Labor and the Logic of Abstraction: An Interview

In this interview, Moishe Postone, author of Time, Labor, and Social Domination, discusses the Marxian critical theory of capitalism against the background of the author's intellectual biography and central historical developments of recent decades. The interview focuses on his reinterpretation of Karl Marx's critical theory, especially on the notion of the historical specificity of the categories that purportedly grasp capitalism and its historical dynamic. It also engages the author's understandings of Georg Lukács, the Frankfurt School, and poststructuralism, while addressing issues of capitalism's historical transformations, its possible abolition, and the reconstitution of progressive politics.