identity politics and moishe postone’s time, labor, and social domination
By shag carpet bomb • Mar 8th, 2009 • Category: Critical Social Theory, Marxist Theory, Theory, Time Labor and Social DominationI haven’t had time to sit down and write about Agustin’s book, Sex at the Margins, but I will try to get to it before it’s due back. Problem is, they’ve ramped up the pace at work, so I worked a long week, which left little time for anything substantive — other than getting to the clay room yesterday to do some work on the tiles I’m making.
Meanwhile, too lazy to retried Sex at the Margins from upstairs, I grabbed Postone’s book to flip through while having coffee. I remembered that I’d written this earlier:
Aha! Reading further in Time, Labor, and Social Domination I see why Carrol thought I might be interested in this book.
As I’ve argued before, against those who disparage identity politics as a kind of interloper that has usurped the true politics of class struggle, identity politics actually derives from what Postone calls “traditional Marxism” which posited a Subject of History — the working class. Practically, in the U.S. this translated into a tendency for Marxist groups to believe that they should help the working class become conscious of its class position, the better to ensure that it truly become the grave digger of capitalism.
But, historical events meant that Marxists ended up feeling betrayed by the working class and the search was on for a new Subject of History: in the U.S. it was the black liberation struggle, which was often tied to third world people; then there was the Marxist arms of the feminist movement which saw women as the Subject of History; enter a critique of feminism from the standpoint of black women, and queer black women, and queer black working class and poor women (an internal critique of, for ex, the Combahee River Collective Statement); etc.
Postone’s argument is that this search for the Subject of History — the epistemological standpoint of the “most oppressed” and “marginalized” which would shine the light of Truth on “what is to be done” — is a misapprehension of Marx’s engagement with Hegel. Moreover, in the endless debate between Carrol and Doug re: subjectivity — with Doug claiming that Carrol espouses some sort of determinate logic of history unfolding before us with which we cannot possibly have much to offer — well, Postone isn’t making that argument:
“Marx’s critique of Hegel, then, is quite different for Lukacs’s materialist appropriation of Hegel, for it does not identity a concrete, conscious, social Subject (for example, the proletariat) that unfolds itself historically, achieving full self-consciousness through a process of self-reflexive objectification. Doing so would implicitly posit “labor” as the constituting substance of a Subject, which prevented the capitalist relations from realizing itself. As I implied in my discussion of “Ricardian Marxism,” the historical Subject in that case would be a collective version of the bourgeois subject, constituting itself and the world through “labor.” The concepts of “labor” and the bourgeois subject (whether interpreted as the individual, or as a class) are intrinsically related: they express a historically specific social reality in ontological form.
Marx’s critique of Hegel breaks with the prepositions of such a position … Rather than viewing capitalist relations as extrinsic to the Subject, as that which hinder its full realization, Marx analyzes those very relations as constituting the Subject. This fundamental difference is related to the one outlined earlier: the quasi-objective structures grasped by the categories of Marx’s critique of political economy do not ‘veil’ either the ‘real’ social relations of capitalism (class relations) or the ‘real’ historical Subject (the proletariat). That, those structures *are* the fundamental relations of capitalist society that, because of their peculiar properties, *constitute* what Hegel grasps as a historical Subject. This theoretical turn means that the Marxian theory neither posits nor is bound to the notion of a historical meta-Subject, such as the proletariat, which will realize itself in a future society. Indeed, the move from a theory of the collective (bourgeois) Subject to a theory of alienated social relations implies a critique of such a notion. It is one aspect of a major shift in critical perspective from a social critique on the basis of “labor” to a social critique of the peculiar nature of labor in capitalism, whereby the former’s standpoint becomes the latter’s object of critique.
… We have seen that the traditional assumptions regarding labor and social relations in capitalism lead the Hegelian concept of totality to be adopted and translated into “materialist” terms as follows: Social totality is constituted by “labor,” but is veiled, apparently fragmented, and prevented from realizing itself by capitalist relations. It represents the *standpoint* of the critique of the capitalist present, and will be realized in socialism.
Marx’s categorial determination of capital as the historical Subject, however, indicates that the totality has become the *object* of his critique. As shall be discussed below, social totality, … is a n essential feature of the capitalist formation and expression of alienation. The capitalist social formation, according to Marx, is unique inasmuch as it is constituted by a qualitatively homogeneous social “substance”; hence, it exists as a social totality. Other social formations are not so totalized: their fundamental social relations are not qualitatively homogeneous. They cannot be grasped by the concept of “substance,” cannot be unfolded from a single structuring principles, and do not display an immanent, necessary historical logic.
Marx’s assertion that capital, and not the proletariat or the species, is the total Subject implies that the historical negations of capitalism would not involve the *realization*, but the *abolition,* of the totality. … Considered on another level, it indicates Marx’s mature understanding of history cannot be grasped adequately as an essentially eschatological conception in secular form.”
pp. 78-79
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Lukacs interpretation of Marx/Hegel was emphatically rejected by the Comintern. The Comintern played a much bigger role than old Lukacs by himself did at the time. Why did Postone waste his time on an insignificant figure when he had could have discussed one of the major forces of ‘traditional Marxism’?
hmm. well, i put the book down after he got into his critic of critical theory. i think he had to go with lukacs because lukacs influenced critical social theory — frankfurt buoyz.
but what he wrote in the intro is that he was interested in battling both: the leninist ideologies prominent in the marxist left in germany when he was there *and* the extremely influential work of the frankfurt school and, later, Habermas critical engagement with the earlier frankfurt buoyz.
his discussion of lukacs, if you ask me, is pretty sparse. he spent a lot more time on horkheimer and pollack. devotes an entire chapter to habermas. i don’t know how influential these people are in movement politics — but then movement politics is a fly speck on an ass pimple.
as far as influencing me, in my life, it was people who’d read marcuse and critical theory more — at least in terms of marxists i encountered in political activism. if they were influenced by the comintern, they never mentioned it. in fact, the only people i can think of who actually seem to be part of more traditional marxist orgs are charles brown and carrol cox. if there are others i’ve met online, it eludes me.
and, you know, it does seem to me that this whole notion of the Subject of History is extremely influential. The search for another subject of history, one to replace the working class that had betrayed the radicals?, that seems to me to be the focus of all kinds of practical politics. e.g., the leftists of the 60s who thought it could only be among black radicals or third world anti-colonial struggles that we’d find a truly radical replacement for labor as the Subject of History.
then there’s 1968, France, and the story conventionally told around those events.
marcuse, hugely popular as far as i understand it, from folks who were around at that time (and that could be just a function of my subjective little circle) — but that whole bit about one-dimensional man, etc. all about the search for a new Subject of History.
and then of course there was the practical politics of it all — combahee river collective claims that their special identity as black queer women would allow them the special insight to be able to make that ‘radical leap’.
i have no clue about the comintern because i’ve just never followed that bit about marxist intellectual and movement history. enlighten me?