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According to one popular microeconomics textbook, an “external cost” is “an uncompensated cost that an individual or firm imposes on others,” while an “external benefit” is a benefit “that individuals or firms confer on others without receiving compensation” (Krugman & Wells Microeconomics 2015: 465).

This is the “textbook” definition of externalities. What should be clear, but is not, is that the “external cost” that an individual or firm imposes on others is, by definition a benefit to the individual or firm; similarly, an “external benefit” that an individual or firm confers upon others is a benefit for which they would be compensated if they could.

The failure of markets to automatically track externalities has led some progressive economists to embrace a very non-progressive solution: give a price to all externalities. It is the same solution vigorously promoted by radical right wing economic thinkers, such as Michael Walker of the Fraser Institute. Although few of you will have heard of Walker or the Fraser Institute, some may remember the segments from Achbar and Abbott’s 2004 The Corporation, in which Walker proposes precisely this solution.

It makes sense. Only when we know the real cost of anything (or the real benefit) can we make rational economic decisions. Except that the underlying premise of pricing is that all things, including things that are not things, have prices that are differentially related to the prices of all other things. And this holds true only in fully elaborated, highly integrated, capitalist economies. Only in capitalist economies does it make any sense at all to monetize things as outwardly different from one another as “family time,” “health,” neighborhood “amenities” such as green space, well-maintained roads, or a view of two bridges. Only in capitalist societies do we differentially value gender, race, ethnicity, and sexual orientation in highly rigorous mathematical models that actually predict and prescribe outcomes.

This is possible because in capitalist societies all things, including things that are not things, are valued in terms of a single social substance: homogeneous undifferentiated labor in the abstract. This means, on the one hand, that it makes good sense to measure the cost individuals and firms are compelled to pay for the carbon foot-print caused by the decisions made by others, an externality. On the other hand, it is only possible to measure this cost because all things, including things that are not things, have been reduced to the same abstract form.

But this also means that things as such have no value. And this is a problem.

Now let us say that we no longer measure value in terms of the abstract homogeneous labor time consumed in their production. To even suggest such a possibility is likely to make people nervous. How, if not in the differential relationships that they bear to one another, can we establish the value of things? Consider something simple like paid family medical leave. I have no other way to measure the value of this leave than in terms of the opportunity cost carried by my employer or by investors so that I can care for an ailing spouse, parent, or child. That is to say, the only way there is to value this time is in terms of abstract value. To even begin to talk about this time in other ways is to “wax poetic,” to resort to “metaphor,” to live in a “fantasy world.” In the hard-nosed bargaining that won workers family leave, all that mattered was the marginal cost and/or marginal benefit it placed on workers and/or employers.

But this also means that accurate pricing of externalities fails to address the underlying problem: our lost capacity even to think about value outside of its relationship to abstract homogeneous labor time.

Is it good to know the total value lost in our dependence on fossil fuels? Yes. Of course. On the other hand, so long as we are measuring this value — the value of property damaged and property lost to extreme weather events, the value of health care for individuals suffering a higher incidence of lung disease and cancers, the value of decreasing bio-diversity and growing dependence on genetically modified organisms — so long as we are measuring value in terms of its abstract value coordinate, we have lost sight of the values of things per se.

The bad news is that this loss is near universal. The good news is that it is extraordinarily recent. Out of the 2.4M years humans have occupied the planet, it is only over the last half millennia that human beings have lost the capacity to value things. In the cultural remains left to us, we have access to a rich, highly diverse, catalogue of ways communities have valued things in the past. Studying and exploring these communities is not simply a flight into the past. It had better be a flight into our very near future, or we very likely will have no future.

Finally, it cannot be overlooked that recalibrating how we value things offers a much more satisfying path to consideration of externalities. Bio-feedback mechanisms are everywhere. We need only learn how to read and listen to them.

Was Karl Marx a Christian? No. Nor is there any evidence that he observed Lent, the season of penitence that leads up to Easter. Nevertheless, let me suggest that Marx’s entire approach to capitalism was a Lenten Practice.

Not Lent as it is often observed — abstaining from chocolate, alcohol, or Facebook — but Lent as it might be observed — reflecting critically, and acting militantly, on behalf of the redemption of the world.

In traditional Protestant theology, at least since the eighteenth century, it has been argued that the modern world is an outgrowth of Christianity. Democracy is an expression of the abstract idea of humanity promoted if not by Jesus, then at least by Paul, and capitalism is an expression of the Christian idea of freedom. In the nineteenth century, the German thinker Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel showed how the modern liberal state was an outgrowth, an expression, of the Christian Spirit.

As a young student, Karl Marx was inclined to agree with Hegel. He simply thought that Hegel needed to be tweaked. Only once the working class was the universal class; only then would the Spirit be fully realized.

But, then, Marx had what can only be described as a conversion experience. Modern liberal capitalism was not the expression of the Spirit. It was the expression only of the spirit of capitalism. And that meant that it did not matter who owned it, capitalists or workers, or how it was owned, publicly or privately. What mattered, according to Marx, was whether or not human beings are dominated by labor, by what they do, and by commodities, by what they make. “True freedom,” Marx remarked at the end of volume three of Capital, only appears where “labor ends.”

This became Marx’s liturgy, his Lenten practice, if you will: ending the domination of labor over people’s lives.

This Lent, as we ease gently into a Biden-Harris neoliberal dream world, I am observing a Marxian Lenten practice. Please join me.

In volume one of Capital, Marx definitively scrapped his earlier analysis of the central contradiction in capitalism. According to his earlier analysis, capitalism would have been overcome — superseded — when the contradiction between the social forces of production (the industrial working class) and the private relations of production (private property and the market) violently clashed, giving rise to the universal species being, its feet firmly anchored on its own soil. Marx now counted this view naive. He now held that the central contradiction within capitalism was internal to the form of the commodity itself:

To say that these mutually independent and antithetical processes form an internal unity is to also that their internal unity moves forward through external antitheses. These two processes lack internal independence because they complement each other. Hence, if the assertion of their external independence proceeds to a certain critical point, their unity violently makes itself felt by producing — a crisis. There is an antithesis, immanent in the commodity, between use-value and value, between private labour which must simultaneously manifest itself as directly social labour, and a particular concrete kind of labour which simultaneously counts as merely abstract universal labour, between the conversion of things into persons and the conversion of persons into things; the antithetical phases of the metamorphosis of the commodity are the developed forms of motion of this immanent contradiction. These forms therefore imply the possibility of crises, though no more than the possibility. For the development of this possibility into a reality a whole series of conditions is required, which do not yet even exist from the standpoint of the simple circulation of commodities (Capital I.I.3 §2 (a)).

I have been reading a lot of extraordinarily sloppy social analysis of the new Biden-Harris regime in the US. As Hegel observed, these commentators paint their grey on grey, as though Biden is Trump in sheep’s clothing, revealing their no longer secret idealism. They want the Kingdom to come. (So do I.)

Or, Biden-Harris are the Kingdom. Oh. My. No.

There is a real “break” (as Lacan would have said) between the surface form and its underlying value; a “break” between the value social actors rely upon and the actual value social mediations assign to things. And this break opens up a “possibility,” but no more than a possibility.

Critical social scientists need to think carefully about the “whole series of conditions” that might be required for even half of the world’s 7.5B inhabitants to “see” what they would have to see in order to do something more than stomp their feet, raise their fists, march, change regimes (again), kill someone, assassinate a leader, retreat, advance . . .

In the mean time, the end (unfortunately) is not near. What could we do to help even half the world’s population to grasp what is happening, what is being done to them, how they are being played, the game they are playing?

Hello Epiphany!

I must confess. I’ve found it difficult seeing the light in 2021. No. The storming of the Capital by the people we defeated in 1945 is not light. Nor is the campaign to defeat them. Where is the light? Let me take a stab at it.

As some of you know, I have been praying the Hours since January 2020. Praying through the Psalms every week, along with the appointed chapters and passages from the Book of Common Prayer, introduced me to what first appeared to me to be a lot, too much, war-mongering. Since many of the Psalms were written by or with David in mind, and since over all of them hover the Exodus and conquest of the “promised land,” this martial theme is not unexpected. (World War I provoked haunting poetry. I have buried myself in WH Auden, among the most insightful poets of WWII, over the pandemic.)

Where is the light?

Let us suppose that the whole point of the Gospel only comes to light in its final chapter. Let us say that, like the disciples in Mark, we are all duller than door knobs. Like Pharisees (or Sadducees) we come, raise our objections or ask our questions, and it really doesn’t hit us.

Wars and rebellions are smoldering. Sedition is rife. To me it feels like I am living in the middle of the Psalms. I don’t know how it ends.

Here is what I know, even before opening the cover of the New Testament. I know that God is on the side of the widow, the poor, the orphan, the outcast, the immigrant, the homeless, the hungry, the sick, and the naked. That much is clear from the Hebrew sacred text. I also know that the well-graduated, the wealthy, the secure, the initiated, the housed, the well-fed, the healthy, and the stylish — the powerful — are ready to do everything they can to secure and protect their ground. They have what the Psalmist calls a “deceitful tongue.” They will lie and deceive to secure and protect what they have. The children of darkness are in this unto death.

In case anyone doubted before January 6 — Epiphany — that the children of darkness are in war against us, that they are using real weapons, that they mean to kill us, that ship (I hope) has sailed. The nations have seen a great light.

Epiphany, this year, perhaps all years, is a promise that reaches us from a distant shore. It says: God is still here. She is fighting on our side. She has appeared, not in Jerusalem, not in the Temple, but in (of all places) Galilee. She has not placed her bets with the Roman occupation, not with the collaborators, not with the racists, misogynists, nationalists, and patriots. The Zoroastrians from the East tell us at least that much.

But, we already knew that before we knew anything about Bethlehem or Galilee or Golgotha. But we did not see the light. We did not hear the word. We did not follow the signs. Then as now.

Where is the light? Do you see it?

For the past year or so I have been exploring the “Hegel” of the mature Karl Marx, the Marx of Capital. Identifying this Hegel has seemed critical to me because Marx described the central contradiction within capitalism using categories clearly drawn from Hegel’s Phenomenology. Where Hegel described the historical elaboration and materialization of the spirit — the spirit’s coming into its fullness — Marx described the historical elaboration and coming into its own of the value form of capital.

Further, the living Substance is being which is in truth Subject, or, what is the same, is in truth actual only in so far as it is the movement of positing itself, or is the mediation of its self-othering with itself. This Substance is, as Subject, pure, simple negativity, and is for this very reason the bifurcation of the simple; it is the doubling which sets up opposition, and then again the negation of this indifferent diversity and of its antithesis [the immediate simplicity]. Only this self-restoring Same-ness, or this reflection in otherness within itself — not an original or immediate unity as such — is the True. It is the process of its own becoming, the circle that presupposes its end as its goal, having its end also as its beginning; and only by being worked out to its end, is it actual. Thus the life of God and divine cognition may well be spoken of as a disporting of Love with itself; but this idea sinks into mere edification, and even insipidity, if it lacks the seriousness, the suffering, the patience, and the labor of the negative.

GWF Hegel Phenomenology §§18-19.

It is constantly changing from one form into the other, without becoming lost in this movement; it thus becomes transformed into an automatic subject. If we pin down the specific forms of appearance assumed in turn by self-valorizing value in the course of its life, we reach the following elucidation: capital is money, capital is commodities. In truth, however, value is here the subject of a process in which, while constantly assuming the form in turn of money and commodities, it changes its own magnitude, throws off surplus-value from itself considered as original value, and thus valorizes itself independently. . . . But now, in the circulation M-C-M´, value suddenly presents itself as a self-moving substance which passes through a process of its own, and for which commodities and money are both mere forms. But there is more to come: instead of simply representing the relations of commodities, it now enters into a private relationship with itself, as it were.

K Marx, Capital, vol. 1, I.iv

Whether we want to differentiate sharply between Hegel’s spirit and Marx’s value form depends on how we understand Hegel’s spirit and Marx’s value. So, for example, we might justifiably credit Hegel with intending a discussion not of universal history, but, more specifically, of modern history, in which case his spirit might easily be taken as homologous with Marx’s value. Similarly, many interpreters of Marx credit him with investing value with transhistorical, universal, validity, such that the apotheosis he imagines lay hidden since the foundation of the world.

The value of interpreting Marx in this way is that it reconciles what I am calling the mature Marx of Capital with Marx’s earlier and earliest writings, such as German Ideology, the Communist Manifesto, and his posthumously published 1844 Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts. In that case, however, Marx’s discussion of value in Capital is rendered virtually incoherent, since Marx’s explicit aim is to show how the formation and quasi-personal autonomy of value, the agency of value, rests on the social and historical validity of the production of commodities. In that case, however, we are presented with a different problem: why or how can Hegel occupy so central a position in Marx’s thinking, both early and late, both during his early humanist phase and during his later neoclassical phase? Why Hegel?

One entirely valid way to answer this question is to notice the central position Hegel occupied in critical reflection in Germany both prior to and after the revolutions of 1848-49. Hegel was everywhere. But this exaggerates Hegel’s importance. Hegel was not everywhere in England. He was not everywhere in France.

Nevertheless, Hegel told a compelling story about the progressive, inevitable, historically embedded universalization of freedom; the spirit coming into its own. Conservative German thinkers could and did interpret this as a commentary on and endorsement of the universal spirit expressed in the universal state. Marx offers a thumb nail sketch of what this meant in his earlier critiques of Hegel. In its fully elaborated form, however, as in Gustav von Schmöller’s Economics, it could prove very dense and detailed. Progressively, throughout history, an ever broader, ever deeper, ever more diverse representation of humanity has found its place in the universal. Schmöller even notes, near the end of his multi-volume Economics, that even Friedrich Engels had abandoned the bloody revolution in favor of the evolutionary principle.

Has not von Schmöller and, indirectly, the mature Engels, proved correct? And has not the young revolutionary Marx and Engels been proven wrong?

If, on the other hand, Marx was critical of the developmental logic implicit in commodity production and exchange; if, as seems clear, he credited this developmental logic to capitalism, then it would be very odd for him to then fault this logic for not being fast enough. Is that the essence of Marx’s critique? Hurry up?

My research suggests an alternative understanding of Marx’s Hegel. Hegel grasped capitalism. But Hegel mistakenly granted its logic universal validity. Marx’s mature critique of Hegel credits Hegel with grasping the logic of capitalism, but not the logic of history. For the mature Marx, the logic of history ends when capitalism ends; which is different than saying that Hegel’s end is Marx’s end. Hegel ends with the fully integrated, fully elaborated, universal logic of capital. Marx ends with the destruction of this fully integrated, fully elaborated, universal logic. The end of capitalism arises when value is no longer determined by abstract time and labor; where the social logic therefore falls apart.

Or, at least, this is the result of my preliminary research. I could be wrong. So I am continuing to work through the material. Of one thing, however, I am very certain. The humanist Marx celebrated in the 1940s and 1950s, and through Marcuse and others fueled the 1960s, bears absolutely no relationship to the Marx of capital. That was a very different, non-Marxian, critique; valid in its own way, but lacking in critical historical and social depth and rigor. The Marx of the 1860s was no longer there. He had moved on.

As is so often the case, the Economist asks the right questions but is clueless in its analysis. This is not, as some suppose, because it relies too much on neoclassical interpretive categories. The Economist’s cluelessness in this case arises from its faith in a relationship that until World War II was completely unknown: the supposed positive correlation of democracy and capitalism.

Prior to World War II any suggestion that this correlation was positive was dismissed in precisely the circles most committed to neoclassical economic categories: not only at LSE, but also at Cambridge, not only at Chicago, but also at Harvard and Berkeley. This was because economists prior to WWII recognized that the broadening of the political franchise without a simultaneous broadening of the social franchise was suicide to the republican values and institutions most of them had reason to value. Since few of them valued a broadening of the social franchise, they also dismissed broadening the political franchise.

It was the conceit of the Austrian School’s Friedrich von Hayek and von Mises sychophant Milton Friedman that democracy and capitalism somehow naturally suggested one another. What capitalism suggests is consumerism, voting through consumption, voting in order to consume. But consumers are the least well equipped to govern republics. Moreover, in the unregulated, privatized world dreamt by Friedman, those who occupy the lower three quarters of the income hierarchy are doomed to ever declining purchasing power, while those at the top are free to expand the range of their consumer preferences indefinitely.

Only massive public intervention, such as WWII, has proven effective expanding the social franchise. And, yet, so long as public resources are diverted to private production and consumption, they cannot help but reproduce conditions hostile to republican values and institutions.

The Economist editors fantasize a different story. Capitalism generates democracy. Greed, avarice, and corruption destroy democracy. In other words, personal morality is at fault. The message is that we need to promote good people and frustrate bad people. This may be a good message. But it has nothing to do with neoclassical economic theory. The Economist is at its worst when it attempts to find the moral of the story.

In capitalist, there is no moral to the story. William Stanley Jevons, the father of neoclassical economics, said as much way back in 1871. He was right. The Economist is not.

https://www.economist.com/leaders/2020/11/26/democracy-contains-the-seeds-of-its-own-recovery

Without naming names (there are too many), Marxian thinkers become less than critical, they become religious, when they address religion. They revert to a pre-Marxian, quattrocento, grasp of both science and religion, which fails to grasp the intimate relationship between both in the emergence of capitalism during that same century.

In fact religion did not exist prior to capitalism. What existed was a bewildering variety of animisms. Spirits occupied every thing. And literally every thing was spiritual. The revolution we call the Reformation was a response to, not the author of, the birth of religion. For it was here, for the first time, that religious practitioners first deprived bodies of their spirits and spirits of their bodies. Finally, after so many centuries of darkness and bondage, the spirit was freed from its body. Religion in its full disembodied sense was born.

Science is not simply the flip-side of religion, the disenchanted body. Science is the logic of capitalism applied to bodies. It deprives bodies their spiritual voice. It compels bodies to speak logically, rationally, mathematically. It is then from the vantage point of this disenchanted body that Marxian thinkers often critique their co-religionists, the religious, whose spirit they fail to recognize as their own.

In a non- or post-capitalist world, bodies would recover their spirits and spirits their bodies. And polytheism would once again reign. But religion in its modern sense would entirely disappear. Or perhaps it would be remembered as that insane moment in history, from roughly 1324 to 2050, when we were compelled to hear the world in the foreign language of pure mathematics.

Social media is a symptom, not a cause. If you followed the congressional interrogation of Jack Dorsey and Mark Zuckerberg yesterday, you will know what I mean.

Social media users are in pain. And I am not only referring to users at the bottom of the income hierarchy. Or consumers of social media. Jack Dorsey and Mark Zuckerberg are in pain. Social media investors are in pain. And, of course, users at the bottom of the income hierarchy are in pain. They are turning to social media — all of them — to solve a range of problems that social media cannot solve. Social media can solve one problem: it can win returns for investors. And were the absence of returns the cause for the pathology investors suffer then social media would offer an appropriate treatment. But this is not the pathology from which investors suffer.Social media reinforces what we already (think we) know. It reassures us that we are members of a much larger community whose members are plagued by the same pains, the same pathologies, we are. Social media might also inform. But information falls far down on the list of reasons we turn to social media. I still wake up every morning and read the New York Times, The Guardian, and Le Monde. I still listen to the BBC and NPR. These are my daily sources for information. I still read the Economist, Financial Times, and Wall Street Journal for information. Next to these outlets, Twitter and Facebook have nothing new to say.This is because when they are not consoling me with empty feel good aphorisms or funny pet videos, Facebook and Twitter are simply aggregating pathological communities, communities of shared pain. But unlike the synagogue’s or mosque’s or church’s grieving circles, Facebook and Twitter do not actually console. Instead, they heighten my sense of pain.That is because this pain is caused by the very social media to which I am turning for consolation; it is caused by my acting on the belief that my pain is caused by a lack of information or a lack of community, which I am now seeking on social media, which is incapable of providing either. Moreover, by validating my belief that it will solve these problems, social media deters me from exploring the social and economic and political dimensions of my pain. It tells me that what I need are more friends and better information.How do Twitter and Facebook make money? Why would investors choose to invest in them? Is it because investors want me to be better informed or cared for? Really? Were this the cause for investors’ interest in Facebook and Twitter, they would do better to lobby for strict limits on campaign spending, strict enforcement of the emoluments clause of the Constitution, forgiveness of student loan debt, universal single-payer healthcare, strong independent institutions of public learning, and strong independent public outlets for media. Instead, Twitter and Facebook have managed to make money both out of my interest in these causes and out of the interest of others in opposing them. Heads they win; tails I lose.In case you need a name for this pathology, its called capitalism; and Twitter and Facebook perfectly illustrate how it works, not to eliminate pathologies, but to reproduce them.Time for me to go post this on social media.

National Public Radio broadcast a chilling interview with Dartmouth professor of government Brendan Nyhan this morning.

It is chilling because it confirms that better than seventy per cent of Republicans polled believe that against all evidence the election was rigged against their presidential candidate. The truth is that Republican state legislators and governors have worked tirelessly over the last twelve years to deny working families and people of color representation commensurate to their population in Congress. The truth is that Republican state legislators and governors have done everything within their powers to restrict voting rights. But, as professor Nyhan notes, we live in times when the public has apparently lost interest not simply in political truth, but in institutional truth more generally.

Two points of light shine through in Lulu Garcia-Navarro’s interview with professor Nyhan. First, if only seventy percent of Republican voters believe the election was rigged in Joe Biden’s favor, thirty percent do not. Added to the 76M who voted for Joe Biden that is a pretty good number. The second point of light is professor Nyhan’s observation that this number shifts dramatically if we select for income and education. Wealthy, healthy, educated Americans overwhelmingly trust America’s scientific, educational, and government institutions. This means that we have a fairly good grasp of the mechanisms at play in the rejection by almost three quarters of the republican electorate of institutional process. But this is also where the light grows specially dim. If thirty percent of Republican voters trust the process, where were they on Election Day? Where are they now? If we know the mechanisms at play in declining confidence in institutions, then where is the public outcry on behalf of income equality, educational equality, and health care equality?

Instead, Democratic National Committee members are once again tripping over one another to be first to recommend a pull-back from “radical” democratic messaging. This widespread denial, it should be noted, is just as pathological, perhaps even more pathological, than republican denial. It arises from an incapacity — not unwillingness — to face, much less accept, the social character of the collapse of democracy and democratic institutions in the United States. It arises from an incapacity — not an unwillingness — to face, much less acknowledge, the central role the Democratic National Committee played in the transition from republican values and democratic process to post-democratic, white Christian nationalism in the US. However, if professor Nyhan is correct then wealth inequality, exploding university tuitions and student debt, privatization and deregulation — all of which were eagerly, enthusiastically, supported by the DNC — were born in the womb of a Democratic Party that wholesale abandoned working families, women, students, and people of color.

What is this pathology? The answer lies in the “incapacity” itself. The Republican Party is selling “capacity.” It is selling a message of responsibility; the capacity to respond. You may remember that this was the cornerstone of the Clinton/Gore victory in 1992. The DNC genuinely believes that the message of capacity — Yes We Can! — is key to their future. But this means that they are incapable of facing the social and institutional, structural, grounds for post-democracy in the US. For to do so would entail admitting their constitutive role in the slide into post-democracy in the US; it would fundamentally undermine their entire vision and agenda. Moreover, it would suggest that the elites, the so-called “meritocracy” that currently governs the DNC did not earn its right to govern out of merit. It earned its right to govern out of privilege. The leadership in the DNC would have to face this privilege — the “private law” that empowers its members — in order to recover its capacity to govern differently.

I would like to believe that thirty percent of those who voted republican in this election could join those who voted democratic in a grand coalition of individuals ready to support republican values and democratic process; a grand coalition ready to embrace science and public institutions.

And, yet, if the DNC leadership is itself incapable of facing its demons, it seems unlikely that the Susan Colins of the world will be capable of facing theirs. They have built an entire ideology around personal responsibility. To shift now to a message of social, political, and economic enfranchisement would be even more difficult for republicans than for the DNC. Which is why we are still sliding into a post-democratic — our grandparents called it “fascist” — consensus in the US.

Our community of faith, which is overwhelmingly European American, is exploring white blindness to racism. It is intense. Among our readings this week was David Dean’s “Roots Deeper than Whiteness” (embedded).

There is so much that is good about the essay that I might leave good enough alone. Except that Mr Dean’s answer to my racism is that I locate and follow the historical trajectory of my own community from its own freedom in what I take to be western Europe’s late Middle Ages into its own class bondage and racism in the Early Modern period. What Mr Dean wants me to discover is, first, that my ancestors were not racist, were deeply committed to the commons, to community, but, second, that they were coopted by capitalism and were offered the wages of whiteness in exchange for a living wage and racial harmony.

I have several problems with this story. First, I do not believe that my mixed Irish-English-French-Ashkenazi ancestors’ way of life was any more authentic than my life today. Both, I would argue, are equally inauthentic, constructed, shaped, and structured. I am as much related to John Doty, the indentured servant who arrived on the Mayflower to whom my mother’s family traces their arrival, as I am to the Jewish community from which she took her surname. Since my practices are qualitatively different from theirs, it is silly for me to attempt to “recover” my “authentic” pre-racist ancestral identity.

Second, the story Mr Dean tells about capitalism reinforces the authenticity of pre-capitalist social being. It reduces capitalism to bad people doing bad things to good people. As a social formation, however, this story bears no resemblance to how capitalism actually emerged, in Ghent, in 1324, in the parish of St John at the Abby of St Pierre. It emerged when the abbot of St Pierre directed the fullers to install a clock in the workhouse recently built there. It marks the first time anywhere productive human activity was measured in equal units of abstract time. From there, the new technique for measuring value spread throughout Western Europe, generating the compulsion unique among Europeans to generate more with less. To this compulsion we owe not only the insatiable appetite for El Dorado, but also the insatiable appetite to lower costs of production and increase the marginal product, appetites directly related to “liberating” serfs from their traditional lands and re-enslaving them, along with Africans, in the expanding empires of Europe.

I do not change this history by recovering my pre-capitalist ancestors in it. Doing so makes me no less racist. It makes the capitalist social formation that has thoroughly shaped me no less constitutive both of race and of racism.

Third, in this way the story Mr Dean tells reinforces racist metaphors by counting ancestry as something ontologically fundamental and given, while treating what has happened since the 15th or 16th century as constructed and superficial. Capitalism gives rise to a real, comprehensive, and therefore all the more terrifying totality, in part, because it drives me to search for my authentic (racial? cultural? linguistic?) roots.

This I have to assume is not Mr Dean’s aim. I think I have some idea of where Mr Dean wants his argument to go. As a historian, I am fundamentally committed to grasping how history has shaped us, shaped me. And it is absolutely critical that I understand, that we understand, that race and racism are constructed, and that they are constructed within capitalism. Which is one of the reasons why it is absolutely important not to ontologize something fundamental, irreducible, within us. We are constructed and grasping how we are constructed is key to acting and working and thinking and caring our way from capitalism and racism into post-capitalism and difference.