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Submitted by adri on March 13, 2021

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adri

3 years 4 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by adri on March 15, 2021

Fwiw Postone critiques Pollock's "State Capitalism" and the idea of the "primacy of the political over the economic" with the move toward state capitalism in his book Time, Labor, and Social Domination. Pollock, in spite of the emphasis in state capitalism on planning over the market, still considers state capitalism a type of capitalism as opposed to socialism (as he argues in his essay there's still wage-labor, profit-making, etc.), but not for all the reasons Postone thinks one should. Postone basically argues Pollock and the rest of the Frankfurt School rely on "traditional understandings" of Marx, but were not completely without any insights:

Postone

In postulating the primacy of politics over economics, he conceptualizes the latter in terms of the quasi-automatic market-mediated coordi­nation of needs and resources, whereby price mechanisms direct production and distribution. Under liberal capitalism, profits and wages direct the flow of cap­ital and the distribution of labor power within the economic process. The market is central to Pollock's understanding of the economic. His assertion that economic "laws" lose their essential function when the state supersedes the market indicates that, in his view, such laws are rooted only in the market mode of social regulation. The centrality of the market to Pollock's notion of the economic is also indicated on a categorial level, by his interpretation of the commodity: a good is a commodity only when circulated by the market, oth­erwise it is a use value. This approach, of course, implies an interpretation of the Marxian category of value—purportedly the fundamental category of the relations of production in capitalism—solely in terms of the market. In other words, Pollock understands the economic sphere and, implicitly, the Marxian categories only in terms of the mode of distribution.

Postone

Pollock's notion of the primacy of the political thus refers to an antagonistic society possessing no immanent dynamic that points toward the possibility of socialism as its negation; the pessimism of his theory is rooted in its analysis of postliberal capitalism as an unfree but noncontradictory society.