Live in value’s shadow: The capitalist state,depoliticisation,and the spectre of the far-right

Abstract

This article explores the complex relationship between the capitalist state, the process of depoliticisation, and the current rise of the far right. Drawing on Marxist critiques of political economy, queer and trans studies, and analyses of racial capitalism, the paper provides a deconstructive critique of contemporary far-right mobilisation of racial and gender orders in constructing anti-systemic rhetoric by examining how capitalist depoliticisation also reproduces race/ethnicity and sexual differences. It argues that understanding how capital reorganises social reproduction—and its limitations—reveals how racial and sexual orders organise life outside capital’s direct determinations but within capitalist class relations of dispossession. Marking life in value’s shadow, their reproduction is shaped by political processes alongside forms of personal domination and immediate extra-economic violence. The paper asserts that the far-right’s focus on racial and sexual violence within and beyond the state enacts social determination outside of value while reinforcing capitalist class relations.

Introduction

Identity politics is a stronghold of the contemporary European far right (Zúquete, 2018). The far right’s alleged anti-globalist and anti-neoliberal agenda for reclaiming the political and economic sovereignty lost to the global market and its agents relies on the defence and reconstruction of so-called “rooted”—as pre-economic and pre-political—identities: sexual difference, “indigenous” labour, and a white European civilisation. At a meeting organised by the Spanish far-right party VOX in 2022, Giorgia Meloni, the Italian far-right leader, effectively outlined their role as key pillars of the contemporary far right’s anti-systemic rhetoric. The Italian Prime Minister started by condemning “globalisation without rules and the triumph of the financial economy above the real economy” as fundamental tendencies of contemporary political and economic dominance (Meloni, 2022). Contrary to what the left believes, she argued, only the far right can truly defend entrepreneurs and workers, who are being undermined by what, back in the early 1980s, the French Nouvelle Droite termed “the totalitarian Economy” (de Benoist and Faye, 1983a, 1983b).

Promptly, she attacked “woke ideology”, “the dominant ideology of political correctness” that

is the attempt to give a high motivation to sinister interests, to destroy identity, the centrality of the person, the achievements of our civilisation, in order to fatten the big multinationals of the undifferentiated, of the synthesised, of the wealth that a few have in the skin of the many (Meloni, 2022).

This passage is powerful because Meloni entangles all aspects of the critique of globalisation. Homogenisation, the loss of genuine difference, and the production of artificiality are the underlying dynamics enabling and enabled by the turning of bodies into wealth, “wealth that a few have in the skin of the many”. Her judgment, shared by contemporary far-right critiques of globalisation, inverts feminist, queer, decolonial and anti-racist politics into ideological vectors of neoliberal “economisation” and domination. This becomes clear as the speech goes on. Gender ideology, Meloni follows, threatens to dissolve “woman” defined by “motherhood”, contributing to the development of the “undifferentiated individual”, one that she quickly qualifies as “masculine”. Defending women, Meloni goes on, means protecting them from attacks by migrants whom the left so welcomes as refugees. The allegedly open borders policy pushed by a neoliberal European Union, Meloni contends, not only threatens “our women” but also our jobs, enabling a new form of “slavery” to “big economic concentrations”. Thus, she concludes, only Brothers of Italy and VOX can “defend the freedom of people, the rights of workers, and the wealth that businesses create when they are allowed to operate and hire”.

A cornerstone of the far-right anti-systemic argument is the renewed role “the political” and the state would have as a restored realm of power, setting the proper boundaries for economic life: natural family, sexual identity, Christendom, and border control alongside a now sovereign white labour market. Most recently, Trump’s second term in the White House initiated a paranoid reading of Diversity, Equality and Inclusion (DEI) “ideologies”—not to mention the infamous Executive Order Defending Woman From Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government (Trump, 2025a)—as responsible for all that is deemed wrong with what Saull terms “cosmopolitan neoliberalism” (Saull, 2023). This is more explicitly expressed in the Proclamation for the National Child Abuse Prevention Month issued by Trump on 3 April 2025. Here, Trump invoked “the sinister threat of gender ideology” as a justification for his anti-gender policies, emphasising “the need for stable families” with “a strong mother and a strong father”, one that can be only realised, he claims, by his efforts to “secure our southern border” (Trump, 2025b).

But how does this desire for, or effective “return” of, the political and the nation relate to our inherited understandings of neoliberalism and its authoritarian aftermath? Is it one of opposition, as the far-right claims, or one of continuation? Oftentimes, whether one’s practices, policies and/or ideologies mark a distancing from or continuity with “neoliberalism” is determined by the extent to which “the economy”—and/or its agents and their needs—can be revealed as determining life’s destiny, or whether “politics” —with an emphasis on interventionist policies or the defence of “non-economy” spheres of socialisation— act as a determining logic in the process sustaining the reproduction and distribution of social needs.

The idea that “the economy has become the destiny” for representing our collective needs through capital’s insatiable absorption of modes of life and worlds rests at the core of many critical interpretations from the 1990s to the 2000s, in the wake of neoliberalism’s consolidation. However, I borrowed this phrase from the highly influential analysis of neoliberalism that shapes contemporary far-right discourses such as Meloni’s, most clearly expressed by French far-right thinker Faye (1983, 2007). For critical scholars seeking to understand the contemporary landscape of increasingly state-led capitalist accumulation and hyper-reactionary politics, grasping the causal relationship between the “political” and “economic” spheres—and what lies “outside” of them—has become essential to understanding neoliberalism’s impact on the democratic state, evidence of capitalism’s continuity, and the condition of possibility for articulating an opposition to both (Benanav, 2023; Dean, 2022; Morozov, 2022; Riley and Brenner, 2022; Varoufakis, 2024; Wark, 2021). Most importantly and precisely because of the growing overlap between ostensibly emancipatory and outwardly reactionary projects concerning gender, sexuality, and race as political categories, clarifying this relationship is imperative for critically grasping the contemporary far-right’s imprint in social life.

Over the past decade, scholars have produced some of the most compelling accounts of what appears to be a resurgence of new far-right groups, highlighting the apparent “autonomisation” of “the political” from “the economy” under neoliberalism. Framed either as a response to or as an unforeseen consequence of the divergence between economic, cultural, and political spheres, no one can avoid engaging with the issue of neoliberal depoliticisation (Anievas and Saull, 2023; Cooper, 2020; Davidson and Saull, 2017; Fraser, 2017; Laval and Dardot, 2019; Slobodian, 2021).

Furthermore, a new trend has recently appeared in the analysis of the (neoliberal, capitalist) state, drawing on the work of prominent scholars such as Simon Clarke and Werner Bonefeld (Alami and Dixon, 2024; Alami et al., 2024; Copley, 2024; Copley and Moraitis, 2021; Hunter et al., 2023; O’Kane, 2020). However, most analyses of neoliberalism’s role in the process of depoliticisation are based on an understanding of capital as tendentially subsuming all modes of life, marking neoliberalism’s historical specificity as a deepening of this tendency, or as Balibar (2019) suggests, a qualitatively new form of “total subsumption” under Absolute Capitalism.

This article examines recent developments in Marxist theory, in conjunction with queer and trans Marxist studies, and critiques of racial capitalism. I will propose a theoretical framework to understand the above-mentioned relationship, capable of providing a critical and deconstructive reading of far-right ideology and its practical functions, particularly its mobilisation of extra-economic and interpersonal violence. I will demonstrate how focusing on the specific constraints in the organisation of social production introduced by value, and the narrow conditions for the subsumption of bodies, life processes, and social needs under it to count as wealth of the few—to return to Meloni above—renders visible the historical and contradictory process of the constitution of a capitalist social ontology. This will help me demonstrate how different ontological trajectories of racial and sexual difference can historically emerge from within the capitalist mode of social reproduction, how they relate to the economic and political mediation of this process, and how they become the object of far-right critique and violence. This reconstruction will uncover how the contemporary far-right ideological, libidinal and material investments, especially its views on sexual and racial orders and the violence unleashed to uphold them, relate to the practices and ideologies that create and mystify such social order as a moment of social struggle and class antagonism.

The depoliticised economy

The renewed interest in analysing the relationship between the capitalist state and its neoliberal (authoritarian) transformations in maintaining an economic sphere free from “politics” highlights the challenges of our times. Most explanations of neoliberalism’s changes share a common shift from a purely “economic” characterisation of neoliberalism—that is, a mistaken idea that neoliberalism only concerns economic issues—to a so-called “political” one (Biebricher, 2019). They also acknowledge the significance of neoliberalism’s “authoritarian turn” (Boffo et al., 2019), which has shaped capitalist social relations since 2008. The neoliberal “political” and “authoritarian turn” seek to understand the dialectical nature of the neoliberal state, where the state’s “politicisation” signifies its “depoliticisation”. Simply put, depoliticisation reveals how the emergence of “the economy” as an autonomous sphere renders “the political” invisible within it, and vice versa, while both appear as externally imposed limits within each other’s legitimate domains of action. The political aspect of the capitalist state functions both as a necessary condition and an obstacle to its core process of reproducing depoliticised socio-economic relations. It also serves as a prerequisite for the market to operate as a realm of freedom from “political coercion”. The above paradoxical and self-contradictory relationship between “political” and “economic” spheres must be understood as a conflictual process, a historical development in constant rearticulation as capitalism reorganises social reproduction on a global scale.

With the above in mind, we might ask: What is it about the capitalist form of social (re)production that makes the separation between the “political” and “economic” spheres of human activity and social organisation a moment of its reproduction? The critique of political economy initiated by Marx aimed to deconstruct the logic behind a world that appears doubled: as economic objectivity and as political will. As Bonefeld states, “[it] is the insight that class relations are prior to economic, political and ideological forms but can only exist within these forms as their mediation that enables us to conceptualise the ‘complexity of the relation between politics and economy’” (Bonefeld, 1992: 107).

According to Echeverria, Marx’s critical discourse hinges on reconstructing a trans-historical form of the human metabolism with nature, which he calls the “socio-natural form” of social reproduction, and how the analysis of capital involves an analysis of its historically specific determination (Echeverría, 1984). Relevant to the discussion is how Echeverria establishes an “essential politicity” of human social praxis that relates to “the subject’s capacity to establish and modify the harmony between their system of capacities and their system of needs. This occurs through the determination of individuals’ effective access—both as producers and as consumers—to the totality of socially produced goods” (Echeverría, 1984: 8). In other words, the essential politicity of the socio-natural reproduction process pertains to humans’ capacity to give form to their social life, to realise a concrete historical-cultural form irreducible to instinctual natural inclinations and always mediating the human metabolism with nature (Saenz De Sicilia, 2025: 96).

As Saenz De Sicilia (2025) puts it, there is a “constitutive underdeterminacy” inherent in the way human life is structured (p. 103). This constitutive underdeterminacy creates the condition for a subjective realm of free social activity. It is also a condition of possibility for capital to insert itself as a form-determining moment of this process. The interlocking between capital as a form determining mode of social production and human reproduction establishes a specific form of power—economic power—and a specific form of social activity—economic relations—which appear as a natural logic that harmonises needs and capacities, seemingly “independent” from—autonomised— the politicity of human social existence (Echeverría, 2017). Marx’s concept of subsumption, as reconstructed by Saenz De Sicilia (2025), is relevant, as it emphasises the specific and historically contingent form-determining process of capital’s determinations sustaining the appearances of the depoliticised “economy”.

Saenz De Sicilia (2025) analytically disentangles the subsumption of social reproduction within value into two interconnected moments: the subsumption of living labour and use-values under the value form of the commodity (pp. 126–130); and the subsumption of the labour process as a valorisation process under the value form (Saenz De Sicilia, 2025, 136–140). These moments are rooted in a spatial and temporal transformation of the specific social form of labour. For Capital to act as the mediator of the reproduction of the total social process, it is essential that labour folds into its commodity form as labour-power—abstract human labour, the substance of value. Commodified labour “appears” in the market in the form of a “special” commodity that workers can alienate through exchange. The fact that these workers are “free” to exchange this commodity with capital as a purely subjective capacity to work “in abstraction from these moments of its actual reality” (Marx, 1993: 295) presupposes labour’s “complete denudation”(Marx, 1993: 295): labour’s existence as stripped of conditions necessary for realising social reproduction—such as instruments of labour and means of subsistence—independently from a determinate relationship to capital (Tetler, 2024). Consequently, what exists on the opposite side of labour as “absolute poverty” (Marx, 1993, 295) is capital as wealth, a particular historical mode of recognising the harmonisation of social needs and capacities.

The relationship between capital and labour is thus both a consequence and a precondition of the capitalist reorganisation of social reproduction into an asymmetrical power relation of mutual dependency (Bonefeld, 1995, 2016; Tetler, 2024). As Sanez de Sicilia puts it succinctly, Capital fulfils

a form-determining function at the level of the material life and historical existence of the human. Once capitalist economic relations take hold of the circulation and production of social wealth in human communities, pre-existing practices, identities and forms of sociality are transformed by their subsumption under its peculiar logics of commodification, quantification and accumulation. (Saenz De Sicilia, 2025, 113).

Labour, in its form as value-positing labour, already structures human social activity in its metabolic relation to nature. As Marx states, “the mutually combined social force of the individuals themselves gives birth to an alien social force in regard to them and which stands above them” (Marx, 1993: 33), appearing in a reified form as the properties and capacities of a social ontology and the relationship between these. This underpins the fetishistic character of “economic” categories such as capital, money, and commodities, which appear as “autonomised”, abstract, and impersonal sources of economic objectivity. It enables the conditions for value—a determinate form of social production—to take empirical forms, their “thing-like being” mode of existence within “the economy”, which “directly regulates their [individuals] practice in everyday life” (Hiromatsu, 2025: 88) and where “labour, itself a historically specific form of praxis taken by social relations, ‘disappears in its appearances” (Tetler, 2024: 9). In other words, the capital-labour relationship, which reports a determinate organisation of the natural form of social reproduction, vanishes into its appearance as a social ontology of economic categories as inverted modes of representation of a harmonisation of social needs and capacities.

The empirical expression of value as “the economy” already manifests the logic of depoliticisation, seizing the realm of “human politicity” and restructuring it according to economic determinations. Value, substantialised by abstract labour, establishes a phantom-like objectivity that mediates and organises social reproduction based on capital’s need for self-valorisation—yet subsisting in and through the satisfaction of concrete “social needs”. Echeverria describes this process as alienation,

[It] constitutes the defining feature of the modern world, as it is only within it that politicity—the specific quality of human existence—is foreclosed within the social subject and relinquished to the total social object, where it becomes reified (Echeverría, 2017: 274).

Nonetheless, capital’s reorganisation of the social form of production is not limited to the mere reproduction of value but involves the extraction of surplus-value from the cycle of capital’s reproduction: it is a valorisation process. This process, which Marx shows can only be maintained through the ongoing engagement of capital and labour in production, is fraught with antagonisms, as labour exists “in and against” capital, in “a movement of contradiction between dependence and separation” (Bonefeld, 1993: 26–31). Crucially, this highlights the incompleteness and open-ended nature of the logic of depoliticisation explored here, which does not exhaust itself in the logic of subsumption. As I will show below, when descending to the “practico-concrete” (Saenz De Sicilia, 2025: 124–125) level of social reproduction, the concrete abstraction of value reveals itself as introducing two fundamental gaps ¹ in the capitalist social reproduction process, creating a shadow that remains both underdetermined and overdetermined by capital class relations: the “abandonment” of social needs, which remain fundamental at the physiological and psychological level of human reproduction, and the abandonment of human life as “surplus” outside its existence as bearers of labour-power. I will explore this question in the following section.

Reproducing (in) the shadow: Overdetermination and underdetermination

Capital as a valorisation process establishes a specific relationship between human reproduction, commodified labour, and wages as means of fulfilling social needs through commodities. However, under capitalist conditions, commodities express a “structural overdetermination” (Saenz De Sicilia, 2025: 125). The commodity’s use-value represents its role in satisfying social needs—either as a means of individual consumption or as a basis for capital production. As use-values, they are universally mediated by the particular form of social objectivity represented by value, and they are activated as bearers of surplus value, a part of which is socially validated through exchange with Money. Therefore, social needs are recognised within their commodity form, insofar as they function as an aliquot of total social value and successfully realise surplus-value. This aliquot reflects a constantly changing social average: the socially necessary labour time needed to produce each need, measured in terms of abstract labour time. The obligation to realise this shapes the relationship between capital and labour (the purchase of labour-power), the social form of production (private production for exchange), the satisfaction of needs through commodities, and the logic of exploitation within the labour process. The pressure to expand surplus-labour time and decrease necessary labour (wages) under competitive conditions causes the recognition of social needs and the possibilities for human reproduction through money to constantly fluctuate.

As recent feminist scholarship has shown, the inversion of social reproduction into capitalist reproduction reveals the logical and historical shortcomings of commodified labour to meet all social needs through money. “Completeness” depends on the ability to commodify all life-sustaining activities, whereas historically this has rarely been the case (De’Ath, 2018; Gonzalez and Neton, 2014; Haller, 2018; Vishmidt and Sutherland, 2020, 2022). ²

If value’s determination of the social reproduction process establishes the temporal and spatial conditions for the recognition and representation of social needs based on their commensurability with units of abstract labour time, what happens to social needs whose satisfaction unfolds in time that “refuses productivity increases” or “cannot be measured in units of socially necessary labour time at all”? (De’Ath, 2018: 1546). As De’Ath argues, the subsumption of social reproduction into the valorisation process leaves a mark, a negative imprint on the social reproduction process. Importantly, De’Ath insists that this negative imprint operates as a “structural and mediated withholding” (De’Ath, 2018) rather than a direct form-determining moment. The formlessness of this negative imprint significantly impacts the organisation and production of social needs. This is particularly true of what feminist scholars call “care” and needs requiring direct, personal interaction (Battistoni, 2024). As Battistoni argues, what “devalues” care as a need is the structural assessment carried out by value’s valorisation under competitive pressures. Their concrete attributes limit capital investment, strategies of cost reduction, and their integration into mass commodity markets. During times of crisis, these become increasingly costly for individual consumption, unattractive for capital investment, and often excluded from production altogether. ³ This concrete labouring activity, while never halted as part of the total social reproduction process, “falls beneath the conceptuality required of it by capital—which is that, abstractly considered, it is a profitable expenditure of time” (Tetler, 2024: 160). As Floyd states, “the ‘naturalization’ of this labor into ‘nonexistence’ [from capital’s field of vision] has, as at least one of its preconditions, an established, historically sedimented dissociation of reproductive labor from the value circuit” (Floyd et al., 2022: 13). Here, I identify one structural gap in social reproduction under valorisation: value’s ongoing abandonment of life processes, some of which are central to the physiological and psychological reproduction of the “human body”, that are not subsumed by capital.

Let me address the second, related gap. As Marx observed, the antagonistic nature of the “absolute general law of capitalist accumulation” lies in capital’s tendency to both expand the labouring population—the commodification of labour—and diminish its necessary part, positing a portion of it as a reserve (Marx, 1990: 798; 1993: 400). Within the “spiral form” of capital reproduction, “Capital now requires that [commodified] labour both appear and disappear” (Singh, 2016: 32). The capitalist drive to reduce wages—even below the value needed to reproduce labour-power—conflicts with capital’s systemic need to increase total surplus value through productive employment of labour-power. Individual capitalists, therefore, struggle with labour to redefine their horizon of material reproduction through wages. Thus,

through the ups and downs of the capitalist economy, the tendency for capital to divest itself of labour ensures that great pools of such ‘useless; human resource are produced as a necessary element within the reproduction of the capital relation. Much of this labour-power, as the specific use vale for capital, is essentially valueless, unusable for the purpose of valorisation, and thus remains in this separated state: a not-capital unable to reconnect with ‘gainful’ employment. Nevertheless, it is clearly not outside the capital relation (Tetler, 2024: 163)

This tendency indicates that, at any given time, the surplus value portion redistributed into wages—always for a determined number of labourers—does not align with the total population through which capital momentarily takes form as labour power. A constantly shifting and growing number of people become expendable, “superfluous”, excluded from value’s accumulation, yet still dependent on money to access use-values enclosed within commodities. ⁴ This non-coincidence between the totality of life and that subsection rendered legible by its proximity to value’s circuits reveals a gap in capital’s social reproduction process—at once underdetermined and overdetermined by value’s insertion in it.

Bring the state back: Politics, abjection and negative social determination

This negative imprint, mediated withholding of the social determination of value inscribed in the social reproduction process, shapes its affordances. It creates a mediated gap, a shadow into the realm of social determinations established by the “essential politicity” of social praxis, which remains underdetermined by value’s form yet structurally overdetermined by the objective material preconditions that guarantee the reproduction of value. In this regard, it raises a question about how this remnant of social reproductive activities and “life surpluses”, these excretions from the system’s value metabolism, are processed in a manner consistent with capitalist class relations while being underdetermined by value. To put it differently, what provides a positive social determination for this formless — from value’s logic — yet negatively circumscribed realm of social human praxis? And how does this negative imprint mark “the political” and its autonomisation?

The capitalist form of social reproduction thus entails the structural separation, spatial and temporal organisation of the logic establishing, in Echeverria’s words, a harmony between social capacities and needs. This process relies on the social objectivity of value to carry a constantly changing but never fully complete portion of this harmony. Gonzalez and Neton capture this aspect of capitalist social reproduction by identifying two co-mediated spheres of social activity: the “Directly market-mediated sphere (DMM)” and the “Indirectly market-mediated sphere (IMM)” (Gonzalez and Neton, 2014: 63). For Gonzalez and Neton, what differentiates these two spheres is not the concrete quality of the social capacities or needs, but rather the form of their social determination. That is, what determination transforms a set of social capacities into the means to satisfy and harmonise a corresponding set of needs.

On the one hand, the DMM sphere encompasses the part of social reproduction ensured through wages: directly purchasing a personal service or a commodity. The latter assumes labour processes that are subsumed under capital’s valorisation at any given time, thus given social form by value’s determinations. These labour processes, regardless of their determinate character, are restructured, subordinated, and brought into “efficient” operation under the control of capitalists, acting as personifications of capital’s mute compulsion (Bonefeld, 2024). Consequently, “market dependency, or impersonal, abstract domination” (Gonzalez and Neton, 2014: 65) characterises the form of social domination within the DMM sphere for both labour and capital: it is the material objective force that compels individuals to work and capitalists to produce. There is “no structural necessity towards direct violence, or planning, to allocate labour per se” (Gonzalez and Neton, 2014: 65).

On the other hand, the IMM sphere signifies the negative circumscription established by the above subsumptive process. The necessarily incomplete incorporation of the social metabolic process into capital’s valorisation produces a mediated underdetermination of the social form harmonising social capacities and needs rendered superfluous from capital’s perspective. As Gonzalez and Neton argue, this sphere of negative form determination is characterised by its capacity to socially signify these social capacities (as bodies capable of executing multiple operations into matter) and needs (as practical objects) as “produced” by non-labour: to dislodge, re-mediate, or suspend the entanglement between waged labour and social reproduction that makes of commodified labour under capital a social synthetic category, and to organise a new reconfiguration outside the social logic of valorisation. Notably, since surplus value extraction is not the objective logic guiding this process, the forms of domination within this sphere differ from the abstractions typical of the DMM sphere. Instead, interpersonal forms of direct domination, extra-economic violence, hierarchical cooperation, or planned allocation at best (Gonzalez and Neton, 2014), among many others, replace the mute compulsion of economic relations in the ongoing reproduction of this sphere.

The particular form of alienated politicity and the concrete form of the capitalist state, as it developed historically in its appearances as autonomous from “the economy”, is mapped across these two spheres. Specifically, the capitalist state, insofar as it claims to represent “the political” under capitalist social reproduction, mediates the relationship between these two spheres as mutually opposed, as domains of social activity that vanish into each other, just as “the economy” vanishes into “the political”.

As Bonefeld puts it,

The development of the state needs to be seen as one in which the contradictory unity of surplus value production is processed in a political form as a moment of the same process of class struggle: social reproduction as, and in and against, domination (Bonefeld, 1992).

This way, the logic of depoliticisation entails the successful realisation of an alienated form of politics, establishing the specific form through which labour is politically integrated in a manner consistent with its existence as a factor of production, as commodified labour. As Gonzalez and Neton state, it depends on the possibility of temporarily accommodating an overlap between the DMM and IMM spheres, allowing for a process of excretions and remediations to be temporarily processed. The existing contradiction that the political form aims at suspending in practice is expressed in its manifestation as a contradictory series of concessions and repressions (Clarke, 1988: 136). Whether it takes the form of “poor laws”, new industrial relations, the kafala system, or the more comprehensive set of political institutions of the Keynesian welfare state, it is always contingent on the realisation of depoliticisation: that is, the successful subsumption of social labour to its capitalist form as an economic factor, so that the social production of social needs is subordinated to capital’s reproduction—the sustained extraction of surplus-value (Clarke, 1988: 136–143; O’Kane, 2020: 690). Thus, “the political”, in the form of capital’s appearance, devolves to negotiating the concrete form of social reproduction within the limits afforded and as a condition for the reproduction of capital. That is, how surplus value is distributed across different constituted economic and political categories within which it vanishes, its existence is “mystified”—wage, profit, rent, interests, but also state subsidies, indirect income, or starvation—and the legal and political forms this distributional categories take, through the bounds of an ethnic-geographical and a historical-cultural community, now substantiated by value (Echeverría, 2017: 256–258).

However, as long as social reproduction remains subsumed by value, some social capacities and needs would remain “desocialised”, non-harmonised by value’s social determination in its “economic” and “political” mediations. The alternative would entail an expansion of state-organised social reproduction, incorporating the two structural gaps discussed above. Given the capitalist form of the state, this process is constantly confronted with its material limits, “forcing” out into the IMM some of these “social surpluses” of needs and life (Clarke, 1988; Mattick, 1978). ⁵ Value’s negative determination of the social reproduction process necessarily maps into the political form of the capitalist state. It circumscribes the range, means, capabilities and needs the capitalist state can directly incorporate away from the IMM without suspending the conditions for capital’s reproduction and, hence, the state’s reproduction. Thus, de-repoliticisation entails more than just integration within the DMM and its overlap with the IMM sphere. The state’s political form also develops through the (temporary) “abandonment” of the harmonising of social capacities and needs to the remnants of the IMM sphere, a process of political negative circumscription doubling that of “the economy”, producing what Gonzalez and Neton named “the abject sphere” (Gonzalez and Neton, 2014).

Analysing the shifting historical transmutations of social determinations—both ideological and structural—afforded within and enabled by the shadow cast over the social reproduction process by value’s mediated withholding has been the focus of feminist, decolonial, and Black studies from various traditions. This shadow reveals itself as a bruise in racialised, feminised, displaced, and erased bodies brought into social existence —that is, given social form—through racialising and feminising violence, even when this social existence is marked by total extermination or death. In the following, I will explore how specifically modern forms of sex and race/ethnicity, as discussed by various authors, operate as mediating categories that both organise social capacities and needs within this shadow and facilitate a process of depoliticisation, informing both the political form of the capitalist state, and the substance and object of “politics”, and the apparent autonomy of “the economy” as different spheres of determination through which social needs are endowed with their social recognition and presentation.

Sex as depoliticisation

How can sex, a seemingly bodily attribute, and the politics organised around its naturalness be understood within the logic of depoliticisation? Contemporary developments in queer and trans-Marxism have provided valuable insights to deconstruct the naturalising category “sex”, illuminating its operations in the shadows of value—the hidden abode of social reproduction (Chitty, 2020; Heaney, 2024; Monfort, 2024; O’Brien, 2023; O’Rourke and Gleeson, 2021; Terán and Travis, 2024). Breaking open the family form, which was the focus of early feminist critiques, renders visible the material dynamics beneath sexual differentiation as a process, along with its shifting interlocking —and missing encounters—with the process of sexual reproduction that stabilise the background condition for what Heaney calls the naturalising logic of cisness (Heaney, 2024). Heaney theorises the material structure that ontologises sexual difference, which can and must be understood separately from the ideology of cisness. Her analysis can be fruitfully connected to my discussion so far, helping to reveal the dynamics that produce sexual difference and shape its embodiment into “sex” as a technology of social determination. These, I argue, insert themselves, are lived/given movement within the gap left by value’s determination of the social reproduction process, so that a bundle of capacities rendered valueless are harmonised with a system of needs left unrecognised by their resignification into the wageless, not-productive, not-labour ⁶ of “gender” when carried within the abject sphere.

For Heaney, there are two modalities of materialism, two sets of social relations which commingle in the process of ontologising—giving social form—sexual difference, which is structured as a hierarchical binary of female/feminine or male/masculine that leaves its imprint on sexed or sexualised bodies. The first set of social relations, Heaney argues, is determined by their “differential relation to money”, based on whether they fall within or outside the subsumptive moments of value, thus rendered valuable or valueless, waged or unwaged. Heaney identifies “cooking, cleaning, care for children and elders, gestation and lactation, and emotional care” as those capacities and needs that, when organised within the abject sphere, are associated with the category feminine/female (Heaney, 2024: 8). This process has historically “consolidated and intensified a particular gendered subjective understanding of work: masculinizing wage labour and feminizing unwaged reproductive labour” (O’Brien, 2019: 379). However, this purely negative determination, this structural abandonment of some fundamental needs, does not suffice to ontologise itself into a sexualised social order. Instead, according to Heaney, this process must be accompanied by a positive determination into the otherwise partly underdetermined—albeit, as I argued above, already mediated by value’s structural overdetermination—social reproduction process. Here, Heaney introduces the second form of materialism, the “more ideated form” (Heaney, 2024, 11) of the process of sexual differentiation: a symbolic representation and embodied experience of this devalued materiality as sexual penetrability. Crucially, Heaney disentangles sexual differentiation from the ideological operations of cisness by starting from the universal “ontological nature” of bodies as penetrable. Sexual difference is then understood as “the partitioning of bodies into penetrator and penetrated, an ideological ordering premised on the denial of universal penetrability” (Heaney, 2024, 9). Value’s partial determination once capital inserts itself as a moment of the social reproduction process and, as I argued, causes the separation of the DMM and IMM spheres, means that the symbolic and embodied representation is turned into a “hierarchy of persons and qualities: masculine/male (active, cerebral, spiritual, agential) over feminine/female (passive, emotional, material, dependent)” (Heaney, 2024, 10). The latter retains the representational form of an embodied experience ontologically rooted in life within value’s shadows, saturating the ideological representations of the “economic” and “political” and which is not, or should not be. Significantly, sexual differentiation is maintained through the dialectical and contradictory entanglement of bodily dispossession, feminising violence—interpersonal, immediately extra-economic—and pleasurable identification, a specific logic that inscribes and gives social form as a sexed and sexualised location to bodies that could otherwise be infinitely differentiated, as per the constitutive underdetermination of “the human”. By commingling the two materialisms—feminising violence and the libidinal investments that are grappled around it, in their multiple variations of signifying this penetrability and the possibility of its repeated visitation of the sexed body—social capacities and needs abandoned by capital are harmonised. ⁷

It is easy to see how sexual differentiation, as discussed so far, takes processes and springs from value’s negative demarcations into the fetish and mystified spheres of “the economy” and “the political”. However, its relation to these spheres differs. The shifting sphere of economic determinations, riddled with class antagonisms and contradictions, only negatively structures the possibility for sexual differentiation to emerge (first materialism). The second materialism, the positive feminisation, directly relates to and re-mediates “the political”. I am interested here in the way feminising violence deploys, participates, or joins a logic of depoliticisation by policing the contours of the feminine/masculine that secure the often precarious, sometimes pleasurable satisfaction of surplus “needs” and life within the abject sphere. At this level, the state is involved either by exercising such violence, by its prosecution, or, most likely, by its active absence from the scene. ⁸

However, the antagonistic nature of the social relations of production means that this sexual mediation is not only temporary, like most capitalist social forms, but also necessarily precarious and thus caught in the constant process of inclusion and transcendence of these forms. The instability of the form indicates that its reproduction, as part of capital’s reproduction, always depends on “a higher and greater level of ideological organisation to make it function” (Fortunati, 1995: 9). The latter is expressed as the political and ideological form of the state, which includes policies aimed at ideologically reinforcing processes of direct domination and organisation of sexual differentiation. Here, cisness as a specific involvement of feminising violence and state activity complements this depoliticisation process.

Cisness, in Mitra’s retelling of Heaney, “is the relentless invention and violent enforcement of biological certitude in science, law, education, policy, and economic life that delimits gender to the perceived sex of the body at birth and reinforces that assignment in social roles that follow” (Mitra, 2024: 241). The ideology of cisness, this “forced biologizing of sex as fact” (Mitra, 2024: 241), lacks any material basis other than the ontology resulting from sexual differentiation. Its existence as “purely ideological”, I argue, derives from it functioning as mediating the relationship between the political form of the capitalist state and the abject sphere as a legitimate shadow of abandoned needs. This is how value’s negative withholding is grafted into the political form of the capitalist state. That is, by the contradictory political demarcation of “nature”—in this case, the nature of sexual difference—as the original cause for the state’s second abandonment of needs, desocialised twice (first from “the economy”, then from “the political”). At this stage, the reproduction of sexual differentiation appears to be one conceptual degree of separation away from value’s mark on the social reproduction process, as entirely independent from “the economy”. Cisness, which comes post-factum, functions by simultaneously mystifying the violence, material processes and libidinal charges structurally conditioning sexual differentiation and by upholding the plethora of ideological, institutional, legal, and scientific apparatuses and techniques necessary to sustain its reality beyond the realm of social contestation. By biologising socially sexed bodies, it inscribes into a stable nature, as instinctual determinations, what belongs to the possibility of human history, the essential politicity and freedom of human praxis. It also puts gender to function as a determinate form of social praxis. What obtains here is a perverted form of appearance of human social praxis, a series of inversions, reflections, and refractions of its moments of social constitution. At this other end of the prism, that is, at the end of the appearance of cisness as a natural fact, the bodies’ natural disposition ignites the violence that visits upon them and its erotic investment in it. Sexed bodies appear as being the bearers themselves of that negative imprint, and their politically anchored instinctual nature becomes the internal harmonising of capacities and needs, so a cervix and a uterus with the capacity to bear life magically ignite instinctual impulses to clean the house, feed the baby, cook a meal, and mend the clothes, all for love.

Race as depoliticisation

Exposure to direct, extra-economic coercion, bodily dispossession, spatial dislocations, and/or anchoring of one’s body in a place—ranging from incarceration to slams to forced disappearance—, strategies of “pacification”, containment, erasure, and the possibility of untrammelled violence upon the flesh as a guarantee and consequence of these are also shared phenomenological attributes, inverted into a “linked fate”, of racialised existence. Many scholars of race and the afterlives of colonisation and slavery have pointed out how race—and its related concepts, racial differentiation, and racialising violence—is a distinctly modern category that spans structural material determinations, social locations and ideological formations, all involved in its ontologisation as a social category (Bhandar, 2018; Bhattacharyya, 2018; Chandra and Chen, 2013, 2022; Hartman, 1997; Meister, 2012; Singh, 2022; Wolfe, 2016). Yet, how does race connect to depoliticisation?

The distinctly modern construction of race is inseparable from European settler colonialism’s material and political logic in establishing what Meister calls “the dialectics of race and place” (Meister, 2012). Settler colonialism initiated the troubled relationship between natives and settlers, where claims over territory in forming a sovereign state by the settler needed to be reconciled with the prior existence of the Indigenous population in the colonised lands, whose claims to identity and place differed from those of the settler. Settler colonialism’s “racial regimes of ownership” (Bhandar, 2018) introduced “race” and racial differentiation as categories created through violent abstractions, the processes of which can be mapped onto the determinations and opacities of value’s absorption of the social reproduction process (Bhandar, 2018; Bhandar and Toscano, 2015).

The dialectics of race and place in settler colonialism operate through a contradictory logic of racial ascription and racial differentiation, which is co-mediated by the category of indigeneity and ethnicity as inherently attached to space. Settlers’ relationship with their distinct group identity, contrasted with that of the indigenous population and their competing land claims, relies on the creation of “race” as a means of expressing, preserving, and articulating a “hidden” bond—an essence—that sustains itself and unites individuals in abstraction from—or, as I mentioned earlier, indifference towards—time and space (Meister, 2012). Race functions as a category that reorganises time and space within the colony and the metropole (Nichols, 2019). In the colonies, “race” is folded back into native populations, serving as a racialised condition necessary for establishing the settler state’s sovereignty over the territory—and their potential new endowed “indigeneity”. Racial abstraction thus operates both to make land alienable to be subjected to repossession, and to forge a new basis for belonging—de-racialisation—through the productive employment of individual capacities as labour (Bhandar, 2018). It also enables the retroactive application of racialised spatial and phenomenological attributes, justifying various political tactics from erasure (Wolfe, 2016), to displacement (Abourahme, 2025), to enslavement (Hartman, 1997) that lead to a variety of modes of racial differentiation.

However, rather than being a historical encounter or a logic of what happened then and there, racial dialectics are carried into the core of the specific political form of the capitalist state (Ferreira da Silva, 2022). As Sarika and Chen argue, the ontologisation of race in this modern iteration and the process of racialisation can be traced to a “material” substantialisation inseparable from the marks left by value’s mediation of the social reproduction process (Chandra and Chen, 2022). Described as the “linked fate” of those who come to inhabit — wilfully or, most likely, through the negative withholding of value’s imprint into the social reproduction process — their own life as “surplus”, useless for capital and a burden upon the state, racialisation is the flip side of a capitalist process of human signification. Its materiality reveals value’s shadowy operations — the second mediated gap mentioned above — for “such populations are expendable but nonetheless trapped within the capital relation, because their existence is defined by a generalised commodity economy which does not recognise their capacity to labour” (Chen, 2013: 212). A solely negative material racial demarcation as life’s abandonment, as socially dead, is only positively determined by the materiality of different intensities of racialising violence and its forms of resistance, ontologising race as “a historically changeable relational structure and an array of formative processes that shape and alter the meaning and material context of racial categories” (Chen, 2019). Lastly, the re-enhancement of the racial dialectics is the mystification of these specific social relations enacting and upholding a racialised other as “alien” to the human political community of capital, substantiated by value’s mediation of the economic and political spheres under the capitalist Nation (Echeverría, 2017). ⁹

Returning to the previous discussion, race as a social form entails its function as a prism that inverse the hidden bond of value’s shadow between the otherwise heterogeneous group of those racialised as a trans-spatial and trans-temporal essence—re-anchored in the pre-social realm of “nature”—dissolving the social relations from which it originates and to which it becomes entirely other. ¹⁰ Similarly, it inverts the temporalities of the racial event, so that the structural, symbolic, state-mediated, and extra-political violence that repeatedly afflicts the body in its racialisation—the bruises left by value’s demarcation of social reproduction—are responses to, rather than causes of, racial difference. ¹¹ Race’s “essence”, once ideologically inverted, operationalises the logic of depoliticisation. It reports a world where human politicity, as a matter of the organisation of the reproduction of all life, is foreclosed and relinquished into the racialised subject as the frontier for legitimate state violence, securitisation, policing, expulsion, non-reproduction, and abandonment (Davis, 2017; Gilmore, 2007; Hall et al., 1982; Neocleous, 2025).

Conclusion: Life in the shadows, authoritarian neoliberalism, far-right depoliticisation

My discussion of the shadows and illuminations of value’s social (under)determination suggests that capital reproduction as domination is upheld by a series of apparent vanishing and co-mediated moments: the economy vanishes into the political, sex into the economy, the political into the racial, the racial into sex, the economy into the racial, and vice versa. In brief, they form a “unity-in-separation”, or the mode of existence of alienated social practice that takes form in each other through negation. This unity-in-separation establishes that each of these instantiations—sexual difference, ethnicity/race, the political, the economy—appears as if its concrete essence and internal logic of reproduction can positively demarcate the limits and affordances of each other’s external reconfiguration (i.e. the concrete historical manifestation of labour, racial and sexual regimes politically mediated by intra- and inter-state institutional arrangements in the world market).

Depoliticisation, when fully understood, maintains this ongoing melting and re-solidifying pot of (un)met needs as the de-recomposition of alienated human social praxis. It is the process by which social antagonisms within capitalist relations of production are temporarily accommodated in the distributional empirical forms of state support, political rights as citizenship, assets, interests, rent, profit, waged labour, and, as argued, various articulations of race/ethnicity and sexual order. When adequately reproduced, these forms socially determine the diversity of practices that make up human life. They are also the forms through which life persists, caught in a dynamic movement in and against, between integration and transcendence into the underlying class relations, mystified within them.

In other words, each of these forms reports the (mis)recognition of social needs, a mode of its provision, if you like. As such, depoliticisation is the active manifestation and (re)production of the mediated existence of social antagonisms that stem from capitalist contradictions when it subsumes the social reproduction process. This dynamic affords endless empirical expressions and delineations of these boundaries, as attested by existing capitalist societies. It creates a specific relationship between politics and the economy, and life in their shadow. Additionally, it links structural (political, economic) violence with what appears as gratuitous and symbolic violence, along with their historical re-entanglements under capitalism. ¹²

As outlined in the introduction, the contemporary far-right discourses “reveal” capital’s source of collective immiseration as its power for abstraction, homogenisation, and undifferentiation. For them, the widening spectrum of genders and sexualities afforded by sex — including transsexual lives — and by “multiculturalism” results from a mode of life uprooted by capital’s abstractions and manipulated to satisfy globalist elites’ needs for profit at the expense of the otherwise real, concrete, or immediate social needs of making home and nation. My analysis of the logic of depoliticisation underlying the reproduction of capitalist relations of production—and its application to sex and race as social forms that can be put to work along this logic—can allow us to deconstruct this ubiquitous critique while locating it within a historical conjuncture identified as an authoritarian neoliberal period.

How can we understand the specificity of neoliberal depoliticisation? The inherently contradictory character of neoliberal rule appears to exist in perpetual morbid self-annihilation, enabling its persistence. Neoliberal depoliticisation exists between progressive integration and authoritarian discipline, closely linked to capitalist boom-and-bust cycles. During periods of sustained accumulation, as capital rushes through its upward tendencies to subsume more social processes, social locations, and modes of life—fulfilling needs within the determinations of value and surplus-value extraction—neoliberal authoritarianism remains hidden. Processes of racialisation and sexual differentiation are reproduced through the economic sphere as differentially valued commodified labour. This allows the neoliberal state to appear neutral in reproducing both exploitation and racial/sexual domination, while a more intense feedback loop between the DMM and the abject sphere operates. This phase corresponds to the ideological form scholars like Nancy Fraser termed “progressive neoliberalism” (Fraser, 2017), where mass commodity expansion, strict monetary policies, and privatisation are believed to ensure a separation between the state and civil society and to pacify social antagonisms. As the expansion of the domestic market reaches the limits of valorisation limits globally—limits which appear as external, unseen powers threatening the nation—the neoliberal state shifts toward its authoritarian form.

Since the collapse of progressive neoliberalism’s hegemony after the 2008 crisis, we have observed the authoritarian aspects of neoliberalism come to the surface. These tendencies are mainly reflected in policies that suppress social antagonisms produced by deeper market integration—shrinking wages and seeking legitimacy through this strategy. At the same time, and in response, there is a rapid rearticulation of neoliberalism’s socially conservative, “non-cosmopolitan” ideologies, incorporating the far-right as it becomes more directly involved in the ongoing re-politicisation of socio-economic relations while sustaining and advocating for a strengthening of the state’s para-political dimensions. This development appears both opposed to “neoliberalism as usual” and somewhat necessary for reconfiguring the neoliberal state. The ideological and material shifts involved not only further weaken the democratic aspects of the liberal state but also tend to promote political violence, mainly through policies that tighten borders, regulate migration, enforce anti-gender norms, and criminalise dissent.

This authoritarian neoliberalism represents an ideological-political form that emphasises market boundaries and socially enforces them by reinforcing forms that reconstruct the abject sphere while scrambling to sustain a shrinking DMM sphere through various economic policies. The contradictions of progressive neoliberalism and its authoritarianism manifest as the politicisation of socio-economic relations that undermine the conditions for reproducing the abject sphere. For example, women’s entry into the labour force and the crisis of the family are reinterpreted as consequences of gender’s politicisation and the dissolution of “womanhood” and “manhood”, channelled through an expanded market that commodifies life beyond limits—including sex, now “exchanged” like lipstick. Globalisation—weakening borders and displacing populations—is based on the commodification of human identity defended both by the left and by a free market that has run amok, eroding regional, national and civilisational forms of differentiation and ethnic identities capable of reasserting themselves back as the limits of domestic accumulation do. These arguments capture aspects of capitalism’s crisis-ridden and antagonistic mode of recognising social needs.

Authoritarian neoliberalism therefore functions as both a critique and a contradiction of its own progressive logic of depoliticisation. Alongside market endorsement—perhaps a form of “neoliberal producerism”—there emerges a political-ideological reconstruction of mediated exclusion from “the economy” and “the political” which is increasingly required for reproducing capital’s social form as social struggles attempt to renegotiate the form and mode of provision and recognition of collective needs, of what is considered essential for a life worth living. As political solutions to domestic discontent become less feasible—from the nation-state or the EU—a process of de-integration and expulsion into the abject sphere intensifies. Thus, in the modern neoliberal global order, and as long as one remains within neoliberal political logic, the escalation of political repression—manifested as a naturalisation of sex and the reinforcement of ethnic/racial difference as categories patrolling the boundaries of the (global) market, or naturally dispossessing individuals of such claims—becomes part of the political toolkit to “consolidate” the social order, thereby reinforcing these authoritarian aspects of the state by transforming the content of politics. Perhaps the structural conditions created by neoliberalisation favour the consolidation of political forms increasingly resembling historical fascism, as the most likely intensification of social discontent that will follow cannot be met but by force—within their framework: the power of money and the authority of the state; nation, sex, and race as predetermined destinies. This is precisely what fascistic conditions produce even in the absence of fascist actors in power. It also presents an opportunity for the ideological, libidinal, and material dimensions of fascism to take hold as a moment of class struggle and social antagonism, yet in a way not already determined by the previously discussed movement of value’s determinations of the social reproductive process and absence.

This renegotiation of the mode of recognition of a new conglomerate of socially valid needs, however, does not occur straightforwardly and ensnares us all within an already mediated—or, as I previously mentioned, both underdetermined and overdetermined—mode of social reproduction marked by capital’s class relations. As Adorno (1942) noted, needs—and, for now, setting aside the impulse to create hierarchy—

are the marks of a state of affairs that forces its victims into flight, while at the same time firmly keeping them under control, and in such a way that the escape always degenerates into a frantic repetition of the state of affairs from which they fled.

For example, the apparent disintegration of sex reports the intensification of a process that renegotiates the ontologisation of sexual difference in its material and ideological dimensions, one that pulls the carpet under the feet of “gender” as the medium through which need and sexual pleasure intertwine in the reproduction of oneself and others, or the harmonisation of needs and capacities. ¹³ This process also risks spilling over into—or, as many far-right transphobes see it, becoming a social contagion of—the entire social reproduction process, prompting calls for its potential reorganisation. In this contradictory mode of existence, “in and against” capital’s swings and shakes, neoliberalism and the far-right converge—or, rather, far-right politics and the ideology of social violence enable the deployment of neoliberal depoliticisation. The far-right’s ideological operations, coupled with its insistence on and acceptance of sexual and racial violence in the pursuit of establishing what is considered the correct sexual and racial order, as well as a means of (mis)recognising what we may truly need, adopt a partisan stance within the ongoing, contradictory process of accumulation and contestation. They do so by intensifying some elements of what (neo)liberal states are already attempting. We are witnessing the radicalisation of an authoritarian neoliberal far-right emerging from within neoliberalism’s core. This time, instead of dismantling the political form of the state—as was the case during the Weimar Republic or the 1970s Keynesian crisis—neoliberalism is laying the foundations from within.