When Value Becomes Anachronistic, So Does the State

Postone, Marx, and the Communist Politics of Shrinking Labor Time

Moishe Postone’s reinterpretation of Marx has become a quiet touchstone for a generation of theorists who sense that traditional Marxism no longer adequately grasped the form of domination characteristic of capitalism. Postone’s insistence that categories like value, abstract labor, and capital are historically specific forms of social mediation—not transhistorical levers of critique—has reoriented debates about what, exactly, communism must abolish.

But one central implication of this reinterpretation remains largely unexplored. If value, as Postone argues, is not only specific to capitalism but increasingly anachronistic relative to the productive forces it has itself unleashed, then the institutional complex that lives off enforcing value—above all, the modern state—is itself historically specific and increasingly irrational. A communist program informed by Postone’s reading of Marx should therefore include, not a hypertrophy of state power, but the radical shrinking of the state, alongside the abolition of capital, as a determinate goal.

Value as a historically irrational measure

Postone’s key move is well known. Against “Ricardian” and traditional Marxism, he argues that Marx’s mature critique in Capital is not primarily a theory of exploitation of labor by capital using an ahistorical notion of value as embodied labor. It is a critique of labor itself as the historically specific social mediation of capitalism.

Value, in this account, is not wealth in general. It is the form of wealth under capitalism: social labor measured in abstract, homogeneous time, expressed in money. Because abstract labor is the substance of value, whereas productive power is a concrete feature of labor, increases in productivity yield more use‑values per hour but not more value. In the short run, higher productivity can generate extra surplus value for the innovating capitalist; in the long run, once the new methods generalize, the value per unit falls back to the socially necessary labor time.

Postone’s decisive point is that this dynamic gives rise to what he calls “shearing pressures”: as productivity rises, the wealth‑producing potential of society increasingly outstrips the value‑measure, which remains tied to abstract labor time. The more capitalism develops, the more irrational it becomes—from the standpoint of material reproduction—to organize social life around the compulsion to produce value, rather than around the planning and distribution of concrete abundance.

Marx already hints at this in Capital, where he notes the tendency for value to become an inadequate measure of wealth vis‑à‑vis the development of large‑scale industry. Postone turns that hint into a central thesis: value as a measure is historically specific and increasingly anachronistic, yet remains central to capitalism’s reproduction. That tension is not merely a conjunctural crisis; it is an internal limit‑condition of the system.

Labor time, the working day, and communism

Once we grasp this, the question of the working day looks different. Traditional Marxism emphasizes the struggle over the length and intensity of the working day as a struggle over exploitation: more hours, more surplus value; fewer hours, less surplus value. Postone’s reading reframes this: the very fact that society is organized around socially necessary labor time, as value, becomes increasingly irrational relative to the material capacity to produce use‑values with less labor.

From this standpoint, the communist demand for a radical reduction in hours of labor is not a moral plea for “more leisure,” nor a technocratic employment reform. It is a determinate negation of value as the organizing principle of social life. To shorten necessary labor time to the point where the compulsion to produce value collapses is, in effect, to abolish value as the dominant form of wealth and social mediation. A communism worthy of Postone must be centrally about freeing time—about breaking the treadmill by which abstract labor continues to dominate social existence even when it is materially unnecessary.

But here a missing term appears: the modern state.

The state as a concentrated value apparatus

Postone’s work, for all its depth, largely brackets the state as such, focusing instead on the internal logic of capital and the way value mediates social relations “behind the backs” of individuals. Marx, however, especially in his analysis of the Paris Commune, gives us crucial resources for thinking the state in value‑theoretical terms.

In The Civil War in France, Marx famously describes the old state machinery as “an excrescence” on society and praises the Commune for beginning to “restore to the social body all the forces hitherto absorbed by the state parasite feeding upon, and clogging the free movement of, society.” The Commune abolished the standing army, fused legislative and executive power in a single, recallable body, drastically reduced bureaucracy, and cut “state functions” down to a few tasks for general purposes.

Marx’s language is striking: the state is a parasite that feeds on social forces—above all, labor—and blocks their free development. Lenin later distills Marx’s lesson as the “correction” to the Communist Manifesto: the working class “cannot simply lay hold of the ready‑made state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes.” It must smash that machinery and replace it with a political form that already begins to wither away.

If we read this through Postone’s lens, a clearer picture emerges. The modern state, especially in its developed capitalist form, is one of the principal institutional concentrations of value‑relations. It organizes taxation, public debt, fiscal and monetary policy, social insurance, security, and administration in ways that presuppose the ongoing production of value and the subordination of living labor to abstract time. Its bureaucratic apparatuses live off surplus labor and act to secure the conditions under which surplus can continue to be extracted.

In other words, the state is parasitic in a specifically value‑theoretical sense: it is structurally dependent on surplus value while contributing to its enforcement. Once value becomes historically anachronistic as a measure of wealth, the functions of the state that exist to sustain value‑relations become anachronistic as well.

Reducing hours means reducing the state

This brings us to the novel insight. If we take seriously Postone’s claim that value is increasingly irrational relative to the productive forces, and Marx’s claim that the state is a parasite living off social forces, then a radical reduction in the working day—far beyond the horizons imagined even by the Paris Communards—is not just a desirable reform. It is a necessary consequence of value’s historical obsolescence.

But such a reduction cannot be realized while the state remains in anything like its current form and scale. So long as the state acts as a central organizer and consumer of surplus labor—through bureaucracy, militarism, carceral systems, and the administration of social policy—there persists a massive institutional demand for value‑production. The more extensive and intensive the state apparatus, the more it reinforces the compulsion to work long hours and reproduce value, regardless of material necessity.

Thus, the communist politics implied by Postone’s value‑critique and Marx’s theory of the state is not a politics of state expansion but of state reduction. To make a drastic reduction in working hours materially and structurally possible, the institutional complex that lives off surplus value must itself be dismantled or shrunk to the minimal coordination of common affairs. This is not anarchism’s dream of overnight abolition; it is Marx’s vision of a “state so constituted that it begins to wither away immediately,” updated for a world in which value has become irrational and the state has swollen into an enormous administrative‑security machine.

Against the new statism of the left

This conclusion cuts against much of the contemporary left’s spontaneous statism. Whether in neo‑social democratic or left‑Keynesian and MMT idioms, the state is often imagined as the primary instrument of emancipation: expanding public employment, redistributing income, managing investment, and guaranteeing social rights. The critique is directed at “neoliberal austerity” and “small government,” not at the state’s parasitic relation to surplus labor and its structural role in reproducing value‑relations.

From the standpoint developed here, such projects risk entrenching the very irrationality they seek to mitigate. They may redistribute value more fairly or moderate its most destructive effects, but they leave intact the compulsion to work long hours to sustain both capital and an ever‑expanding state. They take for granted that the institutional scale and scope of the state is neutral or progressive, rather than recognizing it as part of the machinery through which value continues its domination.

A communist politics adequate to Postone’s reading of Marx must therefore be more radical and more precise. It must aim not simply at “public” control of production, but at the abolition of value as the dominant form of wealth. That implies:

• a radical reduction in necessary labor time,

• the dismantling of institutions that live off surplus value, and

• the progressive elimination of the state’s coercive and parasitic functions.

The reduction of the parasitic state should be as central a communist goal as the abolition of capital itself. Anything less leaves untouched the institutional demand for surplus labor and the compulsion to produce value long after value has become historically obsolete.

Communism as the freeing of time

We can now restate the point in Marx’s own terms. Engels described the “withering away” of the state as the gradual replacement of the “government of persons” by the “administration of things”—as the interference of state power in social relations becoming superfluous “in one sphere after another,” until it ceases of itself. Postone describes the anachronism of value as the growing mismatch between capitalist wealth‑forms and the productive forces, evidenced in the crisis of work and ecological devastation.

Combine these, and communism appears as the historical process by which both value and the state—capitalist wealth and its parasitic apparatus—are rendered structurally unnecessary and practically impossible. The material index of that process is the radical shortening of necessary labor time: the freeing of time from abstract compulsion. A society in which the state still needs vast amounts of surplus labor to sustain its bureaucracy, military, police, and social administration is, by definition, a society still ruled by value.

The task of communist theory today is therefore not to rehabilitate the state as the savior from markets, but to comprehend and organize its abolition as a parasitic consumer of labor, in tandem with the abolition of capital. The task of communist politics is to fight for reductions in working hours so deep that both capital and the state lose their material basis.

When value becomes irrational, so does the state. A communism that takes this seriously will measure progress not by GDP, state capacity, or the expansion of public administration, but by the shrinking of compulsory labor and the shrinking of the institutions built to enforce it.