[citation needed] He was originally denied tenure by the University of Chicago's sociology department, sparking a great deal of public resentment from graduate students whom he had been involved in teaching.
[citation needed] Postone was the Thomas E. Donnelley Professor of Modern History and co-director of the Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory.
Inspired by heterodox Marxist thinkers such as Isaak Rubin and Roman Rosdolsky, and certain authors of the Frankfurt School, for example Alfred Sohn-Rethel, he demonstrated that the assumptions of the "pessimistic turn" of Horkheimer were historically rather than theoretically founded.
Postone interpreted critical writings on Marx's critique of political economy, especially in its Capital 1 edition, and Grundrisse, as the development of a social-mediational theory of value.
Postone thought that in writing the Grundrisse Marx concludes that adequate critical theory must be completely immanent to its purpose.
Postone asserted that the new concept of "commodity fetishism", which has nothing to do with a hoax of consciousness (an inverted representation), is the central part of the intellectual heritage of Marx.
Fetishism, Postone noted, must be analyzed "in terms of the structure of social relations constituted by forms of praxis and its seizure by objectifying the category of capital (and hence value).
It is not, Postone suggested, similar to György Lukács's use of Hegel, wherein the proletariat are identified as Geist, for the spirit would be labour not emancipation.
Postone attempted to build a radical critique of the commodity, money, value, labour and politics not limited to describing the struggles around management and distribution.
Pointing out that the market is a mechanism of distribution, and so secondary to the core of capitalism, allowed Postone to broaden the historical scope of Marx's theory so that it can be applied to the Soviet Union.
It is true, Postone argued, that Nazism claimed to defend the peasantry and craftsmanship, but it also valued modern technological and industrial production.
The rejection of the bourgeoisie and its values is present in Nazism, but Postone saw Nazi ideology as the affirmation of the concrete dimension of capitalism — which includes technology and industrial production, as well as the peasantry and manual labour — as the heart of a healthy, organic social life.