“Not man or men but the struggling, oppressed class itself is the depository of historical knowledge. In Marx it appears as the last enslaved class, as the avenger that completes the task of liberation in the name of generations of the downtrodden. This conviction, which had a brief resurgence in the Spartacist group, has always been objectionable to Social Democrats. Within three decades they managed virtually to erase the name of Blanqui, though it had been the rallying sound that had reverberated through the preceding century. Social Democracy thought fit to assign to the working class the role of the redeemer of future generations, in this way cutting the sinews of its greatest strength. This training made the working class forget both its hatred and its spirit of sacrifice, for both are nourished by the image of enslaved ancestors rather than that of liberated grandchildren.” - Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Concept of History
It may be said that we commit an error in not marking the distinction between capitalists and capitalism. There is certainly no cause for arguing against distinguishing between two different concepts. For that we could just as easily applaud the child who notices the difference between a chair and the person who sits in it. Distinctions are meaningless without a recognition of the relation between what is being distinguished in the first place. Any particular distinction only matters if there is a relation between the moments of its different concepts that we already recognize as a unity. Thus simply stating the distinction without the unity that is formed in and through this difference is just the rhetorical flourish of the dilettante, eager to impress and be on their way unchallenged.[1]
What sense would there be to pose capitalists as the greatest challenge to capitalism today? We may look at their competition, the many acts that appear irrational to the economic logic of the system as a whole. The interest of capitalists as economic actors oriented towards profit often come in conflict with what would appear to be beneficial to capitalism as a whole. Mr. Riley may say that capitalists loathe capitalism and its competitive constraints. However, it is the whole of their activity in competition with each other that reproduces and enforces this very constraint. Capitalists collectively recognize the necessity of their unity in opposition to the proletariat whose collective exploitation and oppression is their common condition of class-being.
Mr. Riley may say that capitalists have existed in various forms for thousands of years, and that capitalism as a system is only a recent emergence. However, one must ask what it even means to say capitalists have existed for thousands of years without capitalism, as if this relation to production is intelligible without a mode of production which would produce it. Such a rational reconstruction makes no distinction between past forms of exploitation, and frustrates the very distinction it aims to make in refusing to recognize such things as a distinctly capitalist form of slavery, or prior forms of class domination not oriented towards the production and appropriation of surplus value. In this way, historicism merely wears the mask of historical materialism and mocks what it claims as its own.
The analytical separation of capitalist and capitalism then conceals a deeper failure of reason: the simple opposition of subject and object as non-identical. It does not recognize in this very non-identity the basis for their identification, for where the subject is represented as a discrete moment in-itself, it is posed as an external moment, and itself becomes objectivity. Likewise, as the object has now become a purpose, it bears the orientation of activity to be taken up by subjectivity, as something for an other. The mere establishment of the distinction is then only a partial moment of reason. Where it finds comfort in remaining in this position, it can only lead to reaction.
The proponents of Political Capitalism claim the world to be one of concepts in fixed determinations, untroubled by the perturbations of class struggle’s history. They see capitalism as a definable term to which reality must be adapted, rather than an unstable concept that is only intelligible in its historical character. It is only through this living history of class struggle that we communists know the necessity of the revolutionary transformation of this society. This is where capitalism as a concept is far less precise than that of the capitalist mode of production, that definite set of social relations of production and practices through which a definite class comes to dominate the terms of social reproduction within a definite history of class struggle. It is no coincidence then that the proletariat fades from view in these accounts, for the abstract notion of a definite system appears methodologically severed from the very agents whose activity in definite social relation to each other that forms and reproduces that system. The truth of the whole is rather to be found in the very particular moments of class struggle that have forged the society in which the capitalist mode of production predominates. As personifications of economic relations, capitalists are those very practitioners of the means of subjugating and reproducing the proletarian classes, the exploitation and domination of which constitutes that form of social life characteristic of the capitalist mode of production.
It is no great mystery why such notions as “racial capitalism,” anti-colonial and anti-racist struggle, and critiques of gender so often irritate the sensibilities of this crowd of “theorists.” Where these critical interventions are practiced within the university system, they are themselves part of a program of political accommodation and a project of counterinsurgency against the militant articulations of these concepts that emerged historically in moments of proletarian insurgency. Yet the proponents of Political Capitalism fail to recognize that their own project in the university system is just as susceptible to the same cooptation that they claim to attack. Their preservation of concepts in their fixed determination is their own reconciliation to the present state of affairs, and the only mode of critique they can levy is theory as a proxy war for their grievances with the state of the academic labor market. No wonder then that such critiques end up being thinly veiled gripes at non-white colleagues. The petit bourgeois radical only conducts ruthless critique to defend that to which they feel entitled.
To Mr. Riley’s charge of political weakness, we communists then say that there is no greater demonstration of political weakness than simply critiquing capitalists for their inability to make productive investments. We find here a form of thought that aims to remove the object of confrontation from its critique, and thus a politics aligned with the world as is. Where Mr. Riley sees a capitalist rationality that capitalists loathe, he retains as possible the political project through which Social Democrats become more competent and equitable administrators of the capitalist state. Where Loïc Wacquant critiques abolitionism as an articulation of struggle against the police, he proposes only more funding to the carceral state for a “penal minimalism,”[2] against all historical evidence to the contrary that more funding only ever makes for a more brutal regime of capitalist judicial terror (let us take the opportunity to be clear here that the only “penal minimalism” worth its name would be the use of carceral capacities in the suppression of the capitalist class and its allies in a revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat). Where John Clegg and Adaner Usmani critique abolitionists’ alleged refusal to recognize the reality of crime, they only affirm the existence of the prison as is.[3] Following this, Usmani goes on to argue elsewhere for an expansive hiring program of 500,000 more police in the US (a goal he is certainly having met by the federal government’s current expansion of ICE employment and operations).[4]
The refusal to reconstruct the history of the capitalist mode of production in the particular moments of class struggle through which the proletariat has formed and sought emancipation in the means of abolishing itself as a class is the position adequate to those who cling to their comfortable jobs for dear life in a world that is all around them being set ablaze. When they bring these critiques to us, know that they are telling us that what they fear most is the proletariat that sets the fire. To this they seek comfort in the embrace of the capitalist state, an institution that has always been their home.
[1] Mr. Riley’s article: https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/no-substitute
[2]See Wacquant’s latest in the same rag: https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii158/articles/loic-wacquant-against-abolitionism
[3] See Clegg & Usmani’s “The Economic Origins of Mass Incarceration”: https://catalyst-journal.com/2019/12/the-economic-origins-of-mass-incarceration
My earlier criticisms of it on this blog, including links to other critical pieces on it: https://open.substack.com/pub/richardhunsinger/p/shadow-boxing?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
[4] The essay that Usmani co-wrote arguing for more policing: https://direct.mit.edu/ajle/article/doi/10.1162/ajle_a_00030/112647/THE-INJUSTICE-OF-UNDER-POLICING-IN-AMERICA1
A criticism of the statistical methodology in that article that demonstrates how its data are misrepresented to promote its conclusions: https://equalityalec.substack.com/p/a-response-to-the-harvard-professors
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