Intersecting Capitalism? – Barbaria

[We publish here a new translation of a text from our comrades in Barbaria, which is a thorough refutation of postmodernism and the ideology of intersectionality —products of an extensive ideological campaign on the part of capital to fragment the proletariat and dissolve class antagonisms into sterile navel-gazing about ‘identities’. This pamphlet exposes how such theories reproduce the very categories of capital they claim to subvert, standing in absolute opposition to the communist movement and its materialist method. It is available here in its original Spanish.]

Introduction

This is not the first time we’ve written about postmodernism [1], yet we return to it. Why? On the one hand, we want to better refine some theoretical and methodological considerations in the critique of postmodernism, and on the other hand, we continue to believe it is one of the ideologies that most influences those today who seek clarification and radicalization in the face of the miseries of this world. For us, it is also a question of method. It is not only important what we think about social reality, but also what method we use to approach it. The postmodern method, as we will explain later, inevitably reproduces the categories of capital and prevents us from conducting a critique that goes to the root of this system, an essential question for those of us who are committed to a different world. Understanding what this postmodern method consists of and what consequences it has is useful, in this sense, for adopting a method that stems from communism and a resolute commitment to revolution. For all these reasons, we believe it is important to return to these themes in a way that is not repetitive but rather delving deeper into the reasons for the critique, the false dichotomies that often confront the defenders of postmodernism with fictitious critiques. This is to understand where postmodernism arises, what are the reasons for its strength and hegemony, since we know that the false is always a moment of the true, or, to put it another way, that every ideology is an expression that is born from the soil of this society. It is not enough simply to denounce it as something fallacious or negative, but to understand it as a distorted, fetishistic expression of the material production and reproduction of the world, in this case, of capitalism. We know, along with Marx and other comrades from our historic party, that ideology is nothing but another example of the metamorphoses of value as a social relation. An expression of its objective social form at the level of thought and spirit. A divided and split world, like the capitalism in which we live, reproduces ideologies and theories that make division and separation the basis of their worldview. Furthermore, at this moment of capitalist development, when its crisis is increasingly acute, these separations tend to become more acute. Money appears, in its virtuality, as authentic wealth, validated in itself. We live in times when fictitious capital multiplies geometrically, with little relation to the real production of value. When these separations become more pronounced, a theory enamoured of the pure simulacra of language becomes possible, regardless of its relationship to reality. We wish to discuss and explore all of this in the pages that follow.

1. The Defeat of the Revolutionary Wave of the 1970s

The 1960s and 1970s marked the partial end of the counterrevolutionary period, which had ushered in the defeat of the important revolutionary wave that the world proletariat led from 1917 to 1927. In those years of the second half of the 20th century, from France to Spain, from Portugal to Mexico, from Argentina to Italy, from Poland to Iran, the proletariat once again led a wave of struggles unparalleled in revolutionary strength and intensity, but which did represent a way out of the counterrevolutionary tedium of the preceding decades. A new generation of proletarians emerged in the class struggle and sought to clarify their positions: a partial expression of how the class struggle emerges from the soil of this society and with it, minorities emerged that shape the historical expression of the party of the proletariat. This partial wave of struggles was defeated throughout the 1980s not only by its own limitations, by a social force (that of the struggling proletariat) that was still largely mired in the confusions sown by the victorious counterrevolution (Stalinism, which finally entered a definitive crisis starting in 1989, thereby revealing the confirmation of its capitalist nature), but also because capitalism and its bourgeoisies still had much more room for manoeuvre than at present (the crisis began to manifest itself in 1973/75), when the internal limits of capital were clearly becoming apparent. The revolution was felt as a subjective urgency but not as a material necessity. Today we live in the inverse paradox: capitalism clearly reveals the impossibility of its existence in time (with the expulsion of the labour force, the geometric increase of superfluous humanity, the accelerated consumption of the planet, etc.), as well as the actual potential of communism as a way of life and production already possible based on current material development (the possibility of implementing a plan for the production and reproduction of the species without commodities and money is already fully present and possible), and at the same time, its subjective possibility is not seen. We live in an eternal present, where the horizon of the future seems broken in the consciousness of the proletarians.

We, as revolutionary communists and historical materialists, are convinced that the contradictions of capitalism and the threat it poses to the survival of the species and the planet itself will surely lead to a sharpening of the class struggle and the processes of social polarization, of class against class. This is an antagonism that profoundly reveals the clash between two worlds: capitalism or communism, catastrophe or species. But in this process of antagonism and social polarization that will be increasingly present, it is very important how we communists demonstrate the general dynamics of the process and the scope of the goals and objectives of our struggle (a community without classes or a state). And, to this end, a determined critique of ideological currents that are an emanation of the old world and that, in this sense, consciously or unconsciously fight for its survival and its catastrophe, is also fundamental. Our critique of postmodernism must be situated on this terrain, the search for clarity in the face of a conception that roots us to this world.

And, in fact, the term postmodernism was born from a 1979 book by Lyotard called The Postmodern Condition. As we have indicated on other occasions, Lyotard was a former member of the far-left group Socialisme ou Barbarie (other prominent members were Castoriadis and Lefort), a group that had broken away from Trotskyism towards internationalist perspectives and a quest for class autonomy following World War II, but which, however, had done so taking with it a series of confusions, such as the attempt to update Marx’s reflections on capitalism or the very characterization of the USSR as a bureaucratic, non-capitalist society. These weaknesses would be decisive for the group’s subsequent demise. In any case, what we believe is important to highlight is that Lyotard’s 1979 book marks the moment in which he reckons with his past. And that moment is already that of the ebb and flow and the defeat that has been announced since the 1980s. The hopes of ’68 had turned into the disillusionment of the ebb. At that moment, individuals and their attempts to reconcile themselves with normality emerge. Revolution is no longer a material reality born of class struggle and the contradictions of this world but becomes an idea. And a bad idea for Lyotard. An idea that leads to the worst of disasters, to totalitarianism, because it has the worst of roots: metanarratives that seek a religious and teleological redemption, an impossibility, in short. We believe it is very important to highlight this origin because it contains the political and ideological matrix of postmodernism, a theory that attempts to explain a historical epoch, the postmodern era, and a relativist way of seeing the world. However, it is essentially a theory born from the defeat of the class struggle and from that cycle of proletarian struggles that emerged in the 1960s. It is a theory that conceives of counterrevolution from the categories of counterrevolution, the opposite of what we claim to do, but which feigns a false radicalism by seeking to deconstruct the categories of this world and, therefore, exerts an ideological fascination among radical activists. But verbal deconstruction does not extinguish this world; rather, it buttresses it.

Postmodern authors, beginning with Lyotard himself, see in postmodernism a new historical epoch. This thesis is defended not only by them but even by some of their academic critics (Jameson), who finds here a new objective era (Jameson speaks of late capitalism) that also implies a new subjective approach to culture, art, and thought. For example, in architecture, the artistic functionalism of the Bauhaus or Le Corbusier and their hive-like buildings for proletarians is replaced by the buildings of Robert Venturi, Moneo, or Calatrava, which privilege the heterogeneity of styles, a return to the past, and the styles specific to each country. If we think of a building like the Pompidou Centre in Paris, it is not precisely a building where harmony or functionality prevails, and this is what draws attention and surprises. Similarly, in thought, the search for desire prevails over enlightened reason, doubt over absolutes. And the class perspective is replaced by new social movements of an identitarian nature. This is a new era marked by a different conception of the world. And this is how its authors present it to us.

We do not deny changes and transformations in capitalism, but we always maintain that its categorical foundations remain the same. In reality, what we are witnessing is a deepening crisis of capitalism, a world that is running out of steam amid a crisis that negates its very foundations, generating a life without meaning through an erosion of the traditional institutions that once organized people’s lives. We are referring to the profound crisis of the traditional organizations of the labour movement, parties and unions of the left of capital, the family, neighbourhood life. This process of erosion and what it generates, in the form of widespread malaise, difficulty in finding certainties and fixed security, is what creates the breeding ground for many postmodern perspectives. In this way, postmodernism is an expression of this world in crisis but one that remains tied to its categories, to the categories of capital. A world in crisis where its own categories have an increasingly dysfunctional and separated relationship with each other: between productive economy and fictitious capital, between economy and states, between its national and transnational realities. It is a bourgeois world that is increasingly exhausted, in crisis, and, in that sense, we say it is an objective social form of the bourgeois spirit: a way of thinking about this world that expresses the social categories that underpin it.

Postmodernism was born in French and North American universities; that is, it is a product of academia. In reality, what we normally call postmodernism is largely a specific current of bourgeois philosophy from the second half of the 20th century: poststructuralism, a current embodied by Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, Guattari, and a long list of authors who, coming from philosophical structuralism, construct a theory that makes subjectivity and will central to thinking about philosophy. These authors, along with others from diverse backgrounds, share a more or less pointed critique of Marx’s work. This is especially true of the communist perspective of the proletariat as a universal class, and of the materialist conception of history as the basis for analysing reality. At the same time, Stalinism and postmodernism are two opposite poles of the same unity, drawing on common origins and in constant dialogue with it. It is enough to consider Foucault’s relationship with Althusser, who share a common structuralism. As we have said, postmodernism as a theoretical movement is born from an exaltation of subjectivity, a subject brewing in its own epistemological sauce. There is no causality between the knowing subject and known reality, and therefore there are no objective criteria of truth. On the other hand, this subjectivism also leads to political voluntarism, since there is no relationship between the individual’s will and a perspective that transcends and encompasses it. The subject does not seek human emancipation and liberation, which would actually be a religious metanarrative leading to totalitarianism. Quite the contrary, the subject seeks to achieve its own rhizomatic desire and is thus also constituted in the desire for its own will. Whatever is desired is good.

So, we can begin by defining some of the characteristics that unite very different authors whom we identify as part of this movement.

• This critique of the idea of truth implies the challenge of all revolutionary theory as a teleological and religious expression, as a narrative that conceals a Gnostic dream of religious redemption, of imposing a religious ordeal on the terrestrial world. Obviously, for postmodern visions, revolutionary theory is one vision among others, but, as good bourgeois theorists would have it, it is also a dangerous and flawed one. Therefore, postmodernism is a theory against revolution and reduces it to one idea among others, and not to the real movement that negates this world—that is, a perspective that has deep material foundations in this world.
• It is argued that a global critique of this world is impossible, impossible to conceive, and impossible to practice. All we are left with are the margins. Postmodernism flees from centres and praises and exalts differences and heterogeneity. It opposes the totality it calls totalitarianism and assumes fragments as an expression within reach of the desires of the human will. In reality, doing so reinforces the impossibility of questioning the foundation that underpins the oppressive unity of this world.
• This extreme relativism coexists coherently with the reduction of the reality of this world to theoretical representations. What matters is the knowing subject, not the known object. The concepts and categories of the subject, its conceptual representations, its discourses, and its texts. Everything is language; reality is filtered exclusively through words and language—words that, as we know, have no reason to tell us anything true about reality. For prominent postmodern authors, such as Derrida, this relationship between thought and reality is a form of metaphysics of presence. The object is never given in immediate terms to our knowledge, which is true, but not for a mere ontological and ahistorical reason, but rather because of how we live in an opaque world dominated by capital. Only by uncovering this commercial fetishism can we grasp the reality that dominates us.
• If reality is a (performative) construction of the subject, of its language, of its representations… it is obvious that postmodernism radically opposes the determinism of historical materialism, a determinism that is not a form of fatalism. Everything is a product of human will; contingency and chance dominate causality and determinism in postmodern discourses. This exaltation of freedom is consistent with previous doctrines: reality is nothing more than an expression of the representations of subjects; human emancipation cannot have any real foundation because otherwise it would be totalizing and totalitarian. The actions of subjects are a pure expression of their identity and their will and never, therefore, of material interests and dynamics.
• A philosophy of identity that opposes the material processes of social polarization and the constitution of social classes. For postmodern theorists, everything is the result of subjects who self-determine their identity or, on the contrary, see their identity shaped by the gaze of others. There are no material processes that shape the subjects of this society; that is, there are no social classes. On the contrary, for us, classes are not an expression of social and subjective identities, but of the material divisions and schisms of this world dominated by capital and of the movements of struggle that, based on material contradictions and antagonisms, segregate the proletariat as a social class that constitutes itself as a party, as Marx said, that is, as a subjectivity organized against the foundations of this world. But this entire process is dominated by the determinism of material reality. Identity and social class are not analogous and do not combine well. The proletariat is not one identity among others that can be accompanied by the postmodern triad of class, race, and gender. Furthermore, the patriarchal or racial oppression of capitalism itself cannot be understood from an identity perspective. Postmodernism’s identity fixation is consistent with the voluntarism and anti-determinism that surrounds all its theoretical notions.
• Identitarianism, relativism, critique of teleology and metanarratives, the impossibility of an emancipatory perspective. All of this implies a critique of the essentialism and dogmatism that we communists who wish to deny this world will employ. And, indeed, we understand that capitalism is constituted by categories that are essentially the same from the moment it emerges as the dominant mode of production, that there is a contrast between human needs and the dynamics of capital, and that, therefore, we can speak of a human nature that, like all forms of invariance, is dynamic and not static, but that contains essential aspects: every human being needs to reproduce their own livelihood, is a communal being, and has rational and sentimental faculties. We are natural beings endowed with faculties that, if not developed and implemented, imply an alienation of our being in the world, as Marx and the communist movement explained from its beginnings. These are the material foundations of the antagonism and contrast of the proletariat in relation to capitalism. The denial of this, postmodern anti-essentialism, its denial of the existence of material foundations, in turn implies the denial of social interests that arise from and underlie existence. It implies, as we have seen, that everything is reduced to a question of identity, not material existence. The dualism between subject and object that underlies postmodern theory, and its dominant subjectivism, implies the reduction of social conflicts to questions of identity and recognition of subjects.
• The impossibility of achieving a truth about this world and a liberating practice. These are theories, therefore, of social impotence because if nothing is more authentic than something else, there is no basis for fighting against this world, nor any better perspective through which to overcome the existing order. Therefore, it is a relativistic vision of the world.

2. The Methodological Individualism of Postmodernity

We think it’s interesting to tell an anecdote to begin this section, one that we have actually experienced on numerous other occasions in a similar way. In a discussion about ’68 and radical environmentalist critiques of this world, we were told that our perspective was interesting but only addressed economics, and that the focus of analysis needed to be broadened to encompass all forms of oppression. And that anti-industrialist reflection after 1968 did help with this. This small example contains a worldview that is typical of bourgeois sociology and that all postmodern theorists implicitly adopt.

For them, we live in an oppressive world, but one constituted by a multiplicity of sources that explain social power. Analysing capitalism is only about understanding one of the bases of domination, in this case the economic one. But the analysis must be complemented with a reading of gender oppression, of the colonialism that constitutes the relationship between races and countries, of the environment, and a consumerist and productivist conception that depletes the planet. Only from this pluralist perspective can we have an updated vision of the system’s domination of our lives. This would be, in a less schematic way, the type of approach we are confronted with. And it is simply not true. There is no multiplicity of oppressions that we as individuals can then synthesize through our intersectional struggles. To remain in that idea is to be stuck within the way capitalism appears to people in their daily lives, in their existence. Capitalism separates us into a diversity of spheres, fragmented from one another, and makes each of them appear as though endowed with autonomy, with its own power, hypostatized, fetishized. It is a partial truth (this is how reality appears to subjects) that conceals the constitutive falsehood of capitalism as a global social relation. Politics appears as the privileged terrain of collective decision-making, law as the sphere of norms of civic conduct, the family as the place of personal and private coexistence, of affections, the market as the instance in which economic actors exchange goods, services, and factors of production. This is the vulgar way in which capitalism appears to us. Not coincidentally, what has been said so far is the basis of theories specific to political and economic liberalism, for example, neoclassical theory. Postmodern authors are more critical in their analyses, more inclined to Max Weber than to vulgar economics. And, therefore, they are critical. But critical criticism is not enough, as Marx and Engels well knew, to deny this world. Postmodern authors reveal the trap that lies before us. Not everything is rosy. We must deconstruct. Law is a biopolitical device that shapes people’s identities from a perspective of social control. The family is a terrain of patriarchal oppression, and citizenship conceals a white, cis, patriarchal male who would be the subject who dominates the world. Now, this effort is undoubtedly critical of the way this world emerges, but it does not reveal its reason for being, its foundation. It is no coincidence that postmodernists shy away from the question of origin. Despite their genealogical and archaeological efforts, there is no origin that allows us to understand the emergence of the categories that dominate us in a concrete and practical way. Ultimately, everything is the result of a will for power and domination of some subjects over others. Of men against women, whites against racialized people, heterosexuals against homosexuals, ableists against disabled people. And all in a multiplicity of combinations that constitute a complex intersection of privileges and counter-privileges.

Now, all this argumentation still explains very little and, in reality, falsifies the essential point. It is a kind of ideal types (as in Weber’s sociology) where the dynamics of plural behaviours of individuals are generalized. As in all behavioural sociology, the important thing is to analyse these attitudes and, from there, construct general models that allow us to universalize and generalize these human behaviours. This vision presupposes the individual as the driving force of their own behaviour (hence methodological individualism), and the point is to observe and consider it theoretically. It moves from the concrete to the abstract. And the concrete would be the social behaviour of individuals. In this case, more or less privileged individuals, with more or less social recognition, with more or less will to power. But the starting point is always the individual and their social self-expression.

What if the concrete were actually a historical product? What if the concrete were in turn a synthesis of multiple abstract determinations? This is Marx’s starting point, and ours. The individual, separated from the community, is a historical product of capitalism, as is existence itself in separate instances of economics, politics, public-private relations, law, nations. To start from these sources of social power as the natural sphere in which subjects act is nothing more than to remain within the proper terrain of the capitalist world but believing it to be something natural and not historical, neutral and not an instance of social reproduction and domination. The paradox of postmodernism is that, by seeking to question everything, it simply naturalizes the constitutive and historical basis of capitalism. It is in this sense that we say that the concrete is a synthesis of the abstract, that is, of the abstract categories of capitalism that permeate and constitute the world of human praxis dominated by capital. Postmodernism naturalizes the behaviours of individuals, or at most explains them as the result of different conceptions or wills to power in conflict, when in reality they are an expression of the way capitalism produces a certain type of individual and human anthropology.

Capitalism is a mode of production with a very precise origin. It historically emerged from the ruptures of peasant communities in Europe, which forced these peasants to become proletarians by selling their labor power, and to a global market that was decisively expanded with the Castilian and Portuguese conquest of America. By selling their labour power to capital, the proletariat causes capital to valorise (or expand) itself productively. Capital swells with value; it thus increases. Capital is, in reality, nothing but surplus value, that is, value swollen with value, value in constant growth. This is what makes capitalism a mode of production dominated by capital, by that social form that is value driven by a relentless desire to grow. It is a system where relationships between people are subordinated to social things, which have their own movement and constitute a kind of second nature. What is originally clearly a violent social relationship appears to the subjects as something natural. The narrative that emerges from the depths of capitalist society tells us that it is normal to get up every morning to go to work, since we have to live somehow. It is normal to sell our labour power in exchange for a wage. It is normal for the owner of the factor of production (the machines) who rents our labour power to appropriate the fruits of our labour, which is increasingly collective. It is all perfectly normal because it is a contract agreed upon between free and equal subjects in their abstract will. All of this occurs in a specific market, such as the labour market. In other words, what is a social relationship of exploitation appears natural to the subjects involved, driven by social forces beyond their control and which become autonomous. That is why Marx speaks of capital as an impersonal force (not controlled by us), which moves by an automatic dynamic, and which makes us appendages (things) subject to its force.

This is the social relationship that postmodernity tends to naturalize. Furthermore, this social relationship mediated by capital is not only expressed in the economic sphere but is condensed and crystallized in multiple determinations and terrains through which human activities, reflections, circumstances, ways of thinking, and exchanges are objectified and autonomous in relation to the people who sustain them. In this way, we can speak of different metamorphoses of the value form, in the different instances of social life, which convey the fetishistic and reifying logic of capitalism. Capitalism not only reifies economic relations, but its metamorphoses affect everything. Capitalism does not explain everything, but nothing can be understood if we do not understand capitalism. The logic of the value-form is reproduced through a multiplicity of separations and cleavages that are inherent to it: between the production and circulation of commodities, between the sphere of production (wage labour) and that of reproduction (the private sphere of families and childrearing, the privileged location of the patriarchal structure of capitalism), between the private sphere of civil society and that of the state, between commercial law and public law, between citizens and workers, between human beings and nature, between body and mind. All these forms are intrinsic to the logic of value in its perpetual and impersonal reproduction. They are not expressions of free individual behaviour or of any personal will to power, but rather ways in which the logic of value coagulates in a permanent process. This is what not all bourgeois theorists understand, as they base their analyses on the social naturalness of capital. At most, they may question the most damaging effects, fight for a fairer distribution of value, or for recognition of the victims of the dynamics of capital. But always without questioning the same dynamic. Without understanding that the shadow of capital lies behind all these movements. The fact is that the capitalist social relationship is not only an expression of the relations of production between capital and labour. When we speak of capitalism, we are not only speaking of economics; rather, it is the social totality that is the expression of the dynamics of capital in motion, in metamorphosis, where it takes on new forms in the form of law, democracy, citizenship. Our critique of capital is also, inseparably, a critique of politics, patriarchy, and law.

We are not, therefore, speaking of a social relationship that is a cumulative combination of networks, interactions, and institutions, but, on the contrary, of a single social logic that inscribes social behaviours in the metamorphoses of the value form of capital. Therefore, social behaviours cannot be understood (as postmodernism and bourgeois sociology conceive) outside of this analysis of the movements of social capital, much less as a starting point for social critique.

This is the great difference in theoretical method between our historic party and other currents critical of capitalism, but which remain under the long shadow of capital. Postmodernists, as a typical expression of bourgeois sociology, start from an analytical vision based on the way reality appears to subjects and from there make a generalization that remains trapped in the impersonal dynamics of capital itself. Social relations, which unfold through multiple masks, are not directly visible or perceptible to people in their social isolation. Masks such as technology, the aesthetics of the commodity, the profusion of objects, consumption, democracy and the general will, human rights. All of these are expressions of the same social being: capital and its abstract logic. It is not visible, but it acts as the true principle of reality. Capital is a set of abstractions that configure its social dynamics and, as we say, are inseparable from its very movement. Ignoring their origin and common connection, understanding them as autonomous and independent entities, disarms us and renders our critique impotent. Wage labour and patriarchal family, citizenship and law, democracy and nation are expressions of the same social world, that of the abstract individual who has broken his connection with pre-capitalist communities. Capital is the true spirit of the world, even if it never appears as such in its immediacy, even if it mediates the relationships between social things or between reified and socially produced forms of thought. It is against this material foundation that we must direct ourselves. The reigning patriarchy or ecocide are not the simple product of conceptions of the world, but expressions rooted in the materiality of a social dynamic. For this very reason, we cannot deconstruct patriarchy to end it or be less consumerist to stop ecocide. Only a more powerful materiality is capable of destroying the hidden monster that believes itself omniscient in its automatic metamorphosis. Communism is the real movement that negates all these forms, to affirm itself and negate capital.

3. The Will to Power as its Origin?

From what we have seen so far, we can understand that there is a logic of identity that is intrinsic to this society, and that arises from its very foundations and parameters. Identity as self-consciousness in a classist and, therefore, oppressive society cannot but reproduce the foundations of the society that continually produces it. Therefore, identity politics, which are the most immediate ideological expression of postmodernism, always operate within the categories of this world. They do not understand its origin or why it reproduces itself, nor its categories or how to end them.

For postmodernism, everything is a question of power. However, the origin of domination is not very clear. Everything is reduced to a will to power of some subjects over others, of some conceptions of the world over others. We are condemned to a perpetual conflict from which there is no escape. It is a war of all against all, which can only be resolved through the legal recognition, by the State, of subaltern identity. It is no coincidence that in the end, albeit in a different way, we reach the same conclusion as Hobbes. The State, as the representation of multiple identities, serves as a mediator. Only it can mediate this perpetual conflict through the recognition of subaltern identities: through laws in favour of trans people, through policies in favour of racialized people in schools, through policies of remembrance for the colonial past, the toppling of statues of former slave owners. The problem with these policies, like everything the State does, is that instead of resolving and alleviating oppression, what they do is amplify it to a higher level. The origins of these real oppressions (racism, patriarchy, the lack of meaning in life experienced by many people today) have a common root in the way capitalism globally organizes its exploitation and the set of oppressions we experience. No law will eliminate racism. Capitalist competition is the fuel that permanently ignites the racist engine. It is the capitalist world, its very anthropology, the permanent competition organized into national collective identities, that elevates racism to something intrinsic to capitalism itself. Therefore, the history of capitalism itself is inseparably linked to that of these oppressions.

But starting from an identitarian vision, which reduces everything to conflicting subjects driven by a will to power, logically implies reproducing separation ad infinitum. There is always an Other over whom oppression is exercised and who needs to be recognized. The logic of postmodern domination and that of exploitation, defended by our historical party, are antagonistic. Capitalist exploitation assumes the existence of an abstract totality, value, which reproduces and unifies its domination in all spheres of life. How subjects experience this exploitation, and domination can only be understood from this concrete totality. Partializing domination into different segments simply serves to understand nothing and to operate within a totality, which is capitalism, of its own categories. This is what happens with postmodern identity politics. And, therefore, when acting, they can only refer to the appropriate channels that capitalism itself, in its impersonal reproduction, presents. If a subaltern identity exists, we must fight for the State to recognize it and grant it rights. The very basis of identity politics is democracy and the state, the nation, and law as social connectors of the identity of subjects. Identity politics stem from the separations and fragmentations of this world and can only attempt a failed unity and stability through the categories this world offers. As we will see in the section on intersectionality, the importance of legal studies and practices for the recognition of rights for identity activists is no coincidence. It is the logical consequence of their very theoretical positions.

Our perspective is not to achieve recognition of this world but to make it burst. It is the logic of negation to affirm the true human community (Gemeinwesen), a community that can only emerge from the negation of the material foundations of this world: commodities, social classes, states, and nations. In other words, it is not about recognition or the distribution of power or resources, but rather the radical negation of the categories of capitalism. Our movement has historically called this negative movement, which affirms the human community, communism: this real movement that negates and overcomes the present state of affairs. The proletariat is the revolutionary class (and not merely the exploited one) to the extent that proletarians “do not have to realize any ideal but simply give free rein to the elements of the new society that the old, dying society carries within it” (Marx, The Civil War in France). And this is possible to the extent that the proletariat assumes,

“The formation of a class in radical chains, of a class of bourgeois society that is not a class of bourgeois society, of a social class that is the disappearance of all social classes; of a sector that derives a universal character from its universal suffering and claims no special right because it does not suffer from social injustice, but injustice itself, which can no longer appeal to a historical pretext but to a human pretext that is not in any particular contradiction with the consequences but in a universal contradiction with the premises of German public order; of a sector, finally, that cannot emancipate itself without emancipating itself from all other sectors of society and without emancipating them in turn; it means, in a word, that the total loss of man can only be remade with the complete recovery of man. This dissolution of society, in the form of a special class, is the proletariat.”

As we see, for us and our historical party, the proletariat is, at the same time, an exploited and revolutionary class. It is revolutionary because, in the material and real movement of defending its human needs, it affirms the need to dissolve this entire old world, which we call capitalist, and to affirm a new world that is already potentially active within the depths of the old. The proletariat does not assert a special right but rather fights to do away with all forms of law and, consequently, of the State. The proletariat is the agent cause of the dissolution of capitalist society, as Marx affirms. To achieve this, it must dissolve all the separations and fragmentations inherent in this world in order to affirm the material communist community. The proletariat does not assert its interests and rights within this world, but rather struggles to negate itself, negating the entire world of capital: not only the economy, as the terrain of production and realization of value, but politics as the social mediation of human wills, patriarchy as the crystallization of gender relations, racism as a violent and oppressive relationship with the other. From Marx’s perspective, the struggle between classes, the social war inherent to capitalism, must be understood within the more global clash between capitalism and communism. The proletariat is, quite simply, the agent of this movement toward communism to the extent that, in order to defend its human needs, it must affirm itself as a class, constitute itself as a party, and, through world revolution, create the conditions of possibility for ultimately negating itself and capitalism. It is the only sector of this world that struggles to negate itself on all levels of its existence.

Neither recognition nor distribution: communist negation.

4. Modernity or Postmodernity?

The very fact of speaking of modernity or postmodernity already presupposes a theoretical conception foreign to our perspective and method. It is no coincidence that we speak of modes of production and not civilizations. To speak of modernity implies speaking of a civilization marked by a worldview (the Enlightenment) and secularized social practices in politics. The dominant approach, once again, is that of Max Weber. What dominates these approaches are perspectives where analysis is channelled through the centrality of ideas, culture, the will to dominate, social behaviours. Processes are ineluctable, but not from the logic of our historical determinism. Their determinism is fatalistic and always assumes a cul de sac with no emancipatory exit. Modernity contains within itself the iron cage that traps our lives in an instrumental rationality. We become appendages of a bureaucratic machine that encloses, within itself, the qualitative aspects of our lives. On the surface, the perspective is not so different from that of Marx’s commodity fetishism, and yet the starting point and the result are completely different. Our method is diametrically opposed.

Starting from a materialist and historical approach, which understands capitalism as a contradiction in progress, allows us to understand that in its materiality, the capitalist world is much more contradictory than bourgeois sociology and philosophy are willing to admit, and that ultimately, they proceed in their analyses setting out from their own categories. Weber’s famous iron cage is not the result of mere and inevitable social complexity, but of a logic, that of the commodity generalized to all aspects of life, which makes us things and instruments for others and automatically grants personality to commodities and things. Instrumental rationality is born from this. Once again, we witness an example of how the modern social sciences are nothing more than objective forms, in thought, of the categories of capital. Modernity as a concept is nothing more than the result of generalizing different ideal types that arise from the experiences and identities of social behaviours in this world. And, obviously, social behaviours are experienced by human beings in a prison-like way. We live a confined, suffocating, increasingly meaningless life. Modernity is all of this, and it is becoming more and more profound. It is not a simple logic; it is the concrete materiality that is born and encompasses everything in this world.

And, at the same time, it is a dynamic, contradictory, dialectical totality. This last word, magical for some as if it were a fetish, is, however, fundamental to Marx and his approach. Marx always analyses the contradictory poles of every social reality, of every mode of production. Capitalism is, at the same time, a catastrophe, but in its very development it prepares its negation. Therefore, Marx’s perspective is not one of a return to an idyllic and remote past, but rather that of the universal community, communism as a plan for the species. Capitalism is dying of social complexity. The development of the productive forces no longer fits within the narrow framework of capitalist social relations. We can no longer live under the aegis of value, money, commodities, and abstract labour. As Marx clearly explains in his preparatory notes for Capital, the Grundrisse:

“Capital, moreover, increases the surplus labour time of the masses by all the resources of art and science, since its wealth consists directly in the appropriation of surplus labour time; since its goal is directly value, not use value. In this way, despite itself, it is instrumental in creating the means of social disposable time, in order to reduce the labour time of the whole of society to a decreasing minimum and thus free up everyone’s time for their own development. Its tendency, however, is always, on the one hand, to create disposable time, and on the other, to convert it into surplus labour. If it succeeds too well in the former, it experiences overproduction, and then necessary labour will be interrupted, because capital cannot valorise any surplus labour. The more this contradiction develops, the more evident it becomes that the growth of the productive forces can no longer be linked to the appropriation of others’ surplus labour, but that the working mass itself must appropriate its surplus labour. Once this is done—and with this, disposable time will cease to have an antithetical existence—on the one hand, necessary labour time will find its measure in the needs of the social individual, and on the other, the development of the social productive force will be so rapid that, although production is now calculated in terms of the common wealth, everyone’s disposable time will grow.”

The problem is not one of social complexity; it is that the degree of material development that humanity has reached implies an irreversible bifurcation: capitalist catastrophe or communism. Tertium non datur. There is no lesser evil or other alternatives. Our historical and dialectical determinism has nothing to do with the fatalism of modern or postmodern interpretations of capitalism. Communism is the mode of production and life possible for our species in the current state of historical development. In fact, it is the only possible one if we do not want to descend into an ever-deepening catastrophe.

Modernity and postmodernity are the binomial largely discussed today by bourgeois sociology and philosophy: on the one hand, the supporters of modernity and the Enlightenment, such as Habermas; on the other, their critics, the postmodern authors in their various versions. For us, this is a false dichotomy.

On the one hand, philosophers like Habermas defend the European Enlightenment as an emblem of reason and human advancement. Modernity, with the use of reason in the public sphere, allows for a communicative rationality based on a “lifeworld” that can and should not be colonized by the structures of the social system. The Enlightenment and modernity exist in this conflict, between the Weberian iron cage and the possibility of a communicative rationality that develops the lifeworld of human beings, its deepest anchor. The Enlightenment and philosophical modernity allow for this positive opening toward life through politics, which prevents economic and political systems from becoming detached from their deepest anthropological foundations. Habermas and his postmodern opponents have much more in common than they dare admit. As we have already seen with regard to postmodernists, Habermas, too, begins with the behaviour of subjects structured in a symbolic and communicative way to think about society. In other words, it is the identity of subjects and their actions that help us think about the functioning of social systems. Hence, Habermas is unable to grasp why the processes of autonomization of social, political, cultural, and economic systems occur. To do so, we must understand the foundations of social production and reproduction, and these are not primarily found in social behaviour. On the contrary, social behaviour is a product of them.

Despite everything, Habermas, in a voluntaristic and idealistic way, presents himself as a defender of modern rationality, as an unfinished project. The Enlightenment allows us to confront the shortcomings of its limits with the use of authentic reason and a deliberative democracy that deploys communicative action. On the contrary, for postmodern authors, the origin of evil clearly stems from modernity itself and all that it entails. A teleological perspective of human development toward emancipation that, in reality, conceals a secularization of the religious narrative, a form of Gnosticism, this time cloaked in the garb of radical ideologies (anarchist and/or communist), a project of social engineering that conceals the totalitarianisms of the 20th century, a use of reason that has covered the world with monstrous dreams. There is no universal project, as modernity once thought, since behind every universalism there is always a particular that illegitimately proclaims itself as the universal. And it does so based on its desire for domination.

We only have lines of flight in relation to what exists, subtraction as a strategy, to avoid totalitarian metanarratives like world revolution, the molecular always better than the molar, the everyday versus the social engineering forms of revolutionary programs, the concrete identities of individuals versus the tyranny of abstractions.

Obviously, the postmodern vision of modernity theoretically has much in common with the modern philosophy it criticizes. It simply represents a radicalization of it, as we have already developed elsewhere. [2]

From a postmodern perspective, the universal is criticized as something pre-constituted that ignores diversity and particularisms. For example, this is very evident when we see how racialization criticizes the notion of the working class as a universal class when it is divided into overlapping and hierarchical races. We already know that, in doing so, it eliminates any idea of universality, and therefore, there is no possible way out. However, at its core, this perspective encompasses the eternal debate in philosophy between universals and particulars. Postmodern authors tell us that every universal is nothing more than a univocal reduction that eliminates that which connotes the particular, the concrete. Therefore, it would be a totalitarian operation. And yet, it is not the only possible relationship that can be established between the universal and the particular.

Let’s consider, to this end, our communist notion of class, which is not that of the sociological working class. It is precisely a becoming universal: when the proletariat struggles, it must confront the forms of separation that capital imposes on it in order to triumph, and in doing so, it becomes universal and anticipates the universal community of communism. But this is incomprehensible if we don’t understand how capitalism previously laid the groundwork for this, subsuming and proletarianizing the entire planet, eroding the patriarchal and traditional structures of pre-capitalist communities in its individualizing drive, questioning religion as a paradigm for understanding the world, etc. There is a permanent analogy that runs through the relationship between the universal and the particular. On the one hand, the proletariat becomes a universal class by confronting the different forms of separation of capital; on the other hand, it is the universality (totality) of capital that constitutes the different particular instances that make up the sum of its dominion. In the reality of capitalism and its global historical movement, the universal and the particular exist in a continuous, reciprocal and dialectical relationship. This is quite different from the reductionism presented by the postmodern conception of it.

5. Our Historical Thread

Postmodernists read everything through their lenses. Everything is a subjective identity, so the proletariat and its history, its formal parties and organizations, its historical program, etc., are reduced to one worldview among others of modernity. A vision that, in this case, sought to impose the dominance of the cis-male worker over the rest of the subaltern minorities. For them, everything is a story, but real life and history can only be deceitfully reduced to mere conflicts of ideas. The communist program of the proletariat, which precisely involves the negation of class society and the proletariat, therefore simply disappears from the postmodern equation. They simply ignore it. They draw so much from modernity that they are yet another expression of the counterrevolution that has been ongoing for 100 years. For them, Marxism is Stalinism, proletarians are workers chained to capitalist competition and organized in national-communist parties. Our opposition to this perspective can only be frontal. It is the frontality we have with any bourgeois faction on a political and ideological level.

And, of course, our history, that of our class and our minorities, is very different from the ignorant narratives enclosed in a text to avoid logocentric contamination, as Derrida would say, that is, the contamination of real life. Our class and our historic party are permanently born from the soil of this society; that is why it is historical. And it is global by its essence, like capitalism. It is a material, constitutive, and primary reality of the social world in which we live; it is not a mere linguistic wish. A proletariat that has fought as a class in defence of our historic interests everywhere, from the Paris Commune of 1871 to Russia in 1917, from Germany in 1919 to Ecuador in 1922, from Italy during the Bienio Rosso to the Chinese proletarians of 1927, and to the struggles that swept across the world in the 1960s and 1970s with the resumption of the independent class struggle, from Paris to the Vitoria-Gasteiz wildcat strike, from Italy during the Hot Autumn to the proletarian slums of São Paolo, from the Chilean industrial belts to the black miners of South Africa, from Iran in 1979 and its shoras or workers’ councils to Poland in 1980 or to the Korean commune of Gwangjiu, to mention only a few examples among tens of thousands. Our class is a material reality that struggles against this world, like an old mole that appears and disappears, but always emerges again. From defeat to defeat, we learn until the final victory against this miserable world that reproduces catastrophe in all aspects of life.

Historical continuity and our memory are fundamental for the future. Only through continuity and learning from our past is a life plan for the species possible. And that requires continuity with the historical comrades of our party, who fought uncompromisingly against capitalism and counterrevolution in all its forms. We owe it to the pétroleuses of the Paris Commune and to Chen Du Xiu and to the tens of thousands of Chinese communists murdered by the Kuomintang and the subsequent Stalinist (Maoist) counterrevolution, to the thousands of Vietnamese internationalist communists who suffered the same fate due to Ho Chi Minh’s counterrevolution, to the Iranian proletarians who were hanged in the squares of the counterrevolution while Foucault cheered on Khomeini’s Ayatollahs.

Thanks to all of them, known and unknown, proletarian internationalism is a material reality constitutive of our historical program. It’s quite different from the postmodern, Baudrillard-style game of pure simulacra where reality doesn’t exist except as an intellectual and empty projection.

6. Intersecting Capitalism?

Intersectionality arises from the same limits as postmodern theory when it attempts to translate itself politically. It is an attempt to take common action when reality is reduced to an infinite network of oppressions, where every victim can also be an oppressor. The proletariat as a class is white and, therefore, colonialist. Feminism as a reaction to patriarchal machismo is also white feminism and, consequently, racist and colonial. A sexist of your own race is less sexist because it must be understood within its cultural parameters. The opposite can be an example of privilege derived from whiteness.

The philosopher Judith Butler’s reflection on the burqa [3] can serve as a symptomatic example of this type of postmodern powerlessness. For her, the burqa should be understood from the cultural traits of belonging to a community, a common history, a religion, a family. It also serves as a protective measure for Afghan women. The burqa, moreover, would be an instrument of protection for women against shame and operates as a demarcation line for the space in which female activity is possible. In this context, the burqa appears as an instrument of protection from the vulnerability and precariousness of women, at least in the countries where it is in use. And this would imply, for Butler, a certain positive evaluation of the use of the burqa, since it would be associated with an ethos (custom, culture) specific to Afghan women that they cannot shed overnight. Removing the burqa means stripping these women naked, extirpating them from their culture and their community. The feminism that proposes this actually hides the desire of the Western colonizer to impose its culture.

This example is very useful for understanding the zero-sum game to which postmodernism is politically condemned. From this perspective, it is impossible to overcome this world because postmodernism always sets out from its categories. We do not intend to trivialize what Butler says. Of course, Western states’ denunciation of the burqa serves as an ideological justification for their imperialist purposes. But the famous American philosopher, through her categories, simply disarms us from any project of liberation, which by essence can only be universal. The burqa is clearly a patriarchal instrument that renders women invisible in the public sphere, a demonstration of the patriarchal character of all class societies, which we as communists must combat. Only within a process of anti-capitalist, class-based revolution of the world proletariat will it be possible to overcome the impasses denounced by postmodern theory, of which Butler is an illustrious representative. Only the struggle of Afghan proletarian women can be an agent of liberation from this and other forms of oppression, because only the proletariat has the power to embody the total negation of this world.

Postmodern authors discover real contradictions within this world. Of course, the Enlightenment is used as a weapon to ideologically justify forms of oppression that are inherent to this system and its social and political dynamics. This is what they fail to understand. They themselves move in a world fragmented by oppressions and forms of social domination that they end up internalizing because they are incapable of understanding their causes and origins. Thus, the burqa becomes simply an instrument of the ethos of Afghan women, which also covers a space of feminine freedom. And any critical pretence in relation to this would conceal a Western desire for domination. Postmodernism clearly emerges as what it is: the theoretical current of powerlessness. The identities created by capitalism and other class societies become insurmountable, inherent to the local ethos and sacred, in an uncriticizable afterlife. By not understanding its origin as a product of class societies, by reducing everything to a struggle of wills for power (in this case, West versus East), what is simply conceived (and ontologized) as something natural is what is the result of the material evolution of history and class societies.

Postmodern theory operates with the categories inherent to capital. Intersectionality is merely an added twist in the use of these instruments. Capitalism unifies its social being, fractured through capitalist competition, thanks to the law. And intersectionality is not coincidentally born as a theory and coined as a term in an article by Kimberlé Crenshaw entitled Mapping the Margins for the Stanford Law Review. In this, we can see the importance of law for the intersectional perspective. In fact, according to Hill Collins and Sirma Bilge, two intersectional scholars, their perspective speaks the language of activists and institutions. It is about achieving their convergence, and to achieve this, the practice of both activists and professionals is fundamental: academics, lawyers, social workers, and so on. Intellectuals and professionals target government agencies to change government policy. As positive examples, these two academics and activists cite examples such as the UN World Conference Against Racism in Durban (2001), the microcredit program implemented by Yunus (Nobel Prize winner in Economics), and so on. Ultimately, intersectionality would serve to intervene, through grassroots activist organizations and the skills of professionals, in the public agendas of states to help implement favourable public policies for different minorities of class, race, and gender. To this end, they offer possible examples, from pressure campaigns against the Obama administration (Why We Can’t Wait) to the aforementioned campaign on microcredit, or to proposals on how intersectionality could be useful for international organizations to better understand social inequality in the world. A conference on inclusive capitalism held in London in 2014 serves as an example.

This type of interpretation of intersectionality is particularly pragmatic. It certainly represents a very moderate kind of distributive liberalism. We recognize that other intersectional perspectives may be more radical in form, but never in content. Content is always the tools that capitalism offers you, if you move within its categories and divisions, as our postmodernists do. As Elizabeth Duval says in her Después de los trans, when she polemicizes with Paul Preciado, the queer perspective has nothing revolutionary about it. It is simply an attempt to obtain recognition from the State (which Duval views positively, as a good leftist) of certain rights.

And intersectionality speaks to us, simply, of different axes of inequality that are autonomous and independent of one another (class, racial, gender, ableism, sexuality, and so on ad infinitum). There is no hierarchy of some oppressions over others, and pluralism is intrinsic to this idea of different systems of domination. Their logic is typical of various personal discriminations, based on categories that are inherent to individuals (for example, whiteness in white people) and that are expressed as a will to power and not as the reality of a capitalist domination that is carried out, above all, by an impersonal and automatic dynamic. Our approach would be, for intersectional authors, an example of monistic and theological reductionism. But what operates in this way, in any case, is the reality of capitalism and its hidden masks.

As we have seen, by using an empiricist method, postmodernism tends to reify identities based on the immediate behaviour of individuals, who, in reality, are a concrete expression of the capitalist world. The class identity that postmodernists think of has much to do with the sociological experiences of workers, and we could develop the same approach with regard to gender or race. What they fail to analyse is why social behaviours and identities are organized this way. And to achieve this, their ideal types are no longer enough; they need to understand how the abstraction of capital constructs them.

In any case, for intersectionality theorists, these axes of inequality express different experiences of discrimination that people experience in their own particular ways: different hierarchies of pain that express a diversity of geopolitics of fear and intersectional discomfort. Since the axes of inequality are multiple and always embodied differently in each person, we can understand that intersectional unity remains a pious and impossible voluntaristic desire for an encounter between Black and white feminisms, epistemologies of the South and the decoloniality of gender, between gay and racialized Iranian movements that have the persecution of homosexuals as their ethos.

At this point, and by way of summary, we can conclude with seven ideas:

1. All of this is the price of starting from reified categories, extracted from the immediate behaviour of individuals, using an empiricist method, characteristic of the creation of ideal types.
2. Postmodernism is the result of a static and crystallized conception of the separations of capital, which fails to see the dynamics of the historical perspective in which class societies, and capitalism in particular, operate.
3. By reducing the proletariat as a class to one identity among others, it fails to grasp its potential reality as a global negation of this world and therefore ends up declaring the impossibility of such a negation.
4. Postmodernism ignores history and origins in its analysis of exploitation and the different forms of oppression, which are revisited in their particularity and tend to be essentialized, as if everything were the result of an eternal power struggle, a war of all against all.
5. This is an idealist perspective that reduces everything to a linguistic game of signifiers that proliferate ad infinitum, where reality is a mere projection without material foundation.
6. The social totality of capitalism is not reducible to the sum of its parts, as the theorists of intersectional postmodernism claim, driven by their desire for pluralism at all costs. Rather, it is the expression of a social relation, value, which in its automatic movement undergoes different metamorphoses. The sum of the parts is not equal to the final result, because to understand the parts, we must start from the concrete abstraction that is value in process.
7. Ultimately, postmodernism is essentially a perspective that is situated on the civic and legalistic terrain of law and democracy, that is, on the terrain that capital presents for the coexistence of its conflicts and separations.

7. Some Final Notes

In the Spanish region, we are witnessing a heated debate between postmodernists and anti-postmodernists. Our explicit intention is to distance ourselves from this debate. Obviously, we have nothing to do with a postmodern approach, as has been made abundantly clear in these pages, but neither do we have anything to do with its false critics who reproduce and worsen their supposed rivals. Who are these critics of postmodernism, and from where do they conduct their critique? Writers and journalists like Daniel Bernabé, with his La trampa de la diversidad, or Ana Iris Simón, with her book Feria, oppose postmodernism simply because they are horrified by the dynamics of dissolution that capitalism entails. We know, with Marx, that capitalism prepares the material conditions for its own overcoming. And it is from this realization that the will can reverse the praxis of the catastrophic dynamic that capitalism also entails: “All that is solid melts into air, all that is sacred is profaned, and men are finally forced to calmly consider their conditions of existence and their relations with one another” (Marx-Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party).

The aforementioned authors confront postmodernist currents by reclaiming and idealizing a past that has already passed, a past they furthermore idealize and from which they arbitrarily deprive themselves of its capitalist and exploitative reality. Postwar capitalism was the result of the imperialist slaughter of World War II, the deaths of millions of proletarians on all fronts, the reigning counterrevolution of the 1930s, fascism, the New Deal, and Stalinism. Our intellectuals embellish all this because, in reality, their discourse is a third-hand product of their lifelong Stalinism. They’re no longer capable of anything; they’re the result of the counterrevolution with this level of superficiality.

Postmodernism is criticized to reclaim the homeland (which is done not only by Ana Iris Simón, but also by Podemos and Errejón), queer feminism is criticized in the name of the family, and the liberalism of self-determination in the name of the State is criticized. We say: all these false solidities have already dissolved, and they will not return, despite the “pious” wishes of Bernabé, who in the recent proletarian strike in Cádiz defended the unions that have fulfilled their role as strike-breakers. The alternative is not between the corporate state or postmodern self-determination, but between capitalist catastrophe or communism.

This Holy Family of defenders of the capitalist past must be joined by other more explicitly counterrevolutionary ones, such as the upstart YouTuber Roberto Vaquero. Vaquero is the leader of the Stalinist group (of the pro-Albanian branch) Workers’ Front. In his videos, by criticizing postmodernism in the name of Stalin’s capitalism [4] and the counterrevolution that massacred the proletariat and its revolutionary minorities in the past, he helps us understand even more clearly the fallacy of the postmodernism/anti-postmodernism dichotomy.

When all these authors defend the working class, they are not, in reality, defending the proletariat as a revolutionary class, in the sense of Marx and our tradition, but rather the sociological working class, exploited, reduced to the cogs of capitalist society with its homelands, its productive, and workerist logic. Its tradition is that of national communism, which has a long history behind it. It is the history of counterrevolution.

Throughout this text, we have tried to confront postmodernism as an ideology of our time. In this brief section, we are seeing how a dichotomy currently exists that tends to polarize the circles and sectors that seek to radically confront this world into two alternatives: postmodern or anti-postmodern. It seems to us, as so often before, a false alternative. Our era is traversed by much more important and decisive conflicts.

When all that is solid melts into thin air, when capitalism reaches its internal limits, at the moment when life seems to have no meaning, when the defence of our human needs compels us to rebel, when the social environment tends to become electrified by poles with opposing interests, when capitalism dissolves all that is solid because it is no longer possible to live under the reign of the commodity, when we could organize our lives as a species, without a State or wage labour. At this historical moment, it is neither a time of modernity nor of postmodernity, it is the time for communism.

Barbaria, December 2021

[1] See our book, Against Postmodernism, available in print and online. https://barbaria.net/2018/11/20/posmodernidad-o-la-impostura-de-una-falsa-radicalidad/

And the transcript of one of our talks in the Chilean region: https://barbaria.net/2020/09/11/titulo-el-espiritu-posmoderno-del-capitalismo/

[2] https://barbaria.net/2020/09/11/titulo-el-espiritu-posmoderno-del-capitalismo/

[3] See her book, Vida Precaria. El poder del duelo y la violencia (Precarious Life. The Power of Mourning and Violence). And Gabriel Bello’s article, available online: Hacia una hermeneutica de la extraña (Towards a Hermeneutics of the Stranger. The Burqa and Muslim Female Bombers).

[4] See our book, Stalin’s Capitalism: https://barbaria.net/2020/12/15/el-capitalismo-de-stalin/