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This article offers a critical discussion of the concept of “abstract domination,” which receives its most thorough theoretical formulation in Moishe Postone’s Time, Labor, and Social Domination. After rehearsing the different meanings of the term, and examining the range of issues involved, two conclusions are presented: that the critique of abstract domination loses all explanatory power when divorced from the analysis of exploitative relations, so that the dilemma between a critique of class domination and a critique of abstract domination proves to be without foundation; and that the critique of abstract domination is based implicitly on a dualistic, substantialist social ontology which is incompatible with the processual orientation of Marxian thought.