https://kommunismen.substack.com/p/newsletter-week-of-511-july-2026

Read it on substack or down here below!

This has been an eventful week, and not just for Lionel Messi and Mohamed Salah — though it was certainly that, since on Tuesday the two of them finally met, and Messi’s Argentina came back from two goals down to knock Salah’s Egypt out 3–2, with the winner arriving in the dying minutes. I am team Messi forever, and apparently so is the rest of the left: according to highly rigorous social science circulating on X, left-wing people prefer Messi over basically anyone else. The dialectic confirms what the heart already knew.

The real event in this household, though, came on Sunday: Norway 2, Brazil 1. And Norway did not merely beat Brazil — they out-possessed them, sixty-six percent of the ball, before scoring twice in the final ten minutes and surviving a nervy stoppage time. On Saturday night they play England in the quarterfinal (23:00 CEST — do not go to bed), and by the time this lands in your inbox we may already know whether the dream survives. I am praying for the stars to align for Norway to win the whole damn thing.

Safe to say I have basically just been writing and watching soccer, which, given the North American kickoff times, means writing by day and staring at a screen at three in the morning by night. But on to news I am more apt to write about than sports: my recent and upcoming projects!

First, the study group!

The next cycle of the study group starts this Sunday, 12 July, and we are heading back to 1843: Marx’s A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, the unfinished manuscript in which the young Marx works through Hegel’s doctrine of the state paragraph by paragraph — the constitution, the bureaucracy, the estates, the whole apparatus — and begins to discover that you cannot criticize the political state without criticizing the society that requires one. It is where the famous procedure of turning Hegel’s subject–predicate relations right side up gets its first sustained workout, and it is a strange, productive experience to read this early critique of the state with the mature critique of political economy in the back of one’s mind.

The entire book is only around a hundred pages, so we are taking it in seven sessions. Every session is a Sunday at 18:00 (6 p.m.) CEST:

• 12/7 — Introduction
• 19/7 — The State
• 26/7 — The Constitution
• 2/8 — The Executive
• 9/8 — The Legislature
• 16/8 — The Estates
• 23/8 — Civil Society

All are invited. Send me an email and ask to join — my address is publicly available on my website — and it is never too late: with a text this short, you can catch up in an afternoon.

What I’ve been reading

I have also been reading lots, and finding myself really enamored with Evgeny Pashukanis’s The General Theory of Law and Marxism (1924) — my thanks to Carl Wilén for the recommendation. What has me hooked is that Pashukanis constructs what looks to me almost like a value-form theory of law. His question is not the familiar one about whose interests the law serves — any instrumentalist account can answer that — but why social regulation under capitalism takes the form of law at all: abstract and general, addressed to free and equal bearers of rights. His answer runs through the commodity. The legal subject is not a natural person whom the law happens to recognize; it is the practical shape a commodity owner must assume so that products can meet in exchange as values. The legal form is the commodity form’s shadow.

Here is how I have been putting it in my own work this week:

Pashukanis derived the legal subject – the bearer of rights, the free and equal person of private law – from the commodity-form itself, as the practical shape commodity-owners must assume in order that their products can relate to one another as values (Pashukanis, The General Theory of Law and Marxism, 1924, pp. 111–13); and Bonefeld has argued, from the side of the critique of political economy, that the doubly free labourer is ‘the indispensable prerequisite of the commodity form’ (Bonefeld, Critical Theory and the Critique of Political Economy, 2014, p. 93), so that the juridical freedom of the person and the class relation are determinations of one and the same social form rather than facts of two different orders.

Juridical freedom and the class relation as determinations of one and the same social form, rather than facts of two different orders: readers of this newsletter will recognize that this is not a detour from my usual obsessions but a straight road into them. It is also, not coincidentally, the terrain of the Copenhagen paper below.

Alongside Pashukanis I have started Chris O’Kane’s Social Constitution and Fetishistic Social Domination, which I am finding really illuminating even though I am only in the beginning chapters. Two things stand out already, both of them exceedingly rare in Marxist academia. First, he separates the fetish character of the commodity from fetishism — the objective, socially valid form of appearance from the consciousness that corresponds to it. This sounds like pedantry until you notice how much bad theory comes from collapsing the two, as if the fetish were merely a mistake in people’s heads, waiting to be dispelled by a good seminar. Second, he is consistent in his usage of terms. Verdinglichung, Versachlichung, and Vergegenständlichung are kept in their proper categories instead of being mulched together into “reification,” and he does the same for Entfremdung (estrangement) and Entäusserung(externalization). Anyone who has tried to track these distinctions through the standard English translations knows what a small miracle this is. Looking forward to getting further into the book next week.

What I have written, and my recent thoughts…

First, out this week: my essay “In What Ways Does Capitalism Dominate?” was published on Wednesday in Avant! no. 3. You can read it here: [https://avantjournal.noblogs.org/2026/07/08/in-what-ways-does-capitalism-dominate/]. The piece does what the title says: it asks what kind of thing capitalist domination actually is, and argues that the answer cannot be found by looking for a dominator. A taste:

Capital is not a stock of machines, a sum of money, or a quantity of goods, although it appears in all of these guises. It is a relation that organizes how people produce, what they must do to live, and how their activity is coordinated behind their backs, and it is a relation that reproduces itself. To call capitalism a social relation rather than an economic arrangement is to say that it is not a static system that could be left running while its parts are swapped out, but a dynamic process whose very operation regenerates the conditions of its own continuation. Domination, on this account, is not something capital has but something capital is: the name for a relation that secures its own continuation through the activity of those it binds.

Second: most of the design work for Ordning no. 2 — our issue on violence, Våld— is now done, including the cover. I am very happy with it, and I will tease it here next week. Consider this the tease of the tease.

Third, and biggest: I finished the first draft of the paper I am taking to Denmark this fall, working title “Freedom as a Social Form: Marx Against Republican Communism.” The paper engages three of the most discussed recent readings of Marx on freedom and domination — Bruno Leipold’s republican Marx, William Clare Roberts’s Marx of non-domination, and Søren Mau’s Marx of mute compulsion — and asks not which of them is right, but what they share. From the draft:

The three accounts disagree on a great deal: whether Marx’s debt to republicanism is formative or merely residual, whether non-domination is a sufficient standard or requires supplementation by a theory of value, and how directly nineteenth-century republican vocabulary survives into Marx’s mature categories. Section 4 will show whether the content secured at the end of the critique requires anything like a positive human essence to underwrite it. This article is not concerned with adjudicating those disagreements. It is concerned with a narrower premise that survives all three: that ‘freedom’, however its content is specified, remains the right name for what communism secures, and that Capital‘s critique of capitalism is oriented toward, and terminates in, a determinate condition nameable in those terms. Leipold’s social republic, Roberts’s association free of domination, and Mau’s abolition of value represent different substantive conceptions within the shared evaluative framework. Each treats the critique of bourgeois freedom as building toward a successor-condition that the critique itself entitles us to specify and to call, in some sense, freedom’s realisation.

A first draft is a first draft, but the skeleton is standing, and it feels like the most direct statement yet of what I have been circling for a long time.

Fourth, for the Swedish readers: this week or next, my text “Vad är en kvinna?” will be arriving in your mailbox, if you are subscribed to the magazine Clarté — which you should be. The essay asks what happens when Marxist theory goes looking for “woman,” and why the two standard answers come up short in the same way:

Båda svaren utgår från antagandet att kvinnan måste kunna härledas ur den marxistiska teorin för att bli synlig för den. Jag presenterar tanken att hon skulle kunna vara en bestämning i det kapitalistiska samhället som kapitalet självt inte kan urskilja. ”Kvinnan” kanske just är det som värdeformen kräver men ändå inte kan tillägna sig. Detta ligger bortom båda traditionerna. Det beror inte på att de är okunniga, utan på att båda strävar efter ett enda svar. En teori måste förklara allt, annars har den misslyckats. Jag är fast övertygad om att den kommunistiska vetenskapen kan gå bortom Marx Kapitalet, precis som Marx själv ämnade att göra – utan att upphöra att vara kommunistisk.

For those without Swedish, the point is both traditions assume that “woman” must be derivable from Marxist theory in order to be visible to it. I suggest instead that she may be a determination of capitalist society that capital itself cannot discern — precisely what the value-form requires yet cannot appropriate. And communist science can go beyond Marx’s Capital, just as Marx himself intended to, without ceasing to be communist.

On the desk

The full stack this week, then: Pashukanis’s The General Theory of Law and Marxism; Chris O’Kane’s Social Constitution and Fetishistic Social Domination; Marx’s A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, for the study group; and Werner Bonefeld’s A Critical Theory of Economic Compulsion. I am enjoying all of them, which is not a sentence I get to write every week.

Next week

And next week I will be continuing work on an English-language “extension” of my text from Ordning no. 1 — extension in quotation marks, because it is less a translation than a rebuild, with new and deepened content, under the working title “Why Marx’s Capital Fails at Being a Work of History.” Hopefully I will find someone willing to publish it!

Until then: join the study group, read Avant!, and if you happen to be awake at 23:00 on Saturday, spare a thought for Norway.

/Emma