The dichotomy of universalism and provincialism is a popular conception which we tend to unthinkingly subscribe. Usually, the dualism is expressed in terms of “globalism” and “nationalism,” or “regionalism” and “cosmopolitanism.” In neoliberal framing, we constantly hear about the struggle of the “international community” and the “ignorant nationalists.”
Those of us who consider ourselves to be progressives or otherwise committed to emancipatory politics tend to consider ourselves universalist in orientation. Many of us make such statements as “we are all human” or “we are all equal,” implying a certain common status, and thus “substance,” to all people. It is simply common sense to us that to be a progressive, one must be a universalist. To be interested in local or specific concerns is apparently reactionary and narrow-minded.
This is not the only way which we can conceive of universalism, however. There are two main philosophical tendencies in contemporary universalist politics: A homogenizing, abstract universalism, and a pluralistic, concrete universalism.
Abstract Universalism
By homogenizing universalism, I mean a universalism which asserts itself on the basis of a fundamental sameness of everyone, such in the statement “we are all human.” This pairs closely with a rhetoric which draws on a notion of equality. We tend to think of equality as inherently progressive, or fundamentally “good.”
In asserting equality, we typically lack consciousness of its inherent homogenizing force. Equality inherently takes two distinct things, in this case people, and subjects them to one measure. In order for this to be done, it is necessary to, in some way, subject them to a homogeneity so that they can be measured as if they were quantities of one substance. Here, we tend to make the substance of “human” and “human rights” the substance of equality between distinct people.
We might consider this to be a common sense means of liberation — isn’t oppression manifested by treating people differently? Thus, doesn’t treating them the same, regardless of who they are, transcend that oppression? Such an assumption fails to recognize that difference is inherent to existence, even if specific differentiations (i.e., racial) are not.
To treat everyone as exactly the same is to demand homogeneity. Equality in the sense of “sameness” seeks to abolish, to flatten difference. Universalism premised on this concept demands that people reject their history, their specific social relations, and so on in favor of a common abstract identity — whether a human, a citizen of a nation, or a citizen of the world.
Despite altruistic pretenses, this is not a true liberation. This all-devouring, all-subsuming universalism, which has a basic tendency to abolish distinction-in-general, is not rooted in emancipatory politics.
This form of universalism is not really universal — despite its abstractness and emphasis on the fundamental sameness of all people, it is actually socially and historically rooted. Specifically, rooted in Western European political history and ideology. It assumes that all people-places are interchangeable, and that history is an eternal marching of some temporal “destiny.” It claims to be unchained to specific people-places, to be free-flying, and yet it is merely the “spirit” of Western Europe spreading its wings to reach over the whole of the world. Vine Deloria Jr. (Standing Rock Sioux) lambasted this outlook, saying:
“Western European peoples have never learned to consider the nature of the world discerned from a spatial point of view. And a singular difficulty faces peoples of Western European heritage in making a transition from thinking in terms of time to thinking in terms of space. The very essence of Western European identity involves the assumption that time proceeds in a linear fashion; further it assumes that at a particular point in the unraveling of this sequence, the peoples of Western Europe became the guardians of the world.”¹
Theodor W. Adorno similarly critiqued the destructive tendencies in this outlook as they manifested in Western European history:
“The abstract utopia would be all too easily reconcilable with the most devious tendencies of society. That all human beings would resemble each other, is exactly what suits this latter. It regards factual or imagined differences as marks of shame, which reveal, that one has not brought things far enough; that something somewhere has been left free of the machine, is not totally determined by the totality. The technics of the concentration camps was designed to turn prisoners into guards, the murdered into murderers. Racial difference was absolutely sublated, so that one could abolish it absolutely, if only in the sense that nothing different survived anymore.”²
This genocidal orientation is not merely an empty potentiality in the North American context, either. It has shown itself loud and clear in infamous historical developments.
In North America, the project of forcibly assimilating Indigenous peoples was premised on the idea that a free, civilized society could only be composed of a homogenous, essentially European citizenry. The communal ways of life among Indigenous peoples was considered to be incompatible with the “civilized” bourgeois republican idea of citizenship. In the words of Captain Richard Henry Pratt, the founder of the Carlisle Indian School, it was a project which aimed to “kill the Indian, save the man.”⁴
In a parallel thread, Thomas Jefferson and other early USAmerican politicians advocated for the expulsion of all Africans from the continent of North America.⁴ Their reasoning was that Africans were inherently an unfree race, and that to have a “slave-people” in the middle of a society of free equal citizens would represent a tendency for degeneration. Thus, the only solution was to expel all Africans from the country, whether to Liberia or elsewhere, so that the United States could be uniformly Euro-American.
Importantly, Jefferson and the other advocates of “colonization” for African slaves were mortally terrified by the Haitian Revolution, wishing to eliminate the potential for an American slave revolution by any means necessary. To have a colony of the “dangerous classes” living among them was suicidal, in the eyes of these bourgeoisie.
The universalist liberalism of the of both of these projects demanded a homogenous humanity or citizenry. Both of them sought to abolish difference, albeit doing so in different forms.
This abstract universalism as we know it is not a neutral outlook in terms of social class. It is essentially bourgeois. This may seem as if it is a typical Marxist approach, to attribute everything to economic interest. This characterization is not so simple. The development of this outlook is organically linked to the social activity of the bourgeoisie, and is an instance of bourgeois ideology naturalizing this perspective into seemingly neutral “common sense.”
The bourgeoisie is a capitalist class, it is the capitalist class. The bourgeoisie is the embodiment or the personal form of capital. But what is capitalism? In simple terms, capitalism is the domination of commodity production, which means production for market exchange. What this entails is that the interest of producing abstract value in the form of profit predominates.
How is concrete labor and its distinct concrete products transformed into this abstract expression of value? Here is where our critique of equality becomes somewhat clearer.
For many distinct products to be exchanged as value-equivalents, there must be an equal measure for that value. The only common, measurable characteristic between commodities, however, is the socially necessary labor time embodied in them.
Let us take an example of a baker and a carpenter. We will assume that the baker produces bread, while the carpenter produces wooden shelves. How can we compare, say, 20 loaves of bread with 1 shelf? What consistent common characteristic do they have? The only one is labor. Yet the forms of labor embodied in each are very different.
How do we derive one “measure” or “substance” of labor from such distinct, specific forms of labor? By abstracting labor into labor-in-general, or into the socially necessary labor time embodied in the products. This is the basis of exchange-value.
The common “substance” of abstract value depends on the abstraction of specific, concrete expenditures of labor into one abstract category of labor-as-such. The equality of a measure to weigh distinct commodities against each other depends on the assumption of an equality and sameness to the labor which produces them. Commodity production produces a homogeneity in the form of value.
This equality is not even a true equality, it is a false equality (though. what equality can even be true in a world of distinct entities?). The capitalists consider the exchange to be “just” and “fair,” since in the hypothetical condition of an equilibrium market, they are buying the labor-power, or commodified labor-capacity, of the workers “at their value” in exchange for an equivalent in money.
Yet labor-power is not like other commodities — it is the only commodity which can produce new value by actively shaping raw materials into a new, embodied form of value. Labor-power produces more than the equivalent for the renumeration of the worker, their wages. The new value is hidden from the sight of the exchange, and becomes surplus-value.
The assumption of an abstract equality between the buyer (capitalist) and seller (worker) ignores the fundamental inequality in the exchange — one owns means of production and the other doesn’t. This distinction in owning versus laboring means that the buyer, or owner, appropriates the new value produced, which is beyond the bounds of the exchange of “equal” commodities. The two classes are not the same despite both being “owners” on the market — the capitalist owns the means of production and the worker owns their labor-power. To acknowledge this basic qualitative distinction would be to toss off the veil of the equality of all market actors and recognize people by their social relations in the system of social relations.
Just as this exchange premised on equality simply hides the inequality and exploitation inherent in the relation of capitalists and proletarians, the ideology of abstract universalism simply smoothes over difference and sweeps oppression under the rug of common “humanity” or “citizenship.”
Once again, as in the “equality” of the buyer and seller, the “equality” in abstract universalism demands homogeneity, and it either attacks or hides difference. We have seen how this takes the form of assimilation when we recognized this tendency within the assimilation of Indigenous peoples. There are other instances where this logic shows itself to be a bourgeois, colonialist project.
In liberal discourse, particularly in the wake of the summer 2020 uprisings in the United States, there is a partial recognition of this. For example, when conservatives assert that “racism is over, we’re already equal,” they mean that since de jure racial distinctions in citizenship status have been abolished, racism in society has been as well. Liberals recognize the fundamental issue in this — the continuity of racial inequality in concrete conditions of life, such as disproportionate police violence and racialized income inequality, means that racism is not “over.” Equal citizenship has merely “privatized” it. From this, they extrapolate that we merely need to establish “true equality.”
But the fundamentally oppressive nature of abstract universal equality goes deeper than being applied in an “untrue” or “incomplete” way. The world can never be abstract, so to impose an abstract conception on it is always to obscure the characteristics of the real state of things. Abstract equality inherently depends on this dissection. It cannot recognize real social relations: the real networks of ties between people, their formations as specific individuals, the historical development of these social relations.
We can see one manifestation of this in an example preceding that of assimilation in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In 17th century Northeastern America, Indigenous peoples who had converted to Christianity held a status as “Praying Indians.”⁵ They were not considered to be equal to European-Americans, nor were they fully included in Euro-American society. However, they were seen as having achieved spiritual equality in the eyes of good. In a word, all souls were equal, but the real, material people who held those souls were not.
In this relation, the “soul” is abstracted away from the concrete relations of oppression at hand in order to establish “equality” in a non-material, fantastical non-existence. The equality of souls in this conception precedes our modern American notion of the equality of “citizens” or “humans.” “Equal in the eyes of God” was simply changed to “equal in the eyes of the God of Man.”
The obscuring of real social relations in favor of abstract categories like “mankind” can represent two forms of mystification. On one hand, one can smooth over concrete oppression by treating oppressor and oppressed as “equal” through an abstract measure. We have discussed this through previous examples. On the other hand, one can conceal this oppression by excluding the oppressed from the category of the equals and considering the equals to be the only ones who exist. That is, by practicing navel-gazing.
For example, in the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson famously wrote:
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness”⁶
This, at the same time that he and many of the other signatories owned slaves. Those enslaved Africans were not included in the Founding Father’s definition of “men,” who were held to be equal. They were simply excluded from such a consideration entirely.
To be excluded from “humanity” or the “community of the free” was also, however, an equality in its own sense. The logic of these exclusions homogenized the groups it excluded under the same category and within the same logic. Abstract categories invoked in oppression overwhelmed and branded them with the mark of that oppression.
For example, the concept of a homogenous group of “Black people” as we think of it was forged in the hellfire of chattel slavery. Before the development of a massive transatlantic slave trade and chattel slave population in the Americas, if one were to ask, say, a Yoruba person whether they consider themselves a “Black person,” the same group as a Xhosa person, the question would seem absurd.
The notion of black Africans composing one racial group emerged hand in hand with American chattel slavery conflating the condition of enslavement, of being a living commodity, with Blackness. Africans from manifold tribal groups were forcibly thrown together into the horrors of the Middle Passage and the exploitation of slavery, regardless of their regional origin, language, or religion. They were abstracted from their real relations, from their ties as indigenous peoples to their people-places, their specific homelands.
The first step in the legitimization of their enslavement was their being “marked” by Blackness — the so-called curse of Cain. The second step was in abstraction from their real social lives and individualities into quantifiable, equal measures of value — their musculature, their age, their gum health, their fertility, and so on. There developed a certain, darkly ironic equality among slaves in a sense — they were subjected to the same measure of exchange-value.
The ones who engaged in this commodification, the slave traffickers and the slave owners, were not contradicting their liberal ideologies of abstract universalism. In fact, this was simply an instance of the “universal” being non-universal, of their exercising of freedom being the freedom to commodify the “unfree” or the “unequal.” In the words of the historian of slavery Stephanie Smallwood:
“If the logic of commodification is one of “quantification” and “abstraction,”’ then presumably people — the most singular of beings — should represent the greatest challenge to that logic, should be the most resilient in the face of its homogenizing impulse. In the first instance, then, we confront the difficult truth that the modern freedom envisaged by Locke and produced by Anglo-Atlantic capitalism not only easily accommodated and protected slavery, but in fact found its fullest expression in the commodification of the person — in the lesson learned that the logic of commodification could be extended to cloak even human beings in its shadow[…]”⁸
The abstract universal is not a real universal— it hides the commodified “draft animal” non-citizens. The non-citizens are “non-universals,” so any conception of the universal overshadows their existence. Their oppression is concrete, it requires operating on the level of concrete relations. If we only concern ourselves with the abstract community of free and equal citizens, we don’t even notice them. Freedom becomes the freedom to commodify, freedom is freedom through the unfreedom of the “non-universals.”
Abstract, bourgeois universalism is thus an all-devouring universality — it claims that “that which is not myself is untrue.” Jack D. Forbes (Powhatan-Renapé and Delaware-Lenapé) recognized this tendency of cannibalism within capitalist civilization, stating that “the wealthy and exploitative literally consume the lives of those that they exploit.”⁸ Oppressors in relations of exploitation tend toward this self-universalization and devouring of the so-called “non-universals.” Colonizers consume the colonized, the patriarchal man consumes the woman. They are merely means to ends for them, things to be possessed in the name of their “universal” goals.
Concrete Universalism
Having demonstrated the destructiveness of abstract universalism, we can finally introduce the positive alternative of concrete universalism into our critique.
The alternative vision is one which is finely summed up by a Zapatista slogan: “Un mundo donde quepan muchos mundos/A world where many worlds fit.” In Zapatista philosophy, this derives from a specifically Mayan iteration of a principle common to Indigenous American philosophies: each people has a right to a cosmology or mode of life particular to their people-place, or homeland. The colonialist project of forcible conversion and homogenization does not make sense within this framework. As Vine Deloria Jr. explains in God is Red:
“Tribal religions are actually complexes of attitudes, beliefs, and practices fine-tuned to harmonize with the lands on which the people live. It is not difficult to understand that the Hopi people, living in the arid plateau and canyon lands of northern Arizona, had need of a rain dance to ensure the success of their farming. Here place and religion have such an obvious parallel that anyone can understand the connection.
“It becomes exceedingly more complicated, however, when we learn that the Lummis and other tribes of the Pacific Northwest also had a rain dance. Perhaps once or twice in a person’s lifetime the West Coast would have an exceedingly heavy snow storm. The snow would bury the longhouses in which the people lived, and if it remained deep for any significant period of time, the Lummis would be unable to get out and hunt and fish and would starve to death. A man with powers to make rain would then perform the rain dance, and the snow would cease falling, turning to rain that melted the snow and prevented the people from being snowbound.”⁹
Socially and historically, this outlook emerges from the basis of Indigenous identities in community social relations, including one’s relation to one’s specific homeland. One’s identity is based in one’s community. One’s worldview does not create a hard dualism between the concrete and the abstract, between the “world” and the “spirit,” but is concerned primarily with the everyday life of the community.
We are not advocating simply to return to pre-colonial community localism here. Rather, we are advocating that we pursue a universalism which is non-homogenizing, which is pluralistic. The universal ought to be the organic unity of the many particulars. We should be students of Indigenous communities to learn this principle, for communism is the restoration of community life out of the tragedy of colonialist, capitalist history.
The investigation of the root of issues in the structure of social relations, and the search for the solution in the transcendence of those social relations are organically linked to a pluralistic outlook. Karl Marx strongly emphasized beginning with social relations as they stand in his study and critique of existing society.
When we start with the concrete, and seek to liberate the concrete from the domination of the abstract (such as in the domination of abstract value over the concrete labor and needs of working people), we start from a much broader foundation than the abstract. The abstract is always an abstraction from the concrete, whether it realizes it or not. The concrete is always more full and multifaceted than the abstract, although the latter is important as a tool to comprehending the former.
Abstract and Concrete
In capitalist society, the bourgeoisie tends to be the “abstracting class,” and the working classes the “concrete classes.” This means that the bourgeoisie represents the embodiment of the drive of abstract value to subordinate all of concrete society to its demands, regardless of the concrete consumption needs of the people. We saw this during the COVID-19 pandemic when capitalists and bourgeois politicians fretted about saving “the economy” while thousands of “essential workers” died from the virus.
The bourgeoisie tends to be dedicated primarily to “abstract” aims, although they engage with “concrete” mechanisms to serve these aims. For example, they wish to serve “the economy,” and they often believe in a form of cosmopolitan politics which is based on purely bourgeois and anti-popular concerns. This manifests in the form of G20, the World Trade Organization, and other capitalist forces. Multinational corporations relocate freely in order to pursue the lowest possible production costs and thus to maximize profit, serving the growth of abstract value.
The bourgeoisie of various countries, bound to international finance capital now more than ever, tends to sacrifice local concerns and needs in the name of satisfying the needs of worldwide value. Often at the advice of imperialist organizations like the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, leaders of periphery countries cut social spending and privatize nationalized industries.
On the other hand, the working classes of various countries are concerned primarily with their conditions of labor, their living standards, their consumption, their communities — in short, with “concrete” aims. They are hostile to finance capital and feel frustration at the domination of their lives by impersonal powers, which they do not always recognize as the power of abstract value.
They are considered narrow-minded by the bourgeoisie. They are described as backwards, localist, provincial, ignorant, and so on. And yet, there is a potential for a far deeper universalism within the very nature of the global working class itself.
Where the bourgeoisie tends towards a homogenous cosmopolitanism which is in truth the projection of abstract value into the world, the working classes tend to specificity in their criticisms and demands, almost all of which point toward the worldwide networks. These market networks and confluence of demands constitute the potential for the realization of a global working class. By this, I mean the activity of the global working class as a class. The working classes of the world have common interests in defying global capital in favor of their concrete demands and livelihoods, although this is expressed in various local forms.
There is a potential for internationalism, for a concrete universalism, among the workers on the basis of this pluralistic commonality of interests. The working class is the true universal class in a very real, concrete sense — they come from the manifold wretched of the earth. They are immigrants, mothers, children, the lowest castes, indigenous peoples, the outsiders — they are the multitude. The working class holds within itself the basis for “a world where many worlds fit,” and comes into direct conflict, by its own bread-and-roses demands, with the false, abstract universalism of the bourgeoisie.
Difference and Universalism
Through a revolutionary, concrete approach to universalism, we can appreciate the importance and power of specificity. Specificity and difference are not contrary to universalism, but ought to be the basis of it. The key is to seek a system of social relations based on a concrete universalism, one which is concerned primarily with people-people relations.
Vine Deloria Jr. tapped into the expression of a form of this in Indigenous views of the individual, remarking:
“The vital difference between Indians in their individualism and the traditional individualism of Anglo-Saxon America is that the two understandings of man are built on entirely different premises. White America speaks of individualism on an economic basis. Indians speak of individualism on a social basis. While the rest of America is devoted to private property, Indians prefer to hold their lands in tribal estate, sharing the resources in common with each other. Where Americans conform to social norms of behavior and set up strata for social recognition, Indians have a free-flowing concept of social prestige that acts as a leveling device against the building of social pyramids.
Thus the two kinds of individualism are diametrically opposed to each other, and it would appear impossible to reconcile one with the other. Where the rich are admired in white society, they are not particularly welcome in Indian society. The success in economic wars is not nearly as important for Indians as it is for whites, since the sociability of individuals with each other acts as a binding tie in Indian society.”¹⁰
Frantz Fanon expressed the power of specificity in the context of Black people rejecting the racist homogenization we described earlier. In his analysis, an important step of the transcending of a colonized state of being is to realize:
“I do not have the duty to be this or that ….
If the white man challenges my humanity, I will impose my whole weight as a man on his life and show him that I am not that “sho’ good eatin’” that he persists in imagining.”¹¹
Fanon and Deloria Jr.’s analyses bring us to particular examples of where universalism fails and where it can succeed. The system of citizenship in the United States is tied directly to abstraction, and thus citizenship. In 1924, the Indian Citizenship Act was passed, extending US citizenship to Indigenous peoples. Yet although this appeared to be a victory for equal rights, it also superseded tribal sovereignty in favor of the unitary jurisdiction of the United States over colonized peoples. The demand for homogeneity was in truth the privatization of oppression. Similarly, while the 1964 Civil Rights Act began the process of abolishing de jure racial hierarchy within legal citizenship, it was premised on the notion of uniform American identity.
If you are an “American,” then to point out distinct forms of racial and colonial oppressions is to disrupt the unity of citizens and to engage in “dangerous separatism.” It is to violate abstract universalism, which is implicitly Euro-American and bourgeois. This is why it is considered “racist” to point out the specific concerns of oppressed peoples, while pretending to be “colorblind,” to “not see race,” is not, even though racial oppression is still a concrete fact in distinctions of everyday life.
And yet, Indigenous peoples and Black Americans have produced their own forms of universalism through their specificities. Pan-Indigenism and Pan-Africanism were formed out of the common experiences of colonial and racial oppression. They do not inherently demand homogeneity. Instead, they seek to unite many particulars into one on the basis of the common interest composed by those particulars. They are not provincialist or navel-gazing, but universal in perspective, starting from the particular and then moving to the universal. They uphold the right to difference and to specificity not as irreconcilable with universalist politics, but as the bedrock of it.
Yet difference can itself become a form of abstraction. We have already seen how the differentiation of the “universals” from the “non-universals” can abstract and homogenize the latter. In resisting their oppression by the “universals,” the “non-universals” can themselves be caught up in their position and naturalize it. Common identities formed from common oppression can become common identities which are dependent on that oppression. One can make an ethic out of their conditions of oppression and condemn the oppressor on the basis of that rather than transcend the bonded identities of oppressor-oppressed.
Frantz Fanon described this dialectic of identity in the context of decolonization:
“The language of the colonizer suddenly scorches his lips. Rediscovering one’s people sometimes means in this phase wanting to be a “[n-word],” not an exceptional “[n-word],” but a real “[n-word],” a “dirty [n-word],” the sort defined by the white man. Rediscovering one’s people means becoming a “filthy Arab,”of going as native as possible, becoming unrecognizable; it means clipping those wings which had been left to grow.”¹²
This expression of a “slave morality” can take a moderate, often liberal form, or it can take a radical form.
In the moderate form, it is expressed in the terms of an ideology extolling diversity as the means to transcend marginalization, or otherwise advocating the moral upholding of marginalized groups. Yet this naturalizes the formation of these identities, ignoring their social-historical development and homogenizing them into ahistorical, asocial, “elements.” For example, the category of “latinx” crumples many ethnic, regional, linguistic, and so on groups into one category on the basis of their relation to the mainstream of Euro-American society. They are assumed to have some form of a homogenous experience as “latinx” since they are a given form of non-Euro-American.
Their manifold distinctions in real histories and community relations are flattened into a diversity category. There is an inherent element of abstraction in this process, which cannot handle the real nuances of historically produced social relations and the identities tied to them. They are merely a certain subset of non-whites. They are defined by the terms of mainstream society, even while they are seeking to challenge the racist exclusion and domination of that society.
In the radical form, the same manner of abstraction dependent on oppressor-oppressed relation is at play. The situation is conceived in a purely dichotomous manner, being a literal oppressor-oppressed relation with absolutely no nuance of real concrete relations. All in the “oppressor” group are flattened into being equivalent and equally bad, and all in the “oppressed” group are flattened into being equivalent and equally good.
This can ignore both the complexities of relations among “oppressor” groups, the fact that their nature as “oppressors” is a historical product rather than “elementarily” grounded in them, and that the “oppressed” also have distinctions among them. One example I am familiar with is that of Xicanismo, which conflates all of us with Indigenous peoples and tends to homogenize both ourselves and to homogenize Euro-Americans as uniformly enemies. This outlook ignores the distinctions of the non-Indigenous among us from Indigenous peoples, the dimension of both Afro-Mexican identity and anti-Blackness in our history. It also fails to recognize the distinctions among Euro-Americans and thus fails to grasp the truth of the dynamics which we seek to supersede.
Yet we should not conflate this “oppressed” chauvinism with “oppressor” chauvinism. The former is ultimately a response to the latter. It is important to remember that it is specifically a naturalization of real relations of exploitation and oppression. To treat them as equivalents is itself to operate on an abstract plane.
One frequent manifestation of this is to act as if white nationalism and Black nationalism in North America are the same. This is quite comical once one considers that the former has historically been how USAmerican identity was defined, and the latter has been a response to that. The latter seeks to escape the former. Where it has chauvinistic tendencies, this is often merely a play at “turning the tables” of the relation of oppression — which is still operating within the terms of that relation. The “oppressor” chauvinism is always primary.
If we look at the situation from the point of view of concrete universalism, we can critique both and redirect our focus to the analysis of concrete social relations and the concrete transcendence of them. We have to remember that the common interests of the oppressed are not “elemental” or “ready-made,” but that they are coalitions formed out of pluralities.
The Universal Community
The world to be built on the basis of concrete universalism is communism, or the universal community. The notion of a community is one based on familiar, person-person connections. Rather than being mediated primarily by abstractions, whether by value or by “divinely ordained” estates, community is mediated by specific relations between specific people. People are not considered faceless, interchangeable atomistic units, but are considered as integral nodes in the web of the community’s relations. What is key is their particular places in that community as their particular individualities.
Yet the old communalist societies held a limitation within their logic. Their nature as closed communities and the associated power of their leaders were the means through which they self-negated into ranked and distanced class societies.¹³ They define themselves according to particular genealogical networks and people-place homelands. This derives from their productive-activity, which is tied to specific localities and the bonds of the citizen-residents in those localities. There is a tendency toward self-negation in their interactions with outsiders, such as via the enslavement of prisoners of war.
The regulations reproducing community bonds within the community rarely apply to outsiders, and outsiders can usually only become community-citizens through adoption into the network of relations. This logic enables the accumulation of slave populations within many of these societies, typically under the monopoly of the most powerful warriors, which becomes the basis for the rise of class distinctions.
To universalize the logic of communal life is to transcend this limitation. We wish to restore the principle of person-person relations and self-identification based off of one’s place in all of their relations. We do not wish to do this solely in a localist framework, but worldwide. We seek the abolition of society as it presently stands. This is not merely a moral assertion. Capitalism has already established a “universal” society by linking up the world and the many communities of it into the networks of the global market. Abstract value binds all of us together in a concrete manner.
The “world,” for the first time in history, exists as a unified thing in a concrete sense through this interconnection. Yet to realize the “world,” we have to liberate this network of interconnection from the domination of capital, which subjects all of us to its despotic, anti-life demands. We seek to transcend parasitic interconnection on the basis of that very interconnection. We seek to liberate ourselves from the domination of the abstract on the basis of what it has forced the concrete to construct.
The universal community to be realized should not be a homogenous project — that is the characteristic tendency of the capital-produced “world.” The universal community should be just that — an all-encompassing, pluralistic society premised on reciprocity and communal bonds. A community of communities, a world of worlds. A world where many worlds fit.
Melange. — The usual argument of tolerance, that all human beings, all races are equal, is a boomerang. It opens itself up to easy rebuttal by the senses, and even the most compelling anthropological evidence for the fact that Jews are not a race at all, will in the case of a pogrom hardly change anything at all, since the totalitarians know very well who they want to kill and who not.
If one wished to proclaim the equality of all those who bear human features as an ideal, instead of establishing it as a fact, this would be of little help. The abstract utopia would be all too easily reconcilable with the most devious tendencies of society. That all human beings would resemble each other, is exactly what suits this latter. It regards factual or imagined differences as marks of shame, which reveal, that one has not brought things far enough; that something somewhere has been left free of the machine, is not totally determined by the totality.
The technics of the concentration camps was designed to turn prisoners into guards, the murdered into murderers. Racial difference was absolutely sublated, so that one could abolish it absolutely, if only in the sense that nothing different survived anymore.
An emancipated society however would be no unitary state, but the realization of the generality in the reconciliation of differences. A politics which took this seriously should therefore not propagate even the idea of the abstract equality of human beings. They should rather point to the bad equality of today, the identity of film interests with weapons interests, and think of the better condition as the one in which one could be different without fear.
If one attested to blacks, that they are exactly like whites, while they are nevertheless not so, then one would secretly wrong them all over again. This humiliates them in a benevolent manner by a standard which, under the pressure of the system, they cannot attain, and moreover whose attainment would be a dubious achievement.
The spokespersons of unitary tolerance are always prepared to turn intolerantly against any group which does not fit in: the obstinate enthusiasm for blacks meshes seamlessly with the outrage over obnoxious Jews. The “melting pot” was an institution of free-wheeling industrial capitalism. The thought of landing in it conjures up martyrdom, not democracy.¹⁴
— Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia
