The ‘Critique of Labour’: Moishe Postone, Wertkritik, John Holloway

Chapter 4 makes a critical review certain theorists for whom a positive labour ontology no longer has any explicit place in a reconsidered critique of political economy. A critique of Moishe Postone’s (and Robert Kurz’s/Wertkritik’s) value theory is developed that draws on key components of the Neue Marx-Lektüre, a reconstruction of Marx’s critique that demonstrates the necessarily monetary nature of Marx’s value theory. Postone’s (and Kurz’s/Wertkritik’s) pre-monetary theory of value is seen to be fundamentally ambiguous, ultimately disarticulating structure and struggle. The work of John Holloway, which stresses the need for a negative critique that recognises capital, value, and abstract labour as forms taken by class struggle, is assessed as a means to address some of these limitations. Despite the overall negativity of Holloway’s critique, a traditional Marxist labour ontology has the tendency to make a return under the guise of the ‘social flow of doing’.