Moishe Postone (April 17, 1942 – March 19, 2018) was a Canadian social theorist, historian, and professor of history at the University of Chicago. He is best known for his influential reinterpretation of Karl Marx's critique of political economy, articulated in his magnum opus, Time, Labor and Social Domination (1993). Postone's work challenges fundamental tenets of Marxist thought. He argued that "traditional Marxism" misunderstands Marx's mature theory by framing it as a critique of capitalism from the "standpoint of labor"; Postone instead proposed that Marx's theory is a critique of labor in capitalism itself. According to him, the core problem of capitalism is not class exploitation based on market relations and private property, but a historically unique form of "abstract domination" by impersonal social structures that individuals themselves constitute. This domination is driven by the contradictory logic of capital, which he characterized as a "treadmill" dynamic that generates increasing material wealth alongside growing social precarity. Postone also applied his theoretical framework to analyze modern antisemitism, which he controversially described as a fetishized, one-sided form of anticapitalism.
Early life and education Moishe Postone was born on April 17, 1942, in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, the oldest son of Evelyn and Abraham Postone. His father was a modern Orthodox rabbi, and his parents, who had met in a Jewish choir in Winnipeg, were immigrants from Eastern Europe. His mother had emigrated from Ukraine in the 1920s, and his father from Lithuania shortly before the outbreak of World War II. The rest of his father's immediate family perished in the Holocaust. Postone's Jewish heritage was a profound influence on his life and thought. As a teenager, he attended a residential Jewish high school (yeshiva) on the west side of Chicago. He remained a practicing Jew throughout his life, despite his secular and rationalist intellectual tastes, and as an adult was a devoted member of Congregation Rodfei Zedek in Chicago's Hyde Park neighborhood. Postone enrolled as an undergraduate at the University of Chicago, where he experienced the interdisciplinary, discussion-based Core curriculum established by Robert Hutchins. He completed his bachelor's degree in biochemistry with a minor in history. His encounter with Marx's Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 sparked what he later described as a "sense of sensation" and an awakening to the world of social thought. Upon graduating in 1963, he was accepted with a four-year fellowship into the university's chemistry graduate program but quickly had second thoughts. He persuaded William McNeill, the chair of the history department, to transfer his fellowship, and he began graduate studies in modern European intellectual history with Leonard Krieger as his major professor. As a graduate student, Postone participated in a 1969 student sit-in at the university's Administration Building; in its aftermath, he led one of two student study groups that sought to understand the historical moment through social theory. After passing his qualifying exams in 1969, Postone taught briefly at Brooklyn College and Richmond College in New York City before moving to Germany in 1973, first to Munich to improve his German and then to Frankfurt. He enrolled as a doctoral student at the Goethe University Frankfurt in the autumn of 1972, where the intellectual climate was shaped by the West German student movement, the Frankfurt School, and the emerging Neue Marx-Lektüre (New Marx Reading). Postone's research on Marx's Grundrisse was deeply influenced by his discovery of the Frankfurt School's works, and he studied Marx and critical theory with former associates and assistants of Theodor Adorno, including Oskar Negt, Alfred Schmidt, Jürgen Ritsert, Gerhard Brandt, and Iring Fetscher. His intellectual approach during this period was distinctive: while his reading of Marx was informed by the critical theory tradition, he in turn began to reread the work of Adorno and Max Horkheimer through the lens of his new interpretation of Marx. He continued his doctoral work on the Marxian critique of labor and time with Fetscher, taught classes, and published contributions to public debates on antisemitism, the German Left, and the German politics of memory. He received his doctorate (DPhil) in political science/sociology in 1983. His dissertation served as the first draft of what would become Time, Labor, and Social Domination a decade later.
Academic career
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