Political and economic crisis functions, in McGowan's account, as a genuine fork in the road, open to both Right and Left with no guarantee in advance which direction a given society will take. The Great Depression produced two different answers within a few years of each other. Franklin Roosevelt's response to 1929 mobilized a form of enjoyment built explicitly around the contradiction between organized capital and ordinary citizens. In an October 1936 speech he named "business and financial monopoly" and "organized money" directly as adversaries and declared, "they are unanimous in their hate for me, and I welcome their hatred." Roosevelt did not appeal to national or ethnic identity; he located his audience on a specific side of an economic contradiction and let them enjoy occupying that side. Germany's response to the same global crisis went the opposite direction, mobilizing an ethnic-nationalist enjoyment that targeted Jews and communists as the source of the nation's economic humiliation rather than naming any structural feature of the economic system itself. Both responses count as answers to the same crisis; only one of them counts as emancipatory.

Beneath any particular crisis sits a structural feature of capitalism that Marx worked out most clearly in the unpublished Grundrisse: capital strives, by its own internal logic, toward universality — endless expansion, endless new markets — while its very structure guarantees that it can never actually arrive there. "The universality towards which it irresistibly strives," Marx writes, "encounters barriers in its own nature" that eventually reveal capital as the greatest obstacle to its own tendency. Every individual capitalist wants to pay their own workers as little as possible while wishing every other capitalist would pay their workers generously enough to become customers — a wish that guarantees the periodic crises of demand and overproduction that punctuate capitalism's entire history, not through mismanagement but through the ordinary, rational pursuit of individual advantage. The system's failure to universalize is not a bug capitalism might eventually fix. It is the mechanism that keeps capitalism running at all, since the promise of an eventually completed, frictionless universal market is precisely what keeps the whole system in motion without ever letting anyone reach it.

This gives capitalism's ideological self-defense a specific philosophical shape. The critic Mark Fisher's phrase for it is "capitalist realism": the claim that no coherent alternative to the current system actually exists. Twentieth-century communism's genuine failures get treated as proof that any egalitarian alternative whatsoever must fail, without any corresponding tally of the damage the unregulated pursuit of capital has caused in the same period. On Hegel's terms this argument mistakes a historical failure for an ontological necessity: the fact that one particular attempt to organize a society around universality collapsed catastrophically says something about how not to pursue universality. It says nothing at all about whether capitalism's endless, structurally guaranteed failure to universalize itself represents the final word on how human societies can be arranged.