My constant reassertion of the problems of reification is linked to my constant reiteration of the problems of political realism. Simply put, the reified world always insists on itself as a limit. In that same breath, it is constantly changing in content, while carrying over its prior form. It can project out its form in numerous but concealed ways, and to just follow one of its threads without a declared and theorized upon aim is a refusal of liberation’s demands. It can seem like, in capital’s opposite global pole, there may be liberation. That opposite pole erases what we are accustomed to as content, as it violently clashes against our known oppressor. Yet the capitalist totality is necessarily split in two spheres, at least, and its Otherized pole is baked-in and not a sign of its overcoming. Capitalism maintains a gravitational pull in this split that can redirect liberatory elements in one pole in service of its opposite pole. We see leftists and marginalized groups in the east forced to escape towards the west, and leftists in the west reaching east to fight their state. In this misidentification of the liberatory force, both are forced to betray each other, and aid the system that maintains their enemies.

In capitalist society, the society of the day prior imposed itself as if it were eternal. That prior society and its form could shed its content, but then act all over again as if its content had been there from the beginning of time. If we do not move towards grasping the totality of relations in any given local or particular struggle, we will be immediately subsumed into that totality, and it will envelop us behind our backs. The form will enclose us in its reproductive logic, and we will be rendered into its new content, which it points to as inevitable and static. We will speak of liberation out of one side of our mouths, and then begin appealing to naturalized, ideological laws of society that we will say must be adhered to in place of that same liberation. This path of “realism” achieves us on a perpetual wishful thinking, that settles for the illusion of victory, even as such false victory erodes our practical foundation and reason for existing.

Reification is a seemingly frozen social reproduction, that presents its current limit as the eternal one. Yet these reified forms are also always, in their moment, very real and limiting. In capitalist reification, we are stuck in a space where we must smash through reality’s appearance and deny its claim of eternity. The only way to do that is through an understanding of the totality, along with grasping its reproductive negation. We can’t achieve liberation through means that practically project capitalist premises into the future. Content in capitalism can always shift, but the stranglehold of capital remains in its forms. That it can do strangle us but then claim eternity while permitting content to ceaselessly shift is its whole game. Only the transcendent political position can expose what its limits are. We can not take its premises for granted and negate them flatly, only in particular dimensions. That negation needs the further step of negating the system in total through practical advancement.

We must ground ourselves in the premise of communism, then look for where it is latent in the world. That must be how we embed ourselves in political situations, because otherwise we will be blind to the capitalist totality. We will unconsciously cede to it if we’re refusing understanding its elasticizing formal shape, and understanding where it meets its limit. We are pushing against its barrier from the inside of the totality and not simply idealizing a state of affairs. We are forcing it to go all the way to its breaking point, where conscious human intervention can then assert itself against its reproductive logic. We are turning the inverted capitalist world right-side out. The material for the new world right now is laid out before us.

Without principled theoretical guidance, capital will constantly re-mold us from behind our backs. The only way to break from it is to understand what the opposite and negating social principle would be across the totality, that would render capitalist subsumption inoperable. We have to construct the negating logic of counter-subsumption by erasing capital’s practical social laws and asserting their totalized opposite. Capital has to hit its wall in the assertion of a new practice that we bring into reality. The practice is woven from elements already within capitalism.

To be a “realist” is to give capitalism all control over our directionality. There could be no shift in that directionality, unless we had a sense of what a negating form of society would look like. In some ways, it is as if we are smashing society’s breaks, as opposed to changing directions. Capital projects a linear direction, and we are erecting barrier for it to crash into. From there we enter a new world that seeks no future hide its goal in. It aims to shape present conditions in a way where it can always be in accordance with any goal, and not practically divorced from it. The experience of shaping the world and embedding goal are two sides of a movement.

That deferral of the goal in prior Communist struggle has always been a “realist” concession to the dominant order that is simultaneously communism’s practical death. “Realism” closes off practical space, and we can never achieve the communist goal through directly antagonistic means, which is what all deferral of the goal adheres to, even in fighting one pole of capital. Capitalist society and communism are opposed in ways that do not lend to gradual, incremental change. Capitalism asserts the necessity of one enclosed form of social reproduction, and communism negates all of its central reproductive claims in practice.

We should never disavow that we are in fact judging this world from the point of view of communism. Otherwise, we will be immediately subsumed. Its rules never cease shaping our behavior, until we make a counter-logic conscious. We either survive on capital’s terms, or we are stressing its overcoming and straining to bring a new world into existence. The fact is, we will be subsumed anyway, even apart from “realist” political maneuvering. I do not need to join with others to fight and die on a mission to be subsumed under a new form of life that camouflages oppressive relations. I certainly don’t need to sit here and root for other states like they’re sports teams, when they are subordinated to the very order I want to overthrow. There are better fantasies.

The point of communism as a movement is the transformation of the capitalist world into a superseding form of life, all through finding the transcendent possibility latent in what exists. We need communism as our anchor, not for the sake of conforming to an ideal, but for creating the force that could counter capital at all, or ever cohere as anything we could call a movement. We can never, in a million years, break from capital by taking its reproductive logic for granted and projecting it out from our actions. Those actions, even when negating one aspect of the system, are governed by the capitalist totality, and in a way that could go on for an eternity without ever brushing shoulders with the genuinely liberatory.

The subjectivity of the “realist” is reified because it is isolated and detached from an active, living theory of social relations, and detached from the genuine movements of popular struggle in the outside world. In its limited perspective, it sees whatever appears as a dominating order it must cower before, hiding its adherence through an affiliation with the less overt pole of global capitalist relations. To break through this reified subjectivity is to be able to see the opposite warring poles of capitalist society in their similarities, and devise the strategy that can materialize the underclasses that serve capital in a proletarian formation.

The reified subjectivity always sees this task as something to put off in favor of taking a stance that is in thrall to reified, isolated appearance, totally absorbed by the parameters of capitalist competition. Whatever current moment they live through is one of an eternal capitalist ideology, to be followed only by a new moment wiping the slate clean and reaffirming its new content as likewise of a piece with capitalist eternity. The “realist” will follow one reified moment to the next, never breaking free. Yet it is precisely when capitalism offers you its opposite pole as liberation that you should reject it.

Beyond that offer from established power is where the “self-interest” of humanity in the form of the self-abolishing proletariat exists. This has to be constructed at the point where the system’s offer breaks down. Those trapped as servants and objects of power find their likeness in the opposite pole, beyond the range of the warring factions who uniformly treat the human life it rules over as grist for war. There may not be perfect symmetries between the underclasses at different poles, but they can find relation is their separate conditions of forced deprivation, and as a kind of livestock repurposed as cannon fodder.

Only at that precise point of the underclasses finding their inversion of the “multipolar world” can capitalism can be perforated at the scale of the totality. Where capitalism announces its split into two sharp poles, those subjugated must pull the rug out for under these factions and assert themselves as the true unity of society. The underclasses must refuse the offer of false salvation in the opposite poles, or in nationalism, and smash at the system across borders. This is never a task to be put off. We are always challenged by the question of how to construct this revolutionary force. Its dilemma is always us. The failure of achieving this formation must burn, and we must keep our focus on the failure still, while never opting for capitalism’s consolation prize. The consolation prize is always to become one form of cannon fodder or another, only achieving purpose through the acceptance of subjugation, and through delusion.