True Totality

When we talk about the reality of base categories in structuralism it has often been the case that we take capitalist relations to be primary; that class is primary, fist on the chopping block; way more serious than everything else. But nowhere in experience are these relationships bare; for actual experience shows capitalist relations to be also racist and gendered. Is this relationship necessary? Can we pinpoint examples of capitalist relations without race or gender hierarchies? Perhaps, but only if we start with a weird definition of racism and patriarchy, one that doesn’t challenge capitalism, or rather, merely reforms capital without tending to anti-humanist critique. I want to say that the very idea of work depends on patriarchy, clearly, but not patriarchal masculinity, which is only a harm-reduction program. And fuck that.

If we say that oppressions as units intersect, then these remain distinct and can be considered as primary or secondary. I am suggesting that these components link together and diminish their individual signification, and that there are two contenders for that which is primary. Perhaps this is trivial. But what I want to argue is that we need to consider intersectionality as a starting point, but without poor liberal descriptors. Our meaning of race is not discrimination in the work place, but the destruction of wild-being. Our meaning of patriarchy is not womyn not getting equal pay, but the very idea of being disabled from living one’s own desires, which is a question of consent and complicity. If we go this way, we have a rhetorical approximation that gets us out from under the left, its uselessness in particular. Reality is not just capital; capital, which establishes bodies as property, operates to coerce bodies against their will, which is (at once) a process of domestication in a fucked up nonconsensual stance. In short, everything is already enclosed, except, perhaps, that which has been used up. But in this using, difference is denied, and it does so without genuine asking. Hence, enclosure is racist raping. The two primaries then are the naming of X as property, the capitalist sense, and the simultaneous becoming of X as not-X (race-), which can be nonconsensual (gender-). And here, even if it is teased out that one might choose to work, and so, gender is not linked necessarily with racism as a contender for the primary, it is clear that race as I think it is fruitful to define it, must be operative in the appropriation of surplus energy, which doesn't just start at the unit of production. In order to be ready for work, one must not be wild.

So then what of the negation of enclosure? The primary mode of capitalist relations is re-sourcing; taking an object from a place, not necessarily a subject, but perhaps, and making it operate as a subject in another register. According to Perlman (The Continuing Appeal of Nationalism), this is necessary for building economies, in the concept preliminary capital. Nothing appropriated within the old shell can avoid this racist raping in the new. So even if class relations are dissolved, while there wouldn't be subjects of a kind, there would still be domestication. 

But it might be that an objects’ being as such operates without anything like the shell. This is what I have suggested elsewhere is present in the distinction between tools and technology, and in particular, with the idea of the background relation.

It seems clear enough that beings are substances that operate according to whatever flows, to varying degrees of decision. Yet those objects that find themselves within society are simultaneously structured as subjectivities. And all sorts of nonhuman objects find themselves structured by domestication/society. 

They are not subjects, one might say, because they do not have the right to leave work, vote, or be a liberal douche. But surely they are subjected to limitations. It seems more correct then to suppose that they are mere capitalist objects for use, a bottom limit case of oppression that makes a sweatshop seem like paradise. But if it is good for the goose, it follows that racist raping occurs here too because these mere working class bodies are always enclosed. What we need to think about is what is means to negate enclosure.

Just to recap. A humyn animal that works is not a mere object for use; one that works is a subject that is complicit in ones’ own misery. Of course, an animal that works for humans might commit suicide; and so we might be willing to say that they are complicit too. But surely the capacity to say ‘work sucks’ depends on whether one knows anything else. It is granted then that animals taken from the wild appear to have these memories, and are, accordingly, more resistant.--For even domesticated animals resist. But in either case, it seems true that those ripped from Nature are the best moral exemplars for us, for hate and for the creation of genuine enemies. So let’s become barbarians, shall we?

I am not saying that humyns are free because they can leave work; that they come and go as they will. One is only free if one is no longer bound by capital at all, and that surely has something to do with negating saving to consume. One is not free because one can go to Los Angeles; but the possibilities of doing whatever for humyns, is surely more quantitative than the poor domesticated beings that work in the technological death machine.

I also reject the argument that a domesticated animal might as well be eaten because it knows nothing else. This position fails to address enclosure, and is therefore a racist raping. If we go with rhetorical approximation, as suggested in opposition to liberal intersectionality, getting out from under capital also means that we have to fuck off and yield to objects with independent desire the possibility to consent to whatever our projects of living might be. And our moral exemplar here might be just that we eat those that are gifted to us.

Am I advocating equality? Of course not. There are the strong and the weak; and the weak ought to perish; but it takes genuine strength to minimize 'place' so that one can determine ones’ strength. Living is too easy; there is here in the shitty no meaning of strength. To be outside of enclosure is see how strong one really is. In other words, it is weak to depend on an apparatus to make predation possible. We are therefore not predators as such. Yet we can be, with our tools, and with our steps towards destroying enclosure. Preying on the weak means feasting on leviathan and all its consequences.