From the trenches Book

Postone is one fuckin weird dude. This is the most naggingly repetitive book i think i've ever read which i still enjoyed. Still--a seminal piece of anglophone value-form theory that is notable for its emphasis on immanent critique--the idea that not only are Marx's categories ones that correspond to specific social formations only but ones that are meant as apprehensions of how perverse those categories are. the idea of value as a specific form of social wealth is very important and almost totally missing from other value-form theory in Englisch. as Luxemburg put it, Marx's analysis is only comprehensible if one realizes that he writes from the perspective that another society is possible. Postone centers this, noting that what people are really accumulating when they accumulate capital is claims on *labor*, not just on stuff. labor is what lies behind the enormous piles of money that the rich swim in--there really isn't very much that one can buy with money that requires no labor, at the present moment. but this isn't forever the case--Postone brings out nicely the utopian dimension of Marx's thought that seeks to abolish not only exploitation but labor itself.

other merits
- useful discussion of most of the Frankfurt School ppl and other western marxists, such as adorno and horkheimer, who aren't often read as value-theory people but should be.

the cons?
- as Bonefeld has said, Postone's approach, despite claiming to solve the structure-agency antinomy by relegating it to a specific historical period, basically comes out and says that agency is almost always subsumed by capital, something Postone has confirmed in interviews.
- not sure why Habermas is even worth critiquing
- Pollock is interesting but also not someone that anyone but Frankfurt School fanboys engage with (his theory of state capitalism which merits quite a bit of discussion here is relegated to a couple pages in most surveys of Marxist theories of the USSR).
- Postone's own theory of the USSR is basically a non-explanation that says that the USSR basically preserved the dynamic of value-production. this is an insight worth engaging with--it situates the core of Marx's theory of capitalism not on the level of property relations but on value itself and the dynamic it generates--but Postone basically fails to integrate that with any consideration of the fact that capital and money did not exist in the USSR.
- he's not really directly responsible for it but both the Antideutsch crypto-zionists and the trolls/harassers/abusers/crypto-zionists Platypus both cite him *a lot*, not to mention weird culty people like Principia Dialectica. worth noting.
- Marx's key point that value is a sort of terrifying automatic subject that subsumes even its nominal masters, capitalists, to it is preserved, but the way that value reproduces itself--through violence, states and property relations--is elided.

in the end, though, a really influential work that's worth reading, especially because it also represents a key link to the Frankfurt School's work on social theory that doesn't rely on bad translations (Postone studied with Iring Fetscher). it's okay to skim some sections, definitely. and he basically has rewritten this book and applied it to other people's work or shorter pieces ever since, so feel free to peep at those shorter things, too (his review of Harvey, Brenner and Arrighi is almost comical--it basically is an extended restatement of the book with nominal references to those three). his article on finance and antisemitism is what sparked some of these nutty crypto-zionist types, but in itself it's a useful elucidation of the need to transcend truncated critiques of finance that artificially separate it from capital, which even people like Kautsky fell into.