Peter Frase

*UPDATE 2*: The news is, sadly, [no longer](http://chicagojewishfunerals.com/funeral-detail-page/?case=4893F287-BFEF-445C-A361-07324D755EDA) premature. I mourn the man's passing and celebrate his contribution to an open and liberatory version of Marxism.

*UPDATE*: I appear to have fallen prey to misinformation, and written a premature obituary. Apologies to Moishe Postone and his loved ones. The remainder of my appreciation of the man remains unchanged.

[Moishe Postone](https://history.uchicago.edu/directory/moishe-postone) was incorrectly reported as having died. This will perhaps be of only peripheral interest, to all but a handful of Marxist theory nerds. But it's of great interest, and great sadness, to me.

Postone emerged from the Marxism of the German new left, and spent much of his life teaching at the University of Chicago. He was teaching there when I was an undergraduate, but I never took his classes. It was only years later that I read his landmark work, *Time, Labor, and Social Domination*.

That book was the great work of Postone's life. In a few hundred pages, it elucidated (a word Postone loved) what he called Marx's "mature critical theory". His central insight was that Marx's critique of capitalism was not about glorifying labor, or about promoting some kind of non-exploitative society in which workers could get the full value of what they produced. The point, rather, was to abolish labor as we know it, and with it a society in which labor, and the value placed on it, regulate our lives.

It was a thorough and relentless explication of one of Marx's famous [asides](https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch16.htm). "To be a productive labourer is, therefore, not a piece of luck, but a misfortune."

He wasn't the only one to grasp this point. Others like Georg Lukacs, Diane Elson--and recently even [David Harvey](http://davidharvey.org/2018/03/marxs-refusal-of-the-labour-theory-of-value-by-david-harvey/)--have made similar points. But my gateway to a post-work, post-laborist understanding of Marx went through Postone, on a winter vacation over a decade ago when I trudged through and broke my head against his work.

And what resulted was the most wondrous kind of experience I know of in social theory. It wasn't that Moishe Postone told me something I didn't know. He did something much more significant: he explained something I *already* knew, but didn't yet understand.

Rarely will you find me explicitly [citing](http://www.peterfrase.com/2011/07/reanimated-marxism/) Postone. But to borrow a phrase from [Joan Robinson](https://www.jacobinmag.com/2011/07/joan-robinsons-open-letter-from-a-keynesian-to-a-marxist-2): I may not always have Postone in my mouth, but I have him in my bones.

Moishe Postone, ¡Presente!