Standpoint theory and double abolition

In Unpayable Debt, Denise Ferreira da Silva renews and extends the revolutionary tradition of standpoint theory. The entire book is an experiment that adopts “the wounded captive body in the scene of subjugation” (Ferreira da Silva, 2022: 16) as its standpoint of analysis. In line with other standpoint theories, this position provides an epistemological advantage, allowing us to see and understand more clearly the structures of domination that rule over the contemporary world. Ferreira da Silva’s also shares with other standpoint theories the proposition that the knowledge thus revealed must ground and facilitate a political project to abolish those structures.

Ferreira da Silva’s argument, however, constitutes an innovation of standpoint theory regarding both the epistemological and political propositions. First, she extends the epistemological project of traditional standpoint theories insofar as the wounded captive body in the scene of subjection, in contrast to the proletarian and the feminist standpoints, which primarily reveal one structure of domination, discloses multiple structures simultaneously. Second, regarding the political project, whereas the standpoint in other theories designates not only a subject of knowledge but also subjects to affirm politically, the proletarian and feminist subjects, which are meant to prefigure a revolutionary future, Ferreira da Silva’s standpoint does not put forward such a revolutionary subject. This is the point I would like to explore more deeply. My hypothesis is that Ferreira da Silva is deploying a doubled revolutionary operation here by which, along with the structures of domination that stand over it, the subject that inhabits the standpoint must itself be abolished. Here, then, the process of liberation is configured as a double abolition.

Before returning to that question, I should articulate the primary arguments that constitute standpoint theories, which will help situate Ferreira da Silva’s argument and its innovations. Karl Marx, for example, proposes a standpoint epistemology when he claims that the discipline of economics is not a universal science but a bourgeois science insofar as it interprets economic laws and phenomena from the standpoint of the capitalist class. In response, he does not propose they we discover a properly universal theory, but rather that we develop a new science that interprets the economy from the standpoint of the proletariat (1976: 96). The standpoint of the bourgeoisie necessarily creates a blindness to the hierarchies of the capitalist social order, seeing that world merely as a natural order, which is assumed to be characterized by freedom and equality. The proletarian standpoint, instead, sees this same world from below, but can reveal its constitutive unfreedoms and inequalities (1976: 279-80).

Georg Lukács develops further Marx’s proposition, elaborating the blindness of bourgeois thought and the epistemological and political consequences of adopting a proletarian standpoint. The reified capitalist world, Lukács maintains, characterized by commodity relations and the value form, is “the necessary, immediate reality of every person living in capitalist society” (Lukács, 1971: 197). However, whereas from the bourgeois standpoint this reified world appears as the natural and necessary form of social reality, the proletarian standpoint reveals that, although these reified forms currently constitute our immediate reality, they are in fact a second nature, which, because constructed, can be transformed. “Bourgeois thought remains fixated on these forms which it believes to be immediate and original and from there it attempts to seek an understanding of economics, blithely unaware that the only phenomenon that has been formulated is its own inability to comprehend its own social foundations. Whereas for the proletariat the way is opened to a complete penetration of the forms of reification” (1971: 185). This way opened for the proletariat affords not only a fuller knowledge of the social order and its structures of domination, but also a political project to abolish those structures. The abolition of “the forms in which contemporary bourgeois society is objectified,” he insists, “if it is to be a true abolition, cannot simply be the result of thought alone, it must also amount to their practical abolition as the actual forms of social life” (1971: 177). The proletariat is thus, in Lukács’ framework, not only the subject of knowledge, but also the political subject that can both destroy this world and, ultimately, create another in its image, a revolutionary proletarian world.

Feminist standpoint theories deploy parallel arguments in many respects. Nancy Hartsock, for example, presents the tasks of a feminist standpoint in relation to patriarchal structures of power in analogy to those of a proletarian standpoint in relation to capitalist structures. “Just as Marx’s understanding of the world from the standpoint of the proletariat enabled him to go beneath bourgeois ideology, so a feminist standpoint can allow us to descend further into materiality to an epistemological level at which we can better understand both why patriarchal institutions and ideologies take such perverse and deadly forms and how both theory and practice can be redirected in more liberatory directions” (Hartsock, 1983: 231). According to Hartsock, this model of standpoint epistemology is portable: that is, a superior knowledge of social hierarchies and structures is available from the standpoint of any subordinated group, but only on condition that this standpoint and this knowledge is part of a political struggle, a result of the education that participation in struggle provides (1983: 232). For Hartsock, then, even more explicitly that for Lukács, the epistemological and political projects are inextricably interwoven. And crucial in the functioning of this standpoint, in her view, is the construction of a subject that is able not only to destroy the structures of our current society but also model and sustain a revolutionary future. “Because of its achieved character and its liberatory potential,” she explains, “I use the term ‘feminist’ rather than ‘women’s standpoint.’ Like the experience of the proletariat, women’s experience and activity as a dominated group contains both negative and positive aspects. A feminist standpoint picks out and amplifies the liberatory possibilities contained in that experience” (1983: 323). The feminist subject of this standpoint, like the proletarian one, in some sense prefigures the world to come.

These brief accounts of some traditional standpoint theories allow me to return to Ferreira da Silva’s argument, which, in my view, deploys several parallel arguments regarding the conjoined epistemological and political projects. Regarding the epistemological side, for Ferreira da Silva, too, the standpoint of the subordinated makes possible a superior and more complete knowledge of the social order. Throughout the book, in a variety of contexts, she indicates “blind spots” that her standpoint can reveal. One such blind spot, for instance, regards the inability to recognize “the joint workings of the Colonial, the Racial, the Juridical, and Capital in the global present.” From below, however, this blind spot can be overcome. “This blind spot figures what blackness rendered as the wounded captive body in the scene of subjugation cannot but expose” (2022: 89). How this standpoint reveals our social reality and its structures of power merits much more study and it occupies a major portion of Ferreira da Silva’s book. Here I want to dwell, first, on an innovation that her argument represents with respect to the standpoint epistemologies I presented above, which is that instead of one structure of power (capital or patriarchy) her project simultaneously seeks to reveal multiple structures of power. She argues, in fact, that no one structure of power can be exposed adequately without the others. In order “to register the ongoing present of slavery in/as global capital,” she argues, for instance, is required “nothing short of collapsing the formal (categorial) boundaries… between Capital, the Racial, and the Colonial” (2022: 76). The standpoint of the wounded captive body in the scene of subjugation, then, is able not only to disclose simultaneously, she maintains, the different structures of power but also reveal the ways that they are interwoven and mutually constitutive.

Regarding the political side, Ferreira da Silva’s project, like the other standpoint theories, links the greater knowledge of the structures of power provide by the standpoint to efforts to abolish them. In part, this political project manifests in her work in the form of a generalized refusal (which she recognizes as in line with Fred Moten’s suggestive notion of a “common refusal” (2022: 54)). Ferreira da Silva seeks, for instance, to activate “the negative capacity that the captive body has gifted blackness” (2022: 44) and this negative capacity is one that can both refuse and undermine the forces of domination. Such instances of refusal are part of a general project of abolition: “the wounded captive body in the scene of subjugation reminds us that what is before us is not a simple task but a demand for the end of (the) world as we know it” (2022: 189). Just as for Hartsock the feminist standpoint picks out and amplifies the liberatory possibilities contained in the experience of the subordinated, so too, for Ferreira da Silva, political potential is amplified, especially in its negative capacity, by the wounded captive body in the scene of subjugation. This is even more powerful because, as I said, Ferreira da Silva’s standpoint can grasp and attack simultaneously capital, the racial, the colonial, and other structures of power – imagining and hastening the end of the world as we know it in expansive and increasingly general terms. One key departure of Ferreira da Silva’s argument from the other standpoint theories, then, in terms of both knowledge and in its negative political project, is to orient our focus toward multiples structures of domination.

This brings me her second departure, which is more complex and potentially more important. For the other theories I sketched above, the standpoint is generally understood to serve as not only as the ground for a negative political project – the abolition of the structures of power, the end of the world as we know it – but also as the basis for a political proposition of the future. The proletariat and feminist subjects that inhabit that standpoint, in other words, are affirmed as prefigurations of a future world, a proletarian or a feminist world. Ferreira da Silva’s argument, however, seems to preclude this move insofar as the wounded captive body in the scene of subjugation cannot be affirmed in this way. Liberation cannot, obviously, perpetuate the woundedness, captivity, and subjugation that define this subjectivity but must instead destroy those attributes.

Some may read as a limitation or even failure of Ferreira da Silva’s argument the fact that the subject the constitutes the standpoint does not offer or prefigure a positive political project. My view, in contrast, is that this aspect is potentially one of her book’s most innovative aspects. The wounded captive body in the scene of subjugation not only offers no political subject to affirm, but also must itself be abolished along with the multiple structures of domination.

To explain the potential I find in this proposition, let me articulate some other theoretical and political experiences that I find to have resonances with this aspect of Ferreira da Silva’s work. Marx provides a first example regarding the political mission of the proletariat as part of the critique of capital. “In so far as such a critique represents a class, it can only represent the class whose historical task is the overthrow of the capitalist mode of production and the final abolition of all classes – the proletariat” (Marx, 1976: 98). While the proletariat presents a critique of the capitalist mode of production and seeks to overthrow it, it must abolish not only the ruling class but all classes, including itself. One can interpret this passage, then, to indicate that Marx does not conceive the proletariat as the subject to be affirmed, destined to form a future world in its likeness. The task of the proletariat, instead, includes a process of self-abolition.

Mario Tronti makes this point more explicitly. Tronti, interpreting the industrial workers movements in Italy in the 1960s, rejects the line of the official Marxist parties that celebrates work and the position of the worker, highlighting, instead, worker actions aimed at the refusal of work. Rather than proposing a liberation of work, then, he focuses on the workers’ movement aimed at a liberation from work. “This point is precisely the separation of the working class from itself, from work, and thus from capital…. To fight against capital, the working class must fight against itself qua capital” (Tronti, 2019: 273). In Tronti’s view, then, although the working class provides the standpoint for a greater knowledge of the structures power in capitalist society and the agent for destroying those structures, it cannot be affirmed as the subject to constitute a revolutionary future. Revolution, instead, requires an abolition of the capitalist social order and an abolition of the working class.

Amilar Cabral provides one final example, which complicates my argument in useful ways. Cabral was a leader of the extended battle in Guinea-Bissau against Portuguese colonial rule, and he recognized that the Guinean petty-bourgeoisie played a central role in the struggle, in part, he explains, because it was the only class with sufficient education. The danger he foresaw for a postcolonial society was that these petty-bourgeois leaders, after eliminating foreign rule, would strive to establish themselves as a new ruling class and profit from the bureaucratic and commercial arrangements of a neocolonial state. The petty-bourgeoisie is thus, according to Cabral, faced with two options: either “to betray the revolution or to commit suicide as a class” (Cabral, 1980: 136). Clearly, this anticolonial situation is different in important ways from the standpoint arguments I have considered thus far. Cabral does not posit the standpoint of the petty-bourgeoisie as a privileged epistemological position for grasping the nature of the structures of power. Nonetheless, this position resonates with what I am trying to articulate here insofar as the Guinean petty-bourgeoisie, after having served as a key agent of the abolition of Portuguese colonial rule, cannot be affirmed as the subject of the postrevolutionary society. It must, instead, direct the fires of abolition also on itself. Class suicide, in that sense, is another figure of double abolition.

Each of these examples, then, involves a process of double abolition that I see functioning, at least implicitly, in Ferreira da Silva’s project, because the wounded captive body in the scene of subjugation, after having provided a standpoint of critique and abolition, cannot subsequently be affirmed. What I see at stake here is the potential of liberation in contrast to emancipation. A political project of a single abolition designates merely a process of emancipation insofar as it seeks to free and preserve a pre-existing subject that was previously subordinated. The process of a double abolition, instead, designates a means of liberation, insofar as it opens an horizon of freedom that does not preserve any previously existing subjects. Double abolition means that a revolutionary process will, after having destroyed the structures of domination, need to not only designate new social relations but also invent new subjectivities to populate this new world.