Month: July 2018

Marx’s work abounds with people who are not citizens, neither bourgeois nor citoyens: slaves, serfs, day labourers, vagabonds, the colonised, proletarians. They have a prominent place in his analysis of capitalism’s origins. In his famous part 8 of Capital I (chapters 26-33), Marx interprets these origins as a continuous process of ‘primitive accumulation’ whereby land was taken away from its original users, enclosed and appropriated as private property. The previous users of the land, in European history often tenant farmers, had to enter the urban labour markets, and in this way capitalism first manifested itself within Europe, and subsequently beyond Europe through colonialism. Only by looking at the fate of these non-citizens can we see the threads and stitches on the inside of the metropole’s embroidery: “This subject’ [primitive accumulation], said Marx, ‘one must study in detail, to see what the bourgeoisie makes of itself and of the labourer, wherever it can, without restraint, model the world after its own image” (543).¹

Marx himself had experience with the right of the state to give and take citizenship. National passports had not yet appeared by the mid-point of the nineteenth century, but the papers and decrees that held poor and bothersome people in their place, or expelled them, had. Indeed, the border was everywhere was the case for more people than the rosy liberal picture of the 19^th century often suggests; this was in many ways comparable to today’s migrant experience that the border is everywhere (Rosenberg 2006). Marx, the social and political critic, was indeed a bothersome person in the eyes of many authorities and was frequently refused residence or employment, therefore becoming the ‘glorious, sacred, accursed but still clandestine immigrant [as] he was all his life.’ (Derrida 2006 [1993], 219).

As a young progressive philosopher around 1840 Marx found no place at a German university and he became a journalist for the radical Rheinische Zeitung. When it was suppressed in 1843 he left for Paris, from where he was ousted in 1845 after Prussia asked for his expulsion claiming high treason against the Prussian state due to his critical views of the Prussian political economy. He was allowed to settle in Brussels, but only after he renounced his Prussian citizenship. That citizenship had been secured by his father in 1815 by converting to Protestantism, because as a Jew, when the Rhineland became a part of Prussia, he could not remain in public service; his father gave up his religious tradition for citizenship, but Marx did not give up his political views, and lost it again. In 1848 he praised the Revolution taking place all over Europe, and became expelled from Belgium too. With his wife Jenny and four young children he emigrated to England. The family lived in poor conditions for years, with only three of the seven children attaining adulthood. Marx died without citizenship, but liked to sign his letters with “Citizen Marx” (Sperber 2013). 

The ‘Jewish question’ or the ‘citizenship question’?

During his stay in Paris, just before his flight to Belgium, Marx had impeccably exposed the paradoxes of modern citizenship in his Zur Judenfrage. These did not concern passports or borders yet, but the right of ‘everyone’ to take part in political power. The core of Marx’s argument is that the equality that arises between citoyens through political emancipation – that is to say through universal suffrage and the general right to political activity – is, on the one hand, a necessary step out of feudalism, but on the other does not end the inequalities in social life, and even exacerbates them in many ways. The homme/man part of the Déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen refers to social life, and Marx reminds the reader that the human with ‘human rights’ is in practice especially the individual with property rights who stands in opposition to others in the ‘bürgerliche Gesellschaft’/civil society. This individual tends to project equality (and solidarity) onto the state, as does the religious human onto heaven. A further phase of human emancipation is necessary, wherein human beings learn to recognise themselves in other humans as free beings, and as all forming part of a Gattungswesen, a species being, as social, relational beings.

Why did the elaboration of this view receive the title Zur Judenfrage – why did it seem that citizenship specifically concerned the Jews? Marx developed his view as a contribution to the debate on the emancipation of the Jews in Prussia which arose in reaction to the provision of civil rights to (property-owning) Jews in France in 1791. He especially reacted to the view of his former friend Bruno Bauer, who had also published a Zur Judenfrage.²

A profoundly saddening aspect of this debate was that the question of citizenship played out in terms of ‘The Jewish Question’, focusing on the minority that did not yet have civil rights, rather than on the elephant in the room, namely the Christian bourgeoisie and its political privileges.³ This focus inextricably linked progressive philosophy to Christian antisemitism. Bauer did address the relationship between Christian privileges and political citizenship, and criticised the recovery of the political power of the conservative Christian bourgeoisie after 1815 during the Restoration, particularly in Prussia. His intended remedy was the secularisation of the State: France and the U.S. were his models. Bauer radicalised those models, however, for the tough Prussian context, and asserted that not only religious privileges and religious institutions but religion in general should be abandoned—he also thought this because, like Marx, he had been convinced, after reading Feuerbach, that religion should be seen as alienation.

Although the political problem thus primarily concerned the religious privileges of the Christian citizens, Bauer used lines from theology and the intellectual culture of the Enlightenment to explain Judaism as the core of the problem – and to refuse the Jews citizenship rights. He set forth Judaism as a more dogmatic, directly political and ritualistic religion than Christianity, and Protestantism in particular. Like so many others Bauer adopted the differentiation between the ‘particularistic’ Old Testament and the ‘universal’ New Testament, between dogma/law and freedom/love, which he inherited directly from Christian theology and German Idealism. Judaism thus actually became a metaphor for the practically stronger political Christendom, and in addition became presented as an objective problem itself.

This happened not only in the work of Bauer, but in an entire nineteenth-century intellectual tradition which developed in the European context, in which Athens and Jerusalem, and/or Indo-European/Aryan and Hebrew/Semitic traditions were compared with each other on the basis of several stereotypes, which were endlessly rehashed in the nineteenth century and early twentieth century (Olender 2002 [1994]; Leonard 2012). Thereby (constructed) theological difference became the problem, instead of the actual religious networks intertwined with the state which were dominated by precisely those Protestants who had defined their own religion as ‘purely moral’.

This is an important genealogy for seeing the possible problems with how again today religion in general (and especially ‘Islam’) has been made the core problem of ‘particularism’ in the public sphere by liberal authors focused on the ‘question of secularism’. We can learn how this hides real power differences and hegemony from view both from critical work on the role of (secularising) Christianity in political processes in twentieth century Europe (such as f.e. Samuel Moyn 2015), and from the work on the racial and class (or neoliberal) dimensions intersected with religious differences and secularism today (f.e. Meer 2012; Jansen 2013; Topolski 2018). In this fashion, today’s debates, focused on ‘religion in the public sphere’ and Islam in particular, create their own implicit non-citizens on the grounds of ‘religious difference’, all promises of assimilation (or integration in today’s jargon) notwithstanding, and thus firmly place themselves in the exclusionary tradition of Bruno Bauer (see Farris 2015). 

Marx

Marx made short work of Bauer. He asked the question that preceded the too-superficial diagnosis and exclusionary ‘solution’ by Bauer, and analysed what makes religion and religious privilege possible, what sustains religion, and what different forms it can take. Consequently, secularism itself becomes a problem because it does not question the conditions of religion, but takes religion as a given – and thus also the religious privileges connected to Christianity, capitalism, and colonialism. He sees the separation between church and state as an important development in Euro-American history because it eliminates the direct political inequalities of feudalism, but at the same time it gives rise to the idea that religious differences, which are actually in many ways the manifestation of social inequalities, are essential differences in religious conviction and an exercise of religious freedom. An example of this for Marx is the combination of the cultivation of religious freedom, with on the one hand the wall of separation and on the other the huge social inequalities in the US. A step back is necessary: “We do not turn secular questions into theological questions [as in Bauer and German Idealism, YJ], we turn theological questions into secular ones.” (Marx 1978 [1843], 31).

Human emancipation then means overcoming secularism as well: the human is no longer divided between the private ‘religious group-member/owner’ bourgeois/homme on the one hand and the public, ‘secular’ citoyen on the other. The ‘human’ in emancipation therefore concerns something different than the ‘human’ in human rights. Where for Marx human rights mostly concerned private law and especially property rights, and the security (and closing off) of the individual, ‘human emancipation’ was precisely about the way in which the human and the citizen can be brought together, and the social inequalities overcome.

In the second part of the text Marx continues with his correction of Bauer and encourages the reader not to focus on the Sabbath-Jew, on faith, or on religious difference, but on the everyday Jew; he shifts from theology to social history (Peled 1992; for the ambivalences of this claim, see Newman 1994; Nirenberg 2013). About the everyday Jew Marx then writes terrible things, making the Jew an emblem for what he will later call capitalism, but still speaks here of usury and the veneration of money. For Marx, just like for Bauer and the Christian philosophers/theologians, ‘the Jew’ remains a figure for the connection between power/authority/law and religion, something that in historical reality was much more connected to the Christian bourgeoisie (and nobility) of Europe. The Jews were, as Yirmiyahu Yovel puts it, a ‘mirror’ of the Europeans and their problems with modernity, whereby they could project their inequalities and discontent onto the religious and/or racialised ‘other’ (Yovel 1998; see as well Nirenberg 2013).⁴

Marx thus remains firmly rooted in the 19th century, from which so much 20^th century political life inherits and which unfortunately appears to be alive and kicking in the 21^st. He wrote about citizenship as Hegel did about history, as a participant in an intellectual world of overly bold men who thought they could grasp ‘everything’ and who were among the main inventors of racial theories and stereotypical ideas about religion, culture, and difference. But on a more ambivalent note, we may also be missing some of the élan of Marx’s grand narrative of emancipation, in a time in which as ‘humanity’, we utterly fail to organise ourselves justly or freely, with a US government composed of billionaires and millionaires, and a Euro-American (and increasingly global) citizenry clinging to its imperial lifestyle (Brand and Wissen 2016) and taking their passports as birthrights.

Ironically enough citizenship as national or European membership has thus, in part, become something of which Marx thought was primarily contained in the ‘bourgeois’ part of citizenship: a source of privilege, supremacy and enduring inequalities. In this respect there can be no non-citizens without reminding contemporary citizens that, next to their being citoyens, they are also the inheritors of those cruel bourgeois, even of the preceding ‘nobility’, who built their wealth on colonies and exploitation. At present the many investments in other notions of citizenship unfortunately cannot compete with that – the ‘we are here … because you were there’, or rather, ‘because you are there’. But still, we are here: to have a voice, to act collectively – those are the other potentials of the citizenship traditions, and they are not dependent on papers; everyone is a citizen, even if borders are everywhere.  

                                                           Translated by Michele Murgia

The non-simultaneity of the simultaneous (Ungleichzeitigkeit des Gleichzeitigen) refers to the complex idea – put in formal and abstract terms – of a coexistence, in a same time (the simultaneous), of things that express or represent different times or that have different dynamics of development (the non-simultaneity). This idea is associated with Marxism and has had repercussions in many areas of knowledge, from structuralism – where a debt is recognized not only vis-a-vis Marx but also vis-a-vis Hegel and Bakhtin – and its attempt to introduce a dynamic dimension into language as a system, up to the sociology of generations and the sociology of modernization, passing through aesthetics and political thought, among others.

The phrase itself was coined at the beginning of the 20th century by the German art historian Wilhelm Pinder, and later introduced into the Marxist tradition by Ernst Bloch. Pinder refers to the coexistence, at the same time, of different generations and artistic styles. With this he recovered the intuition of Wilhelm Dilthey, who sought to rehabilitate – against the reduction of time to the purely quantitative and external (that of simultaneity) – the qualitative and internal or experiential time, which admits of non-simultaneity. In this tradition can be inscribed the sociology of generations, developed by Karl Mannheim, who, against Marx, sought to understand the emancipatory ethos no longer through the struggle of social classes, but in terms of conflictive interaction and mutual influence between social generations, whose birth supposes the connection between age groups, conformation of a common identity and socio-structural conditions. The elementary intuition that brings together this tradition is that the present is fragmented; that not all contemporaries live the same present.

Bloch can appropriate this idea from a Marxist perspective because Marx, within the framework of his materialist dialectic, effectively deals with issues such as the unequal degrees of development of the modes and relations of production, between countries and within them. This was also a key reference point for Leon Trotsky and his theory of combined development, present in revolutionary Russia, in which archaic forms were amalgamated with contemporary forms of development. For Bloch, a typical case of the non-simultaneity of the simultaneous was Germany before the Second World War: a country in which – despite having a high degree of capitalist development – there existed enormous archaic, pre-capitalist, anti-democratic, anti-capitalist and also anti-Marxist tendencies and groups, on whose fertile ground the Nazi regime was nourished. The internal non-simultaneity of Germany also put it into a relation of non-simultaneity with respect to the rest of Europe, heir to the bourgeois revolution. The discussion about the difficulties of Germany’s orientation towards the democratic West, instead of the authoritarian East, did not lose vigor in the 20th century, especially in the work of Jürgen Habermas.

Certainly, the notion of “concrete utopia”, which Bloch develops in his The Principle of Hope, feeds on the notion of a fragmentary present, which not only inhabits the past but also includes prefigurations of a better future; in this case as concrete utopias. Anchored in the Marxist tradition and conserving its emancipatory ethos, Bloch affirms that the fragmentation of the present, as such, is insurmountable, and that in it there coexist past and future, and heterogeneity in the forms of developments. This has several key consequences in the development of Marxist thought.

The Hegelian dialectic of the development of spirit in history and the materialist dialectic of Marx coincide in identifying the non-simultaneity of the simultaneous as a moment that the dialectical movement seeks to overcome; that is, to reestablish the simultaneity of the simultaneous. The non-simultaneity between productive forces and relations of production is overcome by a revolutionary process. Non-simultaneity is the motor of history because it is conceived as a contradiction – between forces (expressing different historical times) – that impels development and, with it, its overcoming. Overcoming the contradiction is translated here as a regeneration of simultaneity. Marx’s early awareness of different degrees of development is accompanied by a moment of overcoming, conceived as a restoration of unity or simultaneity. This teleological representation is no longer accepted. The consciousness of the non-simultaneity of the simultaneous is rescued as an important inheritance, but not the moment of unity.

In the 20th century, the notion of unequal developments and the irreducible autonomy of the various social spheres increasingly came to be accepted, as well as the difficulty of attributing greater value to one stage of development in relation to others. This has been expressed particularly in the criticism of the classical theories of modernization and in a relative consensus, today, on the existence of different patterns of modernization, which are internally complex and mixed, and on the existence of multiple modernities. This is especially relevant for non-European continental and Anglo-Saxon cultures.

When it comes to contemporary social theory, theories of social differentiation – especially systems theory – have convincingly argued that the independent functioning of societal subsystems is not an epiphenomenon or a mere moment or stage in a linear path of progress, but an expression of their mutual irreducibility. This has a double valency for Marxism: on the one hand, it constitutes a relevant critique of the materialist dialectic, in the sense of a rejection of the idea of a moment of unification or “simultaneization” of what, until then, was not simultaneous. On the other hand, the thesis of irreducible social differentiation strengthens the already old criticism of the orthodox reading of Marxism, according to which spheres such as law, art, education, or science, reflect the relations of production (according to the base-superstructure metaphor). Against this orthodox interpretation, the figure of non-simultaneity and relative autonomy of the different spheres of social life is revitalized, initially by Marx himself in the Grundrisse.

A key result of this criticism is the openness to different ways of conceiving emancipatory developments, in culture or politics, for example. The recognition of the insurmountable character of non-simultaneity has led Marxism towards a conceptual path often conceived as post-Marxist. One of its starting points is the highlighting of politics and the political as autonomous from the economic as a last instance. The social struggle of the left moves away from any essentialism and the credit of an ontological privilege, and must be understood both as an anti-hegemonic struggle and a struggle for another hegemony; that is, to impose a progressive model of social cohesion against others, equally legitimate, proposed by its adversaries. The recognition of the insurmountable and irreducible character of non-simultaneity, whose intuition is largely due to Bloch, thereby also finds a conceptual habitat in the Marxism of Antonio Gramsci and the Post-Marxism of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe. There is no doubt that, until now, the idea of non-simultaneity of the simultaneous belongs to the vocabulary of the margins of Marxism; margins that are little explored or known even to specialists. Its implications, however, as can be seen, are far from marginal, and we might therefore expect it to be part of the language of a Marxism for the 21st century.

 

“Marx is all right, but we need to complete Marx” (Aimé Césaire 1972, 70).

The Eurocentrism of Marx’s materialist conception of historical progress has long been a serious bone of contention for many postcolonial theorists. By considering Western capitalist societies as more “advanced” than non-Western societies, Marx’s developmental model reinforces a Eurocentric mode of production narrative because it defines “primitive” forms of accumulation such as the “Asiatic mode of production” to be at a “lower” stage to the industrial capitalist economies of nineteenth-century Western Europe (Morton 2007, 74). Marx’s writings on British colonialism in India are a good example of his Eurocentric vision of world history: “England, it is true, in causing a social revolution in Hindostan, was actuated only by the vilest interests, and was stupid in her manner of enforcing them. But that is not the question. The question is, can mankind fulfil its destiny without a fundamental revolution in the social state of Asia? If not, whatever may have been the crimes of England she was the unconscious tool of history in bringing about that revolution.” (Marx 1853).

While on the one hand Marx bemoans the dissolution of family communities and domestic industry in rural Indian villages, he also claims that the idyllic village communities form the foundation of Oriental despotism (Morton 2007, 74). Edward Said accuses Marx of reproducing an image of Asia as “backward” and “despotic” and rebukes him as follows: “Marx’s economic analyses are perfectly fitted thus to a standard Orientalist undertaking, even though Marx’s humanity, his sympathy for the misery of people, are clearly engaged. Yet in the end it is the Romantic Orientalist vision that wins out.” (Said 1978, 153-4).

Contesting Marx’s claim that “advanced” modes of production simply replace more “primitive” ones, Gayatri Spivak suggests that the “Asiatic mode of production” does not completely disappear in the era of global capitalism (1999, 91). Spivak outlines how the conditions of industrial production and labour in nineteenth 19^th-century Western Europe, which were the focus of Marx’s analysis, have been increasingly substituted by a flexible, non-unionized and causal form of gendered and racialised workforce in the global South (Morton 2007, 73). Spivak thereby rethinks Marx’s labour theory of value in terms of the geographical dynamics of the international division of labour to outline the enduring relevance of the “Asiatic mode of production” for the contemporary global economy. Indeed, Spivak (1999, 167) praises Marx for anticipating the increasing importance of women’s labour power in modern industry and highlights new forms of superexploitation of non-unionized, subcontracted, precarious female labour under contemporary global capitalism.

Along similar lines, Dipesh Chakrabarty (2000, 93) questions Eurocentric historical narratives claiming unity and universality by contesting their assumption of subaltern labour as “primitive”. By focusing on disparate histories of subaltern labour, Chakrabarty thwarts the understanding of “pre-capitalism” as simply a “primitive” stage in the linear history of global capitalist accumulation (Morton 2007, 94). Spivak as well as Chakrabarty urge western Marxists and global justice activists to adopt a more critical vocabulary that considers heterogeneous registers of subaltern labour. Furthermore, Spivak’s focus on the reproductive bodies of subaltern women in the global South pluralizes and diversifies the narrow definition of productive labour proposed by Marx’s labour theory of value.

At the same time, although Spivak is invested in labour movements and the social redistribution of capital towards economic justice, she questions whether a programmatic socialist alternative to capitalism is feasible (Morton 2007, 89). Spivak rethinks socialism as the différance of capitalism as opposed to its overcoming or sublation. In contrast to Marx’s belief that capitalism would inevitably give way to socialism because it contains the seeds of its own destruction, Spivak proposes socialism as the persistent and enduring ethical and political task of undoing capitalism: “a constant pushing away – a differing and a deferral – of the capital-ist harnessing of the social productivity of capital” (1999, 430). This moves away from an evolutionary linear narrative to a more indeterminate understanding of post-imperial futures.

In 2011 and the ensuing years, the world witnessed a global wave of assembly movements such as Occupy Wall Street, the Spanish Indignados, the Turkish Gezi Park protests and Nuit Debout in France. What distinguished these various movements is that they often did not seek to acquire state power, and in many cases refused to even engage with the existing institutions and procedures of representative democracy (Mouffe 2013). Also, they did not often have a comprehensive programme. Instead, within the confined space of an occupied square, these movements created a miniature version of the kind of society that they sought to realise on a grander scale. They experimented with alternative forms of decision-making and new forms of movement organisation and mobilisation, and they established alternative networks of redistribution, education, and communication (Graeber 2013; Howard and Patt-Broyden 2011). This particular form of political activism, which prioritises the experimental realisation of a future ideal in the ‘here and now’, is often described as ‘prefiguration’ or ‘prefigurative politics’ (Van de Sande 2013).

Where exactly does this concept of ‘prefiguration’ come from? Its introduction in the academic literature on radical politics is relatively recent. Stemming from the tradition of biblical exegesis (Auerbach 1984; Gordon 2017), it was first introduced in studies of anarchist and syndicalist workers’ movements in the late 1970s (Boggs 1977). But, arguably, the term refers to a particular view of revolutionary change that has divided the international workers’ movement since the 1860s (Graham 2015). In those days, the ‘First International’ was split between anarchist and Marxist factions, which had very different views on what revolutionary strategy their respective movements should pursue.

According to Marx and his followers, the acquisition of state power was an important step in the establishment of a ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ (Marx 2010a, 355). The state would gradually dissolve only after the proletariat’s rise to power (Marx and Engels 2010, 86-7). Until then, it should function as a revolutionary instrument – an instrument that, it should be noted, would change significantly in the hands of the proletarian class. Marx’ great opponent within the International, the Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin (1814-1876), insisted instead that the social revolution must be established immediately, and thus cannot be preceded by a distinctive political revolution. The state had to be abolished “on the first day of the revolution” (Bakunin 1992, 130). This insistence was much to the annoyance of Marx, who objected that the revolutionary struggle must be directed against the structural basis of capitalism and private property – not its superficial workings and mechanisms, such as the state or hereditary capital (Marx 2010b).

It is clear who ‘won’ the debate eventually: in 1872 the anarchists were expelled from The International, and Bakunin – who in his own days was no less prominent than Marx – went down in the books as a marginal figure in the history of the international workers’ movement. Nevertheless, I hold that some important lessons can be learned from Bakunin today.

First, Bakunin held as a principle that the means of revolutionary struggle must be consistent with its ends. He foresaw that the use of state power as a revolutionary instrument would only lead to a reproduction of its inherent injustices (1990, 178). One simply cannot expect to establish equality or freedom on the basis of inequality and oppression: liberty, Bakunin claimed, “can be created only by liberty” (idem, 179). Thus the workers’ movement should already try to embody its ideal image of a future, decentralised and federated social order: “having for its objective not the creation of new despotisms but the uprooting of all domination, [it should] take on an essentially different character from the organization of the State” (1973, 255). This insistence, that the means of radical change be consistent with its ends, has continued to inform the anarchist tradition ever since (Goldman 1924; Franks 2003), and can also be encountered in the practices of recent assembly movements, such as Occupy Wall Street.

Second, it follows that the struggle against the existing order, and the formation of a radical alternative to it, are complementary parts of the same revolutionary process. One does not follow upon the other, as Marx held, but they always presuppose each other (Van de Sande 2015). Anarchists have therefore always maintained that revolutionary movements should not only seek to topple the capitalist order, but should also gradually give rise to the political and organisational structures that could eventually replace it. Whereas Bakunin’s contemporaries called this strategy ‘embryonism’ (Nettlau 277-8), later syndicalist movements would describe it as an attempt to ‘build a new society in the shell of the old’ (Schmidt and Van der Walt, 2009, 21). In today’s activist jargon, finally, the term ‘prefiguration’ is used in reference to the same strategic rationale (Graeber 2013, 232-3). This indeed is precisely what recent assembly movements sought to establish in the long term. Ideally, the prefigurative miniature society that was erected in Zuccotti Park would eventually serve as “a stepping-stone toward the creation of a whole network of such assemblies” (idem, 43), which would make the current order redundant.

One may argue that this prefigurative approach is not necessarily incompatible with a Marxist analysis of capitalism or revolutionary politics – especially given that both the state and the structure of capital have changed significantly since the late 19^th century. Autonomist Marxists such as Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, for example, tend to describe the multitude’s resistance against capital precisely in terms of ‘building a new society in the shell of the old’ (Hardt and Negri 2009, 8; 301). John Holloway, in turn, has demonstrated why a militant strategy against everyday alienation in capitalist society entails the prefiguration of a radical alternative (2010, 153-4). Besides, there are places in his oeuvre where Marx seems to realise the relevance of a prefigurative approach – for example in his reflections on the Paris Commune of 1871, which “could but betoken the tendency of a government of the people by the people” (2010b, 217). But he, and many followers in his wake, also hastened to add that durable and radical transformation of society would always require the seizure of state power (Lenin 1987) and a centralist party as the platform of organisation (Dean 2016). More generally, the question of how exactly a prefigurative politics must lead to successful political change in the long term, remains open for debate.

In any case, the prefigurative experiments of anarchist movements in the past, and of assembly movements such as Occupy Wall Street in the present, do pinpoint at least two blind spots in Marx’ thought. First, they illustrate that the aim of revolutionary politics cannot be reduced to matters of social-economic equality or divisions of labour. Political equality, democratic participation, and freedom of association are equally important objectives that a radical politics worth its salt must address. Second, the emergence of prefigurative movements and strategies suggest that it is not sufficient to pursue a vague concept of revolutionary change in a distant future. We also want to acquire at least some idea of what it might mean to live in a radically different society today.

 

In addition to exposing capitalism as a social system based on exploitation of humans and nature, Karl Marx also pointed out that capitalist societies produce, and fundamentally rely on, a fetishism that is the veiled yet crucial effect of commodity production where social relationships among people are transformed into economic relationships. In this way, commodities are no longer perceived as embedded in social relations or as products made by people, but instead appear as objects that have an intrinsic exchange value. The “commodity-form, and the value-relation of the products of labour within which it appears, have absolutely no connection with the physical nature of the commodity and the material relations arising out of this. It is nothing but the definite social relation between men themselves which assumes here, for them, the fantastic form of a relation between things. In order, therefore, to find an analogy we must take flight into the misty realm of religion. There the products of the human brain appear as autonomous figures endowed with a life of their own, which enter into relations both with each other and with the human race. […]. I call this the fetishism which attaches itself to the products of labour as soon as they are produced as commodities, and is therefore inseparable from the production of commodities.” (Marx 1867/1966, 165).

In this light, Marx’s analysis of capitalism can be read as an urging to fold political and epistemological dimensions of critique into one other. Inspiration can be taken from Marx’s critique of political economy to call attention to forms of knowledge and social relations that lie beyond what is assumed to be ‘truth’, ‘fact’ and ‘reality’. Marx’s encouragement to challenge these assumptions resonates with queer critiques. Applying a queer perspective holds the potential of deepening Marx’s critique by expanding this epistemological-political interrogation to include bodies, sexuality, subjectivity, and desire, which are realms Marx never addressed.

A queer perspective on capitalism brings to light that commodity fetishism is not the only fetish that capitalist societies are built upon. Commodity fetishism is accompanied by what one might call biopolitical fetishism. Michel Foucault has urged us to delve further than Marx and demonstrated in his own work that biopolitics is “an indispensable element” of capitalism (Foucault 2007, 140). Capitalism not only oppresses people, bodies and (certain) lifestyles, it also requires technologies of power that exert “a positive influence on life, endeavor[ing] to administer, optimize, and multiply it” (ibid., 137), and it also relies on technologies of power that incite and produce certain lifestyles, bodies, and subjectivities. A merit of queer theory is that it has fleshed out Foucault’s insights into capitalism and shown how sexuality and heteronormativity are crucial technologies for biopolitics. Queer theory has unpacked sexuality and heteronormativity showing how they enable – albeit in a very subtle way – subjects and bodies to be constituted, governed, normalized, and rendered ‘natural facts’ that, as such, play a key role in the (re-)production of capitalist society. Heteronormative social relations together with the heteronormative knowledge-power nexus create fictions of coherent identities and bodies that have a ‘natural’ sex. These fictions of ‘natural’, ‘coherent’ bodies, subjects, and identities are necessary for a capitalist mode of production, because this “imperative of coherence” is “infused in the needs of capitalist reproduction” (Cover 2004, 304). The wage worker not only has to be considered doubly ‘free’, but also be rendered a subject within the heteronormative knowledge-power nexus, which makes the ‘free wage worker’ intelligible in the first place. Wage work, the spheres of production and consumerism, require what Pauline Boudry, Brigitta Kuster and Renate Lorenz call “sexual labor” (1999), which produces coherent and intelligible, embodied and sexual subjects, and simultaneously allows the social character of bodies and subjects to disappear.

Furthermore, a queer critique of capitalism unmasks how sexual politics are deployed to organize consent to capitalism as a social system. Despite being a system of exploitation and domination, capitalism’s stability is not solely engendered by “the silent compulsion of economic relations” (Marx 1867, 899) but also by a consensus of the majority of the population, as Louis Althusser and Antonio Gramsci highlight. Desire and sexuality are key technologies of power for organizing such a consensus. The rigid heteronormative sexual politics of Fordism not only mirrored mass production and mass consumption, they also helped to organize consensus to an overarching social order built upon stability, orderliness, and predictability. In addition, the rigid sexual politics of Fordism brought forth a nation state with a strict heteronormative sexual regime that would supposedly set them apart from non-western nation states whose populations were framed as ‘backward’ and ascribed ‘perverse’ sexualities and gender roles. The neoliberalization of capitalism has made sexual politics more ‘open’, inclusive, and ‘tolerant’ by integrating individuals with certain non-heterosexual lifestyles who act in accordance with heteronormative normality. These transformations of sexual politics are key to organizing consensus to a social order based on a flexible mode of production, the precarization of wage-work and modes of living in general. Framing sexual plurality and diversity in terms of a society comprised of self-determined, free and self-responsible subjects is a technology of power that helps to make neoliberalism’s principles of “privatization and personal responsibility” (Duggan 2003, 12) desirable. Moreover, neoliberalized sexual politics incite a desire to belong to a national ‘we’ and to a nation state that now frames ‘sexual tolerance’ and ‘sexual diversity’ as hallmarks of western modernity, democracy and civilization, while simultaneously constructing non-western societies as ‘backward’ due to their assumed lack of tolerance toward non-heterosexual lifestyles (Puar 2007). Thus, sexual politics are not just ‘side-effects’ of political economy, they are fundamental technologies of power that secure the reproduction of capitalism. They do so in a subtle manner by deploying heteronormative and racialized phantasms of ‘sexual normality’ and by inciting a desire for organizing consensus to the capital mode of production and the state.

Queering Capitalism is a project that draws on Marx’s radicalism while offering decisive twists to his insights. It proposes that the economic sphere is inseparable from the sphere of sexuality, bodies, desires and that these do not constitute ‘the other’ of the capitalist mode of production. Instead they are key forces and “a motor of economy” (Dhawan et al. 2015, 3). Sexuality, desire, and bodies are infused with economic needs and conditions, while at the same time sexual politics are used to secure the reproduction of a capitalist mode of production, the sphere of consumption, labor relations, and the state. Consequently, Queering Capitalism shows that capitalism not only has an impact on sexual politics, but that sexual politics are technologies of power that help organize consensus and incite a desire for historically concrete modes of production and statehood.

 

 

Indifference, if not outright hostility, have marked the relations between the disciplinary formations around the study of sexuality (including feminist, gay and lesbian, and queer theory) and engagements with Marx’s writings and Marxist thought in general. The seeming lack of fit between critiques of sexual normalization in queer theory, and materialist analyses of capitalist exploitation and domination, can be approached through juxtaposed terms such as need vs. desire (Morton 1995), recognition vs. redistribution (Fraser 1995), sexuality vs. class, domination vs. exploitation, identity vs. class (Butler 1998) etc. I do not mean to imply there is no intrinsic relation between the terms. However, within the disciplinary domains of Marxist materialist approaches and queer critiques of sexuality (and gender), these terms have formed points of organization around which sometimes strident articulations of fundamental opposition are constructed. Take for example the introduction to the anthology The Material Queer which claims that queer theory opens “a new space for the subject of desire, a space in which sexuality becomes primary” (Morton 1996, 1, emphasis in original). He further argues that postmodern theorizations of queerness assert “the primariness of sexuality/libidanility, the autonomy of desire, and the freedom of the sexual subject from all constraints” (ibid., 2).

Morton claims to speak from a specific form of Marxist materialism which analyses sexuality from the vantage point of the “mode of production”, in opposition to the postmodern queer focus on “mode of signification” (ibid., 3). This stark opposition frames queer theory too simply. Firstly, one would be hard put to find any queer theorist who would assert “the freedom of the sexual subject from all constraints”. In fact, as the sociologist Steven Seidman argues, queer theory and politics aims at a sustained critique of all forms of “normalization” of sexuality precisely by attending to the discursive and material resources through which institutions constrain sexual subjects (2001, 326). The overlap of interests between Marxist and queer analyses of sexuality can be articulated precisely by asking how both approaches understand, analyze and critique the constitution of the sexual subject. Two examples which help address this question illustrate the possibility of such an overlap. The historian John D’Emilio’s (1983)  now canonical, if controversial, essay “Capitalism and Gay Identity” provided a compelling historical and materialist analysis of how shifts produced by the introduction of capitalism provided the conditions of possibility for the emergence of a gay male sexual identity. Rather than arguing for a causal link between capitalism and homosexuality, his analysis articulated the relation between economic transformation and the naturalization of sexual identity. The essay was not an example of economic reductionism (sexuality is an effect of capitalism) but of a conjunctural understanding of how forms of sexual selfhood (identity) emerged through changes in the economy. It demonstrated precisely the sort of materialist understanding of how sexuality as an object of discourse is converted into an identity, and later a form of identity politics. In other words, the relevance of Marxist analyses of capitalism for the formation of sexual identity (rather than sexuality) was established with important implications for queer theory.

The overlap can also be seen in Danae Clark’s (1991) essay “Commodity Lesbianism”. Clark’s analysis of the appearance of an ambivalently pitched “lesbian” in popular culture, including advertising, does not prioritize the “mode of production” over the “mode of signification”. Instead, it tracks the relationship between the dominance of consumer culture in contemporary capitalism and the strategic deployment of depoliticized identity politics by the advertising industry through a textual analysis of the discourses and images of “lesbians”. Modes of signification and production are analyzed together at a specific historical moment to produce an analysis of a queer subject, the “lesbian”, who can be consumed by niche audiences (such as lesbian subcultures) while also appearing suitably normalized and therefore palatable for heterosexual women.

The influence of Foucault’s History of Sexuality: Volume 1 for queer theory, as well as the importance of Derridean deconstruction and Lacanian psychoanalysis in the formation of queer theory, however, clearly points to the possible problems for thinking Marxist and queer theory together, since these influences do not sit easily with an understanding of “materialism” within Marxist thought. The now widespread intellectual purchase of the concept of “matter”, from Judith Butler’s Bodies that Matter (1993) to the recent New Materialisms, have been understood as offering a quite different understanding of what a materialist analysis could be. However, particularly in the work of Judith Butler, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and others, the crucial importance given to analyses of the normalization of the sexed and gendered body, and of (homo)sexual desire can be related to the more historical-materialist analyses of sexuality. If, as Butler argues, the sexually-desiring gendered body is not natural, but is materialized continually through the discursive and institutional operations of a hetero-normative social matrix, then an analysis of the historically-specific constellation of economic, political and cultural forces which constitute sexuality would seem quite closely related to queer analyses of processes of normalization.

In Kevin Floyd’s (2009) book-length The Reification of Desire: Toward a Queer Marxism, precisely such a rapprochement between queer theory and Marxism is substantially attempted. The conjunction of the terms “reification” and “desire” in the title already point to the inadequacy of Morton’s formulation of a stark opposition between materialism and idealism, need and desire, use-value and exchange-value (1996, 5). Floyd clearly states “in explicitly approaching the insights of queer critical practice from a Marxian perspective, my central objective is to indicate some of the ways in which this very move requires a fundamental rethinking of that perspective itself” (2009, 4). Rather than overcoming one perspective by another, Floyd rethinks the central categories of “totality” and “reification” within Marxist thought, and that of György Lukàcs in particular, to understand how in different historical moments from the late 19th century in the United States, homosexual desire gets reified through discourses of masculinity, labour, consumption, and pleasure. By reworking, critiquing and deploying Lukàcs’ concept of reification, and substantially engaging with the work of Judith Butler and Michel Foucault, Floyd analyzes the shifting normalization of masculinity and homosexual desire in the context of post-Fordist modes of economic deregulation and the rise of consumer culture. At the same time, he expands on and fleshes out the discursive normalization of sexuality (his focus here is primarily Judith Butler’s work) by asking how at specific historical moments, economic transformations in U.S. capitalism, and political and social discourses on masculinity produce discourses of sexual normalcy and deviance. The psychoanalytical, deconstructive, and discursive approaches to sexual normalization within queer theory are integrated with materialist critiques of sexual politics by deploying reworked understandings of  desire and reification. The transformation of central concepts in the fields of queer theory and Marxism is convincingly deployed to expose the poverty of both simplistic queer critiques of Marxism and of Marxist critiques of queer theory. Given these writings, one could argue that the stark opposition between the Discursive and Textual Queer Subject of Desire on the one hand, and the “Material Queer” on the other, misrepresents a potentially fruitful if fractious dialogue between Marxism and queer theory.

 

Precarias a la deriva is a feminist initiative situated between research and activism, active in and around Madrid from 2002 onwards. In June 2002 Spanish unions organised a general strike in response to changes in the labour legislation. A group of women, most of them active in the feminist social centre La Eskalera Karakola in Madrid, were unsatisfied with the lack of representation for addressing concerns about their unstable, flexible and precarious working and living conditions, and doubted the effectiveness of strike mobilization as a resistance tool. With these considerations in mind the group spent the day of the general strike on the streets asking women if they were striking, and what were their views regarding the strike and their precarious conditions. The initiative Precarias a la deriva (literally: Precarious women adrift) arose from this experience and organised its first deriva (literally meaning ‘drift’) in October 2002. The method of deriva is appropriated from the Situationist International, a group of artists and activists active between 1957 and 1972 mainly in France, that used purposeless wandering in the city – dérive (French for ‘drift’) – as a performative and subversive technique for experiencing the urban space differently and to provoke social change. In Precarias a la deriva’s version the situationist dérive is released from its bourgeois and masculine connotation of the flâneur in order to be used as a situated, “open and multisensorial”¹ (Precarias a la deriva 2004a, 26) method in the regular everyday space of the participating women. For several months an open and flexible group of women met almost weekly to wander around the relevant places constituting their precarious working and living conditions in the fields of communication work (translation and language teaching, call centres), domestic work, catering, nursing, and in a later stage also sex work, scholarships, advertising, mediation and education. The derivas were inspired by the idea of coming together to create a cartography of these feminized precarious working and living conditions by exchanging experiences, sharing reflections, and taking the self as a starting point for common struggle and resistance (Precarias a la deriva 2004a).

Feminist critique of the general strike as a resistance tool is already mentioned in the 1970s in the context of a general critique of Marx’ analysis of capitalism, which points out that Marx failed to consider the importance of unpaid reproductive work carried out by women, and the role reproductive work plays in the (re-)production of labour-power (Federici 2009). Precarias a la deriva’s analyses and practices were inspired by (Marxist) feminist critiques and took them a step further. They were interested in reproduction in a broad sense and found contemporaraneous rearticulations of a feminist critique on reproduction in the works of Donna Haraway (1991), Chela Sandoval (2000), Anna G. Jónasdóttir (1995), Rosi Braidotti (2002), Cristina Carrasco (1999), Jane Flax (1995) and Cristina Morini (2001). Following Michel Foucault, Judith Butler and Carole Pateman they took analyses of multiple forms of power relations into consideration, such as the “sexual division of labour, control of sexuality, normative heterosexuality and family socialisation” (Precarias a la deriva 2004a, 22-23). 

Precarias a la deriva stressed the importance of an analysis of contemporary capitalism which takes reproduction as well as the history of colonialism, patriarchy and domination based on racism into account. With regard to post-Marxist approaches on immaterial or affective labour (Lazzarato 1996; Hardt/Negri 2000) Precarias a la deriva pointed out that some approaches deriving from immaterial or affective labour theories did not consider the effects of racializing and patriarchal domination (Precarias a la deriva 2004a, 23). Moreover, they made the body as “a place of the expression of domination and exploitation” (Precarias a la deriva 2004a, 23) a subject of discussion and referred to feminist theories on the public and the private, stressing the importance of public visibility and linking precariousness with «questions of care and sexuality» (Precarias a la deriva 2004b).

Based on this theoretical framework, Precarias a la deriva analysed precariousness not as just confined to wage labour but as an ongoing, heterogeneous process that affects the whole existence, and as a tendency which is not new – most of the work carried out by women and people outside of the global north is and always has been precarious – and is affecting hitherto secured sectors of society (Precarias a la deriva 2004a). They defined precariousness as “a juncture of material and symbolic conditions which determine an uncertainty with respect to the sustained access to the resources essential to the full development of one’s life”, an approach which aims at “overcome(ing) the dichotomies of public/private and production/reproduction and to recognize the interconnections between the social and the economic” (Precarias a la deriva 2004b).

Even though today Precarias a la deriva are no longer active under this name, their theories and practices continue to inspire and stimulate militant research practices and initiatives within as well as outside of Spain.

 

 

Credit as exploitation of existence

In his 1844 text “Comments on James Mill”, Marx thinks about credit in a way that helps to understand the politico-economic entanglement of debt and precarization in the present. Already in his critique of Mill’s Elements of Political Economy Marx formulates thoughts that would become his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts. Marx problematized the logic of credit and debt as separating the individuals from one another, destroying social connectedness and blocking common political action.

In the logic of credit, Marx makes clear that it is “man’s moral existence, man’s social existence” that is at stake and which becomes valued. In the relation between the creditor and the debtor “a man recognises another man by advancing him a certain quantity of value.” It is a relation of trust and distrust: the creditor should not be a usurer or a swindler, the debtor should be “a “good” man […], a man who is “able to pay.”” It seems that the main relationship in debt economy is one in which “a rich man gives credit to a poor man whom he considers industrious and decent.” But this, Marx emphazises, is nothing but “the romantic, sentimental part of political economy”. The creditor passes a moral judgement on ‘the poor’, assessing his creditworthiness. As return it is not the social capacities that count but the ‘blood and flesh’, the ‘morality’ and the ‘existence’ of the ‘poor’: “That means, therefore, that all the social virtues of the poor man, the content of his vital activity, his existence itself, represent for the rich man the reimbursement of his capital with the customary interest.” For Marx, it is not the labour that is exploited by the credit but the ethical action of the ‘poor’, the work of self-constituting, the way of life (Lazzarato 2012, 54-5). The aim is not to allow the ‘poor’ a better life, but to not let him pass by: “It is the death of his [the creditor’s] capital together with the interest.”

In credit, however, money is not the medium of exchange, it has “returned out of its material form and been put back in man, but only because the man himself has been put outside himself and has himself assumed a material form. Within the credit relationship, it is not the case that money is transcended in man, but that man himself is turned into money, or money is incorporated in him. Human individuality, human morality itself, has become both an object of commerce and the material in which money exists. Instead of money, or paper, it is my own personal existence, my flesh and blood, my social virtue and importance, which constitutes the material, corporeal form of the spirit of money. Credit no longer resolves the value of money into money but into human flesh and the human heart.

Governing Through Precarization

For over two decades now in Europe, in the ongoing hegemonic of financialized capitalism, a form of governing has been established that does not legitimise itself by guaranteeing social protection and security for the majority of citizens, but is rather characterised by social insecurity and precarization.¹

Governing through precarization means that the precarious are no longer solely those who can be marginalised to the peripheries of society. Due to the individualising restructuring of the social welfare state, the deregulation of the labour market, and the expansion of precarious employment conditions, we currently find ourselves in a process of the normalisation of precarization, which also affects larger portions of the middle class. In this normalisation process, precarization has become a political and economic instrument of governing.² Social security, and also therefore social reproduction, are being increasingly de-collectivised; they are again being privatised, but this time handed over to the self-responsibility of the individual and capitalised. As a result, more and more people are only able to fund retirement provisions, healthcare, and education by taking on debts. At the same time, the productivity of the self and of sociality in low-wage or unpaid positions leads directly to indebtedness. De-collectivisation and its accompanying individualisation of risk, self-management, and self-responsibility, as well as the capitalisation of reproduction, are the central anchoring points in the current neoliberal regime of precarization for an economy of guilt and debt.

Guilt and Debt

Precarious living and working conditions and the privatisation of protection against precariousness are conditions of both a prospering financial capitalism and its concomitant debt economy. As Marx has already pointed out, this economy is based on the expansion of productivity that involves less work in the traditional sense than subjectivation. A subjective figure is needed to assume responsibility, to take on debt, and to internalise the risks both as guilt and as debt: a personality that is doubly indebted and responsible for oneself. This personality plays a decisive role in enabling and stabilising neoliberal governing through precarization and insecurity, for there is no longer an outside of debt. Everybody is indebted in one or another way: “If it is not individual debt, it is public debt that weighs, literally, on every individual’s life, since every individual must take responsibility for it” (Lazzarato 2012, 31). As Maurizio Lazzarato reminds us, Marx was one of the first to expressly link the debt economy with morality, that is, with specific modes of subjectivation. In the Christian genealogy, becoming indebted cannot be separated from burdening oneself with guilt. Incurring debt results in guilt through the promise to repay creditors. The indebted person promises to continuously behave in such a way that they are able to give back what was given to them, so that they can pay back their debts. In the debt economy, this financial exchange constitutes subjectivation. The obligation to pay back debt corresponds to that disciplinary self-governing that ensures not only subjectivising and social productivity, but also compliance. To place one’s behaviour at the service of repaying debt means to place life and sociality at the service of debt and to make oneself even more governable.

To understand the governmental intertwining of precarization and debt, it is important to bear in mind that precarization means dealing with the unforeseeable, with contingency, of acting without being able to predict what the near or distant future will bring. It is precisely this ability to deal with contingency that is exploited by the loan contract, preventing agency that might start something new or refuse to work under the given conditions. The financial promise of the repayment of debt must go on, even if it requires something decidedly paradoxical of the indebted person: in their precarization they must estimate something inestimable, namely, the future. The logic of credit means not only controlling the future in the present, but also through self-governing to make precarization and the precarized person calculable in the incalculability of their life and to hold them under control – yet doing so primarily on behalf of the creditor.

In self-precarization, however, this paradox of calculating the incalculable is reversed, the temporality of debt is phantasmically inverted: by investing the self in what is supposedly one’s ‘own’ future, the doubly indebted personality consciously accepts precarization in the present. The fantasy of shaping the future means accepting precarization in the present. For the illusion of a predictable and better time-to-come, self-precarization appears to be a necessary investment above all amongst the northwestern European middle classes. What is abandoned in this self-investing projection of a future is the agency that might start something new in the present. Taking action, as Marx already pointed out, requires forces that emerge from sociality, from connectedness with others, from precariousness: trust in oneself, in others, and thus in the world. And it is precisely this trust – this ethical relationship – that gets exploited by credit and indebtedness. In the normalisation of precarization what becomes apparent precisely in the crisis of the debt economy is that there is no future, and that at the same time a new present simultaneously opens through this in which people care about how they want to live now.

 

 

 

 

 “Religion is the opium of the people” is one of Marx’s most well-known statements, as emphasized by many scholars working on Marx’s ideas on religion.¹ However, the complexity and ambivalence of this metaphor are not obvious, even for careful readers of Marx. Marx’s ideas on religion are mainly assessed as “marginal” in comparison to his comprehensive critique of political economy. Contrary to this general view, I argue that Marx’s short writings on religion stay at the very center of his critique of modern political and economic relations, and of the dominant form of political community in modern society. His perspective provides crucial insight in understanding both the “insistent return of the religion to public space” and the sources of religion’s enduring power in mobilizing masses in modern society (See Dobbs-Weinstein 2015). Marx believed that the secret of this power of religion lies in the constitution of political relations, suppression of human freedom, and organizations of capitalist social relations. However, Marx’s analysis of religion goes beyond any functional analysis. I will discuss very shortly that this power of religion arises from, first, the affective and imaginary dimension of religion in the organization of communitarian social relations, and from its ability to mobilize conventional beliefs and opinions in order to structure mass psychology. Both of these powers are actually the result of the historically specific form of the political community and articulation between the political and economic fields in capitalist society. Marx’s analysis of religion does not depend on the negligence of the symbolic, imaginary or affective dimension of religion. Rather, he illuminates the nature of religion’s transformation and its new form under capitalist social relations, and why the critique of religion is essential for the realization of human freedom.

In his introduction to Towards a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, Marx declares that “religious suffering is at the same time an expression [Ausdruck] of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the spirit of a spiritless situation. It is the opium of the people.”² It is a well-known fact that the first part of this paragraph is neglected on behalf of the last one. However, this selective reading does not shed light on Marx’s approach to religion. For Marx, the question of religion is not a question of definition. He is interested in how religion works in historically specific contexts. More specifically, how does it work under the condition of a secular political and capitalist order? In this context, Marx provides deep insights into why religion has played such a crucial role in the organization of people’s affection and imagination, explaining why this is an area for the condensed expression of human suffering, hopes and fears. This role of religion cannot simply be understood as a reference to the internal characteristics of religion. Religion structures the emotional dispositions of its believers as a system of belief, imagination and meaning. However, reasons for its function as an opium cannot be found within religion per se. On the contrary, to understand why religion functions as an opium, we should look more carefully into the political field, which conditions religion’s function in modern society. Hence, we should change “theological questions into secular ones,” as Marx did.

Religion cannot be understood just as a reified, self-alienated, or inverted existence of human essence. It contains strong imaginary and affective dimensions, both of which play a crucial role in the organization of both compliance and defiance of subjects in capitalism. However, the sources of this affective capacity must be sought in the organization of the political field (in its abstractly universal character) and the relationship/contradiction between the existence of humans in civil society (egoistic individuals) and political society (abstract citizenship as an expression of species being). For Marx, if the existence of religion can be seen as the “existence of a defect, the source of this defect can only be sought in the nature of the state” (see Marx 200, 51). He underlines that a human individual is a just an “imaginary participant in imaginary sovereignty” in modern society (Ibid., 53). In a political community, where he/she “is valued as communal being,” he/she is actually “robbed of his real life.” In this abstractness, Marx discovers the religious presuppositions of the democratic state and political community. In the absence of any concrete relation within the political community, or due to the existence of political community as an imagined communal being against egoistic relations dominant in civil society, religion arose as the most important sphere for the canalization of affections and imaginations. This shows that there is a substantial link between the way religion functions in capitalist society and the organization of modern society. 

As Michel Löwy has shown, the formulation “religion is the opium of the people” does not actually specifically belong to Marx (See Löwy 1996, 5). What is more distinctive in Marx’s approach to religion is his postulation of the critique of religion as the arche of all critique.³ But why is the critique of religion so significant for Marx? More importantly, what does the critique of religion mean in today’s secular capitalist social order? Part of the answer lies in the bond between the critique of religion, political society, and economic relations, as incisively argued by Dobbs-Weinstein. The critique of religion cannot be restricted to the religious sphere. In that context, any critique that aims to displace and challenge generalized conventions, should start from a critique of religion, since religion contains an archetype of modern opinion formation, and management of mass psychology, as a sphere of belief, imaginations, and emotions. In its relation to human freedom and democracy, both Spinoza and Marx underline this character of religion, as succinctly discussed by Dobbs-Weinstein. For the emancipation of the human mind from generalized conventions, opinions, imposed prejudices, and reactionary emotional states, the link between religion, political economy, and politics should initially be discovered.

Marx’s critique of religion has been generally reduced to a critique of ideology or one-sided analyses of religion. However, Marx’s aim is not to overcome religion or to simply search for its material or spiritual sources in human society. Rather, he politically analyses how religion functions in a secular capitalist society to open the way for human emancipation. In that context, even if the critique of religion seems to play a marginal role in Marx’s analysis of capitalist society, it actually plays a key role in his discussions of different sources of self-alienation in modern society. The subsumption of the imaginary and affective power of humanity within religion, and the conversion of these capacities into an “illusionary happiness”, are directly related to the constitution of the political community. Insofar as political communal being continues to become an abstract entity, culminating in the idea of abstract citizenship and sovereignty, and insofar as there is a separation between humans’ existence in civil society and their existence in political society, religion will continue to be a main resource for building an “affective community”, expressing defiance and compliance. For these reasons, the true realization of human essence, the real overcoming of religion, cannot be reduced to the discovery of an inverted human essence within religion, as Feuerbach suggested; rather, it depends on the analysis of historical and political relations, which condition this process of inversion permanently.

As a result, Marx does not simply expose the dual character of religion, namely its role in the sustenance of relations of domination, and in containing unfulfilled desires and utopian promises as an “imaginary sphere of not-yet-being.” This aspect of religion is comprehensively discussed and analyzed by Marxist authors such as Ernst Bloch, Max Horkheimer, Walter Benjamin and Michael Löwy. However, Marx’s own attempt to formulate a critique of religion as the critique of modern society is still waiting for its followers to realize human emancipation.

 

This much is certain: Marxists have never favoured sabotage as a form of political action capable of advancing the class struggle towards the goal of ending capitalism.

The fate of sabotage in the Marxist imagination was more or less sealed by Engels’ and Marx’s assessment of Luddite machine-breaking during the onset of industrial capitalism in the 19^th century (See Hobsbawn 1952). In his path-breaking account of the working class in Victorian England, Engels concluded of machine-breaking and factory destruction that, “This form of opposition was isolated, restricted to certain localities, and directed against one feature only of our present social arrangements. When the momentary end was attained, the whole weight of social power fell upon the unprotected evil-doers and punished them to its heart’s content, while the machinery was introduced none the less. A new form of opposition had to be found” (Engels 2009, 222). Two decades later, Marx would reiterate this assessment in Volume I of Capital, lamenting that the “enormous destruction of machinery” in England during this period served only to provide authorities with “a pretext for most reactionary and forcible methods” of quelling working class revolt. He continues: “It took both time and experience before the workpeople learnt to distinguish between machinery and its employment by capital, and to direct their attacks, not against the material instruments of production, but against the mode in which they are used” (Marx 1978, 404).

Thus, the essential lines of the Marxist position on sabotage were established. Sabotage indulges the appetite for immediate, local and temporary relief from the symptoms of capitalist exploitation by destroying its instruments. It reflects the irrationality of an immature, undisciplined working class prone to self-defeating action in the absence of political leadership informed by a deeper theorization of material conditions and the dynamics of history. This appraisal set the stage for a history in which sabotage became the bête noire of organized working-class movements committed to a Marxist-inspired political trajectory of unionization, strike, party, revolution, and state power.¹ This antagonism was not limited to Europe and North America. In 1988, for example, the valiant South African trade unionist Nimrod Sejake decried the ANCs call for sabotage against the apartheid state and economy as “dangerous to the revolution, self-defeating and an act of desperation.” Advocating for strike tactics that would culminate in seizure, not destruction, of the means of production, Sejake argued that sabotage signalled “the inability of workers in that place or at that time to unite and use their collective power…sabotage is the method of individuals or isolated groups who divert attention away from the real task – which is to organise and mobilise the working class to use its full social power in mass actions” (Sejake 1988, 86-7).²

Sabotage has been largely disavowed by Marxists, but it has nevertheless persisted alongside related forms of direct, disobedient and disruptive action in the history of militancy and social struggles everywhere (see for example Fox Piven 2006; Scott 1985). Within the context of workers’ movements, sabotage has figured prominently in the anarchist, syndicalist and autonomist traditions in both theory and practice (see Pouget 1913; Negri 1979; Graeber 2009). Beyond workers’ struggles narrowly defined, sabotage has also been a core tactic in slave resistance, anti-colonial liberation struggles, indigenous militancy, the women’s movement, the militant liberalism of hackers and whistleblowers, and radical environmentalism.³ Saboteurial tactics used in these contexts have exceeded those historically associated with the specific acts of machine-breaking that drew the scorn of Marx and Engels, and have included forms—such as, for example, the general strike—that many would identify with the advance of the workers’ struggle. This suggests that those wishing to theorize the shape and potential of contemporary forms of militant political action would do well to pay more attention to the category of sabotage (and its analogues) than more narrow Marxist accounts might allow. 

Among the many things to be learned from serious consideration of the history and philosophy of sabotage is that it cannot be reduced to violence and destruction, despite the tendency to do so by both the institutional left and the authorities of capitalist states. In 1916, legendary IWW organizer Elizabeth Gurley Flynn described sabotage as “the conscious withdrawal of the workers’ industrial efficiency” (Gurley Flynn 2014). The “conscious withdrawal of efficiency” can take many forms, most of which can be considered violent only from a perspective that equates disruption of capitalist value accumulation with violence. Indeed, as most critical accounts of sabotage have pointed out, if sabotage is the conscious withdrawal of efficiency, then capitalist business owners are the greatest saboteurs of all.⁴ This suggests that sabotage – the strategic disruption of established regimes of accumulating value and power by subtracting from their efficiency—might provide insight into the basic logic of politics in capitalist settings, across the multiple relationships of inequality that structure them.

This is the implication of Evan Calder Williams’ observation that sabotage “is not an operation with a definite content, but an exacerbated relation” (Calder Williams 2016). In Williams’ account, “sabotage is not just present in but is constitutive of capitalism,” and all that stands between sabotage that consolidates capitalist hegemony and sabotage that unravels it is a “fine thread of deviation” (Ibid.). To make sabotage the name for transformative political potential in the context of contemporary capitalism – across the multiple relations of inequality and domination characteristic of capitalist societies – is to affirm the tendency of systems to produce the energies and harbour the agencies of their own undoing. We might recall Marx and Engels here: “not only has the bourgeoisie forged the weapons that bring death to itself; it has also called into existence the men who are to wield those weapons… What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers” (Marx and Engels 1972). Marx also taught that in order for political action to be historically effective, it has to take forms appropriate to the material conditions with which it is confronted.  Actually-existing capitalism no longer produces the forms of effective working class action – trade unions, strikes, working-class parties – associated with its earlier periods. Multiple social, economic and technological factors have contributed to this condition. But, what about the saboteurs – those who are positioned to pull fine threads of deviation in order to exacerbate relations (exploitation, racism, sexism, etc.) that already compromise the “efficiency” of the system in a decisive way? Those whose saboteurial actions might produce erosion, if not revolution, particularly under conditions in which capitalism relies for its functioning on articulated infrastructures that it cannot police or secure perfectly? These grave-diggers are, potentially, everywhere.