Chris O’Kane’s first book, Social Constitution and Fetishistic Social Domination in Marx, Lukács, Adorno, and Lefebvre (2026), turns to Marx and other figures in the Western Marxist tradition to develop a critical theory of the social constitution of capitalist social domination. Insisting that domination is not an expression of the price signals of the market, but something constituted in and through capitalist social relations, O’Kane outlines how the manifestation of these relations in the fetish character of the forms of value (and other social institutions like the state) transforms us into personifications of economic categories, in doing so compelling us to act in ways that perpetuate the damage and mutilation wrought by capitalist society. Such an interpretation of the fetish brings into view what standard interpretations miss when they reduce the fetish to a psychological theory of mystified false consciousness, or treat it as synonymous with reification or alienation.
For those without a firm grasp of recent debates in critical theory interpretations of Marxian value-theory, Social Constitution and Fetishistic Social Domination, and perhaps this interview too, will be a challenging read. And yet O’Kane’s arguments are of wide-ranging importance—particularly for those of us engaged in political-economic struggle. If domination is intrinsically social—something reproduced in our identities, institutions and relationships—and not an external power held over us, then can it really be overcome by bureaucratically legislated forms of redistribution alone? What O’Kane’s book points us towards is a more radical challenge: confronting, whenever and however possible, the mechanisms that socialise us into reproducing our own domination by capital.
In this interview with Neil Gray and Paul Pieroni from Material, O’Kane expands on the arguments of his first book. He also traces his trajectory from a habitué of the punk scenes in Brighton and Olympia, WA, to his work as a critical theorist, addresses the recently much-maligned tradition of so-called ‘Western Marxism’ and explains how his interpretations of the supposedly apolitical traditions of Frankfurt School critical theory and value-form theory intersect with questions of political struggle.
Aspects of this book seem familiar from the Open Marxism (OM) school and particularly Werner Bonefeld. Key figures of OM were involved in the Common Sense journal, based in Edinburgh, so this question has some local interest for Scottish readers. Can you say a little more about how this school influenced your work, if at all, and other key theoretical influences? For instance, you also draw on the ‘value-form’ theory of Helmut Reichelt and Hans-Georg Backhaus, two of the major proponents of The Neue Marx-Lektüre (‘New Reading of Marx’).
The question of who and what influenced my work is something I started thinking about as I prepared a talk about Social Constitution and Fetishistic Social Domination, which is based on my PhD thesis of 2013 and was completed in 2023. In the last few years following my submission of the book, interpretations of William Clare Roberts’ and Søren Mau’s important works on Marx’s theory of impersonal domination have unexpectedly become part of an emergent normative republican critique of capitalism as the impersonal domination of the market over society.1 So I began to reflect on how my work on domination is different from these normative critiques of impersonal market domination. This led me to further consider how my work relates to earlier notions of the impersonal domination of value and the significance of these differences. To put it another way, if there are already social critiques of capitalism that centre the impersonal domination of the market and value, why should people care about my work on social constitution and fetishistic social domination in Marx, Lukács, Adorno and Lefebvre or my forthcoming book A Critical Theory of Social Domination? I came to understand that, for me, domination does not amount to the question of how the logic of value or the market dominates society. Nor is it an indication of the lack of republican decision-making. Instead I am interested in how the configuration of society dominates us. This notion of domination is tied to an explanation of how the social relations that are constitutive of capitalist society are necessarily manifest in the personification of things (and other social entities) and transform individuals into personifications of economic categories so that we act in ways that perpetuate it, mutilating us as subjects. This is what I mean by critical theory, social constitution and fetishistic social domination.
I also came to realise that my approach to these questions was shaped by my own life experience as well as the particular context in which I first encountered and developed these ideas. I come from a family that participated in the American civil rights movement and the anti-Vietnam War movement. As a kid I lived in an intentional community in upstate New York. After a few years in Seattle, I lived in East Sussex as a teenager from 1994–7, where I was a classmate of Paul’s older brother [ed note: Paul Pieroni, co-editor Material magazine]. During that time, I got into the international punk underground and riot grrrl. I would go to Brighton any time I could to buy records and hang out. My earliest associations with Scotland are not Common Sense or Open Marxism, but The Vaselines, The Pastels, Urusei Yatsura, Mogwai, The Yummy Fur and Bis. I was, and still am, against Fake DIY and for the Teen C Boy-Girl Revolution.
In 1997, I moved to Olympia, WA, to attend The Evergreen State College and be part of Olympia’s underground music scene. I came to find that despite its anti-capitalist values and the widespread understanding that ‘society was a hole’ and the aspiration to live outside the system on the basis of cooperative schemes like profit sharing, the punk counterculture was not able to escape capitalist society. I also found out that even the huge anti-WTO protests in Seattle in 1999 and the anti-war protests around the invasion of Iraq were unable to stop globalisation and the War on Terror as I had hoped. So I decided to go and do a postgrad in the mid-2000s to try to understand these failures.
I chose Sussex for my MA because it was a critical and interdisciplinary school from the 1960s, but also so I could live in Brighton and hang out with ex-members of the riot grrrl-affiliated bands Huggy Bear and Comet Gain. In my MA, I was interested in Edward Said’s work but also encountered the Frankfurt School and Marx as social and political thinkers who resonated with my interests. After a year in a PhD programme in a different school, I returned to Sussex in the wake of the 2007 crisis where I became friends with members of Endnotes and other people involved in the communisation milieu. I feel like a lot of the work I was interested in and influenced by in this milieu during this time focused on drawing on unknown interpretations of Marx and Marxism—notably writings in the communisation current by (Théorie Communiste, Jacques Camatte, Gilles Dauvé) and what was called value-form theory (Chris Arthur, Moishe Postone and the ‘Neue Marx-Lektüre’ that tried to understand the manner in which the logic of value (or capital) dominated society.2
I had come back to Sussex with the topic of fetishism in Marx, Lukács, Adorno and Lefebvre in mind. But it was through my friendship with Nick Gray that I became familiar with a distinction people like John Clegg, Chris Arthur, Riccardo Bellofiore and Hans Ehrbar had made between two different words Marx used, fetishcharakter and fetishismus, which were both translated into the English translations of Capital as fetishism. These figures argued that translating these two different terms into one missed a crucial distinction that Marx made between the notion of the fetish character of commodities and money, which pertains to the real properties commodities and money have because of how capitalist production and distribution takes place, and fetishism, which is the belief that commodities and money naturally have these properties. But perhaps because of my experience in seeing how the anti-capitalist punk scene could not escape capitalist society and the questions of failure I was interested in, I was never really interested in Théorie Communiste or Jacques Camatte or the question of when and if society had been really subsumed by the logic of the value-form and how this related to communisation, but how the value-form theory and New German Reading of Marx stuff related to Adorno’s critical theory of society as a self-reflexive critique of how our dominating capitalist society was created and reproduced.
These interests led me to discover ‘Open Marxism’ which in my view includes two of the founders of the ‘Neue Marx-Lektüre’, Hans-Georg Backhaus and Helmut Reichelt, since they wrote a number of contributions for Open Marxist publications. I think Werner Bonefeld, Hans-Georg Backhaus and Helmut Reichelt’s work on social constitution, critique, social reality as appearance and Simon Clarke and Bonefeld’s notions of Marx’s social categories in terms of structure and struggle, the critique of the state and periodisation led me to develop what I’ve come to realise is a slightly different reading of the theory of domination in value-form theory. In distinction to the other interpretations I alluded to, which I think tend to explicitly or implicitly draw on I. I. Rubin and Chris Arthur’s approach, I don’t think of value-form theory as a theory of how value or the value-form dominates or does not dominate via form subsuming content. Instead I draw on Open Marxist thinkers to focus on how capitalist society itself entails an objective and subjective dynamic of domination entailing form and content, structure and the struggle, state and capital. In other words, for me it is not a question of the extent to which society has or has not been subsumed by the value-form but how capitalist society is organised so that domination is inherent to its configuration. These interests were further enriched by the editing work I have done with Beverley Best and Werner Bonefeld following my PhD, the influence of Kirstin Munro and the work of countless others interpreted through my own particular interests in the domination of capitalist society.
So, to try to answer your question, as a whole, I think it is the particular way I have drawn on the influence of the Open Marxist work of Bonefeld, Backhaus, Reichelt and Clarke to try to think of the social constitution of the objective and subjective domination of capitalist society. I think this is different from the approaches to capitalist domination that drew together value-form theory and real subsumption in the early Marx revival which are well represented in this great recent edited collection, Abolishing Capitalist Totality: What is to be Done under Real Subsumption?3 I also think this differentiates my work from the recent normative critiques of the external domination of the market over society that draw on Mau and Roberts. Finally, it has some interesting parallels and overlaps with Rebecca Carson’s more recent attempt to think of the relationship between the domination of capitalist logic and social reproduction theory.4 However, I think what distinguishes my approach from hers is the difference between considering to what extent the subsumptive forms of capital relate to social reproduction theory and the question of how the historically specific configuration of capitalist social relations is necessarily realised in an objective-subjective dynamic of the domination of capitalist society inclusive of the linked activities that are separated into the economy, state, household, private life and other cultural institutions that reproduce society. In many ways, I think this overlaps with the conclusion that Andrés Saenz de Sicilia comes to in his work on subsumption and Patrick Murray’s work Capital’s Reach: How Capital Shapes and Subsumes, but by other means.5
You’re publishing two books very close together. In what ways does A Critical Theory of Social Domination: Marxism, The Frankfurt School, and the Critique of Capitalism (available early 2027) relate to and differ from the title we discuss here? What is your broader project?
As I have indicated, my broader project concerns what I have come to call the research programme of the critical theory of the social domination of capitalist society. It grows out of the queries and contexts discussed in the previous question in a number of related ways. In the first place, it reconstructs this research programme by differentiating my interpretation of figures that I see as part of the critical theory of social domination from how they tend to be interpreted. In the second place, it differentiates this critical theory of social domination from other prevalent notions of Marxism, critical theory and domination. In the third place, it argues for the importance of this approach for Marxism and critical theory. Last but not least, it entails trying to further develop this research programme alongside others I consider to be part of it, including Kirstin Munro, Amy De’ath, Fabian Arzuaga, Jordi Maiso, Bev Best, Patrick Murray and Jeanne Schuler, Riccardo Bellofiore, Daniela Russ, Sean O’Brien, Sam Fisher, Rob Hunter, Jacob Blumenfeld, Eric John Russell, Jonathan Catlin, Nathan DuFord, Critical Theory Working Group, Felix del Campo, Zoe Sutherland, Jerome Clark, James Crane, Zachary Loeffler, Gabriel Meier, Madeline Lane-McKinley, Phil Neel, Jasper Bernes, the contributors to the Abolishing Capitalist Totality collection I just mentioned, and others (I also see my editorial work as contributing to the development of this research programme).
Social Constitution and Fetishistic Social Domination represents the initial stage of this broader project because it focuses on differentiating the theory of the fetish in Marx, Lukács, Adorno and Lefebvre—as a theory of social constitution and fetishistic social domination—or a theory of how antagonistic social relations create inverted autonomous entities that transform individuals into charactermasks leading them to act in ways that maim them and perpetuate society—from the prominent interpretations of fetishism as false consciousness, alienation, reification or the Althusserian interpretation of fetishism, while considering to what extent Marx, Lukács, Adorno and Lefebvre are able to use such an interpretation of the fetish to provide a critical theory of the social domination of capitalist society.
Without giving too much away, while I show how these figures draw on the fetish to account for the social constitution of the fetishistic social domination of a number of important aspects of capitalist society (such as the forms of value, bureaucracy, the state, and space) I conclude that neither Marx, Lukács, Adorno nor Lefebvre provide an adequate critical theory of social constitution and fetishistic social domination of the whole of capitalist society on their own. Instead I point to how such a critical theory can be developed by reconstructing, bringing together and building on the heterodox Marxist interpretation of Horkheimer’s and Adorno’s critical theory and a critical-theoretical interpretation of Marx.
A Critical Theory of Social Domination takes this up. In distinction to interpretations of Frankfurt School critical theory that argue the early approach of Horkheimer and Adorno was supplanted by Habermasian critical theory or the approach to Marxism championed by Perry Anderson, it reconstructs the development of what I argue is the active research programme of the critical theory of social domination. Although again I argue that a wide variety of people have contributed to this research programme, I focus on how this research programme was initially developed by the early Horkheimer and further developed by late-Adorno, Alfred Schmidt, Hans-Georg Backhaus and Helmut Reichelt, Moishe Postone and Werner Bonefeld. I show that this research programme sought to develop a critique of the social domination of capitalist society as a concrete negative totality while differentiating itself from traditional Marxist and Habermasian approaches to critical theory whose theories rest on the separated appearance of the different spheres of society (such as the economy and state) and of objectivity and subjectivity.
I take the term concrete negative totality from Schmidt and Adorno who use it to characterise capitalist society “as a sort of linking structure between human beings in which everything and everyone depend on everyone and everything; the whole is only sustained by the unity of the functions fulfilled by all its members, and each single one of these members is in principle assigned such a function, while at the same time each individual is determined to a great degree by his membership in this total structure.”6 In other words, in contrast to traditional Marxist and Habermasian critical theory, but developing the notion of social constitution and fetishistic social domination, conceiving of capitalist society as a concrete negative totality means it isn’t separated into different spheres and objectivity and subjectivity are not separated. Instead drawing on Adorno and Schmidt again, capitalist society as a concrete negative totality entails grasping the systematic ‘unity of unfreedom’ of capitalist society in which antagonism is reflected in every sector and individuals are charactermasks ‘all the way down into their psychology’.7
I argue that the early-Horkheimer’s and late-Adorno’s critical theory of social domination focused on expanding their interpretation of the critique of political economy as a concrete negative totality in which free and equal exchange is necessarily realised in the supraindividual dynamic of capitalist accumulation which simultaneously transforms individuals into ‘charactermasks’ to capitalist society—including nature, the capitalist state, family and other cultural institutions. I also argue that Alfred Schmidt, Hans-Georg Backhaus and Helmut Reichelt, Moishe Postone and Werner Bonefeld then tried to revitalise Horkheimer and Adorno’s approach to critical theory while overcoming its gaps by drawing on their interpretation of Marx to develop a more rigorous interpretation of the critique of political economy as a critical theory of capitalist social domination. Finally, I point to how these two different notions of concrete negative totality—the critical theory of the social domination of capitalist society and the critique of political economy as a critical theory of capitalist social domination—can be drawn together along with other people’s work to further develop this research programme.
Here I try to show how such a critical theory of social domination provides a more complete critique of capitalist domination than the emergent normative critical theories of capitalism as exemplified by Nancy Fraser, who argues that capitalist domination is typified by the market’s external domination of the background spheres it relies on: the state, the reproductive sphere and nature. Such a critical theory envisions socialism as the rule of the state over markets on the basis of the norms of these spheres, which in my view amounts to the perpetuation of capitalist society. In contrast, I argue that the critique of capitalist society as a concrete negative totality shows how the interdependent activities and norms of freedom, democracy and care inclusive of the economy, state, household, private life, the family and culture are inherent to the objective and subjective social domination of capitalist society, demonstrating the necessity of communism. The book I hope to do next will be a more in-depth critical theory of the social domination of capitalist society.
Your book insists that the Marxian theory of the fetish should not be collapsed into false consciousness, alienation or Lukácsian reification, but instead understood as a social theory. Could you set out, as clearly as possible, what is lost or missed when fetishism is treated as ideology, mystification, alienation or reification? And could you explain what is apprehended when fetishism is understood instead as a real, socio-objective, or socio-natural form of domination?
I think it helps if we contextualise the importance of these distinctions in my larger attempt to disentangle the heterodox Marxist critical theory approach to social domination I am developing from other Marxist or Habermasian critical theory approaches. In this book, as implied above, I try to do this by distinguishing an interpretation of the theory of the fetish as a critical theory of social constitution and fetishistic social domination from other prevalent ways that fetishism has been interpreted by Marxists and critical theorists.
I argue that the interpretation of fetishism as false consciousness thinks that fetishism is a mistaken belief that value is the property of commodities, when it is really the property of the labour embedded in the commodities. I also argue that the understandings of fetishism as alienation focus on understanding fetishism as continuous with the young Marx’s theory of alienation. So that interpretations of fetishism as alienation focus on how the process of production and distribution means that workers are alienated from their own labour and thus their human essence. Finally, I argue that interpretations of fetishism as reification follow Lukács’s notion of reification, which interprets fetishism as the transformation of human labour into a thing that veils the proletarian labour that produces it. In contrast, I argue that the theory of the fetish is a theory of how the historically specific class-antagonistic configuration of capitalist society is necessarily realised in the supraindividual domination of things which have very real socially objective properties that invert to dominate individuals as personifications of economic categories.
The book focuses on the extent to which Marx, Lukács, Adorno and Lefebvre apprehend the theory of the fetish in this way in order to account for the social constitution and fetishistic social domination of capitalist society, showing how their theories of fetishistic capitalist society are different from the other readings of these figures based on false consciousness, alienation and reification. First, I argue Marx shows how atomised capitalist production for exchange is necessarily manifest in the fetishistic properties of the forms of value, which invert to dominate individuals in the class relation as charactermasks. Capitalists’ subjectivity becomes the will of capital so that they organise production and exploit proletariat labour to maximise profit. Proletarians compete with each other to sell their labour power in order to survive. Then I show how Lukács provides an idiosyncratic interpretation of fetishism that draws together Hegel and classical Marxism to conceive of reification as a process of mystified domination in which capitalist totality inclusive of the economy, bureaucracy, and bourgeois thought is characterised by the thingified appearance of proletarian labour that leads people to act in a passive and instrumental manner. I then turn to Adorno and show how his interpretation of the fetishistic properties of the exchange abstraction is central to his interpretation of late capitalism as a negative totality in which Fordist production and the Keynesian state compel capitalists, administrators, and proletarians, reducing them to the roles of charactermasks fostering regression and the dependence of individuals on the very institutions that dominate them. Finally, I trace how Lefebvre tries to grasp how fetishistic concrete abstraction pervades and is opposed in everyday life, cities, and space.
The conclusion considers the importance of these interpretations for differentiating the fetish as a theory of social constitution and fetishistic social domination from its more prevalent interpretations. Here I try to show how these other interpretations of fetishism miss what is grasped when the theory of the fetish is interpreted as a theory of social constitution and fetishistic social domination. This is because, in transforming the theory of the fetish into a representative of a different theory, these interpretations do not grasp what is unique about the social organisation and fetishistic social domination of capitalism and instead focus on a certain aspect of fetishism that abstracts from these questions, leading to an incomplete understanding of capitalism and of the fetishistic social domination that is intrinsic to it.
Fetishism as false consciousness treats fetishism as marginal to capitalism which is conceived as the appropriation of the proceeds of proletarian labour, fetishism as alienation also tends to rely on this picture with the added focus on the process of appropriation as one that entails the alienation of human essence. Fetishism as reification does so too, but focuses on how this process of appropriation turns proletarian labour into things. So all these views are based on conceiving of fetishism as part of capitalism defined merely as one class stealing the labour of the other. But the activity of this labour, how it is organised to maximise exploitation through the division of labour and use of machines, how it is related to the rest of society and its dynamic, are not part of the theory. Indeed, theories of alienation and reification even implicitly endorse capitalist labour as human essence.
In distinction, interpreting the fetish as a theory of social constitution and fetishistic social domination aims to explain why and how the peculiar configurations of capitalist social relations create a socially objective, autonomous, inverted dynamic of social domination that compels and maims individuals as charactermasks in the activities that characterise the social relations that constitute this dynamic, leading to its perpetuation. In other words, rather than false consciousness, alienated human essence or things, the focus is on social relations and social dynamics of objectivity and subjectivity. This is why it is central for a contemporary critical social theory worth its name.
In light of recent attacks on Frankfurt School critical theory and ‘Western Marxism’—we are referring here to the controversy around Gabriel Rockhill’s Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism?—are you inclined to defend the political and theoretical value of this putative tradition? If so, how, and in what way?
I think it is important to defend a notion of ‘Western Marxism’ that is different from the recent scapegoated caricature that was created by Rockhill and Losurdo’s desperate attempts to popularise a vulgar and dogmatic approach to Marxism that tries to champion authoritarian states as socialist by denigrating their Marxist critics. At the same time, I also think that it’s important to realise that the other pervasive notion of ‘Western Marxism’ was a tradition that was invented by the New Left in opposition to Stalinism in order to orient their interest in direct democracy and cultural transformation. In fact, this invented tradition was known under a number of names during different periods of the New Left including socialist humanism and Western European Marxism. It came to be called ‘Western Marxism’ when Perry Anderson and others from the New Left wrote historical balance sheets that criticised the focus of the very tradition they had invented to orient their earlier interests in order to move on to theories that oriented their current interests.
That means that the category of ‘Western Marxism’ is most often used as an object of critique for authors to differentiate and promote their own approach to Marxism as the unity of theory and practice. In the case of Anderson, ‘Western Marxism’ was structurally divorced from political practice and came to draw on an array of bourgeois thinkers to criticise Western culture. Since Anderson believed a workers’ movement was re-emerging at the time he wrote Considerations on Western Marxism (1976), he proposed that it was best to turn to the classical Marxist Trotskyist tradition and figures such as Ernest Mandel. This was because Anderson argued that this tradition had a theory of economics and politics lacking in the purported culturalism of ‘Western Marxism’ that could orient the practice of the re-emergent workers’ movement.
Losurdo and Rockhill’s definition follows Anderson’s tack (even though they argue that Anderson is a ‘Western Marxist’). For them, ‘Western Marxism’ is a bourgeois idealist and theoretical enterprise that criticises ‘Eastern Marxism’, making it complicit, or at least ‘compatible’, with Western imperialism. Their orientation to classical Marxism embraces Stalinist arguments that countries like China are anti-imperialist entities that are developing the socialist forces of production and should be supported by Western intellectuals as part of the global anti-imperialist class struggle.
Interestingly enough, the term ‘Western Marxist’ was first used in a similar context when Soviet politicians like Zinoviev denounced Lukács’s History and Class Consciousness and Karl Korsch’s Marxism and Philosophy as ‘revisionist’ and ‘professorial’ ‘ultraleftist’ readings of Marx, which were opposed to the emergent Soviet orthodoxy of what became Marxist-Leninism.
If we keep this larger context in mind, I think we can think of ‘Western Marxism’ as a category that groups together approaches to Marxism that oppose formulations of Marxism that appeal to a classical Marxist orthodoxy. These orthodox formulations draw on interpretations of Marxism developed by leaders of authoritarian states and focus on grasping the scientific development of the productive forces to orient class struggle in a way that often justifies authoritarian states as socialist.
Western Marxism, on the other hand, tends to refer to thinkers who oppose social democratic and state socialist interpretations of Marx. They also tend to move beyond economistic laws of historical development and develop a self-reflexive critique of capitalism that brings together Marx with other thinkers. Rather than focusing on politics as entailing a vanguard that aligns class struggle with developing socialist productive forces or socialist state power, Western Marxists at their best have conceived of politics as the spontaneous activities of the councils or countercultural movements and lent their support to them.
So if we think of ‘Western Marxism’ in that way, I think the political and theoretical value of ‘Western Marxism’ is worth defending and continuing, especially at a moment (at least here in New York City) where far too many people are following Losurdo and Rockhill and espousing China as a socialist alternative to the American empire while arguing that criticising China amounts to support for American imperialism. I think that defending and developing this notion of ‘Western Marxism’ today encompasses re-examining prior interpretations of Marx and ‘Western Marxist’ thinkers from a self-reflexive perspective as well as the category of ‘Western Marxism’ itself. (There seem to be a few recent works by Edward Baring and Santiago Roggerone doing the latter.) But I also think it includes thinking about recent approaches to Marxism, such as the communisation milieu, as a current example of this notion of ‘Western Marxism’. Finally, I think it entails trying to demonstrate the importance of this conception of ‘Western Marxism’ against the approaches to Marxism advocated by its critics.
The theory of fetishistic social domination provides a fundamental critique of the constitution of social relations under capitalism, providing, in your own words, “a contemporary critical theory of capitalist society”. In the book, you discuss the relevance of this theorisation for contemporary critical theory, but what do you consider its relevance for contemporary political-economic struggle? Or are these the same thing for you?
This is a complicated question, especially since, as I indicated in the last answer, the people I focus on in my work are generally associated with ‘Western Marxism’ and are said to have abandoned struggle for high theory. Yet, as I noted, I think of ‘Western Marxism’ as consisting in a belief in spontaneity, council communism and the countercultural movements. And as I also said, I think it’s important to try to show the importance of this approach to Marxism in contrast to its Marxist critics. As I hinted above, I also want to think of my work as part of a broader project. I mean this not just in the sense of the research programme of the critical theory of social domination. But I also think of it as part of a larger anti-systematic movement for social transformation entailing struggles against the system of capitalist social domination. So I also want to make it clear that despite the importance that I put on the subjective component of domination, I do not subscribe to another clichéd view which holds that the Frankfurt School thought mass consumption meant the working class had given up class struggle.
Instead I think struggle is integral to capitalist society in a number of different senses. People struggle to survive. They also struggle to make their lives better. Finally, people also struggle to live in different ways than they are compelled and socialised into by capitalist society which I believe they know consciously or unconsciously is mutilating them. So for me the question is not do these struggles exist? Instead it is how do these different approaches to Marx conceive of political economic struggle? And do they relate to struggle in a way that unwittingly reproduces capitalism, or in a way that is antagonistic to the system?
My conception differs from the more typical classical and contemporary traditional Marxist notions of struggle and of their related notions of the relationship between theory and practice. In these approaches, as typified by the classical Marxist perspectives I referred to in the last question, theory often amounts to a conjunctural analysis that tries to grasp the emancipatory openings based on current contradictions between the development of the productive forces and the relations of production.
This notion of contradiction is usually tied to what I have called an externalist notion of domination that rests on the separated appearance of capitalist society and so conceives of capitalism as the appropriation of the proceeds of labour, and now also reproductive labour and nature, that are opposed to the needs, morals and interests of the people who perform these acts that would be met if the proceeds of these activities were not appropriated. Struggle is then conceived of as a process of emancipation from external domination by overcoming appropriation through democratic socialism or socialism with Chinese characteristics—reformist or non-reformist reforms within society towards the proletarian seizure of the state and the eventual goal of establishing socialism as the collectively decided distribution of the proceeds of these activities. Moreover, these approaches then tend to only think of theory as valid when it is informing these conceptions of struggle and by extension only think of struggle as valid when it is informed or guided by this kind of theory.
Following the critical theory of social domination, I think the constitution of capitalist society is premised on the domination of external and internal nature, the separation of the majority of the population from their own means of reproduction, and necessarily realised in a free and equal class antagonism that is manifest in supraindividual domination that simultaneously transforms individuals into charactermasks. This process occurs not just at work but in the home, in public and private life, in objectivity and subjectivity. It is guaranteed and enforced by the state. This means that domination is not external to these activities or separate from needs and norms but occurs through them. It also means that from our birth until our death we are socialised by a number of overlapping processes from the family to education to public and private life, work and play, into identifying with capitalist society. This pressures us to renounce our instincts and repress our deep-seated understanding that capitalist society is mutilating us.
An important consequence of this is that while reforms can certainly raise people’s standards of living, they have always been transformed into bureaucratic entities of integration and domination that have depoliticised class struggle. This means that the notions of struggle, theory and practice that see them as part of a continuum that will be realised in the socialist distribution of the proceeds of labour and reproductive labour via the state unwittingly aims to perpetuate capitalist society and the processes that produce and reproduce it, albeit in better ways. This also means that these notions of struggle reinforce the process of socialisation that leads us to identify with capitalist society and its norms and repress the parts of us that know it is mutilating us.
As a self-reflexive critique of capitalist social practice, I hope that my approach to the critical theory of social domination is informed by past and present struggles, both in terms of their failures and their aspirations. I hope that by aiming to show how thoughts and actions in capitalist society, including many that purport to transcend it, contribute to the perpetuation of capitalist society and the suffering it entails, I too contribute to people working through their identification with capitalist society and working in a myriad of different ways to overcome it. In so doing, I see myself as a part of a larger anti-systematic movement that includes numerous activities that are non-identical to the capitalist system. These range from critiquing and contesting capitalist socialisation to the recent actions against AI databases, the police, ICE, borders, enclosures, and the current movements in France, Albania, India, Spain and elsewhere all of which point to a world beyond the economy and state where we are no longer separated from each other and we do not have to struggle for subsistence.
Notes
- See William Clare Roberts, Marx’s Inferno: The Political Theory of Capital (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017) and Søren Mau, Mute Compulsion: A Marxist Theory of the Economic Power of Capital (London: Verso, 2023). ↩
- See Riccardo Bellofiore and Tommaso Redolfi Riva, “The Neue Marx-Lektüre: Putting the Critique of Political Economy Back into the Critique of Society,” Radical Philosophy, no. 189 (January/February 2015): 24–36, https://www.radicalphilosophy.com/article/the-neue-marx-lekture ↩
- Anthony Iles and Mattin, eds., Abolishing Capitalist Totality: What Is to Be Done under Real Subsumption? (Minor Compositions, 2026). This volume collects classic writings that focus on the question of how Marx’s category of real subsumption related to the issue of domination and revolution by figures like Jacques Camatte, Antonio Negri, Roland Simon, Theorie Communiste and tracks the development of its reception by Anthony Iles, Ray Brassier, Marina Vishmidt, Dimitra Kotouza, Rob Lucas and Neil Gray [ed note: co-editor Material magazine]. ↩
- Rebecca Carson, Immanent Externalities (Leiden: Brill, 2023). ↩
- Andrés Saenz de Sicilia, Subsumption in Kant, Hegel and Marx: From the Critique of Reason to the Critique of Society (Leiden: Brill, 2025). Patrick Murray ‘Capital’s Reach: How Capital Shapes and Subsumes’ in Daniel Krier and Mark Worrell (eds.) Capitalism’s Future. (Leiden: Brill, 2016). ↩
- Frankfurt Institute for Social Research, Aspects of Sociology, trans. John Viertel (Boston: Beacon Press, 1972), 16–17. ↩
- Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (London and New York: Routledge, 2004), 311. ↩