History and Helplessness: Mass Mobilization and Contemporary Forms of Anticapitalism

In his article "History and Helplessness: Mass Mobilization and Contemporary Forms of Anticapitalism" (2006), Moishe Postone presents a diagnosis of contemporary political crisis and anticapitalist movements, which follows from the author's critical social theory of capitalism. According to this theory, capitalist relations must be understood not merely as a system of class exploitation but as an abstract, impersonal form of domination in which capital itself acts as a self-developing Subject. In the article, the author critiques both post-structuralism (M. Foucault, J. Derrida) and J. Habermas for their inability to comprehend capital as an objective totality of social relations. Postone demonstrates that the failure to understand abstract domination pushes leftist thought into fetishised thinking: capital is split into "good/concrete" (production, industry, the nation) and "bad/abstract" (finance, money) poles. Due to this fetishism, abstract domination is personified by reducing it to concrete subjects (the US, Israel) or by transitioning into a form of antisemitism, in which the Jewish people become the demonised face of capital. Besides this, drawing on H. Arendt's critique of violence, Postone rejects resistance based on C. Schmitt's "friend–enemy" logic and the glorification of violence as an expression of helplessness, calling instead for the realisation of a non-dualistic, critically oriented internationalism. Postone is introduced into the Lithuanian context for the first time.