Sketch of a Proletarian Capitalism
Wes Vanderburgh
17 February 2025
The left has historically lived both in and out of the world. In, meaning that the left makes use of actually existing reality to change it. And out, by virtue of the utopias it introduces to inspire its work. Thus, the left has faced the tension of both constituting and negating the world. Since 1848 and especially since 1914, the left has underpinned capitalism more successfully than it has negated it. And it is precisely that history that must be retraced so that the role of negation isn’t lost completely.
After the abortive revolutions in Europe of 1848, Marx and Engels declared the bourgeoisie unfit to rule the system it shepherded into existence. This class revealed its hand in these revolutions, resigning itself to guarding and extending its wealth at the expense of carrying the project of the Enlightenment to its conclusion. The proletariat was thus politically summoned to fulfill and eliminate the causes of its existence.
Marx and Engels relied on Hegel to make this assessment. As such, their claim to know capitalism rested on an important assumption carried over from Hegel’s philosophy, namely, that knowledge is possible only after the fact. That is, because a book like Capital could be written, that meant that the political possibility of overcoming capitalism existed. Capitalism was on its way out, and the proof was that it could be known as thoroughly and ruthlessly as its very markets covered the globe.
Another way of saying this is that after 1848, capitalism’s ontology became conditional. If one wanted to know more about it, one had to enter the fray to overcome it. It was up in the air whether capitalism would continue to exist or not. Its very being became subject to practical considerations: Would the proletariat fulfill the role Marx and Engels carved out for it? Was the bourgeoisie capable of reinvigorating itself and its system?
Because the specificity of proletarian socialism required the status quo of capitalism to make sense as an attainable utopia, this meant that the left had to maintain capitalism as long as was expedient. Without capitalism, there could be no left, at least as far as proletarian socialism was equivalent with it. The left had to become constitutive of a moribund capitalism in order to revolutionize it.
Indeed, the left did exactly this, just a little bit better than it perhaps should have. The German SPD, for example, the largest socialist party in the Second International, became the largest party in the German political system on the eve of what would become World War I. It thus had a vested, material interest in keeping its power while also claiming an ideological interest in voiding that power. We know how this crisis unfolded.
Capitalism persists, thanks to the left. Indeed, its primary antinomy, that between capital and labor, appears to have dissolved. It makes less sense these days to talk of workers-vs-the-boss than it did one hundred years ago. The states and corporations that shape our lives do so largely on principles inherited from the past iterations of the left. Capitalism instead seems more knowable on the basis of the many antinomies that characterize the proletariat, such as gender, race, sexuality, ability, and so on.
If capitalism seems more understandable on the basis of proletarian categories than bourgeois ones, this signals that capitalism itself has become proletarian. Everybody earns a salary or wage these days, even the highest political elites. All culture has become proletarian, and indeed capitalists seem more willing to pay extravagant sums for such culture the more explicitly proletarian it is. The logic of work has penetrated into the deepest recesses of the psyche, tormenting those who seek to establish ‘genuine’ interpersonal relationships. The bourgeoisie may still retain power, but only because they have adapted themselves to the logics of the proletariat they nominally control.
Because Marxism only conceived of the proletariat negatively, as a negation of the bourgeoisie, it has become a stumbling block. Capitalism makes little sense as long as the proletariat is nothing more than this, because there is now only itself to negate. There is no opposite to inform the contours of its existence. All is proletarian, even the bourgeoisie itself. As such, Marxism obstructs any attempts at positively understanding present life.
If ‘overcoming capitalism’ still means anything, it now means overcoming ourselves, pure and simple. There is no longer an ‘external’ enemy to confront. It is just the proletariat. While this is a source of much anxiety and confusion, it is also perhaps a great opportunity. If socialism seems easier to achieve technologically now than ever before, that belies the political and existential weight of the problem. But again, herein lies opportunity - for if all prior class enemies have fallen away, then that means that the power to remake society lies at our feet, and ours alone. If our responsibility has never seemed more daunting, our power has also never been more absolute.
Currently, there are at least three strategies in play attempting to make something of this opportunity:
One is to know the proletariat. For if the proletariat can be known in its plenitude, according to all the modern sciences and arts, then that would mean, à la Hegel, that its time too has passed, or is passing. But what emancipatory opportunities lie beyond the proletariat have never been sketched, so this kind of intervention proceeds without any firm grounding.
Another is to act irrationally. Despite lacking sufficient self-knowledge, we move anyway, because we must. Any change is change, after all. To act irrationally is to claim the modicum of freedom still allowed in a regime of totalizing rationality. It is to affirm the shrinking immediacy of life. It is beautiful, if tragic. And it is directionless, and therefore motionless.
A third is to return. To force the many antinomies of the proletariat back into just one, that of the proletariat, and no less importantly, to force the reemergence of one single enemy, the bourgeoisie. Thus would we forcibly relive the great unmaking of the failure of world socialist revolution. Only this time, we would get it right. Is it possible to articulate such a conservative utopia? Are there any guarantees we would succeed where our ancestors failed?
Does a falling tree in a deserted forest make a sound? Only if something exists to hear it. Similarly, perhaps, with the proletariat. Does it exist at all if it is all that exists? Is it possible to overthrow oppression when, in the final analysis, it is the oppressed who sustain such oppression? Any contemporary Marxism worthy of the name must wrestle with such questions.
Wes Vanderburgh is an independent writer currently based in the U.S. Their work explores the legacies of the left and the possibilities of osaiupdslkjafdsoa - and, wouldn’t you know it, the cat stepped on the keyboard again! Find more of their work here.
