“The fact is that the so-called European civilization — ”Western” civilization — as it has been shaped by two centuries of bourgeois rule, is incapable of solving the two major problems to which its existence has given rise: the problem of the proletariat and the colonial problem; that Europe is unable to justify itself either before the bar of “reason” or before the bar of “conscience”; and that, increasingly, it takes refuge in a hypocrisy which is all the more odious because it is less and less likely to deceive.”
— Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism (1955)¹
Modernity, or the modernity of this Euro-centered world, began with the assertion of subjectivity. Its roots went back further, like any dialectical potential. But we see something new with the emergence of a specifically bourgeois Christianity (whether Protestant or Catholic humanist), the bourgeois form of scientific materialism, the bourgeois doctrine of free and equal national citizens…
These are the things coupled under the self-congratulatory labels of “Renaissance” (looking backward to Classical Antiquity), “Enlightenment” (looking forward to modernity), and the “Age of Reason” (looking inward for meaning). Many have argued against their conflation, a criticism that cannot be denied, but their association nevertheless is clear. Modernity and subjectivity go hand in hand.
Yet it is clear that this assertion of subjectivity, of subjective freedom (i.e., freedom of thought, of being oneself as a subject) has now turned over into its opposite. The cheery arrogance of the “Enlightenment” defining itself against the so-called “Dark Ages” is especially hilarious now, when the arch-Enlightened structures of mass society now churn out prefab people-units with shallower subjectivity and greater dependency than ever before in history. Today it is impossible to avoid the fact that no one is in control, as hard as we try to run from it. Perhaps no one was ever in control in history. But it is only in this bourgeois civilization where even the body of the sovereign, no matter what form, is so clearly powerless against the impersonal power of capital.
Bourgeois civilization announced itself as the freedom of property. Property was supposed to be the free self-expression of the individual. This could take the form of either property in the sense of attribute, or property in the sense of an external thing that is owned. The self was supposed to own itself and its properties. Individuals were supposed to be free to realize themselves, as long as they didn’t encroach on the self-ownership of others.
And yet, capitalism has transformed property into its opposite for most people in the world.² Most people do not own what they produce, and instead their work is bought by wages in exchange for feeding capital. They are also not sure who they are, what their properties are. They find themselves helpless, confused, in despair. Life seems to be a property of capital in both senses. We live to work instead of working to live.
In the name of subjectivity, of individuality, bourgeois civilization has become the most calcified objective system in history and individuals have become less individual, less unique than ever in history. Capital demands global homogenization — everything must serve a single Plan, a single Totality. Sure, it might grant a bit of autonomy… but it’s just giving some slack to the rope we’re bound with.
Think of it with an everyday example. Even when you aren’t clocked in, you have to plan your life around work. You can’t do much of anything without money when everything has a price, and work is the main way that most people access money. And even when you’re not on the clock, the same principles that organize work organize the rest of society’s structures — mass production, standardization of parts, rationalization according to a Plan, seemingly infinite choices but all of them already chosen for you.
When the capitalist mode of production is well-established, and we are in close proximity to its accumulation, we are made in the image of capital as our God. The light of God-capital does not shine on all equally, but it is unavoidable as the center of the world. This is itself the function of Eurocentrism. Even if the West is no longer the center of global production, it is the center of the general capital. Therefore to be capitalist is to be Western, to be Western is to be civilized, to be civilized is to be modern, to be modern is to be bourgeois, to be bourgeois is to be capitalist…
Abstract Universals
We think of places like Florence and Venice as the birthplaces of bourgeois civilization, admiring their human achievements, their cosmopolitanism, their cultural and intellectual advances. We think of the Renaissance as a Golden Age of bourgeois civilization, the measure for what we should aspire to. But the beautiful, bountiful, bustling streets of Renaissance Venice were tied directly to the agonized cries and thing-ification of the slave trade. This bond acted through capital itself. Freedom in bourgeois civilization is bound to unfreedom, universality to exclusion, Being to non-Being, humanity to inhumanity.
The hagiography of freedom and human flourishing which has been crafted for bourgeois civilization is written in pages of human skin. As Vladimir Lenin said, freedom in bourgeois civilization is “freedom for the slave-owners.”³ The specific forms which freedom takes, particularly that of the rights-baring individual citizen, is inseparable from enslavement, expropriation, and exploitation. The white citizen in North America, unencumbered by a parasitic aristocracy, themselves lived on land seized from Indigenous peoples and with a distance from the “bare life” of proletarianization bought by branding Black people with labor as a state of being.
The white citizens considered life for labor to be the racial destiny of Black people, while citizenry could be free of these concerns and instead focus on the “higher” and universal life of ethics and politics.⁴ They could abstract from the concerns of their “animal” life by abstracting Black human beings into chattel, into the embodiment of labor-values which could be measured in their corporeality itself by capitalist enslavers. The universality of bourgeois citizenry had, and has, as its underside, the inhuman laborer.
Eurocentrism and abstractness thus coincide in the bourgeois citizen. The abstract-universal in bourgeois civilization always-everywhere feeds on its outside and its underside. Living labor is what feeds capital, and it always needs its host to survive. But its relationship to its host is not always the same. It takes different forms according to the political constellation of a given region of global capital, articulating itself especially through citizenship. Some workers enjoy the rights — however illusory — of citizenship, while others don’t. And still today, the slave trade thrives.
Karl Marx argued that the apparently free and equally matched exchange of two commodity owners exercising full rights over their property, the one of capital and the other of labor-power, obscures what operates in the process of production itself. Beyond the sphere of circulation the exploitation of living labor ensures that capital feeds off the externality which becomes surplus-value.⁵ This is one of his key, original insights, and where he overlaps directly with decolonial critique of bourgeois civilization. It is exactly the freedom and equality of capitalism that is the premise for the extraction of surplus-value, for the exploitation of living labor by capital.⁶
The proletarian is not simply the industrial worker. The proletarian is all that living labor which is subordinated to capital directly through the sale of abstract commodity labor-power, the domination of labor as a personal power by labor as an article of sale. The proletarian produces surplus-value, which is distributed to all of capitalist society through wages, profits, rents, interests, taxes, etc. The fundamental exploitation, the making-available of surplus-value to the general capital, is what underlies all of bourgeois civilization. Capital needs the externality of the proletariat to drink the blood of living labor, the proletariat can never be entirely a citizen.
The living labor which capital feeds on and the rights of the commodity-citizen are in a tense relationship, even if they are in a single whole. The tension can be greater or lesser, and in some cases or junctures capital wields a monopoly power which it uses to toss aside the premise of exchange and to simply seize living labor (for example, through unpaid slave labor in prison camps). The difference between abstract commodity labor-power (the citizen-human-commodity) and living labor remains. This difference also means that the proletariat can never be entirely subsumed into capital, and that it must wield its externality as a weapon to seize autonomy and defeat capital.⁷ By defeating capital, the proletariat abolishes itself as a class and steps forth into self-creation.
Aníbal Quijano identified coloniality and power as inseparable in bourgeois civilization.⁸ This civilization, as a civilization unto itself, formed through colonization, through the historical break represented by 1492.⁹ What the bourgeoisie wrought against the peasants in Europe, against Indigenous peoples in the Americas, and against the Africans that it enslaved was a new creation — global capitalism, Euro-bourgeois civilization.¹⁰ The forms of power which it wields are stamped with the birthmarks of these formative moments.¹¹
As C.L.R. James and W.E.B. Du Bois have argued, the techniques of exploitation, control, and instrumental rationality which we associate with factories developed first in the hellish sugar mills and cotton plantations of the so-called New World.¹² Commodity labor-power, as an abstraction from specific human beings and specific kinds of labor, itself finds key moments of its history in the commodification of Indigenous and Black peoples into mere things, exchangeable property.¹³ Like the wage-laborer, enslaved people in racialized chattel slavery were subordinated through their exchangeability to the slave society as a whole, not only to one particular master. For all their pathetic paternalistic imitations of European aristocracy, the enslavers were capitalist.
Yet the difference between slaves and proletarians is still clear — even while they found themselves in horrendous conditions of neglect and abuse, indentured servants were not bound in chains and packed skin to skin like any other commodity to be shipped across the Atlantic and sold. They were not a pure mass of inhuman labor, a difference which would grow into the illusory promise of whiteness. What they saw in enslaved Black people was a terrifying reminder of what the coloniality of power could do, thus the American Patriot slogan that the British government was “making slaves” of them through taxes. This investment in the sanctity of whiteness continued into denunciations of “white slavery,” and grumblings about “[n-word] wages.”¹⁴ Whiteness is thus a basically bourgeois identity, something which white workers cling to in terror of being put at the other end of bourgeois civilization’s vampirism.
The bourgeois citizen is non-relational, the citizen becomes society through contracts. Each citizen is supposed to be themselves and no other, even though they are really more or less interchangeable. The citizen is the son that defines himself by rejecting his birth-bond to his mother, instead desiring the absolute self-ownership (and… ownership of others) which the father wields.¹⁵ The bourgeois citizen is a masculine, individualist, vampiric form of power. The citizen-society is a society of wannabe fathers.
Exploitation does not only take the form of the proletariat and bourgeoisie. There is also the gendered relationship between men and women, and the definition of people in these strictly bipolar terms. One is supposed to complement the other, but really their complement is quite stilted. To be “morally pure,” woman must be a good appendage of the man, he must cover her, she must treat him as a father.
Otherwise she is supposed to betray her own interests, as the proletarian is supposed to betray their interests when they strike and revolt. If she is going to be a public person, an individual unto herself, she must play by the rules of the game. She can’t be hysterical, she can’t be too relational. She has to be a good commodity-owner if she isn’t going to be the owned commodity.¹⁶ Man must be “masculine” and maintain the boundaries of the bourgeois self, or else they risk being penetrated and weak like woman is supposed to be. Men must be men and women must be women, and any variation must ultimately fall within these two poles in a single identical totality.
This entire civilization is built on global exploitation, a global exploitation which is the first of its kind in history. The Romans and Chinese had certainly established world-systems before, but not unified global systems. It is bourgeois civilization which brings together the equation globality-coloniality-modernity. This exploitation does not always take the same forms and strategies, but it is a basic drive nevertheless. Today, in the age of neo-colonialism, global-coloniality looks quite a bit like the exploitation of proletarians. The universal contract relations between nations are themselves the premises for exploitation.
Even where global law of “fair exchange” is enforced (which is quite rare), exploitation occurs.¹⁷ Through the exchange between equal owners, the transfer of surplus-value occurs. Even while the global division of labor has shifted, and the “First World” is no longer the center of production, this Eurocentric arrangement operates. The key is to ask where the centers of capital accumulation are, where the densities of value-chains concentrate.¹⁸
It is also important to remember that nations cannot be made strictly equivalent to classes — while labor-power is a unique commodity in being only one side of a dual character (the other being living labor, which produces and realizes new commodity-values), nation-states do not have such a character in exchange. Nation-states instead distribute surplus-values in these unequal exchanges. Value operates on the level of the general capital, of global capital, of bourgeois civilization, while it is prices, rents, interests, taxes, and outright force that determine distribution.
It is also important to note that imperialist exploitation does not simply occur by extracting from the outside, the pre-capitalist.¹⁹ This is certainly important, but it is not what determines the ultimate fate of the capitalist system as a whole. Imperial exploitation can just as well take the form of universal exchanges within and between bourgeois nation-states.²⁰ By extension, hope for revolution does not depend only on externality. There is an opportunity for revolutionary transformation from within bourgeois civilization itself. But this revolution must break with the world it has grown in, and put the world on a fundamentally new basis. Otherwise it is dead on the vine.
Many Marxists and anarchists have a certain investment in bourgeois civilization. They denounce capitalism for being unable to realize these principles anymore and call on the proletariat to take up the mantle. This has included figures from Rudolf Rocker to the older György Lukács. They remain stuck in the capitalist form of subjectivity, unable to see that exploitation cannot be wiped away from it. To emphasize individualism, contract, totality, and Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity in an uncritical way is to potentially repeat the coloniality and destructive character of bourgeois civilization. This criticism had already been made by contemporary colleagues, such as Errico Malatesta and Theodor Adorno respectively. It is not that these ideals have been betrayed — they have, of their own logic, transformed into their opposite.
The principles of bourgeois civilization lead to their own self-negation. It’s not up to us to simply repeat them, but to work through the process of going beyond them. Marx and Engels identified the seed for this as existing in the European proletariat, which in their day was constituting itself into an independent political force. By the end of their lives, however, they realized that this independence may not have been as solid as they thought — the workers seemed to think and act much the same as the bourgeoisie in many instances. The two started to look to the “underdeveloped” world for new signs of revolutionary struggle.
Historically, revolutionary Marxists have identified the embourgeoisment of Western proletarians, this infection by bourgeois civilization, as emerging from a direct investment in imperialist exploitation. Drawing from preceding arguments made by Friedrich Engels, Lenin argued that “out of such enormous superprofits (since they are obtained over and above the profits which capitalists squeeze out of the workers of their “own” country) it is possible to bribe the labour leaders and the upper stratum of the labour aristocracy. And the capitalists of the “advanced” countries are bribing them; they bribe them in a thousand different ways, direct and indirect, overt and covert.”²¹ However, there are more or less radical ways of thinking about this notion of labor aristocracy.
There is a vulgar form, which assumes that complacence must emerge from “material interests” — workers would only support imperialism if it was directly and obviously padding their paychecks. Such an analysis seems very radical, as it goes far to condemn the complacency as directly and consciously accepting blood money. However this explanation has faltered quite a bit in the past few decades, with neo-colonialism having hidden extraction and distribution and with living standards relatively declining in many Western countries. This has led some, like David Harvey, to argue that imperialism has ended or even shifted to a redistribution of wealth from West to East.²²
Yet this very strange claim is not our only alternative. Instead, we can interpret this concept in a more complex — civilizational — sense.²³ It is superexploitation of some nations, the less-than nations, which enables for other nations civilizational norms closer to the modern ideals of bourgeois society. This does not mean all or even most of the workers in the wealthy nations live happy lives, own their own houses, or live equally to their own bourgeoisie. There can be very sharp class distinctions in income and standards of living — something that’s quite clear living in the United States.
Where this exploitation and accumulation of surplus-values in the metropolitan cores of the world really matters is in enabling the presence of specific institutions, expectations of consumption, and — in short — “moral-historical” norms. For example, the free availability of practically anything year-round in supermarkets is an extreme global and historical aberration specific to the wealthiest imperial centers. It is exactly these institutions and practices which are tied to the recuperation of the proletariat in these countries as well, such as through mass media (culture industry), car culture, high purchasing power by global standards, the aspiration to house ownership, access to globally prestigious institutions… The Western workers can have so many things to occupy them, to create and reproduce their basically bourgeois subjectivity, because of this imperialist exploitation.
Of course, the distribution of this wealth is not uniform even within specific countries. Often, it is heavily racialized. Imperialist exploitation does not stop at national boundaries — the coloniality of power is much more pervasive than that. Food deserts, exposure to toxic waste, unemployment, wage theft, and superexploitation are all distributed along racial lines.
Yet even when they enjoy all of this wealth at once, many find themselves discontented. Bourgeois civilization simply does not have people as its center. There is no given meaning to life, only producing and accumulating capital. There is too much givenness to give meaning to life.²⁴ Some of this wealth is directed to generating meaning through techniques of mass production, today tending to take the form of social media influencers and subcultural brand identities. Capitalists, life coaches, influencers, movies, shows, schools, and books alike encourage people to pursue the fantasy of something beyond a work-life balance, a dream job where you realize your individual authenticity in your work itself. The best work doesn’t feel like work at all! But to get there, to be morally qualified, you have to grind. Those who are unhappy simply haven’t grinded hard enough, or talked to a therapist, or taken medication, or otherwise become a Good Person.
The imperial mode of living is the ultimate passive nihilism that passes itself off as active. Capital is dragging us to apocalypse, to ecocide, and we are supposed to grind away regardless. What the imperial mode of living tells people is that nothing matters but your choices as a market actor, as a bourgeois individual, to ignore anything outside of your myopic concerns. If even your myopic concerns bring you to sound the alarm, then you are a failure — you need to practice a growth mindset. Bourgeois civilization comes to a historical fatalism out of its own subjectivism.
Even this wealth can be no guarantee. There is no fundamental ground in bourgeois civilization except capital. In the past few decades, many workers and petit-bourgeoisie who once enjoyed bountiful fruits of exploitation now find themselves declassed, thrown into unemployment or menial and insecure forms of wage-labor. The labor aristocracy in the conventional sense has shrunk significantly, though the imperial mode of living has not disappeared. These people respond to proletarianization differently, but do so with reference to what they consider normal. Many, even most, look back to the “good old days” for meaning and gravitate towards fascism. Others look forward, to the need to transform the social system to its core.
This has been only a minority however, as the norms which people are used to and the destruction of the proletariat as an independent political force in the West have eroded the viability of communism as an alternative. Communism must constitute itself as an alternative by constituting a new collectivity which fundamentally rejects the premises of bourgeois civilization. The imperial mode of living is transitory and is already collapsing before our eyes. Fascism is a false solution, remaining mired in the passive nihilism baked into our institutions. To really free ourselves, we must abolish Euro-bourgeois civilization and commit to global revolutionary transformation. This means taking on the responsibility of freedom.
Capitalism and Freedom
So we come to the question: How to wrench freedom from bourgeois civilization?
Do we have to leave subjectivity behind? Some have tried to look for a deeper grounding apart from, or more fundamental than, subjectivity. This has been essential to reactionary critiques of modernity, from Martin Heidegger to Julius Evola, who argue that subjectivism has lead to forms of domination which were previously unimaginable in history and that we must return to rootedness in order to be free in a way true to our being.²⁵ Yet this response means falling into fascism, and despite the objections of some, into fatalism. This is an escape from freedom, not the realization of it.
Freedom must work through modern, bourgeois subjectivity itself. Subjectivity has certainly turned into unfreedom in bourgeois society. But subjectivity is key to realizing a society where the freedom of each is the condition of the freedom of all. Subjectivity in bourgeois society is really quite limited — the subjectivity which is the most free is the alienated and impersonal power of capital, and by proximity that of the biggest capitalists. This subjectivity is premised on most people living their lives as things, working to feed capital instead of for themselves. We have not seen what subjectivity could be.
The next question: How to free subjectivity in the name of freedom?
We have to freely understand the nature of freedom itself. We can’t be told to be free, given a mass of commodity-things which we are supposed to be free with. This is the bourgeois understanding of freedom — making the best of what you have, and if possible, having as much as you can. But this is simply taking what’s already given, which is no independence of subjectivity. Free subjectivity can’t simply make do with what is already given to it.
Freedom exercises itself through negativity. This doesn’t simply mean a “negative attitude,” or hopelessness (though rejecting false hope and toxic positivity can be important for freedom). Freedom negates what is given, saying “no” to it. This doesn’t simply mean rejecting abstractly, like we do when we select “no” on a screen at a store. This is “no” that refuses the way things are given to us, implying instead a change. To create also means to destroy. But to create-destroy means to work through something by its own premises. You have to understand, or internalize, a thing’s qualities in order to consciously change it into something else according to your own purpose or desire. Freedom is a determinate negation.²⁶
Freedom therefore requires a subjectivity which comes to an awareness of itself for itself, and which does so by working to understand the world and internalizing the qualities of things into knowledge. Of course, we learn about these qualities from our own corporeal perspectives and drives. We wouldn’t think of a grease trap as a great place to live in and eat because that would probably kill most of us, or at least make us very sick. But this makes sense for bacteria. We categorize the world according to our needs and intentions, which can vary with time, place, and social consciousness. There is already a given in our choices and actions, but they are our choices and actions in their specific negativity in specific situations. They can be more or less ours, but this freedom and openness is inseparable from life. The only thing we can call human nature is to be nothing in particular.²⁷
By understanding things from our subjective perspectives, we open up further possibilities for actions. Determinate negativity is freedom, and freedom is the understanding of necessities. Possibilities are always contextually specific and relational. We tend to think of possibility, at least when we’re thinking of our own possibilities, as more or less arbitrary. We might think they’re inherent to ourselves from birth, they’re spontaneous actions of an abstractly free will, or they’re dropped down from the sky. But possibility, something positive, is defined by negativity. Possibility could be many things, it is not identical to itself. This is why possibility is the home ground of freedom.
Abstractness seems to bring us infinite possibilities. To focus on specific things seems to be dull, uninteresting, and stultifying. Why not act, and act purely of our own will? Life is short. Whatever happens happens, so why waste time? This attitude, so common in bourgeois civilization today, really means an unconscious enslavement to the existing current. Abstractness, purity is an illusion. Already by working through it, a determinate arrangement of things is revealed. Freedom is situated, and it must act through a situation.
At the same time, freedom can negate itself when it treats a thing or situation purely as an instrument of subjective will. This is the bourgeois attitude to the world. All things are means, and the only end is capital. Yet this kind of freedom simply leads to an overaccumulation of instrumentalization, and the disappearance of those who can understand and keep the machine running smoothly. Everything becomes an instrument, a machine, in a gigantic factory that accumulates, accumulates, accumulates. Life becomes an appendage of its own creation, and the only things that are free are… things. But this is not substantial freedom, the negating freedom of subjectivity. This is only a freedom borrowed from the people who conjured capital up.
Capitalism is, in a sense, the accumulation of infinite dead possibilities. Marx described it as the culmination of many class societies across history, incorporating a hodge-podge of all of them under one global form of impersonal power.²⁸ There can be many relations of exploitation, domination, and distribution in capitalism, but they all come back to the gravitational pull of capital-in-general. Capitalism develops only what is necessary for accumulation and allows underdevelopment where it’s convenient. This is especially obvious in an age of waste, where much of what the West exports is literally garbage. We can’t rely the “productive forces” to prepare the way for freedom. Capital is distorting, it is disharmony.
Many people embrace this passively nihilistic way of living, terrified of the consequences implied by trying to be free. Negating this world seems impossible, so if you can’t beat them join them. People want to give up the tension and pain of negativity, of freedom, and let themselves go to be carried away. They throw themselves head first into algorithmic programming of thought and activity, desiring more and more passive forms of consumption.
Some directly practice something like “animism” but for the internet, believing that the internet is a moral-spiritual force which will realize a new, holy world. This takes more subcultural forms, such as in digital accelerationism, or more banal forms, as in obsessive worship of influencer-brands and the measure of moral quality by social media content (Do you post your romantic partner, therefore proving loyalty? Did you post in support of this?). Of course, this is only a specific way of giving up freedom — specific to the heartland of contemporary bourgeois civilization, and varying according to how interpersonal life has been arranged. But it is an especially glaring example of subjectivity turned into a dead objectivity, just as bourgeois individuals imagine “nature” to be. It is a second nature, and people learn to worship it as a “natural order.”
Communism offers a form of freedom much truer than this. The free association of free individuals need not destroy subjectivity. It should be an association of many subjectivities, many freedoms, in a common relational constellation of freedom. The free development of each needs to be the free development of all, rather than each individual being the defining limit of the other as in bourgeois society. For subjectivity to really be one’s own, for one to be a master of oneself, all must be masters.
Bourgeois civilization has produced a massified form of life, one where individuality has been destroyed in the name of individualism. Free subjectivity would need to be able to create and recreate itself, and it can only do so with a respectful and understanding relation with all subjectivities of the world. Freedom of one cannot be at the expense of another — negativity which imposes itself on another becomes givenness. The dominating subjectivity forces identity on another, identifying itself with domination in the process in order to maintain it. It might run from this and obscure it, but its freedom is a bastard freedom. The freedom of subjectivity, torn from bourgeois civilization, would mean a freedom to be otherwise, but otherwise in association and kinship with others.
Freedom is already situational and relational. Exploitation is relational, even where it is premised on a rejection of a relational identity.²⁹ The free citizen has the slave beneath them, even if they think their freedom is entirely a quality of themselves. Their possibilities are expanded on the backs of others. A relationship of exploitation distorts both the exploiter and exploited because it is premised on unfreedom, degradation, and disharmony, not premised on free kinship. Communism puts freedom on a basis true to itself. Everyone is themselves… and they are specifically nothing in particular. All relations are based on this truth. Our possibilities are mutually extended by working with another. Communism puts the flourishing of each and all as an end in itself, it is life-affirming. It is not idyllic — this is an unfree idea of freedom. It means working through difference and understanding, reaching towards the harmony of an Absolute where all are free. Freedom is both a place and a horizon.³⁰
Marx and Engels saw capitalism as something like a Golgotha of the Spirit — a mutilation which humanity must go through in order to realize a greater freedom.³¹ This was the rationale behind their congratulatory analysis of coloniality, considering the spread of bourgeois civilization to be clearing the way for a global human community to emerge. Capitalism creates the potential for a universal humanity — the end of the “pre-history of human society” — by uniting everyone under one global class society for the first time in history.³² It is exactly the abstracting and nihilistic character of bourgeois civilization, where “all that is solid melts into air,” which clears the way for something greater.
The accumulation of many possibilities by capitalism, in the eyes of Marx and Engels, created a potential freedom to be realized by communist society. But has capitalism become overripe, and now threatens to abolish all possibilities? Ecocide threatens the existence of humanity as we have come to know it. The dream of a smooth passage from passive to active nihilism which Marx and Engels indulged was woefully naive. To realize freedom, communism must be far more of a break in history. To refer to Walter Benjamin: “Marx says that revolutions are the locomotive of world history. But perhaps it is quite otherwise. Perhaps revolutions are an attempt by the passengers on this train-namely, the human race-to activate the emergency brake.”³³
Cosmopolitan Roots
What do we do? We can’t even find the conductor’s cabin to pull the brakes. And besides, where do we stop? For many of us, nowhere in the world is a home. The railroads ran through them a long time ago, and all we’ve known is the train careening forward, forever. It’s hard enough to stop the train, how would we find somewhere to be home and free?
We can learn something of this from Indigenous peoples, those who are not strictly train-people and retain the memory and heart of home. Their homes have been run through by the railroads, and they have been carried across space by the imperial train. But they can remember other ways of doing things, ways which don’t have to look like blasting mountains, mania for gold, steel monstrosities, life for labor. To preserve their sovereignty, their distinctness as peoples, they have preserved their principles of communal kinship. Though many are citizens of nation-states today, they hold passenger tickets to the train, they are also kin of their people and of their homelands.
The anarchist geographer Elisée Reclus described very similar principles for a future society, saying:
“Some day our civilization, which is so fiercely individualist and divides the world into as many little belligerent states as there are private properties and family households, will finally collapse, and it will be necessary to practice mutual aid to assure our common survival. Some day the quest for friendship will replace the quest for material well-being that sooner or later will have been adequately provided for. Some day dedicated naturalists will have disclosed to us all that is charming, appealing, human, and often more than human in the nature of animals. We will then reflect upon all the species left behind in the march of progress and seek to make of them neither our servants nor our machines, but rather our true companions.”³⁴
This is cosmopolitan rootedness, rootedness that isn’t rootedness in Blood and Soil but in beloved kin, kinship with all life, kinship with the other. We should stand against the so-called global village, really the global train, as a disaster. Even the imagined universal community of the internet, which was praised at the beginning of this century as heralding utopia, is really just the realization of these train-principles of disembodiment and destruction.³⁵ Rather than think globally and act locally, we should think locally (situated in a place, relationally) and act globally (universal revolution for universal kinship).
The Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy claimed that “the nuclear family is the best form of governance known to mankind.”³⁶ On some level he is right. This cell of bourgeois civilization is not strictly uniform across the globe, but certainly appears as a normative ideal. It churns out good little citizens who know the difference between governor and governed, owner and non-owner, speakers and listeners. The nuclear family affirms and affirms, it is a positivity where the father creates and mother and children say yes.
To introduce negativity, subjectivity, is discomforting for this paterfamilias arrangement. Women’s desire for greater possibilities terrifies nuclear family-society, especially when it means aborting a sacred pregnancy. Children’s desire to be something other than what their parents make them, especially their desire to be other than sons and daughters and to make themselves instead, is a scandal. Subjectivity is only acceptable as long as it is used to affirm, whether to affirm the specific nuclear family unit or the idea of family, order, lineage, rule, national loyalty etc. on a universal scale. The choices we make must be given, we must simply repeat this form of identity over and over. The negativity of subjectivity, freedom in a revolutionary sense, appears like red hot hellfire to this outlook.
Abolition of the family doesn’t mean unleashing the bourgeois citizen as the only node for interpersonal relationships. Abolishing the family in the communist sense means liberating relationality from the bonds of blood, soil, and exploitation. Abolish the family is so that all may be kin. If the bourgeois nuclear family produces stunted, dependent, and possessive consciousness, universal kinship must produce open, free, and loving consciousness.³⁷
In this sense, the “Golgotha of the Spirit” interpretation Marx and Engels made of capitalism has some truth. The universal impersonal relations of capital have spread over the world and put us all under the hand of a common despotic paterfamilias — Capital. Yet, this has united us into a single system of relation. This means the possibility of universal kinship, a community of all communities.
Capital does not abolish the logic that enabled the enslavement of outsiders from communities, and which led to the emergence of class society from out of that exploitation. It extends it into a globally universal claim that some are human and some are inhuman, rather than that some are kin and some are not kin. For this reason we must critique the idea of “primitive communism” as an original Eden or Innocence from which humanity has fallen. This ideal of an original unity is imagined from the standpoint of a split (Tacitus, Rousseau, Ibn Khaldun, etc.). The re-realization of the communal ethic is an active and conscious project, and to be “traditional” in the communal sense means to be revolutionary today.
There is no original unity to return back to. We are on our own. “I am. We are. That is enough. Now we have to begin.”³⁸ The original unity is a ceding of freedom, and so it is a false solution to the question of bourgeois civilization. It is no coincidence that there are fascist potentials already immanent to bourgeois consciousness and life — this is the temptation of passive revolution. But this half-revolution, where everything just change so everything can stay the same, is still passive nihilism.
Nietzsche wrote this prophecy, facing bourgeois society:
“The need to show that as the consumption of man and mankind becomes more and more economical and the “machinery” of interests and services is integrated ever more intricately, a countermovement is inevitable. I designate tins as the secretion of a luxury surplus of mankind: it aims to bring to light a stronger species, a higher type that arises and preserves itself under different conditions from those of the average man. My concept, my metaphor for this type is, as one knows, the word “overman”[…]
“He needs the opposition of the masses, of the “leveled,” a feeling of distance from them! he stands on them, he lives off them. This higher form of aristocracy is that of the future. — Morally speaking, this overall machinery, this solidarity of all gears, represents a maximum in the exploitation of man; but it presupposes those on whose account this exploitation has meaning. Otherwise it would really be nothing but an overall diminution, a value diminution of the type man — a regressive phenomenon in the grand style.”³⁹
In many ways, this came true in the mass societies of fascism in the 20th century. But fascism produced no supermen. Fascism was no social revolution, no revolution of freedom, and do it inherited the stultifying tendencies of bourgeois society in its attempt to reject it. Nation, race, and state-society are creations of bourgeois society.⁴⁰
The fascist is a subhuman — it reveals the deep demonic drives laying unacknowledged submerged within the social-psychological recesses of bourgeois mass citizen-man. The subhuman fascist is bourgeois normality ruptured into a pathetic half attempt at revolution, it is socialism blocked to itself. Fascism as a mass movement finds vitality in subterranean drives to socialism (universal humanity), but they are redirected so that everything can stay fundamentally the same.⁴¹ The hatred for bourgeois society, for citizen-contracting, for consumerism finds itself embracing the mass production of bureaucrat-soldiers, who slaughter their fellow human beings like a farm worker slaughters chickens.
The fascists consistently return to the slogans: Long live death! Live dangerously!⁴² Yes—long live death, but hail the death that subjectivity wields on itself. Hail the negativity in subjectivity, the death in freedom. It’s communism that produces the overman of Nietzsche as a social type, while fascism churns out subhumans.
Even the fascist critics of fascism-as-state, who denounce it for preserving bourgeois society, fall into the same error — they replicate the idea of a return to origins which always comes back to what is given. Fascism rejects bourgeois liberalism and yet it is really a bourgeois desire for meaning, for foundations — whether this is the father, value production, or the recreation of nature in the image of the Volk.
Fascism remains bound to instrumental rationality even while rejecting instrumentality and demanding a totally heroic way of living. What truly works through the meaninglessness of life and the absence of all foundations is love and loving kinship.⁴³ Love does not have to depend on an absolute referent, on an absolute justification. Love is the self loving the other for the other being themselves, exercising freedom specifically through relationality. In this sense love, and the loving kinship of communism, is active nihilism.
The desire for authenticity which emerges as a response against coloniality is also a potential for fascism. Authenticity is an original unity which one comes to from colonial consciousness. One thinks one must be great in one’s being, in what one already is on some level, in order to assert oneself against Eurocentrism. This is confronting coloniality on the terms of the colonizer, begging for recognition either from the colonizer outside of or inside of one’s own subjectivity.
Self-creation is decolonization.⁴⁴ Decoloniality is social revolutionary, not anthropological.⁴⁵ Truly thorough for the masses of people in the world means control over their everyday lives, it means free association. We can see the pitfalls of fascist confrontations against Eurocentrism in the examples of Imperial Japan and Salafi Islam. These kinds of projects develop an identity with the tools of Western anthropology and orientalism. They have try to build a powerful state that confronts Euro-bourgeois civilization on its own terms. This merely introduces competitors. Both examples ended in death, suffering, and slavery.
Real spiritual, civilizational transformation can only be carried through by communist revolutionary decolonization. We should think of capitalism not as decadence, inauthenticity, or rootlessness. We should not think of revolution as origin, authenticity, and absolute foundation. We should think of capital as a Plan, and one which drives to subordinate all Plans to itself. We can exercise autonomy outside of a Plan, but this is not merely an expression of a wellspring of Being. This autonomy is autonomy of Plans, it is the negativity of choice and possibilities. Fascism simply offers another version of a single, despotic Plan. We should ask instead how to create a world with open freedom in planning. Do we want to be the consumer, the producer, the consumer-producer, the destroyer, or the Comrade?
Communist Civilization
The proletariat is the negativity of bourgeois civilization — this is an old, perhaps even the initial, Marxist insight.⁴⁶ If capitalism is the negation of all preceding human history, the proletarian revolution is the negation of the negation.⁴⁷ And yet revolution is not only inside, it is also outside. The proletariat is never entirely identical to capital, though it can act in identity to capital in a slavish loyalty to bourgeois civilization. Revolution is also wrought by those resisting capitalist subsumption, particularly the Indigenous peoples of the world who still do not accept the myth of 1492. There can be no identity fixed to the struggle for freedom, because freedom is negating the identity of the world to itself.
For this reason, we who live under and within bourgeois civilization are not yet communist subjects. Realizing communism, a free society, is a process, it is a labor. Freedom does not simply appear in the world instantly, although we might exercise it more or less successfully in certain moments. Communist revolution is relative — we begin from within the imperium of bourgeois civilization, looking to the horizon of communism. To travel to that horizon, we must go through the desert of struggle. We must face capitalism directly, we cannot run with our back to it. Even after Pharoah promises the Jews their freedom after God has put him through ten plagues, he pursues them relentlessly.
Communist revolution is of a communist character relative to capitalism. It is “stamped with the birthmarks of the old society.”⁴⁸ It is not yet able to turn away — it is still a slave revolt, not yet a free society. The slave revolt certainly practices forms of freedom and solidarity much truer to their concepts than bourgeois civilization, but it is still a revolt from within the civilization. Moses could not go with the Jews to the Promised Land, so the methods of struggle against capital cannot be understood as already communism-in-itself.
“The present generation is like the Jews whom Moses led through the wilderness. It has not only a new world to conquer, it must go under in order to make room for the men who are able to cope with a new world.”⁴⁹
But the Promised Land is not a pie in the sky — the Kingdom of God is already among us. Communism is a potential within sociality itself. It’s up to us to realize it, to ourselves and future generations to hone our practices of freedom and build a new civilization. Communist civilization, absolute communism, must be something unrecognizable from a bourgeois standpoint. Communism itself is Absolute, the free association of all determinacy in universal kinship. This is a new beginning, built out of the ashes of the genocidal abstract universalism of bourgeois civilization.
Active nihilism means rejecting the subjectivity which seeks to subordinate the whole world to an alienated One (capital), which is undead and hostile to life and death alike. Capital eats up the dead as its raw material and forces the living to give their blood to it as a sacrifice. Capital demands worship as a God, as the center of the world. The active nihilism of communism shouts that there are no foundations in life, and that capital is only an idol with subjectivity stolen from those it mutilates.
There is no ultimate center in the world, much less capital. The entire world should be sacred, and all things in this world are relational. Nothing in the world is interchangeable by one measure, as in bourgeois civilization, but neither is everything apart. Communism is not transcendental homelessness, and it is not subordinating the cosmos into a draft animal. Communism means constituting ourselves as universal kin, universal Gemeinwesen, and realizing universal community for the first time in history. Communism means an entirely new civilization, which we build in love and comradeship.
