A Political Economy of the Senses: Neoliberalism, Reification, Critique

IN PART 1 I argued that influential critiques of neoliberal domination in contemporary political theory have relied upon formalist modes of critique that may ultimately obscure fundamental forms of domination in neoliberal polities. By basing their critiques on political norms and principles that are constitutively shielded from the logics of capital, such as an autonomized understanding of “the political” or a purified understanding of “intersubjectivity,” radical democratic theory and third-generation critical theory underplay the extent to which neoliberal domination relies upon formalism for its legitimation in contemporary politics. Theoretical formalism plays into neoliberal forms of depoliticization in contemporary society because the neoliberal state relies on liberal normativity for legitimation, yet in practice overrides the separation between economics and politics upon which liberal normativity is based. By contrast to these formalist approaches, contemporary Marxist critiques of political economy tend to prioritize the mediations between politics and capital. Yet, at the same time, Marxist political economic approaches may neglect the urgent need to translate economic practices and categories into experiential terms, which is critical to the task of repoliticizing neoliberal society.

Radical democratic critique and Marxist critiques of political economy represent two divergent strategies for understanding the possibilities of democratic practice in the context of contemporary capitalism. From the perspective of radical democratic theory, the political is by definition irreducible to the processes of capitalist production. Radical democrats insist upon the autonomy of politics and warn against the reduction of the political to a merely “parasitical” mode of truth, to use Rancière’s formulation of the problem.1 Conversely, in the eyes of neo-Marxists, the mystical world of commodities in dynamic circulation eludes a simple political reduction. According to Marx, the commodity fetish disguises (or mystifies) the relation between humans as a relationship between things. Yet, from the perspective of Marxism, the fetish has a real social existence and is therefore immune to a purely political reading. The incompatibility of these two approaches raises difficult questions about the relationship between radical democratic theory and a robust critique of capitalism.

I hesitate to refer to the dilemma between these two positions as a debate because the categories of radical democratic theory and Marxism are of course far too broad to refer meaningfully to actual debates in the contemporary literature on the relationship between democracy and capitalism. Instead, I think these labels more usefully refer broadly to two divergent methodological approaches: one emphasizing the analysis of politics as a logic autonomous from the socioeconomic dimensions of society, the other emphasizing the mediations between abstract dynamics of the economy and political practices. Slavoj Žižek identifies the dilemma created by the opposition between these two approaches: “the relationship between economy and politics is ultimately that of the well-known visual paradox of the ‘two faces of a vase’: one either sees the two faces or a vase, never both of them—one has to make a choice.”2 Žižek is not alone in his assessment of this dilemma. Kojin Karatani, for example, theorizes the space between economics and politics as a space of “parallax.”³ Similarly, in Politics and the Other Scene, Étienne Balibar describes this methodological conflict as a debate over the “autonomy of the political” versus the “heteronomy of the political.”⁴ The necessity of this choice—between a theory that is sensitive to the contingency and experiential dimensions of political practice on the one hand and one that accounts for the relationship between economic structures and political subjectivity on the other hand—contributes to the impasse in contemporary political theory discussed in chapter 1.

Insofar as the vocabulary of contemporary critical theory necessitates a “choice” or prioritization of either economics or politics, critical theory will be hard-pressed to meet the challenge of analyzing the political implications of contemporary forms of capitalist domination. The fact that sophisticated contemporary work in both Marxism and radical democratic theory retains the implicit priority of either the “economy” or the “political” in their accounts is symptomatic of a deep impasse that has severed the critique of political economy from democratic theory. If unaddressed, this impasse will continue to prevent theorists from achieving a practical understanding of the possibilities of democratic politics today. Moving beyond this impasse will require thinking anew the relation between the economy and the political, both practically and conceptually, in a way that avoids the dichotomizing tendencies of neo-Marxism and radical democratic theory. In short, this task demands a critical vocabulary that thinks beyond formalism and determinism.

Within the critical theory tradition, concepts of alienation and reification probed into the relationship between politics, economics, and subjective experience. However, in responding to the determinism of the Second International, radical democratic theorists based their autonomist conceptions of politics on a radical break from the paradigms of alienation and reification. With the exception of the concept of “class struggle,” which was reinterpreted to free the concept from its purported essentialism, radical democrats discarded Marxian tools of analysis. The rejection of deterministic Marxism was extremely generative for political theorists operating amid vast transformations in the modes of political struggle in the historical context of May 1968.⁵ However, in light of global economic crises and vast shifts in the political-economic structure of capitalist production that we face in the contemporary conjuncture, the interrelated concepts of alienation and reification could prove useful for theorizing the relationship between capital, political subjectivity, and social movements. In order to reconstruct the concept of reification from the critical theory tradition I will first explore how its precursor in Marx’s theory of alienation enables us to understand neoliberal forms of depoliticization.

What is interesting to note about these arguments, couched in the familiar terms of Marxological debate, is the way in which they reproduce contemporary dilemmas in democratic theory between economics and politics and then subsequently project them onto Marx’s work. Radical democrats see in Marx a thinker of class struggle and radical dissensus. They tend to discard those parts of Marx’s theory that retain a metapolitical emphasis on the way in which class struggle and class consciousness are affected by political economy. Neo-Marxists, by contrast, view Marx as first and foremost the theorist of Capital, and they emphasize the forms of abstract domination perpetuated by the seemingly autonomous movements of the capitalist economy while underemphasizing the normative dimensions of Marx’s work as well as the democratic theory he elaborated in his early works.

However, if we return to Marx, we will find that the concept of alienation from the Marxian lexicon crosscuts concepts of economics and politics and therefore is useful for reconstructing a theoretical vocabulary that can help political theorists to think beyond this dichotomy in the context of the new forms of economic and political practice that characterize neoliberalism. This project requires a reconstruction of Marx’s work, not along the traditional fault lines established in Marxological debates but instead by turning to aspects of his work that suggest an alternative understanding of the relationship between democracy and capitalism than those offered by contemporary critics. I suggest that the radical democrats are correct in arguing that Marx can be productively understood as a theorist of democracy. However, making Marx’s work fruitful for democratic theory requires attention to the ways in which the concept of alienation refers neither to a predominantly political phenomenon nor to an exclusively economic one. Rather, alienation refers to a form of depoliticization specific to capitalism that produces two kinds of effects. The first, which emerges from Marx’s concept of political alienation in his early political writings and in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, is the rigidification of the political. This aspect of depoliticization refers to the feature of capitalism that stratifies the institutional structure of forms of self-rule. The second, drawn from the critique of political economy in Capital and articulated largely through the concept of commodity fetishism, is a critique of the bracketing of the political, which refers to the obfuscation of the relationship between the political and economic spheres.

Scholars searching for radical democratic facets of Marx’s theory, such as Kouvelakis, have tended to reject the category of alienation as a merely social, economic, or anthropological category, arguing that Marx’s theory of alienation reduces politics to the economy.8 I counter this interpretation by showing the deep connection between Marx’s concept of alienation in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts and the critique of the rigidification of political form in his “Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right.” Here Marx points to a form of capitalist depoliticization that is focused explicitly on political institutions and their connection to the will of the people. However, this early critique of capitalist depoliticization based on the theory of alienation is incomplete. It is susceptible to the same problems as the radical democratic conception of politics that I referenced earlier insofar as it excludes questions about the economic conditions of possibility of democratic practice. But Marx’s discussion of political alienation points to a second form of capitalist depoliticization that is worked out in his later writings on commodity fetishism, the bracketing of the political from the economy. I argue that this second understanding of capitalist depoliticization is complementary with, rather than at odds with, the first. Together, Marx’s exploration of these two forms of depoliticization can provide tools for rethinking the relationship between economics and politics in a way that moves beyond the impasse in contemporary democratic theory.

Typically, the 1844 manuscripts are read in one of two ways, neither of which is concerned to think the specifically political dimensions of the concept of alienation. By many, the text is considered a preliminary expression of the precepts Marx would later develop in his mature critique of political economy.⁹ For others who are interested in understanding the political dimensions of Marx’s early works, the 1844 manuscripts are viewed as a pivotal text in which Marx turned his attention from the explicitly radical and revolutionary concerns of “The Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right” and “On the Jewish Question” to the antipolitical terms of a Feuerbachian anthropology of man.¹⁰ Both these positions share a general skepticism toward the Marxian concept of “species-being,” the former for its transhistorical treatment of the concept of labor, the latter for its social-ist and metapolitical implications, which purport to find in the human’s status as laboring animal a principle of social harmonization and transparent intersubjective relations that would supersede political dissensus and social antagonism.¹¹

Yet, without ignoring the anthropological emphasis of this text, one can also find moments in the manuscripts where Marx launches a critique of capitalist social relations to reveal fissures of social antagonism and possibilities for political practice in capitalist society. That is to say, although the 1844 manuscripts may appear to be rooted in a socioeconomic analysis instead of a political one, a central point of the critique of alienation as illustrated in this text is a focus on how human beings are alienated from their constitutive powers of world creation, which is the basis for Marx’s understanding of politics as an activity. Moreover, when we read the 1844 manuscripts alongside the earlier “Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right” and “On the Jewish Question,” I suggest that an alternative reading of the manuscripts takes shape. The critique of alienation emerges as a critique of the hypostatization of abstraction, which results in the depoliticization of institutions, both “political” and “economic.” Marx critiques alienated political and economic forms, showing them to be subject to practical transformation. The concept of alienation thus serves as the basis of a Marxian critique of capitalist depoliticization.

At a second level labor is a socially creative human act whereby, in relating to the objects they have produced, human beings relate to one another and come to recognition of their social being through the objects of labor. Taking these two levels together, Marx shows that in the activity of production the specificity of human life is revealed—the human is a being whose essence lies outside of himself. Humans relate to themselves, to one another, and to the species as a whole through the mediation of nonhuman objectivity. Laboring activity allows humans to relate to themselves as well as to their fundamental world-creating capacities through the mediation of the objects they produce.

Under conditions of capitalist production, however, labor takes an alienated form. The essence of alienated labor, as Marx would later express it, is that the product of labor is commodified—it is made into an alienable, sellable thing, produced only in order to then be sold. The laborer himself thereby becomes a commodity. Her labor exists to be sold to the capitalist in order to produce commodities for others’ use rather than to relate her own consciousness to a world created by and for humans. Under such conditions, the free activity of exchange between the human being and nature, manifested in the activity of objectification (Vergegenständlichung), becomes estranged activity (Entfremdung), a means of mere existence, which produces the object as external and hostile to its producer. Alienation inverts the relationship between worker and product: the worker comes to relate to the product of labor as if to an alien object that has power over her, rather than as an objectification of her own self-conscious activity. Through this inversion, the world of things comes to dominate the world of humans.13 The loss of self experienced by the worker under capitalist conditions of labor consists neither solely in the perverted dialectic between human beings and nature nor primarily in the psychological condition experienced by workers separated from their products. Rather, the dimension of alienation that distinguishes Marx’s account from other philosophical and romantic critiques of alienation is that, for Marx, alienation is a form of activity. The means of estrangement are practical, and therein lies the key to criticizing and challenging the conditions of alienated labor in capitalist society.

Marx uses Ludwig Feuerbach’s demystification of religious alienation to illuminate the secret of alienated labor. Feuerbach arrived at the conclusion that the alien being behind religious projections “can only be man himself.”14 Likewise, Marx shows that the “world of things,” that netherworld in which the inversion of labor into a hostile, alien, and dominating being takes place, is, in some sense, “only man himself.” Marx critiques the inversion of species being, manifest in man’s capacity to produce universally, into its alienated form. While this may appear to be an economic understanding of alienation, because it is focused on commodity production, alienation could also be described as the inversion of labor that is social power into labor that is social domination, a formulation that highlights its political significance. Alienated labor, then, appears to be a paradoxical form of relationship—it performs the function of social mediation, relating individuals to one another, but it does so only in alienated form. That is to say, the alienated labor process relates individuals, but this is a form of relation through atomization, a form of relation that necessitates the atomization and separation of individuals from the whole and thus from their social powers.

While the critique of alienation may appear to be rooted in a socioeconomic rather than specifically political analysis, I contend that his critique of a self-positing abstract form of mediation, which manifests as a kind of atomization, has its precedent in Marx’s critique of the state in his political writings of the same period. In these earlier texts Marx discusses the relationship of alienation to the liberal state. Marx’s critique of the social relations of production in the 1844 manuscripts actually parallels the political critique of the liberal state in “On the Jewish Question” and the “Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right.”¹⁵ Each text focuses, albeit at different levels, on the critique of alienation and the hypostatization of abstraction. These texts highlight the centrality of the category of alienation for understanding forms of depoliticization in Marx’s corpus as a whole and demonstrate the ways in which the concept of alienation crosscuts the distinction between the political and the economic in order to open space for forms of politics that go beyond those prevalent in capitalist society.

In arguing that political emancipation is not the “final form” of human emancipation, Marx is not simply denouncing political emancipation. Rather, he is problematizing an inherent contradiction of the liberal state, which creates a tension between a form of emancipation that is confined to the political sphere, and thus incomplete, versus a form of emancipation that applies to all spheres of society. This contradiction is evident by the way in which the political state, serving as the organ of political emancipation by granting equal citizenship to all, does so only by creating the citizen as an empty being, abstracted from the particularities of his material life in civil society.

The perfected political state is essentially the species life of man in opposition to his material life. All presuppositions of this egoistic life are retained outside the sphere of the state in civil society, but as attributes of civil society. Where the political state has attained its true development, man leads—and not only in thought, in consciousness, but also in reality, in life—a double life, a heavenly and an earthly one, a life in the political community, in which he counts as a communal being, and a life in civil society, in which he acts as a private individual, views other people as means, debases himself to the status of a means, and becomes the plaything of alien forces.

(36)

Therefore the division between the human being and citizen is rooted in the liberal state. Marx criticizes political emancipation insofar as it relies on the state form, an indirect medium, to grant freedom. “The state is the mediator between man and human freedom” (35). In political emancipation, the human being frees herself through an estranged medium into which she deposits her freedom. She thus paradoxically frees herself through a medium that is only the repository of her own will—of her own spontaneity—yet one that, in abstraction from the material life of the people, solidifies into an alien and arbitrary force. Against the alienation of the will of the people in the liberal state, Marx reiterates his critique of alienation at the political level in the “Introduction to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right.” “Just as it is not religion that creates man but man who creates religion, so it is not the constitution that creates the people but the people which creates the constitution.”17 This statement encapsulates the political core of alienation that I am highlighting.

In other forms of political state, the sovereignty of the people remains confined to the political sphere, therefore “all remaining forms of state are a certain, determinate, particular form of state.”¹⁹ They are, in other words, alienated forms of the state. Only democracy will no longer differentiate itself from the life of the people as an alien medium—atomizing human social life even as it equalizes individuals in the political sphere—democracy will itself be both the form and content of the people’s existence. In this sense true democracy is an expansive political form in which all areas of social life are held to be potentially political.

Marx’s notion of human emancipation in “On the Jewish Question” thus can be understood in light of this conception of democracy as form and content. Unlike the liberal form of the political state, which alienates human social power in an apparatus that stands above and dominates the real human being of civil society, in democracy the state, insofar as it exists, is an expression of human social power that is no longer abstracted from humans in the guise of political power.20 Human emancipation as the practice of true democracy is no longer a state, an alienated form of social practice separate from the life of people. It is the collective exercise of popular sovereignty, the ongoing expression of collective social power. “In democracy the state as particular is only particular, and as universal is the actual universal, i.e. not a determinate thing in distinction from other content. The modern French have conceived it thus: in true democracy the political state disappears [untergehen]. This is correct inasmuch as qua constitution it is no longer equivalent to the whole.”²¹

The conclusion of the “Introduction to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right” is a radical critique of the abstraction of the state from the general will as well as from the concrete life of the human being, paralyzed and atomized by his segmentation into bourgeois and human being. The political state serves as a form of relation between individuals, but, standing above them as a self-positing, autonomous entity, it relates individuals by dividing them from one another as well as from their collective social power. When Marx claims that democracy is the truth of all political regimes, he aims to reveal the alienation at the heart of the political state.

The critique of the state’s transcendence, of its alien character, indicates the contours of a Marxian concept of politics. Marx’s concept of politics displaces the limit between the political sphere and civil society, a displacement that transforms both spheres. In this sense Marx’s concept of the political focuses not only on politics, conceived in abstraction from its conditions of possibility, but on the sphere of activity opened up by the displacement of the boundary between politics and its other. For Marx, the activity of politics politicizes civil society through its radical expansion. Therefore Marx defines democracy explicitly in contrast to the rigidification of the political that takes place in the liberal capitalist form of democracy he criticizes. The living sovereignty of “true democracy” is a boundless potentiality.²² It constantly undermines the rigid form of the capitalist state form of “democracy” Marx criticizes.

The point of this discussion is to show that Marx’s critique of the state’s transcendence and his critique of the political sphere’s alienated universality, which relates men as citizens only insofar as it necessarily atomizes them as property owners in civil society, parallels and points to Marx’s theorization of the anatomy of civil society and the critique of alienation carried out in the 1844 manuscripts. I foreground the political dimension of the critique of alienation in the 1844 manuscripts and argue that the 1844 manuscripts continue rather than abandon the political focus explicit in “On the Jewish Question” and the “Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right”, even as the object of analysis shifts from the state to the sites of production and labor.

The Marxian concept of alienation duplicates itself on several levels in Marx’s theoretical edifice, at the level of the state and civil society as well as at the level of production. On each of these levels the critique of alienation functions as a critique of the hypostatization of abstraction, abstraction that posits itself as objective, somehow beyond politics, even as it claims to relate and rule that which stands beneath it. My contention is that the critique of alienation marks a particular kind of depoliticization: the rigidification of political form, sedimented in the distinction between the state and civil society. However, I suggest that the concept of democracy that emerges from Marx’s critique of rigidified political forms is insufficient on its own. Taken on its own, Marx’s critique of political alienation leads to a concept of politics that, upon first glance, appears to share much in common with the radical democratic position I critiqued at the beginning of the chapter. It takes politics on its own terms, as autonomous from democracy’s conditions of possibility.

What distinguishes Marx’s concept of politics from radical democratic approaches, however, is precisely the emphasis on democracy as both form and content. This concern moves Marx from a critique of the rigidification of political form to the second form of capitalist depoliticization I introduced previously: the bracketing of the political from the economic. In a similar vein, Balibar describes the essence of the Marxian conception of the political as the transgression of the limits of the political sphere, “which are only ever the limits of the established order.” According to Marx, Balibar claims, “politics has to get back to the ‘non-political’ conditions of that institution (conditions which are, ultimately, eminently political).”23 It is this turn to the extrapolitical conditions of the institution of politics that distinguishes a Marxian conception of politics from theories of politics that see the political as autonomous from the historically specific structure of the economy.²⁴

Yet the rigidification of the political that takes place in capitalism only indicates one aspect of the specific operations of capital upon the political realm. The critique of the rigidification of political form is incomplete insofar as it focuses largely on the formally political (in the radical democratic sense) as opposed to the economic dimensions of depoliticization. In other words, the critique of political alienation that I have presented does not yet fully address the problem introduced at the beginning of the chapter, inasmuch as it seems to remain bound to an analysis of form. Yet Marx’s turn to an analysis of the bracketing of the political from the economic complements his critique of the rigidification of the political and distinguishes his conception of politics from the radical democratic and neo-Marxist perspectives.

Marx’s later writings on political economy have often been criticized for their subordination of politics to the economy through a complete neglect of the dynamics of the political sphere and the operations of the capitalist state. Yet this criticism overlooks the extent to which Marx is speaking of a problem in capitalism that is not reducible to any single positive sphere of society, i.e., to the “economy” or to the political sphere. In Capital, one might say, the critique of enclosures, commodities, and capital refers not to the merely empirical manifestation of these phenomena in the economy but rather, as Žižek puts it, to “a kind of socio-transcendental a priori, the matrix which generates the totality of social and political relations.”25 While in Capital Marx may appear at times to be describing the dynamics of the “economy” in the merely empirical sense, in reality he is describing the abstract frame within which capitalism as a totalizing social form—not as a positive economic sphere—is possible. What separates the early from the late Marx is not a shift in focus from one empirical sphere of society to another, from politics to the economy, but a rather a shift to a further level of abstraction that reveals both politics and the economy to be crucial aspects of capitalism as a mode of material and social production.²⁶ The concept of commodity fetishism reveals the way in which capitalism generates a bracketing of politics from the economy through a displacement of social relations from the intersubjective realm to the relationship between commodities and through the social operation of the real abstraction of labor.

In the famous first chapter of volume 1 of Capital, Marx points to the commodity form as the central structuring principle of capitalist society as a whole. The commodity, Marx explains, is first of all an object of use. It is something that satisfies a human need of some kind. “The nature of these needs, whether they arise, for example, from the stomach, or the imagination, makes no difference.”27 This is the use value of the commodity, which is contained in the physical commodity itself and makes the object a consumable thing. But the commodity is not only an object of use, it is also an object that can be exchanged. Exchange value is the value that a commodity bears with respect to its exchangeability with other commodities. It is a purely relative, quantitative relation in light of which every use value is potentially comparable with every other use value. Far from a “natural” process, commodification is a social process by which objects come to be exchangeable and equivalent through abstraction from the material qualities of use value. This is possible, Marx shows, because all commodities are objectifications of human labor in the abstract. “A use-value, or useful article, therefore has value only because abstract human labor is materialized in it. How, then, is the magnitude of this value to be measured? By means of the quantity of the ‘value forming substance,’ the labour, contained in the article. This quantity is measured by its duration and the labour-time is itself measured on the particular scale of hours, days, etc.” (125).

The exchange value of the commodity reveals that a commodity is something more than an object of consumption. But this “something more” is not revealed by looking at the commodity itself, at least not in its everyday form of appearance. One sees rather a use value on one side and money on the other. But money, Marx shows, is no more than a commodity among commodities that has become a materialized form of equivalence mediating between all other commodities. Due to the form of appearance that presents the commodity and money as distinct, and takes money to be the social mediator of commodities, the status of the commodity as itself a social mediation is obscured. The commodity appears as a use value that has exchange value, but this way of perceiving commodities cannot grasp the commodity’s social essence—that, in fact, the commodity is itself value. Marx argues that the commodity is in its very being a social mediation; its status as a material object only obscures its functions of social mediation.

Not an atom of matter enters into the objectivity of commodities as values; in this it is the direct opposite of the coarsely sensuous objectivity of commodities as physical objects. We may twist and turn a single commodity as we wish; it remains impossible to grasp it as a thing possessing value. However let us remember that commodities possess an objective character as values only in so far as they are all expressions of an identical social substance, human labour, that their objective character as values is therefore purely social.

(139)

According to Marx, the fetish character of the commodity, which veils the social labor that produces the objects of human need, is the central structural feature of capitalism.28 No longer rendered meaningful by social relations external to labor as in precapitalist societies, in capitalism labor takes on a self-grounding form, thereby rendering invisible its status as a social relation. The fetish character of labor consists in being a form of social mediation that obscures itself from the experience of social actors, thereby taking on the character of nonconscious social determination. Labor under capitalism therefore exerts an objective form of compulsion upon individuals in capitalist society. Commodities in circulation appear to be mere “things,” or objects of need, but in reality, as commodities, their movement follows the independent logic of exchange value.

Commodity fetishism is depoliticizing in the way it obscures the relationship between actions and their social effects. The social form of commodity exchange, along with the forms of abstract domination and social compulsion rooted within it, are produced through human action yet are not recognized as something socially produced or historical. Indeed, the very condition of possibility of commodity exchange is the fetishism of commodities as well as the form of consciousness that regards commodities and commodity production as ahistorical, objective, and naturalized. Fetishism invokes a practical abstraction that individuals in capitalist society take toward the social world, toward objects used in everyday life as well as toward other human beings. The effect of commodity fetishism is ultimately to bracket certain areas of social life from political deliberation and subjective experience and to render them invisible from the perspective of political transformation.

My central point is that the problem of the bracketing of the political is one that crucially needs to be addressed in contemporary democratic theory. It provides an important complement to theories of democracy that view the political realm in abstraction from its conditions of possibility. The two constitutive forms of depoliticization that I have outlined here—the rigidification of political form and the bracketing of the political from the economic—are incomplete without one another. An emphasis on the rigidification of the political alone cannot grasp the dynamics of abstract compulsion that circumscribe and displace human relationships to the realm of commodities or the dynamic of capital. Nor can such an account alone describe the kind of practical misrecognition of human activity that is constitutive of the fetishism of commodities in capitalist societies. Likewise, a critique that is confined to the bracketing of the political loses sight of the problem of political form and of the normative specificity of democracy.

Insofar as scholars project the dilemmas of contemporary democratic theory onto their interpretations of Marx by opposing Marx’s early and late works, they overlook valuable resources for moving beyond the impasse of radical democratic theory.29 As long as the two forms of capitalist depoliticization identified here are taken as opposing perspectives rather than as two complementary ways of thinking about capitalist political forms, political theorists will remain bound to an unproductive dichotomy between the economy and politics that leaves intact a debilitating lacuna between theories of radical democracy and critiques of political economy.

György Lukács’s concept of reification, to which I turn in the next chapter, deepens Marx’s account of the bracketing of the political in his theory of reification. Fundamentally influenced by Marx’s later writings on political economy, Lukács invokes the concept of reification to respond to a specific lacuna in Marx’s analysis. While Marx’s political economic writings draw attention to the autonomous and apparently self-perpetuating character of the capitalist economy, Marx does not directly address the ways in which the individual’s subjective stance itself becomes a crucial feature of the capitalist mode of production, nor does he sufficiently address the question of how the problem of the bracketing of the political can become an object of perception and political struggle. Marx pioneers an analysis of politics that is in the truest sense a work of “political economy.” But his theory is not yet a political economy of the senses. Lukács’s essay on reification brings us closer to a political economy of the senses through an analysis of the position that the production of subjectivity occupies within the capitalist mode of production and its implications for democratic politics and democratic perception.