Notes toward a critique of standpoints
§1. What does Experience claim to be?
Wilhelm Dilthey, the 19th-century hermeneuticist, coined the term Erlebnis (translated as “lived experience”) to designate the irreducibility of individual embodied, first-person, pre-reflective experience of oneself and one’s world. Dilthey wanted to distinguish the Geisteswissenschaften (human sciences) from natural science, arguing that understanding human phenomena requires grasping experience from the inside, and not reducing it to external causal laws.
Phenomenology developed this further. Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Sartre all grappled with the structure of first-person experience: intentionality (consciousness is always of something), embodiment (experience is lived through the body, not in a disembodied mind), and the pre-theoretical “lifeworld” (Lebenswelt) as the background against which all theorizing occurs. The radical claim of phenomenology is that the data of consciousness or how things appear to the subject are philosophically primary, and not derivative of physics or neurochemistry.
Phenomenology, which gave the concept of Erlebnis its philosophical rigor, was itself a sustained argument against empiricist naivety. Husserl’s Logical Investigations began with a demolition of psychologism, and the entire phenomenological tradition insisted that the structures of experience are not given but constituted, that the life-world is not a collection of sense-data but a structured practical-hermeneutic field.
The contemporary political deployment of “lived experience” bears only a loose family resemblance to Dilthey or Husserl, borrowing the phenomenological vocabulary while abandoning the phenomenological critique of immediacy that was its animating core. In current usage it tends to refer to the reports of members of marginalized groups about their social experience, which is believed to carry special epistemic and moral authority that outsiders cannot contest.
The contemporary appeal to the epistemic authority of “lived experience” rests on a set of implicit claims:
- That members of marginalized groups have direct access to a form of social truth unavailable to non-members.
- That this access is grounded in the immediacy of their experience, in the fact that they have been there, felt it, and lived through it.
- That this immediacy constitutes a privileged and in some versions irrefutable form of evidence.
- That challenging, contextualizing, or mediating such testimony is a form of epistemic violence or delegitimation.
That knowledge is grounded in immediate sensory or experiential data is the cornerstone of empiricism in its classical and modern forms. The appeal to lived-experience transposes this logic from the individual sensory subject of Lockean empiricism to the collectively situated social subject of identity-politics.
§2. The classical critique of empiricism
Marx’s critique of political economy is simultaneously a critique of the empiricist epistemology that grounds it. The categories of classical political economy are the forms in which the surface of capitalist economic life presents itself to the agents who inhabit it, and political economy’s error (or inadequacy) consists in taking these surface-forms as the adequate expression of the underlying relations that produce them. The critique of political economy is therefore a metacritique which does not simply correct the mistakes of Smith et al but demonstrates why their conceptual framework, however internally rigorous and empirically adequate at the level of phenomena, is fundamentally incapable of grasping what it claims to explain, because the phenomena it takes as its data are themselves the product of a deeper level of social reality that the phenomenal surface conceals.
Marx accents the distinction between appearance and essence, i.e., the forms of appearance (Erscheinungsformen) that present themselves immediately to subjects and the underlying relations (Verhältnisse) that produce and sustain those appearances. Appearance however is not illusory; appearance is real in the mode of phenomenal form. It is produced by a deeper level of social reality that does not present itself immediately.
In the wage-relation, what appears immediately is an exchange between equals: the worker offers labor-power, the capitalist offers wages, and both parties benefit. This is how the relation appears, and it is what happens at the level of circulation. But this appearance is produced by and conceals a relation of exploitation that operates at the level of production, where surplus-value is extracted and appropriated. The immediate experience of wage-workers, or their “lived experience” of receiving wages for work done, is but the phenomenal form through which an underlying relation of exploitation presents itself to its participants.
The commodity, immediately and correctly perceived as a thing with a use-value and an exchange-value, appears to have its value properties as natural attributes. The social relation between producers that gives rise to value is invisible in the commodity-form; it has been absorbed into the thing and presents itself as the thing’s property. This is a structural feature of how commodity-producing societies organize social labor. Fetishism is therefore not just a perceptual illusion on the part of the subject but an objective property of commodity relations.
This means experience, even correct and accurate experience of the surface, is insufficient for knowledge of the social totality. What is required is not more experience, or the experience of different subjects, but the theoretical labor of grasping why the surface appears as it does, what social relations produce it, and what interests are served by its naturalization.
§3. Sanctifying of the Given
Positivism as a philosophical orientation (Comte, Mill, logical positivism, and their heirs in social science and the philosophy thereof) extends empiricism by making it normative: not only is experience the source of knowledge, but the systematization of experiential data through scientific method is the only legitimate form of knowledge. Metaphysical, speculative, or dialectical reasoning that exceeds what can be verified by experience is dismissed as meaningless or unscientific.
The appeal to lived-experience in its contemporary form reproduces a social-scientific positivism, even when its proponents consider themselves anti-positivist. The testimony of subjects about their social experience is a form of data; this data is privileged because it is proximate to the object; the task of inquiry is to collect, document, and center this data; theoretical frameworks that do not take this data as their primary warrant are suspect.
Several specific features make this positivism visible:
- Standpoint-epistemology and lived-experience discourse frequently display hostility to theoretical frameworks that do not begin from the testimony of the marginalized. Theoretical positions developed through engagement with history, political economy, or abstract social analysis are treated as secondary, as requiring “grounding” in experience to be legitimate. This mirrors positivism’s hostility to speculation.
- The claim “I have lived this” functions as an indexical pointer or directness of reference and access. This is structurally identical to the empiricist claim that perceptual reports are privileged because the perceiver was there. In both cases, proximity substitutes for analysis.
- When the framework is generalized, it tends to treat larger aggregates of testimony as producing stronger epistemic authority, as though truth were an average of testimony. This is social-science positivism’s methodology (survey research, qualitative interviews, etc.) given a political valence.
In “The Evidence of Experience” (1991), Joan Scott argues that invoking experience as evidence presupposes rather than interrogates the subject-positions and identity-categories that still need to be explained. By taking “women’s experience” or “the gay experience” as a foundation, historians and theorists naturalize those categories and reproduce the very essentialism they claim to contest. Scott’s critique operates within a Foucauldian discourse-theoretical framework that replaces experience with discourse as the primary ground of social theory. This substitution, however, does not escape the problem it diagnoses. In this instance discourse becomes the new self-constituting given replacing the lived-experience positivism with a textual/discursive positivism. The subject is dispersed into discursive positions but the social relations of production that organize and historicize said discourses remain theoretically inaccessible.
Discourse itself is produced within social relations of production that determine what can be said, what categories are available, and what appearances present themselves as natural. The economic is not a category alongside discursive categories but constitutes the infrastructure within which discursive forms take shape. Foucaultian discourse analysis, by bracketing the economic, remains on the terrain of phenomenal forms by describing the surface in more sophisticated ways but does not reach the underlying relations.
§4. Experience and ideology
In Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, the dialectic of lordship and bondage establishes a structural asymmetry in the conditions of self-knowledge available to the two positions. The lord, who achieves recognition through the Other’s acknowledgment of his independence, is ultimately dependent on the bondsman for the very recognition that was supposed to constitute his independence, and his relationship to the object-world is mediated entirely by the bondsman’s labor. The lord consumes what the bondsman produces without engaging in the formative activity through which self-consciousness discovers itself as a real power in the world. The bondsman, by contrast, achieves through the mediation of labor a form of self-knowledge that the lord’s position forecloses. The object that the bondsman shapes retains the impress of the bondsman’s formative activity and thus functions as a mirror of self-objectification: consciousness recognizes itself in what it has made, and in doing so achieves a mediated self-knowledge unavailable to the lord whose relation to the objective world is purely consumptive.
All knowledge that is possible under bourgeois society is mediated by capital, which turns human relations upside down, inside out, into market relations. This natural state of fetishizing, reifying consciousness is hence false consciousness.
It would be remiss to say ideology or false consciousness is merely individuals having the wrong ideas about the world. Instead, ideology is the set of ideas, representations, and practices through which social agents understand and navigate their world in ways that are functional for the reproduction of existing social relations. Ideological consciousness has a systematic relationship to the social structure it emerges from and reproduces and is thus never arbitrary; specifically, it tends to present the contingent and historically-specific as natural and necessary and the particular interests of dominant classes as the general interests of society.
The problem for the appeal to lived-experience is that experience is the primary medium of ideology. It is not that the dominated have clear experiences that the dominant then mystifies or suppresses, but that their experiences are produced within and through ideological forms that organize how reality appears to them.
This means proximity to oppression places subjects within ideological forms that must be actively worked through to yield theoretical knowledge. The struggle against ideology is precisely the work of denaturalizing experience. This requires the theoretical labor of grasping the totality of capital and the historical conditions of the present from which experience draws its content and form.
One might object that the Marxist tradition itself posits a privileged epistemic standpoint—the standpoint of the proletariat. Does this not commit the same empiricist error?
Lukács, building upon Marx, argues that the standpoint of the proletariat is not grounded in the empirical consciousness of actual workers, or in what workers happen to think or experience at any given point in time. It is instead grounded in the proletariat’s objective structural position as the class whose labor constitutes value, and in the imputed or ascribed consciousness that this structural position makes possible when fully worked through theoretically. The proletariat does not automatically possess this standpoint by virtue of being proletarian; it is achieved through the development of class consciousness in practical struggle.
We observe how this is categorically different from the lived experience of standpoint-epistemology. The Lukácsian standpoint is (1) structurally, not phenomenologically, grounded in the definite positionality of the proletariat as a class in production; (2) is mediated by theory, specifically by the immanent critique of political economy; (3) is historically determined, corresponding to a specific moment in the development of the contradictions of capital; (4) is practically oriented toward the transformation of the totality, and not the recognition of a particular identity.
The gap between imputed consciousness and empirical consciousness, which constitutes the question of organization, is therefore not bridged by the party descending from theory to impose correct ideas on passive workers, but by the party’s practical-theoretical labor of working with the frayed edges of experience in class struggle and drawing them into relation with the totality through immanent critique. The party of the “proletarian standpoint” generalizes and historicizes what remains episodic and localized in proletarian experience, explicating what is already latent in social practice but unavailable to immediate consciousness.
This means the party-form is not a substitute for class consciousness but the organizational mediation through which the class becomes capable of practical reflexivity, and thus of the reversal of praxis. Without the party of the proletarian standpoint, the fraying of ideology produces at most rebellion—explosive, reactive, and easily recomposed into new forms of domination. With the party, it can become revolutionary praxis. The party is the emergent organizational condition for the proletariat’s self-education, and not the pedagogue who already possesses the answers a priori.
The genuinely Marxist insight that the dominated have access to aspects of social reality that the dominant cannot see (the hidden abode of production, mechanisms of exploitation) is sublated by the structural account of the critique of political economy. Ironically, it is precisely what is lost in the pseudo-phenomenological transposition: what the dominated experiences immediately is not the mechanism of their exploitation in itself, but its forms of appearance, which may be more or less ideologically opaque.
§5. What does Representation demand?
It would not be wrong to say that the demand for representation has always been the dominant political horizon of liberal-bourgeois progressive politics.
- Political representation. Marginalized groups should be present, in proportion to their social weight, in legislative, executive, judicial, and administrative institutions.
- Cultural representation. Marginalized groups should be visible, positively depicted, and given narrative centrality in media, literature, and popular culture.
- Social representation. The perspectives and interests of marginalized groups should be centered in knowledge production, policy design, and institutional decision-making.
The existing order is said to be unjust primarily because it excludes or underrepresents certain subjects; justice consists in their inclusion and recognition; the task of emancipatory politics is to achieve fuller and more adequate representation within existing institutions, or “the extension of democracy to social justice.” This is hereafter referred to as democratism.
Democratism is the naturalization of bourgeois-democratic forms as the ultimate horizon of politics, and the consequent reduction of political struggle to the demand for better, fuller, or more inclusive operation of those forms. Bourgeois democracy (parliamentary representation, universal suffrage, constitutional rights, labor law) is not merely a form of class rule (though it is that); it is also a specific ideological form that presents the exercise of political power as the expression of popular will, organized through formal procedures of representation that abstract from class position and thus class antagonism. Because each citizen counts as one vote, regardless of wealth or social status, democracy establishes formal equality as the political norm, systematically concealing the substantive inequality of social position that determines what that formal equality means in practice.
The demand for representation within this framework accepts the framework’s terms by asking that the formal equality be made more thorough-going and that the existing procedures of representation include previously-excluded groups. It does not question whether the form of representation itself is capable of expressing the interests of the dominated or even whether representation is the “emancipatory” content of political struggle. Inclusion in the existing political form is the realization of political freedom.
§6. A pre-given subject
The demand for representation also tends to operate within a populist framework in the sense given to it by Laclau and Mouffe (whatever one thinks of their conclusions), treating political subjects as pre-given, existing prior to and independently of political articulation, as constituted by their social identities (race, gender, sexuality, &c) which then need to be given voice in the political arena.
The task of “emancipatory politics” is to create mechanisms through which these pre-formed subjects can represent themselves or be represented in existing arenas of power. The implicit, because shameful, hope is that in succeeding in doing so, the democratic space will overflow into actual socialist transformation.
The populist character of this logic consists in the assumption that “the people” (here disaggregated into identity-groups) constitute themselves independently of and prior to the state and institutional politics, and that political institutions should express rather than constitute those people’s interests.
Except social subjects are not pre-given prior to political struggle but are constituted precisely through it. Class consciousness is not a natural possession of “workers” (reproduced as a coherent political subject) but a political and theoretical achievement measured on its path to constituting itself as a political class. The communist movement—if we dare call it by name—does not represent a pre-existing working class; it is the very movement of the constitution of the working class into a political subject through organization, theory, and struggle. The distinction between what workers happen to want (empirical desires, shaped by ideology) and what is in their objective interests (the abolition of wage-labor) is central to this account.
The lived-experience/representation complex collapses this important distinction by treating the expressed preferences, testimonies, and identities of social subjects as themselves the content of politics, as though the political task were to aggregate and express existing desires rather than to transform the conditions that produce those desires and the subjects who have them.
The populist-democratist logic of the representation demand has deep roots in what Marxists have called national-popular politics, or the attempt to constitute a broad alliance of diverse social groups under a common political identity defined against an elite or dominant class.
Laclau and Mouffe theorized this as the core of “left politics”, arguing that the working class can no longer be privileged as a political subject and that radical democracy requires building hegemonic “chains of equivalence” between diverse identity demands. The representation politics of the contemporary left is broadly Laclauian (or, really, Gramscian) in its logic, even when its practitioners do not invoke Laclau (-slash-Gramsci), constituting a “progressive bloc” defined by the diversity of its identity composition, seeking to represent multiple marginalized groups in a coalition organized around shared exclusion from the dominant order.
Once it is established that marginalized groups should be represented, the question arises of who is to do the representing. The standpoint-epistemology of lived experience generates a first answer: those with the most direct experience of the group’s situation. This is of course immediately complicated by the fact that within any marginalized group there is a massive heterogeneity of class position, ideological orientation, political perspective, and proximity to institutional power. These categories cross-cut class, region, generation, and ideological commitments in ways that make any claim to authentic group representation deeply contestable and questionable.
§7. The fetish of the image
As it goes, the underrepresentation or misrepresentation of marginalized groups in cultural production (a) reflects and (b) reinforces their subordination. The correction (diverse, positive, authentic representation) must therefore (a) reflect and (b) contribute to their liberation.
The relation between cultural representation and social power is complex and non-linear. The decades of increasing diversity in Hollywood and mainstream media in general have coincided with the intensification of economic inequality, the rollback of activist welfare states, and the expansion of carceral institutions. The proliferation of positive Black representation in American culture over the same period in which the prison-industrial complex expanded is evidence that the cultural and the structural are in different registers and are not immediately transparent to each other.
The fetish of the image reproduces a culturalist reduction of politics to the terrain of signs and representations. It treats the symbolic order as if it were primary—as if changing the images through which social groups appear in culture would change the social relations that produce those images. This is an inversion of the materialist insight that the organization of social relations in the production process produces cultural representations. Or more precisely, the relation is dialectical: culture does have effects on social relations, but the primary level is the organization of social production, reproduction, and appropriation, and cultural politics that does not articulate with transformation at that level can only be pseudo-praxis and produce symbolic change.
Cultural representation politics is also the natural politics of the petty-bourgeois fraction of marginalized groups, i.e. those with access to culturo-intellectual production (writers, filmmakers, academics, journalists, cultural critics) who experience their marginalization primarily through symbolic exclusion and misrecognition rather than through active exploitation and dispossession. For this fraction, cultural representation is genuinely relevant to their social position. But when this fraction claims to speak for the interests of marginalized groups as a whole, it substitutes its own specific interests for the broader and more fundamental interests of those whose primary experience of marginalization is economic.
§8. Toward a critique of standpoints
The theoretical complex of lived experience and representation fails on its own terms: (a) epistemologically because it cannot account for the integral constitution of experience by the very social relations it would invoke experience to diagnose; (b) politically because it takes the existing field of subjects, institutions, and historically-specific forms of power as the irreducible terrain within which emancipation must be sought rather than as the object of transformation.
The argument for what might be called a negative or ‘apophatic’ Marxism proceeds by identifying the form of antagonism that is irreducible within capitalist social relations, namely the capital-labor tension, and showing that this antagonism, rather than constituting one social standpoint among others, necessarily conditions and exceeds the possibility of all standpoints in bourgeois society. This immanently points towards the transformation of standpoints through their reorientation to this antagonism, which, as opposed to enriching and diversifying, negates directly the existing order.
§9. Apopathy
Apophatic theology, via negativa, proceeds by determining what God is through the systematic negation of what God is not, on the grounds that any positive predication of the divine involves an irreducible category error. To describe God as being “good” already assimilates the divine to a human category of goodness, reducing the infinite to the finite. To picture God in one’s mind is already to compatibilize God with the human mind, which is therefore not truly pious worship but idolatry. Apopathy foregrounds and maintains the divine excess which overflows all positive determinations, and that faithfulness to its reality requires the rigorous denial of inadequate predicates rather than the accumulation of adequate ones.
Now, Marxism does not posit a proletarian essence that exceeds all determination. If one had to be careful in not affirming the proletarian standpoint and positing its reproduction as the goal of communist politics, one must be careful here in the inverse extreme too. What it posits is a relation of antagonism that cannot be resolved within the existing order and that therefore cannot be adequately expressed by any positive standpoint constituted within that order. Any standpoint constituted under capitalism is constituted within the social relations of capital and therefore bears the mark of those relations. It is shaped, bounded, and in part produced by the very order against which it might set itself.
This is not to say that these standpoints are false, complicit, or indistinguishable from the standpoint of capital but that they are inadequate as foundations and cannot serve as the ground of a genuinely emancipatory politics as long as they remain positive standpoints defined by the particularity of their position within the status-quo, as what they would need to negate in order to become genuinely emancipatory is precisely the order that constitutes them.
The positive is the negative, and only the negative, determinate negation, is the true positive. What man is can only be said through the mediation of what he is not. To assume a necessary, pre-given positive is to deify the world.
Theodor Adorno, “Contra Paulum” (1944).
Thus, the adequate standpoint for social transformation is not produced by discovering or privileging any existing positive subject-position per se, but by orienting all subject-positions toward the determinate negation of the social relations that produce and sustain them. To proletarianize standpoints is the task set by Marxism in the loose (perhaps less Gramscian) sense of “hegemony-building”. Standpoint proletarianization does not mean converting members of other groups into wage-workers in the sociological sense of class, but drawing any given standpoint into the field of antagonism with capital as such, which is the only mode in which it can become genuinely critical-against rather than merely critical-within the system.
§10. Non-standpoint
Capital is not a thing, a presidential palace, a firm, or even a class of persons. Capital is the relation in which living labor-power is subsumed under the valorization process, in which human productive capacity is organized toward the endless expansion of value, at the expense of human need and flourishing. This relation is not just one axis of oppression among others, but precisely the structural condition within which all standpoints in bourgeois society are constituted. Women are oppressed under capital; racialized groups are subordinated through the specific forms of labor-market segmentation, colonial extraction, and carceral containment that capital has historically required (and today requires); colonized peoples are integrated into the global circuit of accumulation as sources of cheap labor and raw materials.
Therefore capital cannot be a standpoint in the heterogeneous field of social being. It is the vanishing point and the horizon-line, producing, differentiating, and hierarchizing subject-positions without occupying one. The bourgeoisie does not have a “standpoint” in this sense of liberal agency; it has interests, and it has ideological representations of those interests as universal interests of humanity, but the interests themselves are the interests of value in its own expansion which is indifferent to its particular human bearers. Capital migrates, restructures, destroys, and reconstitutes industries (that is, not merely workplaces but ways of life), and abandons individual capitalists when they become obstacles to accumulation. The capitalist is the personification of capital, not the subject of a standpoint.
If capital is not a standpoint, then the antagonism between capital and living labor is also not an antagonism between standpoints. It is the antagonism between value itself and the human capacity of living labor, the subjective element of production, that it must both incorporate and subordinate. Living labor is the source of value and also what value must continually overcome. Its tendency toward self-determination, toward the organization of production according to collective human needs rather than accumulation, that is to say, toward revolutionizing society through upending society, is what capital must perpetually suppress and continually decompose.
The proletariat then is not a sociological category (workers in the conventional sense) and less so a positive identity (working-class culture, experience, community). It is the position of the living element that capital must exploit and that, in the socio-historical movement of this exploitation, potentially develops the capacity for the negation of the relation and therefore the negation of itself. Capitalist proletarianization indeed constitutes the very relation of capitalist exploitation. The proletariat is not what capital is not, but what capital cannot be without.
§11. The proletarianization of standpoints
What does it mean to “proletarianize” the standpoints which constitute the motley array of “progressive” social justice movements today?
For the record, proletarianization, oriented toward class struggle, cannot be the practice of reducing the specific contents of women’s oppression, racial subordination, colonial subjugation, or gender non-conformity to instances of class exploitation, i.e. of exploitation in the economistic sense, or arguing that these forms of domination are mere “superstructural expressions” of an economic base that is the real site of political struggle. This is a type of mechanicism which posits the economic as a “positive ground” to which everything else is referred, in lieu of grasping the social totality as a contradictory and determinate whole in which different forms of domination are internally related through the epicentral mediation of the value-form. The proletarianization of specific subject-positions under bourgeois society simply means that no determinate negation of patriarchy, racial domination, or colonial subjugation can be completed without the negation of capital, because capital is the condition of reproduction of these forms in their specifically modern configurations, and it is this process which articulates their negations within the capital-labor nexus as the latter’s constitutive moda of differentiation.
Proletarianization taken in the active sense (not to be confused with the objective capitalist-subsumptive process, which is also the material force, in crisis-form, of standpoint-proletarianization…) is the politico-ideological reorientation of a standpoint from its internal positive content toward its antagonistic relation to the social relations that produce it. A standpoint is proletarianized not when it adopts the language of class an sich but when it grasps its own constitution as a negative determination of a historically-specific social formation. For example, when the woman’s standpoint ceases to be what women experience and demand within capitalist-patriarchal society and becomes the determinate negation of the social relations that produce ‘woman’ as a category of subordination, the struggle for women’s emancipation is necessarily proletarianized.
Endnotes, in “The Logic of Gender” (Issue 3), has made the definitive case that gender, as a systematic social binary, is not a transhistorical structure that capitalism inherits and reshapes but is already specific to capitalism. The separation of production from reproduction, the constitution of labor-power as a commodity that must be reproduced outside the immediate valorization process, the organization of that reproduction via the privatized household and the unpaid labor of those excluded from the full wage—this is what produces woman as a social category and the family as its institutional shell. Gender cannot have an autonomous logic from the capital-labor nexus, whose reproduction it organizes and naturalizes, because it has no existence independent of it.
Thus proletarianization is not the articulation of separate struggles but the recognition that the women’s struggle, pursued to its determinate negation, is the communist struggle. When the women’s movement demands the abolition of the family instead of its reform or diversification, it effectively demands the abolition of the reproductive separation that produces “woman” as a category of Otherness, of the ‘second sex’.
The woman’s liberation therefore is not a demand that merely intersects with the communist program; it is the communist program in one of its irreducible moments. There can be no abolition of wage-labor without the abolition of the family, and no abolition of the family without the abolition of wage-labor. What else do we have here, comrades, but the self-abolition of womanhood?
The standpoint of the proletariat is therefore not one standpoint among others to which other standpoints must be “articulated” but is itself the living substance of labor-power that capital must produce, differentiate (into genders, races, nations), exploit, and reproduce. Every standpoint constituted by capital is a differentiated position within this unitary process. Because these relations are integral to the reproduction of capital, the struggle against them necessarily enters into antagonism with capital, and therefore necessarily centers the “proletarian standpoint”. The feminist who arrives at this conclusion has been “proletarianized” inasmuch as her standpoint has been drawn into the field of the capital-labor antagonism by pursuing its determinate negation to the root.
Or when the decolonial standpoint ceases to be what colonized peoples experience and demand within the imperialist world-system (whether through utopianisms of “de-linking” and national-popular socialist schemata, or more vulgar nativisms) and becomes the determinate negation of the accumulation-by-dispossession and labor-extraction that constitutes neocolonialism as an ongoing moment of world-capital’s self-reproduction. Anti-colonial struggles exceed a narrow, mechanistic class politics but are impossible to complete without the abolition of the world-market and the value-form that drives accumulation by dispossession.
This is also the process by which bourgeois thinkers, at least of class origin, such as the likes of Marx, Engels, Lenin and others come around to communist politics, and thus belong to the historical communist party as partisans of the revolutionary proletariat.
The positive standpoint demands representation and inclusion within (albeit modified forms of) the existing order, whereas the proletarianized standpoint, the negative standpoint, demands the abolition of the conditions that make the standpoint what it is—thus necessarily the abolition of determinate features of capitalist social relations, and ultimately of those relations themselves, since capitalist patriarchy, racial capitalism, and neocolonial capitalism (or the persistent malady of “semi-feudalism”) are not accidents or distortions of an otherwise neutral or “pure” capitalist world-system implicit in these teleologies but constitutive dimensions of how it has historically organized social production and reproduction at the world-scale.
This reorientation though is not given automatically by the experience of oppression which still presupposes the transparency of immediate experience and thus of the liberal standpoint-epistemology which proletarianization responds to. Beyond the contradictory, self-negating procession of capitalist crisis, it is also the result of theoretical work: specifically, the work of tracing the conditions of a given form of oppression back through its mediations to the capitalist accumulation process. This theoretical work is what transforms a standpoint from a sociological position into a political one in the full sense.
§12. Negativity of method
The fundamental negativity of Marxism as a method lies in the insight that an adequate standpoint for social transformation cannot be derived from the positive content of any existing subject-position but only from the determinate negation of the social relations that produce that position. Determinate negation does not simply dissolve what it negates but grasps the specific content of the object of negation and carries it forward in transformation.
And therefore without simply discarding lived experience, Marxism holds the specific texture of oppression and the ways in which domination is organized and reproduced, or the particular forms in which the value-form appears in different sites of social life, in constant tension with proletarian antagonism for a rigorous and systematic theoretical account of capitalist totality. The error of standpoint-epistemology, while taking the rawness of experience seriously, is that it pushes this as a self-grounding foundation of emancipatory politics, which takes the form of experience as epistemically, therefore practically-slash-politically, authoritative, without subjecting that form to the theoretical labor of grasping what produces it and what it conceals.
Marxism therefore does not discard the demand for representation but historicizes it by revealing that the specific demands arising from specific forms of oppression against patriarchal violence, racial terror, colonial dispossession, &c are determinate negations that point toward the abolition of the conditions producing those oppressions, and ultimately against their amelioration within a reformed order. The error of representation politics is in taking the form of those demands as the content of political practice, instead of grasping those demands as always-already gesturing toward the abolition of the institutions and relations that necessitate the demands in the first place. We need only to take this gesture to its most radical conclusions.
§13. Invariance and apopathy
The Italian Left’s concept of the historical invariance of the communist program, against the philistine vulgarizations of possessing an “eternally correct doctrine” (positive instructions), fixed for all of time, is on the contrary derived precisely from this apophatic methodological principle.
The communist program is invariant, not because it expresses a timeless truth about human nature, or some transhistorical logic of revolution-making, but because it is the expression of the relation of violent proletarianization that is itself invariant within capitalism, or the relation between the value-form and the human capacity for collective self-determination. As long as this relation persists—as long as capitalism exists—the program that expresses its negation persists. The program does not change because the relation it negates does not change in its essential form, however much its surface-manifestations shift with the restructuring of accumulation, the recomposition and decomposition of the working class, the geographical distribution of production, and the contingent political forms of bourgeois rule.
Thus the communist program does not specify in positive terms what communist society will look like, how it will organize production and reproduction, what forms of life it will make possible. Marx was explicit in refusing by principle the utopian prescriptions his predecessors had passed down to the proletarian movement: communism is “not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality will have to adjust itself” but “the real movement which abolishes the present state of things.” The content of communist society cannot be derived in advance because it is the product of a process of negation whose positive results cannot be known prior to the negation itself. What can be known, and thus what the program expresses, is what must be negated: private property, the state, and the family.
§14. Against positive foundations
Every positive standpoint constituted within capitalist social relations—whether grounded in gender, race, colonial experience, disability, or any other axis of domination—is constituted by those relations and therefore carries within itself the mark of what it would negate. To take any of these constituted positions as a positive ground from which to mount emancipatory politics is to take the product of capitalist social relations as the premise of the critique of those relations. This means that the content of the politics will be determined by what those relations select for and can absorb, rather than by what their negation would require.
The apophatic method holds that there is no positive foundation outside the existing order from which to mount a critique of it. There is no view from nowhere, but also no standpoint within the existing order that is, by virtue of its position, already adequate to its negation. Even the proletariat as a definite pole of antagonism can only be spoken of as such in negative light, and not pre-given but formed as a class-for-itself through the historico-practical experience of class struggle.
The foundation is the antagonism itself, as what capital cannot permanently incorporate, cannot fully commodify, cannot ultimately resolve—the ceaseless struggle of living labor against its reduction to capital, which, in its determinate political form, is the communist movement.
Communist politics, then, cannot be the construction of a new positive foundation, of the proletarian standpoint, reaffirmed, as a replacement for other social standpoints, but the continuous work of driving them through their mediations to the antagonism that constitutes the social totality, holding the program that expresses that antagonism’s negation invariant against the pressures of empirical contingency and populism-democratism, and maintaining the apophatic refusal to substitute any determination internal to the existing order for the communist horizon that is defined precisely by its negation.