Process and Totality: A Review of David McNally's 'Slavery and Capitalism'

Because the new historians of capitalism do not consciously grasp the perspective from which they conduct their historical critique, how these findings cash out for those of us stuck in the nightmarish present are indeterminate. The most one can hope for reading these historians is a renewed multiracial social democratic politics that aims for a more equitable distribution of our imperial gains. But for reasons beyond the scope of this essay, such a politics is both undesirable and impossible.[14] Undesirable because it leaves unanswered what becomes of the many millions of people in Africa, Asia, and South America upon whose backs a renewed imperial machine that hardens our imperial borders and reinvigorates the privileges of citizenship would fall on. And impossible because at this stage, international capital has so exhausted itself that the possibility of a new New Deal that has a sufficient amount of profit to redistribute appears remote. Here one sees how the theoretical aversion towards necessity, or at least the assumption that necessity and contingency stand over and against one another, lead to the closure of political possibility.

well its review of book, so rather polemics than theory but