According to Arrighi, we are currently witnessing the decline of the systemic cycle of accumulation dominated by the United States. The defeat suffered by the latter during the Vietnam War was the ‘signal crisis’ of this decline, the war in Iraq is its ‘terminal crisis’. Wars – combined with growing deficits, to which they contribute significantly – play an important role in the transition from one instance of hegemony to the next. For Arrighi, the power of the United States persists to this day, but it represents a typical case of ‘domination without hegemony’. The Italian thinker’s analysis is close here to that of Robert Cox. ‘Domination’ is predicated on instances of economic and military superiority that are not accompanied by the consent of the dominated. The latter endure the domination for want of an alternative, but they do not actively collaborate with it, and invariably seek to undermine it. For domination to be converted into hegemony, it is indispensable that it should rest on a mixture of interests that is clearly understood by the dominated – the dominant classes among the dominated populations must have an interest in the domination – and cultural identification. Until the 1970s, the United States combined these elements, which made it an authentic hegemon. But since the Vietnam War, and still more the war in Iraq and the failure of the ‘Project for a New American Century’, it clearly lacks them.

One of the contributions made by The New Spirit of Capitalism is that it put the word ‘capitalism’ back into circulation in France. The term had almost completely vanished from the public sphere during the neo-liberal decades of the 1980s and 90s, the naturalization of the system (‘there is no alternative’) having entailed the disappearance of the word referring to it. Boltanski and Chiapello define capitalism in minimal fashion as the ‘unlimited accumulation of capital by formally peaceful means’. It is a profoundly absurd system. The ‘unlimited’ character of accumulation is without foundation or justification: why should it be necessary for capital to be infinitely accumulated, given that human needs are by definition limited? Aristotle called the unlimited accumulation of goods as an end in itself ‘chrematistics’. He condemned it and contrasted it with ‘economics’, or accumulation for a purpose. The essence of capitalism, affirm Boltanski and Chiapello, is chrematistic.

[...] The concept of strategic essentialism derives from this critique. It agrees that there are no essences in the social world. However, it draws attention to the fact that in everyday life and social struggles individuals frequently refer to such essences, to the extent that they seem difficult to remove. For example, the category of ‘woman’ put in circulation by classical feminism has generated exclusion in that it has sometimes led the feminist movement to dissociate itself from other oppressed sectors. Such is the criticism of it formulated by Butler. However, the category has also enabled women to mobilize as women – that is, to have a sense of themselves as belonging to a dominated group and to work for its emancipation. The concept of strategic essentialism maintains that the provisional fixing of an essence known to be artificial can in some instances be strategically useful. Alternatively put, anti-essentialism can only be theoretical. If it takes effect in practice, it tends to paralyze action, because any action assumes the formation of collectives and collectives tend to ‘essentialize’ their identities.

The notion of strategic essentialism has been criticized and Spivak has distanced herself from it. Any essentialism, even if only strategic, implies a separation between those included in it and those excluded from it. [...] Even so, it must be acknowledged that Spivak has the merit of having raised a real problem. [...]

[...] Yet even when critical thinking does contain a class dimension, it is invariably only one factor among others. Thus it will be said that a form of class domination exists, just as forms of male domination or ethnic-racial domination exist, these different forms of domination being placed on the same level. This obviously contravenes the most elementary Marxism. From the standpoint of the latter, socio-economic domination – the confrontation between capital and labour, the commodity form, reification and so on – is not one type of domination among others. In truth, it is not even a type of ‘domination’. It is what underpins all forms of domination and confers on them their specificity in the capitalist regime. It is a logic, which allows us to regard capitalism as a system. Male domination, for example, pre-exists capitalism, but is (according to Marxists) largely reconfigured by the latter.

Wright has proposed an original solution to this problem, in the form of the concept of ‘contradictory class locations’. According to him, the middle classes do not in themselves constitute a class. The individuals who make them up are located in several social classes at once, whose interests are often contradictory. Cadres (and managers) exemplify this situation. On the one hand, they are employees – that is, they are not owners of the capital or means of production in the firm for which they work. Obviously, it is now common for these particular types of employee to have an interest in their firm’s profits (via stock options, for example), which makes their situation that much more complex. But from the strict standpoint of property relations, they are above all wage-earners. On the other hand, their interests are opposed to those of other employees, because they have power over them within the firm or possess scarce skills which entitle them to sizeable remuneration. These social categories are therefore split. The higher up one goes in the hierarchy of the middle classes – approaching, for example, the CEOs of transnational firms – the more the interests of middle-class employees can be equated with those of capitalists. The lower one descends in that hierarchy, the more their interests resemble those of workers.

According to Wright, capitalism feeds off exploitation, which entails maintaining this concept at the heart of the analysis. Exploitation is a social relation distinct from domination, which cannot be subsumed under the latter. [...] ‘non-exploitative’ oppression: it can extend to the physical elimination of the oppressed population. Exploitation is a very different phenomenon. The exploiter needs the exploited, since the former’s own material welfare cannot do without the latter’s labour. For this reason, although class massacres can occur, capitalists are to a certain extent compelled to restrain their violence towards workers. That is why the sentence ‘the only good worker is a dead worker’ makes no sense.

[...] If postcolonial theories have taught us one thing, it is to mistrust discourses which exalt ‘origins’ – that is, to reject the idea that it is possible to rediscover a ‘virgin’ postcolonial identity beneath the colonial experience. Nothing of the sort exists, and origins are always hybrid. [...]