Crisis and critique: Interview with Moishe Postone

Abstract

Moishe Postone (1942-2018) was one of the pioneers in critically confronting the apology for labor that underpins right-wing and left-wing theoretical perspectives, including a large part of the Marxism that persists to this day. Postone carried out a groundbreaking reinterpretation of Marxian critical theory by forcefully opposing the thesis that labor constitutes a standpoint antagonistic to that of capital. That thesis ended up restricting the scope of critique to circulation and distribution, that is, solely to the market, private property and the class appropriation of surplus value. On the contrary, Postone recognized the self-abolition of the proletariat, and not its realization, as the horizon of Marx’s thought.