Moishe Postone - Marxian Competence?

Marxist philosopher Moishe Postone, a critic of value theory, died on the 19th March

Andrew Kliman, in Reclaiming Marx’s Capital, “Postone’s Counter Critique”, reveals Postone’s scientific incompetence on the subject of Marx’s value.

To set the context of Marx’s Capital...

• Capital Volume I is a critique of the political economy of capitalist production, conceived by Marx as the process of producing value as capital.
  In Volume I, Marx investigates capitalist production under idealized conditions in which commodities sell at their values.
• Capital Volume II is a critique of the political economy of capitalist circulation, conceived by Marx as the social process of circulating value as capital.
  In Volume II, Marx investigates capitalist circulation under idealized conditions in which commodities sell at their values.
• Capital Volume III is a critique of the political economy of capitalist distribution, conceived by Marx as the social process of distributing value as capital.
  In Volume III, Marx investigates the interconnected capitalist processes of producing, circulating and distributing value as capital under realistic conditions in which commodities do not sell at their values.

Just after Engels published Capital Volume III, a marginalist economist, and Austrian Minister of Finance, Eugen Böhm-Bawerk, in his book “Karl Marx and the Close of his System”, famously claimed that Marx unconditionally contradicted himself:  price = value in Volume I, but price ≠ value in Volume III.

Böhm-Bawerk had been scientifically trained in conditional methodology, where a scientist investigates idealized conditions before progressively investigating more realistic ones, but he was in no mood to recognize conditional methodology in Marx.

Postone is scientifically naive.  He blithely sidesteps the “unconditional contradiction” by claiming that...

• Marx never intended “to write a critical political economy”.
• Marx never intended to use “the law of value to explain the workings of the market”.

In other words, Postone wriggles out of his “unconditional contradiction” by unconditionally contradicting Marx’s thoroughly well-known intention, already announced in his well-known Contribution — Marx’s unconditional subtitle to Capital: “A Critique of Political Economy”.

To this extent, Postone has nothing of value to contribute to Marx’s value.

Andrew Kliman proceeds to consider Postone’s emphasis on Marx’s intentions in Capital — which is philosophical guesswork on Postone’s part — as follows...

• “The crux of the problem, once again, is that Postone is discussing Marx’s intentions and method when the point at issue is instead the logical consistency of his arguments....”
• “I suspect that [Postone’s] misplaced emphasis on intentions and method is due in part to the influence of relativism within much of the humanities and social sciences.  If our presuppositions fully determine the conclusions at which we arrive, as relativism holds, then the logic of our arguments is irrelevant; presuppositions lead to conclusions directly, not through logical argument.  If that were so, one could bypass the logic of Marx’s arguments and acquit him of error simply by explaining “where he was coming from.”  It seems to me that this is the methodology of Postone’s discussion.  I do not mean to suggest that he is a relativist; his text indicates otherwise.  My point is simply that, if Postone had been working in a different milieu, he might have been more cognizant of the need to respond to allegations that Marx’s arguments are logically flawed.”

TWC