Moishe Postone
Moishe Postone was a Canadian social theorist, historian, and professor of history at the University of Chicago. He is best known for his influential reinterpretation of Karl Marx's critique of political economy, articulated in his magnum opus, Time, Labor and Social Domination.
Postone's work challenges fundamental tenets of Marxist thought. He argued that "traditional Marxism" misunderstands Marx's mature theory by framing it as a critique of capitalism from the "standpoint of labor"; Postone instead proposed that Marx's theory is a critique of labor in capitalism itself. According to him, the core problem of capitalism is not class exploitation based on market relations and private property, but a historically unique form of "abstract domination" by impersonal social structures that individuals themselves constitute. This domination is driven by the contradictory logic of capital, which he characterized as a "treadmill" dynamic that generates increasing material wealth alongside growing social precarity. Postone also applied his theoretical framework to analyze modern antisemitism, which he controversially described as a fetishized, one-sided form of anticapitalism.
Early life and education
Moishe Postone was born on April 17, 1942, in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, the oldest son of Evelyn and Abraham Postone. His father was a modern Orthodox rabbi, and his parents, who had met in a Jewish choir in Winnipeg, were immigrants from Eastern Europe. His mother had emigrated from Ukraine in the 1920s, and his father from Lithuania shortly before the outbreak of World War II. The rest of his father's immediate family perished in the Holocaust. Postone's Jewish heritage was a profound influence on his life and thought. As a teenager, he attended a residential Jewish high school on the west side of Chicago. He remained a practicing Jew throughout his life, despite his secular and rationalist intellectual tastes, and as an adult was a devoted member of Congregation Rodfei Zedek in Chicago's Hyde Park neighborhood.Postone enrolled as an undergraduate at the University of Chicago, where he experienced the interdisciplinary, discussion-based Core curriculum established by Robert Hutchins. He completed his bachelor's degree in biochemistry with a minor in history. His encounter with Marx's Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 sparked what he later described as a "sense of sensation" and an awakening to the world of social thought. Upon graduating in 1963, he was accepted with a four-year fellowship into the university's chemistry graduate program but quickly had second thoughts. He persuaded William McNeill, the chair of the history department, to transfer his fellowship, and he began graduate studies in modern European intellectual history with Leonard Krieger as his major professor. As a graduate student, Postone participated in a 1969 student sit-in at the university's Administration Building; in its aftermath, he led one of two student study groups that sought to understand the historical moment through social theory.
After passing his qualifying exams in 1969, Postone taught briefly at Brooklyn College and Richmond College in New York City before moving to Germany in 1973, first to Munich to improve his German and then to Frankfurt. He enrolled as a doctoral student at the Goethe University Frankfurt in the autumn of 1972, where the intellectual climate was shaped by the West German student movement, the Frankfurt School, and the emerging Neue Marx-Lektüre. Postone's research on Marx's Grundrisse was deeply influenced by his discovery of the Frankfurt School's works, and he studied Marx and critical theory with former associates and assistants of Theodor Adorno, including Oskar Negt, Alfred Schmidt, Jürgen Ritsert, Gerhard Brandt, and Iring Fetscher. His intellectual approach during this period was distinctive: while his reading of Marx was informed by the critical theory tradition, he in turn began to reread the work of Adorno and Max Horkheimer through the lens of his new interpretation of Marx. He continued his doctoral work on the Marxian critique of labor and time with Fetscher, taught classes, and published contributions to public debates on antisemitism, the German Left, and the German politics of memory. He received his doctorate in political science/sociology in 1983. His dissertation served as the first draft of what would become Time, Labor, and Social Domination a decade later.
Academic career
Postone's academic career was unorthodox. In 1983, he returned to Chicago to join the Center for Psychosocial Studies, a small, privately funded think tank, where his colleagues included the sociologist Craig Calhoun and the philosopher Nancy Fraser. His first formal postdoctoral academic appointment came in 1987, at the age of 45, as a Harper Fellow and instructor in the Social Sciences Collegiate Division at the University of Chicago, where he taught in the "Self, Culture, and Society" core course. In 1990, he was promoted to an untenured associate professorship in the sociology department and became chair of the course, a position he held until 2016. The appointment in sociology was "never a comfortable fit," as the department had little use for social theory or Marxism. With his colleague William H. Sewell Jr., he co-founded an interdisciplinary Social Theory Workshop in 1992 that ran for 26 years. This workshop eventually led to the creation of the journal Critical Historical Studies in 2015, with Postone as a founding co-editor.In 1995, two years after the publication of Time, Labor, and Social Domination, the department denied him promotion to tenure. The decision was met with protest from senior scholars at the university, including Sewell. Following the protest, the university's provost agreed to consider a tenured appointment if another department would sponsor it. The history department overwhelmingly voted to grant Postone a tenured associate professorship, recognizing him as an important asset to the university despite his work being philosophical and theoretical rather than archival. In 2012, Postone was appointed the Thomas E. Donnelley Professor in the Department of History and the College. He was also an associate of the Greenberg Center for Jewish Studies and a co-director of the Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory.
Postone remained an active member of the university for the rest of his career. He was known as a demanding and deeply influential teacher and mentor. His Socratic teaching style was described as a "transformative experience" by his students. He emphasized a pedagogical practice of "sympathetic reading," insisting that a strong argument is worthy of respect and that better arguments are built on engaging with the inadequacies of strong arguments, not on the "shattered remains of bad ones." In 1999, he won a Llewellyn John and Harriet Manchester Quantrell Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching. Of his approach, he told the University of Chicago Chronicle, "I do not want students writing papers just for me, their teacher, but to take responsibility for communicating what they think". He served on the dissertation committees of over sixty graduate students. Postone also valued international collaboration. In addition to frequent engagements in Europe, he helped support visiting scholars and in the last decades of his life participated in forums in China, Taiwan, India, South Africa, Japan, and Brazil.
In 2006, Postone was diagnosed with cancer, which he fought for 12 years. He continued to teach, write, and organize during his illness; in 2016, he delivered the Vienna Prize Lecture at the International Research Center for Cultural Studies, and in the autumn of 2017 he gave a keynote address on right-wing populism at the Vienna Humanities Festival. Postone died on March 19, 2018, at the age of 75. He left behind several unfinished book projects, including a critical history of critical theory and an assessment of capitalism since the 1970s. His extensive collection of papers and books constitutes his Nachlass, which is in the process of being archived at the University of Chicago.
Social theory
Postone's work is a fundamental re-examination of Karl Marx's mature critical theory. His magnum opus, Time, Labor and Social Domination, was awarded the Theory Prize by the American Sociological Association in 1996 and has been translated into eight languages. Postone argued that Marx's work should not be understood as a critique of class exploitation from the viewpoint of labor, but as a critique of the historically specific character of labor itself in capitalism.Critique of traditional Marxism
Postone defined "traditional Marxism" as a broad tendency in Marxist thought that misinterprets Marx's mature critique of capitalism. This tendency includes not only orthodox Marxism but also many of its critics, including certain thinkers of the Frankfurt School. According to Postone, traditional Marxism understands capitalism primarily as a system of class domination rooted in private ownership of the means of production and market-based distribution. He argued that this traditional view misunderstands Marx by framing the critique of capitalism from the "standpoint of labor". Postone instead proposed that Marx's theory is a critique of labor in capitalism itself.In the traditional view, labor is understood as a transhistorical activity—the fundamental metabolic interaction between humanity and nature—that exists outside of and prior to capitalism. Emancipation is therefore conceived as the liberation of labor from the "fetters" of private property and the market. This traditional framework, Postone noted, was particularly evident in "Ricardian Marxism," such as the work of Paul Sweezy and Maurice Dobb, which focused on market relations and modes of distribution rather than the underlying forms of social labor. In Postone's terms, this traditional view constitutes a "positive" or "redemptive" critique of capitalism, which critiques what exists from the standpoint of what also exists. This contrasts with the "negative critique" he found in Marx's mature work, which critiques what exists from the standpoint of what "could be"—the negation of the existing social conditions themselves.
Postone argued that this framework rendered traditional Marxism unable to adequately critique state-run socialist societies, which had abolished private property and the market but retained the fundamental character of capitalist labor. He also contended that the Frankfurt School's "pessimistic turn" in the mid-20th century stemmed from its residual attachment to this traditional framework. When the rise of state-managed capitalism seemed to resolve the contradiction between labor and the market, thinkers like Friedrich Pollock and Max Horkheimer concluded that capitalism had become a non-contradictory, "totally administered" society, losing its potential for emancipation.