We publish below a text from the Temps critiques collective, the English translation of which was generally shared with us. The essay is available in the original French, as well as Spanish and English, on the collective’s website.
The essay endeavours to interpret the nature of contemporary capital, beyond the labour theory of value, and its tangled and essential relation with state power.
State and Capital: The Current Lay of the Land
Recent discussions and articles on capital or capitalism, and they are few in number,[1] have surprisingly little to say about the state or, for that matter, power in general and the control it affords. The emphasis tends rather to be on profit, a catch-all term that leaves us none the wiser from a microeconomic standpoint. (Why would Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos be so intent on making even more profit?) Nor does it provide any convincing macroeconomic basis for calculating a general rate and its supposed variations (e.g., the improbable tendency of the rate of profit to fall predicted by Marx almost two centuries ago). The state, we are told, has been so seriously undercut by what is now commonly referred to as neoliberalism that the bare-bones attributes of sovereignty are just about all that’s left. Such assertions, however, owe less to actual observation than to a mindset verging on caricature; those who make them sharply contrast today’s states with those of bygone times, and ultimately with an earlier phase of capitalism portrayed in equally caricatured and ill-defined terms. When you listen to much of the French left, for example, you could easily get the impression that the 1944 program of the National Resistance Council practically took France beyond capitalism to a sort of “socialism with a human face.”
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Giorgio Agamben: A political allegory
We are all in hell, but some seem to think that there is nothing to do here but to study and describe in detail the demons, their horrible appearance, their ferocious behaviour, their infamous machinations. Perhaps they delude themselves into believing that in this way they can escape from hell, and do not realise that what occupies them completely is nothing but the worst of the punishments that the demons have devised to torment them. Like the peasant in the Kafkaesque parable, they do nothing but count the fleas on the guardian’s lapel. It must be said that those in hell who spend their time describing the angels of paradise are not right either; this too is a punishment, apparently less cruel, but no less odious than the other.
True politics lies between these two punishments. It begins, first of all, by knowing where we are and that it is not given to us to escape so easily from the infernal machinery that surrounds us. Of demons and angels we know what there is to know, but we also know that it was with a deluded imagination of paradise that hell was built, and that to every consolidation of the walls of Eden there corresponds a deepening of the abyss of Gehenna. Of good we know little, and it is not a subject we can delve into; of evil we only know that it was we ourselves who built the infernal machinery with which we torment ourselves. Perhaps a science of good and evil has never existed, and in any case, here and now it is of no interest to us. True knowledge is not a science; it is, rather, a way out. And it is possible that today it coincides with a tenacious, lucid and agile resistance on the spot.
March 8, 2025
From Quodlibet