Hegel and the cancer of gratitude
Today, a fellow Newton resident responded to a growing anti-capitalist sentiment among students in my school by saying that we should be grateful for our capitalist wealth. This project is not an anti-capitalist critique. It is a social and cultural critique. The economy has become the overarching system that dictates our society; all other systems—like social or political systems—have simply become sub-systems of the economy. Think about how the market controls academia and Congress, for example. There exists no system free from capitalism. It is encompassing. Thus, I cannot write about the mindset and psychology of my neighbors without pointing out the system that so clearly infects all of their brains. Again, this is not simply to say “capitalism is an evil cancer”, it is to say “ignoring capitalism in any cultural critique does a disservice to any pursuit of understanding”. In other words, avoiding it would simply make for bad writing, a bad critique.
The person who made the argument to me said, “We owe all our wealth and privilege to capitalism. We know no reality outside of it, and as people on top of the class hierarchy, it is easy to criticize the system and act holier than thou. We should simply be grateful for what we have”. The logical issues with this argument are clear: of course, people have the right to criticize a system they are on top of, especially when it is literally unavoidable to remove oneself from the system. But I want to focus on a more circuitous rebuttal.
It was Hegel who first theorized about the dialectical relationship between the oppressed and the oppressor. In his famous “lord-bondsman dialectic,” he explains that though the lord wins recognition of superiority over the bondsman, he requires that recognition, and thus, is dependent on the bondsman. The lord’s consciousness and understanding of the self are nothing without the bondsman. The same is true about relations in the capitalist system. The rich are dependent on recognition from the poor. The rich do not actually have more resources than the poor; they depend on social understandings to exercise their privilege. A funny example of the rich needing the recognition of the poor was once given to me by my father on an airplane. He explained that people in 1st class board first, requiring them to spend more time on the plane and get to the airport earlier. Yet, everyone else must walk by them and acknowledge their wealth, which makes it worth it for them. What becomes evident in this relationship is that the rich are not free. Similar to how Franz Fanon thought that the colonizer requires the gaze of the colonized to uphold his existence, the same is true of the rich under capitalism. All that the “be grateful” critique suggests is an obsession with capital and an inability to identify the deeper ways capitalism affects us. Capitalism strips the wealthy of their freedom and makes them dependent on social interactions to affirm their being. Perhaps, there is nothing inherently wrong with this, but it is not simply a truth that wealth is something to be grateful for. And since the only path to changing the system is recognizing its perverse nature, encouraging people to “be grateful” is simply counter-revolutionary.
You may argue that being rich and anti-capitalist is oxymoronic, that one cannot morally enrich themselves while recognizing the exploitative nature of doing so. To that, I would say “fair point”. But criticizing anti-capitalist sentiments at a privileged institution feels like it can only result in more people going into finance and fewer people being radicalized into true progressivism. And what underlies this person’s critique is nothing more than fear: fear that the dialectic will break, and they will be made nothing. That their existence will cease with the condemnation of a system that upholds their being over all others. So to all the rich, privileged anti-capitalists, I say: “Don’t be grateful. Be ashamed of your dialectical position toward the lower and under classes. Be ashamed that your existence is predicated on the subjugation of others. Be so ashamed that you work to change the world”.
