The parallax between politics and economics

The parallax between politics and economics is the irreducible relation between two dimensions of social life that implicate one another without collapsing into a single explanation. Political struggle is shaped by economic power, while the organization of production and exchange is itself socially determining. Neither can be treated as a mere reflection of the other: the attempt to make one the hidden truth of the other obscures the form through which each operates.

Two irreducible logics

The distinction begins with a methodological problem. The critique of political economy follows the logic of commodities, production, and capital; political struggle follows the logic of antagonism. Both are more than descriptions of isolated empirical events, but neither can be reduced to the other. Class struggle is inscribed in economic relations, yet it does not appear there as a fully explicit theme. Conversely, political conflict concerns relations of economic power without becoming a simple expression of them. The mutual implication is real, but it does not permit a direct translation between the two fields.

This formulation resists two symmetrical reductions. To treat politics as the formal expression of an underlying socioeconomic process makes political action seem mechanically determined and erases the openness and contingency of political conflict. But to treat the economy as merely one social sphere among others also misses its structuring force: in the account of Karl Marx’s Capital, the commodity and capital order function as a matrix that helps generate social and political relations. The political cannot be dissolved into the economic, and the economic cannot be demoted to a secondary stage on which politics simply plays out.

Value, exchange, and commodity form

Kojin Karatani’s reading of Karl Marx clarifies why this tension cannot be resolved by choosing production as the sole site of truth. Marx confronts the opposition between David Ricardo’s account of value as grounded in labor and the relational account associated with Bailey, for whom value depends on how a commodity relates to other commodities. The reading presented here treats that opposition as a parallax: value has to be considered in relation both to production and to circulation. Later Marxism, in both Social Democratic and Communist versions, is criticized for losing this perspective and elevating production as the authentic reality while dismissing exchange and consumption as merely illusory.

The commodity itself shows why appearances cannot simply be discarded in favor of an underlying substance. A useful object such as a wooden table does not acquire its commodity character from its physical material alone. It takes on a social form through its place in relations with other commodities. In the account of Marx’s analysis, the commodity’s apparent mystique does not arise from its usefulness or from the quantity of labor considered in isolation; it arises when labor assumes a social form. The object and the position it occupies in a system of relations must therefore be thought together.

This also distinguishes Marx’s method from a simple move from appearance to essence. It is not enough to expose exchange as a surface and announce production as the hidden truth beneath it. The form of exchange is itself essential to how economic relations appear and operate. The question is not only what lies beneath a form, but why the underlying relation must take that form. Ignoring the form as a mere disguise repeats a reduction rather than explaining the social reality it organizes.

Abstraction and social organization

The parallax extends beyond the relation between economic production and explicit political struggle. Different objects of analysis emerge when attention brackets different aspects of social life. Democracy, for example, appears as a form when concrete economic relations and the operations of the state apparatus are abstracted from, leaving people to be considered as abstract units. The analysis of domination likewise requires attention to mechanisms of power while setting aside both democratic self-description and economic reproduction. Economic production becomes a distinct object of analysis when the concrete existence of the state and political ideology is methodologically bracketed.

These abstractions are not merely habits of thought. The account invokes Karl Marx’s notion of real abstraction: the separation of domains is inscribed in social practices themselves. No single description can keep democracy, power, and economic reproduction equally in view without risking the loss of their distinct contours. The task is therefore not to produce an all-at-once picture that dissolves their differences, but to understand what each abstraction reveals, what it sets aside, and how the separated dimensions remain implicated in actual social relations.

The contrast between a politics-centered approach and a production-centered one makes the stakes visible. Some French theories of the Political, including approaches associated with Alain Badiou, Jacques Rancière, Étienne Balibar, Ernesto Laclau, and Chantal Mouffe, are criticized for reducing material production to an ontic sphere without comparable theoretical dignity. From the opposite direction, a focus on economic structure can turn politics into a temporary appearance destined to disappear in a developed Communist or technocratic order, where the administration of people would give way to the administration of things. The image of two faces or a vase captures the difficulty: the viewer sees one configuration or the other, not both at once. The choice of focus alters what the other domain appears to be.

Historical and institutional stakes

The account of the October Revolution and its Stalinist outcome illustrates the danger of replacing a layered explanation with a single verdict. One interpretation treats Stalinism as a contingent deviation from the revolution; another regards the Communist project as totalitarian at its core. The proposed task is to hold together the revolution’s emancipatory potential and the historical necessity of its Stalinist outcome, rather than allowing either side of that tension to erase the other. The forced collectivization and rapid industrialization of the late 1920s are described as a violent transformation of the social body: individual peasant ownership was liquidated, and an old intelligentsia of teachers, doctors, scientists, engineers, and technicians was replaced by a new one. The change was not simply an economic adjustment or a political decision considered in isolation; it remade social life through their entanglement.

A related problem appears when humanitarian intervention is presented as a purely antipolitical response to suffering. The overthrow of Saddam Hussein was justified in terms of ending the suffering of the Iraqi people, but the intervention is also connected to political-economic interests, including oil, and to a project of Western liberal democracy, private property, and participation in the global market. When intervention is framed only as the prevention of harm, the possibility of a different collective project of social and political transformation can be implicitly excluded. The example shows how ostensibly humanitarian politics can carry economic and political commitments that its presentation as neutral assistance conceals.

The same analytic caution applies to law and institutional power. Public authority does not stand apart from violence: the account argues that power relies on an obscene supplement of violence, while apparently nonpolitical relations of subordination in institutions such as the army, church, and family can themselves embody political struggles and decisions. The legal treatment of prisoners at Guantánamo is described as placing them in an in-between status: biologically alive but deprived of ordinary legal standing, while the authorities act in a space that remains within the domain of law yet escapes its usual restrictions. These cases do not make politics and economics identical, but they reinforce the method of the parallax: examine the public form and the relations sustaining it together, without assuming that one can simply be reduced to the other.