The First Negation
The First Negation
Capital took the world by storm and in doing so created one of the most unique moments in human history. What was so special about capital was that it condensed and simplified so many trends that had existed within human class society and ‘set up the pins’ so to say for them to be knocked down. Commodity production which had existed at the edges of human societies was now made the main driver of economies, money which from time to time had been substituted by barter now became king, and economic classes were now truly able to express themselves as economic classes. That is to say whereas before economic systems were fragmented and geographically isolated, capital was a global force, with global economic classes, that could see the system of capital in its totality. The proletariat, that class produced by capital, is in a unique position to end ills that have haunted humanity since its beginning, like class society, religion, patriarchy, and racism for the first time.
Why The Proletariat?
Former classes such as slaves and the peasantry were divided and broken, economically they were isolated from what could be considered world markets that existed at the edges of their lives. Likewise in the case of feudalism, peasants had a stake in their maintenance as peasants, as they were small land owners. The proletariat has nothing but its theoretical ability to do work, labor power. Likewise in a system of commodity production everything produces a commodity including the proletariat whose commodity is its labor power. The proletariat is one of those rare lower classes in history then that is organized sufficiently enough to realize itself as a class, and while that had happened before such as Spartacus’s slave revolts, or the myriad of peasant revolutions that gripped the world, the proletariat has an internationally connected character, giving it the ability to realize itself as a class on a higher level than previous. Likewise capital has taken class and simplified it throwing the majority of humanity into either the bourgeoisie or the proletariat, it has taken human economic trends like money and commodity production and generalized and simplified them. Peasants and slaves if they wanted to abolish class society would have to navigate through webs of disconnected economies and masses, concentrated on small disconnected farms, while the proletariat only has to abolish M-C-M. Capital has generated the technical capacity to abolish most material scarcities that hounded pre-capitalist humanity, industrial fertilizers and farms now produce food and meat at rates that would have made our ancestors’ heads spin. Almost all scarcity under capital that occurs because is because they are beholdent to the value form not actual scarcity. Feudal and slave economies which relied on masses of human labor to do tasks that are now done by industrial behemoths that run day and night without tiring had a much harder task in front of them if they were to attempt abolishing their class societies.
Religion
Marx called religion the opium of the masses, a pain pill given to lessen the burdens of class society. If a man could imagine heaven after death he’d be a much happier prole, while the bourgeoisie built their heaven on earth. Atheists within the 2010s in what was dubbed the New Atheist movement hoped to rid humanity of this opium through debates, logic, and facts. However what they could have never anticipated was that most people in the society around them became unreligious, not out of a strong conviction after listening to their arguments, but out of apathy. But even without religion, societies that have gone atheist have not all become rational scientific beings, instead they have maintained religious frameworks. Moralism, Abrahamic religious conceptions of good vs evil, and faith still dominate predominant cultures and politics of these societies. Religion in essence is replaced with neoliberalism, Democrats and Republicans are caricatured as morally good or evil, Christ vs the devil with white vs illegal, and belief or ‘support’ in things is deemed as of the utmost importance just like faith in god was. (Eg. If you don’t support the government of country x 5 million miles away your non-belief will have a material effect on the ground). Why is this, why didn’t the loss of religion create rational beings?
There’s two main sources, the mode of production and thousands of years of tradition. The capitalist mode of production inherently rejects an objective class based view of concrete relations of society, instead substituting them for moralist pseudo-religious mantras of hard work, nationalism, and whatever else it can use to distract the proletariat from their actual lived reality. The flag isn’t real but a worker’s lived reality every day at their job is, however one is substituted as predominating the other, ‘does your boss make you work long hours with little pay? Well you’re both white and American so you have the same interests, forget it!’ Capital’s goal always is to hide its concrete lived realities under illusions, illusions of human rights which are broken as needed for accumulation, illusions of sports team politics, etc. The second is that old habits die hard, all societies have had thousands of years of religious traditions that have become embedded into every aspect of their cultures. Of course these traditions were embedded for material reasons of older ruling classes but they often stick around under capital as new secular apparatuses need them, even with god removed.
Capitalism then presents the opportunity to truly bring humanity into the rational age if the last veil can be lifted, that of the mysticism of concrete human relations, often masked by the words of ruling elites. If predominant idealism can be shattered with a materialist lens imposed by a change in the mode of production, to socialism, then the atavisms of religion that still haunt the minds of man will be vanquished.
Patriarchy and Racism
Capital gave certain groups a half-step toward liberation by organizing everyone around commodity production. Labor power as a commodity knew no race or gender, so it subsumed all classes, races, and genders it could, even those that had historically been ostracized and kept from participating within wider society under previous modes of production. In doing so it gave all of these groups (women, racial minorities) something powerful, because capital was so reliant on producing value, so interconnected globally, and so organized it allowed these groups themselves to organize and selectively withhold their labor power to win civil rights. But don’t get it twisted. Capital is as much a ceiling as it is liberatory. The so-called freedom was hollow. Primitive accumulation stole Indigenous land, the slave trade financed the Industrial Revolution, and today capital keeps 50 million people in slavery, pays Black households 60 cents for every white dollar, and fills prisons with minorities for cheap labor. In South Asia, capital didn’t dissolve caste—it uses it as a ready-made structure for super-exploitation. The Global North sucks hundreds of billions of hours of labor from the South every year.
And what does liberation even look like under capital? Women’s liberation means either being exploited or becoming the exploiter. A lesbian billionaire CEO is still extracting surplus from millions of other women. Gay liberation gets slapped on Raytheon missiles. Black Lives Matter gets appropriated by Apple while they throw away Black lives in the Congo. Sure, ending formal slavery and women entering the workforce were wins—but those swords of liberation get reforged into chains real quick. Exploitation or the chance to become an exploiter with a different face keeps getting sold as freedom.
The formula doesn’t change: c + v + s = w. Surplus must be appropriated. Struggles just end up fighting over how to split the surplus, not breaking the equation itself. Capital is always driving v down, tossing people into reserve armies, racializing and gendering them, locking them up for pennies. Full emancipation—true abolition of sexism, racism, homophobia—only happens when the working class seizes the means and smashes the value form. Until then, these fights are necessary but limited. They stay trapped in the shadow of that equal sign and the falling rate of profit.
Therefore capital has presented the opportunity to end all of these ills that have haunted humanity since the beginnings of class society—racism, sexism, homophobia—with it already organizing these groups and giving them the power to half-liberate themselves within the confines of commodity production. With commodity production gone they can fully realize themselves as liberated individuals.
Negation of the Negation
Socialism is the negation of the negation; capital has performed the first, and socialism performs the second. If the First Negation was capitalism uprooting the stagnant, localized, and tradition-bound world of feudalism—replacing the priest with the merchant and the peasant with the proletarian—then the Second Negation is the revolutionary reclamation of the world by the producers themselves.
Capitalism negated the old world by centralizing the means of production, but it did so by stripping the individual of everything but their labor power. It socialized the process of work—bringing thousands together into factories and global supply chains—but kept the fruits of that work private. It created a world where we are more connected than ever, yet more alienated from the products of our hands and the people at our sides.
Breaking the Value Form
The Negation of the Negation does not mean a return to the primitive, disconnected past. Instead, it is the synthesis of capitalist technical mastery with a human-centric mode of production. It is the final leap from the kingdom of necessity to the kingdom of freedom.
The Dissolution of M-C-M’: By abolishing the drive for exchange value, production is no longer tethered to the whims of the market or the falling rate of profit. Production is directed toward human need.
The End of the “Economic Individual: In this second negation, the distinctions that capital used to fragment the working class—race, gender, and nationality—lose their material base. When labor power is no longer a commodity to be bought and sold, the “price tag” on human identity vanishes.
Rational Mastery: The mysticism of the invisible hand is replaced by the conscious, democratic planning of society. The industrial behemoths that capital built to enslave the worker are repurposed to reduce the working day to a minimum, giving humanity the one thing capital always stole: time.
The Final Synthesis
Under capitalism, humanity became a “means to an end”—a mere variable (v) in an equation for accumulation. The negation of the negation flips this equation. It places the human being as the end in itself.
The pins have been set up by centuries of exploitation and technical advancement. The proletariat, the only class with no stake in maintaining the property relations of the old world, stands ready to knock them down. The first negation gave us the tools and the global stage; the second negation provides the performance. By smashing the value form, the proletariat does not simply win a better wage or a more diverse set of masters—it dissolves itself as a class, and in doing so, dissolves class society forever.
The Negation of the Negation is the moment where history ceases to be a series of accidents and tragedies and becomes, for the first time, a conscious human undertaking. The masks of religion, the chains of patriarchy, and the divisions of race are not just argued away; they are rendered obsolete by a world that no longer requires them to function.
The first negation created the world; the second will finally make it ours.