The Colors of Capitalism 2024–2025

The proclamation of human and civil rights, which should put an end to servitude, accompanied the bourgeois revolutions. These revolutions dissolved some of the pre-capitalist relations of dependency, such as serfdom and hereditary debt bondage, and fundamentally transformed others, such as patriarchal rule. The universalistic scope of rights also set in motion a political dynamic that—as the Communist Manifesto puts it—sweeps away all fixed, fast-frozen relations and melts all that is solid into air. For the first time in history, social movements emerged from this dynamic that were explicitly committed to the liberation of workers and women, to the fight against colonialism, racism as well as numerous more exclusions and forms of exploitation.
The case being that the dynamics which—among other causes—gave rise to these emancipatory movements were part of the capitalist social order cannot conceal the fact that the inherent economic order also has opposing effects against which the historically new struggles for liberation fought. Even today, it is obvious that capitalism is not as diverse and “colorful” as it appears on the glittering surfaces of image films and advertising clips. Constantly, capitalism devalues social groups and entire parts of the world, systematically exposing them to undisguised exploitation and ecological depletion. Yet apparently, this does not call into question the proclaimed values of freedom and equality. As a result, the research on “Colors of Capitalism” seeks to understand this simultaneity.
In many assessments of the present, capitalism appears to be an exclusive, continuous campaign of plunder living on preconditions that it itself cannot maintain. This judgement becomes evident when land grabbing, the systematic expropriation of natural resources and social wealth continue while ever larger parts of the earth are devasted through industrial production and agriculture transforming the planet into a toxic waste dump. Undoubtedly, these assessments are justified. However, characterizing capitalism as plundering runs the risk of distracting from what is distinctive about it, what gives it its dynamic and productive power: the permanent mobilization of resources, people, material, and knowledge in order to maintain and increase economic power through the production and sale of commodities.
The resulting productivity is a key factor that drives the capitalist hunger for resources. The specific form of capitalism’s rationality of being able to produce more and more with less and less human and material input turns into an equally specific form of irrationality, in which the increase in production becomes an economic necessity—even if it is at the expense of people or the survival of humanity as such and thus of capitalism itself. If the connection between capitalist rationality and irrationality—both driven by the competition principle immanent in the economic system—is not understood, then egoism, greed and similar morally reprehensible attitudes appear to be the causes of exploitation, all the while the continuous increase in “productivity” becomes the justification of the economic principle.
By focusing on capitalism in a primarily theoretical manner, i.e. as an idealized economic model, it reveals itself to be a highly adaptable system of exploitation. This system rests on the basis that formally free and equal persons enter into contracts with each other. Put differently: on paper, exploitation—the fact that some people can appropriate the labor of others and live off of it—also works without one group directly forcing the others to work for them. On the contrary, slavery and servitude are incompatible with the theoretical model of capitalist exploitation.
But characterizing capitalism in this largely ideal manner instead of denouncing it for its continued plunder also captures best a half-truth. The historical emergence of capitalism was intertwined with colonial regimes, whose brutality and ruthlessness were unprecedented. They reinforced existing relations of domination and oppression in many parts of the world rather than undermining them.
Historically, these alliances of pre-capitalist and capitalist rule did not stop there. They took on new forms and the pre-capitalist relations of domination were transformed into neo- and post-colonial forms of exploitation and oppression. But capitalism as we know it would never have existed without the material wealth that the colonizers appropriated in this way, the new models of sovereignty of militarized “joint-stock trade companies” such as the East India Company, or the techniques of administration and rule that were developed and tested in the course of colonization, and the new forms of organization of labor that emerged under the conditions of slavery.
Obviously, both are true: capitalism’s foundation is freedom and equality on the one hand, but at the same time it perverts these in such a way that they turn into their opposite. In the capitalist economy, existing inequalities are exploited in such a way that the poorer become poorer and the oppressed more powerless—at the level of individuals and classes as well as states—, because their formal equality is translated into continued economic dependence. The task of contemporary critical theory is not to exhaust itself in moral indignation, but to analyze the connections between freedom, equality, exploitation, division and oppression. The distinctive approach Critical Theory has in the field of critical theories who dedicate themselves to this task is that it also attempts to preserve the hopes that go hand in hand with the promise of freedom and equality for a reasonable and solidary organization of society.
Far from being merely a historical phase that was necessary for the emergence of fully developed capitalism, the colonial conquests and plundering were symptomatic. The universalizing tendencies of capitalism always generated counter-images: the feminine, the uncivilized, the asocial, rapacious capital, nature. None of these simply existed, but were produced by the practices of capitalist rule and charged with fantasies which capitalism made thrive.
While official capitalism, for example exploited the difference between what is necessary for individual and social reproduction on the one hand and what people were able to produce overall on the other hand, the question of which limits exploitation needed in order for reproduction to function was not a worry in the colonies. For the over-exploited colonies, the concern never arose whether and how the exploited labor power was maintained. The material and mental misery, brutality and despair that such exploitation entailed was already seen as evidence of the inhumanity of those exploited—just like the dependence and subordination of entire states in the capitalist world system. This in turn reinforced the racist ideologies and attitudes that were used to justify over-exploitation and inhumanity. Structural racism and racist attitudes have thus created a vicious circle of mutual confirmation right up to the present day.
At the same time, racism has an exonerating function in contemporary political debates. By giving pseudo-explanations, it ensures that the irrationality of capitalist society—which results structurally from the private appropriation of social wealth—is blamed on a so-called “mother of all problems”. As if migration was the cause of chronically underfunded administrations and education systems, as if it could explain the cyclical nature of a housing market driven by crises and interest rates or the rise of reactionary ideologies. Racism shares this function of pseudo-reasoning with anti-Semitism, i.e. the hostility and discrimination against Jews which capitalism also fundamentally transformed.
Understanding the interplay between racism and anti-Semitism, their common occurrence, but also the differences between their respective pseudo-logics, is one of the present challenges. If their complex interconnections are ignored, it becomes possible to repeatedly pit anti-Semitism against racism. Neither racism nor anti-Semitism can be understood as remnants of outdated prejudices. Like fascism, Islamism and evangelical movements, they are forms of regression that cannot be understood without modern capitalist society and whose analysis must therefore be embedded in a critical social theory. The amazement that “the things” we are experiencing are still possible in our times remains simply a wrong sentiment.
The hope expressed in the Communist Manifesto that all newly formed relations would become obsolete before they could ossify has therefore not materialized. Even where the color lines of capitalism have been formally overcome, for example after the formal abolition of slavery in the USA or after the end of apartheid in South Africa, blatant material inequalities, continued racial violence, and essentialized fantasies about others persist in principle.
Alone these trivial connections imply that an adequate understanding of racism, anti-Semitism and fascist forms of politics in general is not possible without talking about capitalism. However, a theory that links regression with capitalism must achieve more. The noticeable gap between the formal universalism of capitalist exploitation, for which the origin and identity of the labor force appears to be irrelevant, and the multiple nuances and hierarchies between the exploited and the over-exploited, those excluded from official exploitation and other completely declared superfluous groups as well as regions of the world, is constitutive for politics under capitalism. Emancipatory forces continuously strife to realize the universalist promise of freedom and equality, which capitalism has not yet actualized. In practice, however, differences are produced and exacerbated and further exploited to increase profits, perpetuate male dominance or externalize social contradictions.
From the very beginning, Critical Theory aimed to expose the social, psychological and ecological devastations of capitalism. On the one hand, it wants to save—albeit not in a positive conceptualized way—the promise of universal liberation and rationality. On the other hand, it recognizes that in order to rescue these promises we need to understand the way sexist, anti-Semitic and racist oppression are entangled with the universalizing and rationalizing tendencies specific to capitalism.
Under the heading The Colors of Capitalism, in 2024/25 the Centre for Social Critique will examine in particular the connections between racism, anti-Semitism and contemporary capitalism, which is seemingly tolerant, cosmopolitan and multicultural, but in which authoritarianism, fascist tendencies and ideologies mocking all rationality flourish at the same time. By analyzing such contradictions, new insights into capitalism emerge, in which not only the simultaneity of rationality and irrationality can be conceived. By constitutively relating them to each other, so that they do not simply coexist, they reveal their interdependence. The work on this type of analysis is embedded in the efforts to reformulate the program of Critical Theory to criticize the irrationality of the rational in order to enable a more rational society.