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[...] it is far from obvious what sorts of policies are optimal for reproducing capitalism; effective solutions to a given problem may involve going against the interests of particular sectors or groups of capitalists, and their resistance may be sufficient to block functional solutions; the multiplicity of the different conditions for reproducing capitalism means that a solution to some of these destructive tendencies may undermine solutions to others. This last issue may be the most vexing. For example, state policies to reduce social conflicts of various sorts through the development of the welfare state may, over time, require levels of taxation and redistribution that encroach on capital accumulation. This is sometimes referred as the contradiction between the legitimation function of the state (fostering consent and thus reducing conflict) and the accumulation function of the state (creating optimal conditions for profits and capital accumulation). [...]
It is easy—but, I think, a mistake—to see this upsurge of right-wing populism as tapping into widespread, virulent racist and exclusionary nationalist identities. To be sure, there are undoubtedly people drawn to these political movements whose core identities are deeply hostile to racial minorities, immigrants and others. But for many, perhaps most, people who end up supporting right-wing populist politics, these aspects of identity become foregrounded as a result of the political context and lack of available alternatives. Beginning in the 1990s, the political parties traditionally linked to the working class generally embraced, to varying degrees, the core idea of neoliberalism: wherever possible, markets and private initiatives should replace direct state programs as ways of fostering economic dynamism and solving social problems. The disillusionment with the capacity of those parties to improve the lives of most working-class people creates a political vacuum that allows right-wing populism to gain traction. So, while exclusionary nationalism and racism are part of the cultural landscape of identities in most places, the extent to which they are foregrounded or subdued depends on politics.
But don’t mistake me for adding to the chorus who feign surprise at the rise of what they dismiss as “anger” or “resentment” or “populism.” By revenge I mean not only a passing sentiment but a logic of retribution, what Francis Bacon called a “wild justice,” a ruptural claiming of unpayable debts. My goal is deeper than describing the political mood of our moment. I want to explore the notion that capitalism itself is a revenge economy: a system that appears to be taking needless, warrantless, and ultimately self-defeating (but, none the less, profitable for some) vengeance on the world. Revenge capitalism breeds revenge politics among the populations that reel from its impacts and lash back, though usually, tragically, at the wrong targets. I think it is long overdue for us to imagine what it would mean to avenge what it has done to us and to the planet. The line between revenge and avenging is subtle, both linguistically and conceptually. But whereas revenge fantasies fixate on retribution in the coin in which the original injury was dealt, and thereby risk perpetuating that economy, an avenging imaginary dreams of the abolition of the systemic source of that injury and the creation of new economies of peace and justice.
[...] In the shadow of the vindictive borders, beloved bodies drown or waste away to assuage the fear and protect the comforts of the privileged. The world is saturated with heart-wracking injustices that, even more grotesquely, are not even framed as injustices in the worldview of the powerful, just a regrettable necessity or a hiccup of progress.
Liberal and neoliberal philosophers have insisted that capitalist democracy is the climax of human political achievement, the culmination of centuries of human social evolution that has seen the knights of reason and the law banish the dragon of revenge to the borderlands, but revenge is with us still. Indeed, a kind of vengeance is at the core of capitalism, though a revenge largely executed without any single human intending it, operating through the everyday and allegedly inevitable banalities of the economy.
[...] revenge is a useful adjective to attach to capitalism because it helps explain the seemingly irrational, certainly bloodcurdling violence of that system, which reduces so many of us to utter worthlessness and disposability. Calling up the term revenge also helps us better understand this system’s foundations in the cruelties of empire, colonialism and the racial ordering of humanity. These cruelties that continue to this day as humans are, completely unnecessarily, warehoused in prisons, left to die in slums, worked to death in mines, abandoned to the border, or denied the care they require. This vengeance emerges as capitalism responds, directly and indirectly, to constant resistance to its rule. This resistance is, ultimately, the source of the contradictions and crises that drive its innovations and its excesses.
Capitalism, like all systems of power, is reproduced not simply through brute force (though that is certainly part of it) but also through a whole contradictory moral order where its violences and inequalities are normalized, and in which those who refuse or rebel are framed as bestial, stupid, and doomed. It is within liberal capitalism’s dominant moral economy that we have come to even understand revenge. It may well be an eternal human drama, but our interpretation of that drama, our notion of what revenge is, is a discursive formation shaped by the moral order of the historically unique system in which we are steeped and to whose reproduction we are compelled to contribute. How we imagine revenge is shaped by a system of revenge. Thus capitalism appears, in its preferred cosmology, as not only the natural expression of basic and inexorable human impulses to compete, accumulate, and barter, but as the triumph of order, peace and plenty.24 Capitalism has (in a sense) benefited from the (justified) timeless opprobrium for revenge, framed only as an individual drive, to mask its own systematically vengeful nature and to castigate its enemies as heinously, nihilistically vengeful.
Why add another adjective to preface to capitalism? Such a description should be taken alongside, rather than as a competitor, for recent analyses of gore capitalism, racial capitalism, carceral capitalism, surveillance capitalism, cognitive capitalism, narcocapitalism, empire, biocapitalism, financialized capitalism and neoliberal capitalism. This cruel god has many faces. Revenge capitalism is a way to reflect on both an inherent tendency within and a specific period of capitalism.
Then we have the unpayable “debts from below”: those debts which are owed to and sometimes claimed by the oppressed, but which are not honored or acknowledged by the powerful. These include demands for repatriation, reparation, and restoration of lands and artifacts stolen in the process of colonialism, imperialism, or restitution for harms or deprivations suffered. I suggest that, while sometimes the claiming of these debts does manage to articulate itself in ways that can be registered and accommodated within reigning legal and economic orders, they are at the most radical when they make a demand that is practically or ontologically impossible within those orders, when they call into question the legitimacy and foundational narratives of those orders. Here, unpayability strikes at the fundamental injustice of those systems; the only true recompense is their abolition, such that the violence is impossible for anyone.
[...] Enclosure 2.0 represents the further combustion of social wealth into capital through, for instance, the privatization of public services, or the deregulation of industry that destroys ecosystems, or the extractive politics of unpayable debt, where social wealth is funneled away. Enclosure 3.0, or hyperenclosure, represents the use of technology to seize upon the commons of imagination, cognition, communication and creativity,