Naturalization of Political Economy

The "Naturalization of Political Economy" names the ideological operation by which political economy conceals its own constitutive act of abstraction—the reduction of the living worker to a merely functional, animal-like bearer of labor-power—and presents the social arrangements that follow from this reduction (property relations, abstract exchangeability, capitalist temporality) as natural givens rather than historical constructions. The theoretical move here is paradoxical: political economy can only reduce the worker to an animal by first presupposing a specifically human capacity for self-negation, what the source text calls the "voided animal"—a subject capable of limitlessly abstracting from its own particularity. By obscuring this presupposition, political economy performs a double naturalization: it naturalizes both the abstracted worker and the social relations that the act of abstraction makes possible.

This naturalization is not merely a cognitive error or mystification in the classical ideological sense; it is a structural operation with temporal consequences. By presenting the outcomes of historical abstraction as eternally given, political economy abolishes historical time itself—the time in which things could have been otherwise—replacing it with the "eternal repetition of the natural present." This is abstraction in the Hegelian-Marxian sense taken to its ideological extreme: real abstraction (the actual stripping of the worker's particularity within exchange relations) is re-described as the mere discovery of a nature that was always already there, and thereby the dialectical negativity that produced it is foreclosed.

This concept appears in slavoj-zizek-frank-ruda-agon-hamza-reading-marx-polity-pres-2018 (p.88) and sits at the intersection of several cross-referenced canonical concepts. It is most directly an extension and radicalization of Ideology and Fetish: like commodity fetishism, naturalization operates not merely as false belief but as a practical social operation—the disavowal of the historically contingent origin of social forms. Where the Fetish analysis (cross-ref) locates the mechanism in the misrecognition of social relations as "relations between things," the Naturalization of Political Economy specifies that the deeper layer of this mystification concerns the act of reduction itself, the production of "reductive nature" by abstractive violence that then masquerades as natural discovery.

The concept is equally an extension of Abstract (cross-ref): it describes what happens when real abstraction (the production of abstract labor and abstract exchangeability) is not recognized as abstraction but taken for concrete nature. The Hegelian concept of the Abstract insists that isolation and one-sidedness are productive but partial moments to be surpassed dialectically; the naturalization of political economy short-circuits this dialectical movement by freezing the abstract moment as the whole truth. This connects to Repetition: by abolishing historical time, political economy installs the structural repetition of the same—what the corpus passage calls the "eternal repetition of the natural present"—as a stand-in for the dialectical movement it forecloses. The concept thus operates as a critique of Dialectics: naturalization is precisely the anti-dialectical move, the suppression of the negativity and historical conditionedness that dialectical thinking would expose.

Reading MarxSlavoj Žižek, Frank Ruda & Agon Hamza · 2018 (p.88)

Political economy, by obscuring its own act of reduction, naturalizes itself abstractly, producing reductive nature.

The phrase "naturalizes itself abstractly" is theoretically loaded because it holds two normally opposed operations—naturalization (the presentation of something as concrete, given, timeless) and abstraction (the production of one-sided, stripped-down determinations)—in a single paradoxical gesture, revealing that what political economy presents as nature is itself a product of abstraction; "producing reductive nature" then names the result: not nature discovered but nature manufactured through an unacknowledged act of conceptual and social violence.