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Postone’s project—as he explains it—is to identify, or rethink, what is capitalist about capitalism. He notes that capitalism has assumed various ‘social-political-economic-cultural configurations’ in its history, and Postone enquires as to what is common—“core”—to each of them. But this procedure, even if carried out “retrospectively”, is problematic; the question, in that it already assumes what it seeks to explain, is circular. If what is core to configurations of capitalism needs identifying, by what standard are these “capitalisms” capitalist?

More (pdf, 67 KB): On “Stalinism”