For Moishe Postone,[5] Harvey's treatment of space-time compression and postmodern diversity are as merely reactions to capitalism. Hence Harvey's analysis remains "extrinsic to the social forms expressed" by the deep structure concepts of capital, value and the commodity.
For Postone the postmodern moment is not necessarily just a one-sided effect of the contemporary form of capitalism but can also be seen as having an emancipatory side if it happened to be part of a post-capitalism. And because postmodernism usually neglects its own context of embeddedness it can legitimate capitalism as postmodern, whereas at the level of deep structure it may in fact be more concentrated, with large capitals that, accumulate rather than diverge, and with an expansion of commodification niches with fewer buyers.
Postone asserts one cannot step outside capitalism and declare it a pure evil, or as a one-dimensional badness. For Postone, the emancipatory content of such things as equal distribution or diversity are potentials of capitalism itself in its abundant and diverse productive powers. It misfires however, when a form of life such as postmodernism takes itself for being the whole when in fact it is just another appearance of the same capitalist essence