2021, issue 2

The Dark Underbelly of Capitalism:

Exploring the Capitalism-War Connection.

Marius Nijenhuis

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons

Attribution 4.0 License International License (CC

BY 4.0). © 2021 The author(s).

10.21827/krisis.41.2.37963

Krisis41 (2):138-142.

Review of

1382021, issue 2

The Dark Underbelly of Capitalism:

Exploring the Capitalism-War Connection.

Marius Nijenhuis

popular to argue that liberal capitalism is ‘the best’ system of government. Fukuyama

(1992) famously heralded Western liberal democracies as “the end of history”, and propo-

nents of democratic peace theory argue that liberal capitalism creates peace and prosperity

(see for example Mousseau 2019). The well-known post-workerist Maurizio Lazzarato

between capitalism and war. Over the last decade, Lazzarato (2012; 2014; 2015) has

explored the subjectivation and enslavement inherent to capitalism and the way in which

In Capital Hates Everyone: Fascism or Revolution (2021), Lazzarato takes a particularly radical

approach. In this book he draws on Deleuze and Guattari, Foucault, and Marx, among

others, to argue that capitalism has an inherently violent and conictual nature. He uses

the book to argue that capitalism cannot be understood separately from historical and

economy results from “the myth of barter”, the idea that capitalism originated when

one farmer needed milk and the other needed vegetables, leading these equal parties to

barter their goods for mutual benet. However, in practice capitalism has a dark under-

belly of violence and exploitation which it hides through its veil of formal freedom and

equality. Marx already noted that a prerequisite for capitalist relations was “primitive

accumulation”, the expropriation of land and property and their concentration in the

hands of the few (1867, 873-876). In this regard, Marx (1867, 878-895) used the famous

example of the British “enclosure movement” and the violent expropriation that this

land-grabbing of the commons by the wealthy constituted.

More recently, various scholars have noted how violent dispossession continues

system of coercion and force without which existing property relations would break

down (Cohen 2011). Moreover, real-world capitalist relations are almost always char-

acterized by unequal power relations due to past oppression, rendering racial, sexual,

and other forms of exploitation possible through the vehicle of the ‘free’ and ‘equal’

1392021, issue 2

capitalist system (Mills 2017, 113-135). Is it any wonder, then, that many academics in

Western Europe are white, whereas the cleaning stas in the universities often consist

of people of color?

In Capital Hates Everyone, Lazzarato takes inspiration from Foucault’s 1975-1976

Society Must Be Defended (2003) lectures, in which Foucault approached power relations

through the prism of civil war. Lazzarato contrasts this approach with how Foucault

226). In this way, neoliberalization transforms how we operate within the economic

system and within (formerly) non-economic realms of life like health, tness, and

relationships. Lazzarato criticizes authors such as Dardot and Laval (2014) and Brown

(2015; 2019) who, inspired by The Birth of Biopolitics, understand neoliberal capitalism

as predominantly non-violent (Lazzarato 2021, 27-28). Lazzarato, in contrast, argues

that all capitalisms, including neoliberal capitalism, have a violent undercurrent which

consists of interrelated but irreducible (literal and gurative) wars on the basis of class,

race, and gender. In the words of McClanahan (2017, 512), the idea that neoliberalism

is characterized by subjectivation rather than force seems to be the standpoint of “the

subject who polishes her college application, who selects among schools for his kid,

machinic enslavement and […] social subjection” (2006). These machinic assemblages

are not technological per se, as there are various kinds of machines (technological,

social, economic) that shape our lives. In Lazzarato’s conception of capitalism, capital

and labor are always at war, with putative social stability only being the result of one

faction’s temporary dominance. Lazzarato argues that within contemporary neolib-

eralism, which is characterized by the far-reaching nancialization of our everyday

lives and a dominance of capital over labor, our democracies are rendered increasingly

illiberal by the dominance of the “capitalist war machine” that turns everything and

everyone into cogs of capital’s machine (2021, 165). Thus, Lazzarato explains how even

leftist parties like Brazil’s Worker’s Party have become unable to escape the logic of

1402021, issue 2

“neoliberal Frankenstein”, as Brown (2019) argued. In this regard, Lazzarato points to

the anity of some neoliberals for right-wing dictators – Hayek infamously preferred

a “liberal dictatorship to a democratic government devoid of liberalism” (Caldwell and

Montes 2015, 44; Lazzarato 2021, 46-47) – and Lazzarato points to older syntheses of

capital and fascism (like Nazism) to argue that the new fascisms are merely the other side

of neoliberalization (2021, 41-46).

totalizing theory which Foucault (2007, 6), as well as other postmoderns like Lyotard

(1984), rightly criticized as inadequate for understanding social reality. The attempt to

collapse all instances of capitalism into an all-encompassing theory of ‘capital’ and ‘war’,

of ‘fascism’ and ‘revolution’, creates an understanding of society which is not equipped

to cope with the multiplicity of social reality. It renders both capitalism and war as

unitary and monolithic processes with always and everywhere the same underlying

dynamics. One could therefore ask Lazzarato: How should we understand the “varieties

of capitalism” and the “varieties of neoliberalism” which exist in dierent countries in

regard to his seemingly totalizing theory of ‘capitalism’ (Hall and Soskice 2001; Birch

and Mykhnenko 2009)? Has there been no relevant improvement between the capital-

of the ‘post-68 movement’ in philosophy, by which he refers to, among other things,

French Theory and Postcolonial Theory. What Lazzarato argues for, in our current

predicament, is not just a social revolution that contests contemporary subjectivities

and normalization processes, which is the focus of much post-68 thought, but also a

political revolution ‘beyond capitalism’ (2021, 233). Making the Chinese workers at

Foxconn or the Bangladeshi slaves in Qatar aware of their subjectivity and the nor-

malizing forces at play, in so far as they are not already aware of these things, is in itself

appear more miserable. Hence, the exploited and enslaved (the Global North’s precariat

and proletariat, the Global South, people of color) do not just require a “revolutionary

1412021, issue 2

emancipatory they may be, have again and again been co-opted by the dynamics of

capitalism and put to use to hide capital’s ugly face. Thus, the struggle against racism is

co-opted for promoting one’s global sports organization whilst simultaneously sponsor-

ing large-scale slavery; LGBTQI+ rights are turned into something for selling electronic

devices which are made on the backs of Chinese workers; and women’s emancipation

is deployed as an electoral slogan to push neoliberal economic policies that dispropor-

sense akin to ‘The Blob’: it is a depersonalized monster that consumes everything (tech-

nologies, social movements, etc.) in its path only to become stronger, bigger, and more

dangerous for it. At the same time, real social change tends to disappear somewhere over

the horizon.

In my view, Lazzarato should be careful of creating the impression that the

post-68 movement has failed to connect its problematization of subjectivation with

systematic critiques of capitalism and with revolutionary theories directed at toppling

capitalist power relations. Whereas Foucault has mostly kept a ‘safe’ distance from

Marxism, many post-68 scholars have never hidden their anity for, and connection to,

Marxism. The important task, then, should not be to chastise this or that social move-

to become a revolutionary body whilst simultaneously oering “specic strategic prin-

ciples” for reaching a world beyond capitalism (2021, 235). Given the multiplicity of

cross-cutting cleavages that run through the social groups which potentially form the

revolutionary social body, however, this will be an extremely dicult task, but consid-

ering the urgency of what Lazzarato (2021) calls our “apocalyptic times” (7), it might

well be the most pressing task within social and political philosophy today.

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