Presented at the ‘What Is to Be Done under Real Subsumption?’ workshop, Bilbao, 2014, and first published in Abolishing Capitalist Totality (Minor Compositions, 2026), a book dedicated to Marina's memory. Marina would go on to develop her account of the paradoxes of abolition in a 2015 reading of Frank Wilderson; in ‘(Un)making Value’, and ‘From Speculation to Infrastructure’. We are publishing this dossier in her memory.

In what follows, I would like to look at how ideas around abolition and self-abolition can help us understand the processes of dissolution and constitution implied by a revolutionary transformation of social relations, on the individual as well as collective level. Here, ‘abolition’ is a perspective applying chiefly to the abolition of ‘women’ or the abolition of gender. With regard to other determinations, such as race, however, it also needs to be thought together with the calls for ‘destroying the world’ that emerge from the thinking that gets called ‘Afropessimism’, or, more cogently, the emergence of political ontologies around the histories and critiques of anti-blackness. Both can thus be connected to varieties of philosophical negativity in the Western tradition, of which the two most prominent are the dialectical one (negation as transformation) of Hegel and ontological difference in Heidegger. Insofar as the abolition of gender is set out as the abolition of the institutionalised oppression which is the content of the gender relation, it can be aligned with the Hegelian framework, whereas the destruction of the horizon of being as predicated on anti-blackness is the Heideggerian move set on the purported ontological difference of the ‘black’ from the ‘human’ in the Western (and not just Western) social and ethical imagination. But further, some of the thinking I will be discussing below, such as Monique Wittig and Fred Moten, cannot easily be located on either side, as both develop a commitment to ‘entanglement’ as the condition of any rupture, be it in terms of the subject as a device for jettisoning subjectivity (also a theme in the Hegelian-influenced thinking of Theodor W. Adorno) or in terms of an aesthetics of being-together in nothingness as the condition of black social life.

In all the iterations of abolition I would like to discuss, the notion of self-abolition applies to a collective subject, or a subject that becomes collective in the process of its abolition. Hence abolition should be taken strictly in terms of a regulative principle orienting the ‘ruthless struggle’ against ourselves as we are constituted in the present, with a view towards a goal of large-scale social transformation as a dynamic or cumulative goal of these abolitionary processes. In this sense, self-abolition is both similar to and distinct from the traditional Marxist emphasis on the working class’s abolition of itself via its own activity. The notion of ‘abolition’ these days most often occurs in left or libertarian communist theory. This is a viewpoint which is principally (if not universally in practice) opposed to the organs of mediation or representation, such as political parties, that the historical movement guided by the axiom of self-abolition did not in principle exclude. Rather, the notion of self-abolition in this thinking marks and engraves the rejection of mediation insofar as mediation is thought to consolidate rather than overcome the position of classes and other collective subjects on the losing side of capital as social relation. The regulative principle can also be directed outwards – think of the passage in a recently translated text by some late 1970s Milanese feminist groups ‘destroy the bosses that are in you, destroy the capitalistic characteristics within you. destroy yourselves as our bosses, destroy yourselves as the inexhaustible vacuums of our domestic labour’.¹ It is addressed foremost to male comrades, that is, to those who already recognise the necessity of broad social transformation, though not, perhaps, its parameters as being coextensive with the whole of the social field, including its most privatised and naturalised spaces: the home and personal relationships. Those who would be free need to consider whose subjugation their freedom presupposes; as Pierre Macherey trenchantly notes in a recent text, ‘most juridical relationships […] conceal a relationship which is not itself juridical’.² This is an insight that has been increasingly central to feminist and black radical discourse since the late 1970s, from Carol Pateman to Angela Mitropoulos to Fred Moten to Hannah Black, often also encapsulated in Simone Weil’s famous phrase ‘don’t believe you have any rights’.

First, however, I’d like to spell out the problematic of the subject of self-abolition as it figures as a radical appropriation of a subjugated structural position, that sees that position as both a lever to challenge the existing system of domination and as part of what has to overcome within that structure – a question rather than a position and one which takes in elements of the psychic, the subjective, and the historical. I have found the problematic of self-abolition to be a productive way of joining the affirmative and negative moments of any radical emancipatory movement, be it class, gender, race or other hierarchical and naturalised forms of exploitation and control. The analytic of self-abolition also offers a flexible level of abstraction which can both contextualise and interrogate the positing of any social antagonism or difference as primary – an argument from fundamentality which occurs in many radical social movements. Ultimately, it proposes a concrete emancipation to the whole where that oppression is reproduced – it in effect proposes another universality from below, a fissure or a friction in the operation of universality itself. At the same time, the constitution of the collective self which undertakes abolition as a political project of determinate negation remains open to question, since the radical gesture of universality implicit in a liberation struggle can also reproduce the ‘bad universalities’ of homogeneity and ahistorical community that underpin the oppressive social order itself. To account for a self-abolishing subject of struggle, then, means both formulating a subject which cannot be valorised or affirmed beyond the particular historical instances of those struggles, and an agency which drives this struggle that is not somehow already implicit within the social order to be countered or removed – an agency which may be seen as an activated negativity.

A few examples can be derived from the work of theorist and poet Fred Moten, as well as, in this particular exploration, the 1970s and 80s materialist feminist theorist and writer Monique Wittig and Maya Gonzalez, who is also part of the Endnotes collective. They each have different formulations of abolition, or different approaches to this regulative principle if not explicitly naming it in those terms. These are based in strands of revolutionary theory that reckon with the racialised and gendered implications of the nominally abstract subject of ‘the political’. For Monique Wittig, abolition is decisively class-based – she names women as a class, and the hetero-patriarchal gender relation that creates ‘women’ as object and subjected as analogous to the class relation. The struggle of the class of women passes through a transitional point – through the ‘individual’, a type of subject that ‘women’ must pass through, which is to say, strategically affirm as a category of struggle, because they have been historically and normatively deprived of subjectivity by the gender relation. For Fred Moten, aesthetic experience can produce unknown worlds from the place of (racialised) nothingness that a history of commodification and oppression has generated, and this is the substance of the ‘black radical tradition’, social innovation and resistance arising from the site of ‘social death’. Here abolition is figured as emancipatory but not organised, and it happens through the self-activity of a racialised subject which has never been a subject, or, has always been abolished (by capital and the colonial legal apparatus). For Maya Gonzalez, gender is akin to value – it is a social form separating people not so much from their humanity as from their mutability as social beings. Real abstractions such as gender (or, better, the patriarchal duality of men and women), value and labour are the blocks placed upon this human capacity of openness, re-shaping itself under historical conditions only partially of its own choosing. Marx’s concept of ‘species-being’, equivocal and liable to essentialising, humanist affirmations though it might be, seems at least relevant here, albeit, as Lonzi and many other feminists of sexual difference would argue, this is a ‘species’ conceived implicitly according to a male model and in patriarchal times, e.g. ‘Marxism has ignored women, both as oppressed people and as bearers of the future. Its revolutionary theory was developed within the framework of a patriarchal culture.’³ Unlike Wittig, Gonzalez seeks a ‘structural’ explanation for why gender should be abolished, and it is similar to communisation theory has for the class relation: capital no longer needs ‘women’ as women, just like capital no longer needs ‘workers’ per se. This can be connected to the obsolete but lethal factuality Endnotes attempt to capture in the horrifying, yet intimate connotations encoded in ‘the abject’.⁴ In other words, capital may still need people to occupy the position and perform the tasks associated with ‘women’, just like it needs people to work both to produce surplus-value and to uphold the work ethic as a club wielded over the heads of ‘surplus’ populations whose relation to this value is not one of exploitation but extraction, when not annihilation.

Abolition as a category of revolutionary theory and praxis however tries to sidestep the affirmation of any identity in any prior moment to the movement of abolition. Communisation theory is centrally premised on the undesirability of such affirmation. A political identity based on either the position of the woman or the working class is now untenable as the strategic affirmation of either of these social roles can have no emancipatory or transformative implications in the present, when it is no longer a question of being ‘included’ in the social contract but of overturning it (it may be clearer to say, to overturn it as part of a large-scale movement of social transformation, not in the way capital and the state are overturning it at present). Although Gonzalez suggests that the needs of class-based and gender-based struggles are incompatible with one another, given the historical relegation of women to social reproduction and the history of the workers’ movement with regard to the ‘woman question’, self-abolition is still seen as the dynamic adequate to model the overcoming of both social forms. She sees self-abolition in explicit analogy with the class struggle: as the necessary consequence of self-organisation – with all its problems – as women and by women to overcome their situation as women. These ‘problems’ can be summarised, for the purposes of this text, in the term used elsewhere by Ray Brassier in his critique of Endnotes: ‘the paradox of self-abolition’, which consists of how a self conceived in purely negative terms, that is, defined by the capital relation through and through, is to find the resources to negate that relation, much less struggle for something else. For Ray Brassier, self-abolition can only escape its paradoxical status by means of rationality: choosing between good and bad mediations with the world as a process of emancipation from the real abstractions of capital, guided by a self-legislating – or self-determined – rule, in a Kantian-Marxian reading of ‘species-being’. This emerges as not merely a logical problem, but a material one. It attests to the fact that the horizon of transformation is always form-determined by the real abstractions to be transformed or done away with. Unless the problem of subjectivity, or, the politics of subjectivation, is addressed, the paradox remains all too concrete, as we have seen in every historical episode of insurrection, of revolution; even, more minimally, of any instance of self-organisation. This is the problem of subjectivity shaped and deformed by power, a vision of emancipation itself shaped by relations of power, if not in ideology, then in the experience of struggle against a powerful antagonist – no less than in the experience of ongoing unjust social relations themselves. (The question of violence is often posed at this point, albeit often quite abstractly.)

However, the question of subjectivity can be posed otherwise from the perspective of what Cedric Robinson and others have called ‘the black radical tradition’, and this also affects the idea of self-abolition, as we can see in the writing of Fred Moten. In his essay from several years ago, ‘Blackness and Nothingness: Mysticism in the Flesh’, he talks about how the conceptual production of Afropessimism allows us ‘to begin to consider what nothing is, not from its own standpoint or from any standpoint but from the absoluteness of its generative dispersion of a general antagonism that blackness holds and protects in as critical celebration and degenerative and regenerative preservation. [...] What’s the relationship between blackness, thingliness, nothingness and the (de/re)generative operations of what Deleuze might call a life in common?’ This is the proposition of subjectivation as a nothing, but arising from a dialectic between the historical conditions of expropriation from subjectivity, the collapse of variable and fixed capital in the historical experience of slavery and the socialising or socialisable dimension of an ongoing experience of social nothingness as a commonality, that is, as a general antagonism – a nothingness as the basis of sociality. The implication here, it seems to me, is that the other side of lived real abstraction – the degree zero of not just having but being a commodity, of living as a negation of all that is deemed human and full of meaning – generates an experience of contingency which is predicated both in absolute negation as the baseline condition of existence, and the contingencies of experiencing this condition as shared, of transient affirmations and inhabitations. Moten writes that

[t]he history of blackness is testament to the fact that objects can and do resist. Blackness – the extended movement of a specific upheaval, an ongoing irruption that anarranges every line – is a strain that pressures the assumption of the equivalence of personhood and subjectivity. [...] My argument starts with the historical reality of commodities who spoke – of laborers who were commodities before, as it were, the abstraction of labor power from their bodies and who continue to pass on this material heritage across the divide that separates slavery and ‘freedom’. But I am interested, finally, in the implications of the breaking of such speech, the elevating disruptions of the verbal that take the rich content of the object’s/commodity’s aurality outside the confines of meaning precisely by way of this material trace.⁵

The impossibility of integration is shown at the limit case – the racialised subject which never had subjectivity, yet has survived through and despite the basis of this antagonism, in a far from schematic way, an existence permeated not just by structural nothingness but by the physical annihilation, the violence this nothingness produces. It can and cannot be generalised as the impossibility of integration, of being valorised within the existing conditions of the reproduction of capital as we live it today. The mediations disappeared within the speaking commodity do not just include labour-power as such, but raced and gendered labour-power, and the figure of the slave as the speaking commodity brings this into sharp relief. At the same time, the concept of real subsumption is challenged, in complicated ways, by the existence of the slave – who cannot be subsumed because they are already part of the machinery as it is constituted, they who are paradoxically outside the productive relations of capital because they are a precondition for them. Moten’s conception can be read alongside Brassier’s, vastly different as their apparatus of reference is, on the point that the constitution of social being as social death, while not outside capitalist social life and its form-determination of those processes that resist or seek to overcome it, partakes of nothingness as a structural constant rather than the illusionary fullness of capitalist mechanisms of social reproduction and thus starts out from a specific (determinate) place in the process of self-abolition. There is also a difference in the understanding of the emancipatory potential of spontaneity – for Brassier, it is related to a collectively self-determined rationality, while for Moten, it is music and language that illuminates the conditions of ‘the general antagonism’, disrupting the ‘confines of meaning precisely by way of this material trace’. However, the two sets of propositions are closely engaged with the conditionalities of nothingness as the space of redefinition of what it is to think, have affect and live in common. Far from filling abolition with a positive epistemic or social content, this dwelling on nothingness seems rather to point to the lived experience of negativity as mediation with rather than cancellation of ‘the world’.

Abolish, She Said

At this point, let us say that a new personal and subjective definition for all humankind can only be found beyond the categories of sex (woman and man) and that the advent of individual subjects demands first destroying the categories of sex, ending the use of them, and rejecting all sciences which still use these categories as their fundamentals (practically all social sciences). [...] For us this is an absolute necessity; our survival demands that we contribute all our strength to the destruction of the class of women within which men appropriate women. This can be accomplished only by the destruction of heterosexuality as a social system which is based on the oppression of women by men and which produces the doctrine of the difference between the sexes to justify this oppression.⁶

The rationality of Marxist feminism here is seen as self-abolition, plain and simple. Yet, a number of mediations present themselves: class, individuals, sexuality, women, subjects, mediations with very complicated and obviously often unhelpful historical and political baggage. Wittig indicates the dialectics between individual and class in the movement of self-abolition. One must be attained, then abolished, then the next relational position attained, itself to be abolished, etc. All must be moved through, their potentials seized, their limits realised. With relation to Moten, ‘to answer the question of the individual subject in materialist terms’, Wittig does not want to linger in the hallucinatory, still unknown, mediations of nothingness; she is a good worker and wants to embark on the labour of the negative. Self-abolition is a long process, punctuated by the strategic affirmation of a number of ultimately undesirable identities, which are dialectically sloughed off: each is ‘not-all’ and thus does not complete a movement. We have already seen that the structure of gender abolition, here the ‘abolition of women’ in a unequal gender relation, explicitly models ‘women’ on the proletariat, situating them as the revolutionary subject. In Wittig, this is not metaphorical; women are immediately a class, an historical class formed in a class relation with men, exploited and exploiter. The self-abolition of women will be the elimination of women as a class in relation to men, and thus also the abolition of men. This echoes the work of Wittig’s contemporary, Shulamith Firestone, in her concept of ‘sex-class’ as developed in The Dialectic of Sex. Wittig’s famous position in relation to this was that lesbians were not women because they are not subordinated to men, just as you can’t have an exploited class of workers without an exploiter class of capitalists. The gender relation is strongly overdetermined by the dominant term, just like the capital relation.⁷

In accordance with this, although much more schematically, in this text, anyway, we listen to Maya Gonzalez, writing in ‘Communization and the Abolition of Gender’,

In the course of struggle, women will, therefore, come into conflict with men. They will be criticized for derailing the movement, for diverting it from its primary goals. But the ‘goal’ of the struggle lies elsewhere. It is only from within this (and other) conflicts that the proletariat will come to see its class belonging as an external constraint, an impasse which it will have to overcome in order to be anything at all beyond its relation to capital. That overcoming is only the revolution as communization, which destroys gender and all the other divisions that come between us.⁸

The important point here is that unless self-abolition is extended to the overcoming of the gender relation, as it functions to reproduce capital and the relations between men and women, the self-abolition of the proletariat, under whatever conditions it takes place, will never pose an adequate resolution to the ‘woman question’ in its own right. While here stated as a series of axioms, Gonzalez’s point is crucial with regard to the paradox of self-abolition as formulated by Brassier: those who are constituted by a relation cannot at the same time abolish that relation, also because they are constituted as particular subjects – or non-subjects, as we see with Moten – within that process, with very different relations to overcoming (the politics and ethics of gender are commonly overlooked by those who want to ‘smash capitalism’). Thus the self-abolition starts in different places, depending on what is to be abolished. As we see for Wittig, certain things must be realised before being abolished, which to my mind opens up a lot of ambiguity, or, alternatively, space for further determination.

Ending Notes on Abolition

The virtue of the thought of abolition is that it sets its horizon decisively within the immanence of struggle. The structural analysis employed by the discourse of abolition is interested in determinate negation, that is, not an abstract and ideal dismissal of certain elements or structures of the present reality but in seeing what specific structural role those elements have in the reproduction of the total system we would want to change or leave behind. But there are still limitations to the concept no less than to the implied praxis of abolition. This chiefly has to do with the break between the determinacy of the analysis and the abstraction of the imperative ‘to abolish’. One of the most salient of these abstractions is the so-called paradox of self-abolition, which has lately been opened up by Ray Brassier. The subject of abolition emerges through the struggle that abolition entails, yet it must also arrive at a point where the militant identity emerging through struggle has to eliminate its basis in the society that the movement wants to change or overcome. This is not a situation which can be dealt with by fiat, but has to be one of the modes and horizons of struggle itself, in which it will continue to unfold as a painful contradiction. Who is the subject that initiates and who comes out of the other side of self-abolition? The politics of abolition seem to be unable either to be done with, or even to really formulate, this ‘paradox of subjectivity’, which Brassier’s text goes some way toward formulating, albeit opening itself up at times to critiques of formalism.

The problematic of abolition also stands within the question of mediation – what is to be abolished, and do the processes of abolition not necessarily partake of what they are setting out to abolish? Some abolition discourses, particularly in the debates coming out of communisation and other ‘ultra-left’ currents, seem to slide into a kind of gnosticism, in their postulation of a wholesale cancellation of a fallen world – a tendency discussed elsewhere in this volume (‘Feeding the Infant’). We can, in the most preliminary way here, note, with Hegel, that if the ‘rational is the real and the real is the rational’ this can only be so because to the degree the real did not take its present form accidentally but through an ongoing series of complex mediations, as part of the ‘rationality’ of capital in its reproduction, a historical logic that will not be arbitrarily or voluntaristically re-routed. The real can only negate it dialectically, preserving by cancelling, coming to find out what ‘it’ (the thing) really is in the collective process of overcoming. Why this idea has maybe become more recessed in the political thinking of the present is that there is nothing like a historical movement whose goal seems to be self-abolition: therefore, counter-intuitively, it is more than ever the only option. But this echoes the more hollowly, mournfully.

In the question posed by Brassier in his text – ‘given the “ontological inversion” through which “material life” itself is now “animated” by capital, who or what are the agents of communisation?’ – is the question of the hypothesis of real subsumption.⁹ As such, it leaves us with a real and a false problem. The false problem first – the assumption of ‘real subsumption’ is that theoretical objects of experience called capital and life are now co-extensive, that so to speak everything is ‘incorporated’ is a vacuous premise, and a tautology. It eliminates space for analysis, for struggle, for real contradiction and the forms taken by those contradictions in reality – it is, in other words, a comfortable hypothesis, which is why it gets adopted as an easy form of radicalism in cultural scenes first and foremost. It is a contemplative type of idealism which forms the other face of the discourse of the commons and alternative economies that is the other strong vein of political interest running through contemporary art-activism milieus. As Brassier writes about real abstractions in his text,

This logicisation of social reality explains why there can be a contradiction between what human beings think and do in relating to themselves, or what they think and do in reproducing capital. But this logicisation by the value-form is not absolute: it applies to human activities and practices only insofar as they constitute labour. These activities and practices persist within the capital relation as phenomena that it has incorporated but not wholly absorbed. They are not wholly absorbed because they constitute the process through which capital absorbs labour. Capital’s self-reproduction is constituted by phenomena that it cannot reproduce, even as it reproduces the labour which in turn reproduces it. Thus capital’s logicisation of reality is itself conditioned by that reality; this is the bulwark against absolute idealism, which would hypostatise capital as a wholly autonomous, self-moving subject (a causa sui or self-causing being) floating free of material reality altogether¹⁰

Thus, this extremely formalist and empty notion is shown to be nothing if not the positivisation, the affirmation, of social reality in terms of capital’s ‘total subsumption’ of it, rather than staying with nothingness as a fleshly (Moten) or eliminative (Brassier) dimension of lived negativity. It also transfers its formalist absoluteness to the notion of abolition, which then runs the risk of sounding like world-cancelling abstraction rather than a historically mediated possibility.

But the real problem, and I will conclude here, which appears in the diagnosis of a ‘paradox’ – is that some communisation theory attempts to separate subjectivity and theory from struggles, while positing theory as the self-critical or reflexive moment of struggles. The first move is more questionable than the second – the terms in which self-criticism is posed are both the ethical and political milieu of any movement or struggle and that which emerge in the process of struggle themselves. Struggle is never its own answer, it is only ever a question. The question is: why are struggles so rare? The inability of people to reproduce themselves within existing social relations of capital can have a mobilising effect. What it cannot do is prescribe the political direction such mobilisations can take, given the greater traction of reactionary viewpoints on both the Left and Right. The thinking of contingency can accentuate that of abolition, since the contingency of survival on capital’s terms is brought home even more starkly in encounters with a state brutally trying to efface the fact of its own contingency through physical and legal violence. Self-abolition can be a deterministic formula which conflates strategy and ontology; on the other hand, it speaks to the necessity of eradicating the ground on which you stand as part of the transformation you desire. The risk of determinism stems from an illusory concreteness which is logical and schematic, rather than historical and mediated. The problematic here is one of circumscribing categories, but also what it means to keep history and logic, or, different levels of abstraction, apart. As Cinzia Arruzza suggests, we must be careful about tendencies to conflate levels of thought and practice which are related but non-identical, imagining this will politically ground our theoretical work:

proving the logical necessity of gender oppression for capitalism arises from an understandable political concern, i.e., the worry that failing to demonstrate this logical dependence would mean that gender oppression is politically secondary to class politics. [...] I think that we should reject rather than answer this interpellation, given that it rests on a mistaken presupposition: the dynamics of political struggle cannot be directly deduced from theoretical observations at this level of abstraction.¹¹

The paradox of abolition, then, is a paradox of abstraction translated into action. It tries to skate over subjectivity, but also temporality – the local and partial historical achievement of acquiring the universalising fiction of subjectivity. Thus the paradox of self-abolition is on the one hand, a logical one, but it is also affective and social. A collective subject may be the substance and the motor of self-abolition, but once gained in struggle it is hard to dismantle, especially in an unremittingly hostile world. All the monsters of restoration, including its most ‘abject’ mode, commodification, rely on this.