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A Marxist Concept of Politics

⋮ 9/19/2022

by Yanis Iqbal / September 19th, 2022

Under capitalism, political violence is not constantly

required for the extraction of surplus-value and the maintenance of capitalist social relations.
The separation of direct producers from the means of production in capitalist social formations
means that surplus-value can be appropriated by economic mechanisms without the repeated
deployment or threat of deployment of politico-military force in the battle between classes. In
Mute Compulsion: A Theory of the Economic Power of Capital, Søren Mau writes: “The
characteristic thing about the power of capital is precisely that it has an ability to reproduce itself
through economic processes, or, put differently, that the organization of social reproduction on
the basis of capital gives rise to a set of powerful structural mechanisms which ensure its
reproduction all by itself, as it were.” Capitalism constructs a new social relationship between
the employer and the employed, one that allows the former to gain full control over the
immediate environment of the latter. It needs workers to be “free” in a double sense: “free” to
sell their own labor-power (not legally tied to a landlord or master) and “free” of any possession
of the means of production, so that their material survival is dependent on becoming a wage-
laborer. It is important to note here that the “freedom” to sell labor-power is rooted in “the
mystified/mystifying moment of the wage contract and the freedom-of-contract rhetoric of
nineteenth-century liberal individualism.” Such a notion of “freedom” refers not to the ¬ actual
independence of workers but to the ideological concealment of the coerciveness of the wage

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contract through a discourse of legal voluntarism. It denotes the process whereby
proletarianized masses – separated from the means of production – are given the legal ability to
enter the abstract sphere of bourgeois-juridical formalism and participate in the capitalist labor
market. Thus, the economic power of capitalism exists as a form of exploitation that appears as
the agential and self-driven decision of the individualized worker. This appearance is supported
not only by the ideology of liberal contractualism but by the operational modality of economic
power, which involves the application of indirect, structural pressures upon the material
environment of subaltern classes. As Mau comments: “Whereas violence and ideology directly
address the subject, economic power addresses it only indirectly through the manipulation of its
socio-material environment. Economic power thus has to do with the way in which social
relations of domination reproduce themselves by being inscribed in the environment of the
subject.”

Insofar that the economic power of capital renders superfluous the need for political coercion in
the labor process, there emerges a separation of the economic from the political. This concept
of separation, while analytically true, applies to the individual labor process of capitalists, not to
the social totality of the capitalist social formation. At the level of the individual capitalist, the
need to simply survive, to avoid starvation, surely impels subalterns to join the rank of the
proletariat. However, when we look at this issue from the collective standpoint of the capitalist
totality, the process that institutes wage slavery as the only economic way of ensuring
subsistence is brought about by a political closure of alternative employment options. This
situation differs significantly from the one that prevails in pre-capitalist societies. In these
societies, direct producers are not yet deprived of the means of production. Given this fact, the
surplus labor of the exploited classes has to be appropriated in a form other than the economic
coercion of the market found under capitalism. This form is provided by the political power and
naked violence of pre-modern ideologies, which use religious prejudices and primitive attitudes
to ensure subservience to the exploiters. What is evident here is the fact that in pre-capitalist
societies, individual owners of property have to continually use political violence to maintain
control over property, a situation that is different from capitalism, where individual capitalists as
capitalist property-owners do not have to use extra-economic force for the reproduction of their
class status. But the capitalist class as a whole – in the form of the capitalist state – does utilize
political and ideological violence to perpetuate the monopolization of the means of subsistence
of the masses and the forcible destruction of non-capitalist livelihoods that may weaken the
economic power of capital. Hence, both pre-capitalist and capitalist social formations are
dependent upon political violence for their social reproduction. What differentiates the one from
the other is the fact that capitalists, unlike pre-capitalist exploiters, don’t have to use violence at
the individual level to ensure their dominance since that role is served by the economic

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compulsion of the market. However, the absence of violence at the individual level is propped
up by the presence of violence at the collective level, embodied in the capitalist state. The
systematic construction of public apparatuses that can perform repressive tasks for the
bourgeoisie ensures that the working class has no choice not to work for a wage, being unable
to choose between capitalist and non-capitalist employers. This state of structural oppression –
brought about through the political subjugation of non-capitalist subsistence options –
demonstrates that in capitalism, what emerges is not so much the separation of the economic
and the political but their functional division wherein individual capitalists possess economic
power and the capitalist state possesses political power. Raju J Das writes:

the capitalist state and the capitalist class…are two arms of the social relationship
called capitalist class relation. One arm signifies the exploitation of the majority and
its (near) separation from property, and wealth-accumulation in the hands of the
capitalists. Another arm signifies the political oppression/subjugation of the majority
by the state. In other words, one arm signifies the capitalist class as a whole, and
another arm signifies the state which is, above all, the coercive instrument to
reproduce the capitalist class relations.

The capitalist relationship of dialectical mediation between the economic power of capital and
the political power of the bourgeois state – distinguished from the sole presence of political
power in pre-capitalist social formations – means that the immediate capitalist labor process
appears to be free from violence and coercion. This appearance has a material basis in social
reality because it reflects how the economic power of capital is structurally imbricated with the
political power of the state. When acting as exploited workers in the capitalist civil society, it is
only natural for proletarian human beings to perceive their engagement with the labor process
as an economic one, as one that allows them to receive wages and satisfy monetary
requirements. Viewed from the perspective of the human imagination, which concerns itself with
the affective workings of the senses, the capitalist civil society is a representation of the act of
economic exchange and nothing more. The interconnection of this economic sphere with the
coercive logic of the state is ignored because the ideas of the proletariat are interwoven with the
material practice of wage slavery to such an extent that they are strongly limited by the horizons
of the latter. Workers experience the economic mechanisms of capitalism as the immediate
apprehension of objective forms that lie outside their subjective being, as mere methods of
subsistence to which one has to conform. In this way, the proletariat’s material relation with the
economic logic of the capitalist civil society is transformed into an ethereal relation to external
forms. The visibility of the capitalist economy arises out of the structural invisibility of the political
violence that generated its foundational framework, as well as of the overarching network of

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socio-cultural relations that serves the bourgeoisie through its manifold cruelties. This inability of
human imagination to understand the interdependence of capitalist economy on the political
violence of the state is part and parcel of the way in which ideology operates. It limits the mental
capacities of human beings by socially constructing a collective sensorium that carries out
processes of routinized sense-making and shapes comprehension, interaction, and practice.
Gabriel Rockhill and Jennifer Ponce de León elaborate:

Rather than there being a real, given world outside of ideology, that is then simply
distorted through inversion, the world materially delivers itself to us upside down, and
this is the primary datum of our ideological experience…material practice formats our
perceptual matrix in such deep and fundamental ways that the world is “naturally”
delivered to us through the lens of ideology. Instead of simply being a set of illusions
or false ideas, ideology operates as an all-encompassing sensorium that emerges
from the actual life-processes of homo faber. It composes an entire universe through
the collective and historical production of a shared world of sense that is at one and
the same time physical and mental. It is the collective historical life-process (der
historische Lebensprozess) that forges this sensorium in such a seamless fashion
that it is largely rendered imperceptible.

The human imagination is thus essentially entwined with an ideological imaginary i.e. “a
collectively produced practical mode of intelligibility that assembles self-evident givens, being at
one and the same time a way of thinking, feeling, being, perceiving, and acting. Far from
remaining purely conceptual, it is affective, practical, perceptual, and axiological. An imaginary
is thus the anchored modus operandi of social agents, which is flexible and varies across the
social field depending on the agencies involved in its precise configuration.” In contrast to the
ideological nature of human imagination, the rational faculties of human beings interact with
reality by constructing adequate ideas that theoretically totalize the given facts through their
contextualization in a historical movement of fluid social relations. This means that reason will
comprehend the bourgeois political society as a necessary component of capital in which its
essence as an exploitative dynamic is expressed, reinforcing the conditions of possibility of
surplus-extraction through the repression of non-capitalist possibilities in the realm of civil
society. Furthermore, reason understands that the one-sided representation of the capitalist civil
society as a sphere of “free”, non-political wage contracts is essential for the continuous
expansion of capital, for without this ideological illusion – that relationships in bourgeois civil
society are representations of strictly economic exchanges – the commodity-form will fail in
forcing subalterns into the entire circuit of capitalist reproduction that generates surplus-value.
Now, taking into account that the separation of the economic and the political under capitalism

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is primarily an ideological one, we need to examine what impact this separation has upon the
logic of politics in a capitalist social formation. From the bourgeois viewpoint, politics actually
functions as the invisible background of capitalist economics, as the violent underside of the
abstract legalism of the market. The centrality of political violence to the field of economic
production demands that it be ideologically mystified so that the dialectical linkages between the
political power of the state and the economic power of capital can be broken and the character
of the labor process can be normatively described as non-coercive and voluntary. This act of
normative description is carried out by taking the capitalist separation of economics and politics
at face value, without questioning the essence that lies beneath this appearance. As I have
already noted, economic capital, unlike the ideological deployment of violence in pre-capitalist
social formations, interpellates the subalterns in a matrix of subordination that works indirectly
through the molding of their socio-material surroundings and conditions. Once the proletariat
has been politically separated from the preconditions of its sustenance, the realization of its life
can be carried out only through the presence of capital as a mediator. Thus, instead of an
external power, the working class’s own interests with regards to survival force it to sell its labor-
power. Todd McGowan writes: “In the capitalist epoch, a bizarre inversion occurs: one’s
obedience occurs through one’s isolated particularity…One obeys not by submitting to the
domination of an authority’s command but by following one’s own self-interest…Capitalism does
not eliminate obedience, though it does eliminate the act of submission to a structure of
mastery. Individuals continue to participate in a structure that guides their existence, but they
cease to experience it as a structure of mastery.” The coincidence of the proletariat’s individual
interest for sustenance with capital’s profit-driven interest for surplus extraction – rooted in the
political separation of the immediate producers from their means of production – means that the
economy comes to assume a veneer of depoliticized neutrality, with the state’s function of
political violence in the capitalist market fading into the background. As soon as the appearance
of the capitalist market as a technocratic arbiter of individual interests emerges, bourgeois
ideologists discursively entrench this appearance by reconfiguring political society, so that it no
longer signifies the coercive complement of capital’s economic power but a synthetic zone of
abstract legalism that aids the ostensible market rationalism of bourgeois civil society. Politics
no longer refers to the inner component of extra-economic violence that inevitably accompanies
the economic power of capital but to a juridified political society that speaks only through the
language of the formal equality of otherwise unequal citizens – a language that is itself a
reflection of the capitalist market that organizes commodity exchange in terms of the abstract
equivalence of qualitatively unequal market actors. The juridical concept of the equality of all
citizens before the law, the equal respect for the life and property of each citizen, the equal
freedom of association and contract, forms a necessary legal-institutional basis for a system of

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commodity production that posits materially unequal social agents as abstractly equal “rational”
actors that are pursuing their individual interests through the medium of the market. Under a
social structure of capitalist accumulation, the representative liberal state enforces this formal
contractual equality only to cloak the very real inequalities that exist between the propertied
capitalists and the property-less wage-laborers.

For the proletariat, the natural-law contractualism that undergirds politics in a capitalist society –
founded upon the ideological depoliticization of the economy and the technocratic erasure of
the violent antagonistic social relations inherent to the field of production – results in the
systemic delimitation of politics: in its status quoist version, politics sets its boundaries of
intervention in an external fashion with regards to the field of production. It considers its area of
operation to be the juridified political society of capitalism – a sphere of political existence that is
wholly internal to the constraints of the bourgeois state and its institutional apparatuses,
functionally bounded by the field of reproduction of the strategic political and social interests of
the bourgeois class. Here, we can observe how the apparent alienation and separation of this
sphere of bourgeois politics from the material intercourse that takes in bourgeois civil society
actually facilitates their ever close intermeshing. The claims of bourgeois political society to a
juridical status of an abstract entity that can’t interfere with the market rationalism of civil society
leads to a paradoxical non-interventionist stance: state-supported political violence consistently
intervenes against opposition to the scientific pretensions of the market so that it can maintain
the space within which the ostensibly non-political and self-sustaining mechanisms of the
market can work. Political intervention creates the conditions of possibility for a supposedly non-
political market that is touted as an entity capable of sustaining itself without further intervention.
The lack of intervention of the capitalist state in the free market is based upon political
interventions that create the conditions of possibility for that non-interventionism through the
elimination of any form of opposition. Bourgeois ideologists want to drive out the paradoxical
character of the political state by forgetting the political coercion that constitutes the condition of
possibility for the self-regulating market and ideologically consecrating the bourgeois state as a
legal guarantor of the rationalism of capitalist civil society. The proletariat demolishes this
façade by showing how the rationalism of the market requires as its dialectical counterpart the
irrationalism of the political state, how the realization of working class survival through market
exchanges is produced by the destruction of non-capitalist options, how the juridified political
society’s respect for the so-called scientific nature of the market is actually a mask for coercively
eliminating the class antagonisms found in the capitalist labor process. From this, it is clear that
the bourgeoisie’s hegemonic project is conflictual: to gain consent, the ruling class has to
interact with the proletarian hostility arising from the class conflicts that are constitutive of
capitalist society. In this process, the collective structures of civil society are given a bivalent

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character. On the one hand, they serve as the instruments through which the elite exercises
economic and ideological power. On the other hand, insofar that the bourgeoisie has to maintain
a power equilibrium through the creation of apparatuses that deal with subaltern opposition, the
organisms of civil society also function as the principal vehicle for the actions of these
oppressed classes. The existence of this duality causes the emergence of two different
conceptions of politics: bourgeois politics, which revels in the abstractness of legal
contractualism, and proletarian politics, which constantly overflows the barriers of bourgeois
politics to highlight the violence that forms an essential substratum of economic exchange.
While the former resides in the realm of political society, unwilling to explore how the state is not
a legal guarantor of juridical equality but a capitalist enforcer of material inequality, the latter
resides in the connective terrain between political society and civil society, constantly
highlighting the internality of the bourgeois state’s political violence to the supposedly “neutral”
economic power of capital. This form of proletarian politics understands that the enrichment of
the political equality promised by the bourgeois state cannot lead to the eradication of
exploitation from the economic arena of bourgeois civil society. On the contrary, it reinforces the
social legitimacy of the state institutions that are responsible for hiding the essentially violent
and oppressive nature of the capitalist economy. Bourgeois ideologists have combatted the
counter-hegemonic thrust of proletarian politics by portraying it as an unscientific remainder of
pre-capitalism that attempts to politically disrupt the non-political stability of the free market’s
invisible hand. As Etienne Balibar notes:

The fundamental point is that from Adam Smith onwards, ‘economic’ discourse, by
presenting itself as science and radically divorcing itself from ‘politics’, represented
as a remnant of pre-capitalism, and thus instituting the distinction of civil society and
the State, provides the different factions of the bourgeoisie with the means of
considering, and thus of organizing the unity of their interests as just so many
conditions of the accumulation of capital. Everything opposing their mutual interests
is called ‘politics’, and everything which leads back to the logic of accumulation, that
is, to the command of capital (or money) over labour, is called ‘economics’ At last this
provides the means, albeit theoretical, of preventing the interests of labour, or rather
of workers, from entering into the conflict of interests between different bourgeois
factions, so as to disturb its ‘arbitrations’ (as we say nowadays) and to undermine the
mass bases of the State.

To summarize, from the standpoint of the bourgeoisie, there are two definitions of politics: one is
the legalistic one that ideologically reflects the apparent alienation of political society from civil
society and the other is the revolutionary one that emphasizes their real interdependence and

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interpenetration. While the former is based on legal respect for the market rationalism of
supposedly scientific bourgeois economics, the latter is based on radical hostility to the scientific
and rationalist pretensions of capitalist surplus extraction, highlighting their irrational
interrelation with the coercive logic of state-sponsored political violence. These two forms of
politics, however, don’t exist in neat separation from one another. To be more precise,
revolutionary politics itself has suffered the ideological invasion of bourgeois elements, taking
from the latter the notion of the separation of economics and politics under capitalism and
radicalizing it in an anti-capitalist direction. This ideological hybridity manifests itself in the form
of ultra-leftism, which opposes any form of participation in the movement for reforms. Such
opposition emerges from the specific discursive order of that ideology. The appearance of the
division of the extra-economic state from the economic labor process – embodied in the
ideological mystification of juridical abstractness – is accepted with a radical twist: the
separation is now construed no longer as the juridical respect for market rationalism but as the
violent subjection of civil society to the dictates of political society. In the case of bourgeois
ideologists, the separation of economics (civil society) and politics (political society) is affirmed
to maintain the hierarchical subjection of the former to the latter. In the case of ultra-leftwing
ideologists, the same separation is affirmed in favor of civil society. It is said that the hegemonic
perpetuation of the power of capital over labour requires a state machinery which is divorced
from the mass of the people and beyond their democratic control, so the working class, in order
to remove the bourgeoisie from their position of dominance and set up a Communist order,
requires a form of government through which political society can be reabsorbed into civil
society. The privileging of civil society produces a form of anti-politics that regards as futile any
kind of participation in the political system of capitalism. In both the bourgeois and ultra-leftwing
cases, the terms – economics and politics, civil society and political society – continue to exist in
their static state of separation, only their relational ordering is changed. Unlike these two
ideologies, Communism destroys the strict isolation of state and society and points out how it is
their particular dialectical nexus that constitutes the essence of the capitalist arrangement.
Contrary to the propositions of ultra-leftists, capitalism does not involve the separation of civil
society and political society, and the subjection of the former to the violence of the latter.
Instead, it involves the inextricable intermeshing of the political power of the state and the
economic power of capital – the former ensuring the preconditions for the continued existence
of the latter. The role of proletarian politics consists in advancing a class struggle in such a way
that the working class comes to expose the essential violence of the labor process, showing
how it is tethered to the coercive closure of non-capitalist alternatives and is full of irreconcilable
class antagonisms. In the normal conditions of bourgeois hegemony, the civil war between the
proletariat and the bourgeoisie remains latent, or invisible, unavailable to the consciousness of

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the subaltern, which continues to think of economics and politics in terms of market rationalism
and juridical equality, respectively. When the normal exercise of bourgeois hegemony breaks
down, when the apparent separation of economics and politics weakens, the confrontational
edge of class struggle comes to the fore, with the proletariat openly criticizing political society
and civil society as two moments of a dialectical whole, geared towards their exploitation.
Politics in the Marxist sense refers precisely to the transition that is effected by the proletariat
from one phase of class struggle to the other, the becoming visible of the latent struggle
between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat through the destruction of the antinomies of politics
and economics. To use the words of Balibar, for the workers’ movement, the reality of politics “is
nothing other than the development of the contradictions of the economy…To transgress the
limits of the recognized – and artificially separated – political sphere, which are only ever the
limits of the established order, politics has to get back to the ‘non-political’ conditions of that
institution (conditions which are, ultimately, eminently political). It has, in other words, to get
back to the economic contradictions, and gain a purchase on these from the inside.” This
“pattern of referring back to the material conditions of politics, which is in turn required for the
internal political transformation of those conditions,” means that the proletariat cannot refrain
from engaging with the political dynamics of capitalist society. On the contrary, to destroy the
separation of economics and politics, the working class has to consistently build a mass
movement that defends the living standards of workers and activates the latent class
antagonisms in the field of economic production. As part of this, the Communist Party has to
also participate in elections so that it can displace the ostensible neutrality of bourgeois political
society from within that sphere. Expressed in more general terms, while ultra-leftism privileges
civil society and attempts to voluntaristically proclaim a space of proletarian autonomy within
that sphere, Marxism recognizes the structural embeddedness of subalterns in the dialectical
nexus of political society and civil society and thus builds proletarian autonomy through a
concrete movement of political practices that can dissolve that nexus. Bearing in mind how the
apparent separation of economics and politics under capitalism weakens the independence of
the proletariat, the Communist Party always tries to overcome this separation through all
possible means. Insofar that Communism has as its goal the unification of economics and
politics, it is both hyper-political, highlighting the intense antagonisms found in both political
society and civil society, and anti-political, overcoming bourgeois restrictions to articulate an
expansive notion of politics. Once this separation has been overcome, class struggle can
replace the capitalist totality, whose dialectical moments are political society and civil society,
with Communist totality, whose dialectical moments are formed by the free association of
human beings working toward their self-actualization through democratically managed
production.

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Yanis Iqbal is a student and freelance writer based in Aligarh, India. Read other articles by
Yanis.

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