Article

European Journal of Social Theory

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The European crisis ª The Author(s) 2014
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DOI: 10.1177/1368431014530923
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of capitalism

Paul Blokker
CoPolis/University of Trento, Trento, Italy

Abstract
The European crisis has provoked widespread critique of capitalist arrangements in most if
not all countries in Europe. But to what extent do contemporary social protest and cri-
tique indicate a revival of critical capacity? The range of criticisms against the existing
capitalist system raised by various social movements is seen as ineffectual and fragmented.
Such observations are mirrored in sociological analyses of the critique of capitalism. A
distinct type of critique of capitalism has, however, not been explicitly conceptualized. This
political critique, denouncing the depoliticization and the erosion of autonomy resulting
from capitalist arrangements, indicates the crucial role of the political in formulating
common projects. The article will, first, briefly discuss Boltanski and Chiapello’s historical
identification of forms of critique of capitalism as well as the contemporary relevance of
these. In a second step, it will conceptualize and in a way recuperate a political critique of
capitalism. In a third step, it will show that the contours of a critique that explicitly refers to
the political is available in the contemporary European context, not least in claims made by
movements that pursue a ‘Europe of the Commons’ and an ‘alternative Europe’.

Keywords
Boltanski and Chiapello, capitalism, commons, political critique, transnational social
movements

The European financial, sovereign debt, and economic crisis has triggered widespread
civil protests and a critique of capitalist arrangements in most if not all countries in
Europe. The distinctive form of European austerity politics has provoked broad

Corresponding author:
Paul Blokker, CoPolis/University of Trento, Trento, Italy.
Email: [email protected]
2 European Journal of Social Theory

disapproval. Despite a ubiquitous civic voice, an important question remains, however,

in particular in the face of a lack of responsiveness by governments and the European
Union to demands by society. That is, to what extent do contemporary social protest and
critique indicate a revival of critical capacity and consequential forms of critique, in par-
ticular in the context of an ‘uncoupling of capitalism and democracy’ (Delanty, 2012:
450)? In the view of many observers, the range of critique raised against the existing
capitalist system by various social movements has remained rather ineffectual and frag-
mented. A general observation regarding, for instance, the Occupy Movement is that its
ideas are inarticulate, unclear, and distant from institutional solutions (see Tarrow,
2011). More specifically, regarding the European situation and the role of the EU, one
observer claims that ‘[t]he European perspective of such mobilizations has been limited,
failing to develop an appropriate framing for Europe-wide contestation’ (Pianta, 2013:
154) and does not offer a ‘prognostic agenda for change’. Pianta continues:

The wide range of mobilizations emerging out of Europe’s crisis tend to agree on the causes of
the economic crisis—the neoliberal policies which for the last two decades have dominated
economic governance at the continental level. Yet, their framing of ‘what to do’ and ‘how
to do it’ appears to be fragmented along national, ‘thematic’ and ideological lines. (p. 155)

These observations of a weak, fragmented, and ineffectual critique are somehow mir-
rored in sociological accounts of changing forms of capitalism, the role of critique, and
the apparent immunity to critique of neoliberal capitalism. Of immediate relevance is the
well-known work of Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism
([1999] 2005), even if the authors have not directly addressed the European level.1
Boltanski and Chiapello identify two main types of critique of capitalism – a social and
an artistic critique – which have been deprived, however, of much of their effectiveness
since the neoliberal turn of capitalism. Since the 1990s, Boltanski and Chiapello have
observed possibilities for a renewed social critique and in a more timid way for the artis-
tic critique. In the more recent On Critique, however, Boltanski indicates how a new
form of ‘complex domination’ renders any societal form of critique very cumbersome.
In sum, contemporary forms of social critique face severe difficulties in articulating
effective forms of denunciation that delegitimize existing arrangements.
My argument here is that a third type of critique of capitalism – a political critique –
might complement as well as reinforce the social and artistic forms in that it attempts to
relate these to a common project (Table 1). A political critique, related to the contesta-
tion of the essentialized nature of contemporary capitalist institutions and the impedi-
ment of the emergence of a common political project, might be crucial to furthering
forms of social integration in Europe, in which dominated members of the collective
obtain a voice in a more general pursuit of commonality. I will first briefly discuss Bol-
tanski and Chiapello’s historical identification of forms of critique of capitalism as well
as their contemporary relevance. In a second step, I will conceptualize and in a way
recuperate a political critique of capitalism, which is not explicitly conceptualized in
Boltanski and Chiapello’s analysis, but is highly significant in its deconstruction of the
relation between economic and political modernity and in its indication of a form of ‘real
utopia’ (Fung and Olin Wright, 2003). In a third step, I will show that the contours of a
Blokker 3

Table 1. Forms of critique.

Social critique Artistic critique Political critique

Causes of indignation Exploitation Alienation, Depoliticization,

massification erosion of collective
self-determination
Sacrifice Material well-being Self-expression Action in common
Underlying values Equality Individual Collective autonomy
autonomy
Source: Adapted from Chiapello (2013).

critique that explicitly refers to the political is available in the contemporary European
context, in particular in the contestation of the consequences of and responses to the
current financial, economic, and political crisis. Relevant instances of a political critique
concern claims made by the movements for a ‘Europe of the Commons’ and an
‘alternative Europe’.

Capitalist critique and its contemporary relevance

Boltanski and Chiapello have identified two historically significant forms of critique: a
social critique, emerging originally around the so-called social question at the end of the
nineteenth century, and an artistic critique, being articulated in a particularly forceful
way in the events of 1968 and afterwards. The social critique has its origins in socialism
and Marxism, and draws on two ‘sources of indignation’: the identification of ‘capital-
ism as a source of poverty among workers and of inequalities on an unprecedented
scale’, and ‘capitalism as a source of opportunism and egoism which, by exclusively
encouraging private interests, proves destructive of social bonds and collective solidar-
ity, especially of minimal solidarity between rich and poor’ (Boltanski and Chiapello,
[1999] 2005: 37; emphasis in original). The social critique focuses on the exploitation
and social inequality that capitalism generates through the unequal relation between
labour and capital. Labour is understood as the ‘essence of man’ and capitalism is
denounced because it reduces workers to ‘production components in the economic
machinery’, while workers ‘lose all value if they cannot find employment’ (Chiapello,
2013: 64–5). A key focus is how to ameliorate the situation of labour, on the one hand,
and in a more radical sense, through the collectivization of the means of production and,
on the other, following a more libertarian view, through the reduction of heteronomy in
the economic context (pp. 66–7). This critique involves a collectivist focus on the eco-
nomic sphere, that is, the reduction of socio-economic inequality and the strengthening
of solidarity between classes.
The artistic critique has a very different focus, that is, not the social question or the
exploitation of workers but rather the ‘transformation of lifestyles in a capitalist society’
(p. 71). This critique is clearly related to the (variegated) repertoire of critical theory and
the Frankfurt School, in which the emphasis is on the processes of massification, capi-
talist control, and alienation. A key concern is how capitalism leads to the subjection of
4 European Journal of Social Theory

the individual to the ‘capitalist machine’, in terms of consumption, mass society, spread-
ing technology, control and discipline. The primary sources of indignation are ‘capital-
ism as a source of disenchantment and inauthenticity of objects, persons, emotions and,
more generally, the kind of existence associated with it’, and

capitalism as a source of oppression, inasmuch as it is opposed to the freedom, autonomy and

creativity of the human beings who are subject under its sway, on the one hand to the dom-
ination of the market. and on the other hand to the forms of subordination involved in the con-
dition of wage-labour. (Boltanski and Chiapello, [1999] 2005: 37; emphasis in original)

Alienation is a primary concern as it involves a general ‘imprisonment of the human

being in a world of commodities’ (Chiapello, 2013: 72). A closely related concern is
authenticity, which is continuously threatened by capitalism and its machinery of mar-
ketization. This critique is focused on the (cultural) effects of the economy on society,
but not from a collectivist perspective, as in the social critique, but rather in an indivi-
dualist vein, seeking the emancipation of individuals from the oppression of capitalist
relations and the furtherance of possibility for individual self-determination.
One part of the argument of Boltanski and Chiapello is that the strong articulation
of both the social and the artistic critique of the 1960s lost significant ground from
the 1970s onwards.2 The social critique ‘proved largely ineffective when it came to
acting in the new world [of ‘‘connexionist’’ capitalism, PB]’, and ‘found itself
nonplussed, bereft of ideological props, and consigned to the dustbin of history’
(Boltanski and Chiapello, [1999] 2005: 345–6). The artistic critique that figured pro-
minently in the ‘years of 1968’ was itself partially absorbed by the new ‘network
capitalism’. In a way, the very success of the artistic critique that criticized the hier-
archy, inauthenticity and stifling of creativity of the existing order, influenced the
absorption of this critique into a new capitalist spirit, and related to new modes
of capitalist organization. This also meant an at least partial neutralization of this
critique, as the ‘sources of indignation’ that are at its basis became seemingly less
salient in the current ‘project’ or ‘network capitalism’. The neo-capitalism grounded
in the project form is at least partially justified by its contribution to the fulfilment
of such values: ‘capitalist practices have been restructured in such a way that spaces
for autonomy and creativity at the workplace are widened. During this third phase
[of network capitalism, PB], capitalist practices are justified through the expectation
of self-realization at work’ (Wagner, forthcoming: 5). It is in this light that
Boltanski and Chiapello argue, ‘any major transformation of a value system serving
as a justification for a capitalist world is apt, at least temporarily, to disorient critical
activities’ ([1999] 2005: 162, 178).
But while the 1980s indeed portrayed a relative silence of critical forces, this
silence was only of a temporary nature. In the view of Boltanski and Chiapello, a
renewal of capitalist critique is visible from roughly the mid-1990s onwards and
seems predominantly to have taken the form of a renewed, and refocused, social cri-
tique, with ‘artistic criticism remaining silent or becoming standardised (hence inef-
ficient)’ (Boltanski and Chiapello, [1999] 2005: 178). Not least in reaction to the
economic crisis, claims based on a renewed social critique have become much
Blokker 5

upfront. A relevant recent example is the Citizens Manifesto, elaborated by the Eur-
opean network, European Alternatives, which denounces a ‘‘‘race to the bottom’’,
creating internal competition between workers and between countries [resulting]
in chronic unemployment, precarity and poverty, fundamentally undermining the
value of work’ (Citizens Manifesto, 2013: 2; emphasis added).
But in reflecting in particular on the Alter-globalization movement (see Pleyers,
2010) and more recently the waves of protest against austerity in Europe, some now
argue that forms of an artistic critique are equally re-emerging in, for instance, the
claims and discourses of movements such as Occupy or the Indignados. One exam-
ple of the re-emergence of the artistic critique is in forms of ‘localism’, in which
forms of self-government, authentic engagement, and ecological sustainability are
proposed against the oppressive logic of capitalism. As Charles Masquelier argues:

Far from marking the extinction of grounds upon which the artistic critique can draw its
strength and legitimacy, the new ‘spirit’ of capitalism continues to cultivate problems
already visible under bureaucratic capitalism, while creating new opportunities for the revi-
val of social critique primarily concerned with bread-and-butter issues. (2013: 14)

A key question remains to what extent these re-emerging critiques can amount to an
effective critical capacity, in the context of an ever more unbalanced relationship
between the rulers and the ruled, and of the complex dynamics of connextionist capital-
ism (Du Gay and Morgan, 2013). As Boltanski argues, contemporary domination is
grounded in a ‘complex or managerial mode’, in which the dominated are ‘stripped of
the possibility of formatting [tests] and taking advantage of them – that is to say, kept
at a distance from economic power and political action’ (Boltanski, 2011: 153). A gen-
eral set of concerns regarding both the artistic and the social critiques includes the frag-
mentation of collective subjects, the erosion of (a belief in) collective, state action, and
an increased emphasis on singularity and individuality (Guilhot, 2000: 361). What is less
upfront in the debate on capitalist critique is how these types of critique might relate to a
political dimension of collective autonomy. Both the contemporary social and artistic
critiques seem to only weakly and implicitly relate to dimensions of a collective political
project that could effectively challenge the current status quo. Whereas the social cri-
tique today has a highly problematic relation to collective political claims, not least due
to a rather profound delegitimization of ‘organized modernity’ (Wagner, 1994) in both
its welfarist and ‘really-existing-socialism’ guises, the artistic critique appears largely an
expression of individualist concerns of authenticity, identity, and self-realization. It has,
in fact, been argued that a collective political dimension has experienced a kind of
demise since 1968 (while 1968 itself consisted of a kind of ‘failed’ political revolution),
after which individual autonomy became a key marker of economic and political
arrangements (Sörbom and Wennerhag, 2013). As Peter Wagner has it, more collective
claims were prone to a criticism of power (Wagner, 2002). A more widely held view is
that 1968 was about the assertion of ‘individual autonomy’ and the emancipation from
repressive lifestyles, and much less about ‘political forms’ or collective emancipatory
projects. Or, at least, the 1968 movement succeeded in forcefully promoting a ‘cultural
revolution’, whereas a ‘political revolution’, which was anyway a ‘subordinate aspect’,
6 European Journal of Social Theory

failed or never really got off the ground (p. 38). Indeed, Peter Wagner mentions the
‘weakness of intellectual and political alternatives to individualist liberalism and to the
thin approach to democracy that accompanies it’ (p. 42).

A political critique of capitalism

Boltanski and Chiapello’s account seems accurate and convincing, and also largely ade-
quate to describe an important part of the critique that has (re-)emerged with the Eur-
opean crisis, but my concern here is that a political critique is not explicitly being
taken up. This is, however, unfortunate. Such a critique was evidently present also in the
1960s but failed to be instituted. But more generally, a political critique highlights a cru-
cial dimension for overcoming the current crisis, that is, the possibilities for a
re-imagination of forms of commonality in the face of the individualism and fragmenta-
tion resulting (in part) from neo-liberal capitalism. In general terms, the political critique
concerns the pernicious influence of capitalism on the social or collective potential for
self-determination. Such a critique may involve different dimensions. One dimension is
a critique of capitalism as depoliticizing the economy as well as politics, by means of a
naturalization of capitalism and the limitation of political control by means of a techno-
cratization or scientization of economic matters. A second dimension concerns the
ambiguous relationship between the capitalist logic and democracy, and denounces the
tendency of the former to hinder the development of the latter.3

Depoliticization of the economy and of politics

A political critique of capitalism emerges from the observation that the existing (neo-liberal)
capitalist form is not a natural phenomenon, but is a politically constructed one.4 As
Ingerid Straume states, an investigation into the ‘political imaginary’ of capitalism leads
one to the insight that the ‘lack of alternatives to capitalism seems to be a problem
belonging not to the economic but to the political sphere’ (Straume, 2010: 27; italics
in original). The portrayal of capitalism as natural is achieved by a double move that rep-
resents capitalist relations as natural and that depoliticizes the economy by limiting
political control (Swanson, 2008). With regard to the first move, a political critique of
capitalism questions the presentation of capitalist relations and institutions as unavoid-
able, as corresponding directly to human (material) needs. In this, the ‘commonplace
that the capitalist form of economic life now faces no visible challenge from any alternative
projects’ is questioned (Arnason, 2005: 17). Capitalism is seen as having obscured its own
foundations, by promoting an imaginary in which the boundaries of the economy are por-
trayed as natural and fixed, and in which political intervention in the economy is displayed
as ‘impure’. As Swanson argues, ‘The more general economistic notion [claims] that polit-
ical involvement in ‘‘the economy’’ interferes with the smooth operation of the laws (sup-
posedly) governing market and other economic behavior’ (2008: 57).
But the divide between the economy and politics is not static. In the current times of
neoliberal, ‘disorganized’ capitalism, the capitalist project is further depoliticizing5 the
economy, not least by means of an endorsement of independent, expert institutions, the
Blokker 7

constitutionalization of the economy, and the emphasis on expert knowledge and tech-
nocratic forms of governance. Swanson argues that:

[Capitalist discourses] redraw the boundary between the political and the economic so that a
vast sphere of ‘freedom’ is reserved for economic activities and the operation of the econ-
omy’s (allegedly) autonomous laws, while the scope of politics and democratic self-
government is radically curtailed. (2008: 57–8)

As Tuori and Tuori argue in the context of the Eurocrisis and the legitimacy dilemma of
the EU, one strategy of confronting a lack of legitimacy on the European level is ‘depo-
liticising fiscal and economic policy, labelling them fields of non-political expertise
where decisions should be grounded in objectively given economic parameters’ (2014:
211; emphasis added). This means that formerly political matters, part of wider political
debate, are depoliticized under the label of scientific rationalization. In this, ‘scientific
rationalisation leaves only one available option, there is no longer any room or need for
political decision-making’ (Tuori and Tuori, 2014: 222). In Habermas’ discussion of a
few decades ago, this ‘technocratic model’ sees a subordination of politics to expertise
in which the former becomes

[the] mere agent of a scientific intelligentsia, which, in concrete circumstances, elaborates

the objective implications and requirements of available techniques and resources as well as
of optimal strategies and rules of control. If it is possible to rationalize decisions about prac-
tical questions, as a choice in situations of uncertainty, to the point where the ‘symmetry of
uncertainty’ (Rittel) and thus the problems of decision in general are reduced step by step,
the politician in the technical state is left with nothing but a fictitious decision-making
power. The state seems forced to abandon the substance of power in favor of an efficient
way of applying available techniques in the framework of strategies that are objectively
called for. (Habermas, 1971: 63–4)6

The erosion of collective autonomy

A political critique draws on – even if not necessarily in a reflexive way – a historical and
contextual view of capitalism, that in itself can be linked to a view of modernity as inher-
ently unstable and open to different interpretations. In Cornelius Castoriadis’ terms, the
modern world operates with recourse to two predominant imaginary significations, that
is, mastery and autonomy. The former can be understood as more central to economic
modernity while the latter can be seen as being closer to political modernity,7 and the
history of modernity can be understood as involving different combinations of the insti-
tutionalization of these two imaginary significations (cf. Wagner, 1994, 2008). The ten-
sion between the two imaginaries or the ‘instable coexistence and permanent mutual
contestation of capitalism and autonomy’ could be rephrased as a tension between a
regime of unlimited domination and a regime of democratic self-limitation (Arnason,
1989: 323). The current historical moment is understood as a situation in which the dom-
inance of a distinct interpretation of economic modernity (the rational mastery of the
world) impedes a satisfactory achievement of political modernity (the pursuit of
8 European Journal of Social Theory

collective self-determination) (Wagner, 1994, 2008). But rather than accepting the neg-
ative ontology of critical theory, which understands the ever wider expansion of the capi-
talistic logic throughout society as unstoppable, and the possibility of giving meaning to
that tendency – and hence the possibility of acting – as ever more remote (Wagner, 2008:
83ff), a political critique attempts to unearth the political constitution of capitalist dom-
ination. It is linked to political modernity in its attempt to (re-)formulate a project of col-
lective autonomy, against the capitalist thrust of individual autonomy and liberty, and the
denial of the political.
A political critique performs a kind of signalling function, identifying when the thrust
towards mastery related to economic modernity threatens the institutionalization of col-
lective autonomy related to political modernity. This ‘function’ is not unlike Karl Pola-
nyi’s understanding of the embedding of the market economy and the counter-reaction
(the ‘double movement’) that develops when the process of ‘commodification’ extends
too far (Polanyi, [1944] 1985).8 The denunciation invoked by the political critique does
not stop at the observation that the economy is politically constituted. The critique is not
just that capitalism is unduly reified, or that it reduces meaningful knowledge of and
engagement with the world under the banner of science, but rather that its logic invades
spheres of society and of nature, reducing the ‘possibility of action in common’ (cf.
Wagner, 2001: 24). The capitalist logic is an expression (if not the only possible one)
of an imaginary or ‘phantasm of rational mastery in unending progress’ (Arnason,
2001: 115), which tends to erode possibilities for members of a polity to set the rules that
govern life in common themselves.9 In Castoriadis’ view, the danger inherent in the exten-
sion of the capitalist imaginary is twofold, that is, that of a loss of meaning or the ‘repeti-
tion of empty forms’, which involves the ‘extension of the empire of calculability’, and a
loss of freedom, that is, the extension of the market logic at the cost of a project of collec-
tive autonomy (Castoriadis, 2007: 92, 146; cf. Browne, 2005: 287). While the former, the
loss of meaning, is not unrelated to the scientization of politics discussed above, it is the
latter, the loss of freedom, that brings to the fore most prominently the tension between
capitalism and democracy. The political critique in this mode denounces the threat of capi-
talist expansion in the project of an autonomous society, that is, ‘a society capable of call-
ing its own institutions, explicitly and lucidly, back into question’ (Castoriadis, 2007:
85).10 Here, the critique points to the need for a ‘resurgence of the project of individual
and collective autonomy, that is to say, of the will to freedom’ (p. 146).

European transnational movements

Let us now turn to see to what extent such a political critique, which in some ways tries to
revive a project of individual and collective autonomy, is indeed available in the debate
on European integration and the contestation (both domestic and transnational) of cur-
rent EU crisis management. I will show that various dimensions of a political critique
– capitalism as a naturalized phenomenon, the scientization of politics, the erosion of
collective autonomy – can be detected in the critical discourses of (trans-)national social
movements and networks that operate on or interact with the European level. I will par-
ticularly focus on the discourses of movements that endorse a ‘Europe of the Commons’
and related movements for an ‘Alternative Europe’. 11
Blokker 9

The naturalization of the economy

A fundamental observation in the critique of the capitalist status quo by the European
Commons movement is that the classical market–state distinction is in itself a political
construction and prevents the radical rethinking of economic arrangements from coming
about. A key thrust in the critique of the Commons movements is the public–private dis-
tinction – ‘a false counterposition’ – and the idea that this distinction is not a natural, but
a constructed one. In the words of an Italian intellectual, lawyer and activist:

[I]t is urgent to contrast the current condition of diffused political unconsciousness and con-
sequently generalized acceptance of the dominant vision of the world with the theoretical
elaboration and the contextual militant protection of ‘common goods’ (or, less pregnant
with meaning, common property) as a category with juridical and structural autonomy
[which is] clearly alternative both to private and to public property. (Mattei, 2012b: loc
31–50; emphasis added)

The public–private distinction has informed the classical market–state dichotomy with
regard to economic governance, in which particular goods can only be understood as either
privately or publicly owned and administered. This distinction is considered increasingly
problematic in times when large-scale privatization – deemed ‘technically’ inescapable –
is compromising public access to what in essence can be considered public goods (such as
water, education, knowledge, the internet, even beaches). The European crisis has seen the
further affirmation of a ‘model of governance’ – focused on the reduction of public expen-
diture – that is ‘technical and not political’ and grounded in the values of ‘an
organizational-technological and neutral efficiency’ (Mattei, 2012c: 212, 211). But
‘[t]he entirety of [the related] intellectual construction and its own ‘‘naturalization’’ as
‘‘reality’’ cannot but be radically upset by a reflection which puts the common at its centre’
(p. 212). The idea of the commons points to a different form of rationality that goes beyond
the dualistic scheme of public or private property (Rodotà, 2012: 95). In the words of Joan
Subirats, ‘[h]egemonic representation, essentially founded on social Darwinism, holds up
competition, conflict and emulation as the essential triad of reality. [Instead] [t]he com-
mons break with the individualistic vision as conceived by the capitalist tradition’ (Subir-
ats, 2012: 2). The key issue is: ‘[h]ow can the commons overcome this ‘‘dominant
wisdom’’, to carve power away from private property/the market and the state, and transfer
it directly into the hands of the people?’ (Mattei, 2012a: 309). And even if various Com-
mons projects have a primary and crucial bottom-up dimension, this critique is equally
levelled at the European project. In this, the transnational level is understood as crucial
to the success of the implementation of the commons idea.12 In a recently adopted Citizens
Manifesto, a strong case is made for water as a European common good, and EU institu-
tions are asked to ‘classify water as a common good, guaranteed to all, and to take it out of
a strict market and competition logic’ (Citizens Manifesto, 2013: 6).

The scientization and limitation of politics

The critique is political13 in that the thrust of the denunciation of the market–state dichot-
omy regards the latter’s essentialized nature. It exposes the ‘dominant wisdom’ of the
10 European Journal of Social Theory

‘absolute domination of the subject (as owner or state) over the object (territory or, more
generally, the environment)’ (Mattei, 2012a: 320). The set of criticisms of the Commons
movement equally denounces a trend of depoliticization by means of scientization.
Liberal constitutionalism, for instance, is denounced as a technocratic vehicle of order
and stability, and in particular as reducing if not eliminating latent constituent power
from below. In this, the critique tends to follow James Tully’s observation that the mod-
ern constitutional form is disembedded in that it constitutes a higher law that is indepen-
dent from those that are subject to it (Tully, 2008). This de facto means that fundamental
principles underpinning modern constitutional democracies – including the institution of
property – are isolated from popular and political influence, on the basis of an argument
of expertise (cf. Bailey and Mattei, 2013: 5). As Bailey and Mattei argue:

[a] predetermined set of property relations, which are not only defended by the substantive
law but rather underpin the entire constitutional form, restrain and constitute constituent
power within the limits of individual private property relations. This effectively makes the
institution of property invisible/unnoticeable from the point of view of the unified political
entity of ‘the people’ and thus beyond contestation. (2013: 5; emphasis added)

In his Common Goods: A Manifesto, Ugo Mattei denounces a ‘constitutional asymmetry’

and ‘thoroughly technocratic view of the law’. In his view, law is predominantly ‘market
friendly’ and serves the ‘anti-ideological ideology’ of efficiency (Mattei, 2012b: loc 30,
313). As argued by another representative of the movement, such an instrumental view
of the law tends to eradicate possibilities for politics:

In neoliberalism it was not that the political space was dominated by economics but rather it
was consciously eliminated as ‘unreliable,’ ‘unscientific’ and ‘undesirable’ as it was con-
cluded that politics could only produce ideology and that [the] role of government was not to
act as the ‘sovereign will of the people’ but to be an economic administrator. And in this
neoliberal view the only purpose of the law was not to translate the will of politics but to
regulate in a way that would allow the flourishing of enterprise, individual enterprise and
the private sector, the administration of a population of homo economicus and it is the suc-
cess of that story that we face as a tragedy today. (http://www.commonssense.it/s1/?
page_id¼938; emphasis added)

This view is similar, even if less explicitly articulated, to one expressed by the European
Alternatives network, which argues that the EU crisis response (in terms of a Fiscal Pact)
consists of the ‘imposition of fiscal discipline which limits the power of citizens and par-
liaments (including the European Parliament) to decide over key economic and political
choices, further decreasing democratic decision-making’ (http://www.euroalter.com/
democracy/; emphasis added). And the Alter Summit network denounces the ‘silent
revolution’, which

[is] taking place through unprecedented activism at the legal-institutional level: prolifera-
tion of rules on fiscal matters and wages, higher thresholds of requirement of these rules,
tougher penalties and an increasing automization of their implementation, a mandatory
Blokker 11

entry of these rules at basic levels of European and national legislation. (Alter Summit,
2012; emphasis added)

Finally, a manifesto of ‘appalled economists’ maintains that ‘[w]hether it is the effi-

ciency and financial rationality of the markets, or the need to cut spending to reduce debt
or to strengthen the ‘‘stability pact’’, these ‘‘obvious facts’’ have to be examined, and the
plurality of choices of economic policies must be shown’ (Appalled Economists: 2;
emphasis added). They go on:

Europe has been built for three decades on a technocratic basis which has excluded popu-
lations from economic policy debates. The neoliberal doctrine, which rests on the now inde-
fensible assumption of the efficiency of financial markets, should be abandoned. We must
reopen the space of possible policies and discuss alternative and consistent proposals that
constrain the power to finance and organize the ‘harmonisation while the improvement is
being maintained’ of European economic and social systems (art. 151 of the Lisbon Treaty).
(Appalled Economists: 17; emphasis added)

Erosion of possibilities for collective autonomy

The Commons movement understands the erosion of possibilities for collective self-
government predominantly as a result of the extension of the market logic to public and
common goods (through privatization) and the subordination of politics to market
exigencies:

In the large majority of statist realities, in fact, the government – controlled in a capillary
way by global financial interests – dissipates common[/public] goods beyond any control,
taking recourse to the natural explanation (and therefore for the larger part politically
accepted) of the self-reproductive necessity of repaying its ‘gambling’ debts. This perverse
logic, that naturalizes a state of affairs that is the result of continuous and conscious political
choices, disguised as necessity, has to be unmasked so that the sovereign peoples can retake
control (even if perhaps late) of the means that allow them to live a free and worthy life.
(Mattei, 2012b: loc 50)

The Spanish network, Observatorio Metropolitano relates this to a process of ‘financia-

lization’, which turns ‘old social rights and services of citizenship into assets that are
quoted on the financial and property markets, [so that] new mercantile spaces are being
colonised. Natural assets like air, water, land and energy are suffering the full onslaught
of this new financial colonisation’ (Observatorio Metropolitano, 2012: 368). The
counter-strategy ‘is about designating the most important fields for social reproduction
and protecting them against the market’. This needs to be parallelled by the creation of
‘possibilities of new democratic politics’. ‘The commons approach sets up direct democ-
racy for all those aspects that directly relate to social reproduction. [t]he bid for direct
democracy should be completed with proposals for the radical reform of political sys-
tems and the generation of new ones’ (Observatorio Metropolitano, 2012: 369–70). In
the words of the so-called Citizens Manifesto, a key problem in today’s Europe is that
‘people feel that they are losing control of their destiny’. Instead, ‘[r]enewed governance
12 European Journal of Social Theory

must be accompanied by a renewed citizen engagement. Healthy democracies have

always lived off vibrant participation, expressed through collaboration, contestation and
critique’ (Citizens Manifesto, 2013: 1; emphasis added). For Mattei, a ‘new political
vision’ is necessary, which needs to be

endowed with the intelligence and courage necessary to be realized immediately. What is
therefore needed is a plan for the medium term for the regeneration of this collective intel-
ligence. This vision cannot but be put at the centre the idea of the common capable of con-
trolling the extractive degeneration of both the private and the public institutions. (Mattei,
2013: 71)

This vision is related to the European level by means of a European Charter of the Com-
mons, in which it is claimed that a ‘true commonwealth of Europe is possible only by
means of constitutional safeguards of the commons through a direct participatory pro-
cess’ (European Charter, 2012). Such a ‘new political vision’ needs to be connected
to the contestation of the current negation of rights in EU crisis management, in partic-
ular, those of the European Charter of Fundamental Rights, in order to stimulate a ‘‘‘con-
stitutional’’ politics for Europe’, which gives voice to ‘[those] citizens [who do not resort
to] anti-European demagogy’ (Rodotà, 2013).
In sum, the Commons movement proposes to link a political critique with pragmatic
suggestions for common, participatory institutional forms, which would promote a com-
monality different from that of closed communities, in a historical context in which both
the market and the state are delegitimized as providers of public goods. Some of these
proposals appear to indicate a form of ‘critical society’, which is inclusive and non-
hierarchical, endorses the articulation of critical voices and takes a relational, network
form: ‘[i]n the absence of any criterion of objectivity, any criterion of knowledge passes
through an openly political practice, intimately contextualized and experimented in dif-
ferent ways by different individualities participating in the conflict over the recognition
and access to the ‘‘common’’’ (Mattei, 2012c: 215). The commonality constructed is of a
pluralist nature and follows a different logic than that of the popular sovereignty of rep-
resentative democracy. Instead, the attempt is ‘to put all citizens in a position in which
they are really able to participate on the basis of effective, reciprocal equality, and, there-
fore, with full and conscious self-determination to the formation of the governing pop-
ular will’ (Lucarelli, 2013: 56).

Conclusion
In the current multiple crises of the EU, of which the delinking of democracy and capit-
alism is perhaps the structurally most significant one, a political critique of capitalism
contributes to a re-imagination of the European project. If the European integration
project is to be more than a technocratic embedding of market relations, it will need
to find new ways of furthering a social project and engage citizens with its finalities.
A political critique of capitalism can be seen as a complementary critique to the social
and artistic forms, which in a way re-orients both to a collective political project. This
critique, denouncing the depoliticization resulting from capitalist arrangements and the
Blokker 13

erosion of possibilities for collective political action, indicates the crucial role of the
political in identifying forms of commonality, also beyond the confines of the
nation-state. It is only by contesting the infringement of possibilities of common polit-
ical engagement by capitalist arrangements, and the delineation of alternative collec-
tive arrangements, that a more comprehensive idea of a common European future can
be gained. In times of a disconnect between capitalism and democracy in Europe, as
well as an increasing distance between European institutions and a pluralistic
European society, societally based initiatives promoting the repoliticization of crucial
elements of a European (economic) life in common provide important ways of
re-imagining the political. I have argued here that some relevant dimensions of such
a political critique can be detected in the proposals of the Commons movements and
related movements for an ‘Alternative Europe’.

Notes
1. Outhwaite and Spence relate Boltanski’s work to an analysis of the EU (Outhwaite and
Spence, forthcoming).
2. Recently, Eve Chiapello has elaborated on two further historical forms of critique: a conser-
vative and an ecological critique. The first is grounded in critical views of modernity, and
related to the social critique in that it is equally concerned with the social question, but, rather
than emphasizing equality, it is concerned with the moral order (Chiapello, 2013: 70). The
ecological critique confronts the ‘ecological question’. It can be both future- and past-
oriented and ‘challenges the ability of the capitalist system to guarantee the future of mankind,
beginning with its reproducibility’, and is in this not tied to a particular political outlook (pp.
73–4). The ecological critique has affinities with the artistic (and the conservative) critique
when it promotes forms of retreat from capitalism and local forms of self-government and
with the social critique when it takes a materialistic and scientific approach, which points
to ways of correcting capitalism.
3. The three dimensions of a political critique of capitalism – its naturalization, its reduction of
meaning, and its erosion of collective autonomy – show a certain affinity with and are irredu-
cible to the forms of critique as identified by Boltanski and Chiapello. There is an affinity with
the artistic critique of oppression, in that the tendency of capitalism to reduce possibilities for
self-determination is denounced. There is an affinity with the related critique of hierarchy, in
that the idea of self-management is counterpoised to forms of delegated and expert authority.
There is also an affinity with the social critique in its denunciation of exploitation and desire
for (economic) emancipation (cf. Boltanski, 2002: 6). But there are also aspects of the political
critique that are irreducible to the social and artistic critiques and that justify the conceptua-
lization of a distinct form of critique. The emphasis on capitalism as ultimately a political proj-
ect is a crucial dimension of this critique, and of which the source of indignation is not the
oppression or alienation of the individual, but rather the depoliticization of the common world,
that is, the closure of collective imagination and the evasion and neutralization of critique. A
strongly related dimension is that of collective autonomy. Here, the source of indignation is
the loss of possibilities for collective self-determination and self-limitation.
4. This collective-representational dimension is not unrelated to the individually-oriented notion of
‘reification’ as conceptualized by Gyorgy Lukács and recently taken up by Axel Honneth. In the
words of Anita Chari, reification ‘describes the ways in which individuals in capitalist society
14 European Journal of Social Theory

fail to recognize that the economy is constituted by human practices, even as it appears to be an
autonomous and self-perpetuating dynamic’ (Chari, 2010: 589). In this, reification ‘promotes an
apolitical orientation towards the capitalist social form’ (p. 590; emphasis in original). There is
evidently also affinity with Gramsci’s notions of hegemony and common sense.
5. Understood here as the removal of matters of common concern from public debate and
control.
6. Habermas further argues that of three models – the decisionistic, the technocratic, and the
pragmatistic – only the third is ‘necessarily related to democracy’ (Habermas, 1971: 67).
Indeed, ‘[a] technocratic administration of industrial society would deprive any democratic
decision-making process of its object’ (p. 68).
7. But one should be wary of conflating these imaginaries with political and economic moder-
nity, cf. Arnason (2001: 115) and Wagner (2001).
8. Also in Gunther Teubner’s work on ‘societal constitutionalism’ one finds similar observations
on the reaching of a ‘tipping point’, when ‘combating the risks of unrestrained liberalization
has now become indispensable’ (Teubner, 2012: 78).
9. This is evidently not unlike Habermas’ thesis of the ‘colonisation of the lifeworld’ (cf.
Browne, 2005: 287).
10. This dimension of the political critique appears to correspond to what Boltanski ultimately
identifies as the only possibility for emancipation from ‘complex domination’ identified in
On Critique. Capitalist domination can only be effectively countered by bringing about a sit-
uation in which forms of social critique are re-empowered. Any step towards diminishing
forms of domination and exclusion, and thus towards an emancipation of the dominated,
would need to involve an explicit, public recognition of the fragile and political nature of
society’s institutions (Blokker and Brighenti, 2011: 292), including those pertaining to the
capitalist economy.
11. The idea of the commons has been interpreted in very different ways. Given reasons of space, I
am not able to expand on important differences here.
12. As Ugo Mattei told the author in an interview (held in Turin on 28 November 2013), the idea
of the commons is necessarily ‘international’ or post-national in that its main antagonists are
global (global corporations). He also admitted, though, that wider public recognition of the
complex idea of the commons proves difficult, not least with regard to the European level.
13. Evidently, this critique relates to the social one. The argument is that the property logic tends
towards the exclusion of some (or sometimes many) in terms of access and usage of particular
goods (cf. Rodotà, 2012: 106–7), particularly so in times of the widespread privatization of
public goods.

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About biography
Paul Blokker is principal investigator in the research unit, ‘Constitutional Politics in post-
Westphalian Europe’ (CoPolis) in the Department of Sociology and Social Research, University
of Trento, Italy. He acknowledges a Unità di Ricerca grant (2011) from the Provincia Autonoma
di Trento. His current research is on constitutional change, a political sociology of constitutions,
multiple democracies, critique and dissent, and democratic participation. His most recent book is
New Democracies in Crisis? A Comparative Constitutional Study of the Czech Republic, Hungary,
Poland, Romania and Slovakia (Routledge, 2013).