Capitalist society is characterized by domination that occurs, as Marx put it, “behind the backs” of the people in that society. Werner Bonefeld’s important new book analyzes this form of domination—what it is, what it does, why it exists, and most importantly, what its existence reveals to us about societies that are characterized by it. As a closely argued contribution to critical theory, it is a demanding book, but a rewarding one.
Bonefeld is closely associated with the loosely defined tradition known as Open Marxism, which includes both Marxist theorists and theoretically informed empirical researchers. Open Marxism emphasizes the antagonism and contradictions inherent in capitalist society, against the economism and determinism of many other Marxist traditions. In A Critical Theory of Economic Compulsion, Bonefeld continues to develop Open Marxism as a body of theory, by drawing together other Marxian theories and lines of inquiry descended from the Frankfurt School. While the book can certainly stand on its own, it is best read as a continuation of the arguments in his 2014 book, Critical Theory and the Critique of Political Economy (Bloomsbury). Both books intervene in contemporary theoretical debates about what kinds of domination are specific to capitalism; about class struggle as both an explanatory category in social theory and as a phenomenon requiring explanation; and about theories of value, fetishism, and real abstraction. These are rich, challenging, heady matters of tremendous importance insofar as we urgently need to understand capital and its domination of social individuals and nature if we are to abolish such domination.
Bonefeld presents an interpretation of Marx’s critique of political economy that emphasizes the historical specificity of capitalist society. Real, historical societies are significantly different from each other; their character as societies per se is far less illuminating than their character as determinate, particular societies. It is capitalism’s “capital-ness,” so to speak, that really matters. This theoretical move banishes any appeal to human nature or other inherent or essential qualities, while still retaining a notion of systemic dynamism, social logic, and structural constraints on the actions and attitudes of social individuals.
Bonefeld offers a powerful critique of both economism and determinism, and especially those interpretations of Marx that imagine his critique of political economy to be a normative vindication of productive labor. Capitalist social relations consist of social categories and roles constituted through the activity of real people, yet those people are in turn dominated by those very categories and roles. While the proposition is posed abstractly here, the processes are antagonistic, concrete, and bloody, regularly consigning many to suffering and starvation. Capitalist society is subordinated to economic compulsion—the compulsion to valorize capital, which appears as self-expanding value. Although the resulting harms do not evenly afflict everyone, all people—rich and poor, capitalists and workers—are dominated by the historically specific social form that is value.
One of the concepts at the heart of Bonefeld’s book—and at the heart of Marx’s critique of political economy—is a critique of the specific form that wealth takes in capitalist society. Wealth in capitalism is self-increasing money (about which we will say more below). This form of wealth necessarily entails suffering because that wealth is simultaneously, inevitably, also a form of poverty or deprivation. One element of that deprivation is capitalism’s recurrent tendency toward crisis. Another element that Bonefeld emphasizes—and here the book is particularly original—is what he calls “social coldness,” referring to the various forms of indifference and impersonal relationships which capitalism generates and proliferates. At the same time, he insists that the answer to social coldness is not social warmth. There are deeply oppressive and destructive ways to take a close interest in people, after all.
More generally, Bonefeld cautions that we cannot simply embrace the opposite of what we dislike—choosing warmth over coldness—because this only affirms that which we dislike, at the expense of critically investigating how the thing we dislike came to be. Living wages, stricter workplace safety standards, or a universal basic income necessarily affirm exploitative and unfree social conditions even as they mitigate them. Marx stressed a similar point in Value, Price and Profit when he called for abandoning the slogan “a fair day’s wages for a fair day’s work” in favor of “abolish the wage system.” Bonefeld calls us to recognize that capitalism remains capitalism despite transitory or surface variations in its institutional or cultural determinations. Too many critiques of “neoliberal” or “financialized” capitalism are insufficiently far-reaching in their emancipatory ambition and insufficiently thoroughgoing in the depth of their critiques of capitalist social relations. They critique this or that appearance of capitalism rather than capitalism itself. On this point Bonefeld criticizes prominent theorists of socialism such as Leo Panitch, Nancy Fraser, Rahel Jaeggi, or Wolfgang Streeck. He argues that what they want, whether they know it or not, is really a perfected capitalism. Such theorists take up what Bonefeld, following Moishe Postone, calls “the standpoint of labor,” which envisions an apotheosis of productive labor rather than the end of capitalist production.
Economic compulsion is the rule of capital as a social relation, not rule by capitalists as a class. This means that class is organized in a specific way in capitalism, operating behind our backs to a significant degree, rather than consciously. Bonefeld argues powerfully that social domination in capitalism occurs through, and is mediated by, historically specific concepts and categories. This sense of “domination” can be confusing if one thinks of domination in terms of the physical overpowering of one person by another, or the subordination of one person’s will to another. Those kinds of domination certainly happen in capitalism, but they are not the heart of the matter. In capitalism, we are dominated impersonally and behind our backs, such that the array of choices available to us—the ways we go about understanding those choices and reasoning our way to decisions, as well as the consequences of those choices—are all deeply constrained in specific ways. Put simply, capital structures all of our starting points and capacities, and it dynamically interrupts our lives as well, through deep uncertainty and pervasive harms. To illuminate how such compulsion can occur, it is necessary to closely examine Marx’s account of value in his critique of political economy.