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willow
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.