Their focus on emancipation via redistribution legitimizes capitalism and disempowers radical alternatives.

It is not simply the alliance of center-left and center-right party elites and the electorates that propel them to public office who are the culprits for imposing “socially irresponsible rule.” The radical Left and the Far Right have done their share in contracting the space of political contestation. Calls against inequality (from the left) and for safeguarding societies from troublesome incomers (from the right) share a particular logic: they help to politicize the social evils that globally integrated capitalism incurs in the terms of distribution of membership within a given social order. This prevents questioning the social order within which equality and inclusion are being sought. When social harm is thematized in terms of inclusion and equality, it misrepresents instances of what I labeled as systemic injustice in chapter 2 as relational injustice instead. In other words, problems of the model of well-being generated by the sociopolitical system are translated as problems of one’s place or inclu- sion within it. This invites remedial policies of redistribution or inclusion/exclusion rather than radically altering the rules of the game. The most disturbing example of the fallacious politiciza- tion of otherwise valid social grievances is the recourse to xeno- phobia, where political actors have used the most easily available language of political mobilization—that of hatred—to cash in on social discontent.

With the exception of environmental protest, which does indeed target the overall logic of capital accumulation (the way goods are produced, distributed and consumed), the shared myo- pia across forms of social protest and intellectual critique involves focusing attention on instances of injustice rooted in the asymmetrical distribution of economic, political, or symbolic power among actors, a practice engendering inequalities and exclusion. The logical solution, then, is to equalize power relations through redistribution and inclusion, rather than alter the very logic of social reproduction. This inability to question the political economy of capitalism and the democratic framework of politics in terms other than distribution and inclusion persists. It is well illustrated by the Occupy movement and what are now con- sidered radical calls for justice, such as “We Are the 99 Percent” and “Tax the Rich.” While anger is rightly and poignantly mobilized against the uneven distribution of advantage in our societies, it leaves the mechanisms that produce advantage unquestioned—and the whole way of life sodden with injustice for all.

The elimination of power inequalities within a system of social relations is valuable in its own right, but such efforts have tended to divert attention away from forms of domination rooted in the operative logic of the social system beyond a concern with equal- ity and inclusion within that system. This is not an unfortunate oversight that can be remedied easily. It is driven by a compelling logic: the insistence on inclusion and equality within a certain model of well-being gives that model validity and vigor. We have to value the world within which we seek inclusion and equality; the harder the struggle to achieve access and status within that world, the more we value it. In chapter 2, I referred to this conundrum as the “paradox of emancipation.” By falling into the trap of the emancipation paradox, social protest and intellectual criticism inadvertently fortify the legitimacy of capitalism, without solving the social crisis. We remain trapped in the inflammatory condition I called “crisis of the crisis.”

It is in this metamorphosis of the legitimacy relationship of current-day capitalist democracies that we find the key to the two paradoxes of the missing crisis of capitalism that I laid out in chapter 1. Capitalism avoids its legitimation crisis, even as it has violated the ground rule in its legitimation matrix of corre- lating social opportunities and risks. This is the case because the legitimacy deal—not despite, but through social protests—has gradually altered to exclude a robust social safety net. Social safety, even as it remains highly desirable, is no longer among the “political deliverables”—services public authority is required to deliver. By politicizing the roots of the crisis (e.g., a political economy that produces massive precariousness) into the frames of inequality and the menace of immigration, struggles against injustice are enabling the system not only to escape a legitimation crisis, but also to successfully co-opt the emancipatory energies of protest and thus regenerate itself. The pleading cry of the young Spanish Indignados—“We are not against the system, the system is against us”—was hardly a call for a revolution.