This seminar (language English, German) takes the form of a workshop in which all doctoral students present a “work in progress” and a broad discussion with all interested students can arise. The workshop is based on the support of colleagues (Nolz, Holmes, Kukulejevic) and gives an insight, so to speak, into a workplace, into a question that concerns us all.

There will be a preliminary meeting to prepare the two-day workshop.

What is capitalism?

A horrendous, universal nightmare, a crisis-ridden system of valorisation that structurally expands its own limits through their reproduction, and thus relentlessly encroaches on all processes, both human and non-human, an enemy to be identified?

Marx does not understand capitalism as a unified whole, but rather through a series of tensions that have led to various implementations. But for him, the intelligibility of capital was never an end in itself. Moreover, its domination can only be deciphered by those who fight it. According to Marx, the concept of capitalism cannot be established in purely theoretical terms, since it always refers to an antagonistic relationship of forces between the capitalist and the working classes, which is directly reflected in the laws of capital. This intrinsic split in all its determinations requires not only a critical rewriting of the categories of political economy, namely the law of surplus value and ‘so-called’ primitive accumulation, such as money, labour power, private property, relations of production, forces of production, etc. Furthermore, it means that capitalism is a form of politics whose specific feature is to make people forget that it is a form of politics.

How is this forgetting reflected in the ‘classical’ problems of philosophy, and how does political economy demand their reorientation? In the sense of this forgetting, the perspective broadens, both in terms of the scope of capitalism and its differentiation, and in terms of the conjunctures of its crisis. This raises a number of questions: What does capitalism do to ontology? How does capitalism interlock with the modern concept of science? How does state power shape itself in it? How does it lay claim to the desires and pleasures of the subject, and how does it impair them?

Today there is no clear-cut name available that could serve as a name for an antagonistic class vis-à-vis capitalism, such as ‘proletariat’. Furthermore, the mechanisms of capital power have multiplied and mixed without ever replacing each other. Forms of bellicose, state-sovereign domination combine with the murmur of global rumour-machines; discourses of life optimisation or the ‘need for security’ shape the standardisation of subjectivities; the difference between infrastructure and superstructure fades, etc.

Capitalist production materially permeates all institutional, geographical, psychic, national, social relations that it takes hold of, and yet its intrinsically parasitic character is determined by discontinuous tensions: tensions between ‘so-called’ primitive accumulation and exploitation, between formal and real subsumption, between reproduction and production. How its colonial robbery, its interventions in the metabolism of nature, and its patriarchal acts are related depends on the breakdowns of these discontinuities.

The historical periodisations of capitalism are the subject of countless disputes. Here, we summarise that our present time represents a period of ‘high capitalism’ whose globality is characterised by nihilism. The term ‘global’ refers to the modality of real abstraction in which we live, and which Gayatri Spivak has formulated pointedly: ‘Globalisation only takes place in capital and in data. Everything else is damage control’; one would probably also have to mention what resonates implicitly, namely war. Nihilism is essentially part of capitalism, as The Communist Manifesto already observed; but its boundless destruction now occupies the future itself, qua financial debt, climate catastrophe, permanent states of war, genocide.

This workshop works with a hypothesis that it takes from various conflicting traditions: the first operaism, the axiomatics of equality, and Maoism, which is itself an object of dispute. The name ‘proletariat’ may have lost its clout. Nonetheless, the insight gained with Marx continues to apply: that there are always two tendencies of antagonism at work in capitalism. That of capitalism itself has an overarching effect, that of its critique has a divisive effect. Or to put it another way: only by wrenching the subjective out of the objectification of the capitalist system, only by splitting it off from its dialectical integration in a contradictory whole, is it possible to recognise these contradictions as antagonisms.

To put it bluntly: such a ‘partial’ subjective separation constitutes an epistemological condition for eliciting the antagonistic character of capitalism. This ‘partiality’, in turn, does not submit to the appearance of a supposedly neutral ‘multilateral’ ‘liberal’ exchange of views; it tests the discontinuity of knowledge and truth that breaks through their neutrality.

The contributions to this workshop can either refer to one of the aspects mentioned here or confront the outlined common thread. The workshop is intended to support the progress of doctoral students and to bring them into contact with interested students.

The examination consists of writing a report of one paper.

(8-10 pages)