Note as of November 2020: This essay and its prequel were written around the time I started a PhD at the University of Minnesota. I was Muslim at the time and wrestling with the shortcomings in Marxist thought that I was coming up against. It doesn’t reflect my current thought very well, but these ideas were important in my intellectual formation.
Following up on the threads of my previous argument, laying out a critique of Marx’s humanism that approaches the problem from mystic spirituality rather than poststructuralist theory, I want to explore how an understanding of mysticism might help us generate a new kind of political ethic. An ethic that decenters humanity, particularly the rational and autonomous/sovereign humanity that modernity naturalizes. An ethic that provides for the undoing of the Heading of capital(ism), not by providing Another Heading, but by providing the Other of the Heading. An ethic that dissolves the fundamental logic of capitalism.
What am I hoping for this political ethic to replace? In diagnostic terms, I am trying to remedy the fracture of anti-capitalist politics that has hamstrung any efforts to articulate and deploy an effective anti-capitalist movement. This goes far beyond the Internet Communists yelling at each other for being “tankies” or “trots.” It is a practical divide that seeps into organizing spaces, stymieing community work because each sect and subsect forms its own organizing collective. Many have tried to heal this rift between political ideologies by imploring the Left to come together and find a unified political program with ecumenical appeal. This is misguided.
To see why, let’s return to the language of the Heading. A politics that operates from a platform falls into the trap of the Other Heading. Capitalism asserts a certain set of political goals, a vision of the world that it sets out to create. Left politics as it exists now asserts an alternative set of goals, another vision based on different political outcomes. Capitalism says, “This.” The Left responds, “No, this.” At a certain level, this is totally understandable. Humans are naturally inclined to goal-based thinking. We know how we want to live, and we assume that the way to arrive at that endpoint is to assert that as the ideal end. But just as the capitalist Heading necessitates repressive apparatuses to sustain itself, a leftist Heading is nigh impossible to realize in a truly emancipatory manner.
This is rooted, I think, in a misidentification of the root of capitalism’s operations by Marx. Whereas he treats capitalism’s foundation/substrate as a set of material conditions and relations, I think capitalism’s root is most properly understood as an orientation or disposition. Again, relating back to poststructuralist theory, I draw this idea from Foucault’s concept of an “imperative discourse”—a sort of originative statement from which a structure flows. At the root, there is an attitude, encapsulated in the jussive “Acquire,” from which the operations of capital emanate. It is an organizing logic, a psychological (spiritual?) state from which follows our Heading.
To elucidate how this understanding of a dispositional politics functions, I want to turn to the less [explicitly] political case of Islamic spirituality. Islam, as any scholar of Islam would emphasize, is a comprehensive way of life. Islam swept through the Arabian peninsula rapidly, radically altering the social landscape. Where before in Medina and the surrounding areas there was a class-stratified divided society rife with tribal and gender-based violence, Islam left the beginnings of a society that began to transcend tribal allegiances, and violently repressive gender hierarchies, instead being united by a common faith and ethical code. The transformation was not total, but it was remarkable in both breadth and depth.
But Islam did not spring onto the stage as a fully formed sociopolitical system or even as a set of social goals and aspirations. It began as just a seed. A new or renewed attitude that looked to mythic figures like Abraham and other forefathers for inspiration. This seed is made manifest in two aspects: a confessional aspect and a positional aspect. The core of the Islamic way of life or (perhaps more accurately) way of thought, is contained in four words. “La ilaha illa’llah.” Typically translated, “There is no god but God,” this testament can also be rendered as “There is no entity worthy of worship but God.” It is a confession of radical unity or tawhid, an affirmation of a noumenal reality that transcends phenomenal difference. A fundamental principle underlying apparent variation and conflict.
This is the confessional aspect of the seed of Islam. It is also borne out physically by every practicing Muslim at least 34 times a day in the position of sujood. This is the bodily attitude of prostration that is central to Islamic prayer. Toes, knees, hands, and forehead are rooted in the ground, forcing the worshipper into the lowest obeisance possible. It is the physical embodiment of submission. Indeed, in the Islamic science of gnosis or irfan, sujood is seen as not only expressing, but reproducing the psychological state encapsulated in the confession of tawhid. These two aspects—the profession and embodiment of submission to the transcendent One—form the kernel at the heart of the Islamic way of thought.
The entirety of Islam as a system of social and political ethics, as a system of social relations and material distributions, flows from this imperative discourse: “Submit.” The attitude of assent to tawhid leads to a political ethic, a way of being in the political sphere of 7th century Arabia that follows understanding difference as ultimately illusory in a cosmic sense. This ethic does not ignore difference. It affirms difference, offering social correctives specifically tailored to hierarchies that arise from difference (gender, ethnicity, religion, etc.). The end result is a gradual progression to a just and equitable society. But it achieved, not by positing a different vision of the world that accepts as given the fundamental disposition or imperative discourse of the status quo, but by shifting the nature of this disposition such that a new path of political action proceeds from it, leading to a new destination.
Let me be clear. I’m not trying to suggest that the answer to capitalism is some sort of leftist political Islamism. I think that is a bad idea for a whole host of reasons that I won’t go into here. But I think Islam is an excellent demonstration of the dispositional politics that I’m trying to sketch out here. A political ethic that moves away from party platforms, policy objectives, and other forms of programmatic political thinking. Attempting to combat capitalism with political programs is like attempting to stitch together the broken skin of a compound fracture without setting the bone first. We have to set the bone first by changing our basic political orientation. Only then can we remedy the visible damages caused by capitalism.
Mirroring the Islamic example, the seed for a new anti-capitalist politics should have two aspects: confessional and positional. A guiding principle or imperative discourse akin to the shahada of Islam, and a daily praxis like sujood that reproduces that guiding principle in our inner lives. From this seed, we can grow a mode of political action that will guide us in our work toward an alternative to capitalism. We can remain grounded in our basic orientation, our fundamental profession of political faith, rather than attempting to hammer out a set of surface level political outcomes and work backwards from there. More importantly than resolving the issue of sectarianism, this approach to political emancipation attempts something more radical (in the etymological sense) than Marx’s project. It goes beyond the root of capitalism to the seed and attempt to work change there first.
We still have to establish what this seed of a new emancipatory politics will look like. If the seed of capitalism is the confessional injunction to acquire, how do we formulate the undoing of this seed in a way that doesn't stop at negation but still generates a political ethic? What is the seed of the undoing of capitalism, the Other of the Heading? In the final installment of this exploration before I try to smelt these pieces together into something more consumable, I want to explore a figure in Islamic history that suggests a seed that might undo capitalism: the seed of martyrdom.