Ascent of the Blessed by Hieronymus Bosch (1505-1515)

“Atheism, as the denial of this in-essentiality, has no longer any meaning, for atheism is a negation of God, and postulates the *existence of man* through this negation; but socialism as socialism no longer stands in any need of such a mediation. It proceeds from the *practically* and *theoretically sensuous consciousness of man* and of nature as the essence. Socialism is man’s *positive self-consciousness* no longer mediated through the annulment of religion, just as *real life* is man’s positive reality, no longer mediated through the annulment of private property, through *communism*.”

—Karl Marx, 1844 Economic Manuscripts

“Then, but only then, we shall be able to blow the dust off all those books written by the atheists and humanists and even some of the curious works written by the God-is-dead theologians, and find that at last they have come true in an odd way. They all thought that talk of God was just a convoluted and misleading way of talking about man; what we will come to see when we come to the kingdom of divine love is that talk about man is then the only clear and luminous way of talking about God.”

—Fr. Herbert McCabe, God Matters

In On the Jewish Question, Marx sought to speculatively deconstruct the antinomy between the “secular” and the “religious” that many of his Young Hegelian contemporaries took for granted. Going further than subordinating the latter to the former (Feuerbach) or the former to the latter (Bauer), Marx worked to show how presupposing the distinction between the money-grubbing, this-worldly secular sphere and the sentimental, otherworldly religious sphere transhistoricizes the deeper process of class antagonism grounding these compartmentalized spheres, which in turn work to conceal the antagonism producing them. Nearly two centuries later, the danger outlined in Marx’s On the Jewish Question still stands as a stark warning to any Marxist or theologian foolish enough to ontologize the distinction.

This warning, however, has not stopped many from trying anyway. In 2019, Yale professor Martin Hägglund published This Life, a philosophical work arguing for the necessity of moving away from “religious” eternity and towards a “secular” commitment that centers our mortality. Hägglund’s work seeks to finish the job that modernity apparently never finished, hacking away at the religious sphere to clear more room for the secular to expand. “The Golden Rule,” Hägglund writes, “does not require any form of religious faith. On the contrary, a genuine care for others must be based on secular faith.”1 The secular sphere can do far more than the religious sphere is capable of without any of the superstition which religion is guilty of.

Yet despite the ambition of Hägglund’s project, it is profoundly limited from the start. Hägglund’s insistence on substituting transhistorical finitude for the proletariat forces his “secular” sphere to be parasitic on the very religious categories Hägglund claims to have overcome. Hägglund’s “Hegelian”-Marxism that insists on reading Marx’s categories as transhistorical (even as he insists upon their historicity) transforms Marx into a kind of Kantian more interested in the conditions for possibility of freedom’s intelligibility than driving the revolutionary struggle of the proletariat. Hägglund’s move to transform Marx’s historically-grounded atheism into a transcendental metaphysics deprives his atheism of the class standpoint that such a transcendental metaphysics must necessarily exclude. Hägglund’s privileging of the ontological over the social—to the mutual impoverishment of both—further mystifies the religious and the secular that Marx worked to not merely subordinate but abolish altogether.

My critique is not an argument for religion against atheism, nor does it make the case that Marx’s own historical materialism shares Hägglund’s failure. Rather, it is that Hägglund’s atheism, stripped of class content, cannot do what properly historicized atheism has been historically capable of doing. Hägglund’s atheism threatens the “secular” Marxist as well as the “religious” Christian. Where Hägglund threatens the historical materialist basis for the Marxist’s atheism, Hägglund jeopardizes the speculative relationship between finite and infinite at the heart of Christian theology. Both have comparable, if asymmetrical, stakes in combating Hägglund’s intellectual project, which risks reifying the relationship between the “secular” and “religious” grounding the liberal project’s capacity to suppress class struggle.

The task for either the communist partisan or revolutionary theologian is not to “balance” the secular and religious, but to refuse the dualism altogether, recentering the historical protagonist that Hägglund’s theological anti-metaphysics works to exclude—the international proletariat, whose existence threatens the edifice of imperial civil society altogether, and thereby the conceited self-understanding of both the “secular” and “religious” spheres that Hägglund’s project takes for granted.

ETERNALIZING TIME TO DASEIN’S DELIGHT

The central pillar to the book’s architecture is finitude. For Hägglund, finitude is not a deficiency to be overcome, but the enabling condition that allows one to live a life as a life—a life circumscribed and permeated by the knowledge that one’s time will someday come to an end. Temporality as the transcendental category that enables one to experience anything at all is crucial to his argument against “timeless” eternity, a possibility that Hägglund not only disqualifies as real on the basis of the elimination of mortality, but something that we ought to find undesirable per our very being as temporal entities.

Hägglund argues that the a priori recognition of one’s finitude is the transcendental condition that enables human experience and sociality.2 To care about this or that project must presuppose death. “The risk of tragic loss—the loss of your own life and the loss of what you love—is not a prospect that can be eliminated but an intrinsic part of why it matters what you do with your life.”3 Life is circumscribed by death and the a priori knowledge of one’s finitude that “reverberates in every aspect of your life.”4 This knowledge of one’s death is not an empirical datum among other data, something we can choose to care or not care about, but rather is the inescapable miasma that both permeates and enables all that we do and care about. Without the knowledge that one’s time is finite, that the projects which one holds dear are fragile and transient, it would be impossible to care for anything at all: “without the exposure to loss, there would be no impetus to care for anything, since there would be no risk that could motivate the act of taking care.”5 The absence of death within eternity renders eternal life a profoundly undesirable outcome for any person for whom care structures their ordering of time-sensitive priorities and projects. Per Hägglund:

“To attain a peaceful state of eternity you must be liberated from the risk of losing what you love. Were such liberation possible, however, nothing would matter to you. You literally would not care. There would be no urgency to do anything or maintain love for anyone, since nothing of value could be lost. You could not even be motivated to sustain a single activity, since it would not count as a loss for you if you did not engage in the activity.”6

At first, nothing about Hägglund’s analysis appears problematic. The anxiety of death, the manner in which one’s finitude pervades and structures our priorities seems to be phenomenologically obvious to any person upon reflection. If Hägglund were to rigorously maintain the rigor of finitude as a transcendental category, then his analysis would read as a straightforward phenomenology of what it’s like to be any kind of subject.

Yet despite Hägglund’s claim that this is a transcendental condition for the possibility of living any life at all, there are several moments within his argument where the distinction between the ontological and the ontic blur. In his explication of the features of spiritual freedom, Hägglund makes two claims. Hägglund first claims that

“[How I should spend my time] is the question that underlies all normative considerations, since what I do with my time is what I do with my life.”7

All that we do and consider involves the question of time; a statement that does not venture far beyond the transcendental character of Hägglund’s claim pertaining to finitude. Yet his very next sentence makes a far stronger claim:

“every question of what I ought to do—or ought not to do—is ultimately a question of what I ought to do with my time.”8

Hägglund argues here that not only does every activity involve the question of time, but that every question of activity is reducible to the challenge of time-allocation. There is a notable jump between what finitude should ontologically be doing and the work it ends up ontically performing. The knowledge of one’s finitude shifts from being the transcendental condition for activity that, in principle, should not be in competition with or be a priority among other priorities to being the core beneath the crust of all our concerns.

Hägglund’s unnoticed implication that because time is involved in all our activities, they are therefore reducible to considerations of time betrays the slippage between the ontological and the ontic that animates Hägglund’s claim about death as the horizon of life. In spatial terms, the horizon is the “possibility for anything to be visible at all.”9 In temporal terms, death is the horizon of one’s life insofar as “my death is the horizon that renders intelligible all temporal relations of my life.” For Hägglund, the horizon of death plays both an ontological and ontic role: “The horizon of my death always exerts a pressure on my life, but it precedes [emphasis mine] the distinction between negative and positive pressure.” Here Hägglund’s seam protrudes. On the one hand, the horizon of death exerts a pressure upon my life—implying one among other pressures—but on the other hand precedes the distinction between “negative and positive pressure.” Hägglund’s horizon of death somehow overcomes its transcendental character that should be in non-competition with the empirical and manages to empirically poke and prod us like the trickster god Loki.

This same sleight of hand between ontological condition and ontic determinant at play in Hägglund’s ambiguous death-as-horizon reasoning becomes especially prominent in his engagement with Charles Taylor on the relationship between temporality and eternity. Hägglund objects to Taylor’s reasoning that the finite’s phenomenological experience indicates a self-transcendence whose movement indicates an absolute orientation towards the eternal. Per Hägglund, “when we strive to make something last we do not strive to make it eternal but to make it last for a longer time and in a qualitative sense: to make something live on for the future—for persons, projects, and generations that matter to us—rather than for eternity.”10 When we seek to “prolong our life” or maintain a project, we seek to “transcend the limits of a particular time” rather than “seek to transcend the condition of time altogether.” Because to transcend time—finitude—would mean “depriving [ourselves] of the life we want to maintain.”11

Notice the very subtle protrusion of the seam between the ontological and the ontic in Hägglund’s reasoning. To state that to transcend the “condition of time altogether,” i.e. eternity, would deprive us of the “life we want to maintain” would imply that living in time is a capacity that we may possess and therefore be dispossessed of. For time to be a transcendental category, it requires that temporality simply be the mode by which and through which we are who we are. On principle, Hägglund’s subject is not merely a being that experiences temporality, but is constitutively temporal. To be temporal is not a condition one can be “deprived” of. Yet at the very moment where he needs to do polemical work against Taylor, Hägglund reverts to the vulgar notion of time that his own transcendental structure proscribes. Hägglund’s transcendental structure of temporality cannot argue against Taylor’s position on its own transcedndental terms, and so must borrow the possessional grammar of an economistic ontology his transcndental structure claims to have superseded.

Hägglund’s argument against Taylor reveals an asymmetry between his and Taylor’s positions whose uneven shape outlines an external subject position. Taylor’s finite-towards-infinite method works because it stays within the phenomenological experience of the finite. The finite does not discover the infinite outside of itself, but from within its own self-contradiction from the encounter with its own limitations. This is the structure for how Hegel discovers the infinite from within the finite. “It is equally correct that this finite element has no truth, and reason is precisely the insight that the finite is only a limit. But inasmuch as we know something as a limit, we are already beyond it.”12 Hägglund cannot follow Taylor here. Hägglund reports that Taylor’s conclusion is a “mistaken inference” not by providing a more speculative reading of the finite than Taylor’s, but on the grounds that Taylor’s conclusions do not fit Hägglund’s a priori canon of what time ought to do:

“Taylor…disregards that the desire for the continuation and flourishing of finite life does not entail a desire for eternity.”13

Hägglund interprets Taylor’s statement that these finite modes of life are “‘lesser modes or substitutes for eternity.’”14 Bracketing Taylor’s lapses in relating the eternal as a substitute that competes with the temporal rather than the latter’s non-competitive perfection, it is noteworthy that Hägglund chooses not to perform the phenomenological approach to speculatively show how the finite does not necessarily break open into the infinite. The most likely reason for such a procedure that reads Taylor’s framing of the finite and eternal as strictly “either/or” is because it proves immensely convenient for Hägglund’s own antinomial reading of the temporal and eternal. Hägglund’s a priori foreclosure of the possibility of the finite encountering the infinite does the work he needs it to at the high price of betraying the phenomenological method he claims to be performing.

The contrast between Hägglund and Taylor is revealing for why Hägglund’s transcendental structure of finitude is forced to overstep itself and do empirical work. Hägglund infers the transcendental character of finitude—finitude must be what informs care because all forms of care necessarily involve temporality. This contrasts with the speculative mode, where new categories emerge out of the contradictions of prior ones. This is, in fact, what Hegel himself names as a failure of thought: the “dogmatism of the metaphysics of the understanding” which “consists in holding on to one-sided thought-determinations in their isolation.”15 That Hägglund draws consistently on Hegel throughout This Life sharpens the irony—the antinomy Hägglund needs for his anti-metaphysics is precisely the posture his own borrowed authority diagnoses as dogmatically metaphysical.

Because Hägglund’s notion of time is inferred rather than speculatively derived, there remains an uncrossable abyss between the transcendent and the empirical. If Hägglund derived his transcendental structure immanently, he would not have to trespass its self-prescribed boundaries and perform the empirical work that it needs, such as when death-as-horizon at once exerts a pressure despite being the transcendent horizon that on principle should not exert any empirical pressure at all. But Hägglund needs the antinomy, because if he arrives at it speculatively and dissolves the antinomy, that leaves Hägglund’s finite vulnerable to Taylor’s more traditional Hegelian reading that the infinite can be encountered through the finite’s negative encounter with itself, transforming the finite into the very self-transcending entity that Hägglund’s a priori antinomy cannot allow. Far from centering existential finitude, Hägglund is forced to suppress it whenever the finite’s phenomenological experience may point to something more.

From the outset, Hägglund’s radically immanent anti-metaphysics forecloses any notion of the infinite or the eternal. Nevertheless, at each of these moments, it must covertly invert itself into the very transcendental metaphysics it outwardly seems to have superseded. These local lapses are not incidental to Hägglund’s argument, but constitutive of it. To demonstrate why, we must show why Hägglund’s transcendental metaphysics, far from presuming a transhistorical subject, presumes a very particular class position, and its very historically-conditioned and particular experience of temporality.

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RUNNING OUT OF (CLOCK) TIME

Hägglund’s work ambitiously seeks a unity between an existentialist anti-metaphysical metaphysics and a socialist project, what Hägglund terms “democratic socialism.” Hägglund writes that his democratic socialism “is neither an imposed blueprint nor an abstract utopia” and is instead derived from “the commitment to freedom and equality that we already avow.”16 Yet as critics like Jodi Dean have noted, Hägglund’s brand of socialism notably differs from other Marxists’ in the notable absence of arguably the most important element—the proletariat. Dean writes that Hägglund’s “secular faith jettisons class struggle and returns to the spiritual and moral concerns of an earlier generation of socialist reformers.”17

Yet Dean’s critique is limited by its language of substitution. In fact, Hägglund’s very capacity to substitute metaphysics for class struggle is enabled by his naturalization of finitude that not only enables but requires the substitution of a transcendental subject for the proletariat. Dean’s critique names the immediate payoff of Hägglund’s democratic socialist metaphysics, but fails to go further than this. What enables Hägglund to hopscotch from the metaphysical to the political is the same sleight of hand that allows him to oscillate between finitude as transcendental condition to empirical concern among other concerns. Grounding existential anxiety within experience as such rather than a historically-specific subject at once permits him to name democratic socialism as the political form adequate to the finite human being, while also foreclosing the possibility for any privileged class for which this possibility is more materially embodied than other classes, which blunts the question of class struggle.

Hägglund seems to recognize the necessity of struggle through his insistence that his philosophical account is internal to an explicitly named ongoing “social revolution,” yet nothing in that phrase indicates who exactly is doing the revolutionizing, and against whom.18 In lieu of “social revolution,” Hägglund often falls back on the marginally clearer “revaluation of value,” a far more accurate description of what he’s doing than what he lets on.19 What he “revalues” is not Marx’s labor-time as such, but a transhistoricized version of it, projected onto biological nature; and this revaluation describes the bourgeois professional’s relationship with the historically-produced “natural” world far more aptly than it describes the finite and supposedly transhistorical subject as such.

In the second section of his book, Hägglund claims to not only draw upon Marx’s labor theory of value, but to go beyond Marx in locating the originary source of value. Hägglund claims that Marx’s analysis “begins to falter and lapses” on the question of the “transhistorical conditions of economic life” and all historical epochs.20 Hägglund posits a “fourth level of analysis” unthematized in Marx’s analysis that concerns the “conditions of intelligibility for spiritual life:” that life is only intelligible as spiritual life “only in terms of an economy of time.”21 As Hägglund previously established, care can only be care when grounded in the structure of finitude, the a priori knowledge of the finitude both of one’s attention as well as the object to which one is attending. In this case, Hägglund claims that this fourth level of analysis is the condition for possibility of valuing anything at all. “The originary measure of value is therefore your finite lifetime. That you value your own finite time renders intelligible the possibility of valuing anything at all. You can compare the value of two different activities…only because it matters to you what you do with your finite time.”22

Once again, notice the slippage. What looks like a transcendental claim—that valuing presupposes finitude—quietly becomes something stronger and more specific: that comparing the value of two activities is intelligible only via a shared, divisible temporal currency, the amount of finite time each activity costs. The second, empirical claim pertaining to this or that psychologically “matter[ing] to you” does not follow from the first, transcendental claim that “valuing…finite time renders intelligible the possibility of valuing anything at all.” Hägglund smuggles in exactly the operation Marx locates in Capital’s opening chapter: the move whereby qualitatively distinct use-values are rendered comparable through a third term—abstract labor. Later in the chapter, Hägglund performs an identical operation via Aristotle, showing how Aristotle’s theory of value, a forerunner of Marx’s own, can render commensurable through exchange physically incomensurable objects such as gallon of water and a pair of shoes.23 Even as Hägglund formally concurs with Marx that “socially necessary labor-time…becomes the essence of value only in the capitalist mode of production” and is not itself transhistorical, his own practice leaves unclear where the transcendental condition for valuing anything at all ends and exchange-value begins.24

This empirical, comparative logic is not incidental to how Hägglund defines the “realm of necessity” and “realm of freedom” either. Originally, when Marx spoke about these two realms in Volume III, he spoke of them briefly, keeping the distinction between them and the transhistorical basis “thin,” admitting that some necessary labor may always remain even under a communist society, but saying very little beyond that.25 In contrast, Hägglund “thickens” this claim into a biological universal, grounding both realms into the structure of biological life itself: one of the necessary features of natural life is its “striving self-maintenance [as] a living being” which “necessarily generates more lifetime than is required to secure the means of survival.”26 “Surplus” time is hardwired into the metabolic process of nature itself.What this biological grounding enables becomes clear in Hägglund’s applied example.

Hägglund gives us a hypothetical. If I “walk two hours per day to acquire water from a distant well,” he writes, my activity belongs to the realm of necessity, since the time I spend walking to acquire water is “merely a means” to survive. So, “if I could reduce the necessary labor time by having running water to my house, I would do so.” Set this example beside Marx’s own description, in Capital Volume I, of the isolated producer 19th century English political economy often imagined. On Robinson Crusoe’s island, “necessity itself compels him to divide his time with precision between his different functions,” with the proportion of each activity determined by the “magnitude of the difficulties to be overcome in attaining the useful effect aimed at.”27

Hägglund’s peasant at the well is the disguised Robinson Crusoe, the calculating businessman isolated from any determinate social formation, and driven by necessity to catalog his activities by way of a fixed stock of time. The difference being that Marx introduces this figure to deconstruct, not endorse, English political economy’s understanding of the ideal, supposedly transhistorical subject. The reduction to the human being at their “natural” state is really just the bourgeois individual mistaking their historical starting point as the universal beginning of history.

And like the English political economist, Hägglund’s economizing approach abstracts the concrete activity of what the walk to the well may really entail. A two-hour walk shared with other villagers may be where news is shared, favors get exchanged, and courtships proceed—none of this can be registered on either Crusoe or Hägglund’s accounting ledger that asks only how much time getting water costs. Nor can Hägglund’s scarcity mindset be taken as given and projected backwards into the past. E.P. Thompson’s account of pre-industrial temporality describes communities that understood duration through task rather than by clock, where “the day’s tasks (which might vary from fishing to farming, building, mending of nets, thatching, making a cradle or a coffin) seem to disclose themselves, by the logic of need, before the crofter’s eyes,” with no antecedent sense of time as stock to be spent among this or that activity.28 Hägglund’s peasant, reflecting upon the time savings gained by installing indoor plumbing over a walk to the well, is not the transcendental figure whose death is projected as horizon, but the modern member of the Euro-American professional-managerial stratum projecting their economizing disposition onto a form of life they may not share during the train commute to their office in Lower Manhattan.

This individuated form of logic sits uneasily beside Hägglund’s claim pertaining to the democratic and collective character of our lives. “Even our socially necessary labor,” Hägglund writes, “can be an expression of our freedom if it is shared for the sake of the common good.”29 The boundary between the realms of necessity and freedom, he insists, is not a private determination but must be “a democratic question” that is “negotiate[d]—both individually and collectively.”30 On this account, freedom is not an individual determinant but a collectivized process mediated by the labor of persons in common life determining among themselves what counts as “necessary labor” at all.

However, nothing about Hägglund’s fourth level of analysis can deliver anything like this. This “originary source of value” can only belong to the individual subject who determines for themselves what counts and does not count as valuable uses of time. Hägglund’s peasant at the well, who rationalizes their finite time, denotes an ontology of the individual with no other subject or collective deliberation in frame to mediate said deliberation. The more Hägglund absolutizes finite lifetime as “a condition of intelligibility” for spiritual freedom, the more unfree his subjects become—locked into their prescribed role as time-accountants as Hägglund’s transcendental condition strains and becomes empirical. Hägglund individualist phenomenology of finite time cannot, by itself, supply the political criteria for emancipation. The attempt to “naturalize”or ontologize the political only produces the Robinson Crusoe on his island and the homo economicus at his well.

Hägglund’s text is thus pulled in two directions that cannot be reconciled: the first, an ontology that grounds freedom in the transcendental subject’s reckoning with their mortality; the second, a politics that locates freedom within the collective deliberation of the free association of producers. Far from resolving the tension between the ontological and political, Hägglund’s examples must always favor the former over the latter—which is why his attempts continually take the form of an individual counting their abstract, divisible currency of time. Indeed, the choice to use “negotiated” rather than “struggle” denotes Hägglund’s essentially individualist ontology of transcendental rational actors joined by mutual consent, rather than differentially stratified social subjects ineluctably related by class antagonism. The collective, democratic freedom Hägglund promises never actually appears in the book. What appears instead, at every point, is the long shadow of Crusoe.

This atomized form of reasoning is only one part of the problem, however. As important is what gets to count within the realm of “freedom” and “necessity.” Hägglund’s hiker, who walks “for the sake of being a hiker,” exemplifies the realm of freedom precisely because he walks for no other reason than to hike—an innate communion with a natural landscape held high above the peasant-worked realm of necessity, available to be walked through for its own sake. Yet this demarcation of “nature” as a bounded, supposedly non-instrumental object of contemplation from the hustle and bustle of the town conceals that this is the historic achievement of the bourgeois middle-classes severed from the direct subsistence working upon the land, not a phenomenological given.

As Raymond Williams details, the very division between aestheticized “nature” available for a restorative promenade and the monied, economistic “city” was increasingly enabled by the emergence of a class that no longer needed to have direct intercourse with the land.31 The peasant does not self-consciously relate to the land as a demarcated nature that stands outside their labor and sociality either instrumentally or intrinsically. The very question that Hägglund poses—of whether this activity is intrinsic or instrumental—is already presupposing the very split between labor and land that, insofar as it also presents itself as such to the peasant, does so within the terms of the capitalist farmer’s enclosure. What Hägglund at first presents as a phenomenological given between the peasant walking to the well and the hiker traversing the landscape is really the historically-achieved bourgeois managerial-professional’s standpoint that Hägglund takes as his universal starting point.

I use the more specific “professional” over the more broader “bourgeois” or “modern” subject to denote Hägglund’s real subject, not because “bourgeois” is transhistorical in its own right. But to showcase that the historical specificity of the middle-class professional condenses the centuries-long contradiction of the so-called bourgeois—that the most historically-conscious subject must work around the clock to furnish their own identity, dehistoricizing the world around them. The more urgently the professional seeks to furnish a bespoke identity that at once attunes them to while still distinguishing them from their environment, the more they must treat their own time as an undifferentiated, raw, and fungible material. And it is exactly this treatment of time as abstract, homogenous stock that dehistoricizes both the professional and their world. This is precisely Gillian Rose’s critique of the Kantian-Fichtean subject who “abstracts from all specific, historical aspects of social life, and thus reaffirms an abstracted, ‘moral’ individual who only represents one part of it,” thereby mistaking the very localized and socio-historical position they sought to transcend for a universal one.32

This is symptomatic of a point Hägglund himself rightfully makes regarding wage-labor: that wage-labor under capitalism “is historically the first social form which in principle recognizes that each one of us ‘owns’ the time of our lives and that our lifetime is inherently ‘valuable.’”33 Where Hägglund errs, however, is in believing that wage-labor formally “recognizes” a transhistorical, existential condition that we “own” our time and is a stable, epistemological achievement. Marx’s own account of the working-day shows the opposite: the worker’s claim that their labor-power is their own, and that its use must therefore have a limit, runs up against the equal right of the capitalist whose legal purchase of the worker’s labor-power means that the capitalist has a right to consume the worker’s labor-power without limit. This formal standoff Marx resolves only by saying “between equal rights, force decides.”34

Wage-labor does not recognize self-ownership so much as it generates the bare formal claim to it—a formal claim generated by the material struggle between the capitalist and worker’s equally legitimate right over the use-value of labor-power between formally equal purchaser and seller within the “sphere of circulation.”35 Hägglund’s use of “recognizes” collapses what is in reality the shifting, unstable contours of the battlefield of class struggle into a transhistorical, existential condition of what it means to be an abstract human being—rather than a class-specific, historically-constituted living contradiction.

Hägglund’s subject whom he has in mind is neither the propertied capitalist, for whom time is capital to invest, nor is it exactly the racially-segmented proletarian wage-laborer, whose time is clock-disciplined imposed from above and unevenly mediated by racialization. More specifically, Hägglund’s subject whom he has in mind is the credentialed-professional with their particular relationship with time neither as a pool of capital to be invested or chain from which to escape, but as a mound of raw material for the purpose of self-authored identity curation. A person is defined by their prioritization of “practical identities,” i.e. being a father, a Yale professor, etc., and the function of death is less the proletarian’s “I am exploited for my time” and more the upwardly-mobile professional’s “I must decide what my life is for, on pain of it being wasted.”36 So here we have that the more insistent Hägglund grows throughout the book on the universality of his existentialist atheism, the universal phenomenological experience of death available to any subject upon contemplation, the more the consultant’s wristwatch, the graduate student’s Google calendar, and the lawyer’s timesheet emerge into view.

As it turns out, Hägglund’s transcendental subject turns out to be nobody but the marginalist economist wearing the clothes of the phenomenologist. In a revealing passage, Hägglund approves of Friedrich Hayek’s claim that there is a constitutive “economic problem” at the heart of freedom, since, quoting Hayek, “‘all our ends compete for the same means.’”37 The irony is that Hägglund believes himself to be correcting Hayek, faulting him for treating economic organization as “a mere means for the pursuit of individual ends” and insisting instead that how we organize our economy shapes our ends, not merely serves them.38

Far from recentering our spiritual life, Hägglund helps Hayek complete marginalism’s colonization of it, extending the jurisdiction of scarcity and competing ends from mere means to the ends themselves. Simon Clarke’s critique of Max Weber’s “formal rationality” identifies the general shape of this move. What presents itself as a neutral, transhistorical rationality equally applicable to law, religion, and politics turns out on closer inspection to have no independent rationality beyond that of enabling the circulation of the flow of commodities within capitalist markets.39 Hägglund’s “inseparability of economic and spiritual life” performs the identical operation, confirming rather than dissolving Weber’s sphere-differentiation and rationalized compartmentalization, since the “economic” logic Hägglund finds everywhere is nothing more than the rational subject one is more likely to find in an undergraduate economics textbook, discovered anew by Hägglund and classified as ontology.40

Hägglund’s loadbearing assumption that ontological finitude precedes and grounds socio-historical reality drives this substitution of a Kantian transcendental subject for the proletariat. Hägglund’s move to ground “finite lifetime” as the transcendental category that enables experience at all implies that this may be readily cognizable by any rational actor. If Hägglund is right that finitude “reverberates in every aspect of [one’s] life,” then that leaves no room for differentiated access to truth mediated by one’s structural position within the social totality of capital. If Hägglund were to concede on this point, then his transcendental structure of finitude would immediately be revealed to be a socio-historical phenomenon. In other words, Hägglund’s metaphysics of “democratic socialism” must decenter the proletariat if he is to preserve his anti-metaphysics of finitude.

It would, however, be a mistake to install “the proletariat” as the stable, pre-given corrective to Hägglund’s own transcendental subject. Such an unearned move would reproduce the very error at the heart of Hägglund’s dogmatic metaphysics—that there exists a transparent, universal, ready-at-hand subject standing outside history. The proletariat is not the earthy bedrock forming the core of Hägglund’s misty abstraction waiting to be uncovered. The proletariat is itself the internally-differentiated and antagonistically-constituted subject crawling out of the womb of capital as capital engages in its world-historical struggle for command over labor-power. It emerges through the apocalyptic struggles Hägglund’s metaphysics forecloses: the continent-spanning expropriation of African labor, the settler dispossession of thousands of Indigenous nations of their land, and the accumulation of global capital. Hägglund’s notion of “existential identity” as that which supplies no “given answers” seems to cede this process-oriented subjectivity, but he never turns this same historicizing move back onto the concept of “existential identity” itself.41

The result is an ironic tragedy: the a priori “openness” of Hägglund’s transcendental subject is itself a form of closure, foreclosing the very existential struggle—whose labor is the real route to real openness and true recognition—that his metaphysics claims to center. A ready-at-hand and transparent proletariat available to any observer “in principle” necessarily dehistoricizes the proletariat, suppressing the centuries-spanning struggles over who counts as a worker and who counts as labor-power to be disposed of. What Hägglund’s metaphysics forecloses is not simply “the proletariat,” a complete and whole subject to be slotted in place, but the incomplete, unfinished process by which the proletariat becomes what it is—the very class whose struggles Hägglund’s atheism was supposedly intended to make room for.

A THERAPEUTIC ATHEISM

Running throughout This Life is Hägglund’s antinomy between the religious faith and secular faith. “Religious faith,” writes Hägglund, “takes the object of faith to be a god—or some other form of infinite being—that is independent of our practice of faith.”42 Ultimately, religious faith possesses an instrumentalizing logic incapable of valuing this life for its own sake; for Hägglund, any “religious commitment to eternity” must necessarily mean that “finite life does not matter for its own sake but serves as a vehicle to attain salvation.”43 This is contrasted with secular faith, which values the finite not just for the sake of an otherworldly infinite, but for its own sake.

The most fascinating aspect of Hägglund’s treatment of religious faith is not simply his abject failure to understand religious life on its own terms, but how his allegation of instrumentalization unintentionally collapses the very ground on which his preferred secular faith stands. As we saw earlier, the Weberian effort to distinguish between different logics, whether they be religious or secular, only deepens each individual logic’s parasitic relationship to the others. Both the secular and religious spheres are permeated by and constitutive of the same capitalist logic that both formally disavow.

Hägglund provides a convenient example that helps demonstrate this. Hägglund utilizes the meditative practice conducted by Buddhist monks in which the goal is to contemplate the finitude of one’s “bodily parts” with the goal of being “released from all sense of agency and purpose,” a practice Hägglund deems to be an other-worldly ideal that is “empty and not worth striving for.”44 Hägglund presses further and states that the Buddhist monastery is a “self-contradictory ideal,” with many monks not even pursuing “the aim of eternal salvation,” evidenced by their “find[ing] ways of pursuing a passionate life even within the walls of the monastery [instead of the aim of eternal salvation].”45 This contradiction follows from Hägglund’s formal condition of spiritual life that to eliminate “all forms of anxiety…is thoroughly misguided, since it seeks to eradicate the condition of spiritual life itself.”

Hägglund’s own logic predicts precisely the opposite of what the monastery actually delivers. If working to “eradicate all forms of anxiety” destroys “the condition of spiritual life itself,” then the monk working hardest to pursue cessation would wither into inertia culminating in a spiritual paralysis, purchasing that cessation at the cost of all purposive engagement whatsoever. But as Hägglund’s own example shows, we see the opposite happen: the more the monk rigorously detaches himself from the finite, the more thoroughly he dwells in his daily gardening, chores, and care for his brothers.

On a properly incarnational (and speculative) reading, where the eternal does not stand over and against the finite but is enacted through it, the Buddhist monks’ disciplined reflection of their finitude and impermanence allows them to grasp the eternal within every passing moment of daily life in the monastery, where they may dwell in the world more fully. If we are to understand religious life on its own terms, we are forced to disavow Hägglund’s rigid antinomy between the temporal and eternal. The “passionate lives” that Hägglund’s monks lead expresses their success in the pursuit of the “eternal.” Here, Hägglund’s characterization of religious faith as an instrumental logic can and must fail on its own terms.

Hägglund’s insistence on religious faith’s instrumentalizing logic is awkwardly juxtaposed to secular faith’s equally instrumentalizing logic. In the following paragraph, Hägglund writes “Buddhist meditation practices can certainly be employed to great effect for secular ends,” citing their “therapeutic” utility in cognitive therapy.46 Hägglund blandly reasons that secular faith’s appropriation of Eastern practices of spirituality—divorcing the “content” of meditation from the historically-specific “form” of embodied practice of monastic life through which it is realized—is not instrumental because Buddhism’s “religious aim” is to “release you from finite life itself.” By contrast, the secular end is to “deepen your ability to care for others and improv[e] the quality of your life.”47 The obvious legibility of attending one’s private therapist and illegibility of living within a monastery seemingly for its own sake speaks to the privileged credentialed middle-class subject whom Hägglund’s philosophy would especially appeal to.

Hägglund’s refusal to understand religious life on its own terms is exposed not as the failure of the transcendental subject, but the parochialism of the irreligious credentialed-professional—and he pays a dear cost for this failure. The religiously-minded, previously quaking in their boots from the Yale professor’s atheistic onslaught, can turn around, knowing smile on their face, and admit all of Hägglund’s claims about how death, scarcity, and anxiety phenomenologically present themselves—but this subject in question turns out to be the credentialed-professional, whose recourse is to retreat to a Lower Manhattan parish for therapeutic reprieve, or book a therapist for religious relief. Hägglund’s shoddy refutation of religious eternity turns back on itself into an unintentional insight for the theologian’s critique of the professional-managerial subject’s own historical narrowness.

Even worse, Hägglund’s insipid separation between religious and secular faith foreclosed to him what would have been a far more devastating critique of the religious monastery—that it is practically a secular institution. The monastery’s dedication to ascetic spirituality is grounded in land ownership, tenant leasing, and free/highly-reduced labor costs. The religious pursuit of the eternal is constituted by the secular concern for command over labor-power, paying the utility bills, and negotiating leasing contracts. Such a critique of religious faith, commonsensical to any Marxist, is foreclosed to Hägglund however, because it would also open up the secular faith to the same accusation—that it itself is religiously constituted. After all, in what sense is the deepening “your ability to care for others” any less abstract than the desire for eternity?

What the religious and secular spheres have in common, of course, is the Weberian “formal rationality” of pursuing the ends appropriate to their spheres that enables a level of predictability and controllability that facilitates the circulation of commodities on the market and accumulation of capital. Per Simon Clarke, “The rationality of these abstract and impersonal forms of regulation [whether they be religious, political, economic, etc.] can only be derived from the objective rationality of competitive forms of economic regulation.”48 This critique remains open to the historical materialist, but foreclosed from the beginning for the doctrinaire existentialist.

But, however contradictory Hägglund’s not-religious secular faith may be, none of this compares to how this cashes out to his almost embarrassing interpretation of Martin Luther King’s political theology. Despite King famously being a minister, Hägglund claims that his life’s work is “better understood in terms of secular faith.”49 Hägglund’s basis for this astonishing claim is that King claims in one of his accounts that his call to the ministry “was not a miraculous or supernatural something,” but rather “an inner urge to serve humanity.”50 Hägglund presents King’s noted dissatisfaction with ministers preaching only about the afterlife and not enough about “the role the Church could play in improving present day society” as a mutually exclusive turn towards “secular freedom” and away from “religious salvation.”51

What is illegible to Hägglund’s scorekeeping is not just that King’s religious sermons were more political than he admits, or even that his political speeches are more religious than he thinks—it is that King’s own practice never recognized the boundary that Hägglund seeks to impose. The Black American prophetic tradition which King inherits is one that traditionally did not seek a private, otherworldly salvation externally applied onto a this-worldly injustice. The demand for justice is not something that is appended onto faith, but is more integrally what faith consists in. As a minister, King did not have to choose between preaching the Kingdom of God or leading his congregation in a city-wide bus boycott. The Kingdom of God consists precisely in that struggle against the Jim Crow regime, because on his own theological formation these activities did not exist in an either/or relationship.

This integrity between the temporal and spiritual that Hägglund works ceaselessly to dissolve has been a key animating force within the Black political theological tradition and the twentieth-century freedom movement. The Black theologian Howard Thurman, himself a mentor to King, wrote against many of his fellow ministers at the time that “mere preaching is not enough...Any attempt to deal with this situation on a basis of values that disregard the struggle for survival appears to be in itself a compromise with life.”52 This integrity between the this-worldly and otherworldly appears even in the least expected of places. Robin D.G. Kelley writes of how many Alabama Black radicals and sharecroppers would mediate their relationship with communist politics through “God and the Bible.” Black radicals, like the eighteen year-old Black coal miner and communist Angelo Herndon, would “interpret the struggle in biblical terms,” channeling the Black prophetic tradition: “And the day shall come when the bottom rail shall be on top and the top rail on the bottom. The Ethiopians will stretch forth their arms and find their place under the sun.”53

None of this is to deny that there exist competing and contradictory strains from within King’s own tradition of Black radicalism. Nor is it to discount the critiques internal to the Black political-theological tradition of how such a tradition has been (and continues to be) used to support patriarchal modes of domination within church communities themselves. I am making this historicizing claim because the self-understanding of radicals like King foreclosed a sharp distinction between “secular” and “religious” faith. On King’s own terms, the secular and religious were not two discrete things joined by an act of will, but two distinct moments of the same activity. Contrary to Hägglund, this is not King failing to be either consistently religious, or showing himself to secretly having been secular this whole time. It is King’s practice revealing that Hägglund’s antinomy fails to capture the fullness of an actual life constituted through historical struggle.

Indeed, Hägglund’s scorekeeping inhibits the capacity for distinct traditions to take responsibility for the ways in which they have been and continue to be complicit in intersecting modes of domination. Making such a sharp distinction between the “secular” and “religious” at our convenience, Hägglund undermines the very capacity of responsibility he claims to be grounding. Hägglund’s need to place King in one category versus the other, as a result, flattens King’s complicated legacy and his own contradictory relationship with Black feminists inside and outside the Black American protestant church tradition.54 The “religious” and “secular” poles which Hägglund thinks he has found within the ministerial life’s work of King are contradictory because they were never present within the Black political-theological tradition for King to draw upon in precisely the terms that Hägglund’s own dehistoricized method demands. The more Hägglund insists on holding the secular and religious apart out of fear of religious dogma, the more he reveals his own dogmatism in his refusal to allow King—and the Black political-theological tradition of which he is one representative—to speak for himself.

And it is here where we must turn to assess Hägglund’s secular faith on its own terms.

THE CHESS-PLAYING PUPPET NAMED “SECULARISM”

Hägglund’s treatment of secular faith is even more contradictory than his treatment of religious faith because of his steely determination to maintain the purity of the secular from the religious. This determination runs so deep Hägglund is forced to make the baffling move of historically severing liberalism’s genealogical origins in Christian theology: “at the heart of liberal thought,” Hägglund pontificates, is the “idea that we can be utterly finite and still [be] of ultimate value,” something that is “unthinkable in Christianity” because of the degree to which it centers eternity as that which grounds the finite.55 Hägglund’s insistence on the self-sufficiency of secular faith—in this case liberalism—hollows out its historical content, rendering it into a Neo-Kantian ideal to be pursued.

Understated but necessary to Hägglund’s analysis of the secular is that his asserting its independence from the “religious” reifies its negative dependence upon the latter for its definition. Structural to the “secular” is the non-secular, i.e. “religious.” Hägglund’s preference for perpetuating the secular-religious antinomy shows Hägglund’s dependence upon the “religious” for his secular faith to attain its formal constitution. This does not just speculatively hold on the conceptual level. As anthropologist Talal Asad demonstrates in his study, the “religious” does not predate the “secular.” Rather, both erupt forth as an inseparable although contradictory pairing from the apocalyptic social crises defining the early modern period.56 The bloody religious conflicts between Catholics and Protestants drove the emergence of a “secular” sphere in which Central Europeans belonging to different confessions were forced to bracket their religious beliefs in a “religious” or “private” sphere out of the practical consideration of avoiding (or at least better controlling) mass violence.57

While the “internal” crisis of the Reformation worked to drive the emergence of the secular, the uneven process of “external” colonization and the necessity of classifying the colonized nations to enable colonial governance worked to “externally” solidify secularity. The blasé manner in which Hägglund groups all the “world religions” into “Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Islam, and Christianity” belies how much he takes for granted the historical intelligibility of these categories.58 Hägglund does not bother to deconstruct how the category of “world religions” is a colonial-era classificatory achievement, which sorted the forms of life of the colonized and subordinated nations into terms legible to, and useful for, the position of the emerging imperial core, terms that helped to politically facilitate colonial governance and ideologically justify subordination.59 To accept Hägglund’s privileging of the “secular” is to trade away the actual historical and materialist grounding that alone makes the secular/religious distinction available in the first place. The result is an atheism just as idealistic as the religiousness it claims to have superseded.

Hägglund’s wilful ignorance of the historical in order to preserve the independence of the secular faith works to distort his greatest example of secular faith: the turn-of-the-century Western European workers’ mass movements. Hägglund writes that “workers formed democratic socialist organizations” during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, organizing “youth groups, choirs, book clubs, sports teams, and other communal activities” that hypostasized the “sense of spiritual freedom” at the heart of emancipation. Tragically, however, the international solidarity of the workers’ movement was “largely broken” by the outbreak of World War I in August 1914. For the next generation, Hägglund bemoans the bankruptcy wrought by “totalitarians” like Mao and Stalin. But now, however, the task is to retrieve the insights that animated Marx’s teachings for a new generation of struggle for democratic socialism.

Hägglund’s eagerness to tip the scales in the favor of his secular faith blinds him from realizing that the very forces that enabled the success of “secular faith” generated the risk for its own catastrophic collapse. As Eric Hobsbawm notes, the turn-of-the-century workers’ movements were indeed successful in collating a collective working-class political subject—at the same time the mass infrastructure it built more thoroughly integrated the working-class into the construction of the Western European nation-state. “The growing tendency among trade unions,” writes Hobsbawm, “to organize workers in comprehensive bodies each covering a single national industry…reflected this sense of the economy as an integrated whole.”60 Such political organization was necessary in order to coordinate the increasingly enormous power that strategically situated British coalminers and French sailors had in potentially crashing the economy to a screeching halt for maximal effect and to the gain of the international workers’ movement.

However, such organization also allowed Western European nation-states to more effectively integrate their national working-classes into the constitutional order: the maintenance of, for instance, the Eight-Hour Day legislation, required social democratic parties to politically mobilize their working-class bases to go to the polls and mount an increasingly larger stake in the perpetuation of the nation-state—up to and including August 1914, where the German Social Democratic Party voted for war credits and millions of workers in countries like France and the United Kingdom tragically but enthusiastically signed up for what would end up being industrialized mass slaughter.61 Hägglund, however, externalizes the consequences of mass worker mobilization to preserve the religious sanctity of secular faith, effectively reifying what brought about the collapse of the movement over which Hägglund is so starry-eyed.

This is not to say that the collapse of the international solidarity of the Second International was not a world-historical tragedy whose consequences we are paying for to this day. Rather, my point is more precise. Hägglund’s insistent demarcation between the secular and the religious does not only generate blindspots for how secular is itself “religiously” motivated (itself a tired and obvious point), but more seriously the methodological antinomy between the religious and secular distorts historical materialist analysis by arbitrarily demarcating the “bad” consequences from the “good” organization, significantly limiting the actual historical agency of the proletariat in both cases. Hägglund’s secular basis for democratic socialism is just as nostalgic as the liberals whom he believes himself to be going beyond.

This is why Hägglund’s atheism is not merely mistaken, but structurally incapable of delivering any kind of emancipation. It is an atheism that in the end demands nothing from its adherents; the middle-class socialist performs a hop, skip, and a jump from abstract conditions of intelligibility to concrete socialism, serenely refusing the work of history that has crushed the bones of thousands of communist partisans who did not refuse said work. Hägglund’s seemingly revolutionary atheism has nothing to say where the stakes—the lives lost and the communities destroyed—are highest. When real stakes actually present themselves, Hägglund’s atheism departs from Marx’s more critical atheism, reverting to yet another ideal among ideals available to the ideology-shopping bourgeois professional wanting something to say but refusing to do the necessary work that would risk their comfortable livelihood and identity.

The credentialed professional’s freely adopted atheism is formally indistinguishable from that of their other fellow credentialed-professional, who decides instead to begin attending the new Catholic parish trending among his friends in Midtown Manhattan because it offers an “ideal” for which an imperfect society may strive—a “community” where we may all put aside our differences and grab a cup of coffee, pray the rosary, and eagerly discuss the latest episode of Bishop Barron’s Word on Fire podcast. The middle-class professional preaches this atheism to the masses (or, more likely, just his fellow middle-class friends) from an unearned vantage that seems to offer them a view of the whole. Unaware, however, that he’s sitting atop a mountain of dead bodies.

HE WAS CRUCIFIED, DIED, AND (STAYED) BURIED

At the heart of Hägglund’s secular faith is Christ’s crucifixion. Hägglund provides a “secular reading” of Christ’s Crucifixion, in which to look upon the Cross and see “an image of salvation” rather than “irrevocable loss” means renouncing one’s care for the loss of Jesus in the knowledge that God has already “redeem[ed] the loss.”62 Hägglund alleges that, on the religious reading, that Christ’s death is demoted to an “intermediary stage on the way back to the timeless infinity of God.”63

Hägglund picks this thread back up later in the book with his interpretation of Hegel’s “secular reading” of the Crucifixion, writing that the spiritual is always already embodied in and identified with finitude from the beginning, concluding that “absolute knowing of absolute spirit is not the act of a divine mind, but our philosophical grasp of the conditions of spiritual life.”64 Hägglund, on this basis, rounds out what he interprets to be Hegel’s secular reading of the Crucifixion: “Spiritual life does not descend or ‘fall’ into finitude. Rather, spiritual life is from the beginning subject to—and the subject of—a finite form of life.”65

Hägglund’s treatment of Hegel’s reading of the Crucifixion is the heart and climax of the book, and it is here where Hägglund clips the wings of Hegel’s Spirit. Hägglund’s claim that “spiritual life is from the beginning subject to…a finite form of life” gestures towards, but forecloses, what Hegel’s own method must earn through the struggle of development—and what that development actually yields is not bare finitude, but the finite’s perfection through its self-transcending grounding and speculative relation to the infinite. Hegel characterizes the finite’s “path of despair” as one that does not just simply lead back to finitude still standing athward the infinite, but transforms what we understand either to be through their transformation into speculative identity.66

Hägglund, however, short circuits this phenomenology i.e. the hard work of despair, asserting his claim of “absolute knowing of absolute spirit” as the starting axiom rather than the end of a hard-fought struggle. Doing so, Hägglund pickpockets the “stamped coin” which Hegel famously warns is not a “truth…issued directly from the mint and ready for one’s pocket.”67 This specific move, worse than a procedural shortcut, guarantees that the finite can never actually undergo the sublation and internal sublation that may disclose genuine and dynamic relationality to and grounding in the infinite.

For Hegel, the sublimity of the Crucifixion is precisely that “the dying of God” is an essential moment “internal to God himself.”68 This is not merely the infinite revealing itself to have really been finite all along, nor the finite finding within itself to have always been infinite, in a dyadic struggle of supremacy—but the finite entering the darkness of Good Friday, dying to that darkness, and finding itself bathed in the redeeming light of Easter Sunday. The finite’s finitude is not annihilated, but confirmed by the infinite, perfected as finite. Likewise, the infinite does not “degrade” itself by becoming finite, but may only be infinite through its incarnating and dying as finite. To paraphrase St. Maximus, to the same degree that God became human in the historical Incarnation, human beings become God in deification.69

Hägglund’s attempt to assert that the finite is only finite from the beginning, without having done the speculative work of working out its finitude, has led him to adopt the equally religious attitude of proclaiming he has grasped the full measure and breadth of the finite’s meaning—a position that one who has not traveled the path of despair can only take by adopting the external viewpoint of the heavens.

Hägglund’s antinomial estrangement between the finite and infinite—his attempt to harden the finite’s limits precisely by trespassing said limits—forecloses the most direct way out of the contradiction he has made for himself. Adorno’s refusal to complete the positive sublation and principled insistence on “tarrying with the negative” that leaves unredeemed the negativity rather than allowing it to sublate into true infinity could be Hägglund’s route of retreat. And to Hägglund’s credit, his secular reading of the Crucifixion that leaves the loss of Christ as loss seems to sit close to the Adornian reading.

But Hägglund taking the Adornian retreat would cost him a load-bearing support: Adorno’s reasoning for why we ought to leave the dialectic incomplete is because we have not yet earned the position of Hegel’s “absolute knowing” that licenses that move of completion—this pretension to already possessing “absolute knowing” from the beginning is exactly what Hägglund needs, however. Just as we saw earlier with his engagement with Taylor, Hägglund needs this unearned position on “absolute knowing” not only for the anti-metaphysical transcendental architecture grounding his project, but also for his flattening of Hegel’s understanding of the speculative identity between finite and infinite (“absolute knowing…is our philosophical grasp of the conditions of spiritual life”) to work. Hägglund cannot take the Adornian road without giving up the very authority that his reading of the Crucifixion absolutely depends upon.

Hägglund’s treatment of the Crucifixion at the end of his book reveals what was operative from the very beginning—a transcendental metaphysics that is no less religious than anything Aquinas or Augustine had come up with. The one thing the latter had going for them, however, is that they were self aware to know what they were arguing for.

HAND IN HAND, INTO THE DARK GOOD FRIDAY

In Hegel Contra Sociology, Gillian Rose warns that transcendental philosophy’s limitation of the finite to an “insatiable yearning for the unknowable and inaccessible infinite” makes a “rational relation to the social and political conditions of our lives impossible.”70 By “infinite,” Rose is not talking about God per se (though she does not necessarily exclude this possibility), but is referring to something more akin to Marx’s radical insight that “the root [of man] is man.”71

It is the structure of recognition that realizes that any transcendental philosophy that posits an insurmountable abyss between the finite and the infinite—whether it be the existentialism of Hägglund’s proscribing any relationship with the infinite, the naive humanism of the Feuerbachian positing that religion is just the Brotherhood of Man wearing the priest’s robes, or the theologian’s romantic appeal to an unconditioned, irreducible infinite—fails to acknowledge that it is “the ‘unknowable’ infinite has been defined by consciousness itself.”72 All are called to the historical materialism that identifies the finite and infinite in speculative identity, the class struggle of the proletariat whose other-worldly aspirations may only be discovered in the most vulgar this-worldly demands (“There is tenderness only in the coarsest demand: that no-one shall go hungry any more”).73

Hägglund’s greatest fault is not that he is an atheist, but that he does not sufficiently trust his atheism enough to stand on its own. Unlike Marx, Hägglund cannot follow the dialectic of the finite all the way through to the self-transcendence of the infinite on pain of realizing conclusions his transcendental not-metaphysics cannot bear the weight of. Foregoing the critical atheism of Marx, Hägglund encases his atheism in a transcendental shell. In this way, Hägglund becomes Hegel’s “‘poor earthly worm,’” a role Hegel allots to the one who presumes the finite must abase itself before the infinite out of a pious humility cloaking a deep-seated pride.

Hägglund, of course, thinks he is giving the finite its due by rendering death as absolute. But this move only works if he already knows what death means with a certainty no finite, anti-metaphysical perspective could actually claim. Hägglund’s atheism leans on the very religious omniscience it claims to have superseded. But such “arrogance and smugness” that Hegel ascribes to the Kantian can be exhibited by the dogmatic atheist and Christian alike—both share the common task of reifying the world order of New Babylon against the international proletariat, whose stirring shakes the foundations of the world and drives both religious and irreligious to board up the windows of the Euro-American imperial core.74

For the Marxist/atheist, the demand made by historical materialism is to give up the assumption that secularity automatically possesses the more historically self-aware, materialist position. If one chooses to identify as atheist, then they cannot declare “God is dead!” and presume this fact to be sufficiently obvious to all. This would be to declare ahead of time that victory has been secured. God, if he is to die, will not do so, until capital itself has been overcome by the proletariat and the churches, mosques, and synagogues of religion—as well as the city halls, courthouses, and universities of the secular—have finally withered away. The revolutionary’s atheism must be an atheism dead set on abolishing itself.

This willingness to entertain the withering of atheism as well as religion calls even the atheist to stay within the darkness of Good Friday, turning Marx’s atheism back on itself. It is to reproduce Hägglund’s error to posit a flat equivalence between “religion” as such and religion as constituted through the historically-specific relations of capitalist domination or more broadly class-based society. The atheistic communist’s notion that religion per se will wither under communism presupposes Hägglund’s meager Feuerbachianism that relates religion to society in a mechanical fashion. “Religious discourses,” Hägglund writes, “have often been mobilized in concrete struggles against injustice…

“None of these social commitments, however, requires religious faith or a religious form of organization. For these commitments to fulfill their promise of emancipation, religious faith must be converted into secular faith and be devoted to social justice as an end in itself.”75

Such an abstract position—arrived at long before the conclusion of the international proletariat’s revolutionary struggle—must be critiqued by the atheistic communist. Insofar as the communist accepts the withering of the religion defined through class-based domination, they must also admit the same of their secularism, or else adopt the naive position of Hägglund which isolates “secular faith” from its complicity with the present order of domination. Why is the religious adherent’s viewpoint in danger and not equally the communist’s atheism? We cannot admit that communism is the “real movement” to “abolish the present state of things,” only to then imagine the relationship between secularity and religion to be the former absorbing the latter like a vacuum cleaner because it burnishes our egos.

The atheistic communist true to Marx must turn Marx’s critical move back onto Marx and historicize his understanding of “religion”—a conceptual category inherited less from Hegel’s own philosophy of religion, which Marx had engaged only secondhand and polemically during the 1840s, than from Feuerbach’s anthropological reduction of religious consciousness to an alienated projection of humanity’s species-being. This reduction was formulated within, and never completely extricated from, the racial and civilizational hierarchies of early-19th century Western Europe—the same imperial-settler standpoint which produces and enables one to grasp the conceptual taxonomy of “world religions” to begin with.

Pushing the internal contradictions inherent in Marx’s own breezy presumption of where “religion” ends and “secularity” begins brings us then to an uncomfortable question: why must religion post-communism, no longer constituted through relations of class domination, necessarily wither into nothingness? To proclaim a priori that it must do so—to unconsciously presume the settler-imperial end-of-history standpoint and disavow the class-specific, historically-wounded standpoint that Marx’s historical materialism demands we occupy—is to assume that we already grasp the true, historically-exhausted meaning of religion, declaring we’ve won the race before even having crossed the finish line. The atheistic communist may reasonably cite Marx’s own conclusion: that the ontological question—why is there something rather than nothing, is there a Creator who begat existence—will certainly wither under communism once “man” realizes that the root of man’s being is not in some distant originary moment of divine creation, but rather in “man” himself.76

The theologian, however, is not asking the same question precisely in the same terms as the atheistic communist. Although the patristic and medieval theologians under consideration should not be mistaken for “proto”-communists, the Marxist of late modernity and the theologian of the early medieval period nevertheless share a deeper stake: that God—the “root of man”—is not to be identified with some distant, originary moment only disclosed in abstract metaphysics, but within the embodied encounter with wounded humanity: the widow, the orphan, and the stranger; the worker, the slave, the peasant. It is precisely here, in the theoretical identification with and practical struggle alongside the wounded, where the presence of God’s love is disclosed (1 John 4:7-8).

This possibility—that “socialist man” might discover that God was among him this whole time, in the face of his brothers and sisters—is not a novel one arrived at by the late-18th century French revolutionaries, but one that was already a problem reflected upon by the brightest theological minds of the early medieval period, far before these liberal and later socialist revolutionaries arrived at their own, differently-grounded notion of the same intuition. “Therefore it is through bodies in bodies,” the 9th-century Irish monk John Scotus Eriugena writes, “not through Himself, that He shall be seen. Similarly, it is through intellect in intellects, through reason in reasons, not through itself, that the Divine Essence shall appear.”77

If it is true that all of class-based society hitherto is the “prehistory” of and prelude to truly human society, then it may also be true that the millennia-spanning theological traditions of so-called religion constitute the prehistory of real theology.78 It is only under communism that the God Question may really be asked and understood in all the profundity and humane depth only glimpsed by the most speculative mystics and learned theologians.

On the other hand, the demand made upon the Christian is considerably steeper. Not only must the Christian tear down theoretically and practically the asymmetrical barrier between the temporal and eternal, but must also give up the transcendental subject most Euro-American Christian theology presupposes and has only begun to slowly shake off since the postwar period.79 Such a demand is steep, as most theologians have been formed to understand the universality of Christ’s life, death, and resurrection as a revelation taken for granted to be equally available upon reflection of any rational subject. But true universality is not equally available, instead being narrowly and differentially understood. “For the gate is narrow and the way is hard, that leads to life, and those who find it are few” (Matthew 7:14-16). We must identify Christ not only theoretically but practically through our struggle with the broken, the suffering, and the damned. Or, in more speculatively theological terms:

“We have to recognise that the only God we know is the God of the poor, the God who takes sides in the struggle, and any God of consensus who is supposed to belong to both sides is an illusion and a dangerous one.”80

This, equally, lends itself to a Christian’s religiosity that cannot be truly religious until it effectively burns up the abstract universality of dehistoricized “humanity” as such in the consuming fire of the truer universality of the worker and the slave—burning alongside the seemingly class-neutral secularism it had historically negatively depended upon. These flames that purify and disclose are what Paul refers to as God’s love—a love that is universal precisely because it discriminates (1 Corinthians 3:13-15).

I cannot claim that the Christian has nothing to fear from the ascendancy of communism. Historically, the theoreticians of the Euro-American communist movement have taken for granted that communism would inevitably mean the withering of religion and the God question entirely—and, on the basis of their thinking, they would be correct. Here the Christian sincerely committed to revolutionary transformation and the victory of the international proletariat is presented with their very own Good Friday. The communist asks the Christian not simply to join the struggle, but to effectively die to themselves, with the likelihood being that there will be no Christ on the other side. The Christian socialist’s response that, under socialism, Christianity will bloom like a flower risks consolation. Christ’s cry of “why, my God, have you forsaken me?” from the agony of the Cross shows that he had no idea what would lay on the other side of death, let alone the possibility of Resurrection. Herein is the frightening offer the “real movement” presents the international Church: to enter into the darkness of death that communism promises.

But the Church, too, must consider Christ’s despairing Good Friday internal to its own life if it is to more authentically carry its own Cross, following him into the darkness. For it is only in the “thick darkness” of Mount Sinai, repelling the people of Israel and only Moses dared to venture into, where God was found (Exodus 20:21). Perhaps it is true that under world communism there will be abandoned churches as far as the eye can see—the number of Christians of the world collapsing from billions to mere thousands over the centuries. And perhaps most of the Christians today who identify as such out of being born into it, cultural convenience, finding consolation in it, or access to power and privilege will abandon the faith once the property and wealth that buttressed the Church’s societal prominence is removed, just as the crucified Christ was abandoned by all his disciples in the shadow of the Cross (Mark 14:50).

It is only in this darkness—a darkness for the faith so dark that most of us may even forget the name of Christ in the communist society yet to come—where God may be found. For God is only found among the forgotten, the neglected, and the absent. Perhaps, millennia from now, it will only be when the word “Christ” passes for the last time from the lips of the last Christian, and His abandonment on the Cross is truly complete, shall we suddenly, miraculously, and apocalyptically find ourselves caught up in the clouds to meet the Lord (1 Thessalonians 4:17). And in our sudden resurrection, finding ourselves—Marxist and Christian alike—standing within the walls of the New Jerusalem, looking around, laughing, realizing that we have found ourselves at the same destination by two different roads, unbeknownst to either of us.

Here we may find the Apostle Paul’s reading of Jacob and Esau, God hating the older and loving the younger, living through the tragedy of absolute estrangement (Romans 9:10-18). Such absolute estrangement has gestated from within itself the undetermined but actual possibility of absolute embrace—the “hardening” has sprouted into the debt Jubilee (Romans 11:25-32). The Scriptural has become speculative and the speculative Scriptural. Christ did indeed come like a thief in the night, leaving only a mustard seed on the window sill: and, without any of us noticing, the seed had borne its fruit.

But first, if this possibility is to be realized, we must, like Christ, step into the darkness of the Cross, and accept whatever may lie on the other side.

Street Scene Chicago by Archibald Motley (1936)

Yesterday, Cosmonaut published my review of Gautham Rao’s White Power: Policing American Slavery, a very good legal history of how American slaveholders leveraged legal frameworks to build the settler-colonial imperial state. Rao published this history with the purpose of showing how the logic of today’s systematic racism and white supremacy are historically continuous with the colonial and antebellum periods. My critical essay aimed to show how legal terms like “public order” and “private interest” emerge through the struggles of the enslaved, and that their existence today is less an echo of the colonial and antebellum periods, but rather is the latest historical expression of the same contradiction animating our country’s political order over the centuries—the struggle over the command of racialized labor-power and access to dispossessed Indigenous land constituting the heart of the settler-colonial state’s regime of capitalist accumulation, operating precisely through the guarantee of legal equality and maintenance of private property.

Unintentionally, my review was published in the wake of “Woke 1.0” discourse, in which many ostensible leftists and progressives (including Congresswoman AOC) distanced themselves from the 2010s urban rebellions that erupted in the wake of the police murders of Black teenagers such as Michael Brown and Trayvon Martin. Representative Ocasio-Cortez paints the activists, organizers, and militants who stood against police brutality as suffering from an apparent state of mass delusion stemming from the COVID-19 lockdowns. Thankfully, however, we may return to a more “sensible” status quo, in which outrage over the Black and non-white lives subject to police brutality will not be so tumultuous as to interrupt business as usual. The Left, after all, must take a stand for “public order.”

Needless to say, to shamelessly launder Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s famous definition of racism: “public order” is nothing less than the state-sanctioned and extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death. Any leftist chooses to stand with “public order” and blunt its opposition to all that American civil society stands for—the effective organization of the regime through which the United States pillages the wealth of the world and negotiation over the terms on which the spoils may be divided among its citizens and vassal states—no stands with the internationalist, anti-imperialist left in any practical sense that matters. “An injustice anywhere is an injustice everywhere,” once so obvious it was called clichéd, becomes increasingly relevant in the face of a settler left that has grown more opportunistic in a post-2024 environment. Now more than ever we must stand for the ruthless critique of all things below heaven and above earth—even at the cost of the occasional election cycle.

It is in this recent cycle of discourse in which the timing of my review of Rao’s legal history proves apt. As progressive as Rao’s position is—that slavery was pivotal in the legal framework of the United States—it is limited by the degree to which it takes for granted historically given categories like “public order,” “private interest,” “foreign,” and “domestic.” Rao’s discipline as a legal historian limits him from venturing beyond the claim that the colonial and antebellum struggle over racialized labor-power was important to these categories, but actually constitutive of legal categories such as “public order.” I speak more on this in the review itself.

This point, however, cannot be overemphasized. In a post-2024 environment where the counterrevolution is at its height, progressive elements within the settler-colonial project are eager to don the police officer’s badge if it means gaining the rhetorical upper-hand over the MAGA reactionaries. As I write this, many self-described left-wingers are breathlessly pronouncing on their podcasts how the American Left is in reality what the American Right portrays itself to be—our politicians clean while theirs freely pocket bribes;1 ours remain scandal-free while every other week theirs are revealed to be sex predators other week;2 ours are sincerely supportive of “public safety” while theirs imperil it siccing ICE gestapo on law-abiding immigrant communities.3 The progressives, the aforementioned settler left, are eager to paint themselves as more pro-police than the reactionaries—promising that the public may have their cake (decent public services) and eat it too (low crime rates).

At the present conjuncture, many erstwhile leftists trip over themselves falling for the temptation. The perennial temptation is presented—if we moderate on “unrealistic” positions like police abolition, then our popularity among the general public will be sufficient to establish a more progressive hegemony, without necessarily having to confront the question of who has state power. But such a move, jockeying for who can be more supportive of “public order,” only helps to reconsolidate the imperial settler state in its moment of crisis, narrowing the political window through which the organized left may operate. While many progressives are working to “close ranks” among its more recalcitrant organizers in preparation for the midterms, the White House continues to press its NSPM-7 policy to persecute anti-fascist “terrorists.”4 Socialist efforts to place themselves on the side of “public order” with the rationale that elections will protect socialists from harm are highly likely to rebound, placing the left within the imperial core in a position more perilous than it already occupies.

Those militants and organizers committed to an anti-imperial and truly internationalist future must call out such opportunism and continue their work organizing the working-classes in self-defense against the expanding nets of the carceral state presided over by both political parties. “Public order” for whom and by what means should be the question ceaselessly posed by organizers both theoretically and practically through our practice. Only in keeping this principled stand may we offer both by our example and through tireless education a counter-hegemonic position around which the working-classes may work to realize their revolutionary self-activity. Only through our tirelessly casting a light on our lack of freedom within the heart of “public order” may we identify the path forward to true emancipation.

Sliman Mansour, Resisting Israeli Settlements, 1978

INTERVIEWER: Why won’t your organization engage in peace talks with the Israelis?

KANAFANI: You don’t mean exactly peace talks. You mean capitulation, surrendering.

INTERVIEWER: Why not just talk?

KANAFANI: Talk to whom?

INTERVIEWER: Talk to the Israelis

KANAFANI: That’s kind of a conversation between the sword and the neck.1

Above is a segment from a 1970 interview in Beirut between Australian journalist Richard Carleton and Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) spokesman Ghassan Kanafani. Two years later Kanafani, along with his 17 year-old niece, would be killed by a car bomb planted by the intelligence arm of the Israeli state Mossad. Since Kanafani’s death, the Palestinian people have struggled against the settler state of Israel, whose genocidal war against the Palestinians has accelerated since the assault of October 7th, 2023. Palestine has become the global flashpoint for far-right movements, revitalizing the left within the imperial core of North America and Western Europe and forcing it to re-evaluate its relationship with the state in the midst of heightened repression. The Palestinian struggle has forced many movements on the left to recenter questions pertaining to solidarity along the lines of unconditional opposition to imperialism, settler-colonialism, and capitalism.

Within the field of Euro-American theology, the former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams recently published Solidarity: The Work of Recognition, a work of political theology that seeks to elaborate upon the duties and obligations that solidarity as a virtue places upon us. Seeking to overcome the widening rifts rending the crisis-ridden imperial world-order, Williams asks if there may be “a way of engaging, speaking together, that does not presuppose an ultimate incommensurability in human goods, and thus an unavoidable contest about control?”2

Williams’s Solidarity stands out in its efforts to avoid easy answers. Williams denounces the appeal to nostalgia of “simple belonging-together” that many Euro-American fascist political movements have electorally leveraged to gain state power.3 Refreshingly, Williams attempts to avoid grounding the universality of solidarity in “organic patterns of common life” or some “‘pre-existing harmony,” asserting through his reading of Heinrich Pesch that human beings are “irreducibly historical agents.”4 Williams is more attentive than many theologians to the centrality of labor that constitutes solidarity, as well as the ease with which one may fall back to “ethical shortcuts” to go around said labor.5 Crucially, Williams argues that the acknowledgement of and capacity to work from the historical asymmetry between privileged and non-privileged is essential for solidarity to unfold. “What is needed is an acknowledgement by the privileged of the reality of where they stand, and a readiness to work, with consciousness and clarity, from that point…this is indeed a different history from that of the non-privileged or subaltern or oppressed subject.”6 Williams here warns against the characterization of recognition as one happening between two formally equal parties, pushing towards a notion of solidarity that must work through the messiness of history if it is to be a solidarity worthy of the name.

At the same time, key moments in Williams’s Solidarity undermine his thesis regarding recognition and solidarity. These moments are not incidental to Williams’s framework, but constitutive of it. It isn’t that Williams’s solidaristic framework is inapplicable to the case of the settler state. Worse, in the case of Israel and Palestine, Williams refuses to follow the logic of his “solidarity without enemies” whenever its logic actually threatens to name enemies. Williams undermines the historical embodiment core to his interpretation of solidarity, either leveling the (to put it lightly) asymmetrical power relations or projecting the horror of settler colonialism into the realm of pre-political ontology. Williams’s “solidarity without enemies” reifies the genocidal logic of the settlerist foundations of global capitalism at the very moment it ought to confront it. The high price Williams pays for his unwillingness to name an enemy or name the stakes beyond blandly labeled “conflict” or “violence” is a form of solidarity that is not only deprived of any critical bite, but risks running cover for the genocidal violence that drives the global order of capitalist accumulation.

A Conflict with No Antagonists, the Violence with No Name

The manner in which Williams writes about the Palestinian genocide grounds the contradiction between where his logic leads and what his formal conclusions dictate. When talking about the genocide in Gaza, Williams references the Gazan genocide and the many ways in which solidarity emerges across political and geographic lines. People wear the Palestinian keffiyeh “to share the experience of the victims of bombardment in Gaza” while “Jewish activists in Europe and North America also take to the streets in the name of solidarity with a whole nation faced by hostile neighbors whose aim is its annihilation…”7

There are two things to note here about the form of Williams’s description. First, he uses the word “bombardment,” depoliticizing an unfolding genocide by displacing the “bombardment” out of its wider historico-political context. Williams’s formulation renders unclear precisely who is doing the bombardment, only that it’s occurring. At the same time, Williams does not afford the Palestinians the same courtesy he afforded the Israelis, characterizing the events of October 7th as an “initial murderous attack by Hamas militants.” Even as Williams on the one hand asserts the universality of solidarity, he assigns on the other hand responsibility asymmetrically, depending on whose violence is being described.

Second, Williams’s characterization of Israel as “a whole nation faced by hostile neighbors” renders it a passive recipient of rancour from the rest of the region. Why exactly is there so much anger towards Israel from its neighbors? Is this connected to the subjectless “bombardment” unfolding both within Palestine and in neighboring countries? Williams leaves this unclear. And by leaving this unclear risks legitimating the accusations of many Zionists that the opposition against Israel is fundamentally rooted in antisemitism that has no rationale, purpose, or reason. Williams may personally believe that Israel may have the lion’s share of the fault for the ongoing genocide, but by playing fast and loose with the assignment of responsibility, cedes ground to Zionists working to delegitimize every form of critique that threatens Israel’s hegemony within ideological discourse.

The form through which Williams brings together and renders commensurate these two acts of “solidarity”—the person donning the keffiyeh in solidarity with a people resisting genocide, the “Jewish activist” taking to the streets in solidarity with the settler state perpetuating said genocide—risks the erasure of genocide perpetuated by Israel alongside its allies. Williams’s hesitancy to even name the genocide is quite surprising considering even politically moderate organizations such as the United Nations Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory have concluded that the genocide is happening and that Israel is perpetuating it.8 Such unwillingness to acknowledge the genocide this late in its development casts a heavy shadow. Williams may write about the ubiquity of solidarity among all political corners, but, as will be demonstrated below, this rhetorical point is purchased at an extraordinarily steep cost of formally stripping the asymmetrical relation between colonized Palestinians and settler Israeli state he is seeking to at least maintain.

In another place, Williams acknowledges the asymmetries of power between the Palestinian and the Israeli. He critiques psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen’s claim that “any problem immersed in empathy becomes soluble” in the latter’s depiction of a meeting between an Israeli and Palestinian father who have both lost their sons and have come together to advocate for reconciliation. Williams warns that between the two bereaved fathers “there will be asymmetries of power and privilege, and indeed of risk; there will be the danger of expecting the less powerful or privileged to do a disproportionate amount of the work needed to create or restore a ‘felt’ connection, a recognition.”9

Even as he recognizes the inevitable asymmetry of power, Williams’s characterization of the genocide formally undermines the point being made. Both fathers have lost sons in the “murderous conflicts of the region.” The “conflict” has taken the lives of the sons of these fathers, and their lifepaths are the “result of a compacted legacy of violence extending far beyond the Middle East of the last seventy-five years…”10 The active subject throughout Williams’s characterization is “conflict” and “violence,” both of which take on an autonomous character without an actual actor responsible for said conflict or violence. This conflict is rooted in “complex” issues relating to “power, security, and identity.”

Williams’s unwillingness to name historical actors in the ongoing genocide reveals a potentially fatal problem within his model of mutual recognition as it pertains to settler-colonialism. The problem is in the very form of recognition as constitutive of the historical process of solidarity. Per Patrick Wolfe, settler colonialism is “a structure not an event.”11 The settler state is not something that was established in the past and has now attained a self-perpetuating logic. It is an ongoing process that continues to dispossess the indigenous and enable “access to land.”12 Recognition is complicated by the fact that indigeneity is constitutive of settler identity to the present day. Within the context of the Israeli state, to be socially formed and legally recognized as Israeli is constituted by the collective and political process of Palestinian subjugation, dispossession, and elimination. This meeting of recognition is only possible to the extent that the two fathers suspend the settler colonial relation—a suspension that benefits the state of Israel, where violence is demoted from a phenomenon that constitutes the settler state to something that is merely perpetuated by it.

Williams seems to sense this danger and works to qualify that such a meeting between the two fathers is insufficient for political transformation: “[These meetings] are indeed potentially transformative; but they are fully and actually so only when they open the door to deeper and more radical transformations in social attitudes and political agendas; when they expose the power relations that have to be named and changed in the situation.”13 But this qualification is not only insufficient, but conceals the radicality of the asymmetry Williams seems to be gesturing towards. What it would mean within the settler-colonial context to “expose” the power relations that “have to be named and changed” requires the abolition of the settler’s identity as such. It is not that the Israeli citizen’s identity happens to be tinged with the sins of past racism. State-sanctioned dispossession is constitutive of the Israeli citizen’s identity right now. There are existential stakes over which the Israeli settler and Palestinian militant struggle that Williams’s framework that attempts to accommodate asymmetry risks neutralizing.

The neutering of the existential stakes involved is expressive of Williams’s desire that recognition structurally ends in reconciliation. There are moments where he comes close to recognizing the real risk of recognition. In his reading of Pope John Paul II’s theology of solidarity, Williams writes “Our weddedness to self-protection, individual and collective, has to be challenged without compromise.” Here he comes closest to recognizing the existentiality, the potential for death, that comes with the struggle of solidarity. However, at the very moment he acknowledges said struggle, Williams reabsorbs it back into an inevitable victory: “solidarity entails not only the risk of struggle, but the risk of loss—loss of privilege and security, to rediscover another kind of security in the mutuality of a new humanity [emphasis mine] established in the truth.”14

The logic of Williams’s argument of solidarity and recognition does not justify this conclusion of mutuality. At least within the settler colonial context, if Williams is right that solidarity must be historically embodied, then it must entail not only the recognition of what the settler is doing, but what the settler is by their very identity. Algerian psychiatrist and revolutionary Frantz Fanon writes that “the colonial world is a Manichean world” by its nature. The elimination of the asymmetry between indigenous and settler does not mean that “once the borders have been eliminated there will be a right of way between the two sectors.” If the colonist’s very identity to its core is constituted by the subjugation of the colonized, then “To destroy the colonial world means nothing less than demolishing the colonist’s sector, burying it deep within the earth or banishing it from the territory.”15

This possibility is not foreign to Williams’s logic of historically constituted solidarity, but demanded by it. If we take Williams’s injunction that solidarity must entail the “expos[ure] of power relations” seriously, then this cannot but lead to a violent collapse of the colonial order and the demolition of the settler society grounded in this exploitative relation. Williams’s guarantee ahead of time that there shall be a remainder, that mutual relations will be at the other end of the tunnel, may in the abstract be a well-intentioned aversion to violence; but within a society that is already predicated upon indigenous and racialized subjugation, it can only have the effect of reifying the order as it stands, undermining the very solidarity Williams worked to preserve.

Solidarity Without Enemies?

Much of what limits Williams’s solidaristic framework comes down to his move to locate the problem of violence within the realm of ontology. The evacuated moral agency of the Palestinian genocide and the refusal to name an enemy are enabled by Williams’s retreat into ontology at the very moment his logic of solidarity threatens to force a conclusion he cannot allow. The most ambitious chapter of WIlliams’s book is titled ‘Solidarity Without Enemies,” in which Williams analyzes the work of Roman Catholic priest and chaplain of the Polish solidarity movement Józef Tischner. Williams states that solidarity which begins from the “state of irreducible interdependence in which we all stand” forces us to be “consistently suspicious of any position that allows us to declare any other group and their perspective simply deserving of obliteration.”16 For Williams this goes beyond the abstract cliche that “there are fine people on both sides,” because it asserts the historicity which bounds our fates with those of whom we stand against. We cannot claim that our political opponents are deserving of total obliteration.

Yet this insistence on nuance leads to the flattening of the aforementioned “asymmetry” experienced between oppressed and oppressor, thus ontologizing the enemy relation. Williams writes that the basis on which oppressed and oppressor may meet is the shared struggle of “suviv[ing] the wounds inflicted on the self by the hunger for control and possession.”17 My enemy cannot be my enemy at the level of ontology owing to our shared vulnerability of working through these wounds that require the shared labor of the other, the joint “creation of meaning by the discovery of how we work together to sustain the world.”18 But per Fanon and the tradition in which anti-colonial militants and theorists work, the colonizer and colonized do not share one world, but two. Both certainly imply the other, as the categories of “capitalist” and “worker” imply each other. But if the recognition of this mutual dependency must exceed the legal bounds demarcated by the settler class, then bringing about Williams’s “shared horizon of labor” can only be achieved through revolutionary violence. In his Bonhoeffer chapter, Williams writes “If I cannot act without my action being implicated with the actions of others, as well as being already shaped and compromised by what I have inherited, I am bound to recognize that my own fate is not separable from that of others.”19 Where this logic leads within the settler colonial context is that the colonized’s struggle to abolish their being as colonized requires the abolition of the settler, whose very identity is bound up in the subjugation of the colonized, which historically means armed and violent struggle.

Again, this is not two partners coming together to negotiate; as Kanafani mentioned above, coming to this conversation with this presupposition is equivalent with the neck coming to hash it out with the sword. Within the colonial situation, true recognition sometimes entails the sober acknowledgement that the other party is one’s existential enemy by virtue of their structural identity being constitutive of your subordination and abasement. Wolfe writes on how Israel’s establishment of the socially-owned kibbutzim and discouragement of hiring Arab labor through the twentieth century worked to establish a “self-sufficient proto-national Yishuv.“ This creation of the “new Jew” was constituted by the active dispossession of the Arab population. “The positive force that animated the Jewish nation and its individual new-Jewish subjects issued from the negative process of excluding Palestine’s Indigenous owners.”20

In this light, the struggle against the settler state requires naming an existential threat that constitutes the identity of “indigenous” by its very structure. In a different context, critical theorist Robert Nichols writes that although indigenous people have always resisted colonialism, “they have not, however, always done so as Indigenous peoples. Instead, the very idea of indigeneity was, in part, forged in and through this mode of resistance.”21 To identify as and be socially formed as indigenous is to already be engaged in resistance, as implied within it is the settler relation whose logic is eliminatory. The naming of enemies is therefore not an act incidental to the social identity of the indigenous, but constitutive of it. Writing in the late 1960s at a particular peak of heightened struggle with the Israeli settler state, Kanafani published his PFLP: Strategy for the Liberation of Palestine with a section explicitly on naming those enemies of the liberation struggle, above all Israel: “in our battle for liberation, we [the Palestinians] face Israel as a political, military and economic entity that is trying to effect the maximum military mobilization of its two and a half million nationals to defend its aggressive expansionist racial structure and prevent us from regaining our land, our freedom and our rights.”22 Naming the structural enemy confirms what is already the case—the unity among the Palestinian and Arab people in their shared identity as targets of settler elimination and assimilation.

Williams’s own logic does not preclude this naming of (again, putting it lightly) asymmetries of power; there are many instances throughout the text where he acknowledges asymmetries of power that generate conflict. Indeed, Williams notes in his own argument the “impact of Latin American theologies of liberation” that center the fact that “solidarity may entail conflict for the sake of doing justice to an interdependence that is denied or attacked by an unjust economic order.”23 To struggle against the Israeli state necessarily means struggling against (and refusing recognition from) the Israeli settlers, through whose dispossessive activity the authority of the state is realized and their social identity as settlers is actualized. But Williams passes over this possibility when it threatens his “solidarity without enemies.” The conclusions, and therefore the possibility of real recognition, are suppressed whenever the Williams’s logic of recognition begins to bend towards the prospect of the refusal of recognition that threatens to detonate the structural subordination constituting the settler state.

It is precisely at this conceptual moment within his argument when Williams’s solidaristic anthropology—where there is no hard boundary between self and world, interior person and exterior society—begins to breaks down. Williams writes that the goal of solidarity must be “a social order of free and equal participation that embodies the abiding, underlying structures of human mutuality and releases individual agents to play their constructive or life-giving roles.” This is easy enough to cede. However, Williams goes on to write that “the socialism that matters has to entail an interior conversion, overthrowing not a system but a myth of the self. The attempt to create mutuality by legal enforcement is a mistake and a potentially lethal one.”

Here Williams invokes a split, a divide between interior and exterior. The “interior” self must convert before the “exterior” law may change. Williams’s move here minimizes the risk of violence, but does so at a heavy price of the dialectical anthropology he has spent more than half the book building up. Because if the law is not something that exists over and against the self, then “legal enforcement” cannot be straightforwardly amputated from the process of the creation of a post-colonial situation within the wreckage of the old. At least, this should be the case if one’s historical subject is a historically-constituted and therefore class-situated subject rather than humanity as such.

Indigenous (Dene) critical theorist Glenn Coulthard writes how this struggle must be oriented towards the legal apparatus of the settler state, since “[the colonial state’s] reproduction [...] rests on the ability to entice Indigenous peoples to identify, either implicitly or explicitly, with the profoundly asymmetrical and nonreciprocal forms of recognition either imposed on or granted to them by the settler state and society.”24 Here, Coulthard is naming the legal mechanisms of recognition by which Canada may perpetuate the subjugation of the indigenous First Nations. Yet the logic outlined by Coulthard points to how easily recognition may be leveraged to deepen the legitimacy of the Israeli settler order. If recognition is necessary for the settler state’s reproduction, then the colonized’s refusal of recognition on the settler order’s terms—whether that be through expropriation, redistribution, or reorganization of the state itself—can and will be registered by settlers as violence.

In this sense, Williams’s conception of recognition as constitutive of solidarity is complicated by the settler colonial relation to the point of almost collapse. To preserve it, he must suspend the settler colonial relation, which violates Williams’s injunction concerning solidarity as historical embeddedness. But to preserve the historicity would mean opening the possibility of the colonized’s struggle up to and including the possibility of abolishing the settler identity itself—a struggle that would most likely be a violent process given the settler’s very existential identity being constituted by the indigenous’s dispossession and the settler state’s legitimacy. But where the logic demands an enemy to be named, Williams falls back upon theology’s well-worn abode—metaphysics.

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Enemies in the Heavens

Williams explicitly tolerates the presence of conflict and opponents within his universalism. But he cannot allow for a solidarity with enemies because it threatens his ontological stance that interdependence is located at the ontological level of existence.

For Williams, solidarity is a pre-political condition that is located within the realm of ontology. In most religious discourses throughout history, Williams writes, all elements of the cosmos are imagined “as a world of interconnected and interacting ‘nodes’ of divine agency, points of convergence or interaction within a cosmic network of interrelation.”25 All of these elements are “object[s] of love” that bear within them both absolute reception and production of the whole cosmos through which the element is constituted. Indeed, each element “contributes significantly to the whole.”26

“In such a light,” Williams writes, “the final ground of ‘solidarity’ is simply the reality of a manifold, always pre-existing, interaction between the lives of finite beings…This is true whether or not we acknowledge it or consciously work with the grain of it.”27 This seemingly insignificant move jeopardizes the whole architecture of Williams’s solidaristic framework. Let’s assume that the unity between part and whole within the cosmos is such that the parts perfectly interpenetrate the whole, such that the part reflects the whole and vice versa. If the “part” of the colonized is evil, insufficient, and broken, then the whole cosmos itself is evil, insufficient, and broken by virtue of the part constituting the whole.

For a theologian who believes in the doctrine of Original Sin, this doesn’t appear to present a problem for Williams. But because this ontology of mutual interdependence is ‘pre-political’ insofar as it exceeds any structural or historical totality, then Williams’s solidaristic framework effectively reifies the historically-determined process of settler-colonialism at the ontological level with no identifiable political means by which to confront it.

The problem of ontological interdependence is accentuated in Williams’s analogy of ecology. Williams writes: “The balance of the system within which we live is constantly readjusting itself (not always rapidly or easily; the question…is not how to avoid disturbance of an existing balance but how to avoid long-term distortion of or depletion of whatever resources within a particular ecology best allow it to rebalance and regenerate.”28 If the element contributes to the whole, then the global system of capitalism is grounded in the settler-colonial regime. There is no “balance” to a system in which the part is not merely a part of the system but constitutes the entirety of the system. Williams’s ecological analogy to strengthen his ontological claim only reifies the settler colonial relation, lifting it up from a historically determinate moment to one moment within a transhistorical illness for which redress within the political realm is not directly at hand.

If Williams’s anthropology insists that identity cannot be located beyond the socio-historical realm through which we constitute ourselves, then positing a “hunger for control and possession” as a shared ontological ground binding both settler and colonized already undermines that anthropology. Williams is forced to take the very “ethical shortcut” he warns against elsewhere in order to preserve his ontology of pre-political mutual interdependence. This ontologically given but historically unearned interdependence frames the emergence of enemies within the socio-historical sphere as a deviation from the ontologically already-given cosmic network of interrelation.29 Historicizing this “hunger for control and possession,” we find that the “hunger” may be a historically specific ideological formation for a particular mode of production that cannot be abstractly projected into a spiritual condition equally available to all human subjects through history. The “complex issues about power, security, and identity” which he ascribed to the Israeli-Palestinian “war” are revealed to be far more asymmetrical and historically constituted than even Williams acknowledges—the power of the Israeli settler is the deprivation of the Palestinian’s; the Israeli’s security, the Palestinian’s vulnerability; the IDF soldier’s identity, the Palestinian refugee’s dispossession. Williams’s ontological hunger that is supposed to bind both parties in a “horizon of shared labor” and thus grounds his interpretation of solidarity is unveiled as the subjective experience the settler colonial polity inculcates into its settler shock troops.

Williams’s logic of recognition bends towards these conclusions. His relational ontology generates these conclusions. His insistence on historicity and embodiedness imply these outcomes. But before he reaches conclusions that his logic demands—Coulthard’s refusal of settler recognition, Fanon’s wholesale destruction of the colonial world, and Kanafani’s refusal to negotiate as a form of recognition that threatens the settler state’s existence—Williams’s universalist commitments override his relational ontology and historical methodology at the exact moment where they force him to name an enemy. And it is at that moment where Williams is forced to divorce the social from the ontological.

Williams can only divorce between the social and the ontological to preserve the “solidarity without enemies” at the extraordinarily heavy price of gutting whatever critical bite his solidarity framework has. This requires the very divorce between “method” and “system” that Gillian Rose—whose philosophical work figures prominently throughout Williams’s argument—criticizes as the Neo-Kantian divorce between canon and organon; the divorce between the infinite and the finite, what we can’t know and what we can, leads not only to the unknowability of the infinite, but the unknowability of the finite: in other words, “the unknowability of ourselves.”30 Rose’s critique of the Neo-Kantian split between method and system is the exact one this essay has been tracing up until this point: the insistence on asymmetry of responsibility only to subtly level it; the insistence on historicity only to refuse the enemy that historicity demands. Williams’s refusal to acknowledge enemies for the sake of preserving peace instead perpetuates the settler’s genocidal war against the indigenous. Solidarity is no longer the historically embodied virtue Williams sought to establish, but just another ideal we are all striving to realize in an imperfect world. Sentimental, but not very helpful.

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Conclusion

In his lectures on freedom, Adorno wrote that the social democratic parties during the Nazi regime chose to fight under the banner of freedom. They not only lost legally, politically, but rhetorically: “the slogan attracted this ridicule not just for the obvious political reasons, but because the term freedom no longer possesses the power it used to have.” Freedom meant something in the late-18th century when the bourgeoisie were ascendant against the decaying remnants of a feudal order, but in a world where the bourgeois class had long succeeded, freedom lost its flavor in the midst of universal unemployment and global war.

But that does not mean freedom should be tossed aside. What it meant was that we can no longer take it for granted. We must not begin from the premise of freedom, but from our lack of freedom. What has become of freedom today and what threatens to become of it in the future.

Williams’s own account of solidarity already has this conceptual toolkit in mind. Williams admits that “solidarity…can have a bad name for diverse reasons—as a piece of performative and often self-indulgent borrowing of stories and experiences of the vulnerable, and as an equally self-indulgent and ‘perverse’ response to the workings of power in global capitalism.”31 Yet by refusing to complicate the explosive potential of solidarity when followed through within the settler state and also ontologicizing the historical condition of the late capitalist subject, Williams fails to measure up to his own solidaristic framework. To take solidarity as an ontological given—granting Williams’s many qualifications of how historically embodied, practiced, and actualized through time it is—risks ontologizing the settler-colonized relation, reproducing the historical antagonism at the higher level of ontology. This becomes especially damaging with his bland depiction of the ongoing genocide in Gaza.

But this does not mean solidarity is irredeemable. What it does mean is that we must maintain a deep suspicion of the kind of solidarity proffered within the contemporary field of Anglo-American theology. As subjects formed by and living within the imperial core, we must reject the solidarity that appears most natural to us—reconciliation without the risk of armed resistance. The martyred revolutionaries of the past century did not fight for a better reality within the global capitalist world, but one that would destroy and replace it. The struggle of the colonized against their identity as colonized imperils the whole of the international order and therefore our own identities as settlers, colonizers, and imperial subjects. These stakes are life or death. Hence the brutal assassinations, coups, and wars waged by the settler states against not only the formerly colonized, but also the rifts within the formerly colonized as revolutionary parties, postcolonial states, and peasant movements struggle among themselves over the life-or-death question pertaining to the scope and depth of how liberation should and will unfold. The real risks of solidarity and the accompanying mortal stakes can only be really be acknowledged from the position that allows for real antagonism to develop. True unity may only be forged through true division.

To end on a Christological note, we must remember Paul’s admonition in his first letter to the Corinthians: “For the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men” (1 Cor 1:25). Dominican friar and Marxist Fr. Herbert McCabe’s compelling read of this passage is that Paul is proclaiming that “the power of God looks like weakness; and weakness—not the weakness of ineffectiveness but the weakness of love—is our best picture of the power of God.”32 To perceive God we must be prepared to find him in the world of inversion and disguise. The Prince of Peace once said that “I have come not to bring peace, but a sword.” (Matthew 10:34) His enthronement upon a throne over the world came in the form of his crucifixion upon a cross over his grieving friends and jeering crowds.

Three years after October 7th, public opinion has made it easy for the bourgeois theologian to empathize with the Palestinians who struggle against the genocidal logic of the Israeli settler state. As Williams’s own “new humanity” implies, it is even easier to justify struggle against the Israeli state as being for the benefit of the Israeli settlers too—that the Palestinians are actually struggling both for themselves and the settlers. But this conclusion is to paint a faux universalism over a genocidal conflict whose developmental logic does not yet justify such a conclusion; this conclusion tempts us into fleeing the negative at the very moment it demands we stay with it. The universality of Easter Sunday—if it is to come—can only arrive through the darkness of Good Friday.

Kanchenjunga 1938 by Nicholas Roerich

Special thanks to Mark Spinnenweber and Richard George for editorial remarks

INTRODUCTION

Since the catastrophic fall of the USSR, no corner of the planet has been spared from violent integration into global capitalist production. Yet the desire for rupture from the planetary factory has only intensified and quickened through the decades. In this sense, David Bentley Hart’s retrieval of patristic universalism that resolves the crisis by way of ultimate integration into the cosmic Body of Christ (see Part II) reads as ultimately conservative. The ambiguous role played by difference within Hart’s theology leads his universalism to recapitulate the very same logic of the abstract universal that structures late capitalism which his theology aimed to escape. Through the theological register, Hart’s theology gestures towards a key contradiction for late capitalist society—the more forcefully we assert the ultimate unity of the human race, the more abstracted out and sanded down the real differences of particular persons become. How, then, can Anglo-American theology arrive at a theology that is at once wholly universal without (unlike the law of value) subordinating the irreducibility and surplus of particular persons?

This essay argues that the contemporary Neo-Chalcedonian revival and its chief concern with the person figures on a theologically symbolic level the struggle of the irreducibility of the human person with the administrative logic of the imperial capitalist state. Jordan Daniel Wood’s retrieval of Maximus the Confessor in *The Whole Mystery of Christ* clears the way for a political theology that genuinely unites a universalist eschatology with a communist political horizon. More radically, Wood’s reading of Maximus’s formulation of hypostatic identity and its being structured by unity-through-difference deeply resonates with the late-20th century Black feminist tradition, in particular the work of Hortense Spillers. On different fronts, both Wood and Spillers seek to center the hypostatic excess of the human person that continually resists complete integration and management by the administrative logic of capital and the sexual violence of patriarchal domination.

While Hart and Wood are both committed universalists and motivated towards universalism by the same crisis of late capitalist totality, Wood draws upon a different center of gravity. Where for Hart the resolution lies with integration into a universal whole, Wood locates reconciliation within the encounter between particular persons. For Wood, salvation is completely and totally personal. There is no way to know God personally other than through encounter with the person of Jesus of Nazareth. The person is not only the particular, but the universal. And the Logos of Christ is experienced through his logoi—the irreducible and inexhaustible persons through whose multiplicity of differences the Body or Logos of Christ is constituted. Spillers challenges Wood’s retrieval of Maximus through her claim that subjectivity is not only given, but must be claimed and appropriated. Spillers challenges Wood’s reading of Maximus to resituate radical encounter with the Logos of Christ from the abstract world of ontology to the historical irruption of the enslaved and Black female subjects whom the Middle Passage, slavery, Jim Crow, and mass incarceration have worked to reduce to commodified flesh.

This part of the series takes up the dimension of gender alongside race, discovering within Wood’s retrieval of Maximus a theological anthropology of the person that Part II of this series left underdeveloped as only the site in which difference plays out, as a problem to be managed. Part III deepens this to show that the perceived problem of difference to be managed is in reality the only medium through which true universality may be attained.

THE MYSTERY OF THE PERSON

The hypostasis (or person) of Christ is the key mechanism around which Maximus’s theology is centered. Though hypostasis has antecedents within Aristotilean and Neoplatonic philosophy, the Christological disputes that followed in the wake of the Council of Chalcedon declaring that Christ is one person with two natures forced a radical reformulation of who Christ—and by extension the person—is. This theology effectively detonates the Neoplatonic structure of “participation” and in its place substitutes a theology of encounter. It is only through the encounter with the historical person of Jesus of Nazareth and the infinitely different logoi or persons who radically disclose in their own unique mode who he is may one know who God is.

For Maximus, the hypostasis is the subject or “who” that both grounds “what” something is while also remaining irreducible to that thing.1 Though Paul of Tarsus is a human being, “who” Paul is transcends and is irreducible to Paul’s “what” i.e. human nature; not only does Paul transcend his nature, but at the same time hypostasizes that nature in a unique mode only he is capable of hypostasizing. Peter may describe Paul as “well-read,” “annoying,” and “dour,” but none of these predicates exhaust “who” Paul is. Wood analogizes the ontological positivity of the hypostasis with a “black hole” inasmuch as when we talk about a person, we are literally talking around the person. “Personal style marks every instance of universal nature. And yet you cannot speak of that style without predicating either natural qualities (intelligent, loving, hospitable, beautiful, well-formed, etc.) or accidental properties. You can only speak a proper name: ‘It is very Paul to say or do this or that.’”2

Maximus’s transformation of the hypostasis represents a “seismic metaphysical tremor” that detonated the traditional Neoplatonic realism of late antiquity.3 Prior to the sixth century, the hypostasis was traditionally understood as the “bundle of characteristics” that distinguished this or that individual instance of a nature. In the Neoplatonic tradition, the hypostasis follows from genera to progressively specific species of individuation until arriving at the individual: being, animal, human, Greek, Socrates. But Maximus’s hypostasis effectively reverses this logic of genera-to-species. Wood writes that Maximus’s hypostasis effectively precedes and grounds the nature: “Christ grounds and determines his own humanity; he must therefore ‘precede’ both its universal and particular dimension.”4 Maximus critiques the Neoplatonic formulation of the hypostasis as it risks reducing Christ’s hypostasis to being a mere instance of human nature, insinuating that the Incarnate Logos is “subject to a law or logos greater than either of his parts on its own” and risks a vision of the cosmos in which creation somehow precedes its Creator.5 On the other hand, this is not to say that for Maximus the hypostasis is “greater” than nature per se. Rather, on Wood’s reading, the hypostatic identity and nature occupy two different ontological planes that do not compete with one another. Hence why a particular hypostasis can embody a universal nature while being no less particular or universal: “the hypostasis’s indifference [towards the nature] removes any need to distinguish its different ‘aspects.’ It suffers no tension with any nature, certainly not with its own natures, and even less with itself.”6 By arguing that the hypostasis is effectively the “beginning and the end” of nature, Wood’s reading of Maximus puts forward a notion of the person that resists subordination to either a traditional Neoplatonic great chain of being or imperial administrative logic (as we shall see below).

Yet the singularity of Jesus’s Logos may only be disclosed through the multiplicity of his logoi. Each logoi, every person, “forms part of Christ’s body” by virtue of being an irreducible and personal mode by which Christ’s Logos becomes what it is.7 Creation is not a downward process of Neoplatonic emanation, but an upward irruption from the depths of each and every person. Downward because the Logos wills creation through his Incarnation, and upward through the irreducible self-constituting activity of the logoi. Irruption because each of the logoi’s personal mode of being is unconditioned, irreducible to their formal nature. By virtue of each person being unrepeatable, every one of the logoi are “of no kind at all”8 and therefore their mode of being unconditioned even as it incarnates through the human nature it assumes. Each person, as one of the wholly unique, irrepeatable, and irreducible logoi through whom Christ creates and incarnates, is themselves the whole of creation. This means each of the logoi, in a manner personal to each, carries within them the Logos who will create the world into which it may incarnate. History is the process whereby the Logos becomes who he always already is. Wood uses the profound metaphor of the seed and the womb to illustrate this point: “The world is born like a Seed generating the very womb in which it gestates. It is born again and again as the particular seed of this or that creature, and, because it retains all it has hypostasized, gains in each actualized creature a new member of its Body.”9

If human nature is not partly instanced in an individual human being like Christ, but fully and completely embodied in a unique mode, then each hypostatic logoi is not just an instance of humanity, but the whole of humanity embodied and capitulated in a hypostatic identity that is itself irreducible to the universal. Paul is not simply a part of humanity; Paul is the whole of humanity embodied in an unrepeatable mode completely unique to him, whose death means that human nature becomes radically less itself. This logic extends to any one of the logoi: the mother’s loss of her child, the refugee’s suffering under detention does not just happen to an instance of humanity, but to the whole of humanity; yet this universal suffering at the same time does not diminish the fact that it is radically, irreducibly, and unrepeatedly the mother or refugee’s own. All of the logoi are a radical disclosure of who Christ is in a manner completely and totally irreducible to an abstract nature and belonging to them wholly. The relationship between Christ and the person transcends the Neoplatonic picture of participation, becoming the language of historical encounter. Because Christ’s Logos not only recapitulates created human nature, but also uncreated divine nature, then all hypostatic logoi are deified by the assumption of Christ and within him the perfect perichoretic union between the human and divine natures, the created and uncreated. “He is the very Logos that unifies all things and grounds the reciprocal relation or basic symmetry or sympathy among all Christ’s parts, even his created and uncreated natures.”10 Where Christ’s hypostasis directly grounds the union between human and divine natures—created and uncreated—every other human hypostasis is the whole of human nature and is taken up into the deification of the cosmos only through its own encounter with and disclosure of Christ’s hypostatic identity.

This radically Christocentric and person-centric theology has seismic implications for God’s relationship with history. If a nature is never abstract and always embodied, then God may only be encountered through the historical person of Jesus of Nazareth. More broadly, Christ can never be encountered anywhere except through the concrete logoi through which his Logos is uniquely and irreducibly embodied.11 Per Wood, “Maximus thinks that prior to the fact of the historical Incarnation very little could have been known about how God might realize the end of the universe, which is union with him.”12 Every person is a radically unique disclosure of who God is that resists categorization, administration, and universalization. It is only through the differences between irreducible and historical persons may the universal Christ be encountered. Maximus’s theology becomes especially radical when also read as a flashpoint of anti-imperial resistance against a crisis-ridden seventh century Byzantium.

THE PERSON OF THE BASILEUS CONTRA THE PERSON OF CHRIST

Maximus’s theological revolution cannot be understood abstracted from the social crises of the countryside and the restructuring of the seventh century Byzantine state. The imperial crisis wrought by the rise of the Islamic caliphate and the surge of political strength among the peasantry throughout Asia Minor, alongside the growing independence of monastic and episcopal communities in North Africa and Italy, would force the reorganization of the imperial state, attempting to reimpose empire-spanning fiscal systems and ecclesial initiatives to reimpose unity. Reading Maximus’s theology as figuring these struggles at the theological register reveals that the person was a historical site of class struggle with three fronts: the social struggle over peasant labor in the countryside, the fiscal struggle over administrative governance, and the ecclesial struggle over Christological controversy. These three fronts were not a unified and lockstep movement, but structurally homologous expressions of the same social contradiction, each one figuring at its own level the generalized and polyvalent crisis of the category of the person. Maximus’s theology is structured by the same dialectic animating the peasant struggles in the countryside: the more the empire centers the person as a site of fiscal extraction and military conscription to enforce order in the face of crisis, the more its imperial subjects attempt to leverage the emergent category of person to extract rights, privileges, and independence, in turn intensifying imperial centralization.

The first half of the seventh century was the beginning of a centuries-long crisis that would force the radical restructuring of Byzantine society. The rise of the first Islamic caliphate inflicted significant territorial losses upon the empire, driving the militarization of the countryside in Asia Minor that admitted a “marked shift in the balance of power on the land.”13 The losses inflicted by Caliphate raids and Byzantine military conscription pressured villages to spatially nucleate. The shrinkage of labor-power left landowners in a difficult position, with older social forms of peasant discipline increasingly inadequate with land relatively more plentiful than labor. Beginning in the sixth century, the georgos subtly shifted in meaning, designating someone who worked the land with little social status to speak of to an “independent peasant proprietor, who may…strike deals in his own right with an outside landowner…on highly favourable terms.”14 These shifts in labor composition were politically registered by Constantinople, which over the decades moved to center the welfare of the peasant proprietor as “a matter of political significance” if the empire was to maintain a strong line of defense against the Caliphate.15 The peasant proprietors leveraged its growing importance relative to the aristocratic class and forced traditional village leaders “to cede ground to their fellow villagers.” Howard-Johnston notes that social forms privileging familial lines were becoming outmoded in the countryside of Asia Minor as a means of transmitting privilege, with respect increasingly having to be “earned by individuals, through their own efforts and achievements, mov[ing] according to the circulation of wealth and reputation among individuals and their kin.”16 As labor-power became scarcer and local solidarity more critical, personal reputation and ability became more essential for imperial and local survival.

At the same time, the prioritization of military spending drove Byzantium to consolidate and reorganize its taxation system throughout the countryside, contributing to the growing material importance of the individual person. As Howard-Johnston observes, the fiscal apparatus of the Roman empire was retained, but instead of a tax system determined from the “top down,” beginning from the imperial core down to the praetorian prefectures and provinces, “[individual] taxpayers were assessed and given a fixed annual cash liability recorded in a cadaster.”17 The “fiscal solidarity” and increasingly nucleated structure of the village enabled the cadaster to reorganize the logic of social relations within the village to be more socially legible from the standpoint of the Byzantine state, allowing the fiscal state to more deeply penetrate beyond the village and to the individual. In turn, the fiscal consolidation of the Byzantine state facilitated the consolidation of the local village and empowered the peasant proprietor. This dialectical relationship between imperial state and peasant at once fomented new forms of imperial domination but nevertheless generated opportunities of leverage for an emboldened peasant class to assert its personal prerogatives that resisted wholesale imperial subsumption. The transformation of the imperial state was therefore not a top-down imposition, but responsive to and emergent from the significant recomposition of peasant labor.18

The seventh-century person thus emerges as a polyvalent field of social and class struggle between the reorganizing Byzantine state fending off crisis and a burgeoning peasant class struggling for larger concessions. On the one hand, the juridical person emerges as a means to intensify taxation yields as well as more adequately supply manpower to a Byzantine military placed on the backfoot by a powerful caliphate. All peasants were rendered formally equivalent through the register of the cadaster, which made peasants more easily subject to bureaucratic maneuvering, administration, and management. On the other hand, the rising peasant proprietor class came to recognize their growing importance in the midst of foreign invasion and demographic decline, leveraging the imperial recognition of the person qua taxpayer and military conscript to wrest additional privileges and rights from both the imperial core and the peripheral aristocratic class. The centrality of the person at once resisted subjugation by imperial administrative logic while also depending upon that very same logic for its recognition against local wealthy village leaders.

This social revolution in the countryside of Asia Minor and heightening power of the Caliphate was recognized by the monks and bishops on the periphery of Byzantium as opening up opportunities to wrest independence from Constantinople. In the wake of the fifth century Council of Chalcedon, local monastic and church communities were split on the question of whether Christ was one person with two natures (pro-Chalcedon) or one composite nature of divine and human (anti-Chalcedon). The court in Constantinople could not afford ecclesial disunity in the face of a powerful caliphate and escalating crisis throughout the countryside of Asia Minor. To shore up political unity, Emperor Heraclius and the Constantinople Patriarch parlayed their recent military victories against the Caliphate to promote the doctrine of monenergism (the single operation of Christ) and later monotheletism (two distinct natures, but one will) to broker a compromise for the sake of union: one will, one Christ, one empire.19

The empire’s attempt to consolidate and unify the pro- and anti-Chalcedon communities was met with opposition, especially by those monastic communities and bishops in Palestine, North Africa, and Italy. Though successful at first, monotheletism was soon met with opposition by local monastic communities concentrated in Palestine, led by the monk Sophronius and his student Maximus, both of whom insisted on the duality of wills and natures. After Sophronius’s death, Maximus worked to widen and render more visible the division between himself and the imperial unionists by refining and solidifying his tendency’s theological doctrine of dyotheletism. Though at first the difference between the “single” vs “double” operation of Christ’s wills appeared more as a matter of preference, Maximus hammered out and refined the doctrine of dyotheletism, insisting upon the two natures and two wills of Christ and thereby the “the full, rational, human will in Christ.” Maximus soon became the standard bearer for those monks and bishops resistant to what they saw as the domination of imperial logic, allying with the Roman Popes and holding a council in Rome to assert the heterodoxy of the Emperor and Patriarch. As Phil Booth observes, “Constantinopolitan failures in the terrestrial sphere fueled the notion that imperial doctrine was a cause of divine disfavor, and on the other, the articulation of a doctrinal opposition established the intellectual basis upon which political agitation could be legitimized.”20 From the provinces, “where imperial power was increasingly ineffective” and bishops were assuming “an ever more prominent position as the leaders of local communities,” the doctrine of the irreducible hypostasis resistant to the impersonal logic of nature served as an offensive weapon by dissident monks and bishops against the Byzantine state.21

The threat of “full-scale Western secession from Constantinopolitan rule” theologically transposed the social contradictions of the category of the person driving social transformation throughout the empire.22 Theologically, preserving the irreducibility of Christ’s person—that he may unconfusedly unite human and divine natures while nevertheless remaining irreducible to either—was the theological weapon of resistance against an imperial core asserting a false unity that suppressed differences among persons. Maximus’s dyotheletism was wielded offensively within the same struggle waged by the peasants. Maximus could not concede to the monothelite that Christ could have one nature but two wills because to do so would be to imply that Christ’s hypostasis is reducible to a nature. “Maximus insisted…that will (like activity) was natural, not hypostatic…Our capacity to will is natural, *how* we will, the process of willing, is personal.”23 By contrast to the dyothelite two-natures-two-wills of Christ, the monothelite formula centers an imperial, false hypostasis of the Basileus—the Basileus as the single *who* in whom the many imperial subjects are united—achieving this unity by reducing personal will to impersonal nature and subordinating the “many” to the “one.” Whereas the unity of Christ’s hypostasis is realized through irreducible difference, the unity of the Basileus’s hypostasis is actualized by the suppression of real difference. Maximus rejected this monotheletism, theologically registering a logic of personality subsumable to imperial administration by the false hypostasis of the Basileus. For Maximus, the irreducibility of the person’s hypostasis can never be totally subsumed to or reduced to nature, for to do so would be to somehow subject Christ to and explainable by the terms of the natural order. Yet at the same time Christ may only be approached by that same natural order whose person totally transcends it. The contradiction driving peasant assertion was, at the theological level, the very same one animating monastic resistance: for the imperial core to administrate effectively, it must center the person as the basic administrative unit, yet centering the person risked exceeding its administrative logic, threatening to widen theological division and destabilize the very countryside it was working to consolidate.

Maximus’s theology of the irreducible hypostasis, grounded through the struggles of the peasantry and monastic and episcopal rebellions, is animated by the utopian desire for difference against an administrative logic of the imperial core. In Part I, we identified in Gregory of Nyssa’s theology an attempt to symbolically stabilize chaotic difference within the fourth-century Cappadocian countryside through ultimate integration. In Maximus we identify the inverse: Maximus centers heterogeneity and difference in the face of a homogenizing imperial state working to consolidate and solidify in defense of foreign invasion from without and peasant rebellion from within. Though Maximus was no anti-imperialist, the logic of his theology exceeds its formal conclusions: at once appealing to imperial order at his trial while refusing to disavow a theology that undermined the consensus sought by the Emperor and his court.24 Maximus being canonized and his theological revolution of dyotheletism recognized by the Byzantine state sits ironically next to his unceremonious torture, mutilation, and death by the state, recuperating his contradictory legacy. The unity-through-difference constituting Christ’s Logos and realized through the encounter between his logoi latently carries a critique of any overarching imperial logic that attempts to violently subordinate particular persons to abstract universals. While Maximus’s social formation as a monk within a broader social totality precluding collective political agency would limit his theology of the hypostatic identity to the contemplative life, the emergence of a global capitalist society driven by anti-imperialist struggle would come to reveal the potentially revolutionary kernel of his theology.

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THE BYZANTINE BASILEUS BECOMES LATE CAPITALIST LEVIATHAN

The class struggles of late-20th century global capitalism would retain but transform the imperial logic to which Maximus’s theology was responding. Jordan Daniel Wood’s retrieval of Maximus is propelled by concerns similar to Maximus’s own pertaining to the inviolability of the irreducible person resistant to administrative logic. The crucial difference being, however, that Wood’s theological retrieval is made possible by the struggles of the non-white working- and emergent middle-classes that destabilized the Fordist able-bodied white working-class subject. Although enforced by qualitatively different mechanisms, late capitalist state violence and its impersonal, administrative logic provides the historical perch disclosing the utopian drive of irreducible personality within Maximus’s theology. Wood’s retrieval of Maximus radicalizes Maximus’s hypostatic theology in a social totality in which struggle is at once collectively understood yet also irreducibly singular.

The transition from the postwar governance of the mid-20th century to the neoliberalism of the late-20th century was driven by the struggles and transformation of the American proletariat. Per Part I, the centralization of production under the Fordist regime of accumulation created central sites of leverage for the working-class to destabilize postwar capitalist society. The integration and unionization of the manufacturing industry socialized labor so thoroughly that its mobility created a crisis of labor discipline for managers from the Radio Corporation of America in Indiana to General Electric in New York.25 Crucial to this destabilization was the entrance of new working-class subjects into formal wage-labor, particularly white and Black women. Kim Moody writes that perhaps “the most important changes [to the postwar labor composition] were the mass entry of married women and African Americans into the workforce of the nation’s major private industries and its growing public sector.”26 The crisis of discipline not only challenged manufacturing plants and factories, but also business unions, which enforced Jim Crow segregation on the shopfloor and confined all worker disputes to “bread and butter” issues that avoided overtly political issues.27 Once the working-class grew mobile enough to decenter the union as the primary weapon of class struggle, their struggles forced the state to restructure through civil rights legislation that facilitated non-white and women’s entrance into hitherto barred occupations.

The changing terrain of class struggle after the 1970s converged in strange ways with the seventh century Byzantine peasant struggles. The changing terrain of class struggle decentered the white male breadwinner working-class subject, shifting gravity towards one far more mobile, non-white, and female. The mobility won by the new working-class was leveraged to wring civil rights concessions from the state, combining “labor and civil rights law” to facilitate entrance into professional and clerical industries that previously barred entry based on race and sex.28 Yet, at the same time, these victories forcing the capitalist state to restructure opened another theater of class struggle, as the state (in an uneven process) attempted to discipline labor on this same terrain of mobility: “color blind” state policy facilitated police occupation of racialized working-class neighborhoods intensified even as affirmative action policy allowed more non-white people to enter middle-class professional industries and more Black Americans entered government since Reconstruction.29 Like the seventh century Basileus state, the development of the late 20th century Leviathan was driven by the contradiction of the person: on the one hand, the legal category of person granted the state powers to further objectify, administer, and discipline working-class subjects, working to isolate them from traditional social forms of power; on the other hand, such efforts amplified confrontations between the state and working-class, delegitimizing the state as neutral arbiter of legality even as the racialized working-class leveraged the category of person to wring more rights.

The key difference between the Basileus and Leviathan, however, is that where the former buttressed the rights of the peasant qua peasant, Leviathan enforced the rights of the non-white and woman subject qua abstract individuality. Leviathan enforced these rights to the extent to which they may better act as workers (more often professionals) who may buy and sell their labor-power. The late capitalist state enforced a universality that suppressed material inequalities mediated by race and gender in order to enforce the anonymity of market-based participation. At the same time that this was a victory for non-white legal subjects, this made detecting material discrimination more difficult, as such discrimination was no longer personally enforced by the Jim Crow state and now impersonally enabled by seemingly unbiased market forces.

What some “class-first” leftists came to deride as identity politics became a critical front from which to struggle against the state on the terms of who and what constitutes the person. This struggle was fought on a terrain far larger than that waged by the postwar business union: in neighborhoods, prisons, hospitals, universities, and civic groups, class struggle became so broad that class alone could no longer bear the diversity of struggles as the working-class forced the state to bear responsibility for its social reproduction.30 The struggle of non-white working- and middle-class constituencies over and against the state provoked deeper meditations on what the person could be beyond the purview of the state. From the Reagan counterrevolution of the 1980s to the urban rebellions of the 2010s, the state’s recognition of women and the Black community as constituencies provoked a desire to be more than constituencies. There arose a complex dynamic where Blackness and sexual identity were leveraged for workplace protections, and at the same time the repulsion towards one’s racial and sexual identity to be mediated by the state, especially when such protections were rarely afforded to racialized working-class constituencies. The more Blackness or femininity became abstract universals through which subjects could attain state protections, the more intense the desire to appropriate these identities in personal modes irreducible to state administration.

Wood’s historical study of Maximus, published in the wake of the urban uprisings of the 2010s and 2020s that delegitimized the carceral state, is rendered legible by the same problematic of universality-through-difference that structured the uprisings. Wood’s concern with centering difference as the medium through which true universality is achieved theologically registers the changing form of class struggle. This is because through the decades, proletarian struggles came to surpass the scope of traditional intermediary organizations—like the late-nineteenth and twentieth-century mass parties, trade unions, and civil organizations—and coalesced around the street uprising, whose capacity to draw together irreducibly different struggles on a larger scale than the trade union and mass party more directly threatened the carceral logic of the state. Organization remains a necessity, but must materialize through the constellation of distinct struggles in the fulfillment center, the policed streets of the deindustrialized racialized suburb, and the heavily-surveilled inner-city block. The mobility and fragmentation of the American working-class has so far resisted any form of organization that imposes an abstract universal or strategy that cannot be hypostasized by the unique struggles of those on the ground. Wood’s retrieval of Maximus—his preoccupation with the distinction between Logos and logoi, his shifting emphasis from integration to encounter, his critique of the participatory logic of Neoplatonic emanation—structurally encodes the same social contradiction animating the contemporary form of class struggle. It is a contradiction that resists administrative logic from both the reactionary state and the social democratic left: the more universality is imposed from without, the more inflamed the resistance towards universality. Universality can only be achieved through irreducible difference, not by subsuming it.

But the question of how to bring these irreducibly distinct struggles into a form that does not extinguish or deradicalize them is what Wood’s historical theology, by virtue of its contemplative form, cannot yet answer. Wood’s retrieval of Maximus remains limited if only because Maximus wrote of personal identity through the contemplative discourse of monastic life. The retrieval of Maximus must not only be mediated by the radically transformed totality of late capitalist life, but the multiplicity of identities through which the working-class struggles. Maximus’s theology of unity-through-difference and irreducible personal identity requires flesh if its radical implications are to be fully understood. For this, we must turn to the work of Black feminist Hortense Spillers.

THE MIDDLE PASSAGE AND INCARNATIONAL CATASTROPHE

Few modern intellectual traditions have attended more seriously to the crisis of personality under late capitalism than the Black feminist tradition. Spillers’s “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe” (1987) reflects upon the catastrophe the Middle Passage introduced in the early modern period that continues to structure Black American kinship, racial subject formation, and the hollowed identity at the center of American identity. Particularly, Spillers insists that the struggle of Black women at once radically discloses the hollowness of white supremacy and the irruptive personality of Black women whose identity appropriates and exceeds “Blackness” and “femaleness.” Spillers’s figure of the slave ship registers this hollowness with devastating precision: the violent labor of reducing African bodies to quantifiable “cargo” confesses the order’s failure to actually extinguish the hypostatic positivity of the Black enslaved it claims to have reduced to flesh. Spillers challenges Wood’s retrieval of Maximus to enflesh the Incarnational logic of Christ, reading the diversity of struggle as disclosing a deeper universality than any model of integration could supply.

Spillers reflects upon how the tyranny of the abstract universal has formed and shaped the identity of Black women. She begins her essay claiming that she is a marked woman, providing a list of sexualized and racist tropes and stereotypes: “Peaches’ and ‘Brown Sugar,’ ‘Sapphire’ and ‘Earth Mother,’ ‘Aunty,’ ‘Granny,’ God’s ‘Holy Fool, a ‘Miss Ebony First,’ or ‘Black Woman at the Podium.’”31 As a Black woman, Spillers situates herself as a site of “overdetermined nominative properties” that are so loaded with “mythical prepossession” that discerning the personal “who” from the impersonal “what” requires stripping down the layers of historically determined “attenuated meanings” and find “whatever marvels of [her] own inventiveness.” In the Moynihan tradition that Spillers critiques, the Black woman becomes a sort of depository for American white society’s sins, the reason for the dysfunction of the Black family in relation to the white family.

Yet at the same time this movement only mystifies white society’s “actual mutilation, dismemberment, and exile” of the Black body and suppression of real, personal difference to erupt. Spillers critiques Daniel Moynihan and his report on the dysfunction of the “Negro family” and, summarizing that his policy recommendations share the same presupposition that “Black males should reign because that is the way the majority culture carries things out.”32 Moynihan appeals to the administrative logic of white society to denounce the matriarchal structure of the Black family. But this appeal to an abstract norm of dual-parent households and patriarchal authority to which Black persons ought conform to only suppresses white society’s role in breaking African ties of kinship and culture, breaking down the African body into Black “flesh.” This atomizing of the enslaved body into “divided flesh” works to destroy the possibility for the discovery of “relatedness between human personality and its anatomical features, between one human personality and another, between human personality and cultural institutions.”33 Flesh has no family; flesh has no origin; flesh may be divided, bought and sold, commodified.

But the tyranny of the abstract universal, the suffering of administrative imposition, does not exhaust the hypostatic becoming of the African female body made Black flesh. Suggestively, Spillers raises the symbolical and material reality of the slave ship in the Middle Passage as the site of undifferentiated identity. On the one hand, those on the slave ship are undifferentiated by virtue of their reduction of bodies to commodified flesh. On the other hand, the slave ship also symbolically figures an unrealized and “unclaimed richness of possibility” that through its journey across the Atlantic is also nowhere at all, whose Black bodies are not yet “‘counted’/’accounted,’ or differentiated, until [the slave ship’s] movement gains the land thousands of miles away from the point of departure.”34 The nowhere-ness engendered by the catastrophe of the Middle Passage, the American Black condition of kinlessness, itself becomes the site of radical disclosure through the struggle of Black women. Where the “the fatherly reprieve,” the presence of the white father, is able to temporize the labor of the white mother within the white family, the absence of the Black father forced by slavery, Jim Crow, and mass incarceration forces the Black son into a more immediate relation to the mother, a position that allows him to realize that it is “the heritage of the mother that the African-American male must regain as an aspect of his own personhood—the power of ‘yes’ to the ‘female’ within.”35 Such a disclosure proposes to reconfigure the administered universal of gendered relation as such. The Black male’s enforced and immediate proximity to the dispossessed mother presents an alternative relation to the “female within” that the white male’s “fatherly reprieve” cannot allow. The administration of the abstract universal, of “Peaches” and “Brown Sugar,” becomes appropriated by the Black female social subject in a mode personal to her that exceeds the imperial logic of white supremacy and patriarchy. “Actually claiming the monstrosity…which her culture imposes in blindness, ‘Sapphire’ might rewrite after all a radically different text for a female empowerment.”36

Spillers’s reading of the Middle Passage reverses the causality between event and person that bears structural similarity to Maximus’s relationship between nature and hypostasis. White society (in this case the Moynihan Report) reads Black society as object or flesh, subject to external travesty from the Middle Passage to Jim Crow. The Black community mechanically and automatically takes on a matriarchal character to survive or endure these catastrophes. Spillers reverses this reading: the horrors of the Middle Passage, slavery, Jim Crow are at once suffered but also personally appropriated by Black women in a manner that exceeds the administrative logic of the system of white supremacy. The state’s very attempt to reduce bodies to flesh only renders the resistance of the Black body’s reduction to flesh all the more glaring, revealing the tenuousness of the imperial capitalist order. In Maximus’s language, the abstract universals of “Blackness” and “femaleness” can only gesture towards the sheer, positive existence of the hypostasis. But for Maximus, these abstract universals are still akin to ontological givens. In this sense, Spillers actually moves beyond Maximus, dissolving the ontological “given” into the active reclamation of one’s suffering that constitutes a social enactment rather than ontological given. The positivity of Maximus’s hypostasis always already exceeds and appropriates these universals in a personal mode resistant to wholesale or complete domination. However, for Spillers, the ontological positivity of the hypostasis must be one consciously grasped, appropriated, and enacted in a manner that bestows social flesh onto Maximus’s hypostasis. What constitutes the given, ontological positivity of the hypostasis is its being personally grasped as such only through the horror of history and the crucified cosmos.

The struggle between patriarchal white society and Black women becomes the site of a radical double disclosure. From the standpoint of the patriarchal order, it discloses the brittleness and particularity of the administrative universal. The very fact that the dominant order must work so hard to reduce embodied subjects to commodified flesh already confesses its failure to totally reduce personal hypostatic existence to abstract universality. For Spillers, the Black female subject presents a problem for the “traditional symbolics of female gender,” their existence gesturing towards a new social subject whose existence threatens the social order. The particular configuration of “Black” and “woman” yields a social subject that at once grounds and destabilizes the order of capitalist patriarchy rounded out by white supremacy. Grounding, because the social order is constituted by the marginalization of the Black woman as materially and socially other to the white male subject who is politically central to American capitalist society. Destabilizing, because that very order co-constitutes the very subjectivity whose existence poses a threat to the administrative logics it enforces. Spillers’s argument exceeds even earlier Black Radical thinkers like Fanon, who struggle to capture the potential threat of the Black female subject through the axis of racialization alone. Racialization alone cannot capture the unique wound of “ungendering” wrought by the Middle Passage and slavery.37 The existence of the Black female subject destabilizes the abstract universal as applied to persons and discloses that the instability is actually immanent to the abstract universal itself. The intersection of identities (“Black,” “female,” “enslaved”) not only fails to capture the irreducibility of the person, but even fails to capture itself. And this failure to capture only destabilizes when Black women personally reclaim and appropriate their suffering as irreducibly their own.

From the standpoint of the Black female subject, their suffering discloses their irreducibility to the administrative universal. Ontologically, the Black female more than survives the suppression of patriarchal law and colonial violence, living in radical excess that appropriates this suffering in a personal mode that the suppression cannot determine or exhaust. Yet, crucially, this is not a foreclosed certainty for Spillers. Spillers ends her essay oriented towards the future in a manner that emphatically affirms the unaccountable and inexhaustible becoming of what it means to be human. “This different cultural text actually reconfigures, in historically ordained discourse, certain representational potentialities for African-Americans: 1) motherhood as female blood-rite is outraged, is denied, at the very same time that it becomes the founding term of a human and social enactment; 2) a dual fatherhood is set in motion, comprised of the African father’s banished name and body and the captor father’s mocking presence.”38 By at once preserving the openness of the future and insisting upon the horrors of the present and past, Spillers goes further than Wood’s Maximus in preserving the irreducible “thatness” and multiplicity of the logoi in such a way that opens up depths of becoming that historical theology alone could not disclose.

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THE LOGOS’S IRRUPTION OF HIS LOGOI, REFUSAL OF ENCOUNTER

Spillers enfleshes the most radical claim at the heart of Wood’s retrieval of Maximus: that “creation *is* Incarnation.”39 Because Christ grounds both his divine (uncreated) and human (created) natures in his hypostatic identity, there is not a moment when either the divine or human nature “precede” his personal and historical identity of Jesus of Nazareth. Reading the prologue to John’s Gospel literally (“Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made”), then the very moment the Son incarnates *is* the moment the world was created. Christ’s absolute identification between divine and human natures through his person at the same time grounds their absolute distinction. “The second person of the Trinity, the Word, condescended to make himself identical to human nature, and that act was the very creation of that human nature.”40 Christ’s historical acts of walking on water, healing the sick, feeding the hungry are acts of creation that not only constitute himself, but also the cosmos itself.

Through Spillers, Christ’s body becomes the site by which the world achieves enfleshment. The abstract universals of “Galilean,” “man,” “Roman subject,” imposed by the social order are at once exceeded, appropriated, and created through his living and breathing person. Christ on the Cross does not become simply a site of human suffering, but the site of human suffering that is at once infinitely personalized and unrepeatable by virtue of his hypostasis and also completely universal in his human nature. We understand our own personal suffering through the suffering of others. We recognize our own suffering through the suffering of another precisely because their suffering is personally not our own. This infinite difference between our suffering and another’s is what allows us to more radically identify their suffering with ours, more deeply disclosing our suffering precisely through the irreducible multiplicity of ways through which domination is lived. Christ’s Resurrection does not happen in spite of his suffering, but through it. Only by identifying with his suffering on the Cross in our own personal way may the depths of his hypostatic positivity be appreciated. We cannot understand Christ resurrected without knowing Christ disfigured, mutilated, and brutalized. And yet, we cannot know the Logos of Christ tortured without coming to identify with the torture of his infinitely different logoi: the undocumented imprisoned, the Black woman abused, the Gazan refugee assaulted. Only by identifying ourselves through struggle with the imprisoned, abused, and assaulted may we understand that they—and we—are more than their suffering, that they—and we—exceed their suffering, and that they—and we—disclose the poverty of the prevailing social order. Their hypostatic excess and struggle incarnates a shared social world, presenting real emancipatory possibility through the multiplicity of different struggles that threaten to overwhelm white supremacy, familial patriarchy, and colonial violence.

Through Maximus, Spillers’s account of the Middle Passage becomes the violent and catastrophic event through which Incarnation nevertheless erupts. There is never a moment where the Black slave passively suffers, survives, or endures the pains of the whip and dehumanization of the ledger book. Through their life, they present the possibility of reclaiming the wound wrought by the violence that attempts to reduce and suppress personality. Maximus’s logoi are transformed into irreducible and inexhaustible sites of irruption. Their hypostatic becoming appropriates administrative universals to more radically become who they are, always posing an existential threat to an imperial order whose patriarchal and white supremacist foundations they throw into crisis. The Black female slave in antebellum Mississippi, the sharecropper father under Jim Crow South Carolina, the imprisoned Black daughter under neoliberal Louisiana radically disclose by their positive existence and in their infinitely irreducible ways the brittleness, callousness, and thinness of the order.

Here, Wood’s Maximus, transformed by the insight of Spillers, theologically reframes the violence of patriarchy, colonialism, and white supremacy from the paucity of information to the refusal of encounter. The imperial and administrative logic of racial capitalism exists as a means of delaying, diverting, managing, and suppressing true encounter between persons. Wood’s reading of Maximus proposes that evil pertains to “the sensual enjoyment of material objects of knowledge” in ignorance of “the benevolent Cause of beings.”41 To enjoy something in itself, nature qua nature, is to refuse encounter with an object whose existence exceeds its objectivity. To dissolve the Igbo and Yoruban tribesmen into the undifferentiated identity of “Blackness,” to rest content in identifying the body as reducible to flesh, is evil. For Spillers, “The European males who laded and captained these galleys and who policed and corralled these human beings…and for three centuries of human life, were not curious about this “cargo” that bled, packed like so many live sardines among the immovable objects” was an “obscene blindness.”42 The suffering of these “Black” slaves, the logoi, radically disclosed not only the suffering of Christ the Logos, but also the obscene blindness and hollowness of the British, Dutch, and Spanish sailors who policed them. The suffering of Black men and women upon the Middle Passage does not “add” to the suffering of Christ, but deepens and discloses it, in turn disclosing their suffering as the only site through which the Christian may enter the life of Christ.

This encounter is nothing less than the eruption of the world resurrected out of the cosmos crucified. If the world comes to be only through Christ’s kenotic self-giving into history, and we ourselves are his logoi, then the world’s resurrection becomes visible only through the identification of our struggle with that of the widow, the orphan, and the stranger. Throwing ourselves into the struggle of the ICE detainee is revealed to be more than a political act, but a cosmological one. We participate in the re-creation of the oppressed and ourselves, and through this joint struggle both inaugurate the ongoing resurrection of Christ’s Body, the glorified cosmos. This radical disclosure through the encounter of struggle between ourselves and the dispossessed is itself the medium through which Christ’s cosmos is resurrected out of crucifixion. Christ’s Logos lives wherever the logoi recognize each other across the infinite difference of their suffering. The alleged “not-yet” of the Resurrection shifts from being a future event to be waited for to being the already present flames consuming the crucified order. Christ’s work is still at hand because our work remains to be done.

But how exactly does one enter the life of Christ? What mediates Maximus’s hypostatic givenness and Spillers’s enactment of the Black female subject? John’s Gospel offers the key: “My Father is still working, and I am working also.” Labor is at once the living actuality through which the ontological hypostasis pours itself out and by which the hypostasis recognizes itself as kenotic excess, the medium through which the laborer may recognize themselves as more than themselves, in excess of the social relations through which they’re constituted. Yet labor can only be understood historically, through the historically specific labor of the dispossessed and the marginalized. But by what means does one precisely enter the suffering labor of the Gazan widow, the Black American orphan, and the undocumented stranger? By virtue of its form, Wood’s retrieval of Maximus can say little about this even as it becomes grounded in the Black feminist tradition. Maximus’s monastic contemplation precludes the possibility of collective political agency. While Wood radicalizes Maximus’s theology, the discipline of historical theology, by virtue of its contemplative form, struggles to explicate the material means by which one may enter the life of the suffering. Yet, nevertheless, Wood’s theology via Spillers’s Black feminism gestures towards the next part of our series, where the central site of Christological eruption through which the radically marginalized late capitalist subject will be disclosed—class struggle.

“Responsibility, then, is the touchstone by which freedom can be measured in reality, by which freedom can be imputed, as the lawyers put it. But if responsibility truly is the critical zone of freedom, we must say that today there is a complete mismatch between responsibility and influence.” — Theodor Adorno, Lectures on History and Freedom

The Saint Sergius of Radonezh Church by Nikolai Roerich

INTRODUCTION

If universalism resembles a cognitive map of capitalist totality, then the question becomes how responsibility is conceptualized and distributed across that totality. In our previous essay, we framed modern theology’s renewed interest in universalism as one attempt to cognitively map the global crisis of late capitalism. But the emergence of universalism does not occur in a vacuum. The resurgence of universalism over the past couple decades posits itself as a reaction against infernalism, i.e., the eschatology that hell exists as a site of eternal separation from God. The contemporary eschatology debate strikes at a central contradiction that appears in both theology and political economy—what does it mean to take responsibility for a world beyond one’s immediate agency and that escapes direct representation?

We argue here that both universalism and infernalism not only attempt to resolve global fragmentation at the symbolic level, but are engaged in a symbolic struggle over how responsibility should be organized under late capitalism. Our analysis centers David Bentley Hart’s *That All Shall Be Saved*, arguing that the work may be read as registering, at the level of theological form, a key contradiction that also characterizes social democracy, pertaining to the manner in which difference is formally integrated yet materially neutralized. Deeper than this, Hart’s universalism and infernalism respectively absolutize one pole of a deeper contradiction—universal commensurability and singular moral distinction—reproducing at the theological level the contradiction between exchange-value and use-value.

Both Hart’s universalism and infernalism transcode the crisis of responsibility within late capitalism, displacing it in a way that only intensifies the contradiction. In this way, universalism and infernalism symbolically figure a struggle between competing organizational logics of late American capitalist society. Hart’s universalism of integration through inclusion both legitimates the social democratic imaginary of the multinational, publicly-incorporated capitalism that contains antagonism through integration, while also registering its key contradiction of managed but neutralized difference. By contrast, infernalism symbolically resolves the global capitalism’s representational opacity by reasserting personal responsibility, evoking in a theological mode the moral economy of the petty proprietor. Because neither can fully resolve the material contradiction that generates them, they exist in negative dependence upon each other.

What unites both universalism and infernalism in a relation of negative dependence is the common set of conditions through which they conceptualize responsibility—the law of value. The opposition between infernalism and universalism is structurally homologous to the contradiction between use-value and exchange-value, insofar as each pole isolates a moment of the commodity-form and absolutizes it as a total explanatory principle. Infernalism, like use-value, insists upon the moral incommensurability and singularity of the individual, negating universal equivalence and absolutizing difference i.e. the elect and non-elect. By contrast, Hart’s universalism centers ultimate reconciliation at the ontological level in which difference is preserved insofar as it is reconcilable with the single universal end of Christ. This vision is homologous with exchange-value, positing the ultimate commensurability and universality of all particular labors.

By “difference,” this essay signifies several overlapping registers: the ontological difference between persons; the philosophical difference between the particular and the universal; social difference as historically mediated; and qualitative difference within the Marxist expression of use-value. The tensions between these overlapping levels of difference are not accidental, but integral to how difference is lived and conceptualized under capitalist society.

What grounds this homology between universalism/infernalism and exchange-value/use-value is the manner in which difference is registered, particularly through race. Within capitalist society, race has historically been the modality through which class is lived.1 Race is not merely one site of antagonism among others, but a historically central mechanism that articulates the contradiction between qualitative difference and quantitative equivalence. At once, capital absolutizes the qualitative difference between white laborer and black slave; at the same time, it renders difference abstract, reducing qualitative differences between persons to abstract racial categories. In this sense, race is internal to the value-form and one of its central historical mediations. It does not merely mediate the contradiction between qualitative difference and quantitative equivalence, but functions as one of the primary historical mechanisms through which this contradiction is stabilized and reproduced.

Here, universalism and infernalism register these contradictions in distinct ways that reveal their own historical limitations. The infernalist vision manages difference through exclusion and partition, figuring an imaginary akin to white property ownership buoyed by a racialized propertyless working-class. By contrast, Hart’s universalism registers difference through integration, admitting no discordance that cannot be reconciled with the final unity, and figuring a social democratic vision in which racial identity is managed and harmonized within the body politic. Both visions displace rather than resolve the contradiction of managed difference within the late capitalist imaginary. Read in this light, each pole corresponds to a distinct mode of organizing racial antagonism: infernalism through the absolutization of qualitative difference (homologous with use-value); and universalism through the abstraction of difference into commensurable equivalence (homologous with exchange-value), each thereby reproducing in distinct form the same underlying contradiction.

ALL ARE WELCOME

David Bentley Hart’s universalist vision of the cosmos seeks to resolve a central contradiction that infernalism has failed to resolve—how a merciful God may bring about justice in an unjust cosmos; how individual responsibility for one’s actions may be integrated with collective accountability. “The great majority of defenders of the idea of a real hell of eternal torment…never really get around to addressing properly the question of whether we can make moral sense of God’s acts in the great cosmic drama of creation, redemption, and damnation.”2 Hart is sensitive to the question of whether one may truly love a God “who has elected to create a reality in which everlasting torture is a possible final destiny for any of his creatures.”3

This concern structures Hart’s theological anthropology grounded in Gregory of Nyssa’s cosmic Body of Christ, in which each person mirrors and recapitulates the universal Body of which Christ is head. For Hart, the notion that some may be eternally damned is not simply subjectively disturbing, but one that ruptures the concrete solidarity within the human community, whose members are absolutely oriented toward union with God. “For Gregory, then, there can be no true human unity, nor even any perfect unity between God and humanity, except in terms of the concrete solidarity of all persons in that complete community that is, alone, the true image of God.”4 I do not just live in myself, but through all persons. Following from this, an act of harm done to one is an act of harm towards myself and to all. “After all, what is a person other than a whole history of associations, loves, memories, attachments, and affinities? Who are we, other than all the others who have made us who we are, and to whom we belong as much as they to us? We *are* those others.”5 These stakes render visible not only the integrity of the human community, but the stakes concerning one’s very capacity to love God fully—I cannot love God fully knowing that I myself dwell in hell through another.

Hart’s theological anthropology of the person is organized by the principle that responsibility is fundamentally corporate. Individual accountability may only be adequately grasped via the collective, historical brokenness of humanity wrought by sin. Hart’s universalist eschatology registers material brokenness by ontological unity in the form of the collectivity of humanity taking responsibility for each and every act of evil its members have committed.

Yet Hart’s emphasis on corporate responsibility leaves the role *difference* plays in representing legible cosmos ambiguous. While certain critics of Hart’s universalism emphasize that his vision risks losing the value of contingency and particularity, these critiques rarely devote space to why Hart situates difference and particularity in the manner he does. Hart’s eschatology takes deadly seriously Jesus’s warning that what you do to “the least of these” you do to him (Matthew 25:40). Read through Hart’s universalism, Jesus appears to assert the ultimate ontological unity that shines forth despite material difference. Jesus’s flesh is in direct continuity the flesh of the Gazan refugee, the ICE detainee, and the homeless mother. Such a position would implicate a direct commensurability between the one body of Christ and the bodies of all.

This ambiguity unfolds in the manner by which Hart treats the ontological weight of difference and uniqueness. When outlining Gregory’s vision of the cosmic Body of Christ, he states that Christ “join[s] each particular person, each unique inflection of the plērōma’s beauty, to himself.”6 But at the same time Hart is careful to argue that this uniqueness is not the defining feature of the Body, but the divine light that is “the one undifferentiated ground of our existence, not the particularity of our personal existences in and with one another.” Our personality is not accidental to our being, like a “chrysalis to be shed.” However, it is not what is most essential to us even as it constitutes us; Hart tentatively opts for the language of analogy, positing that particular personalities “are dynamic analogies of the simplicity of the divine life of love, and so belong eternally to that corporate identity that is, for Gregory of Nyssa, at once the “Human Being” of the first creation and also the eternal body of Christ.”7 Hart appears to sufficiently preserve difference such that true distinction between the world and God protected and thereby a relationship of *freedom* remains possible, but porous enough that the love of God may erupt forth and reveal the ontological unity that binds humanity together through and by the resurrected Person of Christ.

Hart’s universalist vision therefore organizes responsibility such that the actions of one necessarily follow from the actions of all. We are moments participating in the realization of the universal Body, our actions unfolding beyond ourselves and permeating the cosmic flesh of historical humanity. Hart’s vision overcomes material division by registering it as ontological unity, but whether difference retains a materiality distinct from the universal, or whether it remains formal is a question that animates the text of Hart’s argument. While Hart’s eschatology collectivizes responsibility but risks leaving the status of difference unstable, the infernalist position registers difference in a distinct key.

THE GATED COMMUNITY FROM HELL

Where Hart’s universalism attains ontological unity, the infernalist position absolutizes difference as a means of organizing totality. Though some critics of Hart characterize his universalism as a “relentless pursuit of metaphysical clarity and coherence,” it would be a mistake to contrast infernalism as an eschatology that rejects totality.8 Like universalism, infernalism is invested towards making sense of the unrepresentational character of the cosmos. Rather, it is more productive to frame what distinguishes infernalism not by its rejection of social totality, but by its partitioning of totality as a means of organizing moral responsibility. Whereas Hart’s universalism integrates every particular person into the cosmic Body, infernalism integrates by way of ultimate exclusion—the elect and non-elect are negatively united with one another in a polarity.

This sharp distinction between the blessed and the damned manifests the moral singularity of responsibility within infernalist eschatology. Hart makes explicit this antinomy in his condemnation of the theological position within the tradition that “the knowledge of the torments of the damned will increase the felicity of the blessed in heaven.”9 For Hart, this view—one he takes many American Evangelicals, Reformed Calvinists, and certain Catholics to hold—expresses on the infernalist’s part a sort of libidinal enjoyment, affirming their moral righteousness over those who lumped in with the damned. “It gives them a sense of belonging to a very small and select company, a very special club, and they positively relish the prospect of a whole eternity in which to enjoy the impotent envy of all those writhing, resentful souls that have been permanently consigned to an inferior neighborhood outside the gates. That is the sort of prestige that cannot be bought where the common people shop.”10 The visual imagery of the “inferior neighborhood outside the gates” and where “the common people shop” already hints at the class composition that Hart has in mind, a thread that will be taken up later in this essay.

Of interest to us and what remains unthematized by Hart is the function of *difference* within his sketching of the moral economy of infernalism. Here, the infernalist’s libidinal satisfaction is grounded in having what the damned are denied. The damned’s lack negatively constitutes the infernalist’s blessedness as the elect is negatively defined by the non-elect. We see here how exclusion within infernalism does not negate cosmic totality, but is really a unity-through-exclusion. In difference, there is incommensurability. The blessed and the damned are united by way of this unity-through-exclusion which unites by polarizing, unifies through division. This incommensurability organizes responsibility through moral singularity and simplicity on the part of both blessed and damned—my virtues and vices are completely and totally my own and may not be laid at the feet of any other. For Hart, this vision confirms a “thoroughly modern” notion of “absolutely unpremised liberty” that assures the old holding it that they really are the unconditioned, absolute captain of their destiny. But the infernalist’s desire for unpremised liberty may well express an even deeper desire for moral singularity and an incommensurable difference between oneself and all other members of the human community.

MATERIAL ESCHATOLOGY

Although Hart’s argument has been charged with the characterization of emphasizing metaphysics to the detriment of other considerations, the form of Hart’s argument and the frequency with which he transitions from the ontological to the material discloses deeper material concerns than critics have previously been willing to admit.11 Hart’s book does not seek to only delegitimize a particular eschatology, but the social composition to which infernalism is structurally homologous: the white American small-proprietor class and the late capitalist organizational imaginary of personal domination to which they hold. In its place, Hart’s universalism bears a structural resemblance to a social democratic political imaginary that is in analogue with his notion of corporate responsibility.

Helpful here is once more bringing in Fredric Jameson’s interpretive framing, reading theology as resolving at a symbolic level objective contradictions. Specifically in this essay, we emphasize Jameson’s claim that every idea operates in a “double sense” at once providing a coherent worldview in its own right that also legitimates the ideological and material imaginary of a particular class while at once delegitimating that of another class.12 In this sense, nearly all of Hart’s critics, by grasping the content and not the *form* of his argument, overlook the degree to which the material animates the metaphysical for Hart—but also how the metaphysical itself is conditioned by the material in ways only recoverable at the level of form.

Hart often expresses metaphysical claims through concrete history and social relations, oscillating between the material and the ontological. On the ontological impossibility of committing evil with perfect freedom, Hart uses Hitler as someone for whom the finitude of the will navigating a fragmented and opaque historical reality can make any of us into the monstrous administrators of empire13. In another place, Hart comments upon how the opacity of the historical world generates the conditions for persons to be socially formed in monstrous ways: “I cannot quite forget, or consider it utterly irrelevant, that he was born into a world so thoroughly ruined that a child can be born one day in poverty, suffer from some horrible and incurable congenital disease, die in agony…What precisely did that wicked man, then, ever really know of the Good?”14 And in illustrating his ontological claim of the person being a subsistence of relationality in others, Hart selects the example of the modern prison, a place which does not just punish the perpetrator, but also the family and friends of the perpetrator. “True, most of us do not spare a thought for the murderer in prison…but it is also true that that murderer’s brother, mother, father, sister, child, wife, or friend must think about him, and must suffer grief at the thought of what he has become and the end he has reached.”15 Hart endeavors to show how the evils of one possess a side to them that reveals themselves to be the responsibility of another.

More pressing than the presence of this or that material example is arriving at what drives Hart to form his argument in such a way that it *must* translate material fragmentation into ultimate ontological unity. Though critics frame Hart’s argument as beginning from ontology and ascending to the material, the thread of interdependence uniting his examples reveals that his metaphysical claims are themselves mediated by the historical experience of systematic interdependence. By way of the selection of examples, Hart’s universalism registers a historical transformation in how modern subjects experience responsibility, elevating it to the level of ontology. When Hart points to the prison as an example of how punishment never stops at the individual, but ripples through families and communities, he is pointing to the material phenomenon of globalized responsibility and shared consequences. Hart’s example of Hitler and thereby how easily any of us could have been socially formed to have thought and committed similarly monstrous acts communicate the indifference of modern bureaucratic organizations and their indifference towards the personal identities of the persons who administer such bureaucracies. Hart’s forceful argument that no act is completely private seeks to symbolically represent a material and historical world in which globalized production has rendered the isolation of responsibility increasingly unintelligible. Hart uses these material examples to argue for ontological unity, but the examples themselves presuppose precisely the kind of dispersion of causal clarity that is characteristic of late capitalist society.

Key to note, however, is that the above claim does not imply that Hart is secretly doing sociology; rather, I claim here that Hart’s universalism acquires its persuasive force through the historically specific experience of social interdependence, which his argument repeatedly employs by way of examples such as empire, prison, and poverty.

One may argue, however, that Hart’s arguments are not historically specific, due to the fact that the arguments he employs go all the way back to the era of the early Church Fathers—and that the intelligibility of his arguments are not the product of capitalist society, but rather transhistorical truths recognized throughout history. It is important here to make a distinction between ontological validity and historical legibility. Even if the ontological claims are true, the conditions through which these claims become thinkable, visible, and attractive are historically mediated. The universalist metaphysical vision of Gregory of Nyssa emerges within a horizon of imperial totality that materially integrates diverse nations into a single bureaucratic and juridical order. These conditions render possible the thinkability of a humanity united by a single rational nature. Analogously, our late capitalist moment is defined by the global integration of social life through abstract labor and the law of value; universality re-emerges even as its meaning is transformed. Hart’s retrieval of Gregory of Nyssa is therefore mediated by the specific conditions of late capitalist society in which universality is achieved through commensurability.

The thematization of these conditions grants us a new perspective on how Hart’s modern retrieval of Gregory transforms how difference is registered. In late antiquity, authority was centralized in the person of the emperor and hierarchy rank-ordered difference. Difference was concrete but stratified, with the nations under Rome’s jurisdiction being legally differentiated and socially stratified. Gregory’s cosmic Body of Christ expresses this rank-stratification of difference in how it unifies plurality yet nevertheless maintains ordered difference. By contrast, late capitalist social relations unifies not by law alone, but exchange. Through the law of value, qualitatively distinct persons and different labors become exchangeable, and equivalent. Universality is achieved not through the rank ordering of difference, but its negation. Hart retrieves the universal vision of Gregory, but the *form* of this universality resembles more closely late capitalist society than the totality of late antiquity.

In shifting from an imperial to a capitalist totality, and thereby the transformation of responsibility, Hart’s universalist retrieval of Gregory is homologous with a social democratic imaginary of structuring late capitalist totality in which all moments are integrated and equally count as moments of the universal’s realization. By social democratic politics, I refer to a form of capitalist organization in which all persons and organizations are counted equally as moments and responsibility is incorporated and collectivized. Antagonism between classes—working-class unions and publicly-held corporations—is resolved by way of ultimate integration, historically analogous to the mid-twentieth century North American and Western European class compromise in which working-class victories forced the state into legally recognizing unions as necessary partners in state governance.16 Under the postwar settlement, the state is formally indifferent towards either capital and labor, counting both as equal parties in negotiation over the distribution of social surplus. On the individual level, persons are not only granted formal equality, but material subsidization from the state that intends a level of general equality that does not threaten the integrity of the body politic. Under this social democratic imaginary, responsibility becomes collectivized by the formalization and commensurability of difference. Here, materially-constituted differences such as race are sublated into a formal equality among persons within the totality.

Hart’s universalism thereby theologically registers the fragmentation of late capitalist modernity by not only asserting the collectivity of responsibility via an ultimate ontological unity, but also registers an imaginary akin to a social democratic politics for which this universalist theology figures. Hart’s *That All Shall Be Saved* may therefore be read as a symbolic condemnation of the capitalist imaginary of the white petty proprietor for whom infernalism is the theological analogue. Earlier, we touched upon the partitioned totality which infernalism (in Hart’s reading) generates. We may read this as the partition of the white petty bourgeois whose appearance of bootstrap independence is upheld by a racialized proletariat in the labor form of a large archipelago of contractors and sub-contractors. Melinda Cooper has studied the ways in which the social composition of the American insurrectionary right is constituted by so-called “sole proprietors” dependent on the hidden labor of “spouses and other family members” as well as “nonunionized construction workers who toil under the unmediated authority of the small owner-manager are in the same legal situation as the subordinate in the classic master-servant relationship.”17

In contrast to the social democratic state which attempts to integrate race and class through the negation of difference, the petty bourgeois state integrates by way of absolutizing difference, centralizing authority under the appearance of decentralization by strengthening the authority and appearance of independence of white property-holders and concentrating precarity into a racialized working-class population. For Cooper, this situation reactivates personal forms of domination undergirding previous modes of production, but under the conditions of capitalist universality. “[The state] has consistently used these powers to inflate asset values while doing everything possible to block any greater distribution of social wealth.”18 Hart’s characterization of the infernalist subject telegraphs this partitioned totality in his tongue-in-cheek invocation of the infernalist view of hell above as the “inferior neighborhood outside the gates,” in addition to his portrayal of the infernalist’s notion of unconditioned, individual liberty as “thoroughly modern” and impossible given not only the ontological but also material conditions of dependence which we are thrown into.

One can therefore read Hart’s argument as one whose material content exceeds its metaphysical form, seeking to condemn not only a particular eschatology but also the form of American capitalist organization and the white “private, unincorporated, and often family-based” bourgeois of which this eschatology is an analogue.19 However, if Hart’s argument is historically mediated by this experience of material interdependence, then the question shifts towards why *this* mediation regardless generates a contradiction it cannot fully resolve. It is at this moment where Marx’s analysis of the value-form becomes revealing.

INFERNAL ANTINOMIES OF UNIVERSAL RESPONSIBILITY

Earlier in this essay, we outlined how infernalism and Hart’s universalism as he sketches out seeks to resolve the problem of responsibility in their own distinct ways. Where infernalism achieves totality by partitioning the righteous from the unrighteous, destroying evil by concentrating it into the non-elect, Hart’s universalism achieves totality by eliminating evil from *all* persons, achieving integration via universal inclusion. This distinction, however, registers a deeper unity left unthematized in Hart’s account. Both universalism and infernalism as expressed in Hart’s account intends a totality in which responsibility is organized through integration without remainder. How difference is situated within the totality serves as the medium through responsibility is organized by each theological imaginary. Because of the partiality with which difference must be resolved by each theological pole, infernalism and universalism negatively depends upon and evokes the other to complete the resolution.

Hart’s account of difference within his account of infernalism and universalism homologously reproduces the logic and contradictory relationship between use-value and exchange-value. Marx characterizes use-value as the qualitative dimension of the commodity defined by its incommensurability and singularity. “It is [...] the physical body of the commodity itself, for instance iron, corn, a diamond, which is the use-value or useful thing. This property of a commodity is independent of the amount of labour required to appropriate its useful qualities.”20 Use-values are the bearers of “exchange-values,” which appear first of all as the “quantitative relation” that renders possible the exchange between otherwise incommensurable use-values. Exchange-value acts as the negation of the use-value’s singularity and expresses its universal and exchangeable character. “Within the exchange relation, one use-value is worth just as much as another, provided only that it is present in the appropriate quantity.”21 Throughout the first chapter, use-value and exchange-value enter in negative relation, negating its counterpart and asserting itself as the predominating source of value, only to collapse and give forth its negative counterpart. Use-value asserts itself as wholly singular, but its singularity may only be ascertained via its universality; exchange-value affirms itself as the universal equivalent and true ground of production, but this universality may only be determined through the qualitative differences between commodities. The contradiction is thereby not *between* the poles, but internal to each, such that each position reproduces the very contradiction it intends on resolving.

Marx’s dialectic illustrating the law of value transforms the merely formal comparison between Hart’s characteristic of universalism and infernalism into a dialectic whose poles negatively call forth the other. Hart’s critics frequently charge his universalist argument with eliminating difference in favor of a totalizing metaphysical system. Though most of these critiques either misread or undervalue the role difference plays within Hart’s universalism, the *consistency* of the *form* through which these critiques are formulated tell us something about the historically mediated character of these critiques. For certain critics, not only does Hart’s formalization of difference within ultimate universality inadequately resolve the theological contradiction of collective responsibility and individual autonomy; it calls forth the eschatology that reaffirms individual singularity and absolutization of personal will more adequate to how a particular class formation experiences American capitalist society.

Hart’s notion of corporate responsibility and persons belonging to and being constituted by others rings a disharmonious note for those whom American capitalist society presents itself as a vast network of autonomous property-holders in which particularity precedes universality. Of course, however, the absolutization of difference and insistence that responsibility for one’s actions must fall completely on one’s shoulders calls forth its negative image, which insists upon the universal and commensurable dimension of what appears to be one’s particular and incommensurate actions and proceeding consequences. In this sense, just as use-value and exchange-value each negates the other while depending on it for its own intelligibility, Hart’s framing reproduces this antinomy between universal commensurability (universalism) and particular singularity (infernalism).

What limits each pole towards only a partial resolution of the contradiction is the abstract universality by which capital subsumes life via the generalization of abstract labor. Both Hart’s universalism and infernalism do not tolerate difference that remain ambiguous within or transcend the universal; they are the theological registers for two different organizational logics of capitalist totality. Within Hart’s universalism, all difference which generates discordance within the final unity i.e. evil, is burned up: “the healing assault of unyielding divine love upon obdurate souls, one that will save even those who in this life prove unworthy of heaven by burning away every last vestige of their wicked deeds.”22 Such a theological vision resonates with a social democratic politics in which differences between corporate entities and individuals are maintained insofar as they serve the good of the universal and the members therein. By contrast, infernalism, as Hart sketches out, integrates by absolutizing difference, the elect and the non-elect being analogous for the privately-incorporated capitalist and the large stratum of non-union laborers whose labor perpetuates his seeming independence and liberty. But whether through formalization or absolutization, the collectivization of responsibility among all or concentration into a few, all difference is subjected to a total and clear accounting.

Race becomes a critical locus through which to understand the manner in which difference is mediated by either eschatology. Within the infernalist and, analogously, the petit bourgeois vision of capitalist totality, racial difference is absolutized as one’s biographical decisions forever define their place within the partitioned totality of heaven and hell.

However, it is worth asking how the analogy of difference mediates race in Hart’s universalism. Many within the Black Radical tradition have argued for difference as the locus through which true universality shines forth.23 The recognition of true difference becomes the ground for true equality in the mutual recognition of incommensurability. My difference is not reducible to yours, nor yours to mine, yet each difference constitutes the other’s difference as theirs. Thus the Black Radical conception of difference that attempts to negate the contradictory oscillation between singular use-value and universal exchange-value by positing a unity-through-difference emergent through revolutionary struggle. While Hart’s vision formally incorporates difference, the question that emerges is to what extent that difference mediates true uniqueness. Does difference itself have its own substantial reality irreducible to the whole, or is it already harmonized in advance of the universal?

This contradiction that animates Hart’s notion of difference and which it cannot resolve by itself threatens to call forth its negation, a theology that attempts to recover moral singularity at the cost of ontological unity. Such a movement would be homologous with the breakdown of the postwar settlement in which the integration and attempted negation of racial antagonism ultimately intensified the contradiction, generating the conditions for the racial working-class’s uprising and the collapse of Fordism. The rise of neoliberalism from the wreckage of Fordism brought with it new forms of individualized, propertied subjectivity that would come to define the neoliberal imaginary. Thus Hart’s universalist vision, while irreducible to a social democratic politics, nevertheless registers the historical limits of American social democracy, namely, the extent to which the political totality can integrate difference when that difference seeks to transcend the whole.24

THAT ALL SHALL BE INCORPORATED

Yet it would be simplistic to state that this “flattening” of difference is indicative of failure on Hart’s part; rather, it is historically symptomatic of our global postmodern fragmentation. The abstraction of responsibility—whether through its generalization among all or concentration into a partitioned non-elect—is the price to pay to yield a cognitive map of postmodernity that imagines total reconciliation of one among all. Structurally, late capitalist society renders responsibility unassignable, producing conditions for competing ideological forms broadly corresponding with particular class formations to re-situate agency and map accountability.

Infernalism re-enacts in a theological mode the fantasy of personalized social relations in which someone is clearly to blame, and forms of domination are clearly legible and morally weighable. The class formation to which such a vision corresponds not just formally but materially is the white, patriarchal proprietor for whom the source of the global crisis is the loss of agency amid multinational corporations, dizzying financial markets that resist cognitive representation, and the corrosion of “family values” after the Sexual Revolution and Civil Rights movement. The small business owner, like the neoliberal paradigm from which they emerge, appears to be anti-stateist, but in reality is structurally dependent upon state power for its formal independence, thereby rearticulating hierarchy through a “personal” register. By contrast, Hart’s universalism evokes the fantasy of a globally integrated, cosmopolitan society in which every person is recognized as equally important moments through which political life is realized. Social responsibility is diffused and material outcomes are collective. Hart renders responsibility legible by collectivizing it, but risks preserving difference at the formal level and losing its ontological weight.

In the end, the ambiguous role which difference plays in Hart’s universalism risks reproducing the very logic of postmodern fragmentation by calling forth its negative relation that seeks to preserve true difference in the face of the claustrophobic horizon of late capitalist totality. Much is said of course about the homogenizing effects of global capital; what is often left unsaid is the manner in which capital preserves difference. The difference preserved by capital is abstract insofar as it is experienced as outside one’s control or representation, but formal inasmuch as the differences convey an air of weightlessness even as it presses down upon oneself. Theodor Adorno reflected upon the contradictory development of specialization leading to homogeneity, writing “we see on the one hand how the tendency of modern society over the last three hundred or three hundred and fifty years has unquestionably promoted specialization by breaking up the once unitary artisanal processes into a range of individual functions...But this tendency towards specialization..can also reach a pitch where these functions may finally resemble one another so closely that this facilitates a transition from one function to another.”25 Adorno’s analysis thus clarifies that this is not an external tension between two separate logics, but different expressions of the same contradiction: the same process that enforces universal equivalence at the same time generates the appearance of absolute difference. Adorno expresses the contradiction of how global capital reifies the stark, material divisions between races and nationalities; yet at the same time renders those absolute differences seemingly commensurable with one another. Homologously, the ambiguity of difference within Hart’s universalism risks reproducing this very antinomy which capital generates, in which the pervasion of the universal calls forth the reification and singularity of the individual.

The question our study brings us is whether there exists a theology that not only gives difference its due, but situates it as the source of universality while at the same time not absolutizing it. The question, then, is whether a political theology exists that homologously transcends the antinomy of exchange- and use-value, of particular singularity and universal communicability? If both universalism and infernalism remain trapped within this antinomy, then the task is not to choose either/or, but to realize a form of universality constituted through difference itself. For this, we turn to consider Jordan Wood’s study of St. Maximus Confessor.

Song of Shambhala by Nicholas Roerich (1943)

A striking contradiction has emerged in contemporary Anglo-American theology. Universalism—the eschatological belief that all shall be saved—has gained renewed attention after a century of relative marginality. Yet this resurgence has developed alongside intensifying border regimes, expanding imperial violence, and the normalization of industrial-scale mass death on a global scale. One might presume that such conditions would provoke a renewed emphasis on the fires of hell and judgement. Instead, theology within the English-speaking world has drifted towards visions of universal reconciliation.

What demands our attention is not just the theological arguments for universalism, but the conditions that have made universalism so compelling for newer generations of theologians. Why is universalism achieving such momentum at a historical juncture defined by fragmentation, mass violence, and catastrophe? Some theologians have argued that the moral aesthetics of universalism obviously explain its appeal; but such arguments do not suffice to explain *why* universalism has gained such traction *now*. The question must therefore be asked at the level of historical form: what work does universalism perform at this historical moment?

Fredric Jameson’s account of ideology and allegory as symbolic resolution to real contradictions provides a helpful starting point from which to answer our question. For Jameson, cultural formations do not merely “reflect” their material conditions, but rather attempt to symbolically represent a complex social totality impossible to directly represent. Objective contradictions are transcoded into forms that may be thinkable, writable, and representable. “I tend to feel that allegory raises its head as a solution when beneath this or that seemingly stable or unified reality the tectonic plates of deeper contradictory levels of the Real shift and grate ominous against one another and demand a representation…[that] they are unable to find in the *Schein* or illusory surfaces of existential or social life.”1 Ideology and allegory are what often make political activity possible by providing a cognitive map through which one may navigate their social world. This task of representation becomes all the more urgent in the historical era of postmodernity, in which the scale and scope of global, multinational capitalism makes cognitive mapping, and therefore durable working-class organization, increasingly difficult.2

This series of essays will argue that the rise of universalism within contemporary Anglo-American theology emerges from a growing urgency among theologians for a way of cognitively mapping a twenty-first century riddled by deepening international capitalist crisis and imperial revanchism. Universalism functions not only as an eschatological claim, but as a form of cognitive mapping of international crisis within a world-system that resists representation. Gregory of Nyssa’s image of the Body of Christ in his treatise On the Human Image offers one of the most sophisticated attempts by the Church Fathers to represent this cosmic universal reconciliation. I read Gregory’s Body of Christ not simply as a sophisticated theological system, but a historically situated attempt to symbolically register and resolve the material contradictions of agrarian estate society of late antiquity. Gregory’s theology registers the tension between the Christian demand for ontological unity and the diverse, heterogenous, and often incommensurable forms of social life that emerged out of and structured fourth-century Eastern Roman world.

Yet the historical transformation of capitalist society alters the conditions of such mapping. The emergence of abstract labor, which renders particular forms of human labor commensurable on a global scale, produces a materially real, if contradictory, universality. As production becomes more materially connected and persons more interdependent, this emergent universality at once becomes increasingly difficult to represent as the complexity of global production and circulation intensifies. The paradox of globalized, multinational capitalism is that it becomes both more integrated yet less cognitively mappable.

Under these conditions, Gregory’s theological vision achieves a newfound attraction and relevancy. Fr. John Behr’s 2023 translation of On the Human Image does more than retrieve an old theological vision of the cosmos. Behr’s translation expresses an ongoing, albeit unconscious, effort to symbolically resolve the contradictions of an increasingly crisis-ridden global capitalist society by formulating a vision of universality that negates the fragmentation of the present. Universalism therefore stands as an increasingly popular response within contemporary Anglo-American theology that cognitively maps a social totality that resists direct representation.

This essay reconstructs Gregory’s theological anthropology of the human being as the Image of God as articulated in his vision of the cosmic Body of Christ, situating this vision within the social and economic conditions of late antiquity. I will analyze how the historical limits of Gregory’s vision are registered in its relative difficulty accounting for the concrete particularity of persons and thereby the absence of collective historical agency. The final part of my essay will argue that the contemporary resurgence of universalism does not just reflect shifting interests within theology, but expresses the field of theology’s deeper anxiety concerning the unrepresentationality of how planetary society is spiraling out of any particular class or social group’s control. Universalism therefore is one manner by which theology strives to overcome this resistance towards representation through its capacity to not only register difference but also universality.

THE BODY OF NYSSA

Gregory of Nyssa’s theological vision is driven by the central contradiction between the particular and universal; namely, how an immutable God may enter time and become incarnate; while at the same time, the mutable human being enters eternity and becomes God. This contradiction is formed by Gregory’s concern of how the particular human being of Jesus can “sum up” and save the universal body of humanity in his person. Gregory’s treatise aims to demonstrate how humanity can both be ontologically one in the Image of God while remaining materially fragmented in a fourth-century social world constituted by heterogenous and incommensurable forms of life.

Gregory first outlines his image of the cosmic Body of Christ in book sixteen of *On the Human Image*, and it is there where he lays out one of the primary contradictions that drove the development of theology during Christianity’s early centuries: how the fragile and corruptible human being, which shares the same “properties of the gnat and mouse,” may possibly be the image of the divine and incorruptible God.3 Through this framing, Gregory critiques the Neo-Platonist paradigm for failing to capture what makes humanity most distinctive throughout creation. To define the human being as the meeting place of the cosmic elements is to confine it within a natural hierarchy and reduce it to one being among others.4 By contrast, Gregory urges that the human being is not made in the image of the cosmos but of the *Creator*: “But in what is the human greatness according to the ecclesiastical teaching? Not in the likeness to the created world, but in coming to be in accordance with the image of the nature of the Creator.”5 The human being’s distinctive nature lies in its capacity to transcend nature.

Yet this claim poses an immediate difficulty. How can the notion that the human being stands as the perfect image of God when human life appears characterized by suffering and strife? Gregory himself states the problem in these terms: “How then is the human being, this mortal being, subject to the passions and short-lived, an image of that undefiled and pure and everlasting nature?”6 Gregory’s theology restates the longstanding philosophical tension between the one and the many, the particular and the universal, that drove the development of Greek philosophical tradition.

Gregory’s response is to re-present the human being not as an isolated individual, but as a particular mirror of the universal body of humanity. This universal body of humanity stands in analogical relationship with the body of the particular person: just as the particular human being is “encompassed by his bodily dimensions” in a manner “commensurate with the appearance of his body,” so too was the “entire plenitude of humanity” was included by God as in “one body” from the beginning of creation. Each and every particular person carries in and through them the mark of the universal Body. “For all have the power of understanding and deliberating, and all the other attributes through which the divine nature is reflected in that which came to be in accordance with it. The human being manifested together with the first formation of the world, and he who shall come to be after consummation of all, both likewise have this: they equally bear in themselves the divine image.”7

This resolution of the tension between particular and universal figures as Gregory’s image of the cosmic Body of Christ. For Gregory, the unity of humanity is not an abstraction, but an ontological reality that every particular person is teleologically oriented towards. In the eschaton, Christ shall gather up all persons in his Body in a manner that overcomes division while preserving distinction. In his In Ilud, Gregory interprets the “subjection” of all persons to Christ not as unwilling, but wholly voluntary. “The exposition of the term ‘subjection’ as used here does not mean the forceful, necessary subjection of enemies as is commonly meant; while on the other hand, salvation is clearly interpreted by subjection.”8 Reading 1 Corinthians 15:25-28, Gregory argues that Christ will not subject himself to the Father until “all creation resounds as one voice” and “every tongue will confess[es] that has become one body and is joined in Christ through obedience to one another, he will bring into subjection his own body to the Father.” The universal Body becomes complete when it has pervaded and integrated each and every body created in its Image.

THE LONG FOURTH-CENTURY

Gregory’s On the Human Image, and with it his reading of the eschaton, does not arise in a frictionless vacuum. Gregory’s theological vision may be read as an attempt to displace the contradictions of a fourth-century Eastern Roman agrarian world defined by increasingly complex layers of dependence into the realm of ontology. Jameson’s notion of ideology as symbolic resolution of real contradictions proves helpful, as Gregory’s theological vision of the Body of Christ may be read as an attempt to cognitively map and transcode the fragmented and uneven relations of late antique society, resolving this heterogeneity and conflict into organic unity and reconciliation. The Body of Christ may therefore not only be understood as just a theological vision, but as a means of grasping a complex social totality that resists direct representation. This united whole of Christ’s cosmic body may be understood as transcoding the contradictions of the political community of late-antiquity that demanded some mode of cognitive mapping and representation.

Of course, Gregory’s theological means of cognitively mapping the social world of the Eastern Mediterranean does not imply that it is reducible to these conditions. Rather, it is to say that Gregory is accomplishing two aims with one stroke: at once symbolically resolving the contradiction of how the decrepit and particular human being can hope to mirror the divine; as well as cognitively mapping the increasingly crowded world of Cappadocia, with its many interlocking and overlapping relations of obligation and duty, nevertheless generate a united whole. This transformation is not one-to-one, but rather a reorganization at a higher level of theological abstraction.

Gregory’s role as Bishop of Cappadocia grants this social ontology additional urgency. The exploding heterogeneity of distinct forms of dependence compels Gregory’s theological vision to unearth the unity beneath. On this level we may appreciate how Gregory’s Body of Christ representationally stabilizes these contradictions in a utopian form. Gregory’s theological vision is utopian in its vision of universal inclusion and negation of division. Yet also the form by which this vision negates division is expressed in a conservative form, stabilizing the social world of the Eastern Mediterranean countryside at the symbolic level. Difference and distinction serve to reveal and animate the universal. The universal permeates difference, rendering it intelligible within a whole.

The social and political world of Gregory and the challenges it presented makes his theological vision all the more striking. In another essay, I examined how the crisis of the Western Roman Empire drove St. Augustine towards an innovative political theology that sought to symbolically resolve the objective contradictions of the crisis in a theological register that delegitimated the Roman imperial elites, demoted the temporal might of Rome to being only a moment within God’s eternal and unfolding plan, and legitimated the authority of the church structures at a moment when the old world was in collapse.9

Gregory, by contrast, lived in the more secure eastern half of the Roman Empire in which there emerged a diversity of forms of dependence and exploitation that mediated everyday life on the landed estates. The hierarchy of the Eastern Mediterranean’s social world was richly differentiated and internally uneven. Rural wage-labor existed alongside landed peasant agriculture; peasant agriculture was constituted by a dense network of relations of dependence that spanned smaller farms and huge estates; slaves, tenants, and leased peasants worked side-by-side in the fields; and even the sale of labor power could be mediated by a variety of arrangements from an advance payment of rent, wages in kind, to a type of lease.10

Especially noteworthy is how Augustine and Gregory’s distinct theological visions are mediated by their particular historical positions within the empire. Whereas Augustine sits within the margins of a collapsing Western Roman Empire, Gregory is a bishop in a relatively stable province of the Eastern Roman Empire. Augustine responded to the political and social instability of his moment by offering a sharply dualistic eschatology in which the City of God and City of Man relate dialectically until the eschaton, at which point God’s elect will be divided from the non-elect, thus symbolically delegitimizing the collapsing imperial authorities while legitimating the authority of the Church and urging readers to pick a side. By contrast, the thrust of Gregory’s eschatology seeks ultimate integration and inclusion of difference, symbolically mapping out how the heterogenous social forms of the changing but relatively stable countryside ultimately cash out to a cosmic unity at the theological level.

Yet Gregory’s Body of Christ reveals its theological limitations at the moment it is meant to succeed in demonstrating how the particular and universal mediate each other. It is unclear to what extent the particular human being exists beyond being an instantiation of the universal Body of Christ. Of course, Gregory of Nyssa is emphatic that the individual person is distinct from the universal Body, even as the individual participates and mirrors the universal. Yet the implications of this distinction and unity remain relatively under-developed. There appears an asymmetrical relationship of dependence in which the universal, though in necessary relationship with the particular individual, attains a privileged place insofar as the individual lacks individuality i.e. is irreducible to and transcends the universal. As Johannes Zachubber writes, the Cappadocians manage to critique the limits of late-Neoplatonic philosophy while nevertheless still sharing its “systematic lack of interest for particularity.”11

The theological limitations of Gregory’s Body of Christ registers the historical limitations of late-antiquity in its struggle to represent collective historical agency. Though the countryside of Cappadocia discloses a diversity of forms of labor, there nevertheless still exists an incommensurability between any given form of labor. Fourth-century theology asserts the equality of slave and master at the ontological plane; yet their material inequality still limits many theologians from thinking about the problem of the one and the many in a manner not radically different from the Neoplatonists. Fourth-century bishops like Gregory are confronted with a challenge—theologically represent a world in which the finite individual is finally lifted into the infinite divine using the symbols of a world governed by limited spatial, economic, and social mobility. Even the seventh-century Maximus the Confessor, whose theology of the person pushed the note of person to its extreme speculative limits, was driven to convey his theology by presupposing the social world’s inaccessibility to radical transformation by collective historical agency.

The manner in which Gregory resolves the tension between particular and universal therefore remains historically limited even if at the level of form it appears complete. Where unity remains incomplete at the level of social practice, it is achieved at the ontological level. The contradiction is therefore displaced rather than abolished. Yet this contradiction does not disappear with the dissolution of the society of late antiquity. It is instead reconstituted and generalized under capitalist society in a more acute and universal form. The emergence of abstract labor leads to the commensurability of human labor, which ceases to be merely a theological possibility and becomes a material reality. Heterogenous forms of labor become equivalent and commensurable under a global system of monetary exchange and capitalist relations. Marx remarks on the recognition of abstract labor as the source of value beginning in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century once the heterogeneity of labor is mediated by capitalist valorization: “Indifference towards any specific kind of labour presupposes a very developed totality of real kinds of labour, of which no single one is any longer predominant. As a rule, the most general abstractions arise only in the midst of the richest possible concrete development, where one thing appears as common to many, to all.”12

Humanity becomes integrated in a system of production unprecedented in its universal character and scope. Yet, at the same time, this integration produces conditions that conceal this universality. The expansion of production and scope of circulation across a global scale, accelerated by the class conflicts of the mid- to late-twentieth century, renders the social totality increasingly difficult to represent. It is these conditions that drive contemporary theology’s retrieval of Gregory’s theological vision and through which his vision acquires a newfound valence. Our historical moment, where the world increasingly resembles a planetary factory in its integrative scope deepens both the utopian potential of Gregory’s vision in its capacity to cognitively map postmodernity while also accentuating the contradictions between the universal and particular.

A GLOBAL BODY WITHOUT A HEAD

The contradiction that emerges under capitalism reaches its most acute and refined expression in what Fredric Jameson defines as the defining feature of postmodernity: the growing inability to ideologically represent the social totality. As production becomes globally integrated, the structures that organize daily life recede from immediate experience. Material interdependence intensifies as cognitive representation diminishes. It is within this historical juncture of the unrepresentational character of global postmodernity that Anglo-American theology finds itself compelled to operate.

Fr. John Behr’s translation of Gregory of Nyssa’s On the Human Image reveals that Gregory’s theological anthropology contains a universalism that exceeds the social conditions of its emergence. While the universalism of Gregory’s historical moment sought to symbolically resolve the social contradictions of late antiquity while also legitimating the human being as Imago Dei, the emergence of capitalism—in particular the rise of abstract labor as the organizing principle of production and exchange—retroactively encodes that universalism as a genuinely egalitarian possibility.

To understand why, we should briefly outline what exactly was the historical development of postmodernity that engendered such political impotence and resistance to cognitive mapping. Critically, we should not attribute global capitalism’s resistance towards representation merely to the *quantitative* expansion of capitalist production and circulation. But rather, it is the *way* in which this expansion has proceeded, driven by the class struggles of the past half-century, that has contributed to postmodernity’s resistance to cognitive mapping. As Melinda Cooper observes, the achievements of the working-classes within the New Deal and Great Society era enabled workers—particularly white workers—to confront factory discipline through wildcat strikes, work stoppages, and job switches, while Black and Latino workers led urban uprisings and factory revolts demanding inclusion into the New Deal order.13 The Italian Autonomist and Marxist Antonio Negri analyzes in-depth how the position of mobility from which the working-class forced the state into providing social services through civil society posed a problem for capital: labor had become both geographically and socially difficult to contain.14

Capital’s response was to discipline and manage class antagonism through the very same mobility won by the working-class. Large-scale industry was restructured through automation and geographic dispersion, fragmenting the workforce across entire nation-states and continents. At the same time, the capitalist state reconfigured governance by “decentralizing” the administration of social life through civil society: churches, non-profits, NGOs, state agencies, and other civil institutions.15 But this decentralization at the same time centralized state power, allowing the state to close the distance between itself and the individual by operating through a network of institutions tasked with administering and managing increasingly fragmented and surplus populations. Through civil society, mass incarceration embeds racialized working-class communities, subjecting them to continual surveillance and coercive administration.

Within the paradigm of late-twentieth century neoliberal governance, data emerges as an increasingly important medium of governance. The abstractive form of data allows for both deeper penetration into local, everyday life and broader administrative reach across dispersed populations and geographies. However, the more data that’s accumulated to surveil, administer, and manage vast social terrain, the more the social terrain fragments into discontinuous representations. The abstract universality of data means that the proliferation of data does not clarify the social totality but obscures it. The world becomes more materially interconnected yet appears more cognitively fragmented, generating conditions that further disable political collective agency. Class struggle still drives political transformation, but in a world of financialization, vast shipping lanes, and fragmented production, mapping out class struggle becomes incredibly difficult. Global, national, and local governance takes on the character of political schizophrenia and collective political transformation appears impossible at the moment that transnational crisis—climate crisis, imperial revanchism, and capitalist breakdown—demands it.

These are the conditions in which we must situate the resurgence of interest in eschatological universalism and Gregory of Nyssa’s vision of universal reconciliation. Behr’s translation of Gregory of Nyssa’s On the Human Image in 2023 expresses the urgency with which Anglo-American theology has taken interest in patristic and medieval texts that corroborate this universalist vision. His historically reflexive hermeneutic, inspired by figures like Quentin Skinner and Hans-Georg Gadamer, acknowledges the historical situation of both reader and text, deepening the sense of historical and semiotic content that both binds and distances us to the text.16 In doing so, however, Behr’s method offers the possibility that Gregory’s theological vision may operate as a symbolic form through which the contradictions of our contemporary moment are mediated. Behr’s Gregory may itself be read as an attempt to symbolically resolve a serious set of historical contradictions—the unrepresentability of late capitalist social totality.

The contradiction of late modernity emerges—humanity experiences itself as increasingly fragmented even as it becomes more materially interdependent than ever. Marx anticipates the late capitalist historical contradiction that generates this unrepresentability of late capitalists social totality in the Manifesto: “Modern bourgeois society with its relations of production, of exchange and of property, a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer, who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells.”17 Eighty years after the publication of the Communist Manifesto, Gyorgy Lukacs writes in History and Class Consciousness that the fragmentation of production “necessarily” leads to the fragmentation of the subject: “Neither objectively nor in his relation to his work does man appear as the authentic master of the process; on the contrary, he is a mechanical part incorporated into a mechanical system. He finds it already pre-existing and self-sufficient, it functions independently of him and he has to conform to its laws whether he likes it or not.”18 The material world presents itself to modern theology as alien and external despite being the product of our labor.

Yet it is worth asking what drives Behr and other theologians to *this* theological map over others. What one finds striking about Gregory’s Body of Christ is the manner in which universality is rendered legible in its formal capacity to knit the heterogenous into unity. But the only point of heterogeneity appears to be constituted by the difference between the particular prosopa and the universal pleroma of Christ’s Body. The difference between the individual prosopon appears only formal. Each is an image of the whole, but Gregory spends less time theorizing in what sense each prosopon mirrors the whole in a manner unique to each. One may read this as Gregory symbolically resolving the heterogeneity of the material roles of late agrarian antique society—its peasants, slaves, tenants—and revealing their ultimate, monadic unity within the ontological Body of Christ.

One possible cause for the surge of interest in Gregory’s Body of Christ may be that the movement from material heterogenous fragmentation to ontological homogenous unity so closely parallels the contradiction of value within late modernity. The private labor of the tailor reveals itself as directly social the moment we compare it with any other form of labor. The undifferentiated, commensurable universality of abstract labor is “the reason why [any given labor] results in a product directly exchangeable with other commodities. We have then a [...] peculiarity of the equivalent form, namely, that the labour of private individuals takes the form of its opposite, labour directly social in its form.”19 Capitalist society is driven into socializing the world i.e. establishing the world market, through the privatization of production.

It is precisely this material alienation that allows us to both retrieve and transform Gregory’s theological vision of the cosmos, unlocking the utopian potential of Gregory’s Body of Christ. What was at one historical moment a symbolic resolution of social fragmentation now appears as a cognitive map of a materially integrated, albeit unrepresentable, social totality. Capitalist society does not simply provide a new context in which Gregory’s theology may be applied; it reveals what was previously only latent within his thought. The universalism that Gregory could only theorize at the level of ontology becomes materially real under the conditions of abstract labor, revealing both the utopian content of his thought and the limits imposed by its historical form. What could not be fully thought through in the world of late antiquity becomes legible only in a later historical moment that both realizes and distorts it. In this sense, Gregory’s theology becomes fully intelligible only retroactively, looking backwards from a historical transformation that both fulfills and exceeds it.

This dialectic becomes clear when we trace how the contradiction between particularity and universality within late antiquity is rearticulated in capitalist modernity. Under the conditions of late antiquity, the universality that Gregory posited could only be grasped at the ontological level, through abstraction from these many materially incommensurable and localized forms of life. The asymmetrical relations between particular and universal registers this historical contradiction. Under capitalism, this universality becomes a material reality, albeit in a contradictory form, even as it remains phenomenologically concealed. This previously asymmetrical relationship between particular and universal is transformed into something admitting a formal equality via material collective production. Marx remarks in the Grundrisse that the distinct material basis of modernity leads to a notion of freedom directly antagonistic to the notion of freedom under antiquity: “Equality and freedom as developed to this extent are exactly the opposite of the freedom and equality in the world of antiquity, where developed exchange value was not their basis, but where, rather, the development of that basis destroyed them. Equality and freedom presuppose relations of production as yet unrealized in the ancient world... Direct forced labour is the foundation of the ancient world; the community rests on this as its foundation; labour itself as a ‘privilege’, as still particularized, not yet generally producing exchange values, is the basis of the world of the Middle Ages. Labour is neither forced labour; nor, as in the second case, does it take place with respect to a common, higher unit (the guild).” Modern theology’s retrieval of Gregory’s theological vision transforms as much as it preserves: a theological vision that once symbolically stabilized the social order of the Eastern Mediterranean now mediates the contradictions of a global capitalist order.

Thus we have a curious reversal of intentions in Anglo-American theology’s retrieval of Gregory’s On the Human Image. Gregory’s treatise intended to symbolically show how diverse modes of exploitation, relations of dependence, and overlapping jurisdictions reveal a deeper ontological unity, attesting to the integration of all things into the Body of Christ. Gregory seeks to transcode the particular as universal; the local symbolizes the global. Behr’s translation symbolically reveals how the degree to which universal, globalized production intertwines all particular persons together into a legible image. In our moment, we seek to show how the universal is really particular. What grants modern theologians the perch from which to judge the theological limits of Gregory’s vision is our own historical limits. Because in the very conditions where “history becomes world-history,” when “in England a machine is invented, which deprives countless workers of bread in India and China, and overturns the whole form of existence of these empires,” that is when the social totality risks losing its capacity to be represented and thereby allow persons to retain some measure of exercise political agency over and through world-history.20

But to what extent does this retrieval of Gregory’s vision succeed in mapping postmodernity? Though Gregory’s Body of Christ provides a means of representing a fragmented social totality, his vision risks reproducing the very logic of abstract labor that animates late capitalism which his contemporary theological proponents seek to transcend. Gregory’s Body of Christ achieves universality by way of each particular being subsumed within the universal Body. This integration of all persons into the universal Body of Christ overcomes division at the cost of real difference even as it preserves formal distinction. Difference is preserved, but only as formally equivalent moments of the universal. Through our modern retrieval, the logic of Gregory’s vision seems to mirror the logic of abstract labor, which makes commensurable heterogenous forms of labor by reducing them to a homogenous substance of value. Formal universality is achieved, but through the abstraction from concrete particularity. What appears as reconciliation risks becoming another form of subordination.

Rather than resolving the contradiction between universal and particular, the modern universalist reading of Gregory’s Body of Christ rearticulates and displaces it into the realm of ontology. The attempt to cognitively map the disintegration of global capitalism risks reproducing this very same fragmentation in the form of abstract universality. This failure, however, is instructive. In its attempt to overcome the limits of postmodern capitalist abstraction, modern theology’s attempt to translate Gregory’s Body of Christ reveals the difficulty of overcoming postmodernity through a merely theological register. This failure reveals the necessity of discovering a theological mode of representing postmodern capitalism in which universality does not just preserve formal difference while negating real distinction i.e. reifying the law of value, but becomes what it is through difference.

THE BODY (OF CHRIST) WITHOUT ORGANS

On this basis, one may interpret the resurgence of universalist thought not merely as the ascendancy of those people whom St. Augustine once pejoratively called the misericordes, but a historically situated attempt to symbolically represent the fragmented world-terrain of the early-21st century. The notion that there may be some cast out to the Outer Darkness forever strikes a chord of disharmony within our present social totality, where globalized commodity-production materially bounds us up in a way that complicates many of the Church Fathers’ notion of responsibility, itself bound up with late antiquity’s more localized and personal modes of production. Marx claims that the historical standpoint of capital reveals the meaning of wealth in its universal potentiality, as “the absolute working-out of his creative potentialities” in which “[one] does not reproduce himself in one specificity, but produces his totality.”21 Labor under the capitalist mode of production generates the conditions for us to see that we produce the universal through our particular labors even at the same time as it conceals this. Universalism registers a desire for a form of universality that negates the globalized fracturing of a global capitalist system that remains opaque to those who inhabit it even as we slide into a new century of barbarism.

Yet, as we have shown, this retrieval is not without its tensions and contradictions. In Behr’s retrieval of Gregory, modern theology gains a cognitive map that at once overcomes postmodern fragmentation, but threatens to reify the very conditions that produce said fragmentation. Gregory’s vision of the cosmic Body of Christ renders the social totality thinkable, but does so by subsuming the concrete particular within a universal that threatens to flatten out real difference even as it formally preserves it. The uncritical adoption of Gregory’s Body of Christ risks reproducing the very same material world of universal abstraction—real and abstractive, integrative but estranging—it seeks to overcome.

This tension does not invalidate modern theology’s efforts, but situates them within the limits of our historical present. For the paradox is that modern theology can only reach beyond late capitalism by using its very terms and concepts of representation. The attempt registers modern theology’s anxiety amidst a fracturing international order of rising revanchism in which the international working-class has yet to achieve durable social forms of opposition across a global context. Theology does not overcome postmodernity, but reveals its deepest contradictions in a theological register. Modern theology’s situating of Gregory’s theological map within our historical moment transforms its meaning, attempting to produce the representational conditions necessary for the re-emergence of collective political agency. Universalism, then, should not be understood as theology’s ultimate resolution of the contradiction of postmodernity, but one of the forms through which it is made most thinkable and visible. Without such forms, the global social totality remains opaque—and with it, the prospect of collective proletarian organization and the international class struggle itself.

In our next essay, we will take up David Bentley Hart’s universalism and investigate the ways in which it seeks to politically delegitimize the eschatology of the white American gentry.

Oh rascal children of Gaza,

You who constantly disturbed me with your screams under my window,

You who filled every morning with rush and chaos,

You who broke my vase and stole the lonely flower on my balcony,

Come back –

And scream as you want,

And break all the vases,

Steal all the flowers,

Come back,

Just come back…

Khaled Juma, Oh Rascal Children of Gaza, 2014

Earlier this month, the United States in conjunction with the state of Israel bombed an Iranian elementary school, murdering around 165 children.1 These were children who were loved by their community and through whom family, friends, and all throughout the community encountered the love of God. But now they’re dead, murdered and strewn underfoot by the most destructive empire of the modern era.

The Iran War should lead us to consider the limits of theological language in capturing the immense suffering American empire continues to unleash across the world. How does God know the suffering of the little children in Tehran and Gaza? Questions regarding theodicy are inextricably bound up with how we understand the relationship between temporality and eternity. Whether or not God knows our suffering as an already-complete fact within eternity but as a genuinely new diremption within history significantly recasts what it means for an American soldier to drone strike an elementary school or a mosque. We cannot arrive at an account of evil that gets to the bottomless depth of horror which we find ourselves passively abetting without a theodicy that centers human responsibility.

Augustine and Bulgakov represent two distinct schools of understanding temporality. Both theologians’ theologies were intended to symbolically resolve a set of contradictions arising out of the historical contradictions of fifth-century late-imperial North Africa and late-nineteenth century Russia. I depart from certain sociological studies presenting themselves as Marxist that reduce theology to material conditions. Rather, I claim that a theodicy that resonates with the modern subject of late-imperial capitalism must begin with a critique of past theologians and the historical limits that determined their thought. By doing so, one can arrive towards a modern theodicy that not only affirms that modern intuition that history is the product of human self-activity, but also the depths of evil and vertigo-inducing responsibility we must take as subjects of empire who continue to be complicit in the war crimes of American empire.

AUGUSTINE’S OWL OF MINERVA

We begin our inquiry with a brief sketch of what I will refer to as the “classical” model of temporality and eternity. Within the classical model, the past, present, and future are eternally present to God. The crucifixion, the signing of the Declaration of Independence, and the first shot of the Spanish Civil War are equally present to the knowledge of God in eternity. Crucially, just because these events are eternally present to God, they genuinely happen in time. Formally, time is distinct from eternity in such a manner that human beings act out of free will even as these acts are always-already known by God. In this way, God’s omniscience is preserved even as human freedom is given its due.

Our understanding of the classical model is enriched when we situate it within the historical social totality of late-antiquity from which it emerges. This does not entail the kind of sociological analysis frequently employed where an eternal God “reflects” the apparent eternal character social structures within antiquity take on. This analysis struggles to capture how these ideas are deployed in class struggle, legitimating a given class at the same time that it delegitimizes others. Per Fredric Jameson, “by grasping the ideologeme, not as a mere reflex or reduplication of its situational context, but as the imaginary resolution of the objective contradictions to which it thus constitutes an active response.”2

In this way St. Augustine’s classical model of eternity does not simply “reflect” the prevailing hierarchical ideology of eternity within late-antiquity. Rather, the classical model as deployed by Augustine is best understood as a polyvalent historical act by which Augustine is attempting to at once see beyond the claustrophobia of a collapsing empire, while nevertheless only being able to do so with the concepts and notions of their very same dying epoch.

The novel contribution that Christianity introduces into the late-imperial order (that it inherits from Second Temple Judaism) is the notion that history has an end. This linear conception of history in which Christ is both beginning, middle, and end is contrasted with the dominant Pagan conceptions of eternity and time, wherein narrative falls within two broad camps: on the one hand a cyclical movement of the rise and decline of political orders; and on the other hand, a long decline from a mythological golden age. Both narratives are grounded in an objective social order where the world does not present itself as the product of human activity, with political self-determination out of reach for the vast majority of Roman subjects.

This is the world from which the Christian notion of historical linearity first emerges. In the faith’s first several centuries, the Church Fathers were compelled to resolve a chief contradiction whose problematic propelled the tradition forward: Christ has changed everything, yet the world itself — the callous Roman imperial order administered by its vast archipelago of propertied pater familia with often unquestioning authority over slaves, women, and children — seemed to stay the same. The apparent state of things gave the Christians opponents no shortage of attacks.

It was the Sack of Rome (410) that provided Saint Augustine the historical perch from which he would formulate the most daring attempt to resolve this contradiction in the Patristic tradition. Pagan historians like Tacitus and Livy defined history by the rise and fall of empires. When the Western Roman empire fell, it was experienced as nothing short of the end of the world; one caused by the Christians forsaking the old gods of Rome. Augustine responded to these critiques in the City of God by de-coupling the political from the sacred.3 For Augustine, previous generations of Pagan historians were historically limited by their conception of Rome as the center of the world. It was reasonable on the part of the Pagans to believe that the world was coming to an end when they so completely identified the sacred with Rome itself.4 By contrast, the fulcrum of history for Augustine sought to identify the fulcrum of history from Rome to the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. Every event in history leads up to and follows from the life of the Incarnate Logos. Whereas for Pagan thought the sacking of Rome was tantamount to the end of the world, the sacking is now one more episode within the unfolding of God’s plan for salvation.

Augustine was capable of attaining this perspective on the margins of Roman society at a moment when the Roman world order was on the brink of collapse. The end of antiquity brought forth a revolutionary moment in which a theologian and prominent Bishop like Augustine could consider political possibilities beyond the Roman imperial world. And Augustine used this moment to further delegitimize his Pagan interlocutors and landowners who clung to a dying social order.

But this revolutionary moment that allowed Augustine to see beyond the dying imperial order at once mediated but also limited what exactly there was to see. The teleological view of history the Christian theologians extended was itself mediated by this very same imperial order. The Mediterranean world of late-imperial Rome was one in which privilege was marked by civic honors in which persons participated in imperial structures that presented themselves as unchangeable.5 So even the sack of Rome, the center of the Western Mediterranean world, did not immediately indicate to contemporaries that society was the product of human activity or that it could be purposely reconstructed.

For Augustine, the transience of the Roman imperial order underscored the fragility of any political order and the hard limits of human control over the unfolding of history. We see here the interesting outcome that Augustine’s teleological conception of history unfolds within a notion of divine knowledge that is effectively timeless, transcending time even as it includes and animates it. So even as Augustine breaks the ancient cyclical view of time, he does so by effectively subordinating time to eternity. Even as history unfolds in time, in eternity the manner in which this unfolding occurs is already immediately and eternally known by God.

At the same time, the transience of the Roman world-order was contrasted with the permanence of a different institution—the Church. Augustine’s position as a Bishop of a town in North Africa at the periphery where imperial authority was growing increasingly fragile, made the imminent collapse even more pronounced than it appeared to his contemporaries in the imperial core. Augustine was at once keeper of a Church community at risk of barbarian invasion from without and civil collapse from within. He not only faced enemies outside the walls of the city, but was beset by competing religious communities that included everyone from the Manicheans to the Donatists. The Church was the representative of eternity on earth. In this way, Augustine emphasized to Christians that submission to their Bishops was essential not only for eternal salvation but also for material protection in the final days of empire.6 which professed itself to be eternal simultaneously with an imperial polity whose dissolution would be complete shortly after his lifetime. Seen from this perspective, the “splendid vices” of the City of Man that prized the martial heroism of a conquering empire were unsuitable for a time when empire was on its way out; Augustine substituted in its place the virtues of the City of Man that centered the pious humility of one who submitted to the authority of his or her local Bishop.

It is in the realm of suffering where a rich notion of eternity emerges. Here, suffering is always already accounted for in Divine foreknowledge, but in such a manner where God suffers alongside the widow, the orphan, and the stranger. It is a suffering that God always already knows from the beginning of creation yet nevertheless wills even as he himself must endure such suffering. Augustine’s theology of suffering is one that at once affirms the teleological and linear nature of time against the cyclicality of the Pagans, yet at the same time situates this linear notion of temporality within an ultimately eternal present.

Ultimately though, it is the absence of a proper historical subject that determines Augustine’s conception of time. Without a collective historical subject who consciously produces and is produced by their form of life, the furthest that even Augustine can reach is an eternal present in which history is bequeathed some degree of autonomy, but is ultimately subordinated to Divine will and foreknowledge i.e. somewhere out of reach of human agency. Augustine’s theology of time is an incredibly ambitious attempt to symbolically resolve a set of objective contradictions in which the social world faces collapse and yet life must go on. But Augustine is historically limited in grasping the means by which life must go on i.e. human activity. Because Augustine’s attempt to resolve this contradiction is mediated by the structurally hierarchical world of late antiquity, his theology of time ultimately situates historical becoming within the immediacy of divine knowledge. Importantly, Augustine affirms the novelty of historical events as they occur in time; but frames the entire course of history as an already-complete whole present to divine knowledge. The form through which Augustine attempts to resolve this contradiction is one that emerges from a world where historical development appears outside of the reach of human agency.

Because Augustine’s attempt to resolve this contradiction remains mediated by the hierarchical world of late-antiquity, Augustine at once splinters the ancient cyclical view of time while at the same time ultimately reinscribing historical time within an eternal always-at-once present. Augustine is historically blocked from moving beyond this view of time as eternity’s shadow because conscious and collective social transformation is missing in the society of late antiquity. While Augustine breaks from the cyclical nature of Pagan theories of temporality, he is forced to re-situate history as a completed whole within the eternal presence of God’s knowledge.

Only when history begins to appear as the product of human self-activity does the tension within Augustine’s thought present itself.

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A SOPHIOLOGIST AT JENA

Our ability to identify the tensions within Augustine’s theology of temporality arises from a transformation of our historical experience of time. The social order of late antiquity appeared immutable and beyond the reach of collective social agency. By contrast, the world of modernity increasingly presents itself as a world that is the product of human agency—through social revolutions, political antagonism, and class struggle. This appearance is objectively grounded in the generalization of private property relations and commodity exchange. Each person is formally their own self-legislating monad with the right to alienate their property as they see fit. This alienation has produced a world in which what one’s story is and its meaning is up to him or her. The individual is the final arbiter over their life-story. Whereas in antiquity the world was a place to be inhabited, the modern world was one that was made.

Suffering acquires a new valence in a world constituted by modern freedom in which the world is grasped as something that is our responsibility alone. In an era in which persons gradually acquired a sense of historical consciousness, submission to forces beyond one’s will becomes increasingly unintelligible. The seventeenth- and eighteenth-century positivist spirit of the Enlightenment, though read as a naive and abstract love for capital-r Reason, possessed a polemical edge. It was directed against the feudal remnants of Western Europe that relied on rents and state-baked privilege to cling to power. Suffering could no longer be justified in the ineffable wisdom of God when society now directly presented itself as a product of human labor. Whereas in late-antiquity the death of the innocent could be rationalized within a divinely-unfolding plan, such justifications can no longer hold water in modernity.

It was in nineteenth-century Russia where this reckoning with the classical model of eternity was fully reckoned with. The world of late-nineteenth century imperial Russia was one where old social forms of life were formally subsumed by international capital. The same conditions of ambiguity that allowed Lenin and other Bolsheviks to pen devastating and incisive critiques of the present moment were the very same ones that allowed for the emergence of a generation of theologians who retrieved and critiqued the Church Fathers from the perch of late-eighteenth century German Idealism and mid-nineteenth century German historical-criticism.

It’s here where Sergius Bulgakov holds an analogous relationship to his moment as Augustine. On the one hand, Bulgakov occupies a moment where mass movements and revolutions swirl around him, and the consciousness that it is humanity that makes history was thick in the air. On the other hand, at least leading up to 1917, Tsarist Russia proved more formidable to the forces of liberal or communist revolution than in Western Europe. The stubbornness of the moment in its refusal to change in the face of increasingly tidal-like waves of mass sentiment demanded theological attention.

At the same time, Bulgakov encountered another correlative movement: the more humanity grasps itself as the root of history, the more its destructive potential widens. Bulgakov lived through the Bolshevik revolution in addition to two world wars in which millions upon millions of fellow proletarians killed one another in an ambiguous project of nation-state building. These decades of mass slaughter and awe-inspiring class domination prevailed — even at the same time as Liberalism proclaimed the doctrines of liberty, equality, and freedom. As we came closer to the light of history’s end, humanity’s shadow grew longer and longer.

Sergius Bulgakov’s theological project consisted in reinterpreting it within a historical paradigm in which history for the first time presented itself as a truly open field of human possibility. Bulgakov’s reinterpretation of God’s omniscience — His knowledge pertaining to past, present, and future — offers a view into how radical his theological ambitions really were. Broadly following St. Augustine and also Aquinas, we understand God’s omniscience as God’s immediate knowledge of all events in time. This implies a conception of time in which God knows future events as already-completed from the perspective of eternity even as they remain to be accomplished in time.

However, Bulgakov’s God does not know time in the same manner as modern subjects know time i.e in terms of interchangeable and piecemeal facts. For Bulgakov,

“the world is present before God as all-unity, as the connection of all with all, not in the pre-determinedness of events, but in the general connectedness or determination (and in this sense pre-determinedness) of the whole.”7

God knows history not in its being already-accomplished, but in its absolute openness to becoming. As Bulgakov writes elsewhere, God knew the Fall not as an already-finished moment immediately and eternally present to His knowledge, but as a living and dynamic possibility latent in creation. This is in contrast with the classical model of eternity in which the entire temporal order — every act and event — is immediately present to divine knowledge as a completed whole.

Central to Bulgakov’s conception of omniscience is a productive contradiction—God knows Peter perfectly, but Peter is not a completely describable or exhaustible object of knowledge because Peter exists as a subject that becomes and unfolds through time. Peter as a person, i.e., a concrete spiritual hypostasis, is defined by his always already transcending every fact, description, and limit we may use to define him. As a person, Peter is irreducible; whenever we attempt to describe or talk about him, we are in a literal sense talking *around* him. His depths of dynamic becoming remain unexhausted by any set of propositional statements or facts. Thus temporality is now accorded its own substantial existence as a realm of *genuine* becoming that is distinct from eternity while nevertheless retaining its ultimate unity with eternity. Bulgakov’s radical reinterpretation of creatio ex nihilo casts light on the relationship between temporality and eternity. God’s power is not illustrated by his knowledge of every event that will transpire from now until the second coming. Rather, his power lies in his capacity to limit himself so absolutely that something genuinely new and independent of him can happen. Here it is worth quoting Bulgakov in full:

“The world is real in its divine foundation insofar as its being is *being in the Absolute* — in this, ideas of both creation and emanation agree. But in the idea of creation the world is posited at the same time outside the Absolute, as the self-existent relative. Between the Absolute and the relative runs the border of the creative ‘let there be,’ and therefore the world does not represent a passive outflow, an emanation of the Absolute, like foam in an overfilled cup; rather it is a creatively, initiatively directed and realized emanation — relativity as such.”8

The Absolute is reinterpreted as absolute in its capacity for self-diremption toward the other. Bulgakov reinterprets God’s power by way of God’s power to absolutely limit himself so that something other than God may be created. Yet this diremption nevertheless preserves the boundary between divinity and humanity by grounding the world’s becoming in God’s kenotic self-giving. For Bulgakov, creation remains a gift only insofar as it is recognized as given by someone other than oneself, even at the same time as the recipient participates in receiving the gift.

Bulgakov writes in a world where historical agency has become far more visible through the rise of international revolutionary parties and mass movements as well as the emergence of the proletariat as a collective political subject. Labor is that which allows human beings to distinguish themselves from the world in a manner analogous to how God distinguishes himself from creation through his “Let There Be.” Specifically, the generalization of commodity-relations throughout the world generates the conditions for the emergence of abstract labor— that is, the visible interchangeability and commensurability of all different kinds of labor. In capitalist society, labor (along with nature) emerges as the source of value through which commodities attain their worth and commensurability. Time attains a genuinely substantial character only under conditions where collective transformation wrought by conscious agency becomes possible.

Though no longer formally a Russian Marxist, this insight animates Bulgakov’s theological project and allows him to attain a distinction between temporality and eternity that reaches beyond the merely formal. Because history attains its own substantiality, evil is now grasped with a deeper dimension of existential responsibility. Under the classical model, when Peter denies Christ three times, he is doing something new in time, but was something immediately known by God as an already completed act. In contrast, for Bulgakov, when Peter denies Christ three times, he is doing something genuinely new. God does not know Peter’s denial as an always-already completed act in eternity, but as a living possibility within the life-activity of Peter. Through Peter’s person, God knows Peter’s denial not as something already completed, but as a newly inflicted wound in His body. Providence is transformed from being an immediate knowledge of all events as already-completed to the Spirit’s dynamic activity through history’s becoming and freedom. In this light, Christ’s foreknowledge does not imply that he knows Peter’s denial as an already fully-determined event; rather, Christ’s foreknowledge is reinterpreted as a knowledge of Peter and the concrete historical situation that is so intimate that he knows of Peter’s denial as a living possibility inherent in Peter’s freedom.

Human activity bears a heaviness and responsibility in which every evil act is known by God not as an already-completed fact, but as the human person’s irreducible cut into the fallen world of time. If each person is an irreducibly unique producer of history, then the distortions and fissures he or she introduces are ones that are uniquely their own. To be a person is to bear responsibility for one’s actions.

Bulgakov’s theology may be read as an attempt to symbolically resolve the objective conditions of the commodity fetish. The commodity fetish disguises the inter-connectivity between persons and presents society as a relation between things rather than persons. Bulgakov—horrified by not only the industrial scope warfare had taken on in the world wars but also the unfathomable depths of poverty many millions within the periphery of the Western European imperial core—sought to ground a theodicy that attempted to symbolically resolve the contradiction of a world in which persons are on the one hand capable of so much destruction yet on the other hand capable of a kind of willful ignorance only possible under the conditions of capitalist modernity.

HIPPO IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

The past two decades have seen renewed interest in the work of Bulgakov within the Anglo-American world of contemporary theology. In our postmodern moment, in which international capital has so thoroughly subsumed society that its self-cannibalization can no longer be invisibly displaced, theologians clamor for theological language that can unearth the existential dimension of human evil. The irony that Adorno points out is that we only become conscious of human agency at a moment in which we experience it as totally stifled. “But Hegel rightly perceived that…the rift between individual and society is a necessary element of the emancipation of the individual. Without this rift, the idea of freedom, which points the way beyond both this rupture and the undifferentiated state of affairs, would be inconceivable.”9

The contradiction we experience in the early-21st century is a sharpened iteration of the same one Adorno faced a century earlier—the leaders of Euro-American empire have never been more capable of mass murder with such ease, yet at the same time appear so insulated from the consequences of their actions that the murder and suffering appear not to matter. We find ourselves in a similar position as the Christians of late-antiquity, similarly powerless; though important distinctions remain regarding how decadence functions across different social totalities, even across periods less than a century apart. The Nazis had the shame to conceal the industrial slaughter in the camps of Auschwitz and Treblinka. The voters and leaders of the Republican party buy and sell symbols of imperial cruelty — hats with their nicknames for South Florida concentration camps and allusions to sexual assault of political opponents. The decadence of empire has so thoroughly denuded the American gentry from the consequences of its actions, that merciless imperial policy can only be grasped through its mediation by the commodity-form, as a spectacle to watch on television. In the imperial core of twenty-first century American empire, where the objective reality of mass violence appears to part ways from the subjective experience of moral responsibility, contemporary Anglo-American theology is compelled to rediscover a language through which the subjective and objective dimensions of evil may be reconnected.

In this contradiction we identify how Bulgakov’s eschatology reads like (from our historical vantage point) a desperate attempt to resolve the horrible antagonism of Euro-American empire. Augustine’s eschatology is constituted by the familiar image of the damned suffering in Hell for all eternity and the saved living blissfully in the New Jerusalem. Christ stands above and beyond the world in the Final Judgement, doling out the sentences. This eschatological symbolism is intelligible in a social totality where we grasp the world as an unchangeable structure in which we are merely participants. Contrast this with Bulgakov’s symbolism of the Last Judgement, where it is *we* who shall judge ourselves and Christ the objective measure by which we understand how far we have fallen before the perfect standard of love for neighbor and God that Christ set for us. This *subjective* judgement may only be most adequately grasped in a world where we understand political and social reality to ultimately be our responsibility. Put differently, the Last Judgement can only attain a subjective component when we grasp the source of social reality—labor.

In Bulgakov’s eschatology we find a symbolic resolution of the contradiction of our present moment that implicitly points towards the cruel irony of late postmodernity. More than a hundred Iranian schoolchildren were murdered, emotionally devastating psychically scarring the thousands of persons in whose lives these children played irreplaceable and invaluable parts. Yet at the same time that we have arrived at such incredible means of destruction, there has never been a moment in world-history where we can so easily disavow ourselves of responsibility. The drone operator murdered those children, but this murder was mediated by a button-push and an AI algorithm. Whatever dull pangs of ambiguity he or she feels in their heart is muffled by the knowledge that they were just following orders. Every person within that chain of command has so many points at which they may displace their responsibility that they have the leisure of clocking out of their job at the fusion intelligence center and eating dinner with their family; maybe they’ll attend their daughter’s ballet performance or grab some beers with friends.

So long as the subjective dimension of this evil remains missing, the objective act—the evil that has been committed—remains abstract. Our first instinct towards justice is one where we look towards who was responsible. When we can’t lay the blame at any one particular person’s feet, our own suffering then appears abstract. As Fanon emphasizes throughout Wretched of the Earth, the suffering of the colonized cannot be truly recognized as suffering until some party is held responsible. The violence of decolonization is one means of forcing back that responsibility from the colonizer. Bulgakov’s theology of time attempts to unite the subjective and objective dimensions of suffering, forgiveness, and redemption by allowing time the gift of becoming and novelty. One’s suffering and loneliness is not just the abstract suffering and loneliness of the late-antiquity persona non grata; as a genuinely historical actor through whose activity history is realized, no one has quite suffered like you. But this uniqueness with which one suffers is one that may only attain its concrete reality through recognition of others.

Despite the historical limits of his time, Augustine recognized the necessity for recognition to be true. But the seeming absence of truly historical subjectivity and the possibility of collective transformation meant that he could only displace this recognition into the untouchable eternity, even as his theology affirms that this eternity touches and animates time even as there remains an asynchronicity between the two. Suffering achieves its recognition at the absolute historical limits of late-antiquity. Bulgakov attempts to move beyond the limitations of Augustine’s time to affirm history’s radical distinction from eternity in its capacity to generate genuinely new actualities; but this remains only a symbolic resolution in the face of the twenty-first century’s accelerating pace towards barbarism.

Even as Bulgakov’s theology offers a language through which we may process the number of mass graves that now stretch between Gaza and Iran, it cannot remain simply a theology of consolation. Theology at this moment can either break or be transformed. History can only become history when we grasp ourselves as responsible for dead children. Our agony should burn until it drives us towards the radical negation of the world that continues to produce these graves and dull our capacity for historical responsibility. The world is tinder. Our Redeemer has come to set the world on fire—the fire of the Spirit that burns and yet does not consume, that reveals the responsibility for the horror we’ve made of history. We must only accept a theology that centers Christ’s revelation concerning the Judgement: that the light has come into the world, but men loved the darkness instead of the light, because their deeds were evil. Only when we grasp the history of imperial slaughter as *our* responsibility rather than an already completed temporal order of violence in eternity can time itself be revealed as the site of judgement, and Christ’s exhortation our exhortation.

One thing which has always stood out to me (and many other commentators) is the “hardening” of Pharaoh’s heart. Not just his hardening, but the one who hardens Pharaoh’s heart. The wording God uses telling Moses how He will free his people — how God will harden Pharaoh’s heart — never sat right with me when I was young. It was in fact one of the many marks I held against God in my repulsion towards Christianity. God seemed more like a puppet master rather than a loving father. Why would God make Pharaoh unwilling to let his people go? 

One would be forgiven reading the story as that of an omniscient toddler having a temper tantrum giving himself an excuse to exhibit his power against a despotic ruler. The Egyptian people must suffer God’s plagues of frogs and boils and locusts while their ruler, the only one who can stop the ruin, is unable to because his will has been fixed in place by the cosmos for God’s splendor. This all seems to be part of a perverse drama for God’s entertainment. 

The story of Exodus is fortunately more complex than that. There are many ways in which one can approach Exodus. Volumes have been written on the burning bush, the plagues, and the baby in the reeds. During my days of unemployment I’ve been doing more reading of the scriptures and have had many thoughts on Exodus. The story has resonated with my readings of Marx, black radical politics, and virtue-ethics. The hardening of Pharaoh’s heart is a commentary on what happens to the human being when they ignore their essential being of being powerless and how that turn from reality withers our capacity to make moral choices. 

The Weakness of Moses

Our character study of Pharaoh must begin with Moses. By far the greatest difference lies in the condition of their hearts. We can understand their hearts by how both react in their first encounter with God. 

Moses first encounters God in the form of a burning bush crying for him “Moses, Moses!” (Exodus 3:4). Biblical scholar Ellen F. Davis suggests that the lack of punctuation in the Hebrew frames God almost as calling for help — as though he’s crying for Moses to share with him the burden of the oppressed.1 Moses turns from the ordinary business of life towards God’s cry. This is one of the most important signs that Moses’s heart is open. It is open not only to God, but also the cry of his people, ignored and unheard by the Egyptian aristocracy.

Of course, Moses’s heart is not completely open. Moses fears returning to Egypt and confronting the ruler of the civilized world and fears that God’s power will not be enough against Pharaoh. He furnishes four objections against God’s command that Moses lead his people out of Egypt. His objections range from the serious (“Who am I [a member of an oppressed and poor people] to bring your people out”) to the frivolous (“I am a terrible public speaker.”) Assurances from God himself are insufficient to prod Moses forward.

I find it interesting that the writer(s) of Exodus avoid framing the relationship between God and Moses as simply one between an obedient slave and his master. Instead, there’s give-and-take, a compromise. God not only must assure Moses that he is capable of what must be done but even says that Aaron can speak on his behalf. This is a relationship founded not on obedience but trust, a partnership between man and God. This theme of partnership comes up again and again in God’s dealings with the Jews in the Wilderness. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.

The Brittleness of Pharaoh

Contrast Moses’s encounter with God with that of Pharaoh. The first thing Pharaoh says when confronted by Moses and Aaron’s claims that they are God’s emissaries demanding he let his people go is “Who is the Lord, that I should heed him and let Israel go? I do not know the Lord.” (5:2) Unlike Moses, Pharaoh does not know God nor does he have any desire to. He can’t afford to know God. Pharaoh states bluntly that the Israelites have grown so numerous that they have become Egypt’s primary labor force (5:5). Indeed out of spitefulness for the unknown god Pharaoh commands the Israelites’ slave-drivers to wring even more work out of his slaves (5:6-14). When Moses heard God cry out for him, he dropped everything to see him. When the Jews cried out for Pharaoh’s mercy, he told them to get back to work (5:15-17).

What explains these differences of heart? I believe some of it has to do with Pharaoh’s social position as Pharaoh. In the world of the Near East, the king was considered not only the undisputed ruler but also god of his people. And Egypt was the mightiest civilization in the known world. Pharaoh can’t fathom another being more powerful than him beyond the actual gods of Egypt. The notion that an old man of a conquered people could “command” him to release his civilization’s primary labor force  — upon which all Egypt’s riches are based  — on behalf of a god of whom he’s never heard would not only be laughable but inconceivable. It would be analogous to a freedman at the height of the Cotton Kingdom demanding President John Tyler to abolish slavery and cede all planter land to the slaves.

There’s a reason why we only know Pharaoh not by his name but by his title. Pharaoh’s wealth, his sense of personality, is tied up entirely in his wealth and power over others. To cede his wealth would be tantamount to ceding his personhood. Pharaoh’s heart is hardened because it has to be hardened in order for him to live with himself. Pharaoh’s heart hardens in order to muffle the cries of those he oppresses. He cherishes his power more than he fears God.

But now look at Moses’s position. Moses is identified with the outcast and the marginalized of Egyptian society. Moses’s heart is open and therefore sensitive to the sobs and sighs of his people. And because his heart is open to their cries it is also open to God. Hence why Jesus says “For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me” (Matthew 25:35). We even find secular grounding for this reading in Marx’s analysis of the proletariat as the Universal Class whose suffering and position within the reproduction of society aligns their emancipatory interests with the general interests of mankind as a whole.2 But again, we get ahead of ourselves. Just keep in mind that Moses has a clearer sight and mind than Pharaoh. 

Pharaoh cannot apprehend the enormity of what he’s dealing with. He’s being unreasonable. But what is reason? Reason, simply, is nothing more than regard for and openness to reality.3 And what is this reality? The reality that he — like Moses and the people whom he oppresses — are, at the end of it all, powerless. The god whom Pharaoh meets and knows nothing of is not just Ra or Baal or Mithra, one of many exceptional beings occupying the same genus of godhood. He is Creator. A being so powerful no language is capable of properly describing him. He is who he is (Exodus 3:14). Moses’s heart is open and able to comprehend, however imperfectly, who he’s dealing with. Pharaoh, on the other hand, is unable to see reality for what it is because he clings to wealth and status. 

Let’s take for instance God’s wonders and signs. It’s notable that God does not describe the ten plagues he visits upon Egypt as punishments, but as wonders and signs (4:5). The raining down of frogs and unleashing of locusts are in the same category as the burning bush. God above all desires to be known by us. But our sensitivity to his signs depends on our sensitivity to those around us. All it took for Moses to recognize God was a burning bush. But for Pharaoh, every sign God put forward — beginning with the transformation of Moses’s staff into a snake and ending with the death of every firstborn son of Egypt — only further hardens Pharaoh’s heart.

We must ultimately interpret the hardening of Pharaoh’s heart as what happens to someone when they turn away from their fellow man. Love is the act of seeing someone as an equal — not an extension of your will, nor an alienated Other, but a separate sphere of consciousness whose hopes and dreams, fears and anxieties are just as real as yours. It’s a force that weathers hierarchy, inequality, and subordination. Love reveals that interiority that all people possess and unveils the hidden life. It closes the gap between you and the stranger and reveals both of you for what you are — made in the image of God.

Pharaoh damns himself by ignoring the Hebrew cry for freedom and takes his subjects down with him. The writer of Exodus makes explicit that Pharaoh’s administrators and the Egyptian people are not wicked. Pharaoh’s officials beg him to see that the ensnarement of God’s people is ruining the nation (10:7). But Pharaoh can no longer exercise the moral reason necessary to protect his people and tragically bears the ultimate cost for his ego — his first-born son. 

Pharaoh’s oppression of the Israelites is two-fold. The Egyptians bear the cost of his pride. The objectification of the Israelites ultimately objectifies  — hardens the heart — of the oppressors. The closest analogue to this two-fold alienation is American slavery. Southern planters reduced their slaves as mere “hands” in their account books. The planters objectified the slaves and disrespected their personhood at every moment of their bondage and it came with a terrible cost.

The south was engulfed in a pungent smog of paranoia and fear. Just as the Israelites heavily outnumbered the Egyptians, so too did the slaves outnumber whites in seventeenth-century Barbados and the nineteenth-century Mississippi Delta. This numeric gulf was bridged by white fantasies of bloody revolts, kidnappings, rapes, and barbarous cruelty.4 The planter elite, terrified of their slaves, could not imagine a south whose wealth was not built on their backs. Even worse, they couldn’t even entertain the possibility of what their slaves would do to them without shackles and chains to put them in place. And so, like Pharaoh, the planters confronted their fear by doubling down, expanding operations, and instituting harsher slave codes. 

The Withering of Power

Aristotle writes in the Politics that a human without a community is like a hand without a body — a hand without a body is not properly speaking a hand; a person without a community cannot be a full human being. Humans as children need the security of love, the knowledge that whatever their mistakes or achievements, they are loved by others. That space is what allows one to grow into becoming a fully actualized human being. Without that love, fear — the absence of love — becomes an open maw within us. We try to satisfy the maw by indulging in the fear and further opening the chasm. The heart closes in on itself. It hardens.

Pharaoh was the most powerful ruler in the known world. Yet that power over others blinded him from reality: that he was only human. The refusal to grasp this simple idea has led so many powerful people to become inhuman. When we speak of people being made in the image of God we usually speak in the singular tense — man, not men, made in His image. This is because we are joined in a singular process. We are literally all in this together. When we abuse and oppress others we pervert our social nature and diminish our humanity. 

Moses gains his humanity where Pharaoh loses his in his admission of being a single, powerless human being who owes everything to God and his community. Moses embraces God and community and comes out the better. He doesn’t need riches. The tighter Pharaoh clings to the sinews of power, the more he alienates himself from his closest advisors and the Egyptian people. The more signs God displays to Pharaoh that He Is in fact Who He Is, the further Pharaoh recedes into himself. Pharaoh is ultimately terrified of who he ultimately is without power over others. To admit dependence on God is tantamount to defeat in Pharaoh’s eyes, and defeat to the one gripped by fear might as well be the end of the world. Pharaoh’s fear and inhumanity cripples his moral agency and be the leader his people need him to be.

God is Love

The Sunshine Metaphor is a common metaphor that describes the contrast between Moses and Pharaoh. Moses’s heart is butter while Pharaoh’s heart is clay. When the sun shines on butter it melts, but on clay it hardens. This metaphor tells most of but not the whole story. For one of the ingredients that makes a man’s heart butter or clay is power. Power at once reveals and changes one’s heart. Powerless Moses found his sense of self-worth in his love for his people and God while Powerful Pharaoh identified himself with his power over others. Where the heart finds strength in acknowledging its weakness and leaning on others, it withers when turned inward and away. Moses could turn to God because he understood that God loved him despite his weakness; Pharaoh couldn’t because he thought love was something taken, not given. 

We come back finally to why Pharaoh’s first word to Moses was that he did not know God. Pharaoh was not mocking Moses and Aaron  — he was telling the truth. His heart hardened in the face of his slaves’ sobs of pain and sung laments. Pharaoh could not love his subjects. And as John says, ‘He who does not love does not know God; for God is love.’ 

While critical, the Utopian Socialists’ insufficient understanding of political economy led them to accept some of the central premises of political economy and produce piecemeal solutions ranging from Proudhon’s market socialist schemes and Fourier’s cooperative towns funded by rich benefactors. Their critiques therefore failed to transcend the view of the world from the standpoint of bourgeois political economy.

Marx was a radical. He was not just a radical for his century but a radical for his epoch. It’s not simply his critique of capitalism that made Marx a radical: it was his conception of history as action that marks him head-and-shoulders above his contemporaries. While political economists like Adam Smith and David Ricardo viewed the desire to profit as natural to human nature, Marx studied it as a social and historical phenomenon resulting from the actions of humans and specific to the capitalist mode of production. The “ruthless critique of everything” is not just a more intense critique than those of the Romantics and Utopians that came before. Marx’s ruthless critique was ruthless because it got to the root of the problem.

Marx is essential not only for understanding capitalism but how we approach the totality of human social relations and their reproduction. The implications of his critique stretch beyond economics. Marx’s analysis aids our study of how phenomena like race, wage-labor, gender, private property, and rent are historical constructions and contribute to the unfolding of capitalist social relations. My intent is to lay the broad outline of how the sociological dimension of Marxist analysis leads to a sturdier foundation for acting towards a better future through its use in studying phoenmena like the Black Radical Tradition.

The problem of profit is of our own making. Although it would be foolish to believe that profit and its consequences upon our lives and the earth can simply be unmade, they nevertheless can still be transcended.

Materialism and Out-Smithing Adam Smith

Misunderstandings abound concerning Marx’s method. The most prevalent of these is that Marx reduces everything to “material” conditions, usually entailing factors like income, industry, geography, natural resources, and other factors. Liberal critics criticize Marx for his crude reduction of society to the merely perceptible; more specifically, Marx is accused of connecting literally everything back to the most visible manifestations of class conflict.1

If Marx did hold this approach to studying society, one would indeed wrinkle their nose and scratch their head at the idea that Marx would have anything to say about black slaves or middle-class housewives. But this characterization of Marx’s method is the exact opposite of Marx’s actual approach to understanding society. In actuality, Marx’s method begins at the level of the abstract, the imperceptible, and ends at the concrete. Marx renders his method explicit in the introductory chapter of the Grundrisse: 

“When we consider a given country… we begin with its population, its distribution among classes, town, country, the coast, the different branches of production, export and import, annual production and consumption, commodity prices etc. It seems to be correct to begin with the real and the concrete... However, on closer examination this proves false. The population is an abstraction if I leave out, for example, the classes of which it is composed. These classes in turn are an empty phrase if I am not familiar with the elements on which they rest. E.g. wage labour, capital, etc. These latter in turn presuppose exchange, division of labour, prices, etc… Thus, if I were to begin with the population, this would be a chaotic conception [Vorstellung] of the whole, and I would then, by means of further determination, move analytically towards ever more simple concepts [Begriff], from the imagined concrete towards ever thinner abstractions until I had arrived at the simplest determinations.”2

Marx set out to distinguish himself from the liberal economists and historians of his day by going beyond the crude materialism of his contemporaries. He sought to begin at the level of the abstract because the concrete is merely “the concentration of many [abstract] determinations…” Marx’s method is, in other words, scientific because he seeks out and isolates the simplest elements of a given totality and gradually descends to the level of the concrete, adding more abstract relations until the concrete world emerges from them. This is why Marx begins Capital Volume I by first analyzing its most basic element, the commodity, and introduces more determinations until we arrive at more concrete expressions of capital like commercial capital and banking capital in Volume III. 

This is important because Marx did not set out to merely describe the world i.e. paint a picture of the world as it appeared. The first to attempt this systematically wasn’t Marx but Adam Smith. Marx instead aimed to understand the canvas beneath the paint. 

In their respective investigations, Smith and Ricardo took for granted economic categories like profit, wages, and rents and believed them to be the perfect expressions of natural reason. This led them to project the values and laws of bourgeois society backwards into history. History only starts after the end of the “early and rude state of society” when “the accumulation of stock and the appropriation of land” begins.3 Marx questioned how natural these forms really were and aimed to grasp the “inner-laws” that drove their development to prove that the capitalist mode of production is just as subject to history as those modes of production that preceded it. 

Marx transcended the classical political economists once he criticized the forms on which their investigations into bourgeois society rested. Marx insisted that political economists like David Ricardo

“ultimately made the antagonism of class interests, of wages and profits… the starting point of his investigations, naively taking the antagonism for a social law of nature.”4

The political economists, reaching the limits of eighteenth-century materialism, took the forms of bourgeois society for granted, projecting them backwards into history as eternal laws upon which society moved.

Restoring Human Nature

In the German Ideology, Marx writes that the first premise of all human history is the existence of living human individuals. “Thus the first fact to be established is the physical organization of these individuals and their consequent relation to the rest of nature.”5 The activity which mediates between man and nature is labor. Through their labor, people confront nature, appropriates its material, and changes it “to a form appropriate to his own needs.”6

The corollary of production being the basis of human beings is their reproduction through time. The aim of any people is to survive not only this moment but the next and the one thereafter. Survival is a continuous process where human beings appropriate the wealth of nature in service of this end. 

Presupposing reproduction is not only a change in nature but a change in man. When one appropriates something of nature, i.e. an acre of woodland for timber, the wood is no longer there. The basis of wealth is therefore subject to a constant state of change which people must respond to and build on if they wish to perpetuate themselves. Therefore, people change simultaneously as they change nature, the mediator between the two being labor. As Marx points out, “After the city of Rome had been built and the surrounding countryside cultivated by its citizens, the conditions of the community were different from what they had been before.”7

Let’s descend one level of abstraction. Up to this point we have generally discussed abstract Man’s relationship with abstract nature. There is no Robinson Crusoe, the solitary individual who is able to build society from the bottom-up. The human being above all is a social being. People do not exist alone but exist within a community. For humans to exercise their peculiarly rational faculties, they must have a language through which they may render themselves communicable not only to others but to themselves as individuals. This language through which the individual develops their sense of self exists before them and will exist after them. There also must be social norms and customs and relations in which they are embedded that allow them to exercise their rationality through praxis. Praxis allows people not only to cultivate their rationality but also to form bonds with and care for one another. Out of these bonds forms a social division of labor.

Though it appears to us that there is a fundamental opposition between the individual and general interest, i.e. the private and public spheres, by no means is this opposition “natural.” This opposition only appears fixed in human nature because the opposition between man and man rests on a set of historical social relations that promote competition, opposition, and exclusivity, i.e. private property. It is a social order organized by the relations of private property that divorces the individual from society and forces him or her to confront society as something alien to them instead of recognizing that he or she is constituted by society just as they constitute society.

For now we will leave the problem of private property aside for another day. All that’s important to keep in mind is that, for Marx, the natural opposition between individual and society is a false one. It is a one-sided and mechanical approach that obliterates history. All previous societies are no longer understood on their own terms but on the terms of bourgeois thought. It is a blunt negation of history that understands Qing China and the Roman Republic as unfortunate but necessary steps to the most rational society in human history. Marx insisted against his peers that societies must be understood by their own laws and movements, not our’s. Human beings produce history in very different ways and those ways must be understood as qualitatively different from those of the present day.

The reproduction of a given society is expressed through the bonds that bind people of a particular community together, i.e. their social relations. Humans are the producers and products of social relations. These social relations allow people to express their natural sociality and perpetuate themselves. But, people do not merely reproduce themselves physiologically. They also reproduce their social relations and therefore themselves socially. Hence why Marx critiques the political economists’ uncritical assumptions of wage-labor and capital being inherent to human nature, i.e. Smith’s claim that the “propensity to truck and barter” is simply human nature. For Marx, “The worker produces capital, capital produces him – hence he produces himself, and man as worker, as a commodity, is the product of this entire cycle.”8 Just as the serf is produced by medieval society and medieval society produced the serf, so too does the wage-laborer produce capitalist society and in turn is produced by it.

Black History and White Particularlity

Here we can infer that different means of (re)production produce different societies. While the same elements may exist across different societies, nothing would be more erroneous than to assume a given element fulfills the same role between different modes of production. Money, for example, is not used across societies merely because it avoids the problem of barter as some economists claim. While in a developed capitalist society money is a store of value and plays the role of universal equivalent between commodities, it also plays a far more modest role in those societies in which exchange-relations do not dominate. 

The sociological dimension of Marx’s project was to understand the development of different societies on their own terms. The means by which capitalist society reproduces itself are different from those of feudal society. Whereas even the analytically rigorous Ricardo projects onto the primitive fisherman the mindset of a commodity owner comparing his fish with annuity tables, Marx insists on understanding societies by the laws and limits of their respective sets of social relations.9

Beginning our investigation upon Marxist premises — that the categories of capitalist society (wages, rent, and profit) are socially constructed, men reproduce not only themselves but the social relations in which they’re embedded, and that different societies reproduce themselves in different ways — allows for a richer understanding of the elements on which capitalist society rest. 

The Marxist approach is especially productive when taking social relations like race as its object. Liberal analysis begins at the level of racial antagonism, taking it as a given. It assumes a society constituted of individuals competing with other individuals whose interests must be mediated by an alienated political or social structure e.g. the state or civil society. The end of racial oppression is almost incomprehensible, tantamount to the Coming of the Lord or the four-sided triangle. Blackness is objectified and racialized for the simple reason that it is different from whiteness, a product of individual pathology and bigotry. 

Certain whites disliking blacks because of the color of their skin is a real enough phenomenon. This is certainly a materialist approach insofar as it takes the appearance of reality as is. But if we begin our investigation jumping off the springboard of alienated social forms like race, then we’re going to crack our head on the concrete of reified conclusions. We simply cannot assume race is a transhistorical category synonymous with the “us vs them” abstract understanding of human conflict. To do so merely smudges the differences between different historical epochs and our account becomes both stagist in seeing past societies as merely lesser-developed versions of contemporary society and static in its attributing to race an atemporal quality akin to hunger or thirst, something simply part of human nature.

Simply stating that European whites oppressed Africans because of the color of their skin is fetishistic. It projects social qualities onto a thing i.e. black skin. It would be as fantastic as claiming that social characteristics like selflessness and kindness are inherent in the physical quality of blue eyes. A physical quality only means something when placed within a set of given social relations. This is a product of the generally inverted disposition of bourgeois thought that either attributes social relations to things, i.e. the ability of industrial machinery to produce commodities being inherent in the machine rather than the worker operating it, or derives technical relations from social phenomena, i.e. rent being an inherent aspect of the physical land and soil.

Marxists working within the Black Radical and Feminist traditions have done more than anyone to emphasize the sociological character of Marx’s critique. Cedric Robinson studies the notion of “blackness” as a historical novelty only emerging out of the long sixteenth-century ascendance of capital. Unlike the term African, Moor, or Ethiope, the Negro

“suggested no situatedness in time, that is history, or space, that is ethno- or politico-geography. The Negro had no civilization, no cultures, no religions, no history, no place, and finally no humanity that might command consideration… the Negro constituted a marginally human group, a collection of things of convenience for use and/or eradication.”10

These culturally-differentiated Africans — whether Yoruba, Asante, or Ghanan — were crammed into slave ships, heading for the sugar plantations of the British West Indies, and reduced to their physical quality of being black. Their cultural differences were subordinated to their common bondage and submerged into homogenous exchange-value. Marcus Rediker in his studies of the slave ship furnishes accounts of how whites appeared to enslaved blacks “as evil spirits and horrible-looking ‘white people.’”11 Just as “black” africans were lumped together because of their status as slaves, so too did “whiteness” emerge from the motley crew of sailors — Englishmen, Dutchmen, and Frenchmen — whose commonality was that they were not enslaved “blacks.”

But, crucial in these accounts of blackness are 1) their inherently social character and 2) the continually changing terms on which blackness is defined. Both Robinson and Rediker emphasize the importance of the sugar plantation and slave ship in calling forth a trans-atlantic proletariat whose cultural and ethnic differences were submerged to produce a certain identity associated with a certain form of labor: blackness and slavery. But even so, the fierce, centuries-long slave resistance preserved certain continuities from the African past while forging new bonds of solidarity in the foreign lands of the Carolinas and Caribbean, out of which emerged an African-American identity.

Dialectically, this slave resistance further solidified white solidarity across classes. Seventeenth and eighteenth-century white planters reported how entire provinces in the West Indies were in danger of being massacred by their large African enslaved proletarians.12 Marx’s method demonstrates that, far from an eternal category, race is a rickety social construction that must be continually reproduced on ever-changing conditions if it is to have any power whatsoever.

We must not simply strike at the mask but through it. Race is a social relation historically determined and socially contested throughout time and space. The shifting social relations and the class struggle on which they are based account for how difficult it is to retain a static and transhistorical category of race. Even as blackness first emerged out of a social dynamic as a means of identifying those black-skinned Africans whose only commonality was their shared bondage in the fields, that same mark of oppression was baptized through centuries of struggle as a badge of pride and solidarity. The decolonizing twentieth-century witnessed the greatest global upheaval in human history. Calls for Black Power were not only heard in Greenwood, Mississippi and Harlem, New York but also in Ghana, Algeria, and Guyuana. Black radicals like Kwame Ture, Malcolm X, Kwame Nkrumah, Franz Fanon, and Eric Williams consciously identified with a centuries-old international movement. During the sixteenth century, blackness was a mark of shame to be imposed upon the slave that destined them for the sugar plantations. White was universal and black was particular. The white Englishman defined their freedoms and rights against the bonded condition of the black slave. But by the twentieth century, blackness achieved a new meaning during the global war against imperialism, something more universal. As James Baldwin writes: 

“The white man's unadmitted — and apparently, to him, unspeakable — private fears and longings are projected onto the Negro. The only way he can be released from the Negro's tyrannical power over him is to consent, in effect, to become black himself, to become a part of that suffering and dancing country that he now watches wistfully from the heights of his lonely power and, armed with spiritual traveller's checks, visits surreptitiously after dark. How can one respect, let alone adopt, the values of a people who do not, on any level whatever, live the way they say they do, or the way they say they should?”13

Now, whiteness was particular and black the universal. The prosperity of whiteness hinged on the poverty of blackness.

It wasn’t simply radical black activists who grasped the universal character of their struggle. American whites in power, such as Los Angeles’s police chief William Parker, viewed rioting blacks in the Watts ghetto as “fighting like the Viet Cong” thousands of miles across the Pacific.14 The powerful few understood that the insurgents of the American ghettos had an unsettling amount in common with those of Vietnam, Cuba, and Algeria. Lyndon B. Johnson not only passed the infamous 1968 Crime Bill that laid the first cornerstone of the modern American carceral state, but also strengthened policing resources sent to counterinsurgents and police forces in Europe, South America, and Asia.15 The globalization of the police matched the globalization of the struggle.

The Marxist mode of history helps us understand these developments, from the sixteenth-century to the twentieth, as possessing an organizing logic neither determinative nor wishful. New opportunities of emancipation emerge as others close. It is only during the twentieth century — its two world wars, the reconstitution of global empires, decolonization movements, and global economic crises — that this mode of struggle could be so fully-articulated, even in spite of its contradictions. Marx allows us to understand race not merely as a form of bigotry but as a social relation of production: it is a relation of production not simply producing material commodities, like sugar or cotton, but reproducing society. Race has power precisely because of the alienation between man and man produced by the universalization of a particular identity — private property — across all human society. 

Baldwin wrote in 1963 that whites must become black in order to free themselves of the hold race has on them. In other words, whites must identify themselves with the universal class. So too does Marx claim that private property can only be abolished when the proletariat abolishes itself, i.e. transcends that social relation whose existence hinges on their landlessness, alienation, and separation. Emancipation can only be universal. “Labour in a white skin cannot emancipate itself where it is branded in a black skin.”16

History is made by men, and these men in turn are constituted by the societies that produce them. Marx’s critique of political economy cleanly evades the Scylla and Charybdis of Great Men and Material Conditions by affirming that both men and their societies are both different moments of the same process: history. This process can — must — be put to liberatory ends. Marx’s critique of political economy, in whose place he posits a radical understanding of history and all its institutions as action, allows us to understand the alienated forms of individual and society and act towards a society in which there is neither abstract man nor abstract society — only socialized man and humanized society.

In a previous essay, I argued that the New Deal’s uneven democratization of homeownership sowed the collapse of the New Deal Democratic coalition by pitting a propertied white working-class located in the suburbs against a propertyless black working-class located in the inner-cities. One of the central thrusts of the postwar Civil Rights movement was black professionals and tradesmen’s demands for access to better housing and the abolition of the ghetto in which they were sequestered. Many whites throughout the fifties and sixties met these demands with violence and terror.

However, white reaction to the Civil Rights movement differed in meaningful ways throughout the north and south. Historical accounts of the postwar Civil Rights movement tend to explain differences in white reaction between the north and south by comparing their respective racial compositions, geographies, and regional economies. Scholars such as Kevin Kruse and Lisa McGirr have offered substantial accounts for how processes such as deindustrialization and suburbanization fed into and were fueled by the fiery racial conflict engulfing northern cities throughout the fifties and sixties. These processes explain the different ways through which racial antagonism developed across the country.

These accounts, while crucial, are incomplete. Racial formation — both white and black — is a messy, uneven process of development that cannot only be explained by statistics such as population, racial composition, or industry. We must understand how the lives and identities of both whites and blacks were determined by and filtered through social relations such as private property. Studying racial formation and how whiteness was constituted during the postwar period means beginning not at the level of population demographics — the merely statistical — but at the level of those relations, like property, that bind individuals together into neighborhoods. 

One of the most crucial means through which private property bounded individuals together was religious community. Postwar scholars have tended to treat religion as merely as an identity individuals voluntarily assume rather than also a set of relations that structure and bound entire communities. This has been to the historical consensus’s detriment, as religious community during the twentieth century was crucial in mediating not only one’s relationship to private property but also racial identity.

One of the most decisive religious institutions in structuring the lives of American whites was the Roman Catholic Church. The Church was a profoundly important institution throughout the urban north that structured not only local communities and neighborhoods, but also urban whites’ responses to the Civil Rights movement. The Church, by virtue of its superintendence over urban life, had a powerful hand in reifying the white identity of parishoners. This influence upon white reaction was ultimately grounded in the property relations of the parish in structuring the neighborhood, ethnic nationalism, and white reaction.

Studying the role of the Church in defining whiteness through its particular property relations underscores the importance of understanding race not as a static category but as a living set of relations constantly reconfigured and reified through potlucks, parish halls, and homeowners’ associations. Accounting for the role of the Church in the urban north affords us a much clearer picture of why white backlash in northern cities like Chicago and New York unfolded so explosively.

White People and the Parish Steeple

The ethnic character of the white mobs throwing bricks and glass bottles at King and Civil Rights activists in Chicago was easily apparent to all parties. The african-american Chicago Defender declared “Nearly every man or woman arrested thus far in the Trumbull Park area bore names that very few Americans can pronounce ... It would appear that the people with (zuktjorsljp) names like this in parentheses should be advised by their leaders to live peacefully - the American way."2 The people the ACLU identified as being active leaders within the anti-integration South Deering Improvement Association had names like “Nahirney, Santucci, Salvatore, Lalich, Mistovich, Bogdanovich, Kral, Kelly, Dorio, Robish, Michalik, Jarmusz…”3 Even the local papers serving the white ethnic Calumet Park area proudly "boast[ed] that it was Southern and Eastern Europeans who really built this country while Negroes were 'swinging in trees,' 'eating each other.'”4

Many of these white ethnics were, unsurprisingly, working-class Catholics. At some Chicago white riots, priests were brought out in hopes that their presence would calm the crowd. The Catholic Interracial Council conducted surveys illustrating that “many Catholics appeared to be participating in the anti-racial disturbances.”5 The central role of the white working-class Catholic figured prominently throughout the late-fifties and sixties as urban rebellions flared throughout the north.

One may rightfully ask where the Jews and Protestants were. Surely they were present among the housing mobs of Cicero or Gage Park. While there were undoubtedly some individual Jews and Protestants in the mobs, housing riots were most common in predominantly working-class Catholic neighborhoods. In contrast to their Irish and Italian Catholic counterparts, Jewish youth were reluctant to join street gangs in New York. In Chicago, black realtors brought clients into heavily Jewish neighborhoods and steered clear from the Catholic homeowners of the South and Southwest Sides. And White Protestants (already a small minority within many urban centers in the north) would generally flee rather than fight. A perplexed Chicago seminarian was at a loss for why strongly Catholic “neighborhoods are the most opposed to integration.”6

These peculiar patterns of white violence among white neighborhoods complicates our understanding of the centrality of housing to whiteness. In his study of postwar Oakland, Robert Self concludes that homeownership was akin to a melting pot where white ethnics and Anglo protestants from across the economic spectrum merged into a “tax-conscious voting bloc” especially in the face of an militant Civil Rights movement demanding housing integration.7 Although Richard Rothstein discusses friction among white Catholics, Protestants, and Jews regarding housing, Rothstein only discusses the matter in terms of a grudging mid-twentieth century WASP elite finally allowing Jews and Catholics to claim whiteness as a means of racial solidarity against ghetto rebellions and housing mobilizations.8 Little discussion is reserved for the reasons why white Catholics’ response to neighborhood integration was often far more violent than that of white Protestants and Jews.

The role of the parish is a critical component missing in discussions of why white violence within the urban north was so violent. The parish was not merely somewhere one went to church every Sunday. It did not merely help structure the neighborhood — the parish was the neighborhood. McGreevy hardly exaggerates when he states that “Catholics used the parish to map out space within all of the northern cities.”9 One of the first acts a new parish would do is send the priest out to knock door-to-door within the neighborhood, inquiring if the family inside was Catholic, registered with the parish, and receiving the sacraments. The parish was the defining institution of most urban northern white ethnics. A 1950s Detroit study found that 70 percent of the city’s Catholics claimed to attend services at least once a week compared to 33 percent of the city’s white Protestants and 12 percent of the city’s Jews.10

Crucially, the Catholic parish, unlike the Jewish synagogue or Protestant congregation, was immovable. As John McGreevy points out. Jews and Protestants could liquidate their property and relocate once blacks began moving in. But the property of the parish — including the church, parochial school, a convent, a rectory, and sometimes gymnasiums and auditoriums — were registered in the name of the diocese and therefore could not just be sold.

Scholars tend to take for granted the premium with which all whites put on homeownership and Americanness.11 But working-class immigrants were more likely than middle-class native-born Americans to own their own homes in the north. Catholic immigrants heavily invested their savings in homeownership. In the heavily Catholic Back of the Yards area of Chicago, an impressive 57 percent of the homes were owned, and 90 percent of homeowners were foreign-born. In contrast to Catholics who flocked to single-family dwellings, Jews in the urban north tended to flock to large apartment buildings despite making more on average.12 While homeownership is typically conceived to be the American Dream, it was especially so among working- and middle-class Catholics.

The white ethnic’s fixation on homeownership emerged from parish life. Both priest and parishioner were acutely aware of how spatially rooted the parish is. Priests exhorted parishioners to invest in property and homeownership with “mind-numbing” regularity. One priest during the 1920s proudly announced that more than 80 percent of his parishioners were homeowners; another Philadelphia priest urged his parish, almost entirely working-class, to buy their own homes as the most important step towards a stable, permanent parish life.13

The parish’s concentrated character meant that Catholic life was especially concentrated compared to Protestant and Jewish life. Studies of white Protestant churches in the early-twentieth century found that over half of the congregation lived outside the immediate area. Synagogues drew members from a broad area and competed with other synagogues for members.14 Coupled with the neighborhood-ward system of the urban north which made priests especially important political dealmakers, the Catholic Church was among the most important institutions shaping the everyday lives of white ethnic immigrants. 

The rooted character of the parish and the centripetal force it played in the lives of ethnic whites would play an important role in the urban uprisings to come. Whereas many Jewish and Protestant whites could “peacefully” integrate for a short period and then resegregate to the suburbs or periphery, white ethnic Catholics were far less willing to do the same. This recalcitrance is rooted in not only the metaphorical but literal feeling of pride in the parish property funded through parishioner tithes over the course of decades and the maintenance of well-preserved homes clustered around those parishes. 

The racial violence preserving these neighborhoods was not only powered by economic concern and racial pride but also ethnic nationalism and Catholic identity. After a century spanning the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century — toiling away in the perilous conditions of the meatpacking, auto, and steel industries, and enduring feelings of persecution under Prohibition and nativistic assault — southern and eastern european immigrants achieved some sense of stability. As Hirsch observes of a Polish neighborhood in Chicago, “The pride in these achievements and the construction of ‘beautiful residences’ was surpassed only by the sense of accomplishment that attended the residents' own, literal, construction of the new Polish Catholic Church.”15

Cracker Catholicism

On April 1, 1964, Alabama Governor and segregationist George Wallace visited Milwakee’s south side for a rally in support of his presidential campaign. The rally was organized by ex-Marine Milwaukee tavern owner Bronko Gruber at the St. Sava Serbian Orthodox Church. Hundreds of ethnic white blue-collar workers and small business owners packed the church and overflowed outside to support Wallace. A little less than a decade before, the place was packed to see liberal Democrat John F. Kennedy. 

South Milwaukee is what historian Dan Carter calls typical “Wallace country.”16 Neat single-family houses populated by largely white tradesmen and small business owners. Like Chicago, the adjacent black neighborhoods were expanding and pushing “invading” these neighborhoods. Bitterness and anger crackled through these neighborhoods as white residents fought to preserve the character of their homes, streets, and parishes. 

This bitterness did not emerge from a general, static racial category of what we call whiteness. It was a feeling generated by a conjuncture of place and time. Racial identity is, above all, relational, and the white Catholics voting for Wallace did so as a means of preservation — not only from the blacks “invading” their neighborhoods, but also the Anglo and Jewish whites by whom they were allegedly betrayed. 

Important in understanding the nature of this bitterness is white flight. Normally, one understands white flight as simply being the movement of whites out of a neighborhood as blacks move in. But the mid-twentieth century white flight, both in the north and south, belied a crisis of white solidarity. 

The rapid growth of Chicago’s black ghetto triggered a desperate competition between different groups of whites as the successful “defense” of one white neighborhood from black “invasion” led to the mounting crisis of another. Residents of the heavily Jewish and upper middle-class Hyde Park were able to accomplish the double-movement of at once celebrating racial integration while at the same time “save” itself from blacks moving in by redeveloping affordable housing out of the neighborhood (ironically, the only “blighted” areas of Hyde Park were predominantly white ethnic). As Hirsch notes, working-class white Catholics saw this peculiar response to integration as both “self-serving and threatening by those concerned outside observers.”17

The process of white flight worked the other way as well: Jewish and Protestant neighborhoods being successfully “invaded” led white ethnic Catholics to cling even tighter to their white identity. White ethnic Catholics, too tied to their parishes to leave, were “left behind” by their fellow “whites” to act as buffer zones to blacks moving in. Flowering out of these “buffer zone” neighborhoods throughout the fifties and sixties were homeowners’ associations standing athwart working and middle-class blacks fighting for better and more affordable housing. 

These homeowners associations leveraged militaristic language and spoke of blacks as “invaders'' and electing block “captains.” The territoriality of the parish made it well-suited as a base of operations for homeowners’ groups. Thomas Sugrue writes at length about how a good number of Detroit priests encouraged parishioners to join their local homeowners’ associations “for fear that black ‘invasions’ would hurt parish life.”18 Even while the Catholic hierarchy became more liberal on racial issues throughout the fifties and sixties, there remained many parish priests who were in lockstep with parishioners in calling for the defense of their neighborhoods against integration. 

The anger that white ethnic Catholics felt towards their fellow whites whom they believed to be either naive or malicious was heightened by top-down forces. Real estate brokers would often trigger white flight by paying blacks to walk through white neighborhoods and making calls to white residents. Although scholars like Beryl Sattler rightly point out that most brokers avoided this form of "blockbusting," the practice was nevertheless carried out by a few unscrupulous contract brokers “introducing” blacks into white neighborhoods, allowing them to rush in and buy cheap from departing whites and sell dear to blacks moving in.19 These white brokers were viewed as not only race traitors, outsiders to the community, but also Jewish.

There was also the unseen but felt influence of wealthy and predominantly Jewish and Anglo Protestant city planners and businessmen who used the power of eminent domain to “blight” white ethnic neighborhoods under the aegis of urban improvement. Hirsch accounts how the latter in Chicago viewed residence in the suburbs as “desirable and possible… it was certainly not a prospect to be dreaded, even if one was ‘pushed’ there by changing inner-city realities.” While the planners occupying the interlocking municipal committees and agencies were upwardly-mobile professionals and big businessmen, the ringleaders of the white neighborhood racial violence — such as in Trumbull Park — were tradesmen who owned their own businesses, had trouble paying their bills, and we're second or third generation ethnic immigrants.20

These pressures from without and within fomented a feeling of persecution and paranoia which to outsiders felt especially galling. White ethnics felt the traditional religious-property order was being “subverted” while their fellow whites abandoned them for the suburbs and the federal government increasingly adopted infrastructure and development plans that enabled blacks to move in. White ethnics’ siege mentality — wrought by the perceived trinity of intellectuals, government planners, and big businessmen — was made all the more frightening by the effects of automation and capital flight crippling northern industry beginning in the forties. These historical processes met at the nexus of the Catholic working-class parish, a pressure cooker out of which would sprout the mass base of the Nixon and Reagan counter-revolutions of the seventies and eighties.

Parish Property and the “New” Whites

Of course, Catholics were not completely victimized, nor by any means were they the biggest losers. The Catholic voting bloc still held and exercised significant hold over the urban political machines. Mayor Daley in Chicago was Catholic, and clerics like Cardinal Stritch were able to successfully maneuver highways away from important parishes into black neighborhoods.21 But studying the particular attachments with which working-class Catholics felt towards the parish and their struggles is crucial for understanding why white ethnics felt that their way of life was being “attacked” — even if that way of life was predicated on the racial domination of blacks and the continual reification of the urban ghetto. 

The role the parish played in structuring the lives of white ethnic clarifies why, curiously, there were far more riots in the urban North than the urban South. While Kevin Kruse sensibly points to Atlanta having a much larger percentage of black residents than Chicago for why there fewer riots during the Civil Rights movement, a key component missing from Kruse’s analysis is how many more whites living in Chicago had their lives structured by and rooted in the parish's presupposed property relations.

We cannot simply say that racial conflict unfolded in certain ways because the proportion of undifferentiated blacks and undifferentiated whites varied across geography. During the fifties, members of the white majority-Protestant neighborhoods in Atlanta generally bargained or cajoled their prospective black neighbors or, failing that, fled for the suburbs.22 In contrast, the urban north was embroiled in an “era of hidden violence” as working-class white ethnics and blacks engaged in an urban guerilla war from block to block and house to house.23

The parish is also critical to understanding the politics of the postwar era. During the sixties, Democratic party was caught within a central contradiction from California to Wisconsin — a white ethnic working-class at once firmly pro-union but also fiercely opposed to integrated housing. In early-sixties California, liberal Democrat Lyndon Johnson trounced conservative Republican Barry Goldwater while Proposition 14—a referendum to repeal a ban on racial discrimination in home sales—passed by even higher margins.24 Milwaukee, a powerful union stronghold and one of the few cities overseen by a socialist government, held strong vote returns for the segregationist states’ rights candidate George Wallace. 

Curiously, the racism with which ethnic whites held in the parish neighborhood dissipated somewhat at the factory floor. The same white ethnics who were strongly opposed to blacks moving in were also tolerant of their presence in the workplace and within unions. Of course, as countless scholars have illustrated, many trade unions were complicit in reifying the labor apartheid that kept blacks at the bottom or out of unionized trade and manufacturing jobs.25 The relative racial tolerance in the workplace compared to the neighborhood speaks to the particular bonds working-class white ethnics felt towards parish neighborhoods and thereby property. The seeming multi-faceted racism also helps to explain how strongly pro-union New Dealers would vote for arch-conservatives like Goldwater and segregationists like Wallace as the sixties unfolded.

Finally, the parish points to how whiteness by no means is a static category but is instead a lived set of social relations — something that, for some groups like working-class whites, was irrevocably tied up in the illiquid real estate property fostered by the Catholic structure of religious community. Whiteness is not only changing but also relative. Facing outwards, working-class Catholics may claim the banner of whiteness in the face of the black ghetto, but turned inwards, they struggled to slot themselves within a wobbling hierarchy of other “white” groups whose place was in a constant state of re-negotiation. Not only is an “other” that differentiates whiteness from blackness necessary for the former to exist, but also an “other” within that category of whiteness dividing workers and capitalists, Protestants and Catholics, and Polish and Slav. Whiteness, if it’s to reproduce through time, requires division within and without. 

As sociologist Stuart Hall writes, race, above all, is the modality through which class is lived. A key first-step to fleshing out the radical struggles of the fifties and sixties is beginning from the most local unit of American society — not just the neighborhood, but the parish.

As the global climate crisis boils our oceans, suffocates our skies, and darkens our horizons, we find ourselves in a planetary crisis the likes of which humanity has never seen before. Many in the West have rightfully condemned the continued despoliation of the earth wrought by global markets made ascendant.  

But the view of man dominating nature, no matter how well-intentioned, tells us nothing about the root of the problem. It is in fact an anti-radical idea precisely because it completely misses the root of the problem. It forgoes the particular for the universal. Man dominating nature has been a recurring theme in pastoral literature since at least Ovid. Yet obviously there is a problem particular to our time absent during the time of the Romans. The literary touchstone lacks the explanatory power for why we are living through a climate crisis right now.

We need an independent variable. Something that existed then and exists now. A factor we may compare across time to find the historical processes fueling our planetary crisis. In order to understand the problem of our age, we must understand the pig. 

The pig is no ordinary livestock. It’s a wiley animal, so wiley that all human communities have had to accommodate themselves to it on one level or another. The pig can jump four feet high, swim for miles, and solve its way through most simple enclosures.1 Furthermore, its ubiquity across time makes comparison between snapshots of different eras quite productive. Seen through the pig, the problem is no longer simply one species (man) subjugating another (pig) but instead a particular set of social relations dominating both. Once we understand the problem of the pig, we will find that the problem of our age is not man dominating nature — but capital dominating nature.

Partnership of Pig and Peasant

The relationship between the different segments of medieval society to the pig demonstrates how human society changes itself in the process of transforming nature. During the early medieval period, the very process of domesticating the pig changed the very way humans governed themselves. According to Jamie Kreiner, entire legal codes were erected to deal with the pig. No crime in the sixth-century Frankish book of laws Les Salica has more provisions than that of pig theft.2 Tenth-century Anglo-Saxon kings like Æthelstan were deeply invested in developing protocols for when the pig inevitably outsmarts the farmer and wreaks havoc on his neighbors’ crops.3 The Visigothic kings and lawmakers who compiled the seventh-century Liber Iudiciorum “assumed that having a herd of animals belong[ing] to several owners could lead to confusion about who owned which animals, and they worried that this situation could be exploited by a herder intent on fraud.”4 There is less dominion than there is a fluctuating relationship undergirding a tenuous partnership between man and nature whose terms are always changing.

The medieval legal codes complicate our notion of man dominating nature — a notion which boils down our rich political-environmental history to one of undifferentiated mass dominating undifferentiated matter. A nobleman’s relationship to nature is different from that of a peasant. Under sixth-century Frankish king Clothar I, the Burgundian churches were granted immunity from pig taxes (decimae porcorum) while farmers still had to pay them.5 Noblemen monopolized forests as hunting grounds with peasants having to ask permission before setting their pigs off to eat.6

Clearly man-against-nature is not a simple subject-object relationship but one refracted through a complex set of ever-changing social relations and human institutions. During the medieval period the medieval peasant did not work as they pleased. The peasant owed taxes and rents and obligations to their lord as well as neighbors. Class society meant alienation from the means of production were present then as they are now, albeit in a more muted form.

Even kings could not do as they will. King Clothar Iwas only able to rule because of the concessions he made to the churches and noblemen within his domain. When one finishes demystifying and historicizing the medieval period, the facade of man dominating nature melts to reveal man and nature both dominated by broader social relations: social relations in which the lowest peasant and the greatest king are enmeshed, social relations which humans can change to a degree but which they were nevertheless subjected to. 

The medieval pig forces us to reframe our question from “Does man dominate nature?” to “In what ways is our contemporary relationship to nature different from before?” The first answer may be technology and that we’re finally able to plunder the earth without abandon. But that assumes that man through time has always been a free-floating atom desiring infinite wealth. This fundamentally liberal assumption erases the fundamentally different set of rules early medieval peasants played by. 

Peasants did not maximize production of singular commodities. Ancient agronomists encouraged low-frequency farrowing at one litter of piglets per year. Fifth-century Irish bishop Palladius advised that a sow nurse no more than eight piglets, advice that while less productive maximized the sow’s strength and fertility.7 Medieval peasants did this not because they were necessarily more moral than us but because they were producing for use rather than value i.e. profit. Most peasants cultivated crops and livestock for their survival rather than for sale on the market. 

Much of the surplus peasants’ produce went to their lord as rent, and whatever was left was either saved as a buffer for winter or sold on the market. Because the end of production was use, peasants paid painstaking attention to the physical properties of the world around them; if pigs were cultivated to maximize yield, that would endanger not only the pigs’ health but also that of the surrounding ecosystem, within which the pig played an important role.8 Peasants were maximizing production by preserving the ecological system to which they owed their wealth even if they did not maximize yield and focus all energies in pork production.

Capital and the Hog

The social relations governing modern-day agriculture are fundamentally different. Production is oriented towards value rather than use. The two entail very different processes of production: while use-values satisfy a finite number of wants, value is infinite. In the words of Lewis Mumford, “of all forms of wealth, money alone is without assignable limits. The prince who might desire to build five palaces would hesitate to build five thousand: but what was to prevent him from seeking by conquest and taxes to multiply by thousands the riches in his treasury?”9 The quicker the turnover, the more money made; more money means more to expand production; expanded production means quicker turnover; and so on. One can have enough pork, but never enough profit.

In the abstract, the factory is a social institution whose purpose is to produce as many commodities in as little time as possible. It arose out of a specific set of historical circumstances, social relations, and long-term processes culminating in late-eighteenth century industrial capitalism. Every facet of the factory has developed in accordance with producing as much as possible, as quickly as possible, and as cheaply as possible. 

The pig slaughterhouse is a case in point. In many ways the meatpacking industry was the cutting-edge of capitalist development. While Henry Ford pioneered the modern-day assembly line, he claimed to have actually taken his idea from the Chicago meatpackers’ disassembly line.10 Unlike the medieval pig, which although enclosed nevertheless lives outside within nature, the modern pig is isolated from nature so as to minimize any disturbances to the production process. All outside elements that may biologically contaminate or compromise the pig disassembly process are sealed beyond the factory floor.11

The division of labor marks a crucial difference between the early medieval farmer and industrial laborer. Under feudal social relations, the farmer is responsible for the pig at all stages of life: birth, maturity, death. All steps of the process are united in one peasant. Under capitalism, the process is inverted. Many individuals are instead united into a single process. 

The inversion is clearest when studying the ways not just pigs, but men, are transformed by the factory. Ethnographer Alex Blanchette documents in Porkopolis how capital expands by transforming communities and nature to serve particular though evolving roles in the pork production process. Dover Foods, a giant pork processing plant, dominates the Great Plains town of Dover.12 On the disassembly line Dover Foods meatpackers are physically transformed at the same time as they physically transform the pork. Their bodies morph as they perform the same micro-motions of cutting, slicing, or packaging dead pigs every second, minute, hour, and day: the whites of the fingernails eroded, muscular knots forming in strange parts of the back.13 Whole humans are reduced to a singular muscle motion as their bodies literally adapt themselves to a single function on the disassembly line.

Though their jobs are far cleaner than the meatpackers’, Managers and executives are not free from the domination of the pig. Like the medieval king, managers exercise power; but also like the king, the managers are subject to the social relations governing the production process and division of labor. Managers wear the Dover Foods insignia on their shirts even while attending football games, barbeques, and church.14 Although managers view their relationship to the pig as different from that of the meatpackers, they nevertheless also define themselves through the pig. When asked to define their role, managers claimed that “they work on the Herd” while meatpackers “work with the Herd.”15 While the prepositional phrase differs, the object remains the same.

The granularization of the division of labor — manifested through the architecture of the slaughterhouse as well as the organizational specialization of meatpacker and manager — is propelled by more profit, more efficiency, and more turnover. Granularization means the creation of jobs specializing in discrete phases of the pig’s life cycle: from insemination and slaughter to packaging. Not only is there a vertical integration, but horizontal as well, with workers specializing in different pig organs, muscle fibers, and fats. All this granularization in service of commodity turnover, which in turn alienates the meatpacker from the whole of the “commodity'': while dominated by the pig, meatpackers only work with smaller and smaller parts of the animal.

Part and parcel with the division of labor is a standardization of labor: a given worker in the production process performs the same labor on the same commodities. But a pig is not a standardized commodity. The solution isn’t merely to accommodate the production process to the pig, but to accommodate the pig to the production process. This does not just mean selectively breeding for desired traits; farmers have done that for thousands of years. It means standardizing the pig itself; to turn the pig into the Pig and enable more automation and lower labor costs.16 Specializing workers heightens the need for a standardized pig that will make this ultra-specialized division of labor possible. Not only must meatpackers physically adapt themselves to the demands of capital, but so too must pigs. 

The unceasing parcelization of the production process within the slaughterhouse that dominates both man and pig is driven by the need to realize higher and higher profit rates. As the pork market becomes more saturated, the production process more advanced, and the field more competitive, the drive to eliminate inefficiencies, cut costs, and expand markets becomes more grave. But as producers automate and invest more in fixed capital and machinery, allowing them to increase pork output with less labor, the value of pork lowers as more of it enters the market and prices tend downward. 

Today, these expansive pork processors swallow the ex-steel towns in the midwest and former mill villages in the south. Gas stations along the roads to these pig towns advertise that they’re “100% gas,” meaning they refuse to blend corn-based ethanol into pumps, which would increase the cost of animal feed.17 In Dover, Dover Foods “sponsor[s] every event. Radio DJs lauded the company’s reliable jobs, pay, and medical benefits. People shopping at Walmart wore the Dover Foods insignia on their t-shirts.”18 Nature is not merely reordered to “man’s” ends; both are transformed in the process of reordering the whole community towards the valorization of capital.

Pollution permeates the physical landscape and atmosphere as much as the pork plant permeates the town’s social fabric. The concentration of so many pigs into one physical site of production almost “pigifies” the air and the soil. Farmers and workers often refer to the air pollution as a consequence of the evaporation of literal tons of pig shit. Before the opening of the pork processing plant during the nineties, a “generation of grandparents wrote op-eds that developed vocabularies for enunciating the horror of breathing vaporized hog shit” by posing for photographs wearing gas masks and organizing community forums protesting the plant.

Man and Nature Alike Enslaved

The notion that our problem is one of man dominating nature poses our relationship to the natural world as one-sided, like that between a director and a corporation. But as Marx observes, man transforms himself through the process of transforming nature.19 A necessary requisite for human society is intercourse between man and his physical environment. This is true for all epochs. 

In the medieval period, despite their ubiquity, pigs were seen as only one important element of many within the ecological system. The medievals tended to view the world dialectically, with every element serving and being served by other elements, and all subject to the wider system, which was itself in a constant state of flux. Medieval philosophers like Claudius of Turin and St. Augustine did not view pigs purely instrumentally, i.e. as mere objects to satisfy want, but instead as living beings important for the regulation of any given environment.20 After all, viewing the pig solely as a resource to be exploited and whose yield to be maximized could irreparably damage the local ecological metabolism.

Modern wage-workers' relationship to the land is practically inverted. In contrast to the early medieval peasant, only a very small number of laborers have everyday contact with the pig. But this “handful of communities and workers must endure elevated concentrations of swine” which perpetuates the feeling of domination by a singular creature, the pig.21

The hyper-productive and hyper-exploited few responsible for the production of our global pork supply see their lives as dominated by the pig in a way quite unlike the medieval peasant. Towns in the Great Plains and the southeast built around pork production view their ways of life through the butchered hog. “If it weren’t for the hogs,” said an elderly Dover resident, “there’d be nothing here. This would be a ghost town.”22 From hairdressers, art gallery directors, to breeding farm managers, Dover residents owe their lives not to a living master, but a dead thing: pig dominates man. 

This feeling is true both for the immiserated Guatemalan meatpacker whose working-day is defined by a 1-2 slice into a hog muscle ten times every minute and the well-compensated corporate executive who spends his time finding new markets for pork. Their waking days are dedicated to the hog, their lives dominated by it. 

This unending quest for profit — which drives the specialization of labor within the slaughterhouse, despoliation of the environment, and exploitation of the meatpackers — is not a product of individual greed. Profit and growth are necessary conditions for production; any firm that is not constantly growing is seen as failing. Environmental pollution and worker domination are not inherently determined by the imperative to grow and profit; after all, there is room for human agency and decency. But over time as markets become saturated and competition heightened, the ability to treat workers well and steward over the environment becomes more constrained.

Pork processors are not the only ones who vie for more and more growth. Every industry that has a stake in each stage of the pork production process must grow: construction firms, chemical manufacturers, pharmaceutical firms, grocery store chains, and so on. As I demonstrate in my review of William Cronon’s Nature’s Metropolis, all these industries produce to sell their commodities on an abstract market to realize a profit, which they invest to expand facilities to compete, and continue the cycle ad infinitum. Contra well-intentioned liberals and leftists, there is no controlling this process. Uncontrolled growth is a feature, not a bug, of the global capitalist system.

Thus we come back to the notion of man dominating nature. Abstract man does not dominate abstract nature. What’s true across time is that man and nature are in a dialectical relationship with one another that changes each. Social relations, not abstract homo economicus, are what dominate both; each person relates differently to nature depending on their relation to the means of production and with other people; although man can change his circumstances, he is nevertheless changed and constrained by those very same circumstances. 

Capital dominates man and nature, though of course this is not how either meatpacker and manager articulate their subjugation. Both see themselves dominated not by living and breathing elites residing in Congress or on Wall Street but by a dead hog. Which brings us to the great irony of our era: man is seemingly master of the dead hog: slicing, dicing, packaging, analyzing it — yet nevertheless feels alienated from and dominated by the hog. Of course, the hog is only a fetish for the deeper social relations that have brought man and hog together in the first place: capital. And the only way out of capital’s global subjugation of humanity is the world-historical double-movement: the backward-looking revival of the peasant commune, with production oriented towards use but consciously planned by the community as well as the forward-looking revolutionization of the means of production.

I think the difficulty of explaining communism has its roots in many communists lacking a historical basis. I don’t mean that explaining communism is difficult because it hasn’t happened yet. Communism is difficult to explain because it gets lost in the abstract. Wrapping your head around communism is immensely difficult when the only world you’ve known is capitalism. This was why it took me reading book after book on the political economy of feudalism to clarify what communism actually means. And it is here I hope to clarify in a few words what exactly it is.

Above all, communism is a double movement. The double movement was first coined by Karl Polanyi in his book The Great Transformation. It originally referred to the uprooting of peasants by market forces and the state’s attempted re-embedding of those peasants by means of modern state mechanisms such as the Speenhamland system and the Poor Laws. For our purposes the double movement merely entails a simultaneous backward and forward-movement: the backwards revival of certain social relations by means of new forward means. 

This is a strange conception of communism on its face. After all, we associate looking backwards with reaction. Reactionary ideologies such as monarchism are invested in reviving the social structures of the past, voiding them of their social context, and retrofitting them onto industrial society. And communism is the last thing we associate with reaction. You’d be right. Communism is fundamentally a social revolution and as far from being conservative as possible. As Marx puts it, communism is the real movement to abolish the present state of affairs. There’s little room in this ideology for old social forms, whether they be monarchies or republics.

But revolutions, like communism, are not political movements occurring in a vacuum. One of Marx’s insights in the Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte is that revolutionaries do not decisively step into the great unknown. “Just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language.”1 

Even the most out-there revolutionaries grasp for a semblance of familiarity in which to frame their radical ideas. The Black Panthers borrowed the dress and conduct of their Maoist comrades. The American Revolutionaries fancied themselves Romans, basing the aesthetics of their nation’s capital on the marbled domes, straight lines, and austere designs of classical architecture in reflection of their newfound republican values.

To understand communism, we must look back into history. To understand what communism brings us, we must understand what capital took from us. In order to go forward, we must go backwards. 

Looking Backwards

It would be incorrect to call feudalism an organic society. That implies feudalism was somehow natural rather than social. It was, however, understood by contemporaries like John of Salisbury as an “organic” society in which each class constituted a corresponding organ: the prince and clergy were the soul; the judges, the sense organs; the financiers, the stomach; and the peasants, the feet.2 Feudalist society was therefore perceived as a class-hierarchy governed by a complicated set of obligations due to those above and below, governed by overlapping jurisdictions between lord and church.3 Beyond the exceptions, you will generally die in the class you were born into.

Just as the body is disabled without the feet, so too is the polity crippled without the peasant. The peasant can be understood as being embedded in a particular network of social relations. He cannot freely make contracts; he cannot simply sell his land to whomever; he cannot simply move wherever. He constituted a part of a corporate whole from which he could not easily alienate himself.

This state of affairs sounds tremendously oppressive. And yes, it could be. But one would be wrong to call this society irredeemable. Broadly speaking, with the oppressiveness of local community comes with it the upshot of a certain stability of being part of a corporate, indivisible whole. Although you were coerced to work your plot of land, the lord could not easily remove you from the land at-will, which granted you a degree of independence.

Depending on the region and time period, the average peasant household worked in common with the village, individuals tending to their plots and also managing the commons. As Seccombe writes, villages were communities of “cooperative endeavor and practical interdependence” and governed by “assemblies and ancient forms of local government.” Of course, cooperation was conducted on terms of survival rather than filial love: “Poor and even middling households who lacked sufficient draught animals to comprise a plough team had to pool animals and harness a common team, working out equitable arrangements according to their respective contributions to the team’s assembly.”4

Peasants could control the pace at which they work, not being harried by a clock or boss. Of course, there were limits to this freedom set by their natural environment. Peasants obviously couldn’t labor in the fields after sunset. And this relative freedom within the labor-process should not hide the naked exploitation between landlord and tenant, as the former constantly attempted to raise rents on his tenants.5 But the peasant was governed not by abstract time in the form of rigidly regimented seconds, minutes, and hours, but instead by concrete time in the form of temporally uneven sunrises and sunsets, the time it takes to cook a pot of stew, and even the time it took to take a piss.6 Time was less oppressive because it was less abstract and more in rhythm with natural events instead of the tick-tock of the clock.

Though under a patriarchal society, women possessed some autonomy owing to their base of economic leverage grounded in spinning, farmwork, cooking, and child-rearing.7 Because the household was the primary unit of production, the productive and reproductive spheres were essentially synonymous, meaning women were not burdened with being both mothers and wage-laborers in the way they would under capitalism. The spheres of domestic and productive labor were synonymous under feudalism. The task of rocking a baby to sleep is more compatible with tending to a hearth, weaving, and tending to the garden than working an unremitting assembly line. While women still of course suffered under oppressive conditions, their contributions to the household were recognized and not relegated solely to the task of domestic labor as would occur under capitalism with the social and spatial separation between the spheres of production and reproduction.8

On the flip side, peasant life was generally hard. These peasant communities were first and foremost cooperative and took on a corporate character not out of love, but survival. Peasants may have technically worked fewer hours, but what hours they worked were backbreaking labor. Although peasants controlled their means of production and subsistence, they generally had little left over after paying rent and feeding their household, meaning one or two bad harvests were all it took to send a peasant family into dire straits. 

The degree of simplification I’m employing should be highlighted.9 The class category of peasant even in the heyday of feudalism had a great deal of variability, ranging from small, destitute households to generally well-off households that could even hire a laborer or two. This category is made even more complex when accounting for regional and temporal differences. Importantly, however, the peasant’s relationship to the land and his lord may tentatively be characterized in the above terms, with necessary qualifications.

Looking Forwards

In peculiar ways, capitalist society inverts this. In the first lines of Capital, Marx writes that “the wealth of societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails appears as an immense collection of commodities.” The immense wealth presented in the form of commodities is the first quality associated with capitalist societies. As Polanyi observes, whereas under feudalism the market is embedded in social relations, under capitalism social relations are embedded in the market. 

Capitalist society can produce so much wealth because its north star is not use-value, as it was for the peasant, but value. Use-value is a concrete, material thing. It has limits. One only needs so much food in their pantry before it becomes superfluous to them. But value, in the form of money, has no limit. As Lewis Mumford writes, “The prince who might desire to build five palaces would hesitate to build five thousand: but what was to prevent him from seeking by conquest and taxes to multiply by thousands the riches in his treasury?”10 Money is a peculiar commodity in that it’s both limited and unlimited: limited in the sense that $100 is only $100; but unlimited in the sense that this $100 may be translated into an uncountable number of goods.

In Marx’s words, “This contradiction between the quantitative limitation and the qualitative lack of limitation of money keeps driving the hoarder back to his Sisyphean task: accumulation.”11 The drive to accumulate endlessly is inherent within money at a mature stage of capitalist development. 

This drive for wealth finds its historical handmaiden in liberalism. Liberalism is as difficult to define as communism; but for our purposes, I find the most digestible definition of liberalism is one of uprooting. Peasants make for poor employees; after all, if you can work for yourself, why would you work for somebody else? If you can produce your own food, why work more than you need to? Liberalism thus understood is the ideological justification of the continual process of proletarianization i.e. the alienation of peasants from the land and their transformation as “free-floating” monads in space.

The corporate community of the peasant commune is ripped asunder and streaming out of its ruins are atomized proletarians, possessing nothing to sell for survival but their labor-power i.e. capacity to work. Having little choice, the ex-peasant sells their labor-power to the capitalist and slaves away in the workshops and later the “dark satanic mills” of the textile factories. 

Many peasants still held onto their plots of land. But as David McNally observes, these individuals could no longer be meaningfully called tenants. Larger numbers of them, those who did not outright lose their land, were semi-proletarianized, forced to sell their labor-power to supplement the produce from their small patches of land.12

As Marx observes in the Jewish Question, liberalism is founded upon the “separation of man from man.”13 This is why natural rights as framed within the United States, the first nation on earth founded upon exclusively bourgeois values, are fundamentally negative: the state protects your right to be left alone, and nothing more. You have the right to own property, but not free from its domination. It is an ideology only possible when the corporate peasant community is dissected, uprooted, and parcelized for sale; until all are made into atomized individuals whose right to make contracts, buy and sell property, and freely associate is fully protected. The state’s role is to protect your personal autonomy and right to freely sell your labor-power, but is not obligated to free you from the compulsion of wage-labor. Liberalism under capitalism is freedom in form, not content.

During the nineteenth century, society under the domination of capital had produced incredible wonders. Capitalist society’s technological development and its achievements rival the Pyramids and the Great Wall. Strangely though, while liberalism was premised off of man’s political separation from man, the reality was quite different within the sphere of production.

Under feudalism, every step of the production process was united in the solitary craftsman; under capitalism, many thousands of men are united into one production process. The blacksmith could argue the armor he crafted was his to sell by virtue of the sweat of his brow. This is not the case under mass production. A worker cannot simply take full credit for the assembly-line car just because he put the rubber on the wheels; the car owes its existence not to him alone, but to the many hundreds on the assembly line. Production becomes an increasingly social process.14 But in spite of production becoming more socialized, its fruits continue to accumulate in the hands of a private few.15 Just as liberalism is founded off the separation of man from man, capitalism is founded on the expropriation of the many by the few.

The Synthesis

Communism is thus nothing more than the recognition of not the potential, but actual reality we find ourselves in: that production has brought us together in a state of collective interdependence. Capitalist society in its mature form is the corporate peasant community made mutant. The production process unites thousands of individuals for collective ends, but these individuals are still free-floating monads politically alienated from both their labor and each other despite materially depending on one another to make the production process succeed. 

While production becomes more social, and an absolutely larger number of people are forced to sell their labor-power for survival, profit becomes increasingly private, in the hands of a relatively decreasing number of shareholders. As aggregate profit rates tend to decrease, capital becomes more desperate to protect its profits through the prying open of areas hitherto undisturbed by the market, the cutting of wages, and the off-loading of even more commodities.14

More wealth contradictorily yields more desperation. Capital becomes analogous to “the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells.”15 The problem is not lack of wealth, but too much. Capital does not produce for use, like the old peasant community, but for value. As the productive forces become more refined and can produce more commodities, more commodities must be sold to realize a profit; but the capital investment in means of production means profit decreases relatively in the long-term even if it increases absolutely. This desperation produces waste, inefficiencies, and further immiseration.16

This desperation has terrible consequences, not only for the worker. But also the earth. Encoded within capital is ceaseless accumulation of profit; but the earth is not limitless. Without control over production, the material foundation of society will be destroyed. This can only be checked by control over the advanced forces of production — developed now to such a degree that we can provide for the vital needs of every person on earth — through the revival of the old forms of collectivity embodied in the old peasant community.17 

Herein is the soul of communism: the double movement. Communism is the backwards revitalization of the corporate and collective character of the peasant community, but founded upon the forward means of the advanced productive forces. Communism does not go backwards to revive the forms of the peasant community; those forms cannot exist beyond their time and place. Communism revives the character of the peasant community — its cooperative planning, control over the labor process, and socialization of property in the form of the commons — on new terms. 

This is why market “socialism,” wherein all that’s changed is the collective-ownership of factories and restaurants, is insufficient. A socialized factory is still a site of alienation whether privately or publicly-owned because the very process of production is still oriented towards profit. The capitalist division of labor which undergirds not only the factory, but also service work narrows man’s labor to one task. This is encoded in the very machinery and social organization of most profit-seeking firms, from the factory to the fast food chain.18

Communism seeks to smash the oppressive division of labor and reestablish production on grounds that unleashes rather than inhibits man’s creativity.19 Communism seeks to revive the spirit of the peasant workday — in which workers can vary their efforts according to need, dedicate their time to this task and that task, take breaks, involve neighbors — without the associated drudgery and hard labor.

Marx even utilizes the metaphor of the peasant commune in some of his writings. While discussing the Russian peasant commune in one of his first draft letters to Vera Zasulich, Marx writes that “the [capitalist] crisis will come to an end with the elimination of capitalist production and the return of modern society to a higher form of the most archaic type - collective production and appropriation.”20 Communism is the return of collective ownership and social planning characteristic of the peasant community but established along a fundamentally different, more advanced productive base which will allow for freedom from want and freedom to experiment, to craft, and reflect. 

Before capital, man was joined with man under conditions of subsistence. Under capital, man is separated from man, and suffers immiseration and alienation in a land of wealth. With communism, man is once again reconciled with man, but this time on new terms: terms which will actualize the potential of the universal character of man’s labor. Communism is not merely the guarantee of high standards-of-living for all. Rather, it’s the return of control of society to the people. It’s the capacity to live well with our fellow man needing fewer goods and with control over what is produced being dictated by social deliberation rather than the impersonal and abstract whip of the Market.

Liberalism is not irredeemable, only insufficient. Communism is the redemption of liberalism. While liberalism is the promise, communism is the follow-through. The liberal of the nineteenth century fought for the right to own property, while the communist of the twenty-first fights to be free from the tyranny of property. Liberalism is the shape, communism is the fill. Liberalism is the negative right, communism the positive. 

Communism can be difficult to explain or grasp without a strong grounding in history and engagement with the world around you. Even if one is convinced of the unsustainability of capitalism and the necessity of an alternative, communism is incomprehensible without understanding what life is like beyond and before the market. Communist theory requires a double movement in study: To understand what comes next, we must know what came before. Just as theory and praxis must be united, so too must communists unite the past with the future. After all, communism is nothing more than the abolition of time itself.

These proclamations are among many growing louder and louder in corners of the Right. The embodiment of this new anti-libertarianism is a recent Compact article written by Robert Orr, titled “The Free Market Doesn’t Care About Your Family.” Orr argues that the New Right crusaders seeking to shape GOP policy will have to overcome the party’s “libertarian assumptions.” Orr claims that free-market ideologues “gaslit” pro-family conservatives “into believing their differing priorities are… achieved through the same means.” Orr cites corporate tax breaks as one of several examples illustrating the policies that pro-family conservatives have been conned into believing suit their interests.

It’s a simple but compelling narrative, one which even leftists can find themselves getting behind. But the article demonstrates a fundamental ignorance unfortunately shared by so many on both the Left and the Right: the narrative of the guileless, populist social conservative tricked by the shuckster big-city neoliberal into supporting policies running against his own interests. The term gaslighting denotes a kind of smolbeanification of Middle America; the New Rightists would have it that the housewives and working men of Orange County (those poor babies!) were tricked into Reaganism.

As little regard as I have for the Republican Party, I firmly believe in the necessity of historical agency for the purposes of clear analysis. The narrative which Orr and others push is not only a red herring, but insults the intelligence of the very constituency they defend. The social conservatives were not fooled. The dismantling of the New Deal order was to the immediate material interest of the white homeowners who made up the social conservative mass base. Supporting “anti-family” policies such as corporate tax breaks was and continues to be not only a coherent, but reasonable stance from the material position social conservatives occupy as well as how the rules of a capitalist society function.

The peculiar way our welfare system is distributed through asset-ownership and the ways in which this is racialized clarifies the material basis for why social conservatives i.e. white homeowners appear to vote against their interests and eschew class solidarity time and time again. The goal of this piece is not to evoke sympathy for the conservative cause. Rather, this analysis intends to treat the social conservatives as neither guileless, as the Right would, nor blindly cruel, as the Left would (though I sympathize) — but instead as historical agents, who are both the subjects acting through history and the objects upon which history acts. Clear analysis is a necessary condition for clear strategy.

Neoliberalism From Below

Ironically, the Levittowns of Los Angeles and Long Island whose streets would soon be lined with anti-welfare Goldwater yard signs were the product of prodigious amounts of government money. After the Second World War, the Truman administration accelerated suburban development through a policy of “industrial dispersion,” in which northern and midwestern manufacturers and defense contractors were subsidized through the tax code to move out of industrially-concentrated Steel Belt and Mid-Atlantic cities and into more spread-out Sun Belt cities for national security concerns.1 Because modern conservatism first cohered and found its mass base within the postwar suburbs, throughout this essay I will use conservative and homeowner interchangeably.

Although the New Deal is generally perceived as a centralizing force in American politics, its administration had little choice but to embrace a form of “cooperative federalism” in order to both appease Southern Democrats in Congress and recruit local and state governments in the administration of public works projects. But the New Deal’s attempt to balance federal prerogatives and local initiatives created a contradiction. As Elizabeth Shermer points out, New Dealers wanted to promote economic growth through industrialization that would modernize the Sunbelt, but at the same time “champion state protections for the citizenry through social welfare programs funded through higher taxes…”2 In order to bring in industry, sunbelt municipalities had to build “business friendly” climates attractive to northern manufacturers and defense contractors that promised freedom from pesky union organizers and high taxes to fund social programs.

The flow of capital wrought a Hobbesian one-against-all war between states and municipalities. Large corporations and defense contractors wanting the best deal pitted governments against one another. Although Sunbelt Senators above greased the wheels, by no means was this a top-bottom process of corporations manipulating family-values conservatives. The Sunbelt suburbs played an important role in the northern exodus of capital through their governance strategies. As subsidized as they were, suburbs still needed tax revenue to finance public schools, social services, and public infrastructure to become attractive for both businesses and their blue and white-collar employees. Property taxes are the most common way of going about this. But raising property taxes was the last thing upstart Sunbelt municipalities like Phoenix wanted to do. There was thus a fundamental tension between the desire for strong school systems or public infrastructure and the increased tax revenue necessary to fund them.

This contradiction was partially resolved in the boom times of the postwar era. A nationwide race to the bottom paradoxically produced a virtuous cycle. In 1966, newspapers like The Wall Street Journal hailed Oakland suburbs like San Leandro as models of small-scale municipal governance: “[the city] managed to get all the benefits of lavish public spending while putting a surprisingly small bite on the local taxpayers.” As Sunbelt suburbs like San Leandro attracted more industry, the city could lower the tax rate while still collecting more tax revenue.3

Over a period of three decades, the tax burden on homeowners and industries remained relatively stable because the suburb was constantly expanding, and so tax rates could be kept low while still collecting more revenue. This option was unavailable to Rustbelt cities like Detroit. Whereas Oakland could continue lowering taxes and benefit from constant expansion, Detroit’s shrinking industry — which Sunbelt cities like Oakland benefited from — meant tax cuts would lead to worse public amenities, accelerating capital flight while increasing taxes would also lead to capital flight and thus a shrinking tax base. The total value of property in the city fell as much as “77 percent” beginning in the early 1960s.4 It was not the genius of governance that led to cities like Oakland and Phoenix prospering but the grasstops capitalizing on larger-scale national trends. 

Opting for lower property taxes was a fundamentally rational strategy from the point of view of not only municipalities but homeowners. From the point of view of city governance, lowering taxes and creating a “pro-corporate” environment made complete sense in a regional race-to-the-bottom between cities for the biggest gains from the northern and midwestern exodus of industrial capital. From the perspective of homeowners, fighting for lower taxes on their increasing property values for more money in their pocket was rational. And obviously from the perspective of industry, exploiting the gigantic federal subsidies to move down south was equally so. New rightists argue that the suburbanites were gaslit into supporting business friendly policy, but the incentives to lower taxes were so obvious that no con was necessary. The city councilmen of Phoenix didn’t need Milton Friedman to teach them the benefits of lowering taxes to attract business; they — both suburbanites and city administrators — understood this intimately. Both suburbanites and administrators were not acting against their interests. They were merely playing by the rules of a game unfolding far above their heads.

For all intents and purposes, suburban whites were pursuing “pro-family” policies within the wider economic and political forces in which they found themselves. Suburban white families in the South and West enjoyed the tremendous benefits of prosperous communities funded by a boomtime climate for capital and facilitated by a low tax municipal regimes. New Rightists as well as others are correct to point out that this led to tremendous problems within the housing market. But to declare that the social conservative suburbanites were tricked into being pro-corporate shills detracts from the historical agency which the suburbanites have wielded and continue to wield.

White Homeownership as Welfare

The racial element of this economic development was a crucial factor that shaped the social conservatives’ preferences in social welfare policy. To begin with, the mass ownership of housing after World War II was a double movement. On the one hand, the mass democratization of housing for whites in the suburbs; on the other, the mass enforcement of racial segregation for blacks in the inner-cities. By 1955, black homeownership hovered at a little less than forty percent while white homeownership was around sixty percent.5 Many use the term White Flight to label the mass exodus of whites from the cities to the suburbs during the mid-twentieth century. But as Robert Self argues, the term is a misnomer. Whites in cities like postwar Oakland and Atlanta did not so much “flee” the city as much as respond to the incredible federal subsidies leading them there.6 Meanwhile, The presence of even one black family was often reason enough for a Federal housing Agency (FHA) appraiser to designate the neighborhood as in decay and therefore disqualify all its members from access to highly generous FHA-backed loans.7

To white homeowners, blackness was joined to the hip with failing schools, cratering property values, and shuttering factories. As the inner-cities withered, the movement of whites from the city to the suburbs accelerated. As the postwar continued, suburbs resisted annexation — the traditional means by which cities grew — thus denying cities precious tax revenue to fund social services for increasingly overcrowded black and hispanic neighborhoods. Homeownership was thus highly racialized, pitting propertied white workers in the suburbs against propertyless black workers in the inner-cities.

The Civil Rights movement arose to contest not only the legal apartheid of Jim Crow but the economic apartheid that forbade blacks from the suburbs. President Lyndon Johnson kicked off the Great Society as a means of addressing blacks’ economic subordination. But the “special treatment” blacks received from the federal government through Great Society programs angered blue- and white-collar whites. The “hidden” nature of the American welfare system exacerbated these antagonisms. Working-class homeowning whites saw themselves as strivers who had to work for everything they received.8 But they themselves were the beneficiaries of massive federal subsidies in the form of public-private healthcare, incredibly generous mortgages, and lucrative manufacturing jobs indirectly propped up by military-keynesian spending — benefits which most blacks were excluded from.9 Broadly speaking, whites were the beneficiaries of asset-based welfare while blacks had to rely on state-based welfare. One was indirect and respectable, the other direct and disreputable. The former was the domain of the suburban white male breadwinner, the latter the inner-city black single mother.

Both policies may be considered pro-family from different perspectives. Asset-based welfare is pro-family in that it promotes a certain standard of living and way of life for the propertied middle-class. Importantly, the tactics pursued by grasstops suburban leaders such as the Chambers of Commerce were necessary to their towns’ survival given the rules structural to capital in the postwar era. However, because asset-based welfare is generally “hidden,” the suburban business and government leaders hailing from conservative pressure cookers like Orange County could rail against federal interference and support for “welfare queens” while still eagerly competing for federal funds for internal development projects or defense contractors.8 This also allowed propertied whites to admonish propertyless inner-city blacks, especially single mothers whose families were seen as “broken,” for being dependents on government largesse. 

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The Family-First Society

Understanding the seventies and eighties, the neoliberal turn, is key to the final puzzle piece of why “pro-family” conservatives support “anti-family” policies. Left-wing geographer Ruth Wilson Gilmore characterizes this period as the shift from the postwar welfare-warfare state to the workfare-warfare state in which the “will for equity, however weak it had been, yielded to pressure for privatizing or eliminating public — or social — goods and services [while leaving the militarism intact].”9 While the thrust is generally correct, it leaves unexplained why whites in this period abandoned the New Deal for Nixon and later Reagan. Indeed, Gilmore explains the defection of many whites as the conjunction between their reactions to the seventies profitability crisis and the apex of the Civil Rights movement. While broadly correct, Gilmore is strengthened when considering the role asset-based welfare played in giving homeowning whites a material reason to “vote against their interests” by voting Republican.

For one thing, inflation led to many homeowners being pushed into higher tax brackets. As the flood of capital withered to a drip, the virtuous cycle ended, and many suburbs had to raise property taxes. On top of insult to injury, homeowning whites had to watch the federal government give “special treatment” to blacks while they withered from the effects of inflation.10 It was thus easy to see why social conservatives — who benefited from asset-based welfare and therefore unwilling to support state-based welfare to blacks who were both spatially and socially far away — would support the “dismantling” of the state-based welfare state.

By no means was this a wholesale defunding however. As Melinda Cooper observes, the budget cuts carried out by Reagan did not so much eradicate state-sponsored welfare to the poor as much as “transfer [its provisional responsibilities] to cheaper third-party providers,” in particular, faith-based institutions, which practically exploded in inverse relation to the selective dismantling of the state-based welfare state.11 This form of privatized public-private welfare not only served the interests of the neoliberals but also the social conservatives: their taxes were no longer directly go to single black mothers in the inner-cities, but instead religious-organizations whose assistance came with strings attached in the form of workfare to “teach responsibility” to the undeserving poor.

But what was the positive vision which neoliberals offered to the social conservatives? Neoliberals offered a massive expansion of the asset-based welfare state from which white homeowners benefited in conjunction with the selective contraction of the state-based welfare system. Under the Reagan and Bush administrations, individual pension accounts like 401(k)s and mutual funds exploded. The migration from Social Security to financial assets was one of the most effective tools in fusing the interests of the middle-class with those of financial investors. It offered relief to white homeowners, aligned with the interests of small and large industry, and helped the neoliberals dismantle the New Deal order.

The appreciation on financial assets after the Volcker Shock was a huge windfall, and the neoliberals essentially told the middle-class that the water was fine. And it was! The “pro-family” conservatives were not tricked into this arrangement, because as propertied working and middle-class voters the arrangement was in their short-term interest. The stock market was booming, the value of their assets were soaring, and tax cuts meant they could enjoy even bigger slices of the pie. Furthermore, it was not only to their economic, but also social interest. Ironically, Reagan’s asset-based welfare policies were pro-family inasmuch as they forced individuals to rely more on their families by reprioritizing familial wealth accumulation as the means by which individuals ascend the socio-economic ladder and relegating the responsibilities of distribution from the state to the family. This appealed to the individualist, boot-strapping, family-first values of property-owning middle and upper-class whites. “Unlike Social Security benefits, it was argued, the wealth invested in stocks was inheritable and would therefore serve to strengthen rather than undermine the bonds of family dependence.”12

The “democratization” of asset-based welfare was a key feature of neoliberalism. Abundant credit made the poison pill of precarious wages easier to swallow. But for propertyless Americans, the simultaneous strengthening of asset-based welfare and hollowing out of state-sponsored welfare — upon which many, white and black, depended for survival — was disastrous. Black-Americans would bear the brunt of what was to come. After the mid-sixties blacks could no longer be denied housing based on the color of their skin. But as Keeanga-Yamahata Taylor demonstrates, whereas Jim Crow was characterized by predatory exclusion, post-racist America would be defined by predatory inclusion, in which blacks were finally given access to the American Dream of homeownership, but on predatory terms extremely favorable to mortgage lenders and real estate agents. Johnson and Nixon believed letting blacks into the housing market and subsidizing mortgage brokers to lend was sufficient by itself for asset democratization. The federal government stepped in to “minimize” risk by insuring and underwriting loans made to blacks in the inner-cities.

However, because the wealth gap between blacks and whites remained, the federal government under Johnson and Nixon effectively subsidized brokers to push dilapidated housing on the most speculative terms possible onto highly-risky and therefore highly-profitable black-americans with poor credit.13 Under the neoliberal turn, “color-blind” credit scores were effectively racialized as financial firms preyed on working- and lower-middle-class blacks while the federal government underwrote the new predatory fiscal regime. The gunpowder-speculation resulting from the partnership between the government and financial sector led to the explosive financial crisis and housing collapse in 2008. Black homeowners lost the small but steady gains in wealth made during the post-Civil Rights era. The contradiction of democratizing asset-based ownership — making a “private” asset publicly-owned — is thus further complicated within a society in which economic equality between the races has yet to be achieved.

The False Dichotomy of Being Pro- and Anti-Welfare

Rightists and even many leftists believe that voters are either pro or anti-welfare, when the picture is closer to “welfare for me, not for thee.” The tax giveaways proffered by the Sun Belt suburbs that would become the modern Right’s mass base later on were first playing by the rules laid out by a New Deal order that never got around to resolving the contradiction between a strong welfare state, a lax hand for capital, and uneven geographic development. This strategy was racialized as blacks were left out of the New Deal order and had to fight for their place in it.

The neoliberal turn of the seventies and eighties was characterized not by an anti-welfare policy per se, but a strengthening of the asset-based welfare state whose roots go back to the New Deal and the partial privatization of the state-based welfare state. The neoliberalization of the state and economy benefited “pro-family” conservatives in two ways: first, the windfalls resulting from the far bigger stake they now had in a financialized economy; and second, the triumph of the asset-owning family in the form of private, inherited wealth constituted by stocks, mutual funds, 401(k)s, and inflated housing markets.

The prominence of asset-based welfare complicates the notion of bringing state-based welfare to America. Voting patterns since the eighties points to how. The suburbs are no longer solidly red as they were under Reagan. Since the 1992 Presidential victory of Bill Clinton, and thus the inauguration of the Democrats’ suburban strategy, the suburbs are now the most intensely contested territory in the electoral landscape. The pro-family policy which some Republicans, and even left-leaning Democrats, want would require tremendous tax levies that would require at least partially appropriating and therefore alienating the suburbanites — one of the most crucial voting blocs in the country. 

While the mass base of the Republican party is animated by vitriolic racial animus, it is too often seen as what it’s against rather than what it’s for. The conflict between postwar whites and blacks is often framed as cutting one’s nose to spite their face — instead of working together, whites act against blacks out of pure spite. While vitriolic racism existed before the postwar, the material conditions in which it now existed were genuinely novel: the massive democratization of homeownership that essentially pitted propertied white workers against propertyless black workers. Racial antagonisms were refracted through and exacerbated by two very different welfare states: one based in reputable asset-ownership, the other in disreputable state-sponsored welfare rolls.

My analysis benefits also by situating race not as static categories, but as relational. Race is the mode through which class politics plays out. This does not just apply to black-americans struggling for what was promised to them, but also white-americans fighting to keep what they see as theirs. Situating the white homeowner then and now as a historically rational actor, motivated not only by racial animus, but animus with a clear, material basis, clarifies our analysis and sets forth a clearer strategy whose tactics are better equipped at building cross-racial working-class alliances.

In this essay I argue that the central thrust that broke apart the New Deal coalition was homeownership. Without understanding the role homeownership played in dividing the two main New Deal coalition partners — working-class whites and blacks — it’s impossible to fully understand the postwar political realignment which saw working-class whites move out of the Democratic Party and into the Republican Party. While entirely correct that race played the primary role in destroying the New Deal and creating the modern coalition of the Republican Party, this narrative lacks explanatory power if unrooted from material conditions.

Skin-color only means something when understood within a certain set of social relations. In other words, race is not an eternal struggle of us-versus-them. Race is instead the modality through which class politics plays out. Class — one’s position in relation to the means of production — is refracted through and influences the ever-evolving category of race. We therefore cannot talk about racism without understanding the material world in which it operated.

In America, this not only took the form of fierce labor struggles between blacks and whites over the terms of worker power, but of housing. The uneven democratization of housing across the American working-class promoted a deep fissure within the New Deal coalition which ultimately culminated in the defection of the white working and middle-class to the Republican party in the late-sixties and seventies. 

The House the New Deal Built

The New Deal coalition can be broken down to two very similar yet very different constituencies: white ethnics and blacks. Both were propertyless workers, but also occupied different social positions within the American social hierarchy due to skin-color. These racial differences were refracted into spatial and social distinctions. While white ethnics were concentrated in crowded tenement housing in the northern cities, most blacks lived under a racial police state in the rural south.

Despite their shared class positions, both groups fiercely competed over jobs. While efforts were made toward inter-racial class-first alliances like the Knights of Labor or the Populist Party during the late-nineteenth century, for the most part white workers militantly excluded blacks from trade unions, forcing blacks to become strikebreakers, and reinforcing the weakness of the labor movement as a whole. No matter how militant whiter laborers were in their calls for wildcat and sit-down strikes, these labor actions would never reach their full effectiveness without the inclusion of black workers.

However, the Great Depression changed the dynamic. Times were now so desperate that you had a Democratic President in the form of Franklin D. Roosevelt lean on the inclusion of blacks into the Democratic Party coalition. For blacks, though the Democratic Party was still home to their oppressors, the Southern planter elite, they felt the political balance to be shifting ever so slightly to their favor. The mechanization of cotton agriculture in the 1930s and 1940s meant that blacks less tied to the land started moving to the northern cities. During the 1940s, 1.6 million blacks left the South, followed by 1.5 million more during the 1950s. According to Charles Payne, “the new black vote mattered enough that by 1940 the national Democratic platform spoke to the question of equal protection under the law for the first time.”1 This demographic movement meant that blacks were increasingly becoming a more crucial voter bloc for the Democrats aiming to pass their New Deal program.

While white and black workers were generally hostile to one another, their shared support for the New Deal program brought them together under a big tent coalition. The urgency of the Great Depression made a cross-racial alliance easier to tolerate. However, though the two groups were tenuous allies, black workers still often got the short end of the stick. For instance, while white workers won the right to unionize through the 1935 Wagner Act, the (purposeful) exclusion of domestic and agricultural workers meant the great majority of blacks were effectively denied this same right.2

This happened because Roosevelt needed the votes of the Senate and House Dixiecrats to pass his reforms, and so blacks were the sacrificial lamb that legitimized the American labor movement. The labor movement was tremendously ambivalent towards the economic rights of black-americans, as white ethnics in the construction trades of Detroit forced the latter out of the formal job market, cosigning them to part-time sub-contractor jobs or crime to survive.3

While the unions of the radical Congress of Industrial Relations (CIO) at the national level insisted that locals must be racially integrated, these efforts varied widely from local to local. The result was that everywhere from the steel plants of Pittsburgh, the General Motors manufacturers of Detroit, to the arms factories of Oakland, white ethnics won well-paying, secure jobs on the shop floor while blacks were consigned to the dirtiest and meanest jobs in the production process.

Nevertheless, the New Deal coalition of which the white and black working-classes were vanguard partners yielded tremendous spoils: namely, the democratization of homeownership. The triumph of national power for the next four decades opened up homeownership for millions of white ethnics. Agencies such as the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) and the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC) configured the terms of homeownership to be so favorable that, according to Kenneth Jackson, it was often cheaper to buy a house in the suburbs than rent in the city.4 Working-class white ethnics for the first time were offered a literal new deal and thus subsidized to leave the working-class city for the middle-class suburbs.

It cannot be understated how transformative homeownership was for postwar politics, not just because it ushered in an era of affluence, but because the very experience of owning a home was politically transformative in and of itself. The democratization of white homeownership was nothing less than the elevation of the propertyless to the valhalla of the propertied. No longer would the white ethnic be a working-class outsider on the outskirts of the American political project; he was now an insider possessing a tangible, material stake in the maintenance of private property as proof of his American-ness.

The working-class politics of the tenant could now be thrown to the scrapheap and be exchanged for the new politics of the homeowner. As a homeowner, a working-class white ethnic could now build equity and become little capitalists themselves. While white ethnics would continue to be staunchly pro-union and pro-New Deal, their transformation into homeowners came with new priorities. Owning a little piece of land now meant you could lose that little piece of land. As Robert Self observes in his book on postwar Oakland, though homeowners were diverse in class background, “the structure of the housing markets into which they entered in the postwar decades would begin to give them a common identity, to shape for them a set of concerns and interests that would unite more than divide them.

These issues started with the concrete economics of taxes and home values.”5 Though they were still workers in the sense that they still relied on selling their labor-power for survival, they now possessed a little bit of capital in the form of the home; and protecting this little bit of capital would take priority over everything else. Now, these formerly working-class O’Malleys, Kowalskis, and Espositos were compelled to defend their hard-fought little piece of America, no matter the cost.

Cracks in the Foundation

But as whites reaped the rewards of homeownership, blacks were largely denied them. The FHA and the HOLC imported the practices of the real estate industry and redlined blacks into the inner-cities. Any neighborhood with even one black family was deemed to be in decay and thus its residents unfit for FHA loans. And because many of the new Sun Belt factories were relocating to the suburbs, blacks were also effectively locked out of the formal job market. Conditions were made worse by slumlords who exploited captive blacks in the inner-city with nowhere to go. As Beryl Satter notes, blacks had to sign “on contract” and pay exorbitant monthly terms for dilapidated housing, with even one missed payment triggering eviction.

The usurious terms compelled blacks to divide and subdivide their homes and charge rent to other blacks just so they could meet their monthly payments.6 All these processes intersected to create the black inner-city ghetto: hyper-exploited, over-policed, and under-funded neighborhoods in which blacks were forced by structural forces to live in poverty and joblessness. 

The “over-development of the [white] suburbs and the under-development of the [black] inner-cities”7 would set out the foundation for the Civil Rights movement. Though the momentum of the movement in the fifties began in the South, many of the Civil Rights movement’s first battles would be fought in suburbanizing cities such as Montgomery and Atlanta. Though the two biggest Civil Rights issues in Atlanta, school desegregation and public space desegregation, were ostensibly unrelated to housing, both nevertheless were. Where one lives determines where one’s children attend school. Similarly, where one lives determines what public amenities they may use. Therefore, for suburban whites, the movement of blacks into their neighborhoods meant not just the invasion of blacks into the domestic space, but the educational and municipal space as well.

The Civil Rights movement’s fight for fair housing placed the white working and middle-classes in a defensive position. As blacks marched for school and public space desegregation in southern cities like Atlanta, middle-class whites responded to Supreme Court rulings like Brown by continuing to disinvest from the public spaces of the cities and invest even further in the private enclaves of the suburbs, taking their tax bases with them. But while desegregation was an accelerant, it was not the catalyst of White Flight; as Kenneth Jackson notes,8 whites were already moving out of the city in droves to take advantage of the incredibly generous benefits the FHA and the HOLC offered to democratize homeownership among whites. Blacks, both in the south and the north, were denied these opportunities and were thus trapped in the inner-city ghettos, vulnerable to hyper-exploitation by slumlords. 

The house of the New Deal coalition, which was once the united front that delivered national political power to the Democrats, was now divided against itself. To understand why, we must remember that race is the modality through which class politics plays out. Although working-class white ethnics and blacks fought fiercely over who would benefit from the New Deal, both groups at the end of the day supported the New Deal because of their shared positions as propertyless workers. While white ethnics were obviously more integrated into American political and economic life than blacks due to the color of their skin, they were nevertheless without property, and thus fought for state intervention into the economy on their behalf just as blacks did. Both groups could vote for New Deal Democrats on shared premises. 

But mass homeownership among white ethnics left an irreparable fissure within the New Deal coalition. By elevating one group of people (white working-class ethnics) to middle-class homeownership while denying the same elevation to another group (working-class blacks), a fundamental contradiction was established. 

The politics of the working-class white homeowner, whose primary welfare was now located in their home equity rather than solely wage labor, was now fundamentally different from and opposed to those of the working-class black tenant. As Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor observes, the deterioration of the inner-city and the enrichment of the suburb were “dialectically connected.”9 As the inner-cities’ tax bases shrunk and social services deteriorated, the flight from the city to the suburbs accelerated; and as the suburbs became wealthier, whites became more militant in protecting their tax revenues from the inner-city.

Cities attempted to save themselves by annexing the suburbs to increase tax revenues. But the suburbs fiercely opposed such measures. “[They] wanted no part of the industrial city’s problems.”10 Suburbanites did not want to be burdened with taxes to fund programs that neither they nor their children would benefit from. They were also categorically opposed to sharing any public or private spaces with blacks and the problems suburbanite whites’ believed were their fault. The attempts of annexation as well as the ever-present fear of blacks moving in and thus destroying the property values of their homes (a not-completely absurd prospect as real estate associations and federal agencies constantly insisted that this would happen despite little actual evidence) contributed to a white suburban siege mentality.

The specter of foreclosure and thus losing everything led largely white working-class white suburbs in cities like Detroit to form a united front of homeowners’ associations, civic organizations, and citizens’ watches to stop the “black invasion.”11 This white wall of resistance led to Civil Rights activists like Don McCullum to remark “[h]ere in Oakland… we are ringed by a white noose of suburbia.”12

The House Collapses

This contradiction was not lost on the Republican Party, and a new generation of ultra-conservative leaders sought to exploit it. Though liberal Democrat Lyndon B. Johnson handily beat conservative Republican Barry Goldwater in Northern California, Proposition 14—a referendum to repeal a ban on racial discrimination in home sales—passed by even higher margins.13 White working-class homeowners, though strongly pro-New Deal, were militantly opposed to blacks moving into their neighborhoods and more broadly to the racial liberalism championed by Johnson.

New Southern Republicans like Georgia’s Bo Callaway and California’s Richard Nixon rose up to exploit this breach and poach working-class whites from the Democratic Party. As documented by Kevin Kruse, the new generation of Republicans communicated the old politics of white supremacy in the new language of property rights. With explicit racial animus becoming more frowned upon, new Republicans spoke the rhetoric of white suburbanites increasingly hostile to a federal government bent on “forcing” them to send their white children to schools with blacks and on taxing their homes to fund increasingly larger social programs for the “undeserving” in the inner-cities.14

By the seventies, the New Deal coalition was dashed across the rocks of stagflation, runaway budget deficits, urban rebellions, and the New Left counterculture. The bloc of working-class white ethnics who were once the staunchest New Dealers were now the most steadfast suburban champions of middle-class property.

Becoming a homeowner slotted neatly within the modern Republican Party’s opposition to state-funded welfare and social insurance. It lends one towards opposition to welfare for the undeserving. As Melinda Cooper writes, the tax revolt of the 1970s was “almost exclusively associated with white suburban homeowners in revolt against income transfers to the poor.”15

The general chronology is as follows: though homeowners like when their property values increase, they don’t like when that entails higher tax rates. So homeowners led campaigns against the estate tax and local and state property taxes. However, this meant less money for the state to redistribute. Several possible solutions could have been pursued during the economic crisis of the 1970s. The one which ended up being chosen was to means-test welfare programs or cut them altogether.

These steps could be taken because suburbs could have “private tax collection, volunteer fire departments, and unpaid ambulance services. In particular, [middle and upper-class suburbs] benefitted from having a small percentage of population living at the poverty level and so requiring government assistance.”16 These material realities meant that as the late-twentieth century rolled on, the noose of the white suburbs actually was tightening around the black neck of the inner-cities.

Amid the Ruins

So we see throughout the postwar that housing in particular became a modality through which race developed. But this is because a house is not just a use-value, a domicile for one to sleep and eat in. A house is also a store of value. A house is Americans’ principle store of wealth. The house’s dual-properties of use-value and value can be roughly correlated with a home and a house respectively. A home because it is something personal, a nest of domesticity protecting you from the outside world. And a house, because it is an impersonal commodity that may be bought or sold on the market.

Likewise, the white suburbanite’s attachment to their home may be thought of in these two days: on the one hand, he is attached to his home as someone who’s put a lot of physical and emotional effort into maintaining their home, and who’s taken a great deal of pride in it. And on the other hand, he is attached to his house as a store of value, whose depreciation in value or foreclosure could mean the end of his world. 

We can then see how homeownership could so dramatically transform the politics of the white working-class — because being a homeowner essentially means becoming a little capitalist, a petit bourgeois.

This perhaps seems odd even for many Marxists, since we’re so used to seeing a petit bourgeois as a small business-owner, but makes sense when one remembers that all a member of the petit bourgeoisie entails is being a possessor of a little bit of capital. Of course, homeowners don’t employ anybody, and this is obviously what separates them from being a small business-owner. But I believe that this doesn’t make them not petit bourgeois; rather, it means they inhabit a different social category within that class strata. Underlining this point is important because it helps us to understand how white workers over such a short span of time went from staunch champions of the New Deal Democratic Party to becoming the vanguard soldiers of the modern Republican Party. 

And it’s not as though blacks during the postwar were immune to the politics of homeownership. In 1952, black middle-class residents rallied against a white landlord who wanted to build a 200-unit apartment complex for whites. Black residents protested utilizing strikingly similar rhetoric as white middle-class homeowners, claiming that the complex would promote “overcrowding,” destroy the investments of property owners, and lower property values.17 In Detroit, the black middle-class residents of Conant Gardens “like their counterparts in white, middle-class neighborhoods” strongly “opposed the construction of federally subsidized public housing… forming an unlikely alliance with conservative white homeowners’ groups in the area.”18 But for the most part, during the postwar-era working-class blacks remained propertyless relative to whites.

If homeownership were truly democratized across the working-class, then opposition to public housing or new housing construction would not have been racialized. But because one racial group achieving homeownership and another being denied it, both the suburbs and the inner-cities were effectively racialized, and race found another mode through which to live on. It is thus not completely absurd when radicals call the suburbs testaments to white supremacy.

This history is important because we often don’t make a distinction between workers who own property and workers who do not. Furthermore, we don’t talk about how the process of postwar suburbanization was dialectically connected to the deterioration of the inner-city and the reification of the central role race continues to play in the United States.

The democratization of homeownership among one race at the exclusion of another race meant that though both groups were still very much working-class, the experience of property-ownership was enough of a fissure to completely detonate the most powerful working-class coalition in American history. This bears even more relevance as the housing market continues to be white-hot, and as a minority of homeowners benefit from their sky-rocketing property values while a majority of Americans are left out as tenants. One cannot understand the political trajectory of the United States without understanding how the American Dream of owning a home continues to contribute to our National Nightmare. 

It would be very easy to laugh off this kind of sentiment for largely-intuitive reasons. Namely, that Starbucks workers obviously depend on wages to survive and are therefore workers by even un-Marxist conceptions of the working-class. But this argument deserves a response for two reasons: one, the conception of the working-class as being largely cultural is a widespread view among American reactionaries; and two, because a response will bear a constructive lesson in the Marxist framework of proletarians and the manufacturing of value. This essay is less for presenting a new application of Marxist theory as much as it is a simple lesson for my followers unfamiliar with Marxist analysis. The end goal of correcting flawed arguments like this is important if our mission is to gain a clearer understanding of reality and therefore the means by which we can build organizational power among workers.

We start first with a simple question. Just what is a worker? Broadly speaking, a worker is anybody who acquires the means of subsistence (food, shelter, healthcare) by selling his labor-power as a commodity in return for wages (money) which he needs in order to buy the means of subsistence.

And what is a commodity? A commodity is generally any item or service produced with the intent of sale on the market. The capitalist comes to market as a buyer and the worker a seller. The worker needs money to purchase the means of subsistence. So what does the worker sell? His labor-power. Crucially, the worker sells his labor-power, but not his labor. While labor is the act of working itself, labor-power is the worker’s capacity to labor; in other words, the worker is selling his time, or potential to labor. The worker sells his labor-power as a commodity to a capitalist in exchange for a wage sufficient for him to continue selling his labor-power another day. 

Within the sphere of production, the capitalist assembles together all the commodities he purchased from the market: raw materials, tools, machines, and labor-power. After producing his commodities, the capitalist walks out of the sphere of production and into the sphere of exchange to sell his wares. But something peculiar has happened. The capitalist has somehow left the market with more money than he had in the first place. In other words, the capitalist ends up with a profit. But how?

It’s because labor-power is a very special commodity. Labor-power is the one commodity in the world that can create more value than it itself is worth. 

What’s that mean? Well, let’s say a Starbucks barista is hired for ten hours to produce cups of coffee for a day’s wage of $70, or $7 per hour. Five hours into their shift, the Starbucks barista produces and sells 14 cups of coffee worth $5 each for a total of $70. Just halfway through their shift, the Starbucks employee has sold a number of cups of coffee whose total value equals their total wage for their day shift. 

Now, does that mean they get to go home? No. Remember, the capitalist bought the worker’s labor-power, their capacity to work. That barista’s ten hours, and by extension every commodity they produce, belongs to the capitalist. This means the barista still has to keep making cups of coffee until their shift is over, even though halfway through they’d already produced enough cups of coffee whose total value equals that of their day’s wage. The commodities produced and sold at and above the value of the worker’s daily wage (the value of their labor-power) is called surplus-value. 

The rub of it is that the capitalist hasn’t stolen or done anything immoral in the eyes of the law. Everything that took place was legal. The worker and the capitalist met each other in the market as equal bearers of commodities. The worker exchanged their labor-power for the capitalist’s money. The worker is not entitled to the surplus-value they produced during the time they were working for the capitalist. In the same sense that an apple seed you purchased is entitled to the apples it later produces just because the apples are worth more than the original price of the seed. Those apples belong to you just as the worker’s produce belongs to the capitalist. This is Marx’s great scientific discovery of the capitalist mode of production.

Now, this commodity called labor-power, what we call living labor, needs to be mixed with a few other commodities before it can produce commodities and thereby surplus-value and thus profit. These other commodities are called dead labor. They’re called dead labor because they (the tools, the machines, the coffee beans) are the products of past labor made inanimate. Though the coffee beans come to the barista as just coffee beans, those coffee beans are the product of a coffee planter’s past labor. 

Value, so far undefined, is effectively congealed labor. Value is the actualization of labor. The measure of value is labor-time i.e. the time which it takes society on average to produce and furnish a specific commodity. The value of a commodity being the average amount of time it takes to produce cannot be over-emphasized. The socially-necessary labor-time to produce a cup of coffee does not just include the time it takes for the barista to make the coffee. It also accounts for the average time it took to grow and pick the coffee beans, to transport the beans, to process the beans, to sort the beans, etc. This means that not only the barista’s average amount of labor-time, but also the average labor-time of every single worker involved in the manufacturing process is encoded into the price of that $5 cup of coffee. 

This also means that as productivity i.e. the capacity of a worker to produce more in less time, increases, that means the value of a commodity decreases. This is because less labor-time is encoded into the commodity and is therefore less valuable. This is why even though the price of a t-shirt may fluctuate it will never be higher than the price of a 2005 Toyota Camry. Why? Because the socially-necessary labor-time to produce a t-shirt is generally far less than that of a 2005 Toyota Camry. Hence, the value of a cup of coffee will decrease if the production process becomes more productive. This can come about through the introduction of either sophisticated labor processes or of machinery into the production process: for instance, machinery introduced into coffee bean farming may make it easier to pick more coffee beans with less effort, meaning that less labor-time is encoded into each coffee bean, making coffee beans less valuable, and thereby making a cup of coffee slightly less valuable.

Of course, our model is incredibly simple. We’ve so far assumed that the prices of commodities equal their values, which they never do. We haven’t talked about the countervailing factors that often maintain the price of a commodity even when its manufacture becomes more productive and therefore less valuable. We could talk all day about the Labor-Theory of Value, but what we’ve written so far is sufficient for our purposes. So why is this talk of value so important? 

Because a Starbucks worker is fundamentally the same as an Amazon worker. I’m not just talking here about their reliance on selling their labor-power to survive. I mean that a Starbucks worker and an Amazon worker both engage in real commodity production i.e. the production of tangible commodities whose total value exceeds the value of their labor-power. 

One may think this absurd. And this absurdity probably comes from two levels. The first level being functional; and the second being aesthetic. 

To begin with the functional, at first one may think intuitively that, surely, the Amazon worker is fundamentally different from a Starbucks employee. To which I respond that we must look beyond the aesthetics of both occupations and break them down into their skeletal forms. At root, both the Amazon and Starbucks worker are engaged in production. The former’s role is in the transportation and handling of commodities; the latter physically assembles different commodities into something new. The only difference between the two workers is where along the production process they’re situated. While the Amazon worker works at the logistical point of production, the Starbucks worker is employed at the point of production concerning manufacture. 

Don’t be fooled either, the Starbucks worker is in fact engaged in production. Think about it. All production entails is the multi-step process in which a commodity is produced. Just as your average blue-collar worker is presented with commodities in the form of machines and tools to assist in producing a finished commodity, the Starbucks worker takes the commodities presented to them in the form of coffee beans, vanilla, toppings, paper cups, straws, and machines, and with those commodities produces a new, finished commodity ready for sale. 

Essentially, both workers are presented with commodities in the form of dead labor and soak this dead labor with their living labor to produce something new. If we wish to take this a step further, the Starbucks barista is more directly involved in manufacture than the Amazon warehouse worker. After all, unlike the Starbucks barista, the Amazon worker is not presented with raw materials with which he uses to produce a new commodity. The warehouse worker doesn’t visibly transform the commodity. Does that mean they’re less involved in production than the Starbucks barista? No. Because the Amazon warehouse worker does transform the commodity. They spatially transform it. As Marx writes in Volume 2 of Capital, transportation is an essential part of production; after all, how can one make use of a commodity if it’s twenty miles away? I say all this not to delegitimize the work warehouse workers engage in, but to demonstrate that these differences between the Starbucks barista and the warehouse worker are more aesthetic than substantive. All in all, both workers are individuals who have to sell their labor-power in exchange for a wage. Both produce a number of commodities whose total value exceeds the value of their labor-power. Both are directly involved in production. And both produce surplus-value. 

Now, the absurdity of the aesthetic position is easier to refute but harder to dislodge. Simply put, it is clear that the Amazon warehouse worker and the Starbucks barista are fundamentally the same inasmuch as 1) both must sell their labor-power to survive 2) both are engaged in real commodity production albeit in different parts of the chain and 3) both produce surplus-value. However, very little of this matters if all we care about are aesthetics. Somebody is a proletarian if they appear to be engaged in “useful” labor i.e. produce real commodities. This conception strangely excludes service workers who literally operate tools and raw commodities to produce finished commodities and includes traditional workers engaged in traditionally masculine labor such as loggers or assembly-line workers. 

This conception falls apart given our above outline of the fundamental qualities that both the Amazon warehouse worker and Starbucks barista have in common. But let’s concede a little ground. What if we switched the warehouse worker with a worker more directly engaged in manufacturing like an assembly-line worker? 

Our position would still hold. Sure, one can argue that without the “actually productive” coffee bean pickers and the truck drivers transporting the beans that the Starbucks barista would be useless. This is correct. The barista would in fact be useless without those raw commodities needed to produce something new. 

But why is this not as true for the assembly-line worker? The assembly-line worker also can’t actualize his labor-power without the raw commodities that come further down the value-chain. Does that make him any less of a worker because they’re dependent on the dead labor of others? Obviously not. All political economists from Smith to Marx to Keynes recognize how necessary interdependence is for capitalism. In the parlance of Adam Smith, you can’t have a pin factory producing ten-thousand pins a day without a production process spread out among a large number of men performing relatively simple tasks. It is therefore absurd to claim that the Starbucks barista is somehow fundamentally different from an assembly line worker let alone an Amazon warehouse employee just because the former depends on those earlier back in the production process. 

But let’s give the opposition even more breathing room. What if Starbucks workers are not engaged in productive work? What if they actually don’t produce surplus-value? Would they still qualify as proletarians? Yes. Marx in Capital Vol. I distinguishes between certain kinds of workers: productive and unproductive. While productive workers are directly involved in the production process and add value to a commodity i.e. labor-time to the commodity, unproductive workers are only indirectly involved in the production process and therefore do not add value. As Marx writes: 

The extraordinary increase in the productivity of large-scale industry, accompanied as it is by both a more intensive and a more extensive exploitation of labour-power in all other spheres of production, permits a larger and larger part of the working class to be employed unproductively. Hence it is possible to reproduce the ancient domestic slaves, on a constantly extending scale, under the name of a servant class, including men-servants, women-servants, lackeys, etc. (574)

One could therefore make the case that an assembly-line worker is productive because they produce surplus-value while an accountant for Nike is unproductive because they are not directly involved in the production process. However, the accountant is not useless just because they do not produce surplus-value; after all, accountants perform the crucial service of organizing the finances of a firm and navigating the tax code. We discover then that there are jobs that are unproductive because they do not produce surplus-value but are also socially necessary i.e. are important to the circulation of capital.

The point of this brief digression is to point out that though there are indeed different categories within the proletariat. There is active debate within Marxist circles regarding who does and does not qualify as productive workers. Many workers do in fact fall within a gray area. These workers include occupations as varied as teachers, lawyers, barbers, doctors, etc. The stakes of this debate are also high considering as many as eighty percent of Americans work in the service industry. So if proletarians working in the service industry cannot be revolutionary, this has tremendous implications for American labor organizing.

However, what nearly all Marxists can agree on is that Starbucks baristas, whether or not they are productive, are proletarians. Why? Because even if they do not produce surplus-value, they are at the very least compelled to sell their labor-power as a commodity on the market for a wage in order to survive. This is the most important point to be made here. Regardless of what so-called twitter post-leftists or national conservatives have to say about the dignity of working as a barista versus a factory worker, it is incontestable that both rely on selling their labor-power to survive and are therefore proletarians. If it were the case that all Starbucks employees own enough capital whose passive income is sufficient such that they no longer need to work then this would be a different matter. The average Starbucks barista makes $14/hour, which comes out to $29,120 a year if they work 40-hours a week. So it’s obvious here that Starbucks workers are proletarians whether or not they engage in productive labor. 

To conclude, it’s easy to laugh at somebody like Logo. To many his arguments are stupid, flawed, and even undeserving of attention. However, drawing attention to this kind of argument is important for the following reasons. First, this argument is not rare. It is in fact an argument shelled out by Republicans like Tucker Carlson and U.S. Senators like Tom Cotton. This is bad enough, but the danger of erstwhile leftists of being swept up in these stupid conceptions of the working-class is even worse. While these arguments deserve mockery, they also deserve substantive rebukes; not just to convince the other person, but also to convince others who may be listening. 

Secondly, these ideas offer great opportunities for demonstrating the applicability of Marxist analysis to the modern day. It’s very easy to handwave Marx as somebody whose analysis only applies to nineteenth-century European capitalism. But as we continue into the global crisis plaguing our political and economic systems, Marx has in fact stood the test of time. Utilizing Marxist analysis not only aligns us closer to reality, but also offers those unfamiliar with Marxist thought an introduction and perhaps invitation to learn more. At the very least, I invite Logo to pick up a copy of Capital and start reading; clearly, he needs it.

Nowhere is the concept of alienation better exemplified than in the story of the rise of Chicago and the American Midwest. This story, spanning the early to late-19th century, is impeccably documented in William Cronon’s classic Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West. While not a Marxist himself, Cronon brilliantly illustrates how Chicago’s rise to eminence was a product of alienation from physical geography as borne out by market relations.

This alienation takes the form of separation from the physical landscape through advances in transportation and encroachment of market logic. Cronon deploys a materialist method of investigation that avoids the pitfall of mechanic, vulgar determinism that has beguiled so many Marxists over the centuries; Cronon’s materialism, which is more in line with Marx’s method, is one that doesn’t frame the relationship between humans and nature as a one-sided exploiter-exploited relationship — but instead as a co-evolutionary process where both act upon and respond to each other. By understanding this process, one may achieve a far clearer understanding of the logic of Capital. 

It’s important first to touch on what alienation is. Alienation is above all separation and takes many forms. The average 21st-century worker today is alienated from the land in a way the average 19th-century midwestern small farmer was not. In contrast to the farmer, the worker cannot grow his own food and relies solely on selling his labor-power for wages to survive.

Alienation, while present in some form or another throughout human history, becomes particularly acute under capital’s development. The early story of Chicago and the Midwest is a sterling example of this phenomenon. The mid-1830s was a time of intense land speculation, with Chicago at its very center. Land speculators made their living off of buying parcels of land for cheap and selling them dear. The act of land speculation itself is a process of alienation. Land was parceled off into small plots of squares to make buying and selling easier.1 While neat, the system was completely alienated from the physical landscape. Despite many of these parcels of land not being developed and “[bearing] no relation to economic reality,” they nonetheless fetched dizzying prices on the market.2 News of the Erie Canal’s opening unleashed an electric storm of speculation as speculators bought parcels for hundreds of dollars and sold them for thousands. Boosters and speculators alike breathlessly announced that the canal would augment the “natural advantages” of Chicago to make it the metropolis of the hinterland. These market relations rooted in private property give rise to an important form of alienation: the anticipated, future value of commoditized land disconnected from the actual, physical utility of the land itself.

But financial alienation was only one component of alienation. An even more totalizing example may be found in the relationship between farmers and merchants with the climate. Up until the mid-19th century, Chicago was a city whose business and trade flowed according to the physical limitations of the weather. The flatness of the landscape meant that water was poorly-drained, creating bogs and swamps that trapped farmers’ wagons and carts during the wet summers. The blizzards and storms during the winter made travel over land very difficult. Farmers in the hinterland refrained from travelling frequently “because [they] could carry only small loads in such vehicles, the costs of wagon, horses, and driver consumed a sizable portion of any money they earned.”3 The situation wasn’t much better for merchants. While Chicago sat upon a giant lake, travel to the East ceased during the winter while Lake Michigan froze over. Trade and commerce therefore was forced to respect physical geography and climate.

The railroad changed all this. No longer did commerce have to flow with the rhythm of nature. The explosion of railroads during the 1850s and 1860s operated meant business could operate almost independently of the weather. Neither mud nor ice could stop trains from hauling freight. Farmers now hauled their goods to Chicago year-round regardless of boggy summers and cold snowstorms. Merchants, too, could travel by railroad to New York and bypass the iced-over lake. 

Of course, The railroad did not make the market. Private property and proletarianization existed long before it. The railroad was merely a consequence of processes long in development. But the railroad also accelerated these processes and extended the logic of the market, transforming the geography of the Midwest. No longer could the dead of winter or the peak of summer ground commerce to a halt. No longer did merchants and farmers have to march according to nature’s drum.

The railroad revolution was so profound that it changed how humans experienced time. The railroad cut distance down so much that time itself seemed to warp: while it took 2 weeks to travel to New York in 1830, now it only took 2 days. But the speed of travel was not the sole factor that made the railroad special: it was the form of travel that affected our relationship to the landscape most. As Cronon points out, “Train passengers had less and less need to interact physically with the landscapes through which they were passing.”4

When a farmer travelled to Chicago pre-railroad, he had to constantly mind the physical landscape. Whenever a cartwheel got caught in a mudhole, he had to get up and get it out; at sundown he had to stop and find lodging; travel had to cease for lunch and feed the horses. But with the railroad, all one had to do was sit down and watch the world fly past through the window. The railroad not only liberated commerce from the capricious will of the climate, but also alienated people from the physical environment. Cronon writes “Railroad and telegraph systems would expand in tandem, often following the same routes, and together they shrank the whole perceptual universe of North America. Because people experience distance more in hours than in miles, New York, Chicago, and the Great West quite literally grew closer as the lines of wire and rail proliferated among them.”5 

Parallel to this was the revolution the railroad brought to the hinterland. The west of Chicago consisted of thousands of square miles of prairies: land ripe for wheat farming. But the absence of trees and therefore lumber for cabins and firewood limited the farmer to the prairie’s edge. The dependence on wagons also meant that farmers had to settle where they could “reach the waterways, [because] one of the chief reasons they initially stayed on the margins of the prairies was to keep the trip to the river as short as possible.”4 The necessity of minding the physical landscape limited farmers to smaller scale production. 

The railroad changed that. By making supply runs far easier, farmers no longer had to settle near rivers for transport, forests for lumber, and prairies for cultivation —  now they could strike deep into the heart of the prairie, only needing to depend on the railroad for transport and supplies. Now frontier farmers could settle far from the treelines and the rivers, untethered from the concerns of physical geography beyond those directly affecting crop cultivation for the market.

Cronon’s story of speculation and the railroad is useful as an application of Marx’s theories on ecological alienation. Only over the past several decades have scholars rediscovered the ecological dimensions of Marx’s political theory. John Bellamy Foster in his Marx’s Ecology argues convincingly that it is incorrect to interpret Marx’s comment in the Communist Manifesto on the towns rescuing the masses from the “idiocy of rural life” as an anti-ecological position. On the contrary, “[Marx and Engels] had observed that the division between town and country was ‘the most important division of material and mental labor’: a form of ‘subjection which makes one man into a restricted town-animal, another into a restricted country-animal.”5

While the 19th century London proletarian was immersed in cosmopolitan culture, he was denied clean air, space, and the physical means of life; conversely, the peasant had access to clean air and nature, but was cut off from the world. One was worldlier but sicker, the other was healthier but isolated. The logic of Capital drives this alienation between sites of consumption (workers in the cities) and sites of production (farmers in the country.) 

While according to Cronon the “city and country were growing closer together,” feelings of alienation penetrated the hinterland. Small farmers felt this alienation in their dealings with the middle-men: railroads that charged high rates for their freight and wholesalers who offered the lowest prices for their crops. Mothers across rural Illinois fretted over children leaving the farm for better wages in the cities. Being squeezed from one side by alien forces personified by middle-men and squeezed from the other side by communal precarity, farmers blamed the city: they saw Chicago as a “magnet for sin”6 that attracted their youth and a magnet for wealth as more and more of their profits were sucked away by the middle men. These real economic hardships united small farmers and agricultural proletarians across the West as cooperatives formed and the Populist party arose to challenge the “Money Power.”

Whether or not these farmers underplayed the mutuality between city (for badly needed credit and supplies) and country (for food) misses the more important point: farmers across the midwest felt an increasing alienation. It permeated their consciousness. They perceived themselves as the producers and the city the consumer. Farmers saw Chicago as a metropole whose citizens quite literally ate their lunch.

This collective is articulated most clearly in William Jennings Bryan’s thunderous ‘Cross of Gold’ speech that swept him to become the Democratic nominee for the 1896 Presidential election: “I tell you that the great cities rest upon these broad and fertile prairies. Burn down your cities and leave our farms, and your cities will spring up again as if by magic. But destroy our farms and the grass will grow in the streets of every city in the country.”7 Though the Populists were far from Marxists, many of them probably would have agreed with Marx’s assertion that the logic of Capital at once binds the city and the country closer together but also deepens the divide between the two, producing a relationship that sometimes borders on parasitic. 

This alienation that haunted the populists — that of the deepening division between sites of production and sites of consumption — is a product of a separation from nature that Marx says produces a “robbery of the soil” by Capital.8 As Cronon writes, the railroads “drew every local ecosystem into the web of [Chicago’s] markets, so the environmental dynamics of western places eventually had as much to do with their hinterland status as with their ecology.”9 Prairie animals like bison and Minnesota pine trees, ecological factors crucial to their respective ecosystems, were now commodities: their high numbers produced such low prices that people consumed without abandon, leading to their disappearance across the landscape. Efficient means of transportation expanded the market and at once allowed settlers to live further beyond the hinterland irrespective of local natural resources, while at the same time generating heavier demands on far-away ecosystems in order to support those settlers.

This avarice is not merely a product of human nature, but of the alienation wrought by capitalist market relations. The market itself is a site of alienation. It is where sellers come to meet buyers, both needing something the other has. Prairie farmers hundreds of miles from the woods depended on Minnesota lumbermen for timber; while lumbermen hundreds of miles away from wheat fields depended on farmers for food. The former intensely planted wheat and depleted the soil while the latter furiously cut down trees and exhausted the plentiful Minnesota North Woods.

These farmers and lumbermen did not cultivate tons of grain or cut down thousands of trees for personal use: there’s only so much grain one can eat and so much firewood one needs before more is unnecessary. These groups instead labored to sell on the market. This relationship between farmers and lumbermen, so catastrophic for their respective ecosystems, was mediated by an alienated market upon which both depended on for their survival. The market not only intensifies the division and separation between the site of production as embodied in the country and consumption as embodied in the city; but also divides those sites of production into a dizzying kaleidoscope of more specialized sites of production where workers progressively do not produce for their own consumption but for Market, upon whom eventually all depend for their livelihood. 

Cronon’s story is not just the story of Chicago — it’s a story about us. There is nothing fundamentally different about today versus mid-19th century Illinois. All that’s changed is the degree of alienation brought about by the totalization of the market. In economist Karl Polanyi’s words, “instead of economy being embedded in social relations, social relations are embedded in the economic system.”10

The modern grocery store is illustrative of how alienated consumption now is from production. While the mid-19th century frontier grocer offered perhaps twenty kinds of products, Walmart offers thousands. The grocery store is an incredible human achievement. It unites the labor of millions of worker-producers with the demands of millions of buyers. The production and logistics necessary to make it all work are unmatched in human history.

And yet, as incredible as the cornucopia is, the abundance obscures the relationship between producer and consumer. The food aisle is a cornucopia seemingly sprung forth from the void. The advertising on a package of Great Value thick-cut bacon does not advertise the millions of hours of labor put into the construction of warehouses, maintenance of machinery, and slaughtering of pigs that made its existence possible. The labor that made it all possible is almost invisible in the sphere of consumption. While “Iowa farmers perusing the grocery section of the Sears [direct mail-order] catalog might not forget that Aunt Jemima’s Pancake Flour or Queen Mary Scotch Oatmeal had originally come from farms like their own.”11

Most people nowadays no longer work as farmers. While 50% of the 1950 American workforce was employed in agriculture, that number has dwindled down to 10% in 2020.12 Because most Americans no longer grow their own food or even grow up near farms, the alienation between the site of production and consumption is even more profound than in mid to late-19th century Chicago. This alienation is not different in kind but in degree. The modern day grocery or department store, whose thousands of products seem to spring forth from non-existence , are logical extensions of the Montgomery Ward and Sears direct mail-order catalogs of the late-19th century. What has changed is the intensity of alienation as a result of the expanding domain of Capital.

This deepening alienation has disastrous consequences for the earth. At the same time as Chicago was prying open the hinterland for capitalist farming with the railroad, German agricultural chemists like Justus von Liebig brought attention to the loss of soil nutrients in Britain due to “capitalist agriculture.” Marx was not being metaphorical when he accused capital of robbing the earth. “Food and fiber, containing the elementary constituents of the soil, were being shipped long distances in a one-way [emphasis mine] movement from country to city, leading to the loss to the soil of its nutrients, which later had to be replaced by natural (later synthetic) fertilizers.”13 This relationship of extraction, something small farmers of the Grange and later Populist movement felt so intimately, is a result of the alienation borne out by capitalist production.

If there is one criticism I have of Cronon’s book, it’s that he misunderstands Marx’s political project. Cronon writes that “Some portion of… value, as Marx surely would have argued, was ‘produced’ by the human labor that had transformed prairies into wheat, forests into lumber, and livestock into meat.”14 He goes on to chide Marx, saying that the labor theory of value “cannot by itself” explain the accumulation of capital at the foundation of Chicago’s skyrocketing growth, and that Marx thus neglects nature’s role in providing the materials for that growth.

Ironically, Marx would have wholeheartedly agreed. “Labor,” writes Marx in the Critique of the Gotha Programme, “is not the source of all wealth. Nature is just as much the source of use-values (and it is surely of such that material wealth consists!) as labor, which itself is only the manifestation of a force of nature, human labor power.”15 Cronon thus underestimates the ecological dimension of Marx’s political project. Which, to give him credit, is not entirely his fault: it has only been recently that the ecological component of Marx’s writing has been rediscovered. But nonetheless, alienation for Marx was important not just for its implications for labor, but also for the environment. 

Environmental destruction for the sake of profit is an explicit theme of Nature’s Metropolis. Capitalist production not only destroys the basis of its wealth, but does so in a wasteful manner. As the capitalist farmer puts more pressure on the soil for more yield, he depletes the soil and destroys the basis of his wealth. And all this pressure despite 30-40 percent of our food supply going to waste every year.16 This waste of resources is profoundly irrational when there are millions across the nation and the world suffering from food insecurity.

But hope is not lost. As Marx writes, “Capitalist production… only develops the techniques and the degree of combination of the social process of production by simultaneously undermining the original sources of all wealth — the soil and the worker.”17 This should not be a call for developing the productive forces at the expense of nature or people: this stagist, mechanical understanding of Marx was the fatal mistake of the post-Lenin Soviet Union. Nor does it mean going back to a Rousseau-esque “pristine, untouched” nature that certainly never existed: native americans — whether Iriquois or Sioux — modified and engineered the physical environment just as much as European peasant farmers. What it means is refounding our relationship to nature.

Broadly speaking, the difference between pre-capitalist and capitalist societies is that the former considers itself as evolving with and being a part of nature; the latter group, on the other hand, views itself as evolving against and being above nature. Commerce before the railroad had no choice but to shut down business during winter while the lake froze over and the winter storms made land travel dangerous. But the railroad liberated farmers and merchants from nature: now commerce could continue year-round, irrespective of the weather outside. The logic of Capitalism alienates us from nature and compels us to rob it even while we know that what we are doing will spell our destruction in the long-term.

Cronon does not end his book with a call to action. He ends it with a reflection on his childhood spent between the Illinois countryside and Chicago. While the concluding chapter is stirring, we should not think that romanticism is sufficient for addressing the present crisis. The metabolic rift, a product of the alienation between production and consumption as borne out by the logic of Capital, is transforming the climate for the worse. Little has to be said for the increasing volatility of the seasons and the growing intensity of natural disasters as proof of this. It is not only right but also necessary for us to repair our relationship to the earth to avoid planetary disaster. 

Fortunately, Marx offers a possible roadmap for how we may address the ecological crisis. In the Communist Manifesto, one of Marx’s calls to action is to “[abolish] the distinction between town and country.”18 What does this mean? The only solution to alienation is synthesis.

When Marx calls to abolish the division between country and city, he means a more even dispersal of the population across the country. Society being so sharply divided between the many in the city and the few in the country is a recent historical phenomenon and is the product of a very complex historical process of expropriating and dispossessing peasants of the land and the commons, emptying out the countryside and filling up the cities. Technological advancement has only accelerated this legal, political, and economic process, as fewer and fewer people are needed to produce larger yields of produce. As the mothers in rural 19th-century Illinois can attest, the country’s purpose is now as a site of physical extraction in the form of agricultural production as well as labor extraction in the form of sons and daughters who follow where the well-paying jobs are.

It’s neither the mother nor the son’s fault; nor the fault of the farmer who turns the prairies into wheat or the lumberman who turns the woods into timber. We are all subject to the whims of the Capital’s tyranny over nature, a rule that is at once impersonal and abstract but whose consequences are all the more personal and concrete. 

But there’s a flip side to this. While Capitalism produces an ever-widening alienation between consumption and production, it also “creates the material conditions for a new and higher synthesis.”19 This means transcending the privatization and competition brought about by private property, and moving towards a commons where all may collectively decide on what must be produced and for whose need. It means moving from a mode of production whose end is profit and towards another whose end is use-value: to produce not for profit, but for what is needed. It’s a call for a society where none of us, whether the Amazon warehouse worker or Jeff Bezos himself, lay prostrate before the autocracy of the abstract and impersonal Market — it means democratic control not just of the firm, but of the economy itself.

Cronon’s history of Chicago’s rise and the ways in which market logic alienates us from nature is excellent, and one which I would recommend to anyone who wishes to better understand political economy. I recommend reading it alongside The Robbery of Nature by John Bellamy Foster or, even better, Marx’s Capital. Cronon and Marx complement each other exceptionally well, with both emphasizing the contradiction between how much we rely on nature and yet how divorced we are from it as a result of market relations. Cronon and Marx both state rightfully that Capitalism is a declaration of war against nature. But while the former offers little in the way of a solution, the latter does. This does not make Cronon’s analysis useless, just incomplete. But Marx’s framework complements and completes Cronon’s story. We cannot live against nature. Nor can we live outside nature. Rather, we must live with nature. And that requires a radical transformation in our social relations.

Sadly, all I found was a partisan shriek in the wind, not even on the level of the monographs published by the Lost Cause historians in opposition to Du Bois. Andrews’s essay only superficially engages with Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction and misses its main thesis and point so completely that she may not have even read the book. 

First, Andrews charges that Black Reconstruction “is not the sort of book any scholar would want as the foundation of a new interpretive school” because, according to Du Bois biographer David Levering Lewis, “[Du Bois] only consulted limited sources and did no archival research, an omission that ‘disturbed many scholars.’”1 This charge stood as among the most egregious considering that there is scant historical material from the perspective of the Reconstruction black freedman, Du Bois’s main historical subject. As Du Bois writes, “Little effort has been made to preserve the records of Negro effort and speeches, actions, work and wages, homes and families. Nearly all this has gone down beneath a mass of ridicule and caricature, deliberate omission and misstatement… The loss today is irreparable, and this present study limps and gropes in darkness, lacking most essentials to a complete picture…”2. And what primary sources from the freedman’s perspective that still remained were inaccessible. Du Bois’s lack of access to primary sources is corroborated by the experiences of black historians similarly interested in the experiences of Black Americans during reconstruction:

“As the experiences of John Hope Franklin, Margaret Rowley, and Helen Edmunds, among many professional African-American historians of the South, attest, before the Civil Rights Era it was rarely possible for them to gain access to such records. When they did, the circumstances were unique and the conditions of access segregated and usually deplorable. It is hard to imagine Du Bois motoring from ‘white’ court house to campus entreating entry of red-faced custodians or even, should he even be admitted, agreeing to remain out of sight in small, windowless back rooms pouring over records.”3

It is surprising that Andrews omits Lewis’s critical passage about the immense difficulties of black historians to find primary sources while still quoting him on how disturbed many scholars were by Du Bois’s alleged lack of primary sources — especially considering both the passage and the quote are not only in the same essay, but only a page apart. 

Therefore, Du Bois had to rely on many second-hand sources in order to gain a sufficient understanding of the black worker’s role within Reconstruction. Though this fact should not indict him of laziness or recklessness with respect to historical scholarship. Du Bois made strong use of “government reports, proceedings of state constitutional conventions, unpublished dissertations, and virtually every relevant published monograph.”4 And he made exhaustive use of what sources he could find. For instance, in several of Du Bois’s chapters are exhaustive accounts of state-wide political conventions and their proceedings, votes, and debates. For instance, the South Carolina chapter has an exhaustive account of one of these conventions where topics like debt collection, compulsory education, and land confiscation are discussed.5 Du Bois even requested and received an additional five hundred dollars for help in “mak[ing] the book sufficiently error-proof to withstand ‘a great deal of criticism’” and that “every lapse or mistake as to fact and every date” 6 must be caught and corrected. 

Furthermore, to accuse Du Bois of shoddy scholarship because he did not make use of every last primary source, of which few were available from the black freedmen’s perspective during the 1930s, is to fundamentally misunderstand the goal of his historical project. Du Bois was not out to do original research, but interpretation. Du Bois sought to reinterpret the historical literature in the face of a culture that at that point had became completely hostile to the goal of Reconstruction and black emancipation. On the level of historical scholarship, the early-20th century was dominated by the Dunning School of history. Led by Columbia University professor William Dunning and his students, the Dunning School was exceptionally critical of Reconstruction, reserving the harshest critique for Radical Republicans like Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner and gentle sympathy for the conservative elements such as the planter elite, who stood against the machinations of the unholy political alliance between black freedmen and northern carpetbaggers. For thirty years, from around 1900 to 1930, the Dunning School dominated historical discourse surrounding American Reconstruction, orienting American scholars against the attempt towards political and economic enfranchisement for freedmen. 

But as Civil War historian Matthew Karp emphasizes, the Dunning School was only an extension of a wider cultural era movement of reinterpreting the Civil War as not a “revolutionary clash of nations but as a somber battle between brothers.”7 Indeed, the decades after the close of Reconstruction in 1876 and 1935 witnessed a blossoming of the Lost Cause narrative, of an underdog South valiantly fighting for its agrarian way of life against a rich and industrial North aiming to impose its industrial “way of life” onto the former. In December of 1890, weeks before Du Bois was to give his commencement speech at Harvard, the city of Richmond unveiled a “sixty-foot equestrian statue of Robert E. Lee”.8 As historian David Blight recounts, highbrow late-19th century magazines such as Century “published hundreds of articles lavishly illustrated with engravings, drawings (many made from photographs), and maps” in the 1880s and 1890s to tell the stories of soldiers who fought but also more broadly to “shape a culture of reunion” between brothers while the slave over whom they fought, faded more and more into the background.9 

This reinterpretation of the Civil War and Reconstruction did not confine itself to just print. Movies such as 1915’s The Birth of a Nation valorized southern white terrorist organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan. Far from going down in obscurity, Birth of a Nation proved so popular that it revived the Ku Klux Klan, which proceeded to continue its predecessors’ reign of terror against blacks and their white allies throughout the South for the next half-century.

I have to mention this because Helen Andrews does not. Astonishingly, there are zero references to the Dunning School to whom Du Bois was primarily responding. There are zero mentions of the great many difficulties that Du Bois and his contemporary black historians had attempting to access primary sources regarding freedmen during Reconstruction. And there are zero allusions to the Lost Cause mythology which obscured the very purpose of the Civil War, mystified the role of blacks in Reconstruction, and captured the nation’s imagination for three-quarters of a century. Andrews accuses Du Bois’s historical project as being motivated by political ends, and yet completely ignores the political ends of the mountain of propaganda spewn forth by late-19th century and early-20th century historians, politicians, and writers justifying the subversion of what still stands as the greatest attempt at including Black Americans into American Democracy in our nation’s history.

The reason why Andrews decontextualizes Black Reconstruction is because it makes her job of maligning Du Bois far easier. It is easy for Andrews to admonish Du Bois for “downplaying” the corruption of Reconstruction state governments when she fails to acknowledge the breathtaking omissions by Dunning School historians of the incredible corruption and waste of Antebellum state governments. But even when Andrews lowers the bar to the floor, she still manages to trip through the doorway. Even though she quotes Du Bois as saying “The increase of debts under the Reconstruction regime was not large… There can be no possible proof that all of this increased indebtedness represented theft; nor is there any adequate reason for believing that most of it did… There is nothing on the face of the figures that proves unusual theft” to allege that the goal of Du Bois’s project was to minimize the corruption of Reconstruction governments — she completely ignores the many points at which Du Bois admits to the corruption of Reconstruction. Not only is the book replete with passages testifying to the wastefulness and corruption of many Reconstruction state governments, but also in every state there being black political leaders leading the charge against the corruption.

For instance:

“[The Northern financiers] flaunted the chances of quick and easy money before the faces of ruined planters, small Northern investors, and the few Negroes who had some little capital. The result was widespread graft, debt and corruption in South Carolina and North Carolina, in Florida and Georgia, in Louisiana, and in other states.”10

“On the other hand, both the poor whites and the Negroes were not only poverty-stricken, but, for that reason, peculiarly susceptible to petty graft and bribery. Economically, they had always been stripped bare; a little cash was a curiosity, and a few dollars a fortune. The sale of their votes and political influence was therefore, from the first, simply a matter of their knowledge and conception of what the vote was for and what it could procure.”11

“It was said that the [South Carolina] legislative sessions were unduly prolonged; that unnecessary clerks were employed; that a liquor saloon was maintained, and that under the head of supplies, all sorts of personal things were furnished individual members of the legislature, and charged to the state.”12

It is therefore incredible that Andrews would take Du Bois’s passage out of context and allege that he set out to “refute one of the major accusations against the Reconstruction state legislatures, that they were profligate and corrupt.” Andrews fundamentally misunderstands Du Bois’s mission. He is not out to downplay or sweep under the rug the many instances of corruption committed by both white and black political participants of Reconstruction. He instead means to do what any good historian does: contextualize them. 

Reconstruction took place between 1865-1876. This was the beginning of what would later be called by Mark Twain the Gilded Age. The intensity and duration of the Civil War transformed American political and economic society, significantly enlarging the federal government and facilitating the explosive growth of American corporations. This was a time of incredible corruption where the corruption of Reconstruction state governments was the norm, not the exception.  

“An almost unprecedented scramble for this new power, new wealth and new income ensued. It broke down old standards of wealth distribution, old standards of thrift and honesty. It led to the anarchy of thieves, grafters, and highwaymen. It threatened the orderly processes of production as well as government and morals. The governments, federal, state and local, had paid three-fifths of the cost of the railroads and handed them over to individuals and corporations to use for their profit.”13

“The slime of this era of theft and corruption, which engulfed the nation, did not pass by the South. Legislators and public officials were bribed. Black men and white men were eager to get rich. In every Southern state white members of the old planting aristocracy were part and parcel of the new thieving and grafting…”14

Once again though, Andrews fails to do the task of the historian and contextualize these individual acts of profligacy into a wider, near-universal era of American political corruption, instead accusing Du Bois of drawing “a false equivalence between carpetbag governments and their corrupt northern contemporaries” despite Du Bois repeatedly admitting that black politicians did in fact participate in corruption. Yet again, Andrews fails to understand De Bois’s goal, which is to respond to the staggering number of claims made by white propagandists singling out blacks for corruption when in fact nearly every person of political means, white and black, took part in the graft. 

Above all, the main reason why Du Bois bothers to mention at numerous points the degree to which blacks were involved in corruption is to demonstrate that the black freedman was not a passive subject in history, as characterized by those in the Dunning School. Blacks during Reconstruction were just as much reformers as opportunists. They were crusaders as well as profiteers. “There was not a single reform movement, a single step toward protest, a single experiment for betterment in which Negroes were not found in varying numbers. The protest against corruption and inefficiency in South Carolina had in every case Negro adherents and in many cases Negro leaders.”15 Du Bois aspired to rebuke the many hundreds of essays, books, and monographs alleging that blacks were either only villains or passive animals. The point that Du Bois makes over and over again throughout Black Reconstruction, which Andrews somehow misses, is that the black man is just like the white man in his propensity for virtue and vice; selflessness as well as selfishness; and to govern as well as be governed. Far from absolving the black freedman of responsibility and painting him as a flawless hero, Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction aims to do what any good piece of historical scholarship does: to make the historical Black American an active participant in the making of history

Andrews implicitly casts herself as merely telling “the plain truth… that Reconstruction was bad, objectively bad… The only possible reason for lionizing this traumatic episode would be if you had an ulterior political reason to do so.” But anyone who has read the first couple chapters of Black Reconstruction could tell you the same thing, because Du Bois does not hide the flaws of Reconstruction. He in fact goes to great lengths to document the many shortcomings of Reconstruction state governments and the Freedman’s Bureau. But for Du Bois, unlike Andrews, the great tragedy of Reconstruction is not its wasteful corruption — it is its unrealized possibilities. Du Bois was above all a small-d democrat. To him, slavery turned America from “a vision of democratic self-government: the domination of political life by the intelligent decision of free and self-sustaining men” into one of “Roman Imperialism and Fascism; it restored caste and oligarchy; it replaced freedom with slavery and withdrew the name of humanity from the vast majority of human beings.”16 Du Bois called Reconstruction the greatest experiment in democratic self-governance the world had ever seen because governments once commanded by masters were now ruled by the masterless. Freed slaves finally had the opportunity to prove that they possessed the capability for self-governance as any other race. One should be astonished that former slaves, who only a couple years before were slaving away in cotton fields, were now ruling in the highest offices of state governments. It is in Reconstruction where one had slaves with no formal education, slaves as illiterate as the Russian serf, the Italian peasant, and the English wage laborer, attempt a democratic experiment with few resources and even fewer supporters beyond those visionaries in the North like Frederick Douglass and Benjamin Butler. 

These black freedmen, for all their flaws, were anything but passive subjects of history. They strove towards not just political and economic emancipation but also enlightenment as well. Public schools were of the highest priority for Reconstruction state governments. Despite being reduced to beasts of burden, the black freedmen “were consumed with desire for schools. The uprising of the black man, and the pouring of himself into organized effort for education, in those years between 1861 and 1871, was one of the marvelous occurrences of the modern world; almost without parallel in the history of civilization.”17 Where no general public education system existed even for poor whites, there sprang hundreds of school houses throughout the Lower South, and especially in states where freedmen were given the most opportunity to govern like in South Carolina. And when funds could not be provided by state governments battling former planters who refused to be taxed and politicians who participated in the corrupt practices of the day, freedmen and private citizens made up the fiscal difference.

But Andrews does not speak about any of this. She spends more time hemming about Du Bois’s communist affiliations than she does the valiant efforts of both poor blacks and whites as well as their allies in founding one of the most ambitious democratic experiments the West had ever seen. She ironically makes the same accusation towards Du Bois that Southern sympathizers made towards the Radical Republicans: that they were totalitarian Reds wishing to line the poor, innocent planters up for the guillotine. But Andrews does not acknowledge the decade-long screech of the planters’ newspapers against the Reconstructionist governments. How these governments had to govern under the sabotage of intransigent planter class, the terror of white terrorist organizations, and the libelous claims of regional newspapers. These men fought with every ounce of strength to deny the newly freed slave an economic stake in the new democracy. The tragedy is that after a decade-long struggle, the black freedman, so close to true emancipation, was once again shuffled back into slavery. All because the planter class was able to consolidate itself and ignite the counter-revolution of property. In the face of the deep and fierce resistance to economic and political emancipation by the planter class, it’s bizarre that Andrews would shame Du Bois for arguing that a military dictatorship was probably necessary to break the power of the planter elites and thus allow Black Americans to finally be recognized as full citizens of American Democracy.

But Andrews does not care about the plight of the freedman. She spills no ink for the tremendous struggle fought by freedmen, Northern abolitionists, and even the some of the poor southern whites to finally fulfill the promise of American Democracy. She cares more about accusing Du Bois of rewriting history so that “good is bad, heroes are villains, and the solution to every problem no matter the circumstances is to give money and power to racial minorities.” To reduce the whole of Du Bois’s whole project, that of mourning the tragic, unfulfilled possibility of True Democracy finally coming to America, a Democracy buttressed by political and economic emancipation where both black and white may coexist and co-govern peacefully and confidently, to “giv[ing] money and power to racial minorities” is more than disgraceful. It is disgraceful of Andrews to position herself as a mere seeker of truth where she is the one who unmoors Du Bois’s political project from history. It is shameful that she so willingly defames Du Bois despite the most superficial engagement with his work for the sake of cheap, political points. It is scandalous of Andrews to accuse Du Bois of partisanship when the whole academic, historical, and cultural environment to which he was responding aimed towards erasing the democratic objective of Reconstruction and casting the Redeemers and the Klan as the maligned heroes and the black freedmen the villains. Not just the motive, but the careless means through which she accomplishes her goal would make even reactionary historians like Dunning shake their head in shame. 

There is nothing more I can say that Du Bois hasn’t said more eloquently or persuasively. I therefore leave the reader with one of the most beautiful passages of Black Reconstruction. A passage that not only perfectly summarizes Du Bois’s 730-page history, but fills the reader with the same fury and sorrow that the American Promise continues to go unfulfilled even today for the many millions of black, brown, and even white Americans who are cast out to the margins of society which Du Bois must’ve felt while researching and writing his magnum opus. 

“One reads the truer deeper facts of Reconstruction with a great despair. It is at once so simple and human, and yet so futile. There is no villain, no idiot, no saint. There are just men; men who crave ease and power, men who know want and hunger, men who have crawled. They all dream and strive with ecstasy of fear and strain of effort, balked of hope and hate. Yet the rich world is wide enough for all, wants all, needs all. So slight a gesture, a word, might set the strife in order, not with full content, but with growing dawn of fulfillment. Instead roars the crash of hell; and after its whirlwind a teacher sits in academic halls, learned in the tradition of its elms and its elders. He looks into the upturned face of youth and in him youth sees the gowned shape of wisdom and hears the voice of God. Cynically he sneers at ‘chinks’ and ‘niggers.’ He says that the nation ‘has changed its views in regard to the political relation of races and has at last virtually accepted the ideas of the South upon that subject. The white men of the South need now have no further fear that the Republican party, or Republican Administrations, will ever again give themselves over to the vain imagination of the political equality of man.’”

“Immediately in Africa, a black back runs red with the blood of the lash; in India, a brown girl is raped; in China, a coolie starves; in Alabama, seven darkies are more than lynched; while in London, the white limbs of a prostitute are hung with jewels and silk. Flames of jealous murder sweep the earth, while brains of little children smear the hills.”

“This is education in the Nineteen Hundred and Thirty-fifth year of the Christ; this is modern and exact social science; this is the university course in “History 12” set down by the Senatus academicus; ad quos hae literae pervenerint: Salutem in Domino, sempeternam!”18

But Andrews, sadly, never mentioned this.