J'ai passé le weekend avec Moishe Postone sur une playlist, un cours donné à l'université de Chicago en 2009.
J'ai retranscrit quelques extraits et décidé d'en compiler une partie ici. L'ordre est arbitraire, chaque paragraphe est un extrait. La continuité logique n'est pas parfaite, mais voilà une page de Postone pour une autre lecture du Capital et de l'analyse marxiste.
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What Marx is trying to get at is what he regards as being the whole mark of modernity, which is this non –teleological endless process that he is referring to as the self valorization of value.
What marks the context of this new form of society is that things appear decontextualized. It’s the appearance of decontextualization that actually is the whole mark of this context.
This independent existence of the form of social relations is alienation. Not the alienation by people of part of preexisting essence, but the constitution of an alien, compelling, social other, that results from the circumstance that social relations are created by objectifying activity. Humans create Society behind their own back.
What this means, is that capital really is the alienated other. It’s not just a mystification.
In other words, if we’re talking about the social forms that are abstract, and do not appear to be social at all, than one of the things that Marx is saying is that what’s rational about Hegel is his idealism. Because those forms actually cannot be simply dissolved in terms of the actions of individual agents, whose action are hidden from themselves and therefor they don’t appear to be agents. In fact they are not agents.
The historically specific form of mediation at the heart of capitalism is constituted by determinate forms of practice that become quasi independent of the actors. The result is a new form of social domination, one that subjects people to increasingly impersonal rational imperatives and constraints, that cannot adequately be grasped in terms of the concrete domination by social groupings such as class or institutional agencies of the sate or of the economy. Like power as conceptualized by Foucault, this form of domination has no determinate lockers, and appears not to be social at all. Moreover, it is not static but temporally dynamic.
Capital is this ghostly sphere, behind. And it’s the sphere of the dynamic. It’s the sphere of history. And that history cannot be understood adequately only by looking at state and civil society and their interactions, because it changes both and their interrelations.
Another sphere of social life exists, that’s represented by the category of capital, and that sphere is the dynamic of the social whole. And that dynamic exists behind state and civil society. This critic calls into question the adequacy of the understanding of modern society in terms of this bipartite division.
For Marx, production in capitalism is only apparently material. It really is a vehicle for producing surplus value. And surplus value for him is time. It’s a very metaphysical process: Matter is transformed into units of abstract time. As a temporal form of wealth, capital strives toward boundlessness, ignoring the necessary boundedness of its natural environment, the planet.
What you have is the retention of value in time. Value created in the past is preserved. In a way, and this is only an initial determination, it’s a constant present.
“By incorporating living labor into the lifeless objectivity, the capitalist simultaneously transforms value i.e. past objectified dead labor, into capital, self valorizing value, an animated monster.” Marx
PS :
Un thread sur Postone qui m'avait donné envie de m'y plonger l'année dernière : https://twitter.com/PhilosophyCuck/status/1226945426563256326
La biblio française de la critique de la valeur (Wertkritik)(quand même) :
