06 ISSUE X
FEBRUARY 2026
FEBRUARY 2026
the dialectic of wealth
Wealth shapes the economy in both the fetishistic and real senses, and therefore also political subjectivity. Revolution is only completed through its social destruction.
By Ryder Glickman
The self-understanding of wealth naturalizes the very conditions that initially produce variations across societies. Wealth has come to denote different symbols, cultural expressions, and economic realities. The creation of social meaning and its concrete expressions operate through an objective process of reproduction that governs society as a whole. This operation exists on a global scale, outwardly mediated by, and within, the appearance of a national form, which projects differentiation through its abstract self-understanding, expressed through borders, law, citizenship, and race; all of which are themselves a mystification. Common to the emergence of all contemporary nations is a binding logic behind their creation, or gravitational force, which produces an inescapable universalism of differentiation.
Image by Hans Eiskonen, via Unsplash.
Wealth is co-constituted by its two elements, the ideological and the material.
To understand wealth through ideology is to accept its existence as an independent entity, separate from actual conditions. This is a fundamental condition of its self-understanding and logic. The metamorphosis of capital allows the transmutation of wealth into vast forms of appearance and ideology, making it at once a form of irrational social domination defined by our own subjectivities. The autonomy of wealth in this ideological conjecture produces a methodological violence in which the world ex-ante is mechanical, autonomized, and devoid of the social realities that created it. This is found in neoclassical economic textbooks, where economic agents are purely rational and “utility maximizing,” fundamentally incapable of being racialized populations under colonial occupation, forced to seek employment in the informal sector, or immigrants engaged in unfree labor at an ICE detention facility. Wealth here is produced by the impersonal financial matrix, which denies humanity to the wretched of the earth. Wealth appears as a prediction market that projects whether Trump will bomb Iran within the coming month. Wealth appears as the ability to command global supply chains, freight, and industrial parks in Ethiopia to meet your consumption preferences. Wealth appears as the ICE deportation agent using his wages to flip Airbnb’s in hopes of becoming a member of the rentier class. Wealth here can only be conceived of as independent, self-acting spheres with no concrete origin. The cycles of capital accumulation mirror our own subjectivities, as we mirror its habits and internalize its logic to the point where we can no longer understand it as something external.
Wealth cannot be separated from the nation and the colony. Adam Smith conceived of the WEALTH OF NATIONS, thereby placing definite territorial boundaries on the beneficiaries of wealth. The nation-state becomes a unit of account. It homogenizes class relations, positing formal equality between all economic agents, structures, and persons before the law, producing an abstract personhood that reflects the relations of production in a value-producing society. Wealth emerges from the co-constitution of class and nation. John Locke held that “[i]n a country not furnished by mines, there are but two ways of growing rich, either by conquest or commerce.” The colony is only present in the background of the writings of the “classical political economists”; the colony itself did not speak. The “colony” and its population were viewed as an appendage to the nation's wealth, an external factor divorced from the actual creation of wealth. This is a delusion integral to capital's self-understanding. It does not know its own origins. Wealth is inconceivable without the colony. Wealth is produced in the colony, but it does not remain in its whole; what remains is its mirror effect, its absence, and its concentration, a cumulative process and relation of perpetual under-development. Capital transmits itself throughout history, retroactively justifying both its creation and its destruction.
The colonial process seeks to rupture temporality by producing a linear tract of historical development. Mirroring the expansion of capital, projects eternal meaning and existence upon the conditions it wishes to produce, which can only come into existence through a moment of violent imposition. Much like capital, colonialism operates and functions as an end in itself. The colony and capital contain within themselves the seed of their own destruction. Thus, there is a dialectic between the colony and wealth that is constantly reproduced, reflecting the mandates of accumulation in a given historical period. In other words, the polycentric functioning of the global capitalist system determines both the abstract ideology of wealth, disseminated through informational and communication technologies, reinforced through international cultural and social interactions, and concretely enforced through exploitation and the destruction of the earth.
The forces of supply and demand generated in New York mediated by the money-form translate into the violent dispossession of agricultural producers in South America, the massacre of Palestinians, and the destitution of millions into a slow death driven by Western consumption. Dead labor, the blood, sweat, and dreams of generations embodied into capital, characterizes the colonial present. The cessation of nominal colonialism sanitizes the image of capital. In the era of formal colonialism, the transfer of wealth was outwardly apparent; wealth was drained. The colonial present is cast in the shadow of its nominal past.
Central to this narrative is the discourse of development. The development of Western capitalism, of the world system, and of the capitalist mode of production itself is impossible without the colony. The polarizing nature of capital, occurring on a global scale, projects a world split into two: the civilized and the barbarians. The systemic underdevelopment of a nation is projected onto its people; nation, race, and class become inseparable. One is poor because they are of a nation, and one is racialized because they are of a nation. Global ecological breakdown occurs simultaneously with an immense increase in demand for energy and resources. The expansion of wealth for some must fundamentally require the denial of wealth to the majority of the global population. The downstream intergenerational outcomes of colonial exploitation are mystified in favor of racial mythologies. The Imperial destruction of what is often its colonial inventions, third-world borders, infrastructures, and state capacities, has produced the mass movement of millions. This is articulated in the West as “the barbarians are at the gate.” The colonial present is a cumulative process, entrenched in the eulogy of global development.
Wealth shapes the economy in both the fetishistic and real senses, and therefore also political subjectivity. This is the dialectic of national liberation and resistance informed by the reproduction of wealth. Revolution is driven by its absence, shaped by its concentration and distribution, and declared victorious through its seizure. Revolution, though, is only completed through its social destruction.
Ryder Glickman is completing a BA-MA in Economics at the New School.