The Red Critique of Critical Criticism: From Radical Inversion to Materialist Negation

Stephen Tumino

The rising popular struggles—from the increasing strike wave for better living conditions and workers' "dealignment" from the Democratic Party, to the "student intifada" demonstrations for divestment from Israel, and the massive 50501/No Kings protest movement opposing the Trump regime's fascistic agenda—are read as signs of an emergent "left populism" in the US that will radically transform capitalism by making it less authoritarian and oppressive and more democratic and humane. The left populists are correct; the popular struggles will make capitalism more fair and humane. What they "forget" to add, however, is that it will still exploit workers for private profit and be prone to crisis.¹ Capitalism with a "human face" is still capitalism—it is based not on political oppression (lack of "civil" or so-called "human rights"), but on economic exploitation (unpaid surplus-labor, which is the source of profit). Without ending the private ownership of the means of production—which is the root cause of the low wages and high cost of living, the lack of housing and health care, the mental health crisis and increasing anomie, the climate destruction, proliferating wars, and deepening immiseration that leads to the mass discontent that fuels popular rebellion and requires increasing authoritarian state repression to manage—there can be no justice for all as "right can never be higher than the economic structure of society" (Marx, Critique of the Gotha Program 87). Political domination is an effect of economic exploitation not its cause. Without a class politics that strikes at the source of class domination in property relations, politics becomes merely a list of grievances for cross-class coalitions that put workers' struggles under the leadership of the "progressive" bourgeoisie. The historic role of these cross-class coalitions is to subordinate the class interest of workers for freedom from economic necessity ("positive freedom")—the universal aim of working class struggles—to the libertarian freedom from state domination ("negative freedom") that constitutes bourgeois politics.

The "forgetting" of the materialist basis of political rights in property relations by the left populists—who often consider themselves marxian if not Marxist—is not simply due to ignorance nor is it a strategic move; it is an ideological forgetting to unknow what has long been known in the revolutionary Marxist tradition so as to go along to get along with the dominant economic arrangements for the benefit of a few. It is, in other words, an "enlightened false-consciousness" (Sloterdijk) that "knows" that reforming capitalism simply "perfects" the machinery of bourgeois government (Marx, Eighteenth Brumaire 185) but pursues it just the same to benefit themselves as professional bureaucrats, partisan pundits, and left-y "influencers." This opportunism explains why in their language the left populists do not oppose capitalism, but instead "fight oligarchy" (Bernie Sanders, AOC, DSA), or "techno-feudalism" (Yanis Varoufakis, Jodi Dean), or neoliberal "authoritarianism" (Naomi Klein, Cornel West, Chris Hedges), or…, or…, or,…. The left populists all perpetuate—in different idioms for different audiences—a post-capitalist social theory that claims "knowledge" (information) has replaced labor as the source of value and thus what is required for radical change is more freedom of speech (just like the techno-oligarchs such as Musk and Thiel all say). By opposing the excesses of capitalism (cyberfascism, hyperimperialism, ecocide, etc.) the left populists manufacture the false hope that capitalism may be saved by returning it to an imagined state located elsewhere (whether in the cloud, or in the past, Scandinavia, or Erewhon) with more social justice and equality because there is less greed and corruption and stronger market regulation and legal protections. Like the populist right, the left populists oppose the corruption of market relations by a privileged "elite" so as to "restore" capitalism to what it never was outside the myth of the American Dream—a libertarian commonwealth.

What left populism will deliver, in contrast to the right, is more equity and diversity to the ruling class and its institutions but, as with right populism, by expanding equality of opportunity for wage-labor so that workers must continue to submit to being exploited in order to live to profit the owners. Populism, whether left or right, is a ruling class strategy to make the conditions of life of workers more subject to the demands of market relations by diverting them with the prospect of surface reforms that leave the "property question" unquestioned, for the benefit of the ruling class. What the affirmative democratic left of capital makes imperative above all, I argue, is the renewal of Marx and Engels' root critique of the "Critical Criticism" of capitalism (The Holy Family) for "the most radical rupture with traditional property relations" (Manifesto of the Communist Party 504).

The Radicalism of Red Critique-al Theory

Left populism fundamentally accepts, as Zizek puts it, that "we cannot obviously step out of capitalism," but must learn to "deal with it" (Nash). "Dealing with" capitalism has replaced abolishing capitalism as the horizon of the "radical" in the discourse universe of the transnational populist left. And yet, to be "radical" means to grasp things by the "root." In other words, it is to be engaged in a mode of thinking that questions what is by unpacking how it has come to be, so as to explain why it will become other than it is. Root thinking, in short, is critique-al; it negates the immediacy of phenomenal experience in the cultural commonsense as the illusory appearance of the social totality in order to change it. Critique-al thinking is the "force of abstraction" that is required to know "what is" because in the existing social ontology the cause of "what is" is unavailable to our immediate experience and "neither microscopes nor chemical reagents are of use" (Marx, Preface to Capital, vol. I: 8).

Moreover, critique-al thinking changes what is when it moves from theory to practice and becomes a material force by changing the social relations. It is the historic unity of causal knowledge (materialism) and socialized production (abstract labor) in bourgeois society that has made critique synonymous with science and modernity, to the consternation of cultural conservatives everywhere who naively wish to maintain what is in its current form. It is the implication of market freedom with wage-slavery that normalizes the cultural resistance to critique that Kant characterizes as "self-imposed immaturity"; an "aristocratic epistemology" (Lukács, Destruction of Reason) or "culinary" outlook (Brecht, "The Epic Theatre and its Critic") that "I need not think if only I can pay; others will readily undertake the irksome business for me" (Kant, What is Enlightenment? 17). Historically this has associated critique with "freedom from immaturity" (17) and made it seem "radical" for its declaration of independence from "the guardians who have so benevolently taken over the supervision of men" (17). Critique is only truly radical, however, when it "seizes the masses" (Marx, Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Law 182)—that is, when it is tied to their mode of life and becomes necessary not only for their immediate survival within market relations but for their overall flourishing when they will have taken control of the productive forces—and not merely because it questions the manufactured passivity of consumerist ideology, as Kant's slogan for critique (Sapere Aude!) has been co-opted to mean in market society (Think for yourself!).² What passes for ideology critique in the (post)Marxism of the northatlantic left today is, in fact, a variant of Kant's transcendental (subjective) critique—critique is reduced to a voluntarist rejection of metanarratives of what "should be" on behalf of embracing "what is" as the material concrete in itself, variously coded as the "lifeworld" (Habermas), the "commons" (Negri), or "actor networks" (Latour). In doing so, it obscures the historical-materialist connection between critique and the social ontology of production relations, thus naturalizing existing social relations and mystifying the material force of critique.

When Marx writes that to be radical is to grasp the root of things as "man himself" (Critique of Hegel's Philosophy 182) he clarifies that "man" is not an "essence," an "abstraction inherent in each single individual," but the "ensemble of the social relations" (Theses on Feuerbach 4). So-called "human nature," in other words, is an expression of the "mode of production" (German Ideology 31): "a definite form of activity of… individuals, a definite form of expressing their life, a definite mode of life" (31) that "depends on the material conditions determining their production" (32). This means that whatever is thought to constitute human nature (reason, morals, language, biology,…) always "coincides with their production, both with what they produce and with how they produce" (32) as they "produce their means of subsistence" (31). What makes the human human, in short, is not some inherent difference ("dignity") that marks them as the paragon of animals, as in liberal humanist discourses, but the property relations in which the freedom from necessity of a few capital owners is made possible by the coerced labor of propertyless others who are forced to work like animals for bare survival. Labor is the radical root that makes humans distinct from other animals and that gives them the ability to change their nature by overcoming it through the process of self-critique.

Marx's radical critique-al theory is of course most heavily annotated in the four volumes of Capital (including Theories of Surplus Value), which as a totality investigate the material conditions of possibility for human "freedom from necessity" (Capital, vol III: 807). When Lenin in his Philosophical Notebooks argues that it is impossible to really understand Marx's Capital "without having thoroughly studied and understood the whole of Hegel's Logic" (317) he implies that Capital is to materialist dialectics what Hegel's Logic is to idealist dialectics: its most elaborated form.

What the form of Capital teaches us, which is what makes it a lesson on radical materialist critique, is that the essence of a thing—in other words, "the capitalist mode of production" that is the focus of Capital, vol. I—comes to be through a series of self-negating forms—which are analyzed by Marx as the production and transformation of labor into forms of value, both in theory (in Capital, vol. IV: Theories of Surplus-Value), and in practice (in Capital, vol. II). It is in Capital, vol. III, that the analysis of these economic forms negates the naturalized appearance of capitalism as a "free-market" society by revealing that "civilized man" remains "ruled… by the blind forces of Nature," rather than having become fully "socialized man… rationally regulating their interchange with Nature" (807). Marx's Capital thus teaches that scientific knowledge is dialectical: it is produced through a close examination of the mode of formal self-development of things through the self-contradictory process of their coming into being (becoming itself) and ceasing to be (becoming other than itself). To fail in the theoretical task of "reading" the historical form as a "moving contradiction" (Grundrisse 706)—for example, by taking the unequal distribution of goods in the surface appearance of market relations as the self-evident source of social inequality, or, by reifying the essence of class relations in the transhistorical division between mental and manual labor—that is, the domination of practice (Technik) over theory (Kultur), as a "negative dialectic" at a standstill (as in Adorno and Benjamin)—can only result in reforming market relations for a more "fair" distribution of goods and equal rights to property for all, while leaving the essence of class society—the "realm of necessity" (Capital, vol. III: 809)—uncontested, and the extraction of unpaid surplus-labor by capital beyond critique. It is Marx's materialist dialectics in Capital that Lenin is referring to when he says that "without revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement" (What Is To Be Done? 369) only "bourgeois ideology"; i.e., trade-union consciousness to improve the lot of the wage-slave in her slavery, what Lenin refers to as "economism."

In an afterword to Capital Marx admits his debt to Hegel by referring to him as a "mighty thinker" for having worked out the general form of dialectics "in a comprehensive and conscious manner" ("Afterword" 19) while critiquing "the mystification which dialectic suffers in Hegel's hands" because of his inversion of causality, which makes the totality of being the "real" (phenomenal and concrete) expression of the "ideal" (the immaterial and abstract). According to Marx, Hegel's dialectic "must be turned right side up again, if you would discover the rational kernel within the mystical shell" (19). In short, for Marx "it is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness" (Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy 263).

Marx's materialist "inversion" of Hegel's idealist dialectic is a necessary but insufficient procedure; it both expresses the class struggle at that time at the level of theory and has the philosophical mode of expression of its time that requires us to unpack it for its materialist lessons today. This much is evident insofar as for Marx the materialist inversion of the "mystical" and the discovery of its "rational" origins are not equivalent; for even after "resolving the religious world into its secular basis," one must still explain "the duplication of the world into a religious world and a secular one" by reference to "the inner strife and intrinsic contradictoriness within this secular basis… and [its being] revolutionized in practice" (Theses on Feuerbach 4).

The logic of Capital is "the direct opposite" of Hegel's Logic (Marx, "Afterword" 19), since it reveals the social basis for bourgeois philosophy's mystification of "logic" and "rationality" as an historical inversion of the Enlightenment's secular critique of the religious magical thinking of feudal society. The question Marx's intervention in philosophy raises is: why had the weapon of critique of the bourgeois revolution against feudal slavery and superstition in the eighteenth century itself become religious and reactionary by the middle of the nineteenth century? Why did the bourgeois revolution ultimately fail to emancipate humanity from slavery as promised? Marx's explanation inverts the "rational kernel" and the "mystical shell" of Hegel's theory of dialectics and thereby opens the "continent of history" (Althusser, For Marx 14) to scientific analysis by laying bare the economic formation and self-negation of the modern proletariat. In the process he transforms the "weapon of critique" of ideology—as the mystical consciousness unaware of itself—to being a "critique of weapons" forged by the oppressed to make history (Marx, Critique of Hegel's Philosophy 182).

Unlike Hegel's philosophy, which takes the history of thought to be the rational essence of history—Spirit or Mind—hitherto obscured by the manifold objectified forms of human activity, Marx regards the form of history as rational only insofar as human labor is conscious, goal-directed activity, and its essence as mystified because, under capitalism, the collective labor of humanity is alienated through its separation from the means of production—that is, because of bourgeois private property. As Marx explains, Hegel's ontological assumption that the material world is objectified spirit universalizes what is in actuality historically specific to the bourgeois mode of production—the coming into being of abstract social labor. Because social labor is commodified under the rule of capital it does not primarily serve to cultivate the powers of the producers but to subjugate them to capital owners, who in their freedom from labor personify the rule of dehumanization. The "essence" of social being is "mystical," in short, not because it is other-worldy (free spirit) but because it is this-worldy (alienated labor), because in capitalism socially abstract labor does not empower living labor but serves to augment dead labor in the form of capital. Because it is not subject to the collective control of the producers social relations as a result assume an alienated form that "overawe[s] and govern[s] men as powers completely alien to them" (German Ideology 52). Hence, Marx concludes, "all mysteries which lead theory to mysticism find their rational solution in human practice and in the comprehension of this practice" (Theses 5).

At stake in reading Capital is the question what makes the dialectic "the algebra of revolution" (Herzen); i.e., the "revolutionary theory" without which "there can be no revolution"? Is it because it inverts Hegel's Logic and interprets it materialistically as an allegory of alienated labor, or, because it explains formal logic as an ideological inversion that reflects how "men make their own history, but not under circumstances chosen by themselves" (Eighteenth Brumaire 103)—or, is it both? To put it another way: what makes critique radical? Is it its methodological "inversion" of idealism into materialist premises or its abstract "reflection" of the real inversion of social relations? I argue that this is not an either/or question, but rather the same question viewed from different aspects; first expressed subjectively as abstract method, then objectively as a real abstract totality. The inverted social totality makes the materialist critique of ideology necessary, while the materialist method of critique in turn acts as a guide for resolving the contradictions, first in theory then in practice. My argument as to their unity in the totality is itself necessitated by the "post-al" (Zavarzadeh) mystification of radical critique as deconstruction of the binaries of culture in localities that severs them entirely from their materialist basis as reflections of the root contradiction of capitalism between globally socialized production (proletarian need) and private appropriation (bourgeois right).

Marx refers to Hegel's dialectics as an "apparent" or "occult critique" (Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts 332; "Critique of the Hegelian Dialectic" 111) because of how he reifies the "'revolutionary', … 'practical-critical', activity" (Theses 3) of humans' productive activity—i.e., the abstract social labor of the collective worker—as the singular "labor of thought." Because, for Hegel, "philosophy is its own time apprehended in thoughts" (Philosophy of Right 11), he assumes that "the way in which thought appropriates the concrete, reproduces it as the concrete in the mind" is how "the concrete itself comes into being"—overlooking that "the concrete is concrete because it is the concentration of many determinations, hence unity of the diverse" (Marx, Grundrisse 101). The "rational kernel" of Hegel's theory is his recognition that the labor of thought, like human labor generally, is teleological because, as Marx puts it, "at the end of every labour-process, we get a result that already existed in the imagination of the labourer at its commencement" (Capital, vol. I: 188). What is "mystical" in Hegel, however, is the extension of the purposiveness of human labor to the whole of nature, society, and thought and how this entails a fundamental denial of material causality.

As Lukács explains, Marx's concept of labor as "revolutionary practice" (Theses 4) is the opposite of Hegel's speculative labor theory because it denies "any kind of teleology outside of labour" (Social Being 8). It is thus Marx who, in "the entire history of philosophy" (4), first breaks with the way "teleological positing is not confined to labour" (4)—which, incidentally, is why Heidegger can refer to Marx's critique of Hegelianism as the original "reversal of Platonism" ("The End of Philosophy" 433). However, this "reversal" also transforms the history of philosophy conceived as the epistemic difference between idealism (religion) and materialism (science). According to Lukács, this is possible only once Marx recognizes teleology "as a really effective category, exclusive to labour" (Social Being 10), overcoming the antinomy between "causality and teleology as categorical foundations of reality" (9). This enables grasping

the concrete real and necessary coexistence of causality and teleology… [as] a unitary real process… in a mental plan achieving material realization, in the positing of a desired goal bringing about a change in material reality… which represents something qualitatively and radically new in relation to nature. (10)

For Marx, "the coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity or self-change" (Theses 4) is not within the labor of the concept (logic, philosophy, reason), but outside it, in the "metabolism" between labor and nature in production (Capital, Volume 1: 133).

It is Marx's materialist critique of philosophy that opens the way for his discovery that the proletariat is not merely "a crowd of scrofulous, overworked and consumptive starvelings" (German Ideology 41), but alone among all others in modern bourgeois society "a really revolutionary class" (Manifesto 494). It is in his analysis of the proletariat that Marx discovers in the "affirmative recognition of the existing state of things, at the same time also, the recognition of the negation of that state" ("Afterword" 20) that makes his critique red, i.e., transformative and not merely interpretive. What makes Marx's red critique yet "a scandal and abomination to bourgeoisdom and its doctrinaire professors" ("Afterword" 20) is due to the fact that in their scholarly philosophical "dispute over the reality or non-reality of thinking that is isolated from practice" (Theses 3) they refuse to accept that "critique [Kritik] represents a class" ("Afterword" 16) that can only free itself by freeing everyone from the rule of necessity over social life imposed by capital (i.e., dead alienated labor).

In Capital the occult mystification of history perpetuated by idealist philosophy—"for which conceptual thinking is the real human being, and for which the conceptual world as such is thus the only reality" (Marx, Grundrisse 101)—is considered typical of the form of labor in bourgeois society in which "the social character of men's labour appears to them as an objective character stamped upon the product of that labour" (Capital, vol. I: 83). Take Hegel, for example. Because for him speculation is abstract (qua immaterial) activity as such, its concrete results are necessarily abstract (i.e., intelligible). His speculative philosophy thus reflects how in bourgeois society abstract social labor must appear in the concrete guise of the commodity form, as this or that type of practical activity undertaken for a particular purpose, and never as the material basis of social reality as such, both the source of everything existing and its transformation. Although Marx concludes that Hegel's dialectics is irrational insofar as it takes the way the world has been interpreted within the history of philosophy as an account for how the world itself "rationally" comes into being—as if the progress of reason represents the history of being—he explains the "mystification which dialectic suffers in Hegel's hands" as symptomatic of the "Fetishism which attaches itself to the products of labour, so soon as they are produced as commodities, and which is therefore inseparable from the production of commodities" (Capital, vol. I: 83). This is why in Capital capital itself appears in the Hegelian guise of a "self-moving Subject" that accomplishes the mystery of creating itself (Capital, vol. 1: 165; Capital, Volume 1: 255), but whose apparent motion is in actuality due to the working of an economic law, that, as Engels says, "depends on the lack of awareness of the people who undergo it" (Capital, Volume 1: 168)—the commodification/valorization of labor.

If Capital were turned the "wrong way up" again and interpreted in the Hegelian manner, then the history of economic literature in Cv.IV (Theories of Surplus Value) would constitute the spiritual Essence of Value as a concept; Cv.I (on production) the transmutation of the concept of Value into material practice; Cv.III (on competition between capitals), the internal contradiction of opposed forms of Value; and, Cv.II (the transformation of value into price) the apotheosis of Value into the money form and its spatial expansion as the universal horizon of social life. Thus, the material (economic) laws determining Value, its contradictory forms and transformation, appear as the unfolding of Value out of itself. The result of this inversion of Marx's materialist dialectic back into the idealist Hegelian form can be found in the left Heideggerianism of "political Marxism"—a form of "romantic anti-capitalism" (Lukács, Theory of the Novel 19), more commonly encountered as "gothic," "apophatic," or "dark" Marxism today (Cohen; McNally; Miéville, Wright)—which opposes the dominance of the value-form over culture from a negative theological standpoint epistemology that puts social being under erasure. "Political" Marxism displaces materialism with "matterism" (Ebert, "Red Feminism") by making "class" the absent center of social ontology, following Kant's metaphysical notion of the noumenal thing-in-itself that, like the transcendent concept of God in classical theology, is said to exist but forever eludes detection. In this metaphysical matterism "class is determined by class struggle" (Hardt and Negri, Multitude 104), in other words, it is an effect of a hegemonic discursive "articulation" (Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony) in a Schmittian lifestyle contest between political "friends" and "enemies" (Mouffe, Carl Schmitt), rather than an economic antagonism inscribed in the production relations outside language. "Class," in other words, is a mythopoeic assemblage (as in Sorel), constructed of diverse constituencies who have formed a political coalition around an "empty signifier" or "sublime object" that excludes surfacing the root antagonism of class politics in the economic exploitation of labor by capital.³

The logic of Capital is not simply intellectually radical because by historicizing human nature as an effect of the mode of production it negates the false consciousness of market relations as due to "a certain propensity in human nature… to truck, barter, and exchange one thing for another," as Adam Smith assumes (Wealth of Nations, Book 1, Chpt. 2). It is also socially radical because it provides a guide for revolutionary praxis to change the world by explaining why "the real movement that abolishes the present state of things" (German Ideology 49) is inscribed in the "moving contradiction" of capital itself "to reduce labour time to a minimum, while it posits labour time, on the other side, as sole measure and source of wealth" (Grundrisse 706).

It is this fundamental contradiction of capitalism between the forces and relations of production that makes the working class revolutionary. Why is because the competitive drive to increase productivity by the use of labor-saving technology leads to a decline of profitability overall as "constant capital" in the form of machines increasingly displaces the "variable capital" or living labor which is its source. Since only living labor produces surplus-value, the average rate of profit (s/c+v) tends to fall despite rising exploitation per worker. It is this economic tendency (the rising organic composition of capital) working itself out on a global scale that is ultimately what acts to incentivize the working class to change from being a politically passive class-in-itself (exploited labor subject to capital to survive) to becoming a militantly active class-for-itself (organized to take power in society and socialize property) and thereby abolish classes entirely by inaugurating a society in which "the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all" (Manifesto 506). Marx's red critique thus unites radical theory (scientific materialism) and revolutionary praxis (social dialectics) to lay bare "the coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity or self-changing" (Theses 4) in the global proletariat becoming a self-negating class-for-itself. It thereby completes "the most radical rupture with traditional ideas" of bourgeois modernity by bringing it to its (socio)logical end in "the most radical rupture with traditional property relations" (Manifesto 504). Communism as a result ceases to be an "ideal" and instead is based on the fact that because economic productivity has become universally rationalized and workers everywhere form a propertyless exploited class they represent the only "class that holds the future in its hands" (Manifesto 494).

Critique is the opposite of all "one-sided" interpretations of "what is" that categorically assume an abstract image of change which can only be realized in a voluntarist manner as a change of ideas, as is typical of "the philosophical consciousness—for which conceptual thinking is the real human being, and for which the conceptual world as such is thus the only reality." Closer examination reveals that the overthrowing of the "ruling ideas" by "revolutionary ideas" is always an index of "the dissolution of the old conditions of existence" (Marx and Engels, Manifesto 489) by an increasingly "automatic system of machinery" (Marx, "The Fragment on Machines," Economic Manuscripts 82) that progressively puts "the powers of Nature into… the service of human needs" (86). Thus, the "proletariat alone is revolutionary" because it cannot afford to act "according to the vague notions of a future society entertained by some dreamers" (Engels, "Sonvillier Congress" 66), but is economically compelled by its conditions of life to "set free the elements of the new society with which old collapsing bourgeois society itself is pregnant" (Marx, The Civil War in France 335) by expropriating the productive apparatus of the expropriators for the good of society as a whole.

The Root-less Radicalism of the Affirmative Left

There is nothing more common in the history of capitalism than the claim by its vulgar defenders who agree with Adam Smith that it best expresses "human nature" than the moral objection of its reformist critics who follow Rousseau and consider it contrary to "human nature." It is a hallmark of bourgeois ideology to criticize capitalism on moral grounds for its failure to live up to the civic ideals of the Enlightenment ("Freedom, Equality, Property and Bentham") and thereby perpetuate the myth that the existing property relations based on the individual buying and selling of labor as a commodity (i.e., wage-slavery) are inviolable and inevitable.

Rousseau provides the classical formulation of this apparent critique of capitalism that occults what it contests when he proposes that, "The first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, bethought himself of saying 'This is mine,' and found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil society [with its] many crimes, wars and murders" (Discourse on the Origin of Inequality 84). It is not the materialist expropriation of the labor of the many by the few that is the source of inequality here, but the gullibility of the simple masses to grant them the authority to do so that is. The implication is that should the people cease to believe in the noble lie of the "right" of property and refuse to sell their labor, presumably by being educated to become less possessive and greedy types, civil society would wither away and along with it all social ills as humanity is returned to its pristine "state of nature"—which Rousseau admits "never existed" (vii)—characterized by subsistence labor.

Nietzsche only elaborates on this piece of Robinsonade fan-fiction in The Genealogy of Morals by inverting property relations into affective differences: class society is "explained" in this psycho-cultural imaginary, as due to the "ressentiment" that is characteristic of "slave morality" toward the "noble values" of the "will-to-power" of an elite.⁴ Property on these terms is not made from the unpaid surplus-labor that is daily extracted from the collective worker who possesses nothing but their ability to work for a wage, but represents the immaterial values of the powerful because for them "the conceptual world is the only reality." Revolution on this psycho-cultural model is a contingent "event" that happens whenever the dominant values are usurped and inverted in the language of the subaltern, i.e., when "a vocabulary [is] turned against those who once used it" (Foucault, "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History" 154).

Nietzsche's "transvaluation of values" is a theory of revolution as reversal without transformation—i.e., an anti-dialectical "eternal return" of linguistic change without social change—that effectively breaks with the use of "class" as a social category to make it a nomadic cultural signifier. Because Nietzsche makes class other-wordly (again) he does not nostalgically defend a return to noble values as such, but aesthetically weaponizes them by re-narrating nobility as the sign of a "joy-full" and "affirmative" state of being in affective opposition to the dominant "nihilism" and "ressentiment" he identifies with the domesticated "last man" of modernity. This is what has made his writings, alongside those of other right-wingers like Heidegger and Schmitt, so appealing to the bourgeois common sense—they promise change without change (a change of "heart" or "lifestyle" change) that eternalizes class relations and salves their nagging sense of inferiority.

Negri's "constituent power" (potential, biopolitics) versus "constituted power" (potestas, biopower) is a late(r) elaboration of this psycho-drama of class inversion that depends on the notion of the dematerialization of property as "affective" and "immaterial" labor in the digital commons. In this melodrama "revolutionary movement" is "an act of love" (Multitude 356) because "a class is and can only be a collectivity that struggles in common" (104). For Negri, "class is determined by class struggle" and is revealed in the clash of opposed metaphysical perspectives on labor as being either "subject" to capital when viewed "from above" from the point of view of constituted power (as biopower), or, as "free" of capital when viewed "from below," from the perspective of constitutive power (as biopolitics). Negri, who ascribes to Spinoza's metaphysical monism, considers labor an autonomous substance (the "multitude") that constitutes the social rather than the reverse. In short, "class" for Negri is a compensatory spiritual-affective axiom (love, desire) deployed to feel powerful, rather than an explanatory-materialist category (exploitation, need) that is necessary to change it.

The apparent freedom of labor celebrated by autonomist marxists like Negri as a metaphysical absolute in actuality reflects the fact that labor "has ceased to be organically linked with particular individuals in any specific form" (Marx, Grundrisse 104) because of the dominance of market relations. Labor is not "free" and "immaterial" but determined by "a form of society in which individuals can with ease transfer from one labour to another, and where the specific kind is a matter of chance for them, hence of indifference" (104). In other words, the "autonomy of labor" Negri celebrates is really a sentimentalized form of bourgeois freedom that to the worker represents the freedom to work or starve. The autonomy of labor is what must be critique-ally negated and politically transformed, not ideologically affirmed and metaphorically elaborated, to realize freedom from necessity for all.

A radical critique of capitalism begins where the moralizing reversals of the psycho-dramatists end by explaining why the unequal "life chances on the market" (Weber) are caused by the self-estrangement of labor in production, which requires the capitalist to "to shorten that part of the working day, during which the workman must labour for his own benefit, and by that very shortening, to lengthen the other part of the day, during which he is at liberty to work gratis for the capitalist" (Marx, Capital, vol. I: 326). Such a materialist critique clarifies why the ethical reform of consciousness regarding who is/is not considered human/-ely—i.e., as an agential being, rather than a means to the ends of another—cannot change it. There is nothing radical about culturally trans-valuing the idea of who is human (agential) and thus due "human rights," which can only amount to the right to "freely" exchange labor for wages. What is radical is grasping the human as "the ensemble of the social relations" in which the objectification of real human beings and the humanization of capital has its cause not in the (im)morality of individuals, but in "the dull/silent compulsion of economic relations" (Marx, Capital, vol. I: 726; Capital, Volume 1: 899) and to negate that.

Such critique-al thinking is practically absent in what passes for radical today, which has co-opted and inverted the meaning of "radical" into a "rootless" thinking and mindless activism; a moralizing volunteerism for a renewed egalitarian civic religion—whether "woke" or MAGA makes no difference—that changes nothing. The rootless radical empties the social of its materialist root in class relations and immunizes it from critique. The meaning of radical has thus been hollowed out of its materialist commitment to critique on the terrain of capital/wage-labor relations, and in its place substituted a messianic matterism; what Derrida represents as a "materiality without materialism and even perhaps without matter" ("Typewriter Ribbon" 281) that constitutes a "justice-to-come" that never comes. This spiritualized materiality says "class is determined by class struggle" and unsays class in the materialist anatomy of bourgeois society. This rootless and casual notion of class as a causeless cause of itself is the numinous basis for what Marx in his reading of Hegel called an "occult critique" ("Critique of the Hegelian Dialectic" 111) because of how it inverts the binaries of culture in the beyond only to affirm the existing as non-sublatable.

Below I trace the sublation of occult critique by red critique in the early writings of Marx and Engels to explain the backward character of the current left populism posing as radical today. To do so I must first clarify that, contrary to Althusser, there is no "epistemic break" in Marx's writings from Young Hegelian to mature Marxism upon discovering "the continent of history" (For Marx 14). For one thing, as Marx and Engels themselves acknowledge in The German Ideology, they were not "the first… to give the writing of history a materialistic basis" (42). For another, Marx does not "claim to have discovered either the existence of classes in modern society or the struggle between them" (Letter to Weydemeyer 62). What Althusser misses with his event-al concept of "epistemic break" is the "continent of history" as the unity of thinking and being such that "[c]onsciousness [das Bewusstsein] can never be anything else than conscious being [das bewusste Sein], and the being of men is their actual life-process" (German Ideology 36).

Althusser's reading of Marx misrecognizes the real life process whereby "the dissolution of the old ideas" by "ideas that revolutionize society" always "keeps even pace with the dissolution of the old conditions of existence" (Manifesto 503) by newer productive forces. The result is that his brand of "structuralist" Marxism is predicated on an "aleatory" materialism that does not recognize the materialist dialectics of history in labor, either in theory or practice. Conversely, Marx and Engels themselves emphasize that "the existence of revolutionary ideas in a particular period presupposes the existence of a revolutionary class" (German Ideology 60). What explains their revolutionizing the writing of history is the material transformation of history itself into "world-history" by the world market, which has "made all civilised nations and every individual member of them dependent for the satisfaction of their wants on the whole world, thus destroying the former natural exclusiveness of separate nations" (73). Rather than discovering the "continent of history," Marx's real claim to fame lies in giving a scientific basis for grasping the "end of history" in its various iterations as, (1) historiographic idealism (i.e., separate histories of nations, religion, philosophy, art, etc.); (2) cultural stagnation (as an effect of uneven and combined global economic development), and (3) metaphysical eschatology (speculation about end times), in terms of the social production of real life.

Take the concept of communism itself which prior to Marx, as it is for infantile communists like Badiou today, is made out to be "an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself" (German Ideology 49). For Marx, by contrast, communism is the real contradictory movement in which "the bourgeois mode of production" through the mechanism of the world market establishes both "the world-historical co-operation of individuals" (51) and "the material conditions for a solution of this [class] antagonism [that emanates from the individuals' social conditions of existence]," that brings "the prehistory of human society" to a close with the communist revolution (Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy 264). What makes such a self-negating concept of history possible of course is the recognition of the self-negating quality of labor in bourgeois society, which produces the universal alienation of humanity from itself in the form of the commodity. Thus, with the abolition of the commodity form of labor based on bourgeois private property, "the whole world [will] be put in a position to acquire the capacity to enjoy this all-sided production of the whole earth" (German Ideology 51).

Marx's self-critique of abstract communism by real communism represented the conscious self-expression of the emergent political vanguard of the nineteenth century proletariat in the global North in the process of becoming a class-for-itself. The early writings are especially valuable for showing how communism was transformed from a religious egalitarian ideal "to which reality would have to adjust itself," as it is for sectarian socialists and petty-bourgeois reformists, to becoming a modern scientific explanation of "the real movement abolishing the present state of things" through critique-al analysis of "what the proletariat is, and what, in accordance with this being, it will historically be compelled to do" (Marx and Engels, The Holy Family 37).

After unpacking the formation of the original critique-al Marxism below I will then turn to consider what is "red" about The Red Critique in the twenty-first century and why it represents the radical other of the dominant libertarian left that has abandoned class politics for bourgeois politics. What is "radical" about today's affirmative left is its axiomatic refusal to recognize critique as integral to the process through which the working class becomes a class-for-itself.

Critique Represents a Class

Critique, since its origins in ancient Greece, has been associated with discernment and judgment; the ability to distinguish at the level of knowledge between what is superlatively "true" from what is deceptive and "false," which then allows for rational consideration of what is the right and "good" course of action so as to avoid possibly "bad" consequences, and, as well, to instill appreciation for what is aesthetically pleasing or "beautiful" as a model by which to transform the drearily mundane or "ugly" in human experience. However, although the ancients established the classical form of critique and worked out its logical precepts and procedures, human beings as a social species have always used their judgment to work out for themselves what is in their best interest to survive and flourish. In this sense critique is an evolutionary cognitive adaptation that humans share with other animals that has developed from living in a changing environment that requires organisms to reflect upon and choose from among a series of possible courses of action.⁵ The codification of critique as a logical procedure for establishing the truth of things, as in Socratic dialectic and Aristotelian logic, reflected the fact that humanity had reached the point that it was able to produce material surpluses over which the classes of Greek society contested and, as well, the possibility that these conflicts could lead to the ruin of organized civil society and cause it to fall back into conditions of barbarism (see, Sohn Rethel, Ste. Croix; and Thomson).

Critique as a formal methodological procedure reflected the hegemony of the merchants and landlords who, through their control of the surplus produced by social labor, supported schools to teach formal syllogistic logic as a way to legitimate their form of property as universally good and delegitimate the primary producers' claim to it (e.g., as "wasteful," "craven," "demagogic," etc.). It is because of this more or less explicit class struggle over the products of labor that the meaning and practice of critique has changed over time; from being considered, at times of reaction against economic disruption, the royal road through which the divine enters being (as in Plato and, later, Hegel), to being identified, at times of economic development, with the material process of change itself (as in Heraclitus or Marx), and everything in between. From a "symptom" of unconscious trauma or "ressentiment" as in Freud and Nietzsche, to the "trace" of an orphaned signifier that deconstructs the text of Western metaphysics for Derrida, from the "resistance" of bodies to "knowledge-power" in Foucauldian genealogy, to a human-centered hubris that disavows its entanglement with the nonhuman in Latourian "postcritique," the different ways of conceptualizing critique historically reflect existing property relations. The adventure of the concept, in other words, expresses in a mediated way class conflicts generated by the ownership and control over socially produced wealth at a certain level of historical development of the productive forces.

When Derrida, for example, argues that "deconstruction is neither an analysis nor a critique" ("Letter" 273), but rather a trace of the self-unravelling of the text unable to fix its meaning due to the "play" of the signifier, he implies that all texts are equally unable to secure their coherence. This immanent mode of ludic "close reading" mystifies the way texts and their readings are shaped by the social relations and what appear as literary "differences" ("referential" versus "differential" readings) are rooted in and reflect the social conflicts over material resources in cybercapitalism.

The social reality behind the post-al mystification of texts Derrida represents was the requirement of digital over analog literacies in cybercapitalism, acclimating the workforce to accepting the increasing globality and precarity of the high-tech economy while reading these features as signs of a new form of cultural freedom from outdated social norms. The Derridean deconstruction of mimetic epistemologies ("referentiality") was useful to the ruling class throughout the 1980s and 90s under the hegemony of neoliberalism in disguising their interest in privatizing the social wealth of public resources as freedom from the history of the twentieth-century dominated by "totalitarian" ways of thinking, a code for Marxism and its interpretation as socialist humanism in the "actually existing socialist" states (i.e., European social democracy and the Stalinized workers' states). The institutionalization of deconstruction as part of the broader (post)modern shift in the culture industry acted to negate the class basis of knowledge production by treating class as a floating signifier and a sign of delectable cultural differences to be affirmatively celebrated, rather than negated through critique (e.g., Bourdieu; de Certeau; Fisk).

When with the waning of neoliberalism the growing class inequality became impossible to any longer ignore, a "new" materialist negation of the cultural negation of class became necessary to account for the failure of capitalist globalization in the twenty-first century to replace socialism as the horizon of social justice. Even Derrida, whose writings were instrumental to the ludic dissolution of class in the tropics of "desire" and "taste" (in e.g., A Taste for the Secret) began making a "gesture of fidelity to a certain spirit of Marxism" (Specters of Marx 113) as a critique of "exappropriation (the radical contradiction of all 'capital,' of all property or appropriation, as well as all the concepts that depend on it)" (112). Derrida seemed to be aligning himself with Marxist critical theorists who, in different ways, surfaced the underlying connection between (post)modernity and capitalism.⁶ In actuality his spectral Marxism was the signal for an "ethical turn" in the new humanities toward a "new materialism" based not on the desacralization of ideology but its "re-enchantment" as a spiritual force for change (Joshua and Saler, The Re-Enchantment of the World). As a result, Derrida's writings are more often than not now encountered in religion departments, alongside the mystery-mongering texts of Kant, Heidegger, and Levinas, than on the cutting edge of theory.

The "new materialism(s)" represent the institutionalization of cultural theory as (post)critique on the premise that "materialism must be destroyed" (Harman, "Materialism") so as to affirm the spiritual animism of things free of their historicity in the social totality. The "agential realism" (Barad) of the "new" (spiritualized) materialism is a form of populist spontaneity that underwrites a know-nothing activism "from below" as the most effective mode of change, claiming that people's affective intensity represents an act of radical empathy with the nonhuman and a rejection of the dominant "ready-to-hand" (Heidegger) culture.

What is "most effective" of course is what is most useful to accommodate the existing social relations of capital/wage-labor relations. As the contradictions of class society have become universal and are posing the question of socialism or fascism on a global scale, bourgeois theory is forced to become pragmatic and provide realistic visions of social change in localities while maintaining an unsaid allegiance to "capitalist realism" as the global horizon constituting the "limits of critique" (Felski). Biopolitical (post)humanism has therefore replaced the rigors of discursive (post)humanist philosophy and has shifted the humanities from the rarified interrogation of cultural texts and the discursive play of cultural meanings to questions of embodiment and the reform of personhood by representational inclusion of those who have been excluded from the category of the human (cultural minorities, animals, objects, and artificial intelligences). Such representational inclusion of others is, however, necessary to give cultural legitimacy to the expansion of commodification to more profitable areas of capital investment where labor is cheaper (the global South, the wild hinterlands, the Internet of Things, and the digital commons). In short, contemporary (post)humanism represents "humanism's latent side: the difference of humanism with itself as it adjusts to the heightening class contradictions in the shift from analog to digital capitalism" (Cotter et al., Human, All Too (Post)Human 2), not a new politics of recognition toward nonhumans, as the dominant (post)humanists claim (Braidotti, The Posthuman).

My purpose in this brief historical excursus is to show that despite the rhetoric of critique and whether it is explicitly being denied or affirmed, in the context of a society divided between excess wealth and unmet need critique is an unavoidable part of cultural life, not an arbitrary "desire" or superfluous "metanarrative." Critique is necessary because it cannot be overcome while classes exist. Postcritique, too, represents a class (the ruling class): the only class capable of feeling at home in the world of wage-labor and capital and for whom critique feels like a violation of freedom itself on the hypercynical grounds that people "know very well what they are doing even if they don't articulate it to the satisfaction of the observers" with their "'science of society'" (Latour, Reassembling 4). The ruling class requires its affirmative form of (post)critique (negative freedom from domination) in the (post)humanities to divert and adjust student-citizen-workers to accepting their downward mobility as exploited labor, while the working class requires its own negative form of critique (positive freedom from exploitation) to expose bourgeois ideology and contest the exploitative property relations it attempts to normalize.

As the class struggle intensifies—as it must, as Marx explains, given the profit motive to increase the productivity of labor via the replacement of variable capital (workers' wages) by constant capital (automation) in the production process that inevitably puts bourgeois property itself in crisis ("Fragment on Machines")—we see a vulgarization of critique among bourgeois scholars (e.g., as aesthetic appreciation, decolonization, queering,…), if not the outright denial of it (postcritique, affect theory, reenchantment, surface reading,…). So, whereas in periods when bourgeois property forms were revolutionary and advanced social well-being in general in its battle with the cultural heritage of feudalism—such as in Europe when the bourgeoisie supported the rigorous philosophes of the Enlightenment and later when the classical German Idealists made critique the cutting edge of advanced knowledge against cultural philistinism—after the consolidation of bourgeois power in the continental revolutions of 1848 the force of critique passed over to the side of the modern proletariat. It is with Marx and Engels that the idealist cultural critique of the bourgeois Enlightenment was transformed into materialist ideology critique and became permanently revolutionary. The concept of ideology was also changed in their writings from being a lack of reflexive "self-consciousness," as it was to the Young Hegelians, to being the "false consciousness" of the economic. It was in reaction to the power of Marxist critique in politically organizing the working class movement of Germany in the late nineteenth century that Nietzsche came to associate critique with the nihilistic "ressentiment" of the slave against life affirming "noble values" and abandoned critique for "genealogy." Despite Nietzsche's hostility to materialist critique, however, his writings nevertheless represent a "reversal of Platonism" because of how he implicates ideas in power conflicts. And yet, his opposition to idealism remains idealist in how he occults power as being primarily about morals and culture rather than rooted in economics. It was the same containment of critique to the terms of idealism that led Marx to characterize Hegel's version of critique an "apparent/occult critique" and to oppose to it his own "constant/resistant critique" (kritisieren beständig, Eighteenth Brumaire 106) in which critique "represents a class… whose vocation in history is the overthrow of the capitalist mode of production and the final abolition of all classes—the proletariat" (Marx, "Afterword" 16).

The (post)critique dominant today in the (post)humanities, most prominently articulated in the writings of Rita Felski who uses Latourian flat descriptivism to retreat back to a rather traditional aesthetic reading of cultural texts, is a later version of Nietzsche's affective model of critique as it had been updated by Foucault. Like them, Felski understands critique as a mode of life or lifestyle—an ethos evident in bodily gestures and conventional speech-acts—and thus as a post-class social theory that dismisses reading texts as representations of "the dominant material relations grasped as ideas" (Marx and Engels, German Ideology 59) as merely a "bad" reading style, thereby siding with the owners against the workers.⁷ The object of this occult critique is to disconnect critique from the property relations, as Latour does when he says critique as a "'science of society'" is no longer possible because "'there is no such thing as a society'" since "the proletariat… passed away" (Reassembling the Social 5; "Why Critique?" 226). But if anything, the proletariat has arguably grown outside the global North, with China becoming the factory of the world providing upwards of 30-40% of global manufacturing output. Latour simply takes the lack of "political relevance obtained through a 'science of society'" (Reassembling 4) in the cultural commonsense produced by the bourgeois culture industry as a sign of the nonexistence of the proletariat and the withering away of critique. His social theory "reassembles" materialism (really inverts it) in its assumption that "politics"—which are for him "dingpolitiks," the assemblage of objects as "matters of concern" in a virtual commons, rather than "realpolitiks" ("From Realpolitik to Dingpolitik")—constitutes the social rather than the labor of the other. Latour's (post)critique-al theory hollows the social of the daily and hourly labor of humans that sustains all life on earth, nonhuman as well as human. Its dominance in the bourgeois knowledge industry is due to its denial of why "critique represents a class" because it implicates ideas in the labor relations which are now compelling the proletariat to become a class-for-itself.

How Marx's Radical Critique of Critical Philosophy Became the Materialist Critique of Ideology

The classical Marxist critique of ideology requires clarification because there are two forms of critique that are considered Marxist and have been used by Marxists in opposition to ideology, beginning with Marx himself. There is radical critique as "inversion"—an "exoteric" immanent mode of critique that philosophically reverses the intelligibility of texts—and materialist critique as "reflection"—an "esoteric" outside critique that reflects the moving contradiction between the forces and relations of production outside all cultural texts that explains them. Radical critique-al inversion is the kind of critique that the young Marx gets from Feuerbach and uses against Hegel's idealist dialectics to produce his own materialist dialectic in his early writings, before he and Engels formulated historical materialism as the basis of scientific socialism. Materialist critique is the critique of the inversion method of radical critique itself as a reflection of the real inversion of market relations in which "men's labour appears to them as an objective character stamped upon the product of that labour" rather than "the peculiar social character of the labour that produces them" (Capital, vol. I: 83). Critique in this sense is a (materialist) negation of the (idealist) negation that itself reflects the alienated form of bourgeois production in which the realization of private profit through market exchange takes precedence before meeting the needs of the primary producers.

To see the difference between radical (cultural) critique and materialist (ideology) critique more concretely, consider how in The German Ideology Marx and Engels write that

The premises from which we begin are not arbitrary ones, not dogmas, but real premises from which abstraction can only be made in the imagination. They are the real individuals, their activity and the material conditions under which they live, both those which they find already existing and those produced by their activity. These premises can thus be verified in a purely empirical way. (31)

Here the "real premises" of empirically given historically produced material conditions is counterposed to "ideal premises" as their imaginative inverse image on the theory that "in all ideology men and their circumstances appear upside-down as in a camera obscura" due to contradictions in "their historical life-process" (German Ideology 36). Later, however, Marx will write in the afterword to the second German edition of Capital that

The mystification which dialectic suffers in Hegel's hands, by no means prevents him from being the first to present its general form of working in a comprehensive and conscious manner. With him it is standing on its head. It must be turned right side up again, if you would discover the rational kernel within the mystical shell. (19)

This later description of materialist dialectics as a "rational" inversion of idealist dialectics (turning it right side up again) applies as well to their own earlier conception of critique (which philosophically inverts ideal premises into real empirical premises) as it does to the Young Hegelian "critical criticism" they distance themselves from when they write:

German criticism has, right up to its latest efforts, never left the realm of philosophy. It by no means examines its general philosophic premises, but in fact all its problems originate in a definite philosophical system, that of Hegel. Not only in its answers, even in its questions there was a mystification… To begin with they took pure, unfalsified Hegelian categories such as "substance" and "self-consciousness," later they secularised these categories by giving them more profane names such as "species," "the unique," "man," etc. (28-9)

Marx's concept of "species being" in his early writings is similarly a rational inversion into more secular philosophical language of Hegel's Absolute Spirit. This is why Marx at the time could write that "our whole object can only be—as is also the case in Feuerbach's criticism of religion—to give religious and philosophical questions the form corresponding to man who has become conscious of himself" (Marx to Ruge 144). There is a difference, however, between Marx's materialist inversion of Hegel's idealist dialectic and that of other Young Hegelians like Feuerbach from whom he inherits materialist dialectics. Marx and Engels, unlike the others, also critique "inversion" as the dialectical method of Hegelian critical philosophy. In other words, not only do they critique the materialist conclusions of the critical critics by revealing their intellectual indebtedness to Hegel's idealist philosophy, but also their reified concept of philosophy itself by explaining its socioeconomic determination due to German backwardness (hence, not only in their answers, but even in their questions there is mystification).

Marx's concept of species-being is for this reason not an abstract and ahistorical "essence"—neither "regarded as a single individual" nor "'society as the subject'" (German Ideology 52)—but "the ensemble of the social relations" (Theses on Feuerbach) and therefore represents an advance on Feuerbach's abstract and ahistorical humanism. To put this another way, for Marx "real humanism" is not a given premise (whether speculative or empirical), but a "struggle concept" (Mies; Ebert) that negates the objectification of human activity in wage-labor by tracing its (socio)logical arche and telos in the economic transformation of nature as a whole that causes the proletariat to negate itself as a class.

In The German Ideology Marx and Engels themselves recognize the inadequacy of radical critique-al inversion—the dialectical method of Hegelian "critical philosophy"—when they write

When the reality is described, a self-sufficient philosophy loses its medium of existence. At the best its place can only be taken by a summing-up of the most general results, abstractions which are derived from the observation of the historical development of men. These abstractions in themselves, divorced from real history, have no value whatsoever. They can only serve to facilitate the arrangement of historical material, to indicate the sequence of its separate strata. But they by no means afford a recipe or schema, as does philosophy, for neatly trimming the epochs of history. On the contrary, the difficulties begin only when one sets about the examination and arrangement of the material—whether of a past epoch or of the present—and its actual presentation. The removal of these difficulties is governed by premises which certainly cannot be stated here, but which only the study of the actual life-process and the activity of the individuals of each epoch will make evident. (37)

The "real premises" they themselves appeal to against "ideal premises" in The German Ideology "certainly cannot be stated here" beyond generalities because their "actual study" had not yet been undertaken. The "actual study" and "real depiction" of "real history," will only later be grasped scientifically when in the Grundrisse Marx will explain why it is "wrong to let the economic categories follow one another in the same sequence as that in which they were historically decisive" (107) in the manner of political economy because "their sequence is determined, rather, by their relation to one another in modern bourgeois society, which is precisely the opposite of that which seems to be their natural order or which corresponds to historical development" (107). This is why later in The German Ideology Marx and Engels say they will only give "illustrations" of the "the real depiction—of our historical material" whose conclusions they are presenting. The implication is that as it was not yet possible at the time for "philosophy as an independent branch of knowledge [to] lose[] its medium of existence," and it must, therefore, yet persist in the form of "general… abstractions which arise from the observation of the historical development of men," which at most may "only serve to facilitate the arrangement of historical material, to indicate the sequence of its separate strata" (German Ideology 37).

Marx and Engels refer to their method at this time as a "critique of philosophy" or just "critical philosophy" (Marx to Ruge 145) and write on different occasions that its goal is "self-clarification" (1859 Preface), or, i.e., the "reform of consciousness" (Marx to Ruge 144). Critique as the inversion of ideal premises for self-clarification is characterized as "a matter of a confession, and nothing more. In order to secure remission of its sins, mankind has only to declare them for what they actually are" (145). In other words, at this stage critique takes "the form corresponding to man who has become conscious of himself" (144). In this way, after discovering "the rational kernel in the mystical shell" of speculative philosophy will "the riddle of history" as human self-estrangement be "solved" (Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts 297). Marx will even repeat this religious characterization of critique as "confession" later in the 1859 Preface when he confesses that their earlier mode of critique was a way "to settle accounts with our former philosophical conscience" (264). In short, Marx and Engels themselves recognize at this stage of their research that their critique of post-Hegelian philosophy "is still infected by its antithesis" to some extent, as Marx will say of the dogmatic conceptions of communism by the sectarian left at the time. It was a "sin" they "confessed" to in order to clear their "philosophical conscience" after having formulated their own historical materialism and abandoned the sectarian utopianism of critical philosophy for a scientific communist approach.

Marx in his early writings of the 1840s is a radical republican who is criticizing bourgeois society for politically failing to realize the emancipatory ideals of the bourgeois revolution (Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité). His defense of these ideals consists of showing how they can be advanced by appealing to those who are "politically struggling" (Marx to Ruge 144) for a democratic republic to replace the hereditary monarchies of Europe, as against the reformist constitutional monarchy advocated by the liberal Hegelians. He does not consider himself a socialist or communist because of their utopian rejection at the time of any political movement. At this stage he literally "identifies" critique with popular democratic struggles for reform (144). During this time Marx's critique is "radical" in how it exposes the continuation of political domination despite the realization of constitutional freedom in the name of human freedom in civil society before the proletariat had emerged as a politically independent class-for-itself. The point is to speak for "a class of civil society that is not a class of civil society" but the dissolution of classes (Critique of Hegel's Philosophy 186). Here the proletariat is represented as a passive and inert object of concern, rather than the agent of new social relations. Subsequently, after the proletariat emerges as the agent of socialism in the revolutions of 1848, Marx's critique changes to a materialist one for which political freedom within bourgeois society is considered a mystification of the economic domination of wage-slavery and its self-negation by the internationally organized working class.⁸ The aim of critique changes for Marx in this period from being primarily a declaration of the political independence of the proletariat—"to win the battle of democracy… to wrest, by degrees, all capital from the bourgeoisie" (Manifesto 504)—to being a revolutionary call to arms—the abolition of bourgeois private property through "permanent revolution": "until all more or less possessing classes have been forced out of their position of dominance, the proletariat has conquered state power… [and] the decisive productive forces are concentrated in the hands of the proletarians" (Marx and Engels, "Address" 281). Political domination—i.e., the inversion of democratic forms of governance by a political elite—is itself understood to be an inverted reflection of economic domination—the forced separation of the workers from the means of production and the alienation of exploited wage-labor.

Marx and Engels' theory of ideology in the early period is that it is a imaginary inversion of real relations that is produced by "professional ideologists," like the "Young-Hegelian ideologists" whom they call "industrialists of philosophy" (The German Ideology 27). Their explanation of the cause of ideology is the competitive logic of the market:

The industrialists of philosophy… now seized upon the new combinations. Each with all possible zeal set about retailing his apportioned share. This naturally gave rise to competition, which, to start with, was carried on in moderately staid bourgeois fashion. Later when the German market was glutted, and the commodity in spite of all efforts found no response in the world market, the business was spoiled in the usual German manner by fabricated and fictitious production, deterioration in quality, adulteration of the raw materials, falsification of labels, fictitious purchases, bill-jobbing and a credit system devoid of any real basis. (German Ideology 27-8)

This earlier immanent ("exoteric") critique of ideology as a fantastical inversion of empirical market relations is later grounded in Marx's outside ("esoteric") critique of ideology as the real mystification of labor in commodity production in Capital. Taken in itself this exoteric critique of German ideology—which inverts the pride of German philosophy "as the partie honteuse [shameful part] of German society" (Critique of Hegel's Philosophy 178)—is itself a symptom of "commodity fetishism." By attributing the speculative nature of their abstractions to the concrete labor of the "industrialists of philosophy" (rather than the mode of production as a whole), this view reifies ideology. It treats ideology as an "objective character stamped upon the product of that labour" by the innate natural quality of its immediate producers' concrete activity, not "the peculiar social character of the labour that produces them" (Capital vol. I).

The immanent or exoteric character of critique in The German Ideology can also be seen in its merely descriptive use of political economic categories—such as "fictitious production" above—to explain the intellectual bankruptcy of Young Hegelian "critical criticism." Fictitious production, however, is not simply a particular kind of production, i.e., "false" because it is "devoid of any real basis." On such a surface reading, fictitious production serves to mystify the economic base that explains it in the manner of the technological determinism of (post)marxists today who claim that "immaterial labor" (Negri) has replaced wage-labor as the source of value in "platform capitalism" (Srnicek) because it produces images and ideas. In Capital, by contrast, Marx demystifies "fictitious production" as "fictitious capital" by explaining it as a surface effect of a hidden economic law of capital accumulation. Because capitalist production requires the "ratio of exploitation" to be increased to extract more "relative surplus-value," it inevitably reaches the point that the rate of profit falls in relation to the average mass of capital accumulated and market speculation (i.e., fictitious capital investment) outpaces productive investment in industrial capital (Capital, vol. III: Chapter 15). On this totalizing economic theorization, the idealism of critical criticism is not due to German economic backwardness relative to productive English industry, as The German Ideology implies, but rather the "combined and uneven development" (Trotsky) of European capitalism such that Germany was being actively underdeveloped by British capital due to the overproduction of capital in England.⁹ In other words, as the Manifesto of the Communist Party puts it, because "the conditions of bourgeois society are too narrow to comprise the wealth created by them" capital is forced into "the conquest of new markets, and… the more thorough exploitation of the old ones" (490).

Marx in Capital explicitly critiques his own earlier immanent critique-as-inversion as "uncritical" from a "scientific" point of view when he writes:

Technology discloses man's mode of dealing with Nature, the process of production by which he sustains his life, and thereby also lays bare the mode of formation of his social relations, and of the mental conceptions that flow from them. Every history of religion, even, that fails to take account of this material basis, is uncritical. It is, in reality, much easier to discover by analysis the earthly core of the misty creations of religion, than, conversely, it is, to develop from the actual relations of life the corresponding celestialised forms of those relations. The latter method is the only materialistic, and therefore the only scientific one. (Capital, vol. I:375)

The point is no longer to simply philosophically re-interpret "mental conceptions" as having an "earthly core," but to develop in a positive and reliable way a materialist understanding of the bourgeois mode of production—one that causally explains the "celestialised" appearance of its social relations, which obscures their historicity and thus reveals the revolutionary potential of the modern proletariat as the "gravedigger" of capitalism.

The 1859 Preface is where Marx explicitly states his mature scientific theory in which the cultural superstructure is understood to be determined by the economic base. Here he opposes "the precision of natural science" (to explain "social existence/material life") to "ideology" ("the consciousness of men"). In other words, he is no longer merely inverting ideal premises to discover the real material premises that explain the ideological mystification of social life. Such an inversion of premises only amounts to a description/interpretation of how "men become conscious" of their "real conditions of existence," not explain why self-consciousness is "something they must acquire like it or not" because of how "their social existence determines their consciousness." The latter requires explaining how the mode of production (with its self-negating contradiction between the forces and relations of production) determines "the legal and political superstructure" to which there correspond "definite forms of social consciousness." Ideology (the "forms in which men become conscious") is not just an inverted image of their real conditions of existence (as it is in The German Ideology where ideology mostly refers to the mental abstractions of professional philosophers), it is consciousness as a "reflection" of "the totality of the[] relations of production [that] constitutes the economic structure of society" despite its diverse forms (legal, artistic, religious, scientific, etc.). Even as these ideological forms of consciousness "invert" social reality in diverse ways they also "reflect" the primary contradiction of the social totality between the forces and relations of production. Ideology both advances with "development of the productive forces" by enabling individuals to "become conscious of this conflict" and, as well, "fetters" their consciousness by diverting them from the primary contradiction in society by "fight[ing] it out" in "legal terms" (or, artistic, religious, scientific, etc.). The only difference that matters when considering ideology as an historical materialist is how these forms of consciousness give us to understand the socioeconomic contradictions that determine and hence explain the surface conflicts at the level of the cultural superstructure without the prejudice (literally, pre-judgment) of the actors whose thoughts are necessarily "transmitted from the past" in a reified form. Ideology is thus not merely a reverse image that critique inverts into empirical premises—the "negation of negation" thereby amounting to a subjective, voluntarist act that "confront[s] the world in a doctrinaire way with a new principle" (Marx to Ruge 144). Marx rejects communism as a "dogmatic abstraction" (142-3) for effectively amounting to the ethical imperative to "cease your struggles, they are foolish; we will give you the true slogan of struggle" (144). Rather, critique is revolutionary when "it shows the world what it is really fighting for" (144). And it does so by explaining how the underlying social contradiction between what is made possible by the force of collective labor is being exploited instead to maintain the outdated class relations and the rule of profit over unmet need. In this outside esoteric critique, ideology is a manifestation of the underlying economic contradiction that immanently resists any closural meaning or merely formal cultural resolution to the class antagonism in the social totality.

It is not that the two modes of critique I outline correspond to opposed ways of knowing (inside/outside; immanent/transcendent; from above/from below; etc.). Rather, these binary oppositions, at the level of ideology, are themselves a distorted expression of a fundamental class antagonism whose roots lie in the economic, outside ideology. What is "false" about false consciousness is its reification of ideology as a merely cognitive matter—as if it concerned how people think—which sustains the illusion that material contradictions can be overcome by changing people's ideas. In truth, the point is to explain why the underlying class antagonism is materially reflected in consciousness itself, as a mode of expression through which the sides of the primary economic contradiction "fight it out" at the level of ideas. The "sides" within any given ideological conflict can only be explained from their outside, by reading them as reflecting the contradiction between the forces and relations of production in the economic base. Through this critique-al mode of reading from the outside the immanent negation of the outside in the cultural conflicts is itself negated. The negation of the negation is not merely the inversion of the inside, however, but an index of the transformation of the superstructure by the economic base because the production of "revolutionary ideas" out of the critique of the "dominant ideas" as ideologically false conceptions only emerges "when the material conditions for it… are already present or at least in the course of formation" (1859 Preface).

As Engels explains in his well known letters on ideology as "false consciousness" of the economic, while idealism—in opposition to materialism—emphasizes the "form" over the "substance" of ideas, in any case, the ideologists ("scientists" in whatever field) are compelled to accept "facts" as transmitted from the past, unaware of their more remote origins in "the production and reproduction of actual life" (Engels to J. Bloch, September 21–22, 1890), due to the hegemony of bourgeois production. Thus, he argues, because of "the bourgeois illusion of the eternity and ultimacy of capitalist production" (Engles to Franz Mehring 165), the "majority of people" are "deluded" by the "semblance of an independent history of… ideological conceptions [in every sphere of science]" to accept an "undialectical conception" of natural causality (164-5) and imagine that "all action is induced by thought" (165), unaware of the "actual [hidden] motives" impelling them (164). Elsewhere, he explains that because "the economic history of a given period can never be obtained contemporaneously" (Introduction to Class Struggles in France 506)—because it remains impossible to "to follow day by day the movement of industry and trade on the world market" and "these manifold, complicated and ever-changing factors… generally operate a long time in realms unknown before they suddenly make themselves forcefully felt on the surface" (506)—the materialist method is forced by circumstances to "treat this [the economic situation], the most decisive factor, as constant" (507) and "limit itself to tracing political conflicts back to the struggles between the interests of the existing social classes… caused by economic development," which necessarily makes the writing of contemporary history prone to "error" (507). In this way, bourgeois private property hinders social scientific explanation—because "industry and trade… operate a long time in realms unknown… [economic] statistics always lag behind" (506)—and insures "the course of history up till now" remains "like a natural process" (Engels to J. Bloch 35) beyond collective human control. While the ideological "form" of history as a natural process is dominant in bourgeois society, the economic "substance" of history as social praxis is conversely emphasized in historical materialism because, as Engels says, scientific socialists are forced "to stress this leading principle in the face of opponents who den[y] it" (36). It is on this materialist analysis that Engels elsewhere confesses that "history has proved us, and all who thought like us, wrong" (Introduction to Class Struggles in France 512) in their earlier conception of ideology when during the revolutions of 1848 they assumed that a spontaneous revolution could succeed if the masses were led not by "false representations" but "by ideas that were the truest reflection of their economic condition" (511). Marx had already mocked this dogmatic conception of radical critique in 1843 in his letter to Ruge when he writes that it assumes "the stupid, exoteric world had only to open its mouth for the roast pigeons of absolute knowledge to fly into it" (142). The lesson Engels draws from the failure of sectarian socialism to lead the masses to taking power is that in future the masses "must themselves already have grasped what is at stake" (520), which will require "long, persistent work" by communists to raise their level of class consciousness. What this means is that the immanent critique of ideology through its materialist inversion—such that "false representations" of bourgeois society are replaced by "true ideas" that actually reflect economic conditions—is not in and of itself revolutionary because not only must "philosophy find[] its material weapons in the proletariat, so [too must] the proletariat finds its spiritual weapons in philosophy" (Marx, Critique of Hegel's Philosophy 187). The negation of ideology, in short, is not "true socialist" consciousness, but class consciousness—the praxical transformation of the proletariat from being a class-in-itself to becoming the class-for-itself.

The letters of Engels on ideology quoted above—which appear together as "Letters on Historical Materialism" in the Marx-Engels Reader—are usually read as support for Althusser's "overdetermination" thesis as providing a more sophisticated theory of history than the crude economic determinism of the base/superstructure metaphor of Marx's 1859 Preface. This is itself an ideological misrecognition of Engels' point in these letters. To read Engels here as revising the fundamental premise of historical materialism (economic determinism) is to fall into the very ideological illusion Engels is contesting. By maintaining an aleatory notion of history as "overdetermined" in its essence—so that the social totality appears de-centered and a contingent effect of a "structure in dominance" (For Marx 254) rather than as grounded in the economic relation of humans to the productive forces—Althusser reproduces the dominant ideology of bourgeois society, in which history appears as a natural process beyond conscious collective control. The result is a merely descriptive social theory that remains contemplative and interpretive rather than an explanatory theory capable of grasping the laboring subject and guiding its revolutionary activity. In the assumption that "ideology has no history" (Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy 107) because it reflects the transhistorical structure of domination as persisting despite the transformative dialectic of labor through successive modes of production, Althusser basically accepts the apparent autonomy of the superstructure in relation to the economic base. Hence, Althusser underwrites what Engels theorizes as the "ordinary, undialectical conception of cause and effect" (Engels to Franz Mehring, 165) with regards to the relation of "ideas" vis-à-vis "facts," which is explained by the economic determination of alienated labor in bourgeois production. Because Althusser argues, contrary to Engels' economic determinism, that "the lonely hour of the 'last instance' never comes" (For Marx 113), his (post)marxist social theory serves to "delude[] the majority of people" to accept the "semblance of an independent history of… ideological conceptions" (Engels to Franz Mehring 164-5) so that knowledge of how history is made remains an unconscious process.

Ideology appears to be "inverted" (imaginary rather than real), but in actuality it is "nonsense" formed in ignorance of "the dominating influence of economic development" that is bound to be replaced "by fresh but always less absurd nonsense" (Engels to Joseph Bloch, Reader 764) because, as Marx says, the development of capitalism "will drum dialectics even into the heads" of the most vulgar bourgeois philistine ("Afterword" 20). It "must" because dialectical materialist critique represents the actual impossibility of accepting "the bourgeois illusion of the eternity and the finality of capitalist production" given the undeniability of "basic economic facts," such as the fact that capitalism "has simplified the class antagonisms" and "split society into two great hostile camps… Bourgeoisie and Proletariat" (Manifesto 485) to the point that "society can no longer live under this bourgeoisie" (496) and forces the proletariat to make "despotic inroads on the rights of property, and on the conditions of bourgeois production" (504).

If critique remains immanent, merely a self-critical mode of thinking that contradicts ideology as the "dominant ideas," rather than explaining ideology as "the ideal expression of the dominant material relations, the dominant material relations grasped as ideas" (Marx and Engels, German Ideology 59), then it ceases to be dialectical—what Engels discusses as the "asymptotic approximation" of concepts to objective reality (Engels to Conrad Schmidt 463) and Lenin as a "safeguard against mistakes and rigidity" (Once Again on the Trade Unions 94)—and loses its materialist objectivity. Without such dialectical objectivity whatever "resists" the dominant ideas is for that very reason taken to be material in and of itself, and against which knowledge appears merely contemplative, interpretive, and conventional (as in Kant's transcendental critique of reason, Nietzsche's transvaluative critique of morals, or Heidegger's Destruktive critique of ontology). But the effect of such a subjective view of critique obscures that "dominant" is a class relation, and with the development of the proletariat as a class-for-itself from out of the crisis of capitalism itself, communist consciousness emerges as dominant ("takes hold of the masses") so as to transform the class relations that produce the dominance of the "dominant."

If critique is considered the opposite of reified thought, as it is for critical thinking/philosophy, then the theory of ideology itself becomes idealist (or, one-sided, interpretive) rather than materialist (this-sided, explanatory). This reified purely immanent critique can then be applied equally to both the critique of ideology as the hypostatized concepts of professional philosophers as in The German Ideology, as much as to the economic determinist critique of ideology as commodity fetishism in Capital. When critique is treated as an "abstract identity" (Engels, Dialectics of Nature 496) in this way the substantive difference between immanent and dialectical critique itself becomes abstract, an "irreconcilable opposition" rather than a "difference within identity" (496). The result is that whichever form of critique is prioritized in this false choice, it necessarily becomes one-sided and false. For example, from the viewpoint of Marx's Capital insofar as his youthful critique of ideology as irrational philosophy fails to explain the economic determination of "false consciousness" in commodity fetishism it itself appears ideological. Conversely, from the viewpoint of Marx's earlier "critical philosophy," his mature theorization appears equally one-sided by grounding "the death knell of capitalism" in the esoteric self-negating laws of bourgeois production while neglecting communism as immanent to what "the world has long dreamed of possessing… of which it has only to be conscious in order to possess it in reality" (Marx to Ruge 144). From the latter point of view—remaining immanent to self-consciousness—Marx's argument that capitalism "will drum dialectics even into the heads" of the most practical bourgeois philistine and force humanity "to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind" can only be the kind of dogmatic and doctrinaire approach that the young Marx rejects because it says, "Here is the truth, kneel down before it!" Later, after the emergence of a revolutionary proletariat in Europe, the "reform of consciousness" obscure to itself will be read as the sign of the sectarian attitude of "infantile communism" that "divides society in two, one of which is superior" to the other, which "assumes an inspired prophet on the one side and on the other only gaping asses" (Marx qtd. in Annenkov 271), at a time when "revolutions carried through by small conscious minorities at the head of masses lacking consciousness is past" (Engels, Introduction to Class Struggles in France 520). The formalization of critique as immanent critique of ideology as reified thought in opposition to the materialist critique of ideology as dogmatic economism and the like assumes that the point of critique is the "dialectical reconciliation of concepts and not of comprehending actually existing relations" (Marx, Economic Manuscripts 27).

Marx's later concept of materialist critique, however, transforms how dialectics and change are understood as social ontological categories, i.e, as "real abstractions" made "concrete in thought" through social praxis. It does not merely agitate for the proletariat to fulfill the democratic ideals of bourgeois society by appealing to popular struggles and the libertarian dreams of the people, but explains how the bourgeoisie has brought into existence the "permanent revolutionary" class who alone is able to complete and move beyond the democratic revolution and abolish class as such.

Lenin's discussion of "agitation" and "propaganda" in What Is To Be Done? is also a recognition of the two modes of critique within Marxism. Communists have and must advance both forms of critique (just as Lenin says that Marxists must advance the militantly materialist culture of atheists and scientists). However, to assume their "abstract identity" or formal equivalence without awareness of the "difference within identity" they represent as "sides" of the social totality (base/superstructure; forces/relations; living/dead labor), is to accept a merely formal resolution to what are dialectical contradictions caused by the existing property relations. "Agitation" is concerned with ongoing exposure of the economic struggle between labor and capital to improve the terms of the workers' sale of their labor-power to the capitalists so they may be able as much as possible to be in a better position to acquire political education (class-in-itself), while "propaganda" concerns the political education of the working class so as to prepare it for its revolutionary tasks to abolish class society by ending exploitation (class-for-itself). To "identify" them assumes that the difference is merely strategic—as in the practice of social democrats who counterpose theory and practice under the illusion that "the final goal of socialism is nothing…, the movement everything" (Bernstein, Preconditions of Socialism 190)—which accommodates bourgeois ideology because it normalizes the commodification of labor. Conversely, to only engage in propagandistic activity on behalf of what Lenin codifies as "socialist ideology," risks reducing Marxism to a form of "infantile communism" that assumes what Engels rejects as bowing to the spontaneity of "ideas that are the truest reflection of economic conditions," as do today's "new communists" (Badiou, Zizek, Negri, et al.) for whom ideas are acausal and autonomous on the argument that "immaterial" production is dominant in postindustrial societies. Despite his revisionist concept of ideology, what ultimately makes critique revolutionary for Lenin is that it is dialectical and directed against both the infantile leftist dogma of voluntarism and spontaneity and the sclerotic liberalism and economism of the reformists. Lenin's conception was also Marx's who not only for decades carried out a ruthless struggle against sectarian socialism (Proudhon, Bakunin, Owenism, etc.) and reformism (Chartists, trade-unionists,…), but also against philosophical idealism and mechanical materialism (with its so-called "scientific method").

Critique takes on a different form not only whether it is radically "inverting" or materialistically "negating," but depending on which premises it is inverting/negating. When critique is directed against idealism the point is to show how its "abstract" premises are in actuality distorted reflections of material premises. Conversely, when critique is directed against vulgar (ahistorical/metaphysical) materialism the point is to show how its "concrete" premises are abstract and unreal without a dialectical analysis of their historicity. This "inversion" of premises is in any case predicated on the theory that ideology is produced by ideologists and that critique has as its goal a change in consciousness. And yet, what actually produces ideology and transforms consciousness—thereby negating ideology's unreal negation of the real—is the dialectic of history itself: the "respective powers of the combatants" (Marx, "Value" 146) in class struggle, determined by the "ratio of exploitation" (s/c+v). The task of critique is to prepare the workers to consciously anticipate the inevitable crisis of capitalism due to the logic of accumulation so that they may become the ruling force in society and establish the principle of "from each according to [their] abilities, to each according to [their] needs" (Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme 87) as a universal rule.

Class Dismissed: On the Arrival of The Red Critique

Since its beginnings just about a quarter of a century ago, The Red Critique has primarily served to bring class analysis to bear on contemporary issues in opposition to the post-al theory of the academic left. The journal has historically represented a radical opposition to the incorporation of the university and its bourgeois knowledges into the globalized structures of capital. It has therefore focused on contesting the "post-ality" (Zavarzadeh) of the dominant cultural theory (i.e., postmodern, poststructural, postcolonial, postindustrial, postfordist, postmarxist,…), which posits a break in capitalism severing its exploitative past from a new post-capitalist present, which is thought to be non-exploitative due to greater cultural pluralism and freedom from oppressive norms (sexism, racism, heteronormativity, etc.). The point of The Red Critique has been to show that beyond the hype of a "prosumer" capitalism beyond capitalism that capitalism remained itself—i.e., fundamentally exploitative of working people regardless of their cultural differences and identities.

Since 2024, however, the situation has changed. Not only has it become the commonsense that "woke" capitalism—capitalism with greater diversity and equality of opportunity—is still capitalism and the division of society into two fundamentally opposed classes of rich and poor continues to accelerate, but with the historic decline of its living standards the US working class (the most diverse in the world) has rejected bourgeois identity politics and is beginning to act as a class-for-itself.¹⁰ What we are witnessing is the process Marx described in The Poverty of Philosophy:

Economic conditions had first transformed the mass of the people of the country into workers. The domination of capital has created for this mass a common situation, common interests. This mass is thus already a class as against capital, but not yet for itself. In the struggle, of which we have pointed out only a few phases, this mass becomes united, and constitutes itself as a class for itself. The interests it defends become class interests. But the struggle of class against class is a political struggle. (211)

What we are seeing is that the crisis of global capitalism is "simplifying the class antagonism" in society and by increasing the erosion of living standards around the world is forcing workers "to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind" (Manifesto 487).

The Red Critique has changed along with these broader social changes. Its task is no longer primarily to bring class-consciousness to bear upon the post-class consciousness of deracinated knowledge workers desiring a "line of flight" from class, but to advance revolutionary Marxist theory within the most militantly materialist layers of the working class currently in the process of becoming "the real movement that abolishes the present state of things."

A sign of this shift in orientation from the defense of militant materialism against cultural materialism to accepting "the actuality of the revolution" (Lukács, Lenin) currently in the process of formation, is the differentiation within The Red Critique in reading "ideology critique" as radical "inversion" versus materialist "reflection." Radical critique intervenes in the cultural struggles with "outside" knowledge of class to contest the dominant ideology and open up spaces for change. Such critique is involved in the daily hand-to-hand fight against the scribes of the ruling class who block workers from acquiring the "elements of enlightenment" (Marx and Engels, Manifesto 494) that frees them to advance their class interests against their common exploiters—radical critique represents the class-in-itself. Materialist critique begins where radical critique ends with the singular pursuit of concentrating the vanguard of the working class toward making revolution by abolishing private property and ending class society—materialist critique represents the class-for-itself. This task requires a critique of the working class itself to explain the historical emergence of those who have "raised themselves to the level of comprehending theoretically the historical movement as a whole" (Manifesto 494), from "the great mass of the proletariat" (498).¹¹

The two forms of critique represent a "difference within identity." To abstract them from their unity in the totality effectively equates them while actually prioritizing the first (critique as inversion of ideology from within) over the second (critique of ideology as false-consciousness of the economic outside) and underwrites the dominant immanent culture critique that passes for radical today. Under the assumption of their abstract oppossition a formal equivalence is maintained such that the root materialist difference between them is occulted to make it appear that, (1) anything is a possible object of critique, and, (2) everything is to be critiqued in the same way; as if the point of critique were "the reform of consciousness" and "consists only in making the world aware of its own consciousness" (Marx). But, "consciousness must be explained from the contradictions of material life, from the conflict existing between the social forces of production and the relations of production" because "it is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness" (Marx, 1859 Preface). What is a "radical" and "ruthless critique of everything existing" anyway? Is it one which inverts consciousness on a voluntarist ad hoc basis, which amounts to "agitation" for the class-in-itself by tailing those who are already struggling for improvements within wage-slavery, or, is it the "tribune of the people" that consistently explains consciousness as an effect of property relations, and thereby advances the revolutionary theory that is necessary to transform the class-in-itself into a class-for-itself by "clarify[ing] for all and everyone the world-historic significance of the struggle for the emancipation of the proletariat" (Lenin, What Is To Be Done? 423)?

The immanent inversion of ideology that gives to critique a voluntarist and arbitrary form is a secondary effect of the development of the forces of production which has already made the dominant ideas dead, ineffectual, and obviously irrelevant. As the "clarification of consciousness" critique does the work of bourgeois society that the bourgeoisie themselves have turned against—to advance a democratic culture by building an enlightened public sphere that educates the citizenry to reflect upon the needs of the globalized multicultural workforce that capitalism has itself produced. It is only when critique becomes a scientific explanation of history as transformative praxis, however, that it is capable of showing what this force is destined to produce when the yoke of bourgeois property is overthrown, which makes it red. For critique to be revolutionary it must advance with the forces of production and show how this force dictates what must be done politically now to realize communism. For critique to do this effectively can only be the result of consistent practice in collectivity because only in this way can it be determined how the dominant ideas that currently shape people's illusions about themselves and occult their collective power to make change have already been, or, at least in the course of being, negated in social praxis by the power of global labor.

Take "race" for example, which in mainstream discussions has replaced class as a way to talk about inequality. Everyone already knows—in the same way as Lenin says workers "already know about factory conditions"—that it is a phony arbitrary classification; i.e., ideological rather than real. To give an immanent critique of "race" by its radical inversion means to reveal its secular basis, as Marx, for instance, did in "On the Jewish Question" (1843), where he discusses it as a market phenomenon due to competitive self-interest. Doing so, however, implies that (1) despite racial categories being unreal, they persist as irrational beliefs; (2) it is necessary to correct people's irrational thinking by making it correspond to what actually exists; (3) opposing people's beliefs in imaginary things is the most important thing for social change; and therefore (4) critique as inversion is the most effective mode of critique. But race, like "differences of age and sex" (Manifesto), has no explanatory and transformative power for understanding the proletariat as a class with the power to end the existence of classes. Without ending the existence of class, racial discourses will continue to be used to maintain the economic, political, and ideological power of the ruling class by dividing the workers against themselves to drive down the cost of labor.

Such a materialist approach to race is however oppossed on the argument that the production of racial illusions is also "material" and explains the unequal outcomes of market society in terms of health, housing, education, surveillance, incarceration, and so on. Using a "new materialist" approach, the northatlantic left understand race as an "agential" category possessing a life of its own that exceeds wage-labor/capital relations and is therefore post-ideological: it exceeds its discursive origins in nineteenth century biologism and twentieth century cultural politics because such discourses are entangled in material apparatuses that yet persist despite the delegitimation of these particular discourses. When Butler for example says that "race" is how "class is lived" ("Merely Cultural" 38) what this means is that race is a popular mode of sense making for explaining why certain "bodies matter" (i.e., have rights that must be recognized) while others do not in how they are practically treated (or "valued"), regardless of whatever biological, cultural, or ideological differences they may be thought to possess. Butler's views broadly coincide with the "new materialist" approach which emphasizes matter's role in racialization beyond all linguistic constructs and social ontology. For example, in Karen Barad's "agential realism," non-representational "intra-actions" among material "apparatuses"—which includes everything from school curricula to spirometers and the surveillance tools of the digital marketplace (see e.g.; Peralta, Rosiek, Chadha, et al.)—enact "agential cuts" that intersect with historic patterns of racialized inequity. Race, on this view, is "material" insofar as individual bodies are inequitably affected in racialized ways, not because race relations are rooted in production relations. Such a "matter-ist" notion of materialism as object-al (singularly experienced as harmful) rather than objective (produced by exploitative relations) is used to underwrite an "ethics of mattering" (Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway 353) that recognizes the agency of all things equally as a guide to enacting more just social outcomes as local piecemeal reforms. What is unsaid in this reformist social theory, however, are the relations of determination whose causal power is the basis for transformative explanations. It unsays, in other words, how "the specific economic form in which unpaid surplus labour is pumped out of the direct producers determines… racial relations" (Marx, Capital vol. III: 777-78) and thus explains why "right can never be higher than the economic structure of society" (Marx, Critique of the Gotha Program 87). Ending racism requires abolishing its roots in class exploitation, not in seeking just outcomes within exploitation.

Without an historical materialist theory of race based on an examination of how the commodification of human labor requires the cheapening of labor power to increase profit—by, e.g., using legal mechanisms to deprive "migrant" labor of an equal share of public subsidy as "domestic" labor—race becomes reified as a thing in itself that is naturalized as having an autonomous existence of its own. When race gets "reified" in this way—turned into an extra-economic thing-in-itself rather than understood as emerging from and negated by production relations—it is made a "floating signifier" available for cultural resignification (Hall, "Race, the Floating Signifier"). Instead of challenging the fundamental exploitation of workers under capitalism, racial categories are instead made an object of cultural re-valuation and discursively repurposed to justify redistributing the social surplus rather than abolishing the exploitation of labor at its root. Abolishing the unequal outcomes of workers in terms of race means giving everyone equal opportunity to submit to having their labor exploited for profit. Not only is the freedom to sell one's labor power already the horizon of bourgeois right, however, and, therefore, neither "new" nor "ethical," but it occults a fundamental contradiction of capitalism to decrease the socially necessary average labor time through automation while increasing proletarianization. Capitalism cannot realize bourgeois right for everyone not because society is haunted by "racecraft" (Fields, Racecraft) and certain populations are privileged while others are denied the right to be equally exploited because of their identities, but because it can neither produce full employment nor a "fair" wage for all when the "right" to work is contingent upon one's ability to be exploited (i.e., produce surplus-value) under contracting conditions of profitability (due to accelerating global economic development).

It is only among the petit-bourgeoisie that racial ideology persists as a zombie category for making sense of social inequality within wage-labor/capital relations because only they are in a position to materially benefit from racial politics. This is not (in contrast to the right wing claims) because they are "woke" or "racialist," and neither is it because (as in left-wing discourse) they are "racist" or "white supremacist," but because the "ethics of mattering" they institutionally manage—wether in liberal academia or conservative think tanks—accommodates itself to piecemeal harm reduction within the exisiting relations of production, characterized by the real subsumption of living labor under capital due to the increasing automation of production. Racial justice for some means accepting wage-slavery for all as the horizon of justice. As a result of these economic changes race as a consequence has lost the crude specificity it once had and become more abstract. Previously when capital only formally subsumed pre-capitalist economic formations to itself through colonialism such primitive accumulation of capital was intellectually justified using natural scientific categories that were broadly associated with the values of neutrality and objectivity and race was biologically essentialized. Since science itself has been subsumed under capital to increasing the relative value of labor through automation, race has become a more abstract category seemingly agential in itself as a way to make sense of unequal outcomes among workers in the multipolar global economy. Now race is discussed as "racecraft," a mode of sense making inscribed in cultural practices by institutional apparatuses engaged in the digital exchange of "cultural capital" (Bourdieu, "Classes and Classifications") that give to it the phantom objectivity of the commodity form. With the failure of racial politics in bringing about greater social justice under conditions of increasing inequality and its cooptation as corporate wokism, racial difference is now discussed as "object-al" in itself—as in afropessimist, white supremacist, and pro-zionist discourses—and made out to be non-transformable and therefore resistant to critique. In other words, it has become an ideological discourse of legitimation to justify the institutional privileges of upper management to police public discourse and serve and protect capital.

Race, however, is really and actually irrelevant to the basic functioning of capitalism to produce private profit from abstract social labor. The divisions among the workers are actually caused by the organization of production for the pursuit of profit and the accumulation of value which renders this or that segment historically redundant, not because of its racialization, but because of its lack of profitability, i.e., inability to produce surplus-value.¹² It is only when we take this objective economic approach based on an abstract understanding of the laws of motion of capitalist society as a totality that materialist critique takes the side of the proletariat and refuses to accommodate itself to the illusions of the cultural superstructure, which are simply the forms in which people become conscious of the contradictions in the capitalist mode of production and "fight it out" within ideology. From a scientific socialist standpoint, however, race doesn't matter, in the same way all other ideology doesn't matter "in the final instance" (Engels to J. Bloch) in determining "the relationship of domination and servitude" (Marx, Capital vol. III: 778) in the production and consumption of the social surplus, and is therefore irrelevant in constituting the horizon of a radically transformative politics. Race as an ideological category has no explanatory power regarding the extraction of surplus-value, which depends solely on the difference between the value of labor-power (determined by the socially necessary labor-time required to reproduce the worker) and the unpaid surplus-value created by that labor-power in the production process for the capital owner.

The only reason to consider such ideological illusions as race is to critique them by laying bare why, when "all are instruments of labour, more or less expensive to use," cultural differences "no longer have any distinctive social validity for the working class" (Marx and Engels, Manifesto 491). The point of such a critique is to show why "labour cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the black it is branded" (Marx, Capital vol. I: 305); in short, in order to oppose how race is used by capital to divide workers by mystifying their class commonality. But against whom is such a critique directed if race "no longer has any distinctive social validity for the working class" as a class-for-itself? The question is answered by looking more closely at "the specific economic form in which unpaid surplus labour is pumped out of the direct producers" today, which is globally automated production. Today, race only has "social validity" for petit-bourgeois knowledge workers, among whom cultural differences are emphasized and elaborated upon as so many markers of personality and identity, serving to make their labor more attractive to capital for managing the labor force. It is not that racial illusions divide the workers that they must be critiqued; it is that they divide the fresh reserves of proletarianized knowledge workers with "radical" ideas about "racial justice" as an end in itself from siding with the advanced workers—those who "wish to read and do read all that is written for the intelligentsia" (Lenin, What Is To Be Done? 384)—who are nevertheless committed to "the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority, in the interest of the immense majority" (Manifesto 495) to abolish the existence of classes. It is the latter who represents the social basis for the working class-in-itself to become a revolutionary class-for-itself, provided that they acquire the necessary "elements of enlightenment" of red critique-al theory and oppose the reformist illusions of the dominant pink populism. This requires opposing all forms of (inter)sectional consciousness that subordinate class independence to cross-class coalitions, whether organized around racial justice, national liberation, or any other social movement that fails to center the abolition of wage-labor/bourgeois property.

In other words, the critique of race is necessary not because it is an ethical imperative to oppose how "people still believe in it" or "workers are xenophobic," but because it acts as an ideological fetter to grasping the dialectics of production "with sober senses." To make race the persistent object of ideology as if agential in itself because of its singular effects, however, subsumes the abstract (materialism) to the concrete (matterism), inverting essence (exploitation) and appearance (domination), and can only amount to performing the work of the petty-bourgeois managers to improve the economic functioning of bourgeois society (e.g., by showing how cultural differences must be recognized and accommodated in the workplace). This inversion can only serve to integrate oppositional movements into the reproduction of capital by channeling struggle toward reforms in the sphere of distribution (equal access to wages, housing, education,… ) while leaving exploitation in the relations of production intact. But the reason to expose the class politics of cultural difference—for red critique-al theorists—is to demonstrate the "productive forces slumbering in the lap of social labour" (Manifesto 489), for the majority of which cultural differences no longer practically matter, and to reveal the revolutionary character of the international proletariat and what becomes possible once it throws off the yoke of capital. It is this theoretical reflection of the dissolution of cultural differences in social praxis that makes the red critique the enemy of the reformist populists who want to regulate capitalism to be more fair and manage the redistribution of public resources rather than abolish labor as a commodity by ending private property.

Notes

1. This is evident in how in southern Europe and Latin America left populist parties assumed power in the wake of the 2007-8 crash only to forcibly impose market discipline and austerity on behalf of global capital. Their betrayal of the working class has massively delegitimated liberal-left reformism and encouraged a global swing toward right-wing populism in protest. It raises the question: with the resurrection of left populist programs like Mamdani's Sanders-esque mayoral campaign in New York City and Corbyn's return to float a new left party, what exactly does the third iteration of populist reformism in the US represent? If the first time was the tragic perversion of populism (red MAGA), and the second its cynical parody (blue MAGA, "dark wokism"), then the third stage (pink MAGA) represents the final act of forgetting the class struggle and thereby failing to assimilate the lesson why reformism is dead on arrival in the present era of capitalism's decline.

2. To make this more concrete, consider how during the initial waves of the pandemic the left associated the necessary COVID mitigation policies with common sense governance and techno-scientific expertise rather than appeal to the class interests of the exploited against the exploiters to disastrous result by fueling conspiratorial thinking and increasing vaccine hesitancy. The association of critique with a scientific worldview today is not a matter of its specialized expertise when compared to non-knowledge, but its commitment to the universal aims of the pursuit of knowledge to serve for the realization of human freedom from the manufactured rule of necessity imposed by capitalism. Science is not a specialized knowledge, but a social process of discovery that changes the world. It is the "social brain" (Marx, Grundrisse 694) of the "collective worker" (Gesamtarbeiter) (Marx, Capital vol. I: 354).

3. The latest and most relevant example of this mytho-theological class theory is Bruno Latour's On the Emergence of an Ecological Class. In Latour's "ecological class" the social is composed of a "battle of ideas about what the world is made of" (58), which re-recognizes the property question inscribed in production between capital owners (exploiters) and propertyless wage laborers (exploited) as a "question of metaphysics" (58). Class, for Latour, is a performative Schmittian distinction "between friends and enemies" (5) of materialism; "a conflict over what constitutes a materialist analysis of living conditions" (11) and who are the actual "wealth producers" (47)—"workers" (47) organized in production, or, the "living beings" (48) engaged in "the practices of engendering they depend on" (21)? Class in this social imaginary is a matter of (self)classification rather than objective economic necessity.

4. Marx critiques the libertarian imaginary of this psycho-cultural class theory for how it analytically abstracts existing "civil society" from "the anatomy of this civil society" that explains it (Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy 262). In the Grundrisse he elaborates that it "belongs among the unimaginative conceits [fantasies, aesthetic illusions] of the eighteenth-century Robinsonades… in whose imaginations th[e]… individual… appears as an ideal, whose existence they project into the past. Not as a historic result but as history's point of departure" (83).

5. I leave aside here that the difference between human and nonhuman self-reflection—contrary to vitalist transspecieists like Haraway and flat ontologists such as Latour—is a function of the human self-transformation of the environment. Humans are not only "entangled" in nature, but capable of changing it "in accordance with the standard of every species" (Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts 277).

6. The "spirit" of Derrida's "critique of capital" actually has more in common with (post)marxists like Frederic Jameson (Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism) and David Harvey (The Condition of Postmodernity) who think of capitalism as culturally and/or technologically "overdetermined" than the materialist approach of Mas'ud Zavarzadeh who provides a classical revolutionary Marxist theorization in "Post-ality: The (Dis)simulations of Cybercapitalism" (Post-Ality: Marxism and Postmodernism).

7. For more on Felski's brand of (post)critique see, Tumino.

8. Marx had of course already formulated his immanent critique of "alienated labor" as early as the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 and, as well, explained why communism would result from the self-negation of capitalism in such texts as The Poverty of Philosophy (1847) and Wage-Labour and Capital (1847). What changes after the revolutions of 1848, however, is the conception of the role of critique in the revolutionary process. Prior to the proletarian revolutions of 1848 critique is an "intellectual weapon" for the production of "communist consciousness" through the philosophical negation of alienation (see e.g., the Introduction to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Law, 1844). With the process of political self-organization of the proletariat into a class-for-itself, critique becomes the "element of enlightenment" (Manifesto 494) needed to unite the "sections of the ruling classes" who "are precipitated into the proletariat" by "the advance of industry" (493), with "the most advanced and resolute section of the working-class" (497) into an international communist vanguard party. Critique is necessary precisely to counter the influence of sectarian ideas (e.g., Proudhonian anarchism, "true socialism" and the like etc.) being brought into the workers movement by the declassed petty-bourgeois in crisis, because they compromise the workers' revolutionary independence as a class. Critique changes from being a one-sided negation that is "oppositional" toward "what is" to accelerate the process of social dissolution—the "actual pressure must be made more pressing by adding to it consciousness of pressure" so as "not to allow… a minute for self-deception and resignation" (Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Law 178)—to becoming "transformative" by negation of the negation "until a situation is created which makes all turning back impossible, and the conditions themselves call out: Hic Rhodus, hic salta! (Eighteenth Brumaire 106), and the proletariat is enabled to "set free the elements of the new society with which old collapsing bourgeois society itself is pregnant" (Marx, The Civil War in France 335).

9. British capital investment in German agrarian exports after the economic crisis of 1837 supported the reactionary Junker class over nascent German industry (see, Colligan).

10. Another way to say this is that with the cultural center of bourgeois politics shifting to the right—with the historic dealignment of the working class from the Democratic Party having reached its peak in the 2024 US elections—capital is shedding its neoliberal capitalist realist ideology ("socially liberal and economically conservative") and adopting a neofascist ideology (socially conservative and economically liberal) to contain the emerging proletarian revolution. To use Lukács terminology, the dominant ideology is no longer the romantic anti-capitalist amalgam of "left wing ethics, and right-wing epistemology," represented by (post)modernism, but the reverse—a neoclassical capitalism that uses reactionary norms (irrationalism, hierarchy, status competition) to justify left-wing economics (socialism for the rich) that is post-postmodernist. It therefore no longer appears that "the bourgeois is a bourgeois—for the benefit of the working class" (Marx and Engels, Manifesto 514) and is acting more plutocratic; a class in and for itself. The result is that the working class is being forced to set aside its manufactured cultural "differences" in order to defend its interests as a class against the entirety of bourgeois politics.

11. Such a critique entails materialist analysis of the difference between productive and unproductive labor to explain ideological differences that arise within the workers' movement (see, Mandel, The Leninist Theory of Organization). Productive labor is abstract social labor that increases the total mass of surplus-value by the transformation of raw materials into useful products. Workers in these sectors engage in socially necessary labor that increases the mass of capital as a whole. They therefore constitute the permanent core of the working class without which there can be no capitalism. It is their centrality that allows them to acquire the "elements of enlightenment" that are necessary for an abstract theoretical outlook (the "propaganda" of materialist critique). This is also what makes them more prone to the "opportunist" reformist politics of the labor bureaucracy/social democracy. In this they are distinct from the mass of the working class which is exploited but unproductive in relation to the mass of capital as a whole and whose numbers grow in proportion to productive labor as the productivity of the latter increases overall due to automation. Because unproductive labor is more subject to market fluctuations and therefore precarious, these workers are more prone to rebellion, but also more open to "sectarian" cultural politics, as Mandel explains. Because of their spontaneity they are more open to the "agitation" of radical critique. The task of critique now is to overcome this social contradiction between the vanguard and the mass of the working class by "propagating" the red critique of the totality.

12. It is the general cheapening of labor power in high-tech global capitalism that produces the economically precarious conditions of life that makes the working class predominantly anti-racist in outlook. It is this, not "The Great Awokening," that explains the spontaneous solidarity of the majority white working class with oppressed minorities we see in recent mass mobilizations in the US, from the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, to the Gaza solidarity protests of 2025, and the current anti-ICE demonstrations. Race, in other words, has become practically irrelevant to the mass of the working class despite its popularity as a category of identification in bourgeois politics to divide and police the workforce into accepting the declining living standards due to the overaccumulation of capital. The question now—since race is already being overcome as an obstacle to the realization of class solidarity—is how will the workers overthrow the power of the ruling class that uses racism to divide the workers to maintain its power? The "weapon of critique" must become the "critique of weapons" (Marx, Critique of Hegel's Philosophy 182). The failure of mass protests to end the race baiting of migrant labor to divide the US working class is giving rise to calls for a general strike, but even large-scale strikes will fail unless workers assimilate the lessons of revolutionary struggle distilled in classical Marxist theory and broaden the horizon of struggle beyond simple harm reduction.

Works Cited

Althusser, Louis. For Marx. Verso, 2005.

—. Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. Translated by Ben Brewster, Monthly Review Press, 2001.

Annenkov, Pavel. "From the Essay 'A Wonderful Ten Years'." Reminiscences of Marx and Engels, edited by Institute of Marxism-Leninism of the C.C., C.P.S.U., Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1957, pp. 269-72.

Barad, Karen Michelle. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Duke University Press, 2007. https://bit.ly/3NLRmqS.

Bernstein, Eduard. The Preconditions of Socialism. Translated by Henry Tudor, Cambridge UP, 1993.

Bourdieu, Pierre. "Conclusion: Classes and Classifications." Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Translated by Richard Nice, Harvard University Press, 1984, pp. 466–484.

—. Forms of Capital. Edited by Patrick Champagne et al., translated by Peter Collier, Polity Press, 2021.

Braidotti, Rosi. The Posthuman. Polity Press, 2013.

Brecht, Bertolt. "The Epic Theatre and Its Critic." Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic, edited and translated by John Willett, Hill and Wang, 1964, pp. 33-36.

Butler, Judith. "Merely Cultural." New Left Review, vol. I, no. 227, Jan.-Feb. 1998.

Chadha, Noor, Bernadette Lim, Madeleine Kane, and Brenly Rowland. Toward the Abolition of Biological Race in Medicine: Transforming Clinical Education, Research, and Practice. Othering & Belonging Institute and Institute for Healing and Justice in Medicine, May 2020.

Cohen, Margaret. Profane Illumination: Walter Benjamin and the Paris of Surrealist Revolution. U of California P, 1993.

Colligan, Daniel C. The Origins of German Industrialization: The Transition to Capitalism in Prussian Agriculture. PhD dissertation, City University of New York, 2025, https://bit.ly/4uL2kxn.

Cotter, Jennifer et al. Human, All Too (Post)Human: The Humanities after Humanism. Eds. Jennifer Cotter, Kimberly DeFazio, Robert Faivre, Amrohini Sahay, Julie P. Torrant, Stephen Tumino and Robert Wilkie. Lexington Books, 2016.

De Ste Croix, G. E. M. The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World: From the Archaic Age to the Arab Conquests. Cornell University Press, 1998.

Derrida, Jacques. The Animal That Therefore I Am. Fordham University Press, 2008.

—. "Letter to a Japanese Friend." A Derrida Reader: Between the Blinds, edited by Peggy Kamuf, Columbia UP, 1991, pp. 269-76.

—. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, The Work of Mourning & the New International. Routledge, 1994, https://bit.ly/4c3mA62.

—. "Typewriter Ribbon: Limited Ink (2) ('within such limits')." Material Events: Paul de Man and the Afterlife of Theory, edited by Tom Cohen, University of Minnesota Press, pp. 277-360.

Derrida, Jacques, and Maurizio Ferraris. A Taste for the Secret. Polity, 2001.

Ebert, Teresa L. "Rematerializing Feminism." Science & Society, vol. 69, no. 1, 2005, pp. 33-55. https://bit.ly/4bKI1Y9.

—. "(Untimely) Critiques for a Red Feminism." Post-Ality: Marxism and Postmodernism, edited by Mas'ud Zavarzadeh, Teresa L. Ebert, and Donald Morton, Maisonneuve Press, 1995, pp. 113–149.

Engels, Frederick. "The Congress of Sonvillier and the International." Karl Marx/Frederick Engels: Collected Works, 50 vols., Progress Publishers, 1988, vol. 23, pp. 64-70.

—. "Dialectics of Nature. Notes and Fragments. Dialectics." Marx/Engels Collected Works, vol. 25, Progress Publishers, 1987, pp. 492–98.

—. "Introduction to Karl Marx's Civil War in France." Karl Marx/Frederick Engels: Collected Works, 50 vols., Progress Publishers, 1990, vol. 27, pp. 179-91.

—. "Introduction to Karl Marx's The Class Struggles in France, 1848 to 1850." Marx/Engels Collected Works (MECW), vol. 27, Progress Publishers, 1990, pp. 505–24.

—. "To Conrad Schmidt, 12 March 1895." Karl Marx/Frederick Engels: Collected Works, 50 vols., Progress Publishers, 1989, vol. 50, pp. 462-67.

—. "To Franz Mehring, 14 July 1893." Marx/Engels Collected Works, 50 vols., Progress Publishers, 1989, vol. 50, pp. 163-68.

—. "To J. Bloch in Königsberg, 21 September 1890." Marx and Engels Collected Works, Progress Publishers, 1994, vol. 49, pp. 33-37.

—. "Letter to Joseph Bloch, 21-22 September 1890." The Marx-Engels Reader, 2nd ed., edited by Robert C. Tucker, W.W. Norton, 1978, pp. 760-65.

Felski, Rita. The Limits of Critique. The University of Chicago Press, 2015. https://bit.ly/4bH9LwU.

Fields, Karen E., and Barbara J. Fields. Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life. Verso, 2012.

Fiske, John. Understanding Popular Culture. 2nd ed., Routledge, 2011. https://bit.ly/4rXZSkG.

Foucault, Michel. "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History." Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, edited by Donald F. Bouchard, translated by Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon, Cornell University Press, 1977, pp. 139-64.

Hall, Stuart. "Race, the Floating Signifier." It's Not Where You're From . . . It's Where You're At: The Stuart Hall Collection, edited by Sut Jhally, Media Education Foundation, 2021.

Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire. Penguin Books, 2005.

Harman, Graham. "I Am Also of the Opinion That Materialism Must Be Destroyed." Environment and Planning D, vol. 28, no. 5, 2010, pp. 772-90, https://bit.ly/4sxRM3h.

Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Philosophy of Right. Translated by T. M. Knox, Oxford UP, 1967.

Heidegger, Martin. "The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking." Basic Writings from Being and Time (1927) to The Task of Thinking (1964), edited by David Farrell Krell, translated by Joan Stambaugh, HarperCollins, 1993, pp. 431–449.

Kant, Immanuel. "An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment?" Practical Philosophy, Cambridge University Press, 1996, pp. 11-22, https://bit.ly/47lMqQ2.

Laclau, Ernesto, and Chantal Mouffe. Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics. 2nd ed, Verso, 2014.

Landy, Joshua, and Michael T. Saler. The Re-Enchantment of the World: Secular Magic in a Rational Age. Stanford University Press, 2009. https://bit.ly/3PIefMm.

Latour, Bruno. "From Realpolitik to Dingpolitik or How to Make Things Public." Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy. Edited by Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005, pp. 14-41.

—. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford University Press, 2005, doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780199256044.001.0001.

—. "Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern." Critical Inquiry, vol. 30, no. 2, 2004, pp. 225-48, https://bit.ly/4uSnQ3h.

Latour, Bruno, and Nikolaj Schultz. On the Emergence of an Ecological Class: A Memo—How to Promote the Emergence of an Ecological Class That's Self-Aware and Proud. Translated by Julie Rose, Polity Press, 2022.

Lenin, V.I. Philosophical Notebooks. V. I. Lenin Collected Works, 45 vols., Progress Publishers, 1977, 38.

—. "Once Again on the Trade Unions, the Current Situation and the Mistakes of Trotsky and Bukharin." Collected Works, vol. 32, Progress Publishers, 1965, pp. 70-107.

—. "What Is To Be Done?: Burning Questions of Our Movement," V. I. Lenin Collected Works, 45 vols. (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1977), 5, pp. 347–529.

Lukács, György. The Destruction of Reason. Translated by Peter Palmer, Humanities Press, 1981.

—. Lenin: A Study on the Unity of His Thought. Translated by Nicholas Jacobs, New Left Books, 1970.

—. The Ontology of Social Being: 3. Labour. Merlin Press, 1978.

Mandel, Ernest. The Leninist Theory of Organization: Its Relevance for Today. International Marxist Group, 1971.

Marx, Karl. "Afterword to the Second German Edition of Capital." Karl Marx/Frederick Engels: Collected Works, 50 vols., Progress Publishers, 1996, vol. 35, pp. 2-20.

—. Capital, A Critique of Political Economy, vol. I. Karl Marx/Frederick Engels: Collected Works, 50 vols., Progress Publishers, 1983, 35.

—. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Volume 1. Translated by Ben Fowkes, Vintage, 1990.

—. Capital, A Critique of Political Economy, vol. III, Karl Marx/Frederick Engels: Collected Works, 50 vols (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1983), 37.

—. "Civil War in France." Karl Marx/Frederick Engels: Collected Works, 50 vols., Progress Publishers, 1986, vol. 22, pp. 307-59.

—. "Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Law. Introduction." Karl Marx/Frederick Engels: Collected Works, 50 vols., Progress Publishers, 1976, vol. 3, pp. 175-87.

—. "Critique of the Gotha Programme." Karl Marx/Frederick Engels: Collected Works, 50 vols., Progress Publishers, 1984, vol. 24, pp. 75-99.

—. "Critique of the Hegelian Dialectic and Philosophy as a Whole." The Marx-Engels Reader, edited by Robert C. Tucker, Norton, 1978, pp. 106-25.

—. "Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844." Karl Marx/Frederick Engels: Collected Works, 50 vols., Progress Publishers, 1975, vol. 3, pp. 229-346.

—. "Economic Manuscripts of 1857-8." Karl Marx/Frederick Engels: Collected Works, 50 vols., Progress Publishers, 1986, vol. 28, pp. 17-537.

—. "The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte." Karl Marx/Frederick Engels: Collected Works, 50 vols., Progress Publishers, 1979, vol. 11, pp. 99-197.

—. Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (Rough Draft). Penguin Books, 1993.

—. Letter to Joseph Weydemeyer, 5 Mar. 1852. Karl Marx/Frederick Engels: Collected Works, 50 vols., Progress, 1983, vol. 39, pp. 62-64.

—. "Marx to Ruge is Kreuznach." Karl Marx/Frederick Engels: Collected Works, 50 vols., Progress Publishers, 1975, vol. 3, pp. 141-45.

—. The Poverty of Philosophy. Marx and Engels Collected Works, Progress Publishers, 1976, vol. 6, pp. 105-212.

—. "Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy." Karl Marx/Frederick Engels: Collected Works, 50 vols., Progress Publishers, 1987, vol. 29, pp. 261-65.

—. "Preface to the First German Edition of Capital." Karl Marx/Frederick Engels: Collected Works, 50 vols., Progress Publishers, 1983, vol. 35, pp. 7-11.

—. "Theses on Feuerbach." Karl Marx/Frederick Engels: Collected Works, 50 vols., Progress Publishers, 1975, vol. 5, pp. 3-8.

—. 'Value, Price and Profit', Karl Marx/Frederick Engels: Collected Works, 50 vols, Progress Publishers, 1985, vol. 20, pp. 101–49.

Marx, Karl, and Frederick Engels. "The German Ideology." Karl Marx/Frederick Engels: Collected Works, 50 vols., Progress Publishers, 1976, vol. 5.

—. 'Address of the Central Authority to the League,' March 1850, Karl Marx/Frederick Engels: Collected Works, 50 vols (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1978), 10, pp. 277–87.

—. "The Holy Family, or Critique of Critical Criticism." Karl Marx/Frederick Engels: Collected Works, 50 vols., Progress Publishers, 1975, vol. 4, pp. 5-211.

—. "The Manifesto of the Communist Party." Karl Marx/Frederick Engels: Collected Works, 50 vols., Progress Publishers, 1976, vol. 6, pp. 477-519.

McNally, David. Monsters of the Market: Zombies, Vampires and Global Capitalism. Haymarket Books, 2011.

Mies, Maria, and Silvia Federici. Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale: Women in the International Division of Labour. Bloomsbury Academic, 2022. https://bit.ly/4rZy0N5.

Miéville, China. "Silence in Debris: Towards an Apophatic Marxism." Salvage, no. 6, 2017, https://bit.ly/4t8ruEH. Accessed 24 Jan. 2026.

Mouffe, Chantal, editor. The Challenge of Carl Schmitt. Verso, 1999.

Nash, Charlie. "What I Like about Coronavirus by Slavoj Žižek." The Spectator, 2020.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. On the Genealogy of Morality and Other Writings. Edited by Keith Ansell-Pearson, translated by Carol Diethe, Cambridge University Press, 1994. https://bit.ly/4sr4zEy.

Peralta, Lee Melvin. "Agential Realism." The Handbook of Critical Theoretical Research Methods in Education, edited by Cheryl E. Matias, Routledge, 2021,

Rosiek, Jerome. "Critical Race Theory Meets Posthumanism: Lessons from a Study of Racial Resegregation in Public Schools." Race Ethnicity and Education, vol. 22, no. 1, 2019, pp. 73-92.

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. Discourse on the Origin of Inequality. Translated by Donald A. Cress, Hackett Publishing Company, 1992.

Sloterdijk, Peter. Critique of Cynical Reason. Translated by Michael Eldred, foreword by Andreas Huyssen, U of Minnesota P, 1987.

Smith, Adam. An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. Edited by R. H. Campbell and A. S. Skinner, 2 vols., Oxford University Press, 1976.

Sohn-Rethel, Alfred. Intellectual and Manual Labour: A Critique of Epistemology. Macmillan Press, 1978.

Srnicek, Nick. Platform Capitalism. Polity Press, 2016.

Thomson, George Derwent. Studies in Ancient Greek Society. Lawrence and Wishart, 1977.

Tumino, Stephen. Thinking Blue/Writing Red: Marxism and the (Post)Human. Open Book Publishers, 2024. doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0324.

Wright, Ian. "Marx on Capital as a Real God." Dark Marxism, 3 Sept. 2020, https://bit.ly/40Tl8wU. Accessed 30 Jan. 2026.

Zavarzadeh, Mas'ud. "Post-ality: The (Dis)Simulations of Cybercapitalism." Transformation 1: Marxist Boundary Work in Theory, Economics, Politics and Culture, Maisonneuve Press, 1995, pp. 1–75.