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Moishe Postone - Time Labor, and Social Domination, pg 357
In the Marxian analysis, the proletariat thus remains structurally important to capitalism as the source of value, but not of material wealth. This is diametrically opposed to traditional understandings regarding the proletariat: far from constituting the socialized productive forces that come into contradiction with capitalist social relations and thereby point to the possibility of a postcapitalist future, the working class, for Marx, is the essential constituting element of those relations themselves. Both the proletariat and the capitalist class are bound to capital, but the former is more so: capital conceivably could exist without capitalists, but it could not exist without value-creating labor. According to the logic of Marx's analysis, the working class, rather than embodying a possible future society, is the necessary basis of the present under which it suffers; it is tied to the existing order in a way that makes it the object of history. In short, Marx's analysis of the trajectory of capital does not in any way point toward the possible self-realization in a socialist society of the proletariat as the true Subject of history. On the contrary, it points to the possible abolition of the proletariat and the labor it performs as a condition of emancipation.

February 2, 2025 at 7:51 PM

willow·Feb 2, 2025

Moishe Postone - Time Labor, and Social Domination, pg 66
From the viewpoint of a critique of the specific character of labor in capitalism, however, the critique of one dimension of the existing social formation from the standpoint of another of its existing dimensions—that is, the critique of the mode of distribution from the standpoint of industrial production—has serious weaknesses and consequences. Rather than pointing beyond the capitalist social formation, the traditional positive critique, made from the standpoint of "labor," hypostatizes and projects onto all histories and societies the forms of wealth and labor that are historically specific to capitalism. Such a projection hinders consideration of the specificity of a society in which labor plays a unique constituting role and renders unclear the nature of the possible overcoming of that society. The difference between the two modes of social critique is that between a critical analysis of capitalism as a form of class exploitation and domination within modern society, and a critical analysis of the form of modern society itself