Since the election of Donald Trump there has been increasing debate around the roles of ‘economic anxiety’, racism, sexism, xenophobia, etc. Unfortunately, much of the debate has pitted these factors against each other. At its worst, it devolves into arguments that a single factor explains the rise of Donald Trump to the exclusion of all other factors. What follows is an unproductive and dissatisfying conversation that does nothing to help us grasp the current crisis of our capitalist society. In service of a more productive conversation, I would like to look closely at four faulty assumptions, methodological errors, or missteps in analysis that serve as serious barriers to understanding our current situation.

Proceeding from an understanding of capitalism only as an ‘economic’ system.

Many of the errors in analysis begin with a faulty understanding of capitalism and its relation to society. Consistent with classic liberal economic theory, most people view capitalism as an external economic system that acts upon society and creates certain constraints upon people’s lives. Political views influence how people interpret this external force, with some attributing it to a set of ‘natural’ economic laws and others conceiving of it as the result of a particular historical process. Yet, a fundamental error unites these positions: the separation of capitalism from society. Thus, capitalism is viewed as an economic system and only an economic system.

In contrast, Werner Bonefeld contends that Karl Marx’s work in Capital presents a critical social theory that conceives of capitalism as existing only through particular social relations.1 For a critical social theory, “the question of the social nature of the movement of coins is therefore one about the specific character of capitalistically constituted social relations that assert themselves in the form of economic forces beyond human control.” Bonefeld reminds us that no matter how objective or ‘real’ these economic forces may seem in capitalist society, they are in “in their entirety socially constituted.”

Once socially constituted, capitalism cannot act upon society from the outside, because it exists only in and through the social relations of those people who it enslaves. Critically conceived, so-called ‘natural’ economic laws cannot exist independently, but retain their force only through the social relations and practices that form the capitalist mode of production. Following Marx’s critique, capitalism cannot be understood as an economic system separate from the people whose activity drives its development. In order to avoid disconnecting economic categories from the social relations that produce them, a critique of political economy must proceed as a critical social theory rather than a permutation of economic critique. Only a critical social theory fully realizes the social and political life under capitalism and the constraints capitalism places on the individuals whose life processes make up society.

A compartmentalized and structural understanding of ‘the social’

If our goal is to look critically at capitalist society, we can only do so through careful analysis of ‘the social’,i.e. the totality of the social relations that make up capitalist society. Debates on race versus class, or class versus gender, or any other such combinations are based on an understanding of the social that is compartmentalized and structuralized. In such conceptions, society is torn into pieces, or ‘structures,’ that then seem to interact with one another haphazardly to produce particular social experiences. However, as Himani Bannerji describes, “both non-white and white people living in [the world] know that this social experience is not, as lived, a matter of intersectionality. Their sense of being in the world, textured through myriad social relations and cultural forms, is lived or felt or perceived as being all together and all at once.”2

When we think of society as only the sum of ‘component parts’, class becomes an economic category and race and gender are social or cultural forms. Such crude abstractions lead to the segmentation of parts of society and ill-conceived debates about one component being more ‘integral’ to society (or an individual’s experience) than another. Proceeding from this fragmented understanding of the social, a ‘class-reductionist’ Marxism clashes with an anti-racism focused ‘solely on cultural demands.’ This fragmentation becomes increasingly rigid when paired with a structural understanding of society in which social structures exert force on individuals in their everyday life. At their most extreme this view reifies these structures and conceals the real people whose life processes and social relations maintain the social and cultural forms that comprise the structures. In doing so, society loses the dynamic, socially-mediated processes that involve “living conscious human agents” in their “sensuous practical human activity.”

However real these ‘structures’ and ‘compartments’ are in abstraction, they cannot exist outside of the social relations and social forms that give them their shape and ‘structure’. To return to a more complex understanding of these social relations we must reject social theory that “ruptures the integrity of the social and joyously valorizes fragments” and instead see “every aspect or moment [of society] reflecting others, where each little piece of [society] contains the macrocosm in the microcosm.” All social activity is “relational and […] mediated and articulated with expressive as well as embedded forms of consciousness.” Rather than structuralize notions of race, gender, and class, we must follow Bannerji’s suggestion to socialize them — realize them as social relations internal to social practices and social forms rather than external forces beyond human control.

If class, race, and gender are ‘social’ concepts, their relationship to one another becomes one of dynamism and mediation through a social totality rather than one of rigidity and intersection, through social fragmentation. While the social forms of race, class, and gender are distinct, they are not fully separable in the concrete form of the social — their difference is constituted through their unity in being mediated through the capitalist social mode of production. If the social relations of capitalism dictate a particular social topography on which individuals must attempt to make their history, then race and class, through social mediation, organization, and practice, determine who ends up where, or rather who receives what. As social-relational practices under capitalism, race and class are formatively implicated; race is firmly rooted in the class relation that gives rise to the capitalist mode of production, and class — ‘standing for an entire ensemble of social relations’ — cannot be conceptualized or lived in its historical specificity without race.

As Bannerji warns, this does not preclude organizing around particular issues, but instead insists that the particular can only be fully understood through “the wider or extra-local context of socioeconomic and cultural relations.” Bannerji continues, “if they are ‘specific’ issues, we have to realize that is because they are ‘specific’ to a general larger set of social […] relations.” Rejecting a fragmented concept of society means we cannot pick and choose or rank and order social forms. instead we relate moments of the social to one another in their ‘difference in unity’ — “each microcosm containing the macrocosm.” 3

An ahistorical understanding of the meaning of ‘working class’

A socialized understanding of class, race, and gender, allows a clearer articulation of the specific social relations that constitute the capitalist mode of production.4 As its precondition — both historically and logically speaking — , capitalism requires a class of people who can no longer provide for themselves through their own labor and human activity because they lack direct access to the means of production. Instead (whether through slavery or wage labor) every individual is corporeally and materially compelled to sell his or her labor power to the capitalist in order to survive.

The process by which such a group of people exists cannot be attributed to the rule of economic categories or forces of the capitalist mode of production because capitalism could not be formed prior to the existence of its constituent social relations. It would be an historical error to suggest the process of primitive accumulation (the process by which the peasantry was divorced from the means of production) was carried out with the goal of creating capitalism or to suggest that feudal society carried within it the germ of capitalism. In Bonefeld’s words, “the past does not contain the future as its unfolding destiny…rather the present contains the past and it is the present that reveals the significance of the past as the historical foundation of the existing social relations.”

As Marx describes in his work on primitive accumulation, divorcing the people from their land and the means of production was a historical process, itself the result of the particular social relations, political struggles, and material conditions of feudalism. The expropriation of the peasantry across the globe was a violent, forceful, highly contested endeavor. Indeed, Marx describes the nascent capitalism as ‘dripping from head to foot, from every pore with blood and dirt.” In The Caliban and The Witch, Silvia Federici details how a capitalist mode of production was in no way predetermined by feudalism. Instead, she asserts the development of capitalism was the result of particular political and social processes. Peasants strongly resisted being forced from the land they owned and once that struggle was lost they did not quietly acquiesce to becoming wage laborers. According to Federici, the landless class’ participation in the horrors of wage labor required significant state violence and coercion. This is clear not only in the actions of those who struggled vehemently against wage labor but also in the choice of peasants who were so abhorred by the idea of wage labor and its corporeal conditions that they preferred to live as vagabonds rather than subject themselves to the wage.5

While the historical specifics differ, the development of slavery evinces similar resistance. No one entered into slavery willingly or became a slave because they were divorced from their land. Both wage labor and slavery are the results of particular historical and political projects that required force, violence and coercion. The violence of these particular processes created the social relations which formed the basis for capitalist accumulation, belying the notion that capitalism relies only on civilized economic coercion. Bonefeld summarizes the reality of violence and capitalism succinctly, saying that capitalism “entails the force of law-making violence within its concept.”

That the creation of a working class or proletariat — which itself is internal to capitalist accumulation — required tremendous violence and encountered great resistance poses significant questions regarding the limits of a so-called ‘working class politics’. Many on the modern left or those associated with the ‘workerism’ of Marxism-past rely on appeals to the working class as the only basis for socialism or socialist organizing. In contrast, I contend that there is nothing unique or historically transcendent about the working class. There are no true subjects of history to which we must turn our attention. In fact, many who rightly criticize appeals to the working class as racialized and gendered, retain the faulty assumption that a particular group of people are the true subjects of history, or that a particular group’s experience contains the key to understanding and moving beyond our current society.

We need look no further than to Marx himself for a corrective: “to be a productive laborer [or I would add any other oppressed person] is not a piece of luck but a misfortune.” From the perspective of social analysis, Bonefeld contends that, “the standpoint of labor does not reveal an ontologically privileged position. Rather the standpoint of labor is in every aspect tied to the capitalist economy of labor.” Borrowing from Federici’s analysis, I contend that the creation of the working class was itself an historical defeat that — far from being predetermined — resulted from the particular struggles of the feudalist class society. (For a more detailed historical analysis of the rise and fall of working class politics under capitalism see Endnotes volume 4.)

Thus, a working class that organizes itself on the basis of its own reproduction is consigned to organizing around its historical loss and the negation of life under capitalism. While communization theory may be difficult to apply practically, it provides clarifying insight that: the affirmation of the working class is always an affirmation of one pole of the capitalist relation. This is not to say that we cannot support the working class in its struggle for better conditions and a better life. However, it does mean we cannot assume that working class politics in and of themselves hold the key to overcoming capitalist social relations; “the class struggle is […] the working class struggle to make a living. It has no transcendent meaning.”

A false assumption that capitalism presupposes the unity of the proletariat.

The social relations and material conditions that form the basis of the capitalist mode of production manifest themselves in the masses of individuals without access to the means of production. This material and social alienation is often rightly described as the objective basis for resistance and overcoming of capitalist society. However, the ‘unification’ of the proletariat in misery under capitalism does not guarantee political or organizational solidarity. In fact, capitalism unifies the proletariat only in separation — their separation from the material and social needs for human fulfillment as well as their separation from one another in an increasingly atomized workplace. 6

A closer look at the workplace itself reveals the corporeal origins of the disjunction and immiseration that permeates everyday life under capitalism. Joseph Fracchia argues that Marx’s analysis of the immiseration and exploitation of the worker under capitalism contains an often neglected corporeal dimension — the horrific infliction of bodily pain in the workplace. In comparing Marx’s description of the use of machinery in the capitalist workplace to the machine in Kafka’s Penal colony, Fracchia demonstrates “capital’s systemic production of bodies in pain” and its rule over the productive bodies it requires to produce surplus value.7

The debilitating effects of the capitalist production process originate not just from the machinery itself, but from the logic of the subdivision of the production process in the pursuit of greater productivity for the sake of increased surplus value. As Fracchia describes, Marx spared no indignation when cataloging the effects of the division of labor, relying on quotes from the classical political economist who themselves willingly admit its deleterious effects. Since Marx’s writing, the workplace has only become further subdivided and increasingly atomized; recalling Marx’s work in Capital where he quotes a member of English parliament: “to subdivide a man is to execute him, if he deserves the sentence, to assassinate him if he does not… the subdivision of labour is the assassination of a people.”

Turning his attention to the machinery itself, Fracchia, through Marx, describes the ways in which capitalist machinery manifests the social domination of capital in corporeal form. The machine acts upon and rules over the worker to such a point where the worker himself becomes the instrument of capital. Labor is completely devoid of its object and in fact the laborer becomes the object of the capitalist production process. The workers objectless-ness, his separation from the means to produce his own life, now confronts him physically in the domination of the capitalist machine over his bodily functions. Marx describes machine labor as “exhausting the nervous system to the utmost, suppressing the many-sided play of muscles, and confiscating all free bodily and mental activity.” The capitalist production process is inscribed in the bodies of the workers in wounds, scars, deformed limbs, and deteriorating joints. Marx continues, “even the alleviation of labour becomes an instrument of torture since the machine does not free the worker from work, but empties the work of all content.”8

The destructive, isolating force of corporeal pain in the capitalist workplace bears significantly on the ability of the proletariat to organize itself socially. The intense immiseration of the work process extends itself into workers’ everyday lives — even beyond the production process. Fracchia describes the nature of life under capitalism for the worker:

The physical pain of the production process is accompanied by the destruction of “the quality of both work and free time.” By pushing the working day to its physical limits, capital leaves little time available for workers to satisfy their ‘intellectual and social needs’.

Through the ongoing pain of the capitalist production process the worker experiences his or her own isolation. In her seminal work “The Body In Pain” Elaine Scarry argues that physical pain is by its very nature, unable to be shared or communicated. According to Scarry, “Physical pain does not simply resist language but actively destroys it.” In the destruction of communication, pain creates not only isolation but also antagonism through two distinct roles in relationship to pain that are implicated in one another. First, the person experiencing the physical pain who is unable to communicate, reach out, and be understood. Second the person hearing someone else describe their pain who, because they are incapable of sharing in pain, cannot help but be skeptical. Scarry adeptly describes this phenomenon: “To have pain is to have certainty, to hear someone else describe their pain is to have doubt.” The proletarian under capitalism is separated from his fellow workers through the simultaneous assumption of both roles: constantly certain of his own pain, constantly in doubt of the pain of others.9

Pain and isolation, not unity, are the standard conditions of the proletariat under capitalism. Unfortunately, as the crisis intensifies, the immiseration and pain of the exploited class only increases. Under such conditions the proletariat tends toward further separation as easily as it tends toward solidarity. Those who are scared of losing their ever-precarious ‘security’ rightfully fear those demanding access to the jobs which they’ve been denied. Under conditions of a stagnating economy, state violence, and austerity it seems that gains of one section of the working class can only come at the expense of another section.10 Thus instead of solidarity with a fellow proletarian, there is only fear, insecurity, and often hate.

To echo Marx, the position of the worker is not one of strength, but already one of defeat. In contrast to prior eras, we cannot say that “worker” is a category to aspire to, nor is it one of historical destiny or predetermined unity.10 Capitalism does not exist in spite of the worker but because of him/her: “Rather than having to hunt for its victims, capital enlists its victims to produce and reproduce the exploitative conditions of their own immiseration.”

Increasingly, the conditions of their own immiseration include the conditions that ultimately deprive the laborer of access to labor. As the economy stagnates, the class war intensifies and greater numbers of the proletariat are left without access to formal job markets. Many are left in so called ‘surplus populations’ superfluous to capital but without any means to secure the needs of life.11 The surplus populations are themselves highly racialized and sexed and increasingly managed only through increased state violence and coercion (carried out by the police and military). In such historical and political circumstances, it is difficult to see exactly what a return to a ‘working class politics’ provides. If one is jobless, how can one identify with a workers movement? If one’s experience of joblessness is one of racialized state violence and/or increased sexual violence what can a working class politics offer?

If we are to take seriously both Bannerji’s notion of socializing race, class and gender, then the transcending of the capitalist social relations must be our target, not the organization of working class as the working class (itself one half of the basis and continuing result of those relations). Thus, we see that class, race and gender are the social relations and material forces which unify proletarians in their separation — not as workers but as those subjected to the desperation, deprivation, and humiliation of life under a racist, sexist capitalist society. Our basis, then, is not the working class but the corporeal, material, and social needs of those ‘real living individuals,’ and creating a society that fulfills those needs.

We see communism not as the fulfillment of workers’ destiny, but as remedying “life-long neediness” which is itself “a concerted attack on the body and bodily capacities of those in need.” With such a goal in mind we are not forced to choose between a ‘working class politics’ and an ‘identity politics’. Instead we can see the connections between cries of “Black Lives Matter” and loss of meaningful life and community in rural areas(of any race) riddled with joblessness, poverty and addiction. We see the systemic violence of the state against its own people and the everyday violence committed by men against women as linked — not equal but connected. In those social moments, individuals share in the desperation, deprivation, and violence of capitalist society not as workers but as humans with material and social needs that have gone unfulfilled. “The problem of communism is not the ‘freeing of the proletarian’ or the self organization of the working class but the creation of the classless society” — fulfilling that which has gone unfulfilled.12

Making these connections in the actual composition of our social movements is an exceedingly difficult task. However, it is one we must undertake if we are to have any hope of building a better world rather than entering into darkness. We need a politics that is capable of holding a more complex understanding of the social relations in our current historical moment. By doing so, we can build a movement not as workers, not just as those against capitalism, but as people for the classless society we want. In order to begin such work, we must see “every moment of the social reflecting others,” both accounting for and appreciating how capitalist society separates us, while also seeing the possibility for the creation of new social relations which unify us in community rather than in separation. Without such clarity, we are unable to see — or choose not to see — the gravity of what stands before us: “‘The whole is false.’ The whole has to go.”13 There can be nothing less than the supersession of capitalist society and it is only those who share in their objectlessness — in the murder of their loved ones, in the destruction of their communities, in the pain of their bodies — who can make it so.

1. All quotes from Werner Bonefeld’s “Critical Theory And The Critique of Political Economy” which can be found here http://www.bloomsbury.com/us/critical-theory-and-the-critique-of-political-economy-9781623563318/

2. All Himani Bannerji quotes from her essay “Building From Marx: Reflections on “race”, gender, and class” which can be found online here http://www.davidmcnally.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/bannerji.buildingfrommarx.pdf

3. The concept of difference in unity is owed to the following quote from Werner Bonefeld:

“To trace out the inner connection between social phenomena is to search for the substantive abstraction which constitutes their social reality as interconnected, as complex forms different from, but united to, each other, in order to theorise this interconnection, the theoretical approach has to specify the historical process which constitutes the common element that makes social phenomena different from each other in unity.”

4. These social relations are not only constitutive of capitalist accumulation but are themselves then mediated in a society where ‘social relations between people manifests themselves as relationships between economic things’.

5. As both Foucault and Federici note the subjection of the body to wage labor was directly tied to the criminalization of those who refused wage labor in one manner or another. Synthesizing accounts from Federici, Foucault and Marx I think it is safe to say that simply divorcing the peasants from the means of production did not guarantee a system of wage labor and slavery that form the basis for capitalist accumulation. Instead both beginning in England, and throughout the world since, the creation of a labor force is itself an historical process that forms the basis of the capitalism. In other words, the working class did not simply come into existence by accident or according to natural economic laws — -rather, the working class had to be made.

6. I owe the concept of ‘unity in separation’ to Endnotes Volume 4 which can be found online here: https://endnotes.org.uk/.

7. All citations from Joseph Fracchia’s “The Capitalist Labor Process And The Body In Pain: The Corporeal Depths of Marx’s Concept of Immiseration”

8. See Jasper Bernes discussion of Richard Sennett’s documentation of the changes in the mechanization of the bread making process. “The more transparent and ‘user friendly’ the computerized processes are, the more opaque the total process they control becomes.” https://endnotes.org.uk/issues/3/en/jasper-bernes-logistics-counterlogistics-and-the-communist-prospect

9. Scarry notes that all states of consciousness except pain pair with an object to which that state can be placed. Thus hunger can be satisfied by food. Love is felt for a person. Belonging felt towards one community. However, pain has no object where it can be placed. If such an object can be created (say a medicine or device that alleviates the pain) then pain ceases to be pain and no longer exists. Conversely, if a state of consciousness is without its object, that consciousness approaches the experience of physical pain. If love goes unfulfilled, if one’s community is destroyed and he or she no longer has a place to belong, if one does not have food with which to satisfy his or her hunger — these experiences are “world destroying” in much the same way physical pain is.

10. For a much more detailed analysis of these conditions please see “The Holding Pattern” from Endnotes Volume 3 found here: https://endnotes.org.uk/issues/3/en/endnotes-the-holding-pattern

11. For more on the internal dynamics of capitalism that produce these surplus populations see “Misery And Debt” a collaboration between Endnotes and Aaron Benanav: https://endnotes.org.uk/issues/2/en/endnotes-misery-and-debt

12. One of the most interesting arguments pursued by Federici in “Caliban and The Witch” is the degree to which the enclosure process destroyed the literal physical and geographical space where peasants conducted their communal activities. Her work on the witch trials in Europe also demonstrates the process by which peasant solidarity and community were defeated in the establishment of capitalist class relations and thus the capitalist mode of production. More generally, Federici’s work (and the work of others on primitive accumulation) points to interesting inquiries into the degree to which the creation of a ‘working class’ was already itself a defeat of the ‘unity’ the working class is supposed to already contain.

13. Again from Bonefeld as cited above