Theory in Action, Vol. 11, No.

3, July (© 2018)
DOI:10.3798/tia.1937-0237.1819

Inversion and Abolition:

On the Upside-Down Logics of Wealth, Poverty, and Capital

Richard Gilman-Opalsky1

[Article copies available for a fee from The Transformative Studies

Institute. E-mail address: journal@transformativestudies.org
Website: http://www.transformativestudies.org ©2018 by The
Transformative Studies Institute. All rights reserved.]

1. UPSIDE-DOWN

The capitalist world is upside-down. A world governed by capital is a

world organized and ruled by fatal logics: Everyday life from childhood
to death (from childcare to the death and dying industries) is governed by
the logics of profit and private property. Thus, our ability to secure the
most basic things from food and shelter to education and healthcare is
largely decided by our ability to pay, and concentrations of wealth
determine the form and content of political power. As every child is
well-taught and knows, money should not govern human life; and yet it
does.
One upside-down perspective views capital as wealth, but capital is
not wealth. Capital is a power, whereas wealth is a certain property (or a
composite of aggregate properties). Poverty specifies a relative absence
of properties, including those properties needed to secure the most basic
things mentioned above. It is remarkable and absurd that capitalism has
come to be associated with wealth. Global macroeconomic data shows
that capitalism and its neoliberal growth have in fact grown income
inequality and intensified the brutal exclusions of poverty.2 It is not only
upside-down that we do not associate capitalism with inequality and
poverty, but also that we do not associate it with the ruthless and rampant
capitalism of India, Liberia, Haiti, Honduras, Indonesia, Colombia, and

1
Richard Gilman-Opalsky, Ph.D., is Associate Professor of Political Philosophy at the
University of Illinois in the Department of Political Science. Address correspondence to:
Dr. Richard Gilman-Opalsky, University of Illinois, Public Affairs Center, Room # 362,
Springfield, IL 62703-5407; Tel.: 217.206.8328; e-mail: rgilm3@uis.edu; Page:
http://www.uis.edu/politicalscience/faculty/gilman-opalsky/.
2 Saskia Sassen, Expulsions: Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy

(Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 2014).

1937-0229 ©2018 Transformative Studies Institute

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El Salvador. Although we should think of these countries (and other so-

called “third world” countries) as perfect images of capitalism, we tend
to make capitalist icons out of the things we like best in the U.S. and
Western Europe. Meanwhile, some form of David Ricardo’s apologetics
is still regularly deployed to rationalize and excuse the things we like
least in the U.S. and Western Europe.3
At the same time, even from the more narrow economistic
perspectives of Thomas Piketty and friends at the Paris and London
Schools of Economics, it would make more sense to associate capitalism
with poverty. In January of 2017, OXFAM reported that “since 2015, the
richest 1% has owned more wealth than the rest of the planet” and that
“eight men now own the same amount of wealth as the poorest half of
the world.”4 And yet, the common understanding is so upside-down as to
imagine capitalism as causally related to wealth; a total inversion of
reality.

2. THE POVERTY OF WEALTH (FIRST INVERSION)

In Plato’s Republic, Socrates claims that a healthy city must defend

itself against wealth. Wealth “produces luxury, idleness, and
innovation.”5
Socrates worries about luxury as a subversion of the more vital
concern for human needs and social health. Luxury shifts the focus to
what Guy Debord would much later call “pseudo-needs.”6 Socrates
worries also about idleness as the inactivity of those who have been
deprived of their basic motivations for doing anything. His example is
that of the “potter who’s gotten rich” who comes to care less about his
craft.7 Socrates wrongly assumes that the potter is only motivated by
money. The evidence of his error can be found in the present reality (and
long history) of art created in a world of unpaid artists who are punished
by capital for doing their craft. Parents tremble in fear at the thought of

3 See Karl Marx, “Crisis Theory” in The Marx-Engels Reader: Second Edition, edited by

Robert C. Tucker (New York and London: W. W. Norton & Company, 1978), pp. 444,
448-449.
4 See: https://www.oxfam.org/sites/www.oxfam.org/files/file_attachments/bp-economy-

for-99-percent-160117-summ-en.pdf
5 The Republic of Plato, translated by Allan Bloom (New York: Basic Books, 1991),

422a, p. 99.
6 Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith (New

York: Zone Books, 1995), p.33

7 Plato, op. cit., 421d, p.99.

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their little ones trying to make a life out of pottery, poetry, music,
philosophy, painting, or performance art, because they have seen how the
star system that rewards precious few artists (and often the worst ones,
lest you think that capital only appreciates the best) makes casualties out
of most of the world’s artists. Finally, innovation, a term always
celebrated by capitalists, is condemned by Socrates as one of the evils of
wealth. With innovation, Socrates worries about all the experiments in
doing new and dangerous things that come from wielding wealth beyond
any regard for real human needs. Here, we may think of long histories of
war and political corruption, urban and suburban developments of
ecological destruction, and technological isolation in an anxious, lonely
world.
His mistakes notwithstanding, Socrates was right to be worried about
the poverty of the wealthy society.

3. THE WEALTH OF POVERTY (SECOND INVERSION)

Socrates also condemns poverty as something against which every

healthy city should guard. No one wants to be poor, and for that reason
alone we should abolish poverty and the whole class of concentrated
impoverishment, just as generations of revolutionaries have imagined.
Socrates says that poverty produces “illiberality and wrongdoing as
well as innovation.”8
By illiberality, Socrates means the “vulgarity” of the deprivation of
cultural or scholarly refinement, which he predictably dislikes. He also
worries about wrongdoing, including the whole range of possible
criminality. And once again, innovation, which was also an evil of
wealth, is at the same time an evil of poverty, in that some of the most
innovative people are criminals, rebels, and “wrongdoers.” Long before
the empirical vindications of criminology, Socrates understood that
crime was less the cause of criminals than of the conditions of life that
are its raison d’être.
Of course, Socrates could not understand the contemporary condition
of poverty as so eloquently described by John Berger:

“The poverty of our century is unlike that of any other. It is not, as

poverty was before, the result of natural scarcity, but of a set of
priorities imposed upon the rest of the world by the rich.
Consequently, the modern poor are not pitied... but written off as

8 Ibid, 422a, p. 99.

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trash. The twentieth century consumer economy has produced the

first culture for which a beggar is a reminder of nothing.”9

In contrast to Socrates’s fear of what poverty produces in the poor, I

see a potential wealth that is not the property of the powerful. As Berger
observes, the poor are despised and written off, but ancient-to-recent
revolts have shown that poverty also generates forms of being-against the
existing reality.

4. ABOLITIONIST PERSPECTIVE (INVERSION OF THE

INVERTED)

Socrates wanted a society guarded against the twin evils of poverty

and wealth. A capitalist society could try to guard against poverty and
wealth with, one could imagine, a minimum and a maximum wage, a
global tax, or by way of some other regulation. But after more than 200
years of failed efforts to do these things, a certain conclusion is clear: We
cannot govern capital with laws that are themselves governed by capital,
and because capital governs the governments of the world, an abolitionist
perspective is necessary. Wealth and poverty call out for abolition, and
they need to be met with an abolitionism that rejects the inverted logics
of a world governed by capital. This means that—everywhere we are
able and know how to do it—we must bring to light the root causes of
our problems, and the material necessity (and ethical obligation) of a
total opposition, of a total inversion of the inverted.
An abolitionist may do many things. The being-against of insurrection
is one thing. Other things may include artwork, writing, printmaking,
music-making, discussion circles, protest, disobedience, sabotage, and a
wide range of expressions of disaffection from the radical imagination.
An abolitionist does not want to “conserve” and defend what already
exists (like a conservative), and an abolitionist does not adopt a politics
of accepting the unacceptable (like a liberal). We need to recover a
tradition of resistance and revolt that emerged around the same time that
the anarchist and communist trajectories took off:

“Slave resistance was everywhere in the in the 1830s. When the

Amistad revolt took place everybody saw it as part of something
much bigger. The abolitionists saw it that way; the Africans saw it

9 John Berger, Keeping a Rendezvous (New York: Pantheon Books, 1991), p. 227.

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that way; that was part of its power. To situate the event in a larger
field of struggle is important.”10

According to Marcus Rediker above, slave resistance understood itself

as part of a larger field of emancipatory struggle, and Angela Y. Davis
has long argued for the continuation of abolitionist politics after the legal
abolition of slavery. Davis picks up the term “abolition democracy” from
W. E. B. Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction.11 Following Du Bois, Davis
points out that the legal abolition of slavery was the negation of a
particular institution, but that the larger project of which that
accomplishment was one major victory would need to be ongoing. Davis
argues that today, abolitionism requires a confrontation with the death
penalty, mass incarceration, ongoing sexisms and racisms, capitalism,
and empire.
One negation is never enough. In the field of mathematics, the
multiplication of negatives produces positives, and in the field of Marxist
theory, negation is not only negative. Indeed, negation is the heart of
revolution in permanence. The abolitionist idea captures well what Raya
Dunayevskaya called “the power of negativity.”12 And in fact,
Dunayevskaya wrote about abolitionism in a powerful way:

“The movement renounced all traditional politics, considering all

political parties of the day as ‘corrupt’. They were inter-racial and
in a slave society preached and practiced Negro equality. They were
distinguished as well for inspiring, aligning with and fighting for
equality of women in an age when the women had neither the right
to the ballot nor to property nor to divorce. They were
internationalist, covering Europe with their message… They sought
no rewards of any kind, fighting for the pure idea, though that
meant facing the hostility of the national government, the state, the
local police, and the best citizens who became the most unruly
mobs.”13

10 Marcus Rediker, “Native Resistance: A Conversation with Historian Marcus Rediker”

in Work and Days: Scholactivism: Reflections on Transforming Praxis in and Beyond the
Classroom, 65/66, 67/68, Volumes 33 & 34, 2016-17, p.100.
11 Angela Y. Davis, Abolition Democracy: Beyond Empire, Prisons, and Torture (New

York: Seven Stories Press, 2005), p.91.

12 Raya Dunayevskaya, The Power of Negativity: Selected Writings on the Dialectic in

Hegel and Marx, edited by Peter Hudis and Kevin B. Anderson (Lanham: Lexington
Books, 2002).
13 Raya Dunayevskaya, American Civilization on Trial: Black Masses as Vanguard

(Chicago: News and Letters, 2003), p. 34 [italics in original].

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Like Du Bois and Davis, Dunayevskaya hoped for a second phase of

abolitionism through which to continue revolutionary struggle, but she
observed instead: “Soon after the war and the abolition of slavery,
Abolitionism as a movement vanished from the scene.”14
We must not forget, however, that this world has never been without
its abolitionists, and that abolitionism as a real movement is only ever
temporarily demobilized, halted, or disappeared. An irrepressible-
repressed abolitionism may be kept down only for so long, sometimes as
the result of its own despair, or perhaps in search of a new form and
content (a new aim and expression), but it is never gone for good.
One thing that we must everywhere resist and reject is the capitalist
logic that perpetuates a pathological results-orientation according to
which every action, effort, or initiative is valued only by its measurable
and direct outcomes. When Egyptians abolish one regime and end up
with another intolerable one, the pathological results-orientation quickly
declares that the revolution was a failure, predictably saying: “Ah, but
see? Nothing good has come from it. It was all for naught.” Aside from
the fact that such declarations of failure are demonstrably false, we must
also keep in mind that the abolition of the existing world is not an
activity well-suited for the corporate appraisal of outcomes. What
abolitionists have always done throughout human history, and in every
context, is not something to measure like customer satisfaction. We
cannot measure abolitionist success in terms of an accounting of direct
results. Therefore, abolitionists must resist and reject the pathological
results-orientation, denouncing it as the distinguishing feature of a
method of analysis that is in fact the special product and property of
capital. An insidious capitalist logic holds hostage the far richer and
better understanding of value that we use to appreciate our lives in their
real fullness, and we must not subject our struggles and movements to
the reductionist thinking of our enemies.
Abolitionists can consider how—situated such as they are—they
might contribute to a continuation of an old abolitionism in new ways.
Today’s abolitionists must put all their talents in the service of
confronting and overturning the inverted logics that govern the world, so
that we may eventually reorganize human life according to the many
healthy logics of a common wealth.

14 Ibid, 37.

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