From Primitives to Derivatives

n 1984Moishe Postone returned from Frankfurt and became a fellow at the Center for Psychosocial Studies in Chicago; he would immediately run a two-year seminar on volume 1 of Capital that would become Time, Labor, and Social Domination. Three of the contributors to this issue of Critical Historical Studies, Craig Calhoun, Edward LiPuma, and myself, were participants in that now legendary seminar. Moishe was talking about a book on volume 2 of Capital even when he left the center to become a Harper Fellow at the University of Chicago in 1987; it would remain unfinished at his death, but another contributor to this issue, Robert Meister, would attend Moishe’s penultimate seminar on volume 2 in the spring of 2015, which would (finally) determine whether volume 2 was written in the form of an immanent critique, as Moishe maintained volume 1 was. In 1988, the center began a collaboration with Pierre Bourdieu that introduced an anthropological perspective on the development of capitalism. Moishe would join Craig and Ed in editing Pierre Bourdieu: Critical Perspectives, and Ed and I, inspired by Bourdieu and Moishe, would write Financial Derivatives and the Globalization of Risk, which would set us down the path of derivative finance; we would ultimately join Bob Meister and Randy Martin in a working seminar on derivatives organized by Arjun Appadurai at New York University. Ed, Bob, and I often argued with Moishe about the role of derivative finance in late capitalism, and as Bob relates in his essay, although Moishe saw derivatives as producing unprecedented wealth, he did not see them as producing a new form of value even as value became increasingly anachronistic in an age of finance-driven capitalism; it was the contradiction between value and wealth that was propelling late capitalism.