Mechanism and Chemism

Mechanism and Chemism is a concept drawn from Hegel's Logic and redeployed in the source (slavoj-zizek-frank-ruda-agon-hamza-reading-marx-polity-pres-2018) to diagnose the specific ontological structure of capitalist "second nature." In Hegel's objective logic, mechanism designates a mode of relation in which objects exert force on one another externally, without interiority — things behave as if driven by blind necessity, their ends not their own. Chemism, by contrast, names a mode of relation in which heterogeneous substances are drawn together by an affinity or attraction that dissolves their independent self-subsistence into a new compound — a bonding force that is not yet freedom but is no longer merely mechanical push-and-pull. Freedom, for Hegel, supervenes only when the concept becomes its own ground, sublating both mechanism and chemism. The theoretical move here is to argue that capitalism short-circuits this dialectical progression: rather than allowing mechanism and chemism to be aufgehoben into freedom, the capitalist political economy fixes them as a permanent composite structure. Labor — which ought to be the site of purposive, self-determining activity — is reduced to mechanical movement (abstract, repetitive, un-spontaneous), while money functions as the chemical bond, the affinity-force that holds these denuded labor-units together and keeps the reduction in place. The result is a social totality that simulates organic cohesion (through the chemism of the money-form) while delivering only the blind compulsion of mechanism.

This composite — capitalism = chemism + mechanism — is therefore not a neutral description of productive forces but an indictment: it names the specific way in which capitalist relations arrest the dialectic at the level of abstract, un-free nature, converting what should be a transitional moment (mechanism as precondition of freedom) into a self-reproducing terminus. The worker becomes a purely mechanical "second-nature being," stripped of subjective ends, while money as chemical power "grounds and keeps together" this reduction, supplying the appearance of social connection without any genuine intersubjectivity or freedom. The concept thus articulates the ontological structure of alienation in the register of Hegel's philosophy of nature rather than his philosophy of spirit.

Within slavoj-zizek-frank-ruda-agon-hamza-reading-marx-polity-pres-2018, Mechanism and Chemism functions as a precise ontological specification of several canonical concepts that the corpus treats more broadly. It is most directly an elaboration of Second Nature: capitalism is "naturalized produced and perpetuated reductions" — a fabricated order that presents itself as inevitable natural law. The mechanism/chemism composite explains how second nature achieves this naturalization: by freezing the dialectical movement at a pre-freedom level of Hegel's Logic, capitalism installs natural-necessity where social freedom should emerge. The concept is equally a specification of Alienation: where the canonical treatment locates alienation in the subject's subordination to the signifying chain of the Other, here alienation is mapped onto the logical categories of Hegel's objective sphere — laborers are alienated not merely socially but ontologically, reduced to "abstract objective mechanical movements," which resonates with the corpus's account of Abstract labor as the stripping of human content from work.

The concept also illuminates the Fetish and Jouissance axes of the corpus. Money operating as "chemical power" recalls the fetish as the binding element that veils lack while keeping the circuit running — here, money's chemism is the social glue that holds the reduction together, just as the fetish holds the desiring economy together by covering a void. The reduction of workers to mechanical movements, generating surplus through blind repetition, aligns structurally with the account of Jouissance as the drive's satisfaction in its own repetitive, purposeless circuit — capitalism extracts a kind of surplus-jouissance from the very mechanism it imposes. The concept is neither a simple extension nor a critique of these canonicals but a Hegelian-logical restatement of them: it translates Marx's political-economic critique into the vocabulary of Hegel's Logic of Objectivity, revealing capitalism's ontological structure as a arrested dialectic rather than merely a social injustice.

Reading MarxSlavoj Žižek, Frank Ruda & Agon Hamza · 2018 (page unknown)

capitalist nature (the naturalized produced and perpetuated reductions) can be understood as composite of mechanism and chemism: a chemical power grounding and keeping together the reduction of laboring subjects to abstract objective mechanical movements: capitalism = chemism + mechanism.

The phrase "chemical power grounding and keeping together the reduction" is theoretically loaded because it assigns money a precise Hegelian-logical function — not mere exchange medium but the affinity-force (chemism) that actively sustains the ontological reduction of subjects to "abstract objective mechanical movements"; the algebraic formula "capitalism = chemism + mechanism" then crystallizes the argument that capitalism is structurally defined by the arrest of the dialectic at a sub-freedom level, foreclosing the sublation into genuine self-determination.