Book Review: A Critical Theory of Economic Compulsion. Wealth,Suffering,Negation

Werner Bonefeld's most recent book, A Critical Theory of Economic Compulsion: Wealth, Suffering, Negation, delivers an excoriating critique of the compounded limitations of social democratic politics from the point of view of Marxian critical theory. Appearing in hardback a little under a year after Søren Mau's popular Mute Compulsion: A Marxist Theory of the Economic Power of Capital (2023), and now released in paperback, A Critical Theory of Economic Compulsion is distinguished from Mau's book in a number of ways. In particular, it elaborates the critical consequences of Marx's laconic identification of the double freedom of economic compulsion – a ‘freedom’ which itself is a state of bondage that is not recognised as such. The book is exemplary in its articulation of the abstract domination that is the essence of the lived reality of bourgeois society. Characterising Marx's theory as a negative evocation of the Kantian categorical imperative, it succeeds in demonstrating in the strongest possible terms the fantastically inverted reality in which humans function as the means and the reproduction of capital as the ends of our social relations.

Bonefeld's critique of economic compulsion is marshalled primarily through its negative dialectical unmasking of the wrong-headedness of what he describes as ‘practical humanist’ and ‘counter-hegemonic’ forms of struggle. Following Adorno, and Marx before him, Bonefeld interrogates this wrong-headedness in which extant norms of freedom, justice, and equality are valorised by those movements struggling against capital in what is in essence a capitulation to the constitutive values of the existing social relations to which they are conceptually bound. Bonefeld identifies the programmes that issue from such positions as essentially an accommodation to the world they critique – a world that, following Adorno, he characterises in terms of its central experience of suffering and social coldness.

Through this critique, Bonefeld shatters the illusions of a form of struggle that fails to seriously follow through Marx's account of bourgeois society as one of many-sided compulsion. As with Marx, the description of the dramatis personae adopted by the respective parties of the class-bound exchange relationship is exemplified: ‘[b]oth the labourer and the capitalist cannot extract themselves from a society that compels them as personifications of the economic categories—the one buying labour power to avoid bankruptcy by profiting from its employment, enriching himself, the other selling labour power to make a living as society's surplus value producer’ (p. 4). Rather, the profitable accumulation of yesterday's yield of surplus value constitutes the condition of today's wage-based access to the means of subsistence; people are put to work in search of profit and are governed by processes of real abstractions that move behind their backs, but which have distinctly corporeal effects.

It is this ‘social violence’ that Bonefeld points us to—a social violence that functions through a process of ‘inverted sociability’ in which the human ‘vanishes in her own social world only to reappear with a price tag, struggling to sustain the strength of her connection to the world of social wealth through the productive expenditure of her living labour’ (p. 32). One might object that this is really Marx (or Adorno) speaking, but Bonefeld's renditions are masterful at elaborating and deepening their critique of the realities through which this situation reproduces itself. More to the point, Bonefeld ably demonstrates the ways in which the fact that we live in a world of real abstractions that ‘compel the individuals as adjustable human derivatives of the economic forces of cash, profit, and rent’ (p. 24) is not seriously grappled with in the normative cry for justice and equality.

A Critical Theory of Economic Compulsion, as well exemplary in its elaboration of Marx's critique of bourgeois society, also represents a distinct contribution to the development of value form theory and the themes of Neue Marx Lectüre. In particular, Bonefeld elaborates upon the freedom of bourgeois society as effectively the freedom of the ‘money subject’. Relative to this freedom, ‘the needs of the social individuals are a mere metaphysical distraction. What counts is money (as more money)’ (p. 43). Marx's world of metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties is thereby ‘resolve[d] into algebra, which is the language of economic thought’ (p. 53). The reader follows Bonefeld through a process of unmasking—a stark conceptual practice that works to reverse the action of the prior conceptual inversion in which ‘money rules’ (p. 53). Critical theory, Bonefeld tells us, ‘scrutinises the untruth of the economic abstractions’ (p. 3)—it is this in which Bonefeld excels.

Importantly, Bonefeld demonstrates that the money subject is one that functions through the world market and does so with the same objectivity that enlivens its functioning in the domestic market: namely, that one's labour returns a profit. ‘The world market pressures’, he tells us, ‘manifest themselves through the “heavy artillery” of cheaper prices that threatens the less productive capitals with competitive erosion and the national economies, in which the reward on the expended labour falls below the average world market rate of profit, with downward pressures’ (p. 67). The target here is those who may draw strength from a belief that the nation state can create the conditions of refuge from a world of social misery. Once again, the effect of this is to pull the rug from under the feet of those who labour under the misapprehension that inhuman relations can be humanised within the parameters of bourgeois society. To do so, he tells us, would be a wonderful thing. But to fall for this dream would be to fall for a mirage that remains distant on the horizon as we advance apparently towards it.

Bonefeld works to dispel this mirage. The bogey men of neoliberalism, globalisation, and financialisation are reconceptualised as the unabridged and unmediated versions of the money subject, and moreover, inviolable economic and political realities. Competition and the valorisation of capital are not optional extras of our social world, but rather its inexorable pillars, and the dream of a Keynesian interventionism will not save us. From this position it is clear: ‘[t]here is therefore a misfortune far worse than being a productive worker, and that is the misfortune of being a superfluous worker who, deprived of wage income, depends on the charity of others for her subsistence (p. 5–6). This is the lived reality of our world. It is better that our eyes do not remain shut to it as we pretend to live in another.

At the same time, the book progresses its argument in the manner of a double unmasking. Underneath the democratic socialist dreams of a tamed market lies a transhistorical categorisation of labour. Echoing Moishe Postone's (1993) critique of the ontologisation of the capitalist labour economy, Bonefeld takes to task the assorted critics of capitalism who nevertheless conceive of their alternative from the standpoint of labour. He thereby draws attention to the central issue: that it is not the labour economy as such that is the analytical heart of the critique of capital but, rather, the social relations that constitute it and that ensure its reproduction. It is these relations per se that must be challenged. To this end, the goal of a perfected labour economy, extolled in many extant and prospective social democratic and state socialist societies, is revealed as one in which the state ‘replaces the semblance of freedom in market-mediated forms of social coercion by the freedom of state socialism as an unmediated form of coercion’ (p. 7). Such a critique, then, is necessarily caught within the limits of its conceptuality: ‘[t]he illusion of democratic socialism identifies what really matters and yet, it does not recognise the very society that it rejects—abstractly’ (p. 104).

One might complain that the book would have benefitted from clarity over the notion of ‘practical humanism’ that Bonefeld identifies in the aforementioned positions. In his account, Althusser is connected with Fraser and Harvey, as social democracy is connected to scientific socialism and to theoretical anti-humanism. However, in For Marx it seems that Althusser uses the term ‘practical humanism’ as a term of disapprobation rather than an approbation—as an ideology mired in idealism that can in ‘no way…abrogate the attributes of a theoretical concept’ (Althusser, 1990: 246). Practical humanism, as with ‘real humanism’, for Althusser is ‘gestural’ (1990: 242) and falls short of his own putative ‘science of society’ (Althusser, 1990: 26). Where the equation is helpful, however, is in drawing attention to the failure in either Althusser or the democratic socialists to adequately develop their critique in a manner consistent with the form of struggle. Both remain caught in a position that is unable to challenge the centrality of labour in the visions of a liberated society.

What is vital here is Bonefeld's identification of Althusser's ‘science of society without a subject’, an identification we can see implicated in vanguardist and statist ‘solutions’ to the questions of struggle. Importantly, Bonefeld differentiates himself from those who theorise capital, value, money, or the commodity as an ‘automatic subject’ (e.g., Arthur, 2003; Jappe, 2023; Smith, 1990). Bonefeld is clear: ‘money [capital, etc.] does not talk. It is rather the social relations that speak in and through money as the independent power of their social relations’ (p. 11). The economic world is an abstraction upon the social world, a world of objectivity, that only works through the subjectivity and spontaneity of the social subject. This is the reality that we must start from. Relative to this, Bonefeld raises in many ways the most important question today, where authoritarianism rises seemingly triumphant around us: namely, that of where the articulation of a less-compromised form of liberatory politics may arise. Caught in the grips of a silent process of compulsion, and within the conceptuality of that compulsion that also encompasses much of its apparent critique, we are faced with the difficulty of developing a form of struggle that is appropriate to its object.

More practically, Bonefeld's book points to a paradox of sorts with the critique of political economy. He evokes what Fabian Freyenhagen (2013) has, in relation to the thought of Adorno, characterised as ‘negativism’: namely, the idea that we cannot know the good, only the bad of our social world, and that knowledge of the bad is sufficient in terms of our struggle against it. Underneath this idea is the notion that we can only sense the good in fragments, perhaps when we close our eyes. One might contend that while there is a definite truth to the idea that we will not truly know the good until we realise it, our sense of the good is nevertheless not insubstantial. Was not the Paris Commune, for instance, an example of the good, however limited? Do we not have other examples of council communist and non-statist forms that we can draw upon to fuel the communist imagination? Of course, Bonefeld's point is to ward off vanguardist reification, which is surely agreeable. But, given the paradox that the book ends with—the postscript on the ‘necessity and impossibility of communism’—it is incumbent upon us to demarcate the conditions of the possible (however impossible they may also seem) with the utmost stringency. In a situation in which it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism, we may want to acknowledge that we do know something of the good.

Relatedly, one might also question Bonefeld's Benjaminian assertion that the class struggle is ‘a struggle for access to “crude and material things”’ (p. 6). The danger here is that this may be read as a normative rather than analytical claim—an equivocation that is not perhaps quite resolved in the postscript. Class struggle is at one level such a struggle; but as a struggle in, against, and beyond class, it is also, as Bonefeld acknowledges, a struggle against economic compulsion, against labour, and the abstract time determination that governs it. In short, it is a struggle for a dignified life exemplifying a form of human freedom true to its concept. Indeed, as Bonefeld puts it: it is a struggle that ‘stands for a completely different conception of human development. It stands for the establishment of social relationships that are no longer governed by social abstractions. Instead, it is [for a] society itself that organises its own social powers directly’ (p. 157—emphasis added). It is the task of movements today to elaborate on these lines, both in practice and in theory. Bonefeld's book—which is a powerful and evocative critique of our self-wrought and imposed impediments here—will be an important clarificatory resource in this herculean task.