PARTICIPATORY SELECTIVITY AS ONTOLOGICAL ACQUIESCENCE: A Critique of Praxis Anti-Capitalism in Advanced Capitalism

This article argues that anti-capitalist practices within advanced capitalism amount, in the main, not to structural negation but to participatory selectivity: a mode of engagement in which the subject filters forms of involvement within an otherwise unchanged systemic structure. Rather than refusing capitalism as an ontological horizon, the subject refuses only those forms of participation deemed incongruent with its avowed values. Such prac- tices therefore reproduce capitalism whilst sustaining a claim to opposition. To describe this condition, the article introduces the concept of ontological acquiescence, understood as the practical affirmation of capitalism’s structural horizon through everyday conduct, irrespective of explicit intention. Drawing upon a critical synthesis of Foucault, Marx, Lukács, Bourdieu, and Žižek, the article develops a stratified account of resistance ranging from micro-level practice to institutional transformation. It proposes two criteria for effective resistance: the institutional substitution of the system’s core functions and a scalar capacity adequate to sustain structural alternatives. Where neither condition is met, praxis anti-capitalism remains internal to the logic of the very system it claims to contest.