critique distinction. Postone does not lose the proletariat as antagonistic subject through an oversight. He deliberately rejects it, on principled grounds: labor in capitalism "far from being the standpoint of Marx's critique, is its object." The proletariat is "the necessary basis of the present under which it suffers… the object of history," and emancipation points to the abolition of proletarian labor, not its realization. So when the article writes that the vagueness of the "social individual" is "not accidental," it is right about the symptom and wrong about the cause: the indeterminacy isn't a residue of displacing labor power, it's the consequence of a load-bearing commitment — that you cannot make the agent of negation the bearer of the substance to be negated without collapsing back into affirmative, traditional Marxism.
I think legitimate version of this objection would be something like this: the asymmetry between the rigor of Postone’s negative critique and the underdetermination of the his supposedly positive program. In some of the texts and few of his interviews Postone concedes that he can only "allude" to the relation between working-class struggles and the overcoming of capitalism and of course that is an obvious lacuna in his whole legacy - a quip that the likes of Chris Cutrone and his Platypus cadres have confronted the honourable professor multiple times - but this absence of the ‘positive program’ is about the role of particular-substantial political mediation and transition, not about a forgotten category. I think your article would be much stronger if it pressed there: not "you omitted the agent" but "your principled refusal of the labor-standpoint leaves the passage from anachronism to abolition without a determinate bearer." Or maybe we just disagree on the formulation/framing of the same issue in essence, I’m not sure.
Price. This I think is the weakest section and largely a non-objection. Postone brackets the transformation problem and price determination by design — his is a qualitative analysis of the value form, not a quantitative theory of magnitudes; he repeatedly flags (e.g., the footnote at p. 290) that he is deliberately not addressing the structure/action, value/price mediation. The proposed "price anomaly / crisis of measure," with wages "oscillating wildly above and below" the value of labor power, is undertheorized: if the value form is "dying," the article owes us what magnitudes the price is supposedly oscillating around, and it doesn't say. This is a traditional concern (value of labor power, wage determination by class struggle) dressed as a novel category, and it engages Postone on terrain he explicitly declined rather than showing that the terrain he chose fails on its own terms.
The fatal issue is that the "correction" reasserts labor-ontology — the very position Postone diagnoses as the core of traditional Marxism. The article wants to keep the anachronism-of-value thesis and make proletarian labor "the living contradiction that makes the measure move," the substance of value and the agent of negation. Postone's whole wager is that these are incompatible. If labor is the substance and the standpoint, then post-capitalism is the realization of labor (a "communism of distribution," the universalization of the working class — which, as he notes, implies the universalization of capital, e.g., in the state form), and you lose the abolition of value and the disposable-time conclusion you were trying to keep. The article saws off the branch it sits on: it cannot have disposable-time-as-class-conquest while installing labor as the living arrow of value, because the anachronism thesis requires labor to be the object of critique, something to be abolished, not the ground from which critique is launched.
There's also a quieter slippage your own prior reading is tuned to catch. The article naturalizes labor power as "the living source of new value," "the living arrow of time," treating its value-producing character as a quasi-ontological constant — the eternal nucleus. But for Postone (following his Marx) the value-producing character of labor is itself historically specific, not a property of living labor as such. Treating it as the trans-historical substance that merely takes a capitalist form is a version of the same substrate-plus-form move that reproduces the error Postone targets — labor as "'the' labour," Arbeit sans phrase, the "phantom" abstraction. The article reintroduces precisely the figure Postone built the book to dissolve.
As an extension, it's self-undermining: its corrective premise is incompatible with the Postonean conclusion it claims to preserve. As a critique, it lands exactly one valid blow — the underdetermination of the positive/transitional program — but (a) that point is among the most widely registered objections to Postone, not novel, and (b) the article misattributes it to a categorial omission rather than to the principled commitment that actually generates it, which weakens it as immanent critique. Two of its three "consequences" (compulsion, price) rest on misreadings the text directly contradicts.
The most charitable and accurate description is that this isn't a critique of Postone at all but a refusal of him — a sophisticated reassertion of traditional Marxism that declines his central reinterpretation while borrowing its rhetoric. Read that way it's coherent and even forceful: someone who simply rejects the claim that labor is the object rather than the standpoint of critique can write all of this. But it should announce itself as that rejection. By dressing a refusal of Postone's framework as an internal correction "affirming his insight," it generates a performative contradiction — keeping the anachronism thesis with one hand while reinstating, with the other, the labor-ontology that makes that thesis unstateable. The closing line gives the game away: "put the worker back into the social division of time… as the living contradiction." Postone's entire argument is that doing so is what prevents you from seeing value as historically superfluous in the first place.
Give me some time to study this and respond. I think you raise some valid objections that require me to rethink at least some of my argument.
absolutely take your time mate, I admire your work a lot and it was actually your own texts in your blogs that agitated my interest in Postone’s & Kurz’s works, so this response was definitely written in good faith and with great appreciation of your own line of thought. I’m glad you found this interesting, will be waiting for the feedback for sure!
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.)
My humble suggestion is that it might instead be the unemployed or surplus pop who have to redeem disposable time by constituting themselves politically in some fashion.