Kant, Capital, and the Prohibition of Incest

Study Notes: Nick Land’s “Kant, Capital, and the Prohibition of Incest: A Polemical Introduction to the Configuration of Philosophy and Modernity”

Core Thesis: Inhibited Synthesis and Modernity

The central concept in Land’s essay is “inhibited synthesis,” which connects Kantian philosophy, capitalist economics, and patriarchal kinship systems. This concept describes modernity’s fundamental structure – a system simultaneously engaging with otherness while controlling and restricting this engagement.

Key concepts underpinning the analysis:

Patrilineal exogamy: A kinship system where (1) descent and inheritance follow the male line (“patrilineal”), and (2) marriage must occur outside one’s own group or clan (“exogamy”). Women move between social groups through marriage, while men remain in their birth groups, maintaining continuity of identity and property through the male line. The prohibition of incest establishes this exchange of women between groups, creating alliances between otherwise separate social units.

Synthesis in Kantian philosophy: The process by which new knowledge is constructed by combining concepts with sensory intuition – adding to what we know rather than merely analyzing existing concepts. Land repurposes this term to describe cultural and economic processes involving engagement with otherness – creating new social forms through encounter and exchange.

With these concepts in mind, Land’s central thesis positions modernity not merely as a compromise between commercial organization and archaic patrilineal exogamy, but rather as “a deepening of the compromise already integral to any exogamy that is able to remain patrilineal.” Capitalism, in Land’s formulation, represents “the point at which a culture refuses the possibility – which it has itself engendered – of pushing the prohibition of incest towards its limit.”

The “disaster of world history” as Land articulates it, is that:

“Capitalism was never the progressive unwinding of patrilineage through a series of generalized exploitative relations associated with a trans-cultural exogamy, leading to an uncontrollable eruption of feminine (i.e. migrant) alterity into the father’s heartland, and thus to the emergence of a radical – or ethnically disruptive and post-patriarchal – synthesis. Instead, kinship and trade were systematically isolated from each other, so that the internationalization of the economy was coupled with an entrenchment of xenophobic (nationalistic) kinship practices, maintaining a concentration of political and economic power within an isolated and geographically sedentary ethnic stock.”

This formulation reveals Land’s fundamental critique: capitalism perpetuates itself by separating economic relations from kinship systems, allowing global trade to coexist with nationalist exclusion, thereby preventing the radical synthesis that might emerge from truly unbounded exchange.

In Land’s view, capitalism contains an important contradiction: it drives global interconnection through trade and economic exchange while simultaneously reinforcing national, ethnic, and racial boundaries that preserve existing power structures. The logic of capital demands ever-expanding markets and labour sources (a kind of economic exogamy or outward movement), yet this is countered by social and political forces that maintain strict borders and hierarchies (a form of endogamy or inward closure).

Had this contradiction been resolved differently—had the expansive, boundary-crossing tendencies of capitalism been allowed to transform kinship and social relations as thoroughly as they transformed economic relations—Land suggests we might have seen a radical disruption of patriarchal and national structures. The movement of people, cultures, and identities might have matched the movement of goods and capital, creating an “uncontrollable eruption of feminine alterity”—where “feminine” stands for the radical other that has been controlled and contained by patriarchal structures.

Instead, we got the worst of both worlds: the exploitative economic relations of global capitalism without the potentially liberating social and cultural mixing that might have accompanied it. Land thus frames capitalism not as a rupture with traditional social forms but as their preservation through transformation—a system that extends patriarchal control through new means.

Apartheid as Microcosm of Global Capital Relations

Land begins by analysing South African apartheid as a microcosm that reveals the structure of global neo-colonial order. Rather than treating apartheid as a unique or exceptional case of racial oppression, Land sees it as a concentrated expression of global capital’s fundamental logic.

The fundamental observation is that apartheid attempted to create “simultaneous political distance and economic proximity vis-à-vis the white metropolis.” This policy sought to “recast the currently existing political exteriority of the black population in its relation to the society that utilizes its labour into a system of geographical relations modelled on national sovereignty.”

The Bantustans or “homelands” policy of the South African regime attempted to create nominally independent territories for black South Africans. These territories were designed to give the appearance of self-determination and national sovereignty while ensuring that:

Black labour remained available to the white-controlled economy
Black political rights were exercised solely within these territories, not in “white South Africa”
Resistance to exploitation could be fragmented along ethnic and geographical lines

This spatial arrangement mirrors how global capital operates on a world scale:

The Bantustans policy sought to “dissociate politics from economic relations” – separating the economic relationship (labour extraction) from its political consequences (demands for rights, representation, and redistribution)
This parallels how global capital creates political distance between metropole and periphery while maintaining economic exploitation
In both cases, geographical separation serves to neutralize political resistance while preserving economic domination

Land’s central contention expands this parallel: “The Third World as a whole is the product of a successful – although piecemeal and largely unconscious – ‘bantustan’ policy on the part of the global Kapital metropolis.” The post-colonial world system, organized around formally independent nation-states in the Global South that remain economically subordinated to Western powers, reproduces at a global scale the same structure that apartheid attempted to create within South Africa.

This analysis shows how nationalism and national sovereignty in the post-colonial context function not as challenges to capitalist exploitation, but rather as mechanisms that enable its operation on a global scale. The nation-state system becomes a means of containing and managing political resistance while enabling economic extraction. By channelling resistance into nationalist frameworks, the fundamental structures of global inequality are preserved even as their formal expression changes.

The implications of this analysis is important: just as black South Africans could not find liberation within the bantustans system while leaving the overall structure intact, Land suggests that peoples of the Global South cannot achieve genuine liberation through national sovereignty alone while remaining integrated into an unchanged global capitalist system.

Marx, Primitive Accumulation, and the Infrastructure of Capital

Building on Marx’s concept of “primitive accumulation,” Land argues that capitalism’s origin is not economic but political – a violent process of dispossession that forces subsistence producers into wage labour relations.

In Capital Volume I, Marx used the term “so-called primitive accumulation” to describe the historical processes that created the preconditions for capitalist production. These included the enclosure of common lands, colonial plunder, the slave trade, and various forms of legislated violence that separated people from their traditional means of subsistence, creating a propertyless proletariat forced to sell their labour power to survive. Marx emphasized that this process was anything but “primitive” in the sense of being gentle or natural – it was, in his words, written “in letters of blood and fire.”

Land builds on this to argue that: “Despite inadequacies in Marx’s grasp of the nation state in its colonial and neo-colonial functioning, his account of ‘so-called primitive accumulation’ clearly demonstrates that the origin of wage labour relations is not itself economic, but lies in an overt war against the people, or their forced removal from previous conditions of subsistence.”

Land’s key theoretical move is to suggest that this violent origin of capitalism isn’t merely historical but structurally necessary for its ongoing operation. Primitive accumulation isn’t just something that happened in the past to enable capitalism to begin – it’s a continuous process essential to capitalism’s reproduction:

“It is the outward shock-wave of this violent process of coercion, whereby the subsistence producer is driven into the marketplace, that determines the character of the imperialist project and its offspring. Capital has always sought to distance itself in reality – i.e. geographically – from this brutal political infrastructure.”

This geographical distancing operates through a global disaggregation of political and economic systems:

“The only practical option available to the rulers of capitalist societies has lain in the global disaggregation of the political system, accompanied by a regional distortion of the world labour trading system in favour of the working classes in the metropolitan regions (‘welfare capitalism’).”

This reveals a “deep complicity” between the nation-state system and global capitalism. The nation-state isn’t opposed to global capital but is rather its necessary political form, allowing for the spatial management of exploitation and resistance. The political form of national sovereignty serves to contain and manage the resistance that would naturally emerge from an “undistorted” global labour market:

“Since it is of systematic necessity that the economic conditions of an undistorted labour market are accompanied by political crisis, the world order functions as an integrated process based upon the flow of market-priced labour into the metropolis from the Third World (on the basis of the economic form of capital production), and the export of political instability to the Third World from the metropolis (on the basis of the political form of autonomous national sovereignty).”

In Land’s analysis, global capitalism operates through a dual movement:

The economic extraction of surplus value through labor exploitation
The geographical displacement of the political consequences of this exploitation

This process of displacement constitutes what Land calls “the ultimate ‘base’ or ‘infrastructure’ of capital accumulation,” and crucially depends on systems of social control organized around “kinship” and “marriage organization” – what he terms “the sexual economy of gender and race.”

This is where Land’s analysis departs most significantly from orthodox Marxism. While traditional Marxist analysis might focus primarily on class relations, Land argues that the management of gender and racial boundaries is equally fundamental to capitalism’s operation. The control of reproduction, inheritance, and social belonging through patriarchal kinship systems provides the social infrastructure that enables the economic system to function. This is why Land insists that any analysis of capitalism must simultaneously be an analysis of patriarchy and racism.

Kant’s Philosophy as the Culmination of Bourgeois Thought

Land positions Kant as the philosophical culmination of bourgeois civilization because Kant’s thought captures modernity’s fundamental problem:

“With the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, Western cultural history culminates in a self-reflecting bourgeois civilization, because his thought of synthesis (or relation to alterity), and also the strangulation of this thought within his system, captures modernity as a problem.”

This cryptic statement requires careful unpacking. Land sees in Kant’s philosophy the perfect expression of modernity’s paradoxical relationship to otherness—simultaneously requiring engagement with the other while carefully controlling this engagement. To understand this claim, we need a deeper exploration of Kant’s epistemological revolution.

Kant’s Epistemological Framework: The Synthetic A Priori

Kant’s central philosophical contribution revolves around the concept of “synthetic a priori knowledge” – knowledge that is both given in advance yet adds to what we know. This seemingly contradictory form of knowledge parallels what Land sees as the fundamental paradox of enlightenment modernity: wanting both to learn and to legislate, to encounter the other without vulnerability.

To understand the significance of this concept, one needs to examine the philosophical landscape Kant inherited:

“Modern philosophy between René Descartes (1596–1650) and Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) is usually retrospectively understood in terms of the two basic tendencies which we refer to as ’empiricism’ and ‘rationalism’… By the time Kant wrote his first great critique, The Critique of Pure Reason, he was able to take the writings of David Hume (1711–76) as definitive for empirical thought, and those of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716) as definitive for rationalism.”

Pre-Kantian philosophy divided between:

Empiricism: Knowledge is synthetic and a posteriori (derived from experience). Empiricists like Hume argued that all genuine knowledge comes from sensory experience. Knowledge adds to what we know (synthetic) because it comes after experience (a posteriori).
Rationalism: Knowledge is analytic and a priori (derived from reason alone). Rationalists like Leibniz argued that certain fundamental truths can be known through reason independently of experience. This knowledge clarifies what is already contained in our concepts (analytic) because it precedes experience (a priori).

Kant’s revolutionary move was to break this alignment by positing a third possibility:

“Kant thought that both empiricist and rationalist philosophers had accepted the simple alignment of the synthetic with the a posteriori and of the analytic with the a priori… This assumption was not accepted by Kant, who re-aligned the two pairs of concepts in a perpendicular fashion to form a grid, thus yielding four permutations. He granted the elimination of any analytic a posteriori knowledge, but clung doggedly to the possibility of knowledge that would be both synthetic and a priori.”

This synthetic a priori knowledge concerns what Kant called the “conditions of experience” – the necessary forms that structure how we encounter objects. These include:

The forms of intuition (space and time) – the necessary structures of all sensible experience
The categories of understanding (substance, causality, etc.) – the necessary concepts for any possible experience
The regulative ideas of reason (self, world, God) – the necessary ideals that guide our systematization of knowledge

What makes these forms “transcendental” is that they constitute the universal conditions for any possible experience:

“Kant’s ‘object’ is thus the universal form of the relation to alterity; that which must of necessity be the same in the other in order for it to appear to us. This universal form is that which is necessary for anything to be ‘on offer’ for experience, it is the ‘exchange value’ that first allows a thing to be marketed to the enlightenment mind.”

The Colonial Analogy: Knowledge as Appropriation

Land’s provocative interpretive move is to read this epistemological framework as structurally parallel to colonial appropriation. Just as colonialism encounters other cultures not to learn from them on their own terms but to extract value according to predetermined forms, Kantian epistemology encounters objects not as they are in themselves but as they conform to our predetermined cognitive structures:

“Between medieval scholasticism and Kant Western reason moves from a parochial economy to a system in which, abandoning the project of repressing the traffic with alterity, one resolves instead to control the system of trade. With the overthrow of the ancien regime it became impossible to simply exclude novelty; it could only be appropriated, stamped with a constant form, and integrated into an immutable formal system.”

The medieval approach to knowledge, Land suggests, sought to exclude otherness through dogmatic assertion of established truths. The Kantian/modern approach, by contrast, engages with otherness but only on its own terms – by imposing universal conditions that strip the other of its radical alterity. The thing-in-itself (the noumenon) remains forever inaccessible, just as the colonized other in their authentic difference remains forever outside the colonial system of representation.

What Kant gives with one hand (the possibility of synthesis – of genuinely encountering and learning from the other), he takes away with the other (by insisting that this synthesis can only occur within predetermined forms). This is precisely the “strangulation” of synthesis that Land identifies as characteristic of modernity – the containment of difference within sameness, of otherness within identity.

The Three Critiques and Colonial Expansion

Land traces a development across Kant’s three Critiques that he explicitly connects to colonial expansion:

First Critique (Pure Reason): Corresponds to appropriative economy/commodification

“Where theoretical knowledge is open to a limited negotiation with alterity, practical or moral certainty is forbidden from entering into relation with anything outside itself, except to issue commands.”

Second Critique (Practical Reason): Corresponds to imperial jurisdiction

“Kant’s moral theory is an ethics of appropriative modernity, and breaks with the parochial or scriptural morality of the ancien regime… Only that is moral which can be demanded of every rational being unconditionally, in the name of an ultra-empire that Kant names the ’empire of ends’ [Reich der Zwecke].”

This imperial moral framework produces a unilateral, non-negotiable structure:

“The law is that which cannot be legitimately discussed, and which is therefore an unresponsive or unilateral imposition. It is not difficult to see that the second critique distills the xenophobic violence of the first and elevates it to the most extreme possible fanaticism.”

Third Critique (Judgment): Corresponds to war at the margins of resistance

“If the first Critique corresponds to appropriative economy or commodification, and the second critique corresponds to imperial jurisdiction, the third critique corresponds to the exercise of war at those margins of the global system that continue to resist both the market and the administration.”

The Third Critique introduces a more aggressive conception of excess:

“In the third critique there is a far more aggressive conception of excess, which generates a feeling of delight, because it is essentially extortionate. This excess is not a surplus of certainty stemming from dimensions of objectivity possessed in advance of intuition, and thus by right, but rather a surplus of purchase upon the object.”

Land summarizes the Third Critique’s imperial implications:

“Kant’s advice to the imperial war-machine in his third critique can be summarized as: ‘treat all resistance as if it were less than you might justifiably fear’. The Critique of Judgment thus projects the global victory of capitalized reason as pure and exuberant ambition.”

Inhibited Synthesis and Dual Organization

The concept of “inhibited synthesis” emerges as Land’s central framework for understanding modernity. This requires careful unpacking to appreciate its full theoretical significance.

The Concept of Synthesis and Its Inhibition

In Land’s usage, synthesis refers to encounters with alterity (otherness) that generate newness and transformation. Synthesis is the process through which different elements, cultures, or beings come together to produce something genuinely new – not merely the dominance of one over the other, but a true transformation that changes both parties. It is, in a sense, the creative potential of difference itself.

In modernity, Land argues, this synthesis is systematically inhibited – controlled, limited, and structured to maintain existing power relations. The inhibition of synthesis is the mechanism by which dominant systems engage with otherness while neutralizing its transformative potential. This allows for engagement with difference (necessary for expansion and growth) while preventing that difference from fundamentally challenging existing hierarchies and structures.

Lévi-Strauss and Dual Organization

Land draws on structural anthropology to explain how this inhibition functions, specifically invoking Claude Lévi-Strauss’s concept of “dual organization”:

“The cultural inhibition of synthesis takes a form that Lévi-Strauss calls ‘dual organization’. A dual organization arises when two groups form a closed system of reciprocal exchange, in which each consumes the rich food, and marries the women, of the other. Such organizations reproduce themselves culturally through shared myths articulated around basic dualities (day / night, sun / moon, up-river / down-river etc.).”

Lévi-Strauss analyzed how many traditional societies organize themselves through binary oppositions and reciprocal exchange systems. In these systems, two groups establish regulated patterns of exchange (of food, women, symbols, etc.) that simultaneously connect them while maintaining their distinct identities. The crucial point is that these exchanges occur within a closed system governed by rules that contain and control the interaction.

The function of the myths and rituals associated with dual organization is to “capture alterity within a system of rules, to provide it with an identity, and to exclude the possibility of the radically different.” By organizing all possible relations within a binary framework, these systems eliminate the possibility of encounters with radical otherness that might transform the entire structure.

From Anthropology to Philosophy

Land’s innovative move is to draw a parallel between this anthropological concept and Western philosophical tradition, particularly Kantian philosophy:

“It should not surprise us, therefore, that Kant inherited a philosophical tradition whose decisive concepts were organized into basic couples (spirit / matter, form / content, abstract / concrete, universal / particular, etc.).”

Western philosophy, Land suggests, has been structured by binary oppositions that function similarly to the dual organization of traditional societies – they provide a framework for containing and controlling difference within a predetermined structure. The history of Western metaphysics, with its foundational oppositions (being/becoming, form/matter, mind/body, etc.), can be read as a sophisticated version of the binary myths that Lévi-Strauss analyzed in traditional societies.

Even Kant’s attempt to overcome the limitations of previous metaphysical systems through his critical philosophy ends up reproducing this binary structure:

“One crucial symptom of this is that the structure of Kantian critique itself perpetuates the oppositional form of metaphysical thought, since its resolution of the antinomies depends upon the mobilization of further dichotomies, in particular those of transcendental / empirical, phenomenon / noumenon, concept / intuition, and analysis / synthesis.”

The fundamental problem persists: “The vocabulary that would describe the other of metaphysics is itself inscribed within metaphysics, since the inside and the outside are both conceptually determined from the inside, within a binary myth or cultural symptom of dual organization.”

This creates a philosophical trap: any attempt to think beyond dualism must use concepts that are already structured by dualism. The philosophical language available to us for thinking about difference is itself the product of a system designed to contain and control difference. This is why radical alterity – that which genuinely exceeds our conceptual frameworks – remains unthinkable within traditional philosophical discourse.

The Political Implications

The political implications of this analysis are significant. If modernity operates through inhibited synthesis – engaging with otherness only to control and neutralize it – then the global expansion of capitalism and Western institutions doesn’t represent genuine cultural exchange and transformation but rather the extension of a system designed to manage difference while preserving existing power structures.

This helps explain the persistence of nationalism alongside globalization, of cultural barriers alongside economic integration, of patriarchal structures alongside women’s formal equality. In each case, the potentially transformative encounter with difference is inhibited – allowed to proceed only to the extent that it doesn’t threaten fundamental power relations.

Anthropological Dimensions: Lévi-Strauss and Kinship Systems

Land draws heavily on Claude Lévi-Strauss’s structural anthropology, particularly his analysis of kinship systems. Key concepts include:

The prohibition of incest as the fundamental rule establishing exchange between groups
The distinction between “normal food” (consumed by producers) and “rich food” (exchanged between groups)

Land notes that:

“In The Elementary Structures of Kinship Claude Lévi-Strauss notes the frequent distinction made by various societies between normal and ‘rich food’. Normal food is consumed by its producers as a means to their subsistence, whilst rich food is given to another to consume, and received from another.”

This distinction maps onto fundamental social relations:

“The difference between rich food and normal food maps onto the difference between filiation (relation by blood) and alliance (relation by marriage). This is because rich food occupies the position of women within a marriage system regulated by patrilineal exogamy, with its producer renouncing it for himself, and thus echoing the prohibition of incest.”

Land draws a parallel between this anthropological framework and epistemology:

“What is of particular philosophical interest, however, is that it also marks a distinction between the ‘rational’ (analytic) and the ’empirical’ (synthetic), and thus defines a terrain upon which we can sketch an economy of knowledge.”

Modern capital has disrupted this traditional structure:

“Modern capital has therefore brought about a fundamental dislocation between filiation and alliance by simultaneously de-regulating alliance and abstracting it from all kinship implications. The primordial anthropological bond between marriage and trade is dissolved, in order that capital can ethnically and geographically quarantine its consequences from itself.”

This dissolution has profound implications:

“The question of racism, which arises under patriarchal capital as the default of a global trade in women (a parochialism in the system of misogynistic violence; the non-emergence of a trans-cultural exogamy), is thus more complex than it might seem, and is bound in profound but often paradoxical ways to the functioning of patriarchy and capital.”

The Politics of Purity: Fascism, Racism, and Genocide

Land draws stark political conclusions from his theoretical framework:

“The only possible politics of purity is fascism, or a militant activism rooted in the inhibitory and exclusive dimensions of a metropolitanism.”

He positions racism not as incidental but structurally necessary to global capitalism:

“Racism, as a regulated, automatic, and indefinitely suspended process of genocide (as opposed to the hysterical and unsustainable genocide of the Nazis) is the real condition of persistence for a global economic system that is dependent upon an aggregate price of labour approximating to the cost of its bare subsistence, and therefore upon an expanding pool of labour power which must be constantly ‘stimulated’ into this market by an annihilating poverty.”

This implicates capitalism in an ongoing form of violence:

“If fascism is evaded in metropolitan societies it is only because a chronic passive genocide trails in the wake of capital and commodity markets as they displace themselves around the Third World, ‘disciplining’ the labour market, and ensuring that basic commodity prices are not high enough to distribute capital back into primary producer societies.”

Revolutionary Feminism and Radical Politics

Land locates revolutionary potential in what he calls “exogamic” or “exotropic” forces:

“The forces most unambiguously antagonistic to this grotesque process are ‘exogamic’ (or, less humanistically, ‘exotropic’); the synthetic energies that condition all surplus value, and yet co-exist with capital only under repression.”

He argues for a radical internationalism:

“A radical international socialism would not be a socialist ideology generalized beyond its culture of origin, but a programme of collectivity or unrestrained synthesis that springs from the theoretical and libidinal dissolution of national totality. To get to a world without nations would in itself guarantee the achievement of all immediately post-capitalist social and economic goals.”

Land positions feminism as having revolutionary potential:

“It is this revolutionary requirement for a spontaneously homeless subversion that gives an urgency to certain possibilities of feminist politics, since the erasure of matrilineal genealogy within the patriarchal machine means that fascisizing valorizations of ancestry have no final purchase on the feminine ‘subject’.”

He elaborates on women’s potential revolutionary role:

“The patronymic has irrecoverably divested all the women who fall under it of any recourse to an ethno-geographical identity; only the twin powers of father and husband suppress the nomadism of the anonymous female fluxes that patriarchy oppressively manipulates, violates, and psychiatrizes.”

However, he criticizes what he sees as liberal or reformist feminism:

“By allowing women some access to wealth and social prestige the liberalization of patriarchy has sought to defuse the explosive force of this anonymity, just as capital has tended to reduce the voluptuous excess of exogamic conjugation to the stability of nationally segmented trading circuits.”

Land advances a controversial position on feminist revolutionary politics and violence:

“The only resolutely revolutionary politics is feminist in orientation, but only if the synthetic forces mobilized under patriarchy are extrapolated beyond the possibility of assimilation, rather than being criticized from the perspective of mutilated genealogies.”

He criticizes feminist movements for their alleged reluctance to embrace violence:

“If feminist struggles have been constantly deprioritized in theory and practice it is surely because of their idealistic recoil from the currency of violence, which is to say, from the only definitive ‘matter’ of politics. The state apparatus of an advanced industrial society can certainly not be defeated without a willingness to escalate the cycle of violence without limit.”

Land’s position on revolutionary violence is extreme:

“It is a terrible fact that atrocity is not the perversion, but the very motor of such struggles: the language of inexorable political will. A revolutionary war against a modern metropolitan state can only be fought in hell.”

Detailed Philosophic Exegesis: Kant’s System Unpacked

To fully understand Land’s argument, one must carefully unpack Kant’s philosophical system as he presents it. Kant revolutionized philosophy by reconceptualizing how we understand knowledge:

In Kant’s system:

A priori/a posteriori distinction: Knowledge is a priori if it precedes experience, a posteriori if it follows from experience.
Analytic/synthetic distinction: Analytic judgments merely clarify concepts (predicates contained in subjects), while synthetic judgments add new information (predicates not contained in subjects).
Transcendental idealism: Space and time are not features of things-in-themselves but rather forms of intuition that structure how objects appear to us.
Categories of understanding: Concepts like causality, substance, and unity are not derived from experience but imposed by the mind to make experience possible.

Land emphasizes the colonial parallel in Kant’s transcendental project:

Land sees in Kant’s epistemology the same structure that operates in colonial administration:

“With the overthrow of the ancien regime it became impossible to simply exclude novelty; it could only be appropriated, stamped with a constant form, and integrated into an immutable formal system.”

The distinction between phenomena (things as they appear) and noumena (things in themselves) becomes, for Land, the philosophical parallel to the colonial relationship:

“The paradox of enlightenment, then, is an attempt to fix a stable relation with what is radically other, since insofar as the other is rigidly positioned within a relation it is no longer fully other.”

Capitalism and the Global Structure of Exploitation

Land presents a sophisticated analysis of how capitalism operates globally through a colonial structure:

Spatial disaggregation of politics and economics

“The displacement of the political consequences of wage labour relations away from the metropolis is not an incidental feature of capital accumulation, as the economic purists aligned to both the bourgeoisie and the workerist left assert. It is rather the fundamental condition of capital as nothing other than an explicit aggression against the masses.”

Capital’s ideal of depoliticization

“After all, the ideal of bourgeois politics is the absence of politics, since capital is nothing other than the consistent displacement of social decision-making into the marketplace.”

Geographical containment of political resistance

“This ideal of total de-politicization, or the absolute annihilation of resistance to market relations, is an impossible megalomaniac fantasy, and Marx’s contention that labour trading at its natural price in an undistorted market (equal to the cost of its reproduction) will tend strongly to express an equally ‘natural’ political refusal of the market, continues to haunt the global bourgeoisie.”

Regional distortion of labor markets

Export of political instability

“The world order functions as an integrated process based upon the flow of market-priced labour into the metropolis from the Third World (on the basis of the economic form of capital production), and the export of political instability to the Third World from the metropolis (on the basis of the political form of autonomous national sovereignty).”

Nationalist Struggles and Their Limitations

Land is critical of nationalist struggles as solutions to capitalism:

“Victorious Third World struggles, so long as they have been successfully localized, do not lead to realistic post-capitalist achievements, and certainly not to post-patriarchal ones, since the conservation of the form of the nation state is itself enough to guarantee the reinsertion of a society into the system of inhibited synthesis.”

He argues that nationalism merely reconfigures the geography of exploitation without challenging its fundamental structure:

“Such nationalist struggles are relevant only to the geographical modulation of capital, and not to the radical jeopardizing of neo-colonialism (inhibited synthesis) as such.”

The problem with nationalist revolutions is that they reproduce the same patriarchal structures:

“For as long as the dynamic of guerilla war just leads to new men at the top – with all that this entails in terms of the communication between individuated sovereignties – history will continue to look bleak.”

Philosophical and Historical Analysis of Incest Prohibition

Land locates the prohibition of incest as the fundamental rule establishing cultural synthesis:

“Modernity is not merely a compromise between novel forms of commercially driven social organization and this archaic cultural pattern of patrilineal exogamy, but more fundamentally, a deepening of the compromise already integral to any exogamy that is able to remain patrilineal.”

The inhibitory function of patriarchy in relation to exogamy is key:

“It is only by understanding the inhibitive function of patriarchies in relation to exogamic dissipation (an inhibition that is supremely logical in that it conserves identity, and which is for this reason violently xenophobic) that we can make sense of capital production and its tendency towards the peculiar cultural mutation that was baptised by Mussolini as ‘fascism’.”

Land frames capitalism as a specific form of exogamic patriarchy:

“A capitalist trading empire is a developed form of exogamic patriarchy, and inherits its tensions. Domination of the other is inhibited in principle from developing into full absorption, because it is the residual alterity of the other that conditions the generation of surplus.”

The parallel with slavery illuminates this relationship:

“The parallel difference between a labour market and a slave market is based on the fact that one cannot do business with a slave (but only with a slave-owner), and similarly, one cannot base a kinship system upon a harem.”

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