169

Secondary Original Accumulation and

its Complementary Valorization
in Illiberal Politics and Art
Frank Engster

The Origin of the Division of the World:

The Processes of Separation and Their Reproduction

According to Marx, the capitalist mode of production emerg-

es from an “original” or “primitive”1 process of accumulation
that separates producers and the means of production through
(primarily violent) processes of expropriation and appropria-
tion, while at the same time ascribing them an economic
value. Subjected to their reciprocal and collective valorization,
producers and the means of production are transformed into
labor power and capital.

The same original procedure, however, also separates this

productive relation from various, seemingly extra-economic
re-productive relations. This separation is accompanied by the
construction of specific identities (and of “the other”), and
by their relegation to particular spheres of society and their
functions. Unlike production, labor, and capital, these fields of
reproduction are not directly commodified and assigned eco-
nomic value, but only an ideological one, precisely in order
for them to enter into the process of valorization as non-com-
modified, seemingly extra-economic spheres and activities

1 The term “original accumu-

lation” is now preferred to the
more misleading “primitive
accumulation.”
170

capable of maintaining a relative level of autonomy. As such,

original accumulation does not just separate and accumulate
labor power and capital, it also externalizes their extra-eco-
nomic reproduction, cordoning off the spaces in which they
take place, and at the same time accumulating the forms of
this reproduction: femininity and the private sphere, the slave
and the colony, ecology and nature, sexual norms and sexu-
ality. In this realm, exploitation is not directly aimed at the
quantitative appropriation of a difference (that is, the surplus
value, which Marx traces back to the difference between nec-
essary and surplus labor time). Rather, what is ideologically,
socially, politically, and culturally exploited in the construc-
tion of identity and otherness are differences: gender, ethnic,
national, cultural, religious, and sexual differences. Ultimate-
ly, though, original accumulation also leads to the emergence
of the seemingly unproductive and superfluous, the crisis-rid-
den and corrosive elements of the capitalist mode of produc-
tion, which can be made tangible (and attacked or excluded)
in the form of particular personifications: the Jew and invisi-
ble, corrosive powers; the criminal and the prison; the insane
person and the psych ward, and so forth. In short, original
accumulation is a practical and ideological partitioning and
classification of society—indeed, of the whole world—and it
is an accumulation not just of labor power and the various
forms of capital, but also of particular identities and their
“characteristics.”

The technology2 for the purely quantitative valorization of

labor and capital—which for society becomes a second, purely
societal nature, analogous and opposed to first nature—is pro-
vided by the functions and circulation of money.3 In the very
same capitalist valorization, though, there is also an ideological
valorization and production of ideology taking place through
an inverted naturalization, as it were, which traces back the so-
cial relations of the aforementioned second nature to the first
and its characteristics, and identifies both of them such that
social relations take on the appearance of particular group’s
quasi-natural characteristics, which can then be discussed as
such. Examples include the characteristics of men and wom-
en, of peoples, “races” and cultures, Jews and Sinti and Roma,
of gays and lesbians, of deviants and criminals, all replete
with their corresponding categorizations and differentiations.
2 “Technology” is used here in
the Foucauldian sense.

3 Frank Engster, “Measure,

Machine, Money,” Capital &
Class, vol. 44, no. 2 (2020):
pp. 261–272.

4 Karl Marx, Capital: Volume I,
MECW 35, London: Lawrence
& Wishart, 2010, pp. 164f.
5 The original term here is Ver-
nichtung, which is difficult to
translate because of the breadth
of its usage. Importantly, it is
the term used to refer to the
extermination of European
Jews in the Holocaust, but can
also refer to the destruction of
objects or commodities, or the
elimination of jobs through
the process of automation, for
example.—Trans.
171
As such, original accumulation is also the origin of two con-
tradictory (self-)naturalizations and self-conceptions of soci-
ety. The economic aspect of these relations for money and the
movement of capital can be intuitively and indifferently read
in a purely quantitative fashion, since money exploits only
quantitative differences and becomes an “automatic subject”
which,4 analogous to the first nature, leads to the objectivity
of a second nature of quantitative relations; in their ideologi-
cal and culturalist naturalization, these same relations become
legible only in almost the opposite sense, namely as quali-
tative, meaningful differences and distinctions. The radical
break with all pre- and non-capitalist relations of gender and
patriarchy, slavery, religious anti-Judaism, and all pre-existing
forms of exploitation and domination more generally is also
the point of intersection between the two threads of this dou-
ble naturalization, which is both historically new and specifi-
cally capitalist. Although our capital relation is an agent of the
Enlightenment, it is ultimately inept as a system of domination,
because it is not able to indifferently and purely quantitatively
make positive and valorize the very sociality and universality
of its domination without “impurely” “qualifying” and differ-
entiating it through processes such as gendering, racialization,
and culturalization, and then basing its reproduction on top of
this qualification.
On the one hand, through gendering, ethnicization, cultur-
alization, criminalization, and the production of meaning
in general, this ideological production makes social and (in
particular) economic relations identifiable as quasi-natural
properties, while on the other hand these very societal rela-
tions—and in particular their economic qualities—are made
invisible by being overwritten with meaning or distorted into
meaning. This ideological mechanism of making social (re-)
productive relations invisible precisely through their distor-
tion and inscription mirrors practices of externalizing pro-
duction costs and crises, the enclosure within, and exclusion
from, the various spheres of reproduction, and the production
of difference—or, alternatively, practices of discrimination, of
imprisonment, of deportation, all the way through to elimi-
nation or extermination5 in the event of economic crises and
an overaccumulation of labor power and capital that cannot
be productively valorized. This elimination, too, is no purely
172

quantitative economic devalorization and physical elimina-

tion of the two components of valorization: labor and capital.
Rather, whenever economic valorization is brought to a halt by
a crisis, turning valorization into devalorization and produc-
tive forces into destructive ones, ideology production eagerly
comes to the aid of economic valorization—or rather, the ne-
cessity of devalorization. This works exceedingly well in the
case of war, which is an equally physical and ideological ma-
chinery of designating and subsequently eliminating enemies.

In capitalist society, however, not unlike social critique and

philosophy, art is a kind of wild card. It belongs neither to
production and valorization nor to the deliberately non-com-
modified, seemingly extra-economic sphere of reproduction,
nor is it cast out as unproductive and corrosive. Art’s great
masterstroke is the way that it manages to occupy the (empty)
spaces created by this cleft, allowing it to reflect upon the par-
titioning and shaping of the world (particularly the sensuous
world), upon the technologies by which this partitioning is
carried out and the meaning of its own peculiar intermediary
position within this system. And it gives form to this (self-)
reflection through works of art. This technology of opening up
free spaces in capitalist society, exploring its status of relative
autonomy while at the same time providing this status with an
individual form, is for art its own kind of original or primitive
accumulation and the origin of its sovereignty. Its inalienable
possession consists in directly giving this technology a form of
self-alienation and self-representation as artworks.

Secondary Original Accumulation and the Post-industrial Age

All of these spheres into which society is “originally” divided

up in capitalism are maintained by the requirement to per-
form their own reproduction. Just as labor and capital have to
reproduce their own separation through their economic valo-
rization (which is why, according to Marx, the actual outcome
of the capitalist mode of production is not commodities but the
relation of production itself), the cordoning off of the spaces
of reproduction—with their boundaries, their identities, and
the “characteristics” and functions of these identities—has to
be reproduced and upheld. However, their mode of reproduc-
tion is accompanied by an extra-economic process of ideology
 173
production in which identities are interpellated, centered, and
upheld through specific categories and discourses, narratives,
performative practices, and so on. In both cases, however, the
violence of the original divisions and partitions is deferred
by these modes of reproduction. Original accumulation is an
ongoing process, which must continually defer and manage
the violence that its forms direcly embody, and which is con-
stantly repressed and staved off through them—but at any mo-
ment, such as in crises of valorization, this violence can break
through to the surface.

This continuation of the origin of original accumulation is

particularly visible in the last incisive break that occurred
in the late 1960s. This period saw the conjunction of the ex-
haustion of the Fordist post-war era of production for private
mass consumption, with the social upheavals of ’68, and a new
industrial revolution. For the traditional industrial nations,
this caesura ushered in a post-industrial phase; for the really
existing socialist East an implosion; for the so-called “newly
industrializing” economies an economic modernization; and
for the Global South, a formal decolonization, and the inaugu-
ration of a neocolonial state of affairs. This global rupture led
to a crisis-driven capitalism which—and this is what I seek to
demonstrate—is addressed in a complementary fashion by, on
the one hand, the identarian and authoritarian containments
of “illiberal democracy,” “right-wing populism,” and a new
fascism, and the “openings” of liberal and anti-authoritarian
forms of contemporary art on the other.

This rupture was accompanied by new technologies and pro-

cesses of original accumulation in the economy as well as in the
political and social realms. It eroded the borders of the tradi-
tional partitioning and classification of the world, and brought
new forms of valorization into effect. What’s more, it repre-
sented a genuine secondary phase of accumulation. The “first,”
original, or primitive phase had initially activated labor and
capital; to begin with, by means of the manufacturing-driven
mode of production, and later through the forms of industrial
capitalism and the systems of slavery and colonialism. These
forms became most concentrated, centralized, and homog-
enized in their “organic composition”6 in the Fordist phase
of the Industrial Age and its conditions of reproduction: the

6 Marx, Capital: Volume I,

pp. 607–703.
174

factory, state regulation and infrastructure, the nuclear family,

education and training facilities, social security systems, the
representational forms of labor (parties and trade unions), and
so on. The “secondary” phase built upon these very figures and
forms of developed-but-exhausted Fordist-industrial labor
and (re)productive relations, adding new economic, political,
and social technologies:

1. the economic technologies of financial capitalism;

2. the political technologies of neoliberalism;
3. the technologies deployed by the new social movements,
in political struggles, and in the field of art and (pop)
culture, and;
4. technology in a more literal sense, namely the micro-
electronic revolution, followed by the digital revolution
and the rise of coding, programming, and AI.

What unites these various technologies is the fact that in each

instance, divisions, splits, and openings were brought about
which were accompanied by processes of primary valoriza-
tion, of commodification, capitalization, and financialization,
allowing new forms to be released and employed for the cre-
ation of surplus value, and new fields to be opened up and
exploited. These processes are generally gathered together un-
der catchwords such as “financial capitalism,” “neoliberalism,”
“post-Fordism,” and the “Information Age”; and in social cri-
tique they have been extensively described using terms such as
“commodification and decommodification,” “financialization,”
“deregulation,” “privatization,” “flexibilization,” “outsourcing,”
“individualization,” “precarization,” “accumulation by dispos-
session,”7 “new land-grabbing,”8 and “secondary exploitation.”
Picking up on the work of Karl Polanyi, there has even been
talk of the “second great transformation,”9 not to mention sug-
gestions of a “second modernity,” and of course of “postmo-
dernity.” But these processes have not been framed as a con- 7 David Harvey, The New
tinuation of original accumulation, nor have they been—as I Imperialism, Oxford: Oxford
hope to demonstrate later—conceived of as the moment of its University Press, 2003.
becoming-reflexive at the highpoint of an exhausted industrial 8 Klaus Dörre, “Die neue
capitalism. Landnahme: Dynamiken und
Grenzen des Finanzmarktkapi-
talismus,” in Soziologie – Kapi-
talismus – Kritik: Eine Debatte,
eds. Klaus Dörre, Stephan
Lessenich, and Hartmut Rosa,
Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp,
2013, pp. 21–86.

9 Nancy Fraser, “A Triple Move-

ment? Parsing the Politics of
Crisis after Polanyi,” New Left
Review, no. 81 (2013):
pp. 119–132.
 175
As far as the accumulation of whole swathes of new labor pow-
er is regarded, in the Global South and in the newly industrial-
ized countries these developments resulted in the commodifi-
cation and capitalization of pre-capitalist producers, activities,
and spheres of life, just as in the first phase of original accu-
mulation. This occurred primarily through the breaking up
of structures of subsistence economies and farming. Mean-
while, in the traditional industrial nations, existing industrial
mass production was rationalized, and the industrial worker
was (once again) freed up and transferred to other spheres,
such as service provision, the public sector, or into the fields
of knowledge production, education, art, and culture. On top
of this, new, additional sources of labor power were generat-
ed, above all through the picking apart of Fordist familial and
gender relations, with women moving into paid employment,
partially under their own steam and partially by economic ne-
cessity (or more accurately, after being expelled from the fields
of material production and their housewifeization during the
mechanization of the big industry, they returned to the spheres
of waged labor and production).10 Above all, though, the re-
lationships of employment were debordered and replaced by
new, flexibilized, deregulated and individualized, loose forms.

On the part of capital as well, masses of new forms and figures

were unleashed, primarily through the economic technologies
of finance capitalism and the political technologies of neolib-
eralism, in concert with those of microelectronics and then
of the digital age and information processing. These included
the decoupling from the gold standard, the dissolution of the
system of fixed exchange rates, the liberalization and dereg-
ulation of the finance and banking system, the financializa-
tion of money and income flows, the expansion of monetary
capital and the credit system, the growth of fictitious capital,
the interplay of financialization and informatization, and so
on. Capital was also provided with access to the capitalization
of a future which was first of all anticipated through forms of
financial and fictitious capital, in order to then commodify
and exploit this future, a future which has since been made
insecure through the same technologies of finance used to
economically securitize it, in particular through the defining,
evaluating, and hedging of risks. The secondary phase of orig-
inal accumulation thus also comprises an activation, primary
10 On the new sexual contract
in post-Fordism and its situa-
tion after the financial crisis, see
Lisa Adkins, “Out of Work or
Out of Time? Rethinking Labor
after the Financial Crisis,” South
Atlantic Quarterly, vol. 111,
no. 4 (2012): pp. 621–641.
176

valorization, and accumulation of a future made imminent

through its speculative projection and anticipation.

This secondary accumulation of additional and new labor

power and capital also takes place specifically at the divide
between production and reproduction; indeed, it is precisely
this border that is being economically exploited and politi-
cized, reconfiguring their relationship. While the divide and
the economic productive relation between labor and capital
was previously reflected in—and politically and practically
played out through—class struggle, with this shift, the cor-
doned-off, seemingly extra-economic spheres of reproduc-
tion have increasingly become part of economic valorization
and commodification, of social struggles and political debate,
and of legal forms of recognition. If the social dynamics of the
century that followed the publication of Marx’s Capital stood
under the banner of production, of the contradiction between
labor and capital, and of class struggle, the social critique and
movements that subsequently emerged—particularly those
following the long year of 1968—conceptualize production,
labor, and class from the angle of individual and societal re-
production. In this view, however, reproduction is no longer
conceived in a purely economic sense, but is also particularly
concerned with ideology production and its technologies; for
example, the reproduction of “race” through racialization,11 of
gender through the concept of “becoming a woman,”12 and the
performative practices of “doing gender,”13 and of the subject
through “subjectivation.”14 Feminism, postcolonial theory, cri-
tiques of antisemitism, LGBTQI+ visibility, environmentalism,
and the climate change movement: all base their analysis on
societal and individual reproduction, dismantle constructions 11 Cedric Robinson, Black
of identity, interrogate borders and categorizations, fight for Marxism: The Making of the
forms of access and participation, for or against the commod- Black Radical Tradition,
Chapel Hill: University of
ification and capitalization of their fields and activities, and North Carolina Press, 1983.
so on. The relative autonomy of all the fields of reproduction 12 Simone de Beauvoir, The
with respect to economic valorization is also essentially func- Second Sex, translated by
tional for this valorization, allowing newly valorizable fields Constance Borde and Sheila
Malovany-Chevallier, New
and forms to be activated, and to continually renegotiate the York: Random House, 2009.
relationship between economic production and reproduction, 13 Judith Butler, Undoing
not just in an economic sense, but also politically, legally, and Gender, New York: Routledge,
culturally. 2004.

14 Michel Foucault, The History

of Sexuality: Volume I: An Intro-
duction, translated by Robert
Hurley, New York: Random
House, 1985; and Technologies
of the Self: A Seminar with
Michel Foucault, Amherst:
University of Massachusetts
Press, 1988.

15 Pierre Bourdieu, Distinc-
tion: A Social Critique of the
Judgement of Taste, translated
by Richard Nice, Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1984.
16 Jean Baudrillard, Symbolic
Exchange and Death, translated
by Iain Hamilton Grant,
London: Sage, 1993.
177
The release and accumulation of new and additional forms
of labor and capital have also resulted in new commodities.
A massive field of new commodities and new forms of labor
power was produced by the commodification of all kinds of
service provision and of knowledge, skills, and rights, often
gathered together under the category of “immaterial goods”
(just as new paths in the theory of value and the concept of
capital have led to value and capital also supposedly being “cul-
turally” and “symbolically” valorizable,15 or even having trans-
formed into simulations).16 Through the new technologies of
the digital age, however, processes of division are taking place
(primarily in the area of what’s known as “platform capitalism”
and the “sharing economy”) whereby “traditional” objects
and private and public spheres are being so comprehensively
compartmentalized and broken up that they are only partial-
ly or temporarily valorized and commodified, making them
economically hazy and entangled objects; such as apartments
(Airbnb), bicycles (delivery platforms, like Lieferando or
Deliveroo), or cars (Uber). These technologies are also directly
involved in the commodification and financialization of the
information and data that they themselves produce, including
the commodification of the evaluation and processing of said
data and information by programs, big data, and AI. This en-
tanglement is similar to that of finance capital, where a future
is projected, and made imminent through this very action.
These new commodities are not traditional material objects
of “primary” reproduction, like housing, clothing, or food,
nor are they commodities of what might be called secondary
reproduction, which takes place through the consumption of
the commodities of industrialized mass production (such as
cars, electronics, and so forth). What is additionally commo-
dified and made into an economic object in the course of this
secondary accumulation—and also sucks up the labor power
that was previously engaged in agriculture and industry—and
which at the same time (just as happened with agriculture and
industry before it) is absorbed into the expansion of repro-
duction as cheap mass commodities, is the public element of
the public sector, the consumption of the state; it is services,
knowledge and education, art and culture, communication,
information and data, mobility, tourism, healthcare and oth-
er care work, fitness and wellness, sport, new age products,
178

gaming, sex work, psychological and affective labor, it is the

evental and the spectacular.

Compound Valorization

The secondary accumulation of labor, capital, and commod-

ities and their peculiarly post-Fordist, finance-capitalist-
fictitious, and immaterial status have a shared horizon: they
increasingly revolve around the production of a single com-
modity, the single truly productive commodity: the commod-
ity of labor power itself. As such, secondary accumulation
can be understood as a kind of compound valorization: what
is produced is the productive commodity par excellence, and
in doing so, it expands its re-production to a third power, as
it were, after agriculture and industry. That the valorization is
debordered on the one hand and falls apart in the subject on
the other also explains the demand for a “biopolitical turn,”17
or even the abandonment of Marxism’s classical (labor) theory
of value.

But the expanded reproduction and secondary valorization of

labor power is not only brought about by these new, post-Ford-
ist or even post-industrial sources of labor power, by financial
and fictitious capital, and the new “immaterial” commodities.
The actual multiplication and expansion of its reproduction
comes (chrono-)logically prior, as it were, in the process of
subjectivation: in the fact that the subjects actively adopt these
technologies of secondary accumulation. They are pressured by
financial-capitalist, neoliberal, and digital technologies and by
the social movements and struggles in the fields of individual
and societal reproduction to adopt the technologies that per-
form this splitting and dividing and valorizing, as well as those
of recomposition and commodification, and to voluntarily
and autonomously become individual subjects to this second-
ary original accumulation and compound valorization. At the
very least, the subjects have to open themselves up and submit
themselves to these processes, in order to be able to take part
in this secondary process of accumulation and compound val-
orization through this relation of uncertainty. A subject is that
which functions as an interface for this uncertainty and these
projections, and at the same time extracts meaning—particu-
larly through the subject and their behavior being increasingly
17 Addressed comprehensively
in the works Empire, Multitude,
Commonwealth, and Assembly
by Negri and Hardt. See, for
example, Michael Hardt and
Antonio Negri, Empire, Cam-
bridge and London: Harvard
University Press, 2000, pp. 70ff.
85
180
87

18 Karl Marx, “Results of the
Direct Production Process,”
MECW 34, London: Lawrence
& Wishart, 2010, pp. 355–466,
in particular pp. 429ff.
19 Luc Boltanski and Eve
Chiapello, The New Spirit
of Capitalism, translated by
Gregory Elliott, London: Verso,
2006.
20 Gilles Deleuze, “Postscript
on the Societies of Control,”
October, vol. 59 (1992): pp. 3–7;
Michaela Ott, Dividuationen:
Theorien der Teilhabe, Berlin:
b_books, 2014.
195
incorporated into economic evaluation and valorization and
into political regimes of control as information. The subject
becomes the “site” at which the generation and processing of
information overlaps with economic calculations and with so-
cial control and management. It is no longer only the physical,
mental, or immaterial labor of the subject that is valorized;
rather, the second phase of compound valorization evaluates
their data and writes this data into programs and algorithms
in order to evaluate it politically, socially, economically, and
to access and predict the subject’s behavior, in order to better
direct and control it.
It is as if the “first,” “original” or “primitive” accumulation
and “formal and real subsumption under capital”18 has, in the
course of the secondary phase of accumulation, folded itself
into the subject and become individualized, allowing it to be-
come reflexive in its compounded valorization. In the course
of the “first,” “original” accumulation, labor power, the work
itself as well as the population and the category of gender were
subjected to the technologies and processes of economic and
political homogenization and normalization described by
Marx, the social and national homogenization and normal-
ization outlined by Adorno, and Foucault’s disciplining and
shaping, and this subsumption still seemed to primarily be
exercised in an authoritarian, top-down manner (through the
state, institutions, the factories, military, mass organizations,
and broad-based political parties), but also through a partic-
ular shaping of knowledge and of identificatory thinking. The
outcomes of the valorization process—its commodities—were
likewise made into standardized and normalized mass arti-
cles. Secondary accumulation folds and individualizes these
techniques into subjects, which are no longer subordinated
to the now-historic subsumption processes and disciplinary
regimes, and are not treated as creases to be ironed out, but
as “human capital,” potential, and as carriers of data and in-
formation. In the technologies of flexibilization and deregu-
lation, of privatization and individualization, of information
generation and processing, in the “new spirit of capitalism,”
in the “artist’s critique,”19 and in the new social movements:
everywhere they go, subjects are encouraged as dividuals20
to submit themselves to processes of self-optimization, orga-
nization, and self-governance, and to actively and creatively
196

develop and evolve; they are also urged—through processes of

opening, debordering, division, and the production of differ-
ences—to produce those new “objects,” those “outsides,” and
that data which can be fed into the process of valorization, and
expand both individual and societal reproduction. As such,
after the relatively sheltered and regulated Fordist post-war
era, the individual subject must now become the sovereign
of uncertainties and indeterminacies which, as if existing in
a myriad of minor Schmittian states of exception, demand
individualized decisions: not only the wholesale debordering
of production and reproduction, but also of labor and leisure
time, of public and private investment, of consumption and
production, of the spheres of production and circulation. The
traditional regime of property also seems to have grown pre-
carious and is demanding new forms (such as universal basic
income, the sharing economy, social infrastructure, the com-
mons, and expropriation). And even the supposedly natural
division par excellence, the division or the “beat”21 into two
genders and heteronormativity, essentially becomes the re-
sponsibility of the subjects, to which they are then supposed
to submit themselves. The naturalization of gender is essen-
tially transferred from nature to the technologies and practic-
es of the social construction of gender.22 The academic and
philosophical counterpart to this is found in the development
of theories which—setting aside their many differences—seek
to overcome or frustrate the traditional subject–object para-
digm, such as new materialism, speculative realism/material-
ism, and actor-network theory, and more generally theories
and philosophies of anti-, trans-, and post-humanism, and of
cultural techniques and media.

In summary, the capital relation is expanded through new

technologies which divide and deborder not just social spheres
but also objects and subjects, creating hazy borders and per-
mitting continual recompositions. The two most elaborate
valorizations of these new technologies are the philosophy of
deconstruction and the derivatives of finance markets. While
deconstruction and poststructuralist philosophy revolve 21 Jacques Derrida,
around the production of meaning through the play of differ- “Geschlecht: Sexual Difference,
Ontological Difference,”
ences, and Derrida’s “différance”23 signals the temporalization Research in Phenomenology,
of meaning through the materialism of writing, in the econo- vol. 13, no. 1 (1983): pp. 65–83.
my, the action of simultaneously debordering and enclosing 22 Paul B. Preciado, Can the
Monster Speak? Report to an
Academy of Psychoanalysts,
Cambridge: Semiotext(e), 2021.

23 Jacques Derrida, “Dif-

férance,” Margins of Philosophy,
Chicago: Chicago University
Press, 1982.
 197
time represents the construction of the hazy, hybrid “object”
par excellence: the derivative. Produced by a combination of
commodification, financialization/capitalization, and mone-
tarization, it can thus exhibit characteristics of the commodity,
capital, and money, and makes the risks of valorization—in its
compound or “derived” form, as it were—themselves into a
source of profit. Indeed, the derivative is the ultimate dispositif
for governmentality in (post-?)neoliberal society, particularly
because social risks are managed via the financialization of da-
ta-based social control.24

The Dialectic of Enlightenment in Secondary Original

Accumulation: Releasing and Containing Over-Accumulation

Original accumulation does not just activate the forms of valo-

rization (labor and capital) and simultaneously cordon off the
spaces and forms of reproduction; it also activates the crises of
this valorization. And it does so due to the fact that a successful,
productive valorization and an increase in its productive power
actually leads to an over-accumulation of both of its compo-
nents. Labor power and forms of capital are accumulated be-
yond their productive valorization, and this over-accumula-
tion has not only intensified with the emergence of secondary
accumulation, it seems as if the (over-)accumulation of finance
capital on the one hand, and a global surplus population on the
other, has made the time-honored “contract” between labor and
capital to valorize each other through their direct confronta-
tion, as it were, null and void (though the forces of neofascism
are promising the old working class a return to this contract).

As such, this secondary original accumulation and its organi-

zation around a compound form of valorization are accom-
panied first of all by massive devalorizations. These processes
of devalorization affect the outdated industrial-Fordist forms
of labor and capital, but they are not restricted to purely eco-
nomic forms of devalorization. There is also a comprehensive
social and cultural devalorization which takes place alongside
it, one which affects an entire age along with its ways of life.
In the process, entire demographics and regions are econom-
24 Achim Szepanski, Kapital ically devalorized, socially demoted, and viewed as cultural-
und Macht im 21. Jahrhundert, ly backward, and they experience all of this as a slight. Even
Hamburg: Laika, 2018. On the
overlapping of financializa- more significant than this comprehensive devalorization is the
tion, information processing,
and the production of social
differences, see, for example,
Jonathan Beller, The World
Computer: Derivative Con-
ditions of Racial Capitalism,
Durham: Duke University
Press, 2021.
198

over-accumulation of labor power. In particular, the advances

in productivity and the replacement of human labor power by
new micro-electronic and digital technologies have made the
commodity of labor power “free in the double sense,”25 to use
Marx’s terminology: free (bereft) of their own means of (re)
production, and thus abandoned to the freedom of having to
sell their labor power in order to secure their reproduction.
Unable to sell their labor, however, a genuine and substantial
surplus population is produced, a non-valorizable entity exist-
ing apart from capital. And with this, the violence of original
accumulation breaks open at the heart of global capitalism,
and since it cannot be capitalized upon, it must be tackled by
other means.

In summary, what these new forms of labor power, capital, and

commodities and their new status widely generate and (over-)
accumulate, and what must consequently be tackled, are pre-
carity and insecurity. Insecurity, here, is meant not just in the
economic and social sense, but more comprehensively. All the
openings and divisions in society, all the relocations and new
forms of labor and capital as well as the deborderings, frag-
mentations, and recompositions and reclassifications undo
some of the classical bonds and forms of security that emerged
in the Industrial Age. For workers, it is primarily the tradition-
ally secure forms of employment and the Fordist family head-
ed by the male breadwinner that have been dismantled; for
capital, this insecurity is produced by forms of deregulation
and the debordering of the financial system and the opening
up of new, global finance markets and finance streams, with
their crisis-ridden economic and ecological dynamics, while
the nation-state has transformed into a competitive market-
place, dismantling and restructuring its public social security
systems along neoliberal lines. What has also become insecure
is the status of the object, the subject, gender, and identity,
along with their representability.

Identitarian Hedging vs. Artistic Openings

My thesis here is that illiberal-authoritarian, right-wing pop-

ulist, and fascist tendencies on the one hand, and art on the
other, form two contrary—but complementary—forces in the
conjuncture that I have sketched out above.

25 Karl Marx, Capital: Volume

I, MECW 35, London: Law-
rence & Wishart, 2010, p. 179.
 199
As far as illiberal-authoritarian forces go, they appropriate the
dissolution of borders, its technologies and the insecurity it
generates by essentially pre-framing everything according to
categories of race, gender, sexuality, and the like, personifying
these developments, and exploiting them in order to (re)pro-
duce gender, racial, sexual, and cultural differences for their
ideology and politics, primarily by promising—almost as a
kind of fascist derivative—authoritarian hedging and nation-
al closures, accompanied by political sovereignty and cultural
identity. Through these technologies, these forces execute the
processes of original accumulation while adapting them to the
current context, by adopting the technologies of secondary
original accumulation described above. These technologies
contribute to reproductive relations and crises of (over-)accu-
mulation; that is, to the very areas which from the beginning
of the original accumulation were so chopped up and natural-
ized that they had to be carried out at the intersectionality of
race, gender, and the like. Authoritarian-illiberal forces pro-
duce and accumulate differences which are then ideologically
exploited and turned into political capital; they further inten-
sify economic insecurity and social disintegration and fan the
flames of a politics based on these very insecurities and fears,
which they then seek to contain through national security
measures and the promise of identitarian enclosures. All the
while, they warn of an existential threat to the family and the
state, to the nation and to culture, asking to be made into a
sovereign in exchange for acting as their protector and savior.

However, despite the fact that this authoritarian-ideological

process of valorization makes effective use of the economic
crises and political delegitimization of the conjuncture
described above, it is beset by its own cycle of crises, and is be-
ginning to corrode from within. This cycle began with the au-
thoritarian-technocratic turn of neoliberalism, which emerged
in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. This turn, which was
almost internal in nature, was then taken up by fundamental-
ist religious, right-wing populist forces, together with neofas-
cist forces. This development occurred around the world in
the form of new movements and political parties, or by taking
over existing conservative parties, as in the US and the UK. By
now, though, it seems that none of these formations—whether
200

parties, movements, or organizations—are in a position to

carry out this political and ideological appropriation, ex-
ploitation, and valorization in a lasting and stable fashion. The
valorization process crumbles into the self-activation and mo-
bilization of a kind of ominous, diffuse multitude, dispersed
throughout public squares, in parliaments and in protests out-
side them, in semi-public internet forums and chat threads, in
the counter-public sphere of “alternative media,” and in more
closed and private cliques, bubbles, and echo chambers, and
all this is held together and reproduced purely by the constant
combination of ideological fragments and the weaving of con-
spiracy theories.

Art stands in a complementary relationship to this. In the new

art forms of the 1960s—and then much more completely in
contemporary art—art itself became part of these processes
of opening, debordering, and deconstruction. At the same
time, it reflected upon these processes and their technologies
and sought to integrate these technologies into art—but with-
out identitarian forms of enclosure and containment or po-
litical promises of sovereignty. On the contrary, art sought to
give form to these very processes of debordering, such as the
opening up of the concept of the object and its blurring, the
precarity of the classical partitioning and classification of the
world and the senses, as well as the deconstruction of identity,
presence, and representation. In art, this form-giving is also
experimental, innovative, and open—open in particular to the
use and integration of new concepts, technologies, and media.
With relative autonomy, art even anticipated—at least exper-
imentally and quite often provocatively and subversively—
what was only beginning to emerge in economics, in social
movements, and in a range of spheres of society. Similar to the
new tendencies in philosophy and social critique in the late
1960s (whose reproduction has since been notably expanded
through “turns” and “returns,” as well as their “post” versions,
such that they too have undergone a second phase of valori-
zation, as it were), art also engaged in a celebration of the hy-
brid and the simulacrum, the ambivalent, the paradoxical, the
opaque, the peripheral, the fractal, celebrations of uncertainty,
of overlaying and the transient, of the collage-like, the mul-
tiple, and the multivalent. Even where the task and above all
radicality of art was supposed to lie in “critique,”26 the “politics

26 Theodor W. Adorno,
Aesthetic Theory, translated by
Robert Hullot-Kentor, Minne-
apolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1997.
 201
of aesthetics,”27 in the “event” and “process of a truth”28 or
even in “resistance” and the “potentiality not to,”29 art broke
down borders and created expansions, interruptions, and de-
constructions, redivisions and recompositions, intersections,
interactions, connections, and encounters, which in the end
do open up possibilities, and ultimately expand the accumu-
lation of what art is. Of course, art is not merely concerned
with opening up new fields and forms for its own use. It seeks
to create an art of activation and opening up in and of itself.
This masterstroke is art’s original, primitive accumulation,
its autonomy and what makes it avant-garde with respect to
capitalism, and also its contribution to the expansion of social
reproduction. For this reason, art is a technology, and perhaps
even the capitalist technology par excellence.

As such, illiberal-authoritarian politics and the liberal and an-

tiauthoritarian quality of art are absorbed in contrary and yet
complementary ways in the process of secondary original ac-
cumulation, in compound valorization, and in the expansion
of reproduction. On one side, the deborderings, openings, and
ambiguities and their crisis-ridden dynamics are contained
and ideologically appropriated, hedged, exploited, and valo-
rized through a politics of security, sovereignty, and identity,
while on the other side, art gives form to these processes of
opening and deconstruction, debordering, and new combina-
tions, replete with their technologies, making them commod-
ifiable, and capable of being communicated, valorized, and
marketed—as art.

27 Jacques Rancière, The Politics

of Aesthetics: The Distribution
of the Sensible, translated by
Gabriel Rockhill, London:
Bloomsbury, 2004.

28 Alain Badiou, “Fifteen

Theses on Contemporary
Art,” Lacanian Ink, no. 23,
pp. 103–119; and “The Subject
of Art,” The Symptom, no. 6,
online https://www.lacan.com/
symptom6_articles/badiou.
html, accessed May 11, 2021.

29 Giorgio Agamben, Creation

and Anarchy: The Work of Art
and the Religion of Capitalism,
translated by Adam Kotsko,
Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 2019.
202

Fig. 1 Albrecht Dürer (attrib.), “Wheel of Fortune,” woodcut.

Illustration to Sebastian Brant, Daß Narrenschyff ad Narragoniam
(“Ship of Fools”), Basel, ca. 1499. Scan from a copy of the original
Basel 1499 ms.