The exchange between Ray Brassier and Dimitra Kotouza began with the publication of ‘Wandering Abstraction’ in Mute in February 2014 and developed further in discussion at the Bilbao workshop later that year. The following text developed from their correspondence after the seminar, and remained unpublished until it appeared in Abolishing Capitalist Totality (Minor Compositions, 2026). Quotations are from Kotouza’s ‘Keepsakes’ unless otherwise indicated; in places they follow the correspondence rather than the published text.
I want to begin by noting my points of agreement with Dimitra Kotouza’s criticisms:1 they cut to the core of the issues at stake and by exposing the inadequacy of many of my formulations present me with an opportunity to clarify my position. Ultimately, these criticisms boil down to a single rejoinder: because they retain cognitive categories and social forms rooted in capitalist social relations (‘keepsakes’), my objections to communisation betray a conservatism precluding any genuinely revolutionary break with capitalism. This is a salutary criticism because it clarifies the underlying issue: what kind of negation is at stake in the overthrowing of capitalism? Kotouza charges me with a fundamentally conservative appeal to determinate negation (Aufhebung). Her rejoinder is that communism is capitalism’s abolition, not its sublation. On her account, communisation is radical precisely because it practices a form of negation that refuses to be determined by what it negates: i.e., commodification, property, wage-labour, law, the state, and ultimately, value itself. At the same time, Kotouza concedes that ‘total transformation’, understood as ‘the negation of all that exists’, will also ‘contain radically altered elements of the old world.’ Since we both agree that communism is not the remainderless annihilation of everything that exists – transfigurative annihilation is the purview of religious eschatology, not historical materialism – the crux is understanding what ‘radically altered’ means here. We know that communism entails the abolition of class, wage-labour, private property, the state, etc. This is a negative determination of its logical space; i.e., what communism must exclude. But we do not know what new social forms or experiential possibilities this exclusion will generate. Thus, we lack any positive determination of communism’s qualitative characteristics; i.e., what communism will be like.2 The question then is whether the negative determination of communism’s logical space, even if it entails no positive determination of its qualitative content, nevertheless entails a determination of this negation, such that negated content co-determines the form of its negation. My conviction that it does is broadly Hegelian (although I cannot substantiate this here). However, to say that content co-determines the form of its negation is not to say that content is preserved through its negation. What sublation preserves is the difference between the immediate and its mediation, not the identity of the immediate. Sublation is not the contrary of abolition but its truth: sublation abolishes positive immediacy while preserving the negativity that corrodes it from within. Abstracted from this movement, indeterminate negation perpetuates the positivity it aims to abolish because it misses its contradictoriness. ‘Radical alteration’ is the retroactive movement from immediate to mediate difference, in which contradiction is conserved, not the progress from determination to determination, in which identity is preserved. In political terms, it is the movement from wrong to the right wrong, not from wrong to right.
Kotouza’s rejection of determinate negation as intrinsically conservative derives at least in part from her conviction that both the form and content of negation can be determined only ‘in and through actual struggles’. However, the impossibility of pre-determining the effective (wirklich) form and content of negation for any specific instance does not justify the claim that its specific effectivity (Wirklichkeit) is un- or in- determined. This insistence that the work of determination unfolds in and through effective struggles is correct as far as it goes. But the claim that ‘struggles alone’ (which here also seems to imply the experiences generated through struggles) are practically and conceptually determining threatens a retreat to empiricism, which is simply the obverse of programmatism. It suggests that struggle is the exclusive matrix for the form and content of negation, downplaying the extent to which struggles are formed by and structured around determinate social contents. A one-sided emphasis on struggle as the sole source of an absolute but indeterminate negativity, disregarding struggle’s objective structural determinations, is also an empiricist capitulation to the existing order of things. The danger of such capitulation follows from the merely subjective rejection of the objective domain encompassing social and cognitive forms. The term ‘communism’ carries a historical weight that makes it imperative to preserve the fundamental distinction between subjective rejection and objective negation (where ‘objective’ here encompasses everything currently characterised as ‘subjective’). To ask ‘What is transformed and how?’ is to consider more closely what it is exactly that distinguishes revolutionary negation from a subjectivist conception of abolition whose radicalism turns out to be superficial. In this regard, I think the conservation of objective social and cognitive form for which Kotouza reproaches me is mirrored by the conservation of subjective form presupposed by her critique. This is the conservation of what Kotouza describes as a ‘potentiality’ for ‘self-transformation’ persisting despite capitalist social relations.3 To the extent that this potential is supposed to be the wellspring for the abolition of capitalist social relations, the question then is whether the unmediated subjective negation of capitalism can ever give rise to communism.4 I propose to address this question by considering the three fundamental problems raised by Kotouza’s objections:
The problem of the unity of the subject of struggle
The problem of the production of history
The problem of repurposing
1. The Unity of the Subject of Struggle
Kotouza thinks I commit a slippage from the claim that cognition is conditioned by practice to the claim that cognition can discriminate a priori between those practices which can and those which cannot abolish the real abstractions of capital (this is the question of the correlation between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ cognitive abstractions on one hand; and ‘progressive’ and ‘regressive’ social forms on the other). The problem with this approach, Kotouza argues, is twofold. First, it ignores how revolutionary practice transforms cognition. Second, it assumes ‘a single decision-making subject (the subject of theory) [… and] the possibility of a theoretical decision by a uniform “we” that predates a revolutionary moment.’ According to Kotouza, such a decision ‘pre-empts’ and ‘reduces’ ‘the multiplicity of desires and conflicts that are unleashed in struggles.’
I agree that revolutionary practice cannot but transform theory. But to acknowledge the various ways in which struggle transforms theory is not to say that struggle suffices to determine theory. A theory born of struggle is not thereby rendered infallible. Experience is a corrective for theory, not its generative matrix. The claim that theory begins and ends in experience is empiricism. It assumes that experience speaks univocally and that its lessons are incontrovertible. But experience is equivocal and what it has to teach can only be crystallised through further theoretical effort. Kotouza observes that ‘every theory takes a specific stance within struggles […] the question is how to discover the limits faced and possibilities produced in existing struggles, which are central to an analysis of the capital relation in this period.’ With this too I concur. My point is only that the limits against which struggles abut, and the possibilities they produce, do not reveal themselves transparently within the horizon of an extant struggle; they need to be drawn out and articulated by means of a theoretical analysis capable of illuminating struggle without being blinkered by it.
However, to acknowledge theory’s necessary responsiveness to struggle does not oblige us to accept as ineliminable ‘the multiplicity of desires and conflicts unleashed in struggle’. Simply to affirm the irreducibility of conflictual multiplicity is to capitulate to a theoretical doxa (instituted by post-structuralism) that has long since become integral to neoliberal ideology. Instead of uncritically affirming the multiplicity of desires, we should ask: what are these desires desires for? To what extent are they symptoms of capitalist subjectivation? Is their conflict ineluctable? Or is their disparity not perhaps the common element out of which might be woven a communist subjectivity? Individual consciousness is a theatre of conflicting desires largely (although not exclusively) shaped by the impersonal circuitries of capital. If it is naïve to presuppose the unity of the revolutionary subject, it is equally naïve to celebrate the agonism of desires as though it were a guarantor of emancipatory potency. Struggle unleashes a multiplicity of desires and conflicts but the expansion of struggle cannot be the extension of already existing desires and conflicts. It requires their integration such that all these desires and conflicts ultimately converge towards the abolition of the capital relation. This is not to say that a unitary horizon of integration can be stipulated in advance, merely to insist that the goal towards which communist theory and practice are oriented is the achievement of a unity-in-difference – or what Alain Badiou calls a generic multiplicity. That this unity is indiscernible from the vantage of the present does not render it unrealisable (what can be is a function of what is, which is not necessarily what we currently recognise). It is not given; it must be constructed. But the elements for its construction are precisely what is real, rather than imaginary, in these desires, and what is common, rather than exclusionary, among these conflicts.
Kotouza lays considerable emphasis on the fragmentary and indeterminate character of any contemporary affirmation of communism. The criticism of the present generated through struggle ‘is negative (reaching levels of suicidalness) because the positivity of “communist society” is today an unknown, the narrative that once led to it is defunct, and all we have is a limited criticism of the present through the practices of a fragmented proletariat with no ambition to unify or take power and manage anything at all.’ But, she goes on, ‘this lack of unity and of a future is fully material, and not an ideological falsity that can be cognitively defeated.’ It is true that a positive vision of communism remains largely out of sight and that the paths traditionally taken to lead to it are no longer practicable. But to conclude from this that any positive characterisation of communism is a betrayal is to treat communism as an agnostos theos and communist theory as a via negativa. Theological transcendence is too impracticable to wield as a weapon against capital. We can positively characterise communism’s logical form if not its qualitative content. The complete delinking of negation from determination turns the necessary acknowledgement of communism’s historical defeat into a prohibition on any vision of its future realisation. Just as absolute iconoclasm idolises the shattered image, abstract abolition becomes redemptive: a consolatory substitute for the determining exercise of negation in theory and practice. But to be a materialist is to refuse to fetishise shattered icons and to insist that nothing is redeemed by abolition. This is why the abolitions of wage labour, private property, and the state must be determinations as well as negations. And while materialism demands that we acknowledge proletarian fragmentation and the disintegration of revolutionary ambition (which have been trumpeted by reactionaries for decades), it does not require that we treat contingent historical defeats as though they were decrees from an absconded divinity. The point is to learn from the historical failures to achieve communism, not to embrace failure as the necessary chastisement for sinful hubris. The inference from ‘lack of unity’ to ‘lack of a future’ is idealist, not materialist.
By the same token, it is not clear why a struggle shaped entirely by the contours of what it rejects deserves to be called ‘criticism’. Criticism of the wrong state of things prefigures in negative, through its ruthlessness, the right state of things; otherwise it is not criticism but lament. And however vehement, lament inexorably reinstates what has been as what should be. It fetishises a lost immediacy. Struggle unilluminated by prefiguration is not criticism; it is a reflex conditioned by and therefore bolstering what it is recoiling against. The unity of theory is the condition of prefiguration as what provides the horizon for thinking and acting; but this theoretical unity need not and does not guarantee the unity of the revolutionary subject which is its practical corollary. Thus Kotouza is completely right to insist that theory begins from the absence of a unified revolutionary subjectivity. Communist subjectivity is a result, not a precondition: ‘Theory cannot presume a decision-making revolutionary unity, because the latter can only begin to be produced in the process of abolishing the social divisions that fragment it.’ The question then is how to situate the unity of theory in relation to the production of communist subjectivity on one hand and the abolition of social divisions on the other. Since materialist theory is the double articulation of thinking and acting, its unity does not exist independently of practice. From a materialist standpoint, theory, subjectivity, and practice are co-constitutive facets of a single dynamic process. Theory only achieves unity through the movement in which communist subjectivity is produced and social division is abolished. Thus the unity of theory is nothing but the coincidence of production and abolition. To recognise this is to refuse to abstract any moment from the process or subordinate the others to it. The unity of theory is not the precondition for subjectivity or practice; but nor do they provide the grounds for it. Materialist theory is nothing but productive abolition. Because theory is immanent to subjective practice, which is nothing but the exercise of theory, the practice of theory generates the immanent criteria through which the distinction between emancipatory and oppressive forms is exercised. This is not ‘categorisation’ according to pre-established theoretical criteria but cognitive discrimination in and through practice. Thus I disagree with Kotouza when she writes:
The very premises of the question of categorising ‘oppressive’ and ‘emancipatory’ social forms and mediations are then mistaken. The question should instead become one of how objective and subjective relations and forms of being can transform and become other than, beyond, capitalist. This is a question of the process of a radical criticism of the present and of the possibility of overcoming the limits of who we are. It conceives of transformation through struggles and internal conflicts within them; not via the classification of the stuff of this world outside of the process that transforms it, and certainly not through looking in advance for something to preserve.
The refusal to discriminate between oppressive and emancipatory forms leads Kotouza to posit a pure transformative potential that is no longer mediated by capitalist social relations but simply characterised as the abstract ‘overcoming’ of all those objective and subjective determinations (both social and historical) that make us what we are. This potential for self-overcoming is invoked as a pre-existing power waiting to be unleashed by the cancellation of determining limits (‘the limits of who we are’). But as such it remains an abstract subjective possibility, what Heidegger (a problematic precursor here) would call ‘a pure potentiality to be’, rather than a concrete material possibility harbouring determinate transformative power. Conceived as pure or indeterminate potentiality, the process that transforms the world, however subjectively conflictual, is not of this world. To insist that it is, then, is to insist that the world must be made to participate in its own overcoming. This is theory as productive abolition, which is neither the expression of a pre-existing potential inscribed within the world, nor the miraculous upsurge of a subjective potency transcending the world. Theory becomes collectively transformative as the immanent discrimination of concrete universality in becoming. In this regard, Kotouza sees in my attempt to align universality with impersonality, impartiality, and objectivity an uncritical acceptance of the ‘all too familiar principles of bourgeois legal judgement’ that perpetuate the social relations reproduced by bourgeois law. The overcoming of capitalism, she claims, must be thought not only at the level of the impersonal but also of the personal: ‘The “personal”, apart from a form of social power, also designates the social level at which the singularity of each person in their full material dimension, in their difference, can be recognised.’ The problem here is not with the ‘recognition’ of singularity, for as Kotouza makes clear, ‘the point is absolutely not a democratist prescription of “mutual recognition” in processes of struggle.’ But if the ‘democratist’ conception of personal singularity rooted in mutual recognition is rejected without the elaboration of a dialectical alternative, the singularity of persons remains a metaphysical abstraction rooted in theology, and the appeal to the ‘material dimension’ of individual ‘difference’ simply reiterates the ideology of individualism. The only thing that is ‘material’ about the singularity of persons is the fact that it is rooted in socioeconomic status and underwritten by the state. This equation of individuality with difference is of a piece with liberal ideology. Its resurgence here reveals how the merely abstract negation of the categories of bourgeois civil society unwittingly reinstates them.
Kotouza’s subsequent characterisation of communism as a state of ‘radical insecurity’ and her account of the abolition of social categories as a process of radical ‘self-redefinition’ also reveals how, in the absence of objective mediation, the purely subjective abolition of capitalist social forms unwittingly converges with the neoliberal injunction to engage in a process of ‘multiple’ and ‘open-ended’ self-realisation under conditions of generalised socioeconomic precarity. Thus, Kotouza continues, the alternative to the rigidly impersonal conception of the universal and the ‘democratist’ ideology of mutual recognition is:
the conception of communism as a state of radical insecurity, if the abolition of constraining social categories is to not merely reproduce the rigid liberal universality of ‘man’, but instead open up a process of radical self-redefinition as a dialectic between the universal and the particular. The process of recognition is never a neat one-off abstract classification but always under contestation of both recogniser (the social) and recognised. It also means that the meaning of ‘human’ is multiple and open-ended. This dialectic is impossible under a notion of universality that gives primacy to the impersonal and to the closure of objectivity.
I want to make three critical remarks here. First, for the billions of humans already existing in conditions of extreme material precarity, the characterisation of communism as a state of ‘radical insecurity’ hardly sounds like a transformation. On the contrary, it makes it sound as if communism’s only promise is the indefinite perpetuation of their current immiseration. The communism of indigence is the penitential fantasy of first-world leftists. Communism is about satisfying the material needs of the many despite the interests of the few, not about punishing the luxury of the few at the expense of the many. Since the resources for satisfying these needs – and many others besides – already exist, this means that the many are entitled to appropriate much more than the bare means of subsistence. Second, if communism entails ‘radical self-redefinition’, the ‘self’ at issue cannot be understood as a pre-existing singularity juxtaposed to the many, as it is in traditional metaphysical schemas. Only insofar as the social recogniser redefines itself in the recognised particular, and the recognised particular redefines itself in the social recogniser, can the process of self-redefinition be genuinely collective, rather than merely individual. The ‘I’ must recognise itself in the ‘we’ and the ‘we’ recognise itself in the ‘I’. Third, insofar as this process of collective redefinition dissolves the traditional opposition of personal self to impersonal collectivity, it entails a new mode of existence, beyond the identifications of self, family, community, nation, and species, as well as the divisions of gender, race, and class. It is in this sense that the impersonal is a gateway to the universal. Only in this way can the parochialism of ‘human’ identity be overcome; not by pluralising and relativising the meaning of ‘human’, following the familiar strategy of liberal inclusiveness, but by superseding the opposition of identity and difference in the concrete universal. So long as the process of ‘self-redefinition’ remains anchored in the dialectic of recognised self and recognising collectivity, its ‘open-endedness’ remains bounded by the horizon of identification.
Communist subjectivity is the overcoming of this horizon by abolishing the identifications of class, race, gender, etc. But this self-abolition is only feasible if the agent of the abolition (act) is distinguished from the abolished self (content). It is this distinction that defuses what I have called ‘the paradox of self-abolition’, which Kotouza (mistakenly) takes me to endorse: ‘The paradox is of course only valid if we accept the logicisation of reality and subjectivity of which Brassier accuses Endnotes.’ In fact, it is Endnotes who attribute this logicisation to capital and the paradox it seems to engender does not follow from the false equivalence between logical and real subsumption, which Endnotes rightly reject, but from the conflation of subjectivity with self-identity. My claim is that Endnotes can avoid this conflation, as well as the attendant paradox, by distinguishing abolishing subject from abolished self.5 Kotouza seems to embrace something like this dissolution of the paradox. But she does so while continuing to equate subjective struggle with a potential self-transformation and in doing so she hypostasises subjectivity as the abstract overcoming of self-identity:
[I]f proletarians abolish ‘proletarian’ as a material social category, if they abolish the class relation, they are no longer proletarians: women are no longer women – their bodily difference has no oppressive social significance – ‘blacks’ are no longer ‘blacks’ and so on. They produce themselves as something else that is both singular and universal, creating the possibility of self-definition and of the re-definition of what is human, inventing new ways of relating to one another and to the world. It is the something else this abolition produces, the de-subjectification which objectively overcomes the limit of what one is, that the paradox seems to rule out. This, however, is the conception of a potential transformation, not the application of a logical necessity. The concept of self-abolition is conceivable not as a logical unfolding but as a potential that we can decipher in the present historical conjuncture because of the impossibility of class self-affirmation [my emphasis RB]. We could of course be proven entirely wrong.
It is to Kotouza’s credit that she acknowledges the obstacles standing in the way of such a realisation. But the difficulty is arguably more fundamental. By itself, the impossibility of class self-affirmation does not suffice to anchor this potential in the present historical conjuncture. A real gap separates the actuality of this objective impossibility from the actualisation of this subjective potential. Communism’s ‘real movement’ has split: it has forked into the real gap between objective forces and subjective potential.
2. The Production of History
If communism is no longer the forward march of history, it can no longer assume the mantle of modernity. This has become a critical commonplace. Thus Kotouza refuses any connection between it and the ‘progressive’ institutions of modernity (reduction of the working day, universal suffrage, health care, gender equality, automation, etc.). By the same token, she rejects any attempt to locate a hidden emancipatory element in the present:
The warnings against ‘the repudiation of modernity’ and ‘cancelling the emancipatory potentials latent in technologies’ can be seen as attached to a conservative interpretation of the Hegelian concept of Aufhebung. This is the idea that the overcoming of capitalism is not a total transformation, a negation of everything that exists so that something new might emerge, which will, inevitably, contain radically altered elements of the old world; rather, this overcoming must necessarily leave intact the ‘progressive’ elements latent within capitalism, because it is those elements that point towards its overcoming. Despite Marx’s best insights on historical determination only being applicable retrospectively, this approach wishes to locate the future in the present instead of producing it from the premises of the present.
Correctly understood, it is precisely sublation that entails that historical determination is only applicable retrospectively. However, this does nothing to substantiate Kotouza’s closing distinction, which seems to be purely verbal. If the future is ‘produced from the premises of the present’ without being ‘locatable’ in the present this is precisely because its premises are locatable within the present. Otherwise, what would it mean to call them its premises and how could they serve to produce it? Surely no programmatist ever claimed that the future is already in the present such that it does not need to be produced. The Marxist claim about the ‘real movement’ is precisely the insistence that the movement of things is irreducible to the movement of ideas, such that the production of the future not be confused with utopian futurism. Proponents of communisation see an objective index of the real movement in the expulsion of an ever-increasing surplus population from the process of value-creation. On Kotouza’s account, the subjective realisation of this movement unfolds as a self-overcoming that is not determined in return by the socially mediated determinations of the self. To reinstate a co-dependence between the movement of overcoming and the determinations that are overcome would be to tie communism back to the social institutions of modernity. Abolition would collapse back into Aufhebung. To the extent that she rejects any such interdependence between the act of overcoming and the content that is overcome, Kotouza cannot but hypostasise the movement of overcoming as a purely subjective transcendence. The real gap between communism’s possibility and its reality has to be filled in by endowing subjectivity with the power to transcend objective determination. This is to subjectivise the premises for the production of the future. Since they are no longer objectively locatable, whether in the determinations of class, the institutions of modernity, or the resources of technology, they too can only be subjectively identified through struggles:
We have to produce theory based on the struggles that take place today, when the notion of communism as progress has lost all social validity. The failure of past revolutions, the decline of the workers’ movement, the failure of social movements to make any significant gains in the past 40 years that would add up to a unifying ‘dynamic’ have killed off any delusion that history is on the side of proletarians. History has to be produced, everything has to be reconsidered.
It is certainly true that theory cannot deliver certainty of victory, especially not given the disappearance of any recognisable historical guarantors for the overcoming of capitalism. But a theory entirely subordinated to the vicissitudes of subjective agonism cannot even assume the practical possibility of transformation; it can only hope for its indeterminate advent, whether catastrophic or messianic. Moreover, if we cannot objectively determine the extent to which such an advent reconfigures the horizon of possibility, how could we even act upon it? Practical possibilities are rooted in material affordances. While it is certainly important to acknowledge how ideology misrepresents or occludes affordances, there must be some objective criterion for discerning occluded possibilities, otherwise how can we even talk of possibilities? A politics that relinquishes the possible either embraces the fatalistic foreclosure of transformation6 or maintains transformation as a vacuous possibility, which is the transubstantiation of incapacity: we no longer know how to change the world, or even how it could change, yet we continue to hope that it will. This is an ethics of struggle negatively mirroring the certainties of programmatism. But a struggle that has already foreclosed the possibility of victory is not a struggle: it is the spasm of the condemned.
3. The Problem of Repurposing
The identification of material points of leverage for interventions that might precipitate change presupposes some sort of objective understanding. Moreover, the only actually existing points of leverage are currently embedded within capitalist modernity. Kotouza rejects the claim that communism is the realisation of modernity.7 And indeed, to claim that it is would be to revert to a teleological interpretation of sublation that crudely traduces the historical dialectic. But the point is that modernity provides the material for the possibility of communism, not that the latter is the completion of the former. Thus when Kotouza writes:
the attachment to modernity must be criticised: not as a corruption of the idealised human community, but as a fetishism that objectifies and eternalises capitalist expansion, commodities, capitalist technology, knowledge and institutions, blind to the social mediations from which these are inseparable: the world-scale management and enforcement of exploitative social relations, and all the ensuing suffering and death.
She assumes that to acknowledge modernity as the material for communism is to be blind to the destructive nature of capitalist expansion and the oppressive social mediations with which it is bound up. But this simply does not follow. It confuses the claim that modernity provides the only available social material from which communism can be constructed with the claim that communism is the realisation of potentialities already actual in capitalism. Capital accumulation and exploitative social relations must be abolished, but the materials from whence this abolition proceeds are the commodities, technologies, knowledges, and institutions of capitalism. What else could be the starting point?
Capitalist modernity is not an attachment but an ineluctable condition. So we must ask: what does it mean to affirm a sociality untainted by any of the mediations characteristic of capitalism? Either we appeal to a lost immediacy or we evoke mediations that are not the result of capitalism. Kotouza recognises this problem but does not offer any solutions:
If social unity is to be founded on complex global-scale production, and if such production is to continue functioning with today’s effectiveness, this would require a complex and hierarchical division of labour, which presupposes social divisions, as well as a centralised power that would ensure that things function, that everyone who is able to ‘contributes to society’ by working and everyone is ‘fairly’ remunerated. Beyond the difficult problem of mediation (what would be the measure of ‘fairness’ here, and what form will remuneration take if not that of money?) there is also the question of social management as a potential form of oppression.
I agree that the specialisation of management is a potential source of oppression. But it is so to a much greater degree than social management per se, which need not entail a rigid division of labour and fixed specialisation. So it is important not to slip from suspecting the specialisation of social management to suspecting social management per se. I do not think Kotouza commits this slippage. But the questions she raises are difficult. Is all division hierarchical? Is every form of social management suspect because it is a potential source of oppression? (Waste disposal? Sanitation? Social housing?) The suspicion of social management betrays the unspoken conviction that sociality itself is oppressive. But what prospect then for a communist society? To predicate the realisation of communism on a set of social mediations that bear no relation whatsoever to actually existing capitalist mediations is to reduce communism to a wholly indeterminate ideal. The retort that determination can only be achieved through struggles is unconvincing: struggles are both determined and determining and invariably generate as many problems as they resolve. Unless one can specify how struggles could give rise to practices that mediate social relations without reinstating any real abstractions (not just the real abstractions of capital, such as money and abstract labour), the communist alternative to capitalist society evaporates into a plea for an idealised human community. The distinction between logical form and qualitative content is relevant here: what would mediations that are not generated by real abstraction be? Is every social synthesis generative of real abstraction? The denunciation of abstract domination implies an account of alternative forms of social synthesis; without this it becomes an empiricist condemnation of abstraction in the name of the fetishised concretion of a community without mediation. The latter is an abstraction more oppressive than any real abstraction of capitalism.
If the technologies of capitalist modernity are enveloped by social mediations that enforce the abstract domination of value then abolishing this domination requires constructing a new social synthesis. But if the realisation of a new synthesis is the precondition for non-oppressive technologies, then capitalist technology cannot be repurposed: any attempt to repurpose it merely perpetuates capitalist domination. This is a consequence Kotouza seems willing to embrace:
[W]hy should we assume today that, in the future, survival from illness would have to involve medicine as it exists today? […] It is […] impossible to extricate ‘function’ from its system of production, the complex, oppressively hierarchical divisions of labour and power relations on which today depend the production of medical knowledge as well as the commodities based on it. The use-value this argument attempts to extract as an ‘emancipatory potential’ from within capitalist commodities does not exist as a mere mechanical or biological functionality that can be separated from the social, the capitalist mode of relating in the process of its production and consumption, even less so from its subjection to exchange-value [….] Taken as far as it can go, this critique of use-value is the condition of possibility for the production of new forms of knowledge or technology, which are not guided by value but by an entirely different logic of relating.
How might one respond? The emancipatory potential of modern technology does not exist as a mechanical or biological functionality – it is not actual in that sense – rather, it exists as a potential but currently unrecognised function whose actualisation presupposes the construction of a new social relation. Thus my suggestion is not that technology itself harbours emancipatory potential but that its actual function (or use-value) does not exclude other possible modes of functioning in the construction of new social relations. But to claim, as Kotouza does, that the utility of modern medicine is circumscribed by and reproductive of capitalist social relations commits one to giving an account of what this ‘entirely different’ logic of relating might be. Otherwise, talk of the production of new forms of knowledge and technology remains empty, precisely because such knowledges and technologies are strictly inconceivable within the capital relation. Indeed, how could they even be called ‘knowledges’ or ‘technologies’? Since knowledge and technology as we know them are guided by value, the abolition of value entails the abolition of knowledge and technology as we know them. This is the price of Kotouza’s insistence that cognitive norms and technological functions are entirely circumscribed by a logic of relating subordinated to value. Nothing of the world as we know it can remain after the abolition of value. Thus it is not clear what Kotouza means when she writes that the transformed world will nevertheless ‘contain radically altered elements of the old world.’ Alteration is only intelligible against some background continuity; absolute alterity is unintelligible because it is effectively unrecognisable and therefore indiscernible from sameness. An alteration so radical as to alter the very form of its recognition is the same as one that leaves everything as it is. Kotouza de-absolutises capitalist domination by absolutising struggle as indomitable resistance. But how does one abolish a world if using any part of it in that abolition perpetuates it?