Previous articleNext article No AccessGifts, Commodities, and the Encompassment of OthersEdward LiPuma and Moishe PostoneEdward LiPumaUniversity of Miami Search for more articles by this author and Moishe PostoneUniversity of Chicago Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Critical Historical Studies Volume 7, Number 1Spring 2020 Sponsored by the Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory (3CT) Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/708255 Views: 353Total views on this site Citations: 1Citations are reported from Crossref © 2020 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Ann E. Davis Postone's Legacy: Capitalism and Time, Critical Historical Studies 9, no.11 (Jun 2022): 1–34.https://doi.org/10.1086/719126

The far-reaching transformation of the world in recent decades has dramatically indicated that contemporary critical theory must be centrally concerned with questions of historical dynamics and large-scale structural changes if it is to be adequate for our social universe. A critical theory of capitalism based on the Marxian category of capital could significantly illuminate these historical developments, but only if it is fundamentally reconceptualized in ways that distinguish it from various understandings of capital in traditional Marxist interpretations as well as in recent social sciences discourses.

The concept of class had faded from much social analysis during and because of the Cold War. Rare usages of class occurred as epithets when each side in the Cold War insisted that it had erased class differences while excoriating the other side's class differences. Wealth and income classifications presupposed notions and measures of private property. A powerful class confronts a powerless class: rulers and the ruled. Power definitions of class also extend to intersperse middle classes, members of society who both take orders from some while giving orders to others. Some property theorists of class simply assumed that altering its distribution would likewise and in some necessary way alter the social distribution of power. Karl Marx's Capital identifies and analyzes the social process missed by his revolutionary forbears. In Marx's view, all human communities assign subsets of their populations to perform labor that produces goods and services.

Contrary to the traditional Marxist interpretation, Marx's critical theory is not, on its most fundamental level, a critique of a mode of class exploitation that distorts modernity, undertaken from a standpoint that affirms labor. Rather, more basically, it uncovers and analyzes a unique form of social mediation that structures modernity itself as a historically specific form of social life. This form of mediation is socially constituted by a historically unique form of labor and is essentially temporal.

Purpose - To demonstrate that, at its core, Marx's critical theory is not a critique of a mode of class exploitation that distorts modernity, undertaken from a standpoint that affirms labor, but rather one that uncovers and analyzes a unique form of social mediation and domination that structures modernity itself as a historically specific form of social life.Methodology/approach - Critical reconstruction, interpretation, and application of Marx's critique of political economy as developed in the Grundrisse and Capital, to the massive global transformations of the past four decades.Findings - Marx's critical analysis is well-suited to function as the foundation for a theory that systematically illuminates modern society in the 21st century. It is more conducive to grasping the contemporary world than traditional Marxism or most versions of post-Marxism.Originality/value - The historical transformations of the past century suggest the central significance of a critique of capitalism for an adequate critical theory today. Such a critique must be capable of grasping the core of a social formation that is generative of a peculiar dynamic of identity and non-identity, of pointing beyond itself while reasserting itself. It indicates that the realization of the possibility of the abolition of proletarian labor is a necessary response to a deep structural crisis of capitalism.

Moishe Postone (nacido en 1942) es sociólogo, historiador y profesor de teoría social en la Universidad de Chicago y codirector del Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory. Su obra fundamental es Tiempo, trabajo y dominación social. Una reinterpretación de la teoría crítica de Marx (1993), por la que obtuvo el premio de teoría de la American Sociological Association (ASA) en 1996. La profundidad de su crítica a lo que él denomina marxismo tradicional, así como la radicalidad de sus planteamientos, atraen cada vez más atención en todo el mundo. En sus seminarios se discute sobre la actual crisis, la abolición del trabajo y la teoría crítica del capitalismo, irónicamente en el mismo edificio donde han enseñado Milton Friedman, Gary Becker y otros nombres conocidos del neoliberalismo. Además de su obra principal, otras contribuciones de Postone han puesto en juego su interpretación del capitalismo para explicar el antisemitismo nacionalsocialista, las formas “reaccionarias” de anticapitalismo, el surgimiento del neoliberalismo y la crítica de importantes autores clásicos y contemporáneos. Recientemente, se ha creado una nueva revista de la que Postone es coeditor: Critical Historical Studies, que pretende dar cabida a trabajos de investigación sociohistórica interpretados en el marco de la teoría crítica del capitalismo. A lo largo de esta entrevista conversamos principalmente sobre temas que no se han abordado directamente en otras entrevistas publicadas en castellano: por ejemplo, cuál ha sido el diálogo con su obra a veinte años de su publicación, qué papel transformador puede tener la teoría, la actual situación política en España y Europa, el papel de las identidades nacionales, la izquierda, y algunos aspectos conceptuales de la teoría crítica del capitalismo. Al final, se incluye un resumen de sus obras y artículos junto con videos y entrevistas en castellano y en inglés.

In this article Moishe Postone analyzes the general relationship between the structural global turn towards neoliberalism which took place in the 1970s and the evolution of political conceptions within the western Left concerning internationalism, anti-hegemonic politics and violence.The crisis of state-centrism, connected to neoliberalism, had as consequence the decline of welfare States, of "actually existing socialism", and the end of the Cold War. Although a new epoch in capital's domination was beginning, the possibility of a new global internationalism was emerging too. However, a dualistic internationalism has been implicitly maintained by different movements: it is showed as such, for example, in the significant absence of critical analysis concerning the Middle East and jihadism, in the mobilizations which identify exclusively the United States with global capital, or the inability to distinguish between different forms of political violence and resistance. The article analyzes and provides historical examples of how these dualistic conceptions have been reproduced and/or distinguished during the 20th century.To sum up, the article criticizes the fact that the Left is not approaching adequately the historical "helplessness" that the dominated regions of the world are subjected to as result of imperialist rivalries. Historically, that theoretical and political gap has paved the way for forms of anticapitalism which are rather reactionary than emancipatory.

En este artículo Moishe Postone analiza las relaciones generales entre el giro estructural global hacia el neoliberalismo de los setenta y la evolución de las concepciones políticas de la izquierda occidental respecto al internacionalismo, la política antihegemónica y la violencia. La crisis del estatocentrismo asociada al neoliberalismo, derivó en el declive de los Estados de Bienestar, del “socialismo realmente existente” y en el fin de la Guerra Fría. Aunque se abría una nueva época en la dominación del capital, también emergía la posibilidad de un nuevo internacionalismo global. Sin embargo, un internacionalismo dualista se ha mantenido implícitamente en distintos movimientos: así se muestra, por ejemplo, en la importante ausencia de análisis críticos respecto a Oriente Próximo y el yihadismo, en las movilizaciones que identifican exclusivamente a Estados Unidos con el capital global, o en la indistinción entre diferentes formas de violencia política y resistencia. Se analiza y se ejemplifica históricamente cómo esas concepciones duales se han reproducido y/o diferenciado durante el siglo XX. En síntesis, se critica que la izquierda no está enfocando adecuadamente la“indefensión” histórica a la que están sometidas las regiones del mundo dominadas respecto a las rivalidades interimperialistas. Históricamente, este vacío teórico-político está facilitando el surgimiento de formas de anticapitalismo más reaccionarias que emancipadoras.

Next article FreeIntroducing Critical Historical StudiesManu Goswami, Moishe Postone, Andrew Sartori, and William H. Sewell Jr.Manu Goswami, Moishe Postone, Andrew Sartori, and William H. Sewell Jr.PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreWe launch Critical Historical Studies with a sense that critical understandings of politics, culture, economy, and social life need renewal and deepening.1 Over the past few decades, most critical thinking in the humanities and social sciences has utilized the tools of the cultural or linguistic turns as a privileged analytic lens and has broadly focused on questions of identity—that is, on inequities structured by gender, race, sexuality, ethnicity, and postcoloniality. An earlier style of critique, largely grounded in Marxist analysis of class inequities, has dwindled proportionally. We recognize the important analytical, political, and moral gains achieved by the cultural and linguistic turns. Yet it seems increasingly clear that the problems besetting the contemporary world cannot be grasped adequately without renewed attention to questions of political economy. Since the 1970s, during the very period when the humanities and social sciences were caught up in the linguistic and cultural turns, world capitalism has undergone fundamental and irreversible transformations—transformations that pose profound challenges to our understanding of both the past and the present. Critical Historical Studies aims to develop an innovative approach to historical transformations that is adequate to this challenge, an approach strongly influenced by a critical appropriation of Marx but that remains in open and vigorous dialogue with other theoretical currents. The journal encourages systematic exploration of connections between cultural and political change on the one hand and overarching transformations in socioeconomic contexts on the other.The current deep crisis of the world economy has significantly revived the question of capitalism in contemporary scholarly and popular debates, for example, about the legitimacy of neoliberalism, the threat of ecological crises and global climate change, or the causes and consequences of widening economic inequalities. This awareness of contemporary political economic issues has coincided with the emergence of new histories and historical sociologies of capitalism rooted variously in geographical, ecological, or institutional approaches; an advancing wave of ethnographies on the politics of dispossession and debt or on the construction and circulation of abstract financial artifacts; and even a substantial surge of heterodox economics. The multiple economic, ecological, and political crises that beset our present have thus bolstered the fortunes of political economy as a substantive line of inquiry. These cross-disciplinary developments attest to a growing distrust of the formalism of standard economics and a rising challenge to the utopian faith in market rule. In our opinion, these developments underscore why the question of capitalism and attendant large-scale transformations must be reintroduced and recast in intrinsically historical terms across social-scientific and humanistic research. Ever since capitalism emerged as humanity's dominant socioeconomic framework, its peculiar dynamic of creative destruction has imparted a specific rhythm and shape to modern history. The flourishing and decline of disparate cultural forms, social movements, and political struggles are necessarily interwoven with specific eras of capitalism's history. Grasping the influence of capitalism's trends in the present requires a rich sense of historically recurrent processes, constraints, and possibilities. Critical Historical Studies is intended as a forum for nurturing this necessary historical consciousness.We believe that studies of past eras or of ongoing historical transformations should be informed by critical reflection about why such work is worth carrying out in the present. Critique in a Kantian sense implies a philosophical perspective aimed at a reasoned clarification of the meanings and implications of doctrines, judgments, practices, and institutions. Our usage borrows in particular from the critical theory of Marx and the Frankfurt School, which aimed to evaluate institutions, ideas, and practices according to their implications for the possibility of human emancipation. Critical history, therefore, is in the first instance history that is based on a moral and political standpoint in the present, on a reasoned dissatisfaction with life as it is currently lived and an attempt to reflect on that dissatisfaction by means of historical investigation. But if critical history is necessarily based on moral concerns, it is not a moralistic history. It does not set up the historian as a sovereign moral judge of the past and the present. Rather, it analyzes what exists with reference to what is possible and does so while insisting on the necessity of deep historical reflexivity. A critical historical scholar, when wrestling with a historical problem, should always ask herself not only "Why does this problem seem important to me?" but also "How am I and my own moral judgments implicated in the problem I study?" Or "What is it in the current historical situation that makes me capable of seeing this as a problem at all?" Or "What are the political, discursive, social, or cultural conditions in the current phase of social development that pose this as a problem to me but that made it seem nonproblematic or differently problematic to investigators working in a previous period?" Critical historical scholarship, in other words, implies a reflexive historical critique of the conditions of possibility for the inquirer to engage in the inquiry at hand.In our view, what makes a particular work or approach historical is neither its temporal reference—for example, past, present, or future—nor its disciplinary origin. Historical studies entail a reflexive temporalization of the phenomenon in question, a mode of analysis as relevant for parsing ongoing financial dislocations as it is for understanding the dynamics of the French Revolution or nineteenth-century imperialism. The challenge, in either instance, is to explicate the entwinement of social practices within shared spatiotemporal matrices, rendering them intelligible as simultaneously conceptual and empirical problematics. Given that our present is shaped by the institutional and cultural forms of capitalism, critique must among other things take into account the specific forms of domination characteristic of capitalism—from various kinds of direct exploitation to the general commodification of social and cultural life, to the imperatives and constraints that underlie capitalism's temporal dynamics. Capitalism is not, from this vantage point, reducible to the economy or economic phenomena. Our concern rather is with the historical processes by which economic, social, and cultural forms become intrinsically interrelated.If our own perspective cleaves to the tradition of historically reflexive approaches to capitalism, a major goal of Critical Historical Studies is to foster open-ended dialogues with scholars whose perspectives are shaped by other theoretical perspectives. We welcome articles written from the points of view of, for example, critical ecology, feminism, critical race studies, critical realism, postcolonialism, critical geography, science studies, or critical legal studies. We encourage submissions from all disciplines in the social sciences and humanities. We welcome monographic research articles as well as theoretical interventions; critical reflections on current cultural, political, and scholarly issues; and substantial review essays. We are convinced that the full flourishing of critical historical studies requires many-sided arguments backed by sound research, searching theoretical development, and open intellectual engagement. Critical Historical Studies invites its contributors and readers to join this venture. Notes 1The idea of launching Critical Historical Studies arose during a conference held at the University of Chicago in December 2011 to mark the twentieth anniversary of the Social Theory Workshop, a faculty and graduate student forum led from its inception by Moishe Postone and William Sewell. Thomas Dodman, Parker Everett, and Stacie Kent, the three graduate students who conceptualized, planned, and organized the conference, felt that the workshop had, over the years, generated a distinctive yet insufficiently articulated theoretical approach to historical questions, one that needed to be fleshed out in intensive discussion. Critical Historical Studies represents, among other things, an effort to widen and deepen the ever-branching conversations begun at the conference. Next article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Critical Historical Studies Volume 1, Number 1Spring 2014 Sponsored by the Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory (3CT) Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/675083 Views: 2557Total views on this site Citations: 3Citations are reported from Crossref © 2014 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Jessica Stanier An Introduction to Engaged Phenomenology, Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 53, no.33 (Jun 2022): 226–242.https://doi.org/10.1080/00071773.2022.2081533Stephen W. Sawyer Epilogue: Neoliberalism and the Crisis of Democratic Theory, (Jan 2016): 191–213.https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137581266_10Heidi J. S. Tworek, Simone M. Müller Editorial – communicating global capitalism, Journal of Global History 10, no.22 (Jun 2015): 203–211.https://doi.org/10.1017/S1740022815000030

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Je voudrais décrire pourquoi, de mon point de vue, un théorie critique du capitalisme est nécessaire aujourd'hui et pourquoi une telle théori e doit différer des critiques traditionnelles du capitalisme. C'est-à-dire que j'ai l'intention d 'interroger de façon critique quelques lieux communs sur la nature des relations sociales fondam entales au sein du capitalisme. Je ferai ceci dans une voie qui interprète les catégories ma rxiennes comme des catégories de forme sociale, mettant ainsi en question le schéma concep tuel familier opposant infrastructure/superstructure.