Totality Without Exit? Abolition After Real Subsumption

Review of Abolishing Capitalist Totality. What Is to Be Done under Real Subsumption?
Jason Bonilla

This book, comparable to a grenade, was published in 2026 by Minor Compositions, founded on collective intelligence. It is an ambitious anthology, eagerly awaited for a decade, whose war machine – borrowing from Deleuzian-Guattarian terminology – traces lines of flight that unfold from communist theory and the problem of communization – Théorie Communiste and Endnotes – to critical philosophy and the problem of totality – Kant and Hegel – , revolving around a relatively obscure but enormously powerful concept: subsumption in Marx, specifically the distinction between formal and real subsumption of labor as stages in the organization of productive processes under capital.

Although the volume does indeed revolve around the concept of subsumption, in my view the two vital concepts that run through the discussion, across its nearly 600 pages, are communization and totality. Communization, following Endnotes’ definition, is the revolutionary process understood as the immediate abolition of capitalist social relations – such as wage labor, value, money, and private property – through the direct creation of communist forms of life, without transitional stages or state mediation. Totality, in the Hegelian sense, is the dynamic and self-sufficient unity of all the determinations of reality, in which each particular moment only has meaning in its internal relation to the whole, which is constituted and developed through the dialectical unfolding of its own contradictions. Retaining both definitions will help us understand the philosophical interface of notions such as class, race, gender, and other such misfortunes, as will be presented below.

Marina Vishmidt, to whose memory the book is dedicated, sees in the paradox of self-abolition, presented by Ray Brassier in his critique of Endnotes, the unification of the problems of rejecting all prior political identity – of gender, race, or class – given that revolutionary abolition today advocates subverting the social contract rather than being included in it. Vishmidt says:

“One of the most salient of these abstractions is the so-called paradox of self-abolition, which has lately been opened up by Ray Brassier. The subject of abolition emerges through the struggle that abolition entails, yet it must also arrive at a point where the militant identity emerging through struggle has to eliminate its basis in the society that the movement wants to change or overcome. This is not a situation which can be dealt with by fiat, but has to be one of the modes and horizons of struggle itself, in which it will continue to unfold as a painful contradiction. Who is the subject that initiates and who comes out of the other side of self-abolition? ” (436)

For Brassier, self-abolition only escapes its paradoxical nature through rationality: by choosing emancipatory mediations guided by an autonomous rule, in the Kantian-Marxist sense of “generic being” (430-431). But the problem is material and not merely logical: the horizon of transformation is always determined by the real abstractions that one intends to transform. If the politics of subjectivation is not addressed, the paradox remains concrete – as every historical experience of insurrection, revolution, or self-organization testifies – because subjectivity is always distorted by power.

This leads Vishmidt to mention other fronts of struggle that are more attuned to the Latin American context, such as Afropessimism. The ‘radical Black tradition’ offers an alternative way of thinking about subjectivation as a generative nothingness and not as an affirmation of identity. Returning to Afropessimism, Vishmidt proposes that the historical experience of the expropriation of subjectivity – being-as-commodity, the negation of the human – produces a shared nothingness that becomes sociability and antagonism. In dialogue with Deleuze , this nothingness is not pure negation but potentiality: a “life in common” that emerges precisely from absolute dispersion, from the contingency of collectively experiencing the condition of negation as the starting point for the common. Real abstraction lived in its zero degree does not close off but rather opens up, in a degenerative and regenerative way at the same time, a form of subjectivation irreducible to any prior positive identity.

Like the history of the indigenous peoples of Central America, the history of blackness is a testament to the fact that objects can and do resist.

Abolition, as a category of revolutionary theory and practice, presents problems precisely because it fails to make visible the minority struggles that are excluded from communization. Despite the historical incompatibility between class, gender, and race struggles, self-abolition continues to seem like the appropriate model for overcoming these social forms: just as class must abolish itself, women must organize themselves as women to overcome their condition as women. In this approach by Vishmidt, the contradiction in the dialectical movement of the indigenous is evident in retrospect, since in various contexts many native communities are oppressed through gender, yet they continue to organize themselves as indigenous people to guarantee, rather than overcome, their condition as indigenous people.

The volume brings together historical materials, original essays, dialogues, and poetic interventions, organized into four main sections. Given their quality, we would like to comment on each piece, but due to space constraints, we will limit ourselves to a selection.

The editors’ introduction is long and dense. Iles and Mattin begin with a shared diagnosis of our time: the widespread feeling that capitalism is inevitable, that “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism,” to paraphrase Fredric Jameson’s famous formula popularized by Mark Fisher.

The central argument proposes that, to overcome political and intellectual paralysis, it is necessary to recover and deepen the Marxist concept of subsumption, initially a philosophical term that Marx radically transformed to describe how capital seizes existing social forms (formal subsumption) and remakes them in its own image (real subsumption). The editors trace the history of the concept from Aristotle, through Kant and Hegel, to Marx and its use in the “Results of the Immediate Production Process,” the “lost chapter” of Capital. The recovery of the concept of subsumption also goes hand in hand with the Neue Marx-Lektüre, that is, with the investigation of the manuscripts of Marx’s various drafts.

The introduction also maps the reception of the concept in 20th-century Marxist thought: Italian operaismo (Negri, Tronti), the French ultra-left (Camatte, Négation), Latin American debates (Bolívar Echeverría, Liga Comunista 23 de Septiembre), and the communization current (Théorie Communiste, Endnotes). The volume further attempts to engage these traditions in dialogue with Afropessimism, decolonial feminism, antinationalism, and prison and police abolition movements, questioning whether subsumption can be a tool for understanding the mediations between capitalism, race, gender, and class without reducing them to one another.

Block I: Historical Materials

Andrés Saenz de Sicilia’s article situates the intervention of the Ecuadorian-Mexican philosopher Bolívar Echeverría in 1983, when he published in the journal Cuadernos Políticos a selection of fragments by Marx on the concept of subsumption, taken from the 1861-63 manuscripts, distinct from the better-known “Results.” Saenz de Sicilia argues that Echeverría was not simply seeking to popularize Marx, but rather to intervene critically to break with the statist interpretation, which treats formal and real subsumption as mutually exclusive, successive historical phases, pointing instead toward a simultaneous use of the concept. For Echeverría, Saenz de Sicilia says, subsumption is the theoretical mediation that links capitalist relations of production with technological development, inscribing within the means of production themselves a particular form of social cooperation that restricts human possibilities for action and resistance.

Bolívar Echeverría’s text is brief but precise. As we have already mentioned, it introduces the reader to the 1861-63 manuscripts, pointing out that the concept of the subsumption of the labor process under capital appears in an articulated manner within them. Subsumption, from this perspective, is not merely an economic mechanism but a regressive social necessity: the capitalist form imposes a logic that is not neutral but perpetuates conditions of domination even when it ostensibly modernizes or “develops” production. Echeverría rejects both the teleological view of revolution as an inevitable destiny and as pure, inconceivable negativity, pointing instead toward a theory of communist transition that begins with the concrete analysis of subsumption in its multiple forms.

Federico Corriente contextualizes the emergence of the Négation group within the French far left of the early 1970s, heirs to the May ‘68 movement and the debates surrounding the Grundrisse and Marx’s manuscripts circulating in amateur translations. He explains why this text, the first English translation of Marx’s work, is foundational for what would later be called the communization movement: the thesis that under real subsumption, the proletariat can no longer assert itself as a working class to destroy capital, but must instead abolish itself in the revolutionary process.

Thus, Négation’s “The Proletariat as Destroyer of Work” is the longest and most historically significant text in the collection. Originally published in the first issue of the journal of the same name in 1972, it occupies virtually its entirety. Négation begins with a rigorous reading of Marx’s ‘lost chapter’ to argue that the distinction between formal subsumption – the first historical phase, the still incomplete domination of capital over labor – and real subsumption – the second phase, the effective and total domination – has radical revolutionary consequences.

The argument rests on the fact that under the material community of capital – that is, the state of society completely subordinated to capital, in which its products pervade all spheres of life – the proletariat can no longer effectively fight for its interests as a working class. Socialization by capital destroys the foundation upon which trade unionism, workers’ parties, and programmatic activism were built. Revolution, then, cannot consist of the affirmation of liberated labor or the seizure of state power: it must be the destruction of labor as a category, the abolition of the working class as a class. In one quote: “The proletariat must destroy this function by abolishing itself. In doing so, it brings about the destruction of individual human labor in a humanly social sense; it liberates humanity and nature by reconciling them, and lays the foundations for a productive social activity that can be defined as the organic exchange between social human beings and nature” (123). This dense and rigorous text combines Marxist economic analysis with political conclusions that anticipate decades of debate in the theory of communism.

Roland Simon, one of the leading theorists of Théorie Communiste (TC), offers a critical assessment of Négation’s legacy in “Afterword: Négation, From the Abolition of Labour to the Search for the Subject of the Revolution.” He acknowledges the collective’s foundational importance but points out its limitations: Négation succeeded in articulating the need for the proletariat’s self-abolition but failed to resolve the question of the subject of that revolution. If the proletariat must abolish itself, who or what drives this process? This question is answered by the concept of ‘communization’ as the revolutionary process itself, in which, as we have already stated, the abolition of capitalist relations occurs directly in the struggle, without passing through a transitional period or a prior affirmation of proletarian identity.

Block II: Arguments

The essay “History, System, and Subsumption” is one of the most philosophically rigorous in the volume. Saenz De Sicilia revisits his doctoral research on the problem of subsumption in Kant, Hegel, and Marx to explore how the concept mediates between the systematic and historical dimensions of Marx’s thought. Capital is simultaneously a system with its own internal logic of expanded reproduction and a historical phenomenon subject to emergence and decline. Subsumption is the mechanism by which capital subordinates and incorporates existing social forms, both at the economic level (relations of production) and at the material level (technology, techniques, products). This author argues that subsumption cannot be relegated solely to the historical pole of periodization nor solely to the systematic pole of the pure logic of capital: it must be considered as a mediating concept between the two. The essay also develops a materialist reading of subsumption that separates it from its Kantian and Hegelian idealist heritage, reinscribing it within living human praxis.

“It is necessary, now as always, to free communism from the dialectical schemes of necessity that would sanction its historical development from the capitalist present as a preordained or organic ascent. History has been implacable in this respect. Revolution has been exposed, not as a form that subsists in content and that destiny or necessity would push toward concretion, but as an experimental task and a struggle that theoretical efforts can support but not guarantee. If Marx reminds us that communism is not a state of affairs but a real movement, its inescapable dilemma is what concrete social forms that movement will seek to establish, what life it intends to build from the ruins of the current order.” (170)

In “Real Subsumption and the Contradiction between the Proletariat and Capital: An Historical Approach,” Théorie Communiste offers a systematic exposition of its theory of the periodization of real subsumption and its consequences for the class struggle. The text distinguishes between the period of programmatism, corresponding to formal subsumption and the first phase of real subsumption, from the beginning of the 19th century to the 1960s, and the current period, in which programmatism has collapsed because capital has actually subsumed working-class identity, destroying the foundation upon which traditional working-class organizations were based.

Programmatism is defined as the practice by which the proletariat, in its liberation movement, found the elements of a future positive social organization: the party, the councils, the dictatorship of the proletariat. Under the generalized real subsumption, this assertion is no longer possible: the contradiction between proletariat and capital can only be resolved through communization, that is, the direct production of communist relations in the very process of the revolution, without a transitional period. The text concludes with the statement on communism as the abolition of value and wage labor.

It is time to invoke Ray Brassier’s “Wandering Abstraction.” Originally published in Mute in 2014 and developed from a paper presented at a symposium on accelerationism in Berlin (2013), this essay is one of the most influential and intellectually stimulating in the volume. The starting point is the following question: what theory of social abstraction is necessary to articulate cognitive knowledge with emancipatory political practice? It addresses the paradox of abolition:

“This logicization of social reality explains why there can be a contradiction between what human beings think and do in their relationship with themselves, or between what they think and do in reproducing capital. But this logicization by the value-form is not absolute: it applies to human activities and practices only insofar as they constitute labor. These activities and practices persist within the capital relation as phenomena that it has incorporated but not completely absorbed. They are not completely absorbed because they constitute the process by which capital absorbs labor. The self-reproduction of capital is constituted by phenomena that it itself cannot reproduce, even though it reproduces the labor that, in turn, reproduces it. Thus, the logicization of reality by capital is itself conditioned by that reality; this is the bulwark against absolute idealism, which would hypostatize capital as a completely autonomous and self-moving subject (causa sui), completely detaching itself from material reality.” (215)

Brassier contrasts two positions: accelerationism – especially in the version of Srnicek and Williams – with theories of communization – particularly Endnotes – and the figure of Jacques Camatte, whose reading of real subsumption as the “domestication” of humanity by capital leads him to propose the separation of the human community from the community of capital. Brassier argues that Endnotes is right to reject the possibility of such a separation: there is no outside to capital because capital constitutes us. The essay concludes with a plea for a form of collective and self-determined rationality that avoids both subjectivist voluntarism and naturalist objectivism.

Neil Gray revisits the famous concept of the “social factory” from Italian operaismo and the post-operaist tradition, developed by Mario Tronti in his influential 1962 text, subjecting it to rigorous critique from the perspective of urban geography and spatial studies. His argument is that the social factory thesis was never fully developed by operaismo due to its neglect of analyzing urbanization, transportation, and communications as processes that modify the relations and forces of production. Gray proposes recovering Lefebvre’s notion of the “mode of production of the state” and the production of space as a privileged instrument of accumulation strategies, in order to lend greater concreteness and rigor to the social factory thesis. The result is an essay that, without abandoning the conceptual framework of subsumption, adds a spatial and geographical dimension frequently ignored in theories of communization.

Rob Lucas’s essay is another of the volume’s most philosophically sophisticated pieces, bridging the gap between “False Totalities Don’t Have Exits,” included in the revised volume, and the more developed version of “Error,” both from Endnotes. The central issue is the concept of totality in Marxism: what do we mean when we speak of capitalist totality? Is it a saturated, all-encompassing totality from which there is no escape? Or is it an incomplete, contradictory totality that contains its own negation?

Lucas traces the Marxist history of the concept of totality from Hegel and Lukács to Althusser, highlighting the term’s inherent ambiguity and its polemical uses. He distinguishes between “indeterminate totalities” (which vacuously encompass everything) and “determinate totalities” (which specify their limits and internal contradictions). He argues that many uses of the concept of real subsumption fall into the trap of saturated totality, producing a theoretical impasse: if capital has subsumed everything, how is revolution possible? Lucas proposes overcoming this problem by distinguishing between the internal unity of capital as a system of production and the multiple contradictory mediations that operate outside the immediate production process.

Federico Corriente offers an archaeology of the convergences and divergences between the far-left’s theory of communization and the autonomous and libertarian traditions of the Spanish left. The essay is, in part, an intellectual history and, in part, an analysis of why Spain, despite its rich revolutionary tradition – the 1936 revolution, the 1917 general strike, etc. – lacked theorists comparable to Luxemburg, Pannekoek, Bordigas, or Gorters.

Corriente’s interesting position in “Spain and Communisation Theory: Past and Present” argues that this is largely due to the fact that the transition from formal to real subsumption in Spain came late, during the Francoist “stabilisation” of the late 1950s and 1960s, when European theoretical debates had already advanced significantly. The essay also analyzes the current reception of the theory of communization by groups such as Théorie Communiste and Endnotes in the Spanish and Latin American context, with its particularities and limitations, reviewing the main moments of other groups such as the Iberian Liberation Movement, 15-M or ‘Indignados’, concluding with the following statement: “Theory is simply a necessary moment of the self-critical character of the struggles that actually exist and, therefore, participates in their contradictory nature. Far from invalidating it, accepting the incomplete character of the theory of communization is what allows it to live up to what it describes” (322).

From my perspective within the Central American experience of reality, I can say that this text by Corriente feels close to me, although noticeably incomplete in light of the current struggles of indigenous peoples in countries like Guatemala, where this type of population expands the confrontation of social classes, opening a new dimension of analysis when we discuss self-organized resistances, which are constantly attacked by capitalism through the perpetration of gender or racial inequality.

“The Fantasy of Subsumption? Labour-Power and the Social (non) Relation” introduces a destabilizing voice into the volume. Nadia Bou Ali begins with a confrontation between the positions of Théorie Communiste and Endnotes on the scope of subsumption, but takes the critique further: she questions whether the very category of subsumption is not built on a series of assumptions that leave out fundamental dimensions of capitalist reproduction, especially with regard to reproductive labor, labor power as a sui generis commodity, and social relations – of gender, race, coloniality – that are not reducible to the immediate process of production.

Bou Ali argues that TC, by locating subsumption exclusively within the production process, produces a ‘fantasy’ – that is, a theoretical totality coherent in its own terms but which leaves the social conditions of labor power reproduction unexplained. This critique has affinities with Marxist feminism and social reproduction studies, although Bou Ali articulates it from a broader philosophical perspective.

Anthony Iles, one of the co-editors, contributes “This Implies Nothing,” an essay that reconstructs the history of three concepts – reification, alienation, and subsumption – within the Frankfurt School, focusing particularly on Horkheimer and Adorno. The argument is that these three concepts, rooted in Marx, underwent significant shifts and mutations throughout the twentieth century, converging around the notion of total domination in the School’s later work. Iles identifies a paradox: while the Marxist concept of subsumption refers strictly to the production process and maintains a tension between formal and real subsumption, in the Frankfurt School it tends to be replaced by a notion of total domination that, paradoxically, closes off the horizon of transformation. The essay also explores the links between critical theory and the artistic avant-gardes, considering the possibility of recovering communist perspectives from this historical legacy.

In “Stirner, Marx and the Unreal Totality,” Andrei Chitu proposes a conceptually austere intervention against theoretical excesses. Chitu confronts two seemingly opposing positions: Max Stirner’s radical individualism (which liberates the “self” from all social determination) and Adorno’s quasi-ontologism (which presents the individual as completely dominated by the capitalist system). He argues that both positions fall into the error of ahistorical totalization: Stirner overestimates the freedom of the individual; Adorno overestimates the coherence and completeness of the system. He adds: “It is significant – for Marx – that in Stirner the understanding of generality as an (epistemic) illusion corresponds to a vacuity of (social) ontology at one extreme, and to a creative nothingness, a productive ineffability, the substance of the self, at the other. The Self discovers itself by dispelling the illusions it creates for itself. The content of these illusions – social ontology – seems to have no relation to the life of the Self. The Self is not an object for itself” (412).

Using Marx’s critique of Stirner in The German Ideology as a template, Chitu proposes a notion of relative autonomy: the individual is neither free-floating nor epiphenomenal. Capitalist totality is always incomplete, contradictory, never fully present at any given moment . This temporal incoherence of the totality is the real condition of possibility for political struggles.

Marina Vishmidt addresses the central problem of the volume from a perspective that combines feminist theory, art, and political philosophy: Ray Brassier’s paradox of self-abolition. If the proletariat – or women, Indigenous people, Black people, or any historical subject constituted by a relationship of oppression – must abolish itself in the revolutionary process, who carries out this abolition? How can one be both subject and object of negation at the same time? Drawing on currents such as Afropessimism, Vishmidt rearticulates the aforementioned paradox of self-abolition, problematizing real subsumption from various expressions of slavery.

The essay, titled “Procedures of Abolition and Several Paradoxes They Throw Up,” explores this paradox through various figures: the notion of proletarian self-abolition in Négation and Théorie Communiste, the abolition of women as a class in Monique Wittig, and the abolition of gender in Maya Gonzalez. Vishmidt argues that self-abolition is not a simple movement but a long process punctuated by moments of strategic affirmation of identities that are, ultimately, undesirable. Thus: “The paradox of abolition is, then, a paradox of abstraction translated into action. It attempts to circumvent both subjectivity and temporality – the local and partial historical achievement of reaching the universal. The difficulty is, on the one hand, of a logical order, but also affective and social. A collective subject can be the substance and the driving force of self-abolition, but once conquered in the struggle, it is difficult to dismantle, especially in a relentlessly hostile world” (439-440).

Co-editor Mattin closes the section of arguments with an essay that attempts to synthesize and problematize the preceding discussions on self-abolition. His starting point is the observation that capitalism simultaneously produces generic equivalence (value as a universal abstraction) and dissociative fragmentation (the separation of individuals from one another and from their own experience). This tension between abstract unity and concrete dissociation blocks our understanding of the system. Mattin attempts to clarify the differences between four related but distinct concepts: subsumption, real abstraction, reification, and form determination. Through the Marxist distinction, epistemologically reformed by Brassier, between “concrete-in-act” and “concrete-in-thought,” the essay problematizes the notion of self-abolition: what “we” are we talking about? Can a form of determinate negativity be constructed that neither obliterates us nor obliterates the planet? The text concludes that the notion of “we” needs to be radically reconsidered if we want to overcome the universalizing power of capital. We can find in this writing an example of what Mario Aguiriano, in his review of Mattin’s Social Dissonance, calls “Brassierian Marxism.” ²

Block III: Dialogues

The next text to be mentioned is Dimitra Kotouza’s response to Brassier’s essay. Kotouza rejects Brassier’s project of identifying progressive social forms or emancipatory elements, latent in the capitalist present, that should be preserved in a future transformation. For Kotouza, this reproduces a conservative version of the Hegelian concept of Aufhebung , which imagines communism as the preservation and elevation of the best of capitalism – technology, rationality, science. Kotouza proposes, instead, a more radical understanding of negation: communism cannot be located in the present nor can it be constructed from the identification of its progressive premises. Theory must be produced from the struggles taking place today, when the notion of communism as progress has lost all social validity.

Brassier’s rebuttal, entitled “Abolition and Aufhebung,” is rigorous and philosophically demanding. In these lines, Brassier argues that Kotouza’s position, by rejecting any emancipatory element locatable in the present, falls into a voluntarist subjectivism: if there are no objective premises for transformation, change can only be expected as an indeterminate, catastrophic, or messianic advent. Brassier argues that Aufhebung, properly understood, does not imply preserving the progressive elements of capitalism, but rather that historical determinations are always retrospectively identifiable, and this does not equate to locating the future in the present.

The Kotouza-Brassier controversy is one of the most productive moments in the volume because it puts two conceptions of negativity into tension: one that bets on collective rational self-determination (Brassier) and another that insists on the irreducibility of the multiplicity of desires and conflicts in the struggles (Kotouza).

The appendix to the volume contains acknowledgments, a directory of contributors, a chronology of the concept of subsumption – tracing the intellectual and political history of the term from Marx’s manuscripts to the present day – an extensive bibliography, and a subject index. The chronology is especially useful as a navigational map for those approaching this debate for the first time.

Throughout the volume appear texts by Anne Boyer, Lisa Jeschke, Em Heditch, Loss Choi, Danny Hayward, Sean Bonney – the book is also dedicated to him – and Sacha Kahir. These interventions are not ornamental: they are strategically placed to interrupt, destabilize, and subvert theoretical arguments.

In short, Abolishing Capitalist Totality is a truly challenging book, demanding from the reader a particular familiarity with Marx, the post-Marxist tradition, the French and Italian far left, and German critical philosophy. But it is also a necessary book. Its greatest merit is bringing together, for the first time in English, a constellation of texts and debates that had remained scattered, inaccessible, or confined to separate national traditions. The first English translation of the 1972 text of Négation is, in itself, an event in the Badiounian sense of the term.

The tensions within this volume are its greatest strengths: the debate between historical periodization (TP) and critique of totality (Endnotes), between determinate negativity (Brassier) and openness to multiplicity (Kotouza), between the Eurocentric communist tradition and the critiques of Afro-pessimism, feminism, and decolonial thought, remain open and productive. There is no easy synthesis, which is intellectually honest given the current state of struggles and theory. What is clear, however, is that the concept of subsumption, recovered, complexified, and problematized in these pages, offers genuine tools for thinking about the specific way in which capital seizes social life, its limits, its contradictions, and the points from which a praxis of abolition can be articulated.

Taken from https://hyperspekulation.substack.com/p/abolishing-capitalist-totality

Machine translated, with possible resulting weirdness.