Capitalist Demonization and Real Abstraction

The notion of capitalist demonization provides additional tools to analyze capitalism in general and neoliberalism in particular, keeping together Marxist philosophy, political theology, and the social sciences. It builds on Marx’s insights on “so-called primitive accumulation,” which contain important political-theological intuitions. From this angle, demonization is the specific “production of subjectivity” brought about by primitive accumulation, which, conceived as the expropriative (rather than merely exploitative) dimension of capitalism, is in fact ongoing. In the case of neoliberalism, demonization produces subjectivities characterized by a peculiar connection between debt and guilt. Analytically, the Marxian concept of “real abstraction”—with which demonization needs to be combined to properly grasp the specific nature of neoliberalism and to conceive alternatives to it—plays a key role.