Co-agencement Node Dossier

Diego Giménez Vila is a PhD candidate in Philosophy at the University of Valencia, Spain. He is the creator of the YouTube channel Indagando, a space where he shares analyses, reflections, and commentary on the readings that accompany his ongoing education and research. His work is characterized by a defence of eclecticism and freedom of thought, understood as fundamental tools against dogmatism and as pathways toward an open-ended search for meaning.

• YouTube: Indagando
• E-mail: [email protected]

Author’s Note

The following text forms part of an interdisciplinary approach and methodology that I intend to develop in greater detail in my doctoral thesis research. The project lies at the intersection of several fields of research, particularly ontology, economics, cybernetics, sociology, and philosophy of technology, which serve as its central axes for developing a renewed perspective from which to reflect upon the socioeconomic system in which we find ourselves.

Abstract

This article seeks to formulate a new theoretical proposal in dialogue with established traditions of thought, while critically addressing a number of recurring conceptual shortcomings. Grounded in an ontological-economic approach to capitalism, the concept of numerical capitalism aims to foreground a series of problems that have become increasingly pronounced within cultural criticism over recent decades. Capitalism is approached here as a dynamic system, comparable to a form of software that continuously updates itself in response to shifting social, economic, and cultural conditions.

By critically reassessing previous qualitative attempts to conceptualise capitalism, the article proposes a numerical and correlative framework capable of tracing its transformations through historically identifiable milestones. Taking capitalism’s capacity for self-replication, adaptation, and structural reconfiguration as a central premise, the argument rejects a number of utopian approaches in favour of a realist perspective. Methodologically, this framework seeks to operate across the boundaries of philosophy and the social sciences, providing a transversal approach to the analysis of capitalism and its historical transformations.

Keywords: capitalism, capitalist realism, post-capitalism, postmodernity, Nick Land, Deleuze and Guattari, Mark Fisher.

1. INTRODUCTION

The proposal advanced in this study does not seek to be disruptive for the sake of disruption. Its eclecticism arises from the need to address both the shortcomings and the excesses that it seeks to remedy. Nor does it intend to reproduce the very problem it criticises. On the contrary, its purpose is to bring a particular problem into view in order to dispel uncertainties rather than generate new ones. It is an attempt to understand our social reality without filtering it through explicitly political or moral categories, even though its consequences cannot ultimately be apolitical.

This effort at clarification seeks to address a problem that is simultaneously historical, philosophical, and social. The fragmented multiplicity of our era often develops into an intricate web of nomenclatures and propositions concerning the present and the future which, rather than enduring, ultimately become yet another ephemeral product of their time. More modestly, our proposal seeks to remain valid for as long as capitalism itself endures and, since such a duration cannot be known a priori, its purpose is to situate itself at the level of what is most fundamental to the social reality of our epoch.

For this reason, the present study proceeds in several directions. It considers the problems and inefficiencies inherited from the past, examines the interpretative dislocations of the present, and, finally, proposes a way of approaching the horizon that is beginning to emerge before us.

The first section sets out the problem that grounds and motivates our proposal. As we shall see, this is an issue that appears to concern almost no one and yet substantially complicates the interpretative task demanded by our time.

The second section examines those approaches which, to date, have proved most precise in attempting to account for the sociohistorical reality of our epoch.

The third section offers a critique of recent attempts to evade the reality that is unfolding before us in pursuit of some form of redemption from our existing social conditions.

The fourth section explains the rationale behind our approach, arguing for its necessity as a means of moving beyond explicitly politicised frameworks.

Finally, we present our proposal in relation to the problems, criticisms, and circumstances that define our historical conjuncture. Through this exercise in problematisation, critique, and proposition, we seek to develop an approach capable of analysing, understanding, and distilling the various mechanisms that constitute our social reality. At the same time, we aim to enter into dialogue with —and, where necessary, move beyond— established traditions surrounding these problems, seeking to codify what is central to our present and what is likely to remain central within our horizon of possibilities.

2. THE PROBLEM

CONCEPTUAL INFLATION AND THE OVERDETERMINATION OF ADJECTIVES

From the twentieth century onwards, and particularly from its middle decades, a wide range of authors sought to explain and conceptualise the social reality taking shape through transformations of every kind under a capitalist economic structure: technological advances, cultural movements, the unprecedented rise of a middle class, mass consumption, entertainment, and much else besides.

Following the Second World War, the so-called “welfare society” consolidated itself across the West, while capitalism assumed an increasingly hegemonic role — one that would ultimately appear to be vindicated by force of events following the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Within this shifting social order, capitalism continuously restructures its internal axiomatics, operating through liberal and social-democratic societies while simultaneously accompanying the transition from disciplinary societies to societies of control. The reality of our epoch therefore depends upon a multiplicity of forms that resist straightforward conceptualisation.

Each author, writing from within a particular historical moment, has attempted to offer an account of these developments: an interpretation of the phenomena inscribed within the social reality of their time. At first sight, this appears both useful and productive. Each attempt to explain social reality may be understood as another brick in the construction of a theoretical and descriptive edifice.

Yet once we move beyond the specific contributions of those authors who, in recent decades, have approached these issues from critical, philosophical, sociological, or economic perspectives, it becomes apparent that their interpretations are often as dispersed and fragmented as the social reality they seek to explain.

At first glance, this need not constitute a problem either. Each author approaches the phenomenon from a particular perspective and develops its interpretative potential accordingly. Nevertheless, what may initially appear to be an intellectually productive theoretical exercise gradually becomes, through decades of accumulation, a considerable conceptual burden. Rather than clarifying the present, this proliferation of categories risks drawing us ever further into the fragmentation characteristic of our epoch.

To make the problem more concrete, consider the following examples:

Late capitalism, Fordism, Taylorism, post-Fordism, post-Taylorism, industrial capitalism, post-industrial capitalism, cognitive capitalism, relational capitalism, affective capitalism, surveillance capitalism, capitalist realism, advanced capitalism, immaterial capitalism, digital capitalism, attention capitalism, disaster capitalism, green capitalism, platform capitalism, financial capitalism, extractive capitalism, algorithmic capitalism, technocapitalism, technofeudalism, society of control, consumer society, burnout society, information society, society of the spectacle, affluent society, risk society, performance society, algorithmic society, dataist society, liquid society, late modernity, late-modernity, postmodernity, hypermodernity, supermodernity, metamodernity, liquid modernity, or, indeed, we have never been modern…

Many more concepts developed over recent decades could be added to this list, whether as derivatives of the above, redundant extensions, or variations according to whether they are intended to designate social, economic, or historical phenomena. The point is that if we examine them closely while temporarily bracketing the contexts that made them possible — as well as the arguments their authors provide to justify their urgency — their proliferation can at times approach the point of parody through a form of conceptual endogamy.

Moreover, these concepts develop and intertwine through endogenous variations that multiply entities as though each referred to a distinct, and sometimes even contradictory, reality. Were we able to stand outside the historical conditions that produced them, observing them as a radically decontextualised outsider might, we could easily conclude that all these “societies” were fundamentally different from one another, as though they referred to parallel universes organised around distinctive defining characteristics.

Yet the reality is that all these concepts — along with those omitted here — emerged within a period of less than eighty years. Although societies undoubtedly change, and increasingly do so at accelerated rates, it is neither plausible nor conceptually desirable for the terminology through which we describe society to change more rapidly than society itself.

In other words, the nouns and adjectives used to designate social reality reproduce and replicate themselves through variations every few decades — and sometimes every few years. They overlap and, at best, complement one another. Yet whenever an author introduces a new concept and develops the theoretical apparatus surrounding it, that concept tends to be positioned above the others, displacing from the centre whichever category had previously enjoyed greater authority or appeared more adequate to reality.

This should not be understood as a wholesale rejection of the theoretical and conceptual contributions made by these authors. In many cases, such concepts have been useful, precise, and illuminating. Their function has often been entirely necessary for the task they set themselves: explaining the changing forms of social reality at a particular stage in the development of capitalism.

Nevertheless, whether because of the evidence furnished by capitalism’s historical and socioeconomic development, or simply because Ockham’s razor can scarcely withstand shaving any more concepts from Marx’s ever-growing theoretical beard, it is necessary to place this proliferation in context and consider a more realist concept — one capable of distancing itself from previous attempts that proceed through critique, historical blindness, or denial of capitalism’s ontologically dynamic and immanent process.

Before proceeding, it is worth emphasising that many of the concepts listed above have successfully contributed to the interpretation of the social realities within which they emerged. Nevertheless, they have not all achieved the same recognition, nor have they all been equally successful, either theoretically or practically, in articulating an integrated account of the broader reality of actually existing capitalism.

For these reasons, before setting out our own position, we shall focus on two concepts that we regard as among the most significant and successful attempts to capture the core of our object of study: postmodernity and capitalist realism.

3. POSTMODERNITY AND CAPITALIST REALISM

ADVANCED STAGES OF CAPITALISM

To speak of postmodernity is almost inevitably to encounter the discomfort produced by an elusive signifier: one that gestures towards something, yet becomes engulfed in a vortex of connotations and semantic relations to the point that one is left uncertain as to whether the phenomenon it seeks to designate has ever been fully grasped. Nevertheless, postmodernity has remained one of the most powerful concepts for charting the trajectory of our historical context and identifying the volatile character of our era. The fact that the concept continues to retain currency today — albeit with a certain degree of reluctance and frequent misunderstanding — suggests that it succeeded in capturing something in both a totalising and descriptive manner, despite being especially characteristic of the 1970s and 1980s. Postmodernity has been associated with a wide range of authors and intellectual currents, linked to cultural movements, forms of artistic expression, theories of cultural criticism, and socioeconomic analyses of the cultural effects of consumer society. Numerous thinkers have been associated with the term. Jean-François Lyotard is perhaps the most widely recognised as its principal theorist; nevertheless, it is Fredric Jameson who most effectively gathers and excavates this legacy in an attempt to organise the scattered elements involved in understanding postmodernity.

One element that has always remained latent within the concept of postmodernity is its attempt to capture a specific historical period. Yet although the prefix “post-” signals an “after”, it remains unclear whether postmodernity represents the culmination of modernity or a rupture with it. It appears to designate a historical conjuncture that distinguishes itself from previous moments, as though some threshold had been surpassed. What remains uncertain, however, is precisely which boundary has been crossed and what determines this presumed structural transformation. Jameson argues that the underlying problem of postmodernity lies in its own search for change. There is a conceptual impulse to designate transformation in response to the continuous fragmentation of events. Postmodernity thus appears to be a form of time understood as a climate rather than as a chronological period. Its attempt to grasp events responds less to the identification of a historical rupture separating a “before” from an “after” than to the need to capture continuous transformation. As Jameson puts it, the theory of postmodernism is “the effort to measure the temperature of the age without the appropriate instruments, and in a situation in which we are no longer even certain that anything like an ‘age’, a Zeitgeist, a ‘system’, or a ‘current situation’ still exists” (Jameson, 2015a, p. 13).

Postmodernity therefore seeks to diagnose the sociohistorical atmosphere within which we live. It constitutes an attempt to understand a reality traversed by a conflictual temporality. This crisis of historicity is ultimately linked to the fragmentation of events: space has subsumed time as everything becomes interconnected under a single logic — that of advanced capitalism¹. The rules of the game remain the same, yet this process, rather than unifying events or providing them with narrative coherence, fragments reality into a collection of heterogeneous pieces assembled within a global economic framework. The experience of individuals under postmodernity has lost the structural narrative capable of anchoring it; paradoxically, it is precisely this absence of an external anchoring structure that permits the proliferation of heterogeneous narratives. Jameson describes this problem in relation to the experience of the subject:

The subject has lost the capacity actively to extend its pro-tensions and re-tensions across the temporal manifold and to organise its past and future into a coherent experience. It therefore becomes difficult to imagine how the cultural productions of such a subject could amount to anything more than “heaps of fragments”, or to practices of random heterogeneity, fragmentation, and contingency (Jameson, 2015a, p. 65).

The temporal distortion characteristic of postmodernity might therefore be described as a chaosmos, to borrow Félix Guattari’s term: a form of ordered chaotic interaction that displays features of both poles and is correspondingly difficult to isolate systematically. The mode of existence of postmodernity is itself asystematic, and it is precisely for this reason that attempts to constrain it through fixed schemas and patterns prove difficult. Nevertheless, as Jameson argues, the core of postmodernity lies in the fact that it appeals to a status quo dominated by late capitalism (Jameson, 2015a, p. 15). From this it follows that postmodernity, whatever else it may be, must always be understood as an advanced stage of the capitalist system and, within its particular historical climate, as the cultural dominant of this stage of capitalism.

It does not represent an entirely unprecedented condition. Rather, it constitutes a further update and modification of previous phases. On this point, Jameson criticises the almost Adamic impulse to conceptualise each historical moment as though every transformation necessarily amounted to a radical rupture with the past. Indeed, this very compulsion may itself be understood as a symptom of postmodernity. Jameson writes:

The frenzy with which virtually anything in the present is invoked as evidence of its absolute singularity and radical difference from earlier moments of human time gives the impression of a distinctively self-referential pathology, as though our complete forgetting of the past had culminated in the vacant yet hypnotised contemplation of a schizophrenic present that is, by definition, virtually incomparable (Jameson, 2015a, p. 15).

From this perspective, every cultural transformation, technological development, or unprecedented phenomenon would appear to require a corresponding transformation in the conceptual structures through which reality is described. Yet postmodernity would itself conceptually encompass this very need. The concept subsumes the dominant tone of the epoch, while its ambiguous yet expansive character allows it to incorporate a diversity of phenomena that other categories — post-industrial society, consumer society, globalisation, and so forth — tend to restrict to more specific domains. Postmodernity would therefore seek to gather together the various series of elements generated within and by late capitalism, subsuming them within capitalism’s heterogeneous capacity to organise and culturally expand its own axiomatics.

Accordingly, we argue that — as Jameson himself indicates in the title of his work — the clearest and most concise definition of postmodernity is to understand it as “the cultural logic of advanced capitalism” (Jameson, 1991). The question of postmodernity must therefore be approached through the dialectical tension between the processes of late capitalism and their cultural effects, without granting exclusive primacy to either side. Jameson responds directly to this issue in his reply to a criticism made by Featherstone:

Featherstone believes that my use of the term “postmodernism” belongs to a specifically cultural category. This is not the case and, for better or worse, it is intended to name a “mode of production” in which cultural production occupies a specific functional place, while the symptomatology of my own analysis is primarily derived from culture (Jameson, 2015b, p. 190).

Featherstone’s criticism thus rests on the assumption that Jameson reduces postmodernity to a cultural category. Yet, as Jameson makes clear, “the cultural” constitutes only one dimension of the problem. Postmodernity may designate a cultural “mode of production”, but this mode of production — a deliberately Marxian term — is itself organised by a capitalist structure that generates a particular cultural milieu and produces specific social, economic, and political effects. It is precisely this tension between culture and capitalism that produces the postmodern context.

We could continue outlining additional characteristics associated with so-called postmodernity. For present purposes, however, the elements discussed above are sufficient to highlight the point at issue: postmodernity functions both as a concept designating an advanced stage of capitalism and as a totalising conceptual instrument for understanding social reality — or, more succinctly, as “the cultural logic of advanced capitalism”.

The problem with this concept, however — as with all concepts seeking to perform a similar function — is that capitalism, understood in its ontological dimension, is a dynamic system that attaches itself to historical mutations both through its direct flows of influence and through its capacity to absorb what emerges within it, subsequently integrating these developments into its own structure. It is primarily for this reason that every qualitative concept ultimately becomes partial and historically obsolete.

In light of this problem, the second major attempt we shall examine is Mark Fisher’s concept of “capitalist realism”. Unlike Jameson and the principal theorists of postmodernity, Fisher writes more than three decades later. His analysis therefore incorporates the historical transformations produced by two of the most significant cultural, social, political, and economic events of recent decades: the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and, subsequently, the economic crisis of 2008.

Beyond other significant internal mutations that altered the structure and mode of existence of capitalist society, these two events had an enormous impact on the ideological, political, and economic reorganisation of the global order. Fisher’s analysis is therefore able to provide a more refined account of contemporary social reality while simultaneously taking to its logical conclusion something that many critics of capitalism had ignored because it represented one of their most disturbing possibilities: that capitalism may have come to stay.

In dialogue with Jameson, capitalist realism incorporates a number of key insights that extend beyond the decades in which the concept of postmodernity first emerged. As Fisher argues, postmodernity remains valid to a certain extent and performs a function broadly comparable to capitalist realism in several respects². Yet the concept does not fully correspond to the problem Fisher seeks to update. Regarding Jameson’s analysis, Fisher writes:

What I call capitalist realism could indeed be subsumed under the rubric of postmodernism and postmodernity as theorised by Jameson. And yet, despite Jameson’s immense and clarifying contribution, the concept of postmodernism remains contested; its meanings, simultaneously useful and useless, are multiple and unstable. I would even argue that some of the processes described and analysed by Jameson have intensified and become chronic to such an extent that they have undergone something resembling a qualitative transformation (Fisher, 2018, pp. 28–29).

Fisher moves away from the concept of postmodernity in favour of capitalist realism for two principal reasons. First, as already noted, capitalist realism emerges in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet bloc and incorporates its ideological consequences on a global scale. Capitalism, as Fukuyama argued with varying degrees of accuracy, establishes itself as the only viable alternative. Other possibilities are perceived as undesirable because “actually existing socialism”, as Fisher puts it, has already demonstrated the limits of its historical trajectory. There is therefore no longer any real or nominal alternative to capitalism: “what we are confronting now, instead, is a more generalised and deeper sense of political exhaustion and sterility” (Fisher, 2018, p. 29).

Second, Fisher assumes that the horizon upon which capitalism now operates has been cleared and secured in its favour. Generations born from the 1990s onwards have grown up without any genuinely viable alternative within their political imaginary. Capitalist reality is consequently accepted as given and, in the absence of credible alternatives, as preferable by default. As Fisher writes, “one way of understanding what is specifically realist about capitalist realism is through its presumption that it no longer believes in the big Other” (Fisher, 2018, pp. 78–79).

Capitalist realism therefore takes hold insofar as a fundamentally different form of socioeconomic organisation has become increasingly difficult to imagine. Capitalism permeates every layer of reality, while this condition is simultaneously normalised through the apparent naturalness of what is already given. If Fisher’s concept succeeds, it is because the current stage of capitalism appears to have reached a point of no return — a threshold that earlier critiques often refused to acknowledge in favour of radical transformations and revolutionary speculation. Today, however, meaningful transformations can only occur within capitalism’s own tentacular structure rather than through an actually existing and radically external alternative.

4. ANTICAPITALISM AND POSTCAPITALISM

MIRAGES OF DESIRE

When Jameson and Žižek formulated the striking proposition that “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism” (Fisher, 2018, p. 2), what is implicitly revealed is that any ecological or sociopolitical catastrophe is, in the final instance, a problem immanent to capitalism rather than transcendent to it. Rather than nature threatening us from some external outside, it is precisely this outside that different anticapitalist and postcapitalist positions long for. The reality is that these are problems of capitalism: internal to its processes, produced by its dynamics, and ultimately constituted as challenges arising within its own limits³. Thus, rather than threatening material reality as such, they threaten capitalist reality, and it is for this reason that the system’s internal mechanisms deploy different modes of intervention in order to address, through new measures and transformations, what had previously been implemented but has since become obsolete.

The principal problem affecting left-wing critiques in recent years is that their neo-Marxist nostalgia has prevented them from adapting to the transformations and updates described above. The restructuring of capitalism’s internal axiomatics is considerably more powerful and adaptive than the revolutionary aspirations periodically revived from one generation to the next — the “spectre of communism” recalled by Jacques Derrida. This does not mean that Karl Marx is necessarily obsolete. Rather, Marxist critique must be filtered and contextualised as one reading and one critique among others, since social reality has changed radically since Marx, and several premises long accepted dogmatically have subsequently proved false.

Ideas such as the theory of exploitation — grounded in the erroneous objective theory of value inherited from Adam Smith and David Ricardo — or the supposed predestination of communism have, in this respect, done more harm than good, insofar as some continue to accept them today through an appeal to authority rather than through a critical examination of the assumptions upon which they rest. It is in this context that Nick Land offers a critique that is as severe as it is incisive. In his role as an enfant terrible, his disruptive capacity and ideological promiscuity allow him to provoke both a reactionary right and a neo-revolutionary left.

The discomfort generated by Land’s thought must be understood against the difficulty of gaining legitimacy on the left within an increasingly sociopolitically polarised world. Ultimately, Land is the left’s guilty pleasure, because anyone willing to confront the programmatic implications of his ideas must reconsider those dust-covered axioms that have lost much of their force in the present. Such ideas may remain intellectually powerful as readings, but their correlation with contemporary reality often approaches the level of superstition. Landian accelerationism therefore articulates a critique that necessarily unsettles the socioeconomic creed of the left, inviting a reconsideration of its foundations and providing a starting point from which to rethink the assemblages sustaining progressive thought.

In the short text Critique of Transcendental Miserablism, Land sharpens one of his most uncomfortable criticisms in relation to the issues discussed above. First, he argues that anticapitalism is dead, or at least that the aspirations traditionally attached to it amount to little more than an exhausted reverie: a collection of revolutionary ambitions that today survive largely as imaginary narratives seeking, once again, to seize control of reality by fixating upon the possibility of producing change.

The problem here is not the presumed intention to seek a better world, but rather an ignorance of the internal dynamics of the capitalist system and a rigid belief that negating the only currently viable alternative will necessarily produce something both practically superior and normatively more desirable. Anticapitalism, rather than functioning as an aspiration, would thus reveal itself as a pathology of denial: a refusal to accept certain dynamics that have become necessary. They are not necessary because they are definitive, but because the historical trajectory itself continues to move in the direction of capitalism. Land writes:

There will probably never cease to be a fashionable anticapitalism, but all of its versions will sooner or later pass away, while capitalism, identifying itself ever more closely with its own self-overcoming, will always remain the ultimate novelty. The “means” and “relations” of production have emulsified into decentralised competitive networks under numerical control, rendering the paleomarxist hope of extracting a postcapitalist future from the capitalist machine increasingly unimaginable. Machines have sophisticated themselves beyond the possibility of socialist utility and, in the process, have embodied the mechanics of the market within their nano-assembled interstices, evolving through quasi-Darwinian algorithms that construct hypercompetition within “the infrastructure”. It is no longer merely society, but time itself, that has taken “the path of capitalism” (Land, 2019a, p. 273).

Land’s point is that this path has become increasingly sedimented and its direction progressively consolidated. Far from leaving the rails, the capitalist train appears ever more firmly established upon them. This is not to suggest that capitalism will constitute the final direction taken by the future of the species. It does, however, appear to be the only trajectory likely to continue over the medium and long term when one surveys the present horizon of possibilities.

Anticapitalism, for its part, will almost certainly continue to exist as a system of belief. At best, it will continue to generate novel, critical, and perceptive perspectives. Yet we must remember that such positions always operate as a shadow, as the negation of the thesis, as capitalism’s antithesis. If A exists, non-A must also exist. If capitalism exists, its negation must exist as well.

There is, however, a considerable conceptual leap between recognising the necessity of the negation of A — as a logical necessity — and believing that a revolutionary or synthetic outcome will actually emerge to dethrone A. Such a belief implies a failure, whether conscious or unconscious, to recognise what capitalism actually is. The necessary explanation of this point will be reserved for the following section.

With this in mind, it becomes apparent that, since the emergence of accelerationism in Land and of capitalist realism in Fisher, anticapitalism has struggled to formulate a programme that is genuinely realistic in proposing a viable alternative trajectory. Nevertheless, in dialogue with these authors, a number of thinkers have in recent years developed tentative projects of transcendence or adaptation oriented towards the possibility of a postcapitalist future.

So-called left accelerationism, in contrast to Landian accelerationism — which does not negate the process but rather intensifies it — has gained prominence particularly through authors such as Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams, above all through their well-known Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics. Unlike many earlier positions, Srnicek and Williams establish a genuinely productive line of debate by rethinking the role of the traditional left and abandoning those aspects whose former political vitality has visibly faded.

Unlike previous proposals, for example, Srnicek and Williams make certain concessions to capitalism and seek to begin from some of its achievements in order to identify a possible line of flight. They acknowledge that capitalism has generated advances that may be considered indispensable⁴ and which could provide the momentum for a long-awaited postcapitalist future. In their words:

Accelerationists want to unleash latent productive forces. In this project, the material platform of neoliberalism does not need to be destroyed; it needs to be repurposed towards common ends. The existing infrastructure is not a stage to be demolished, but a launching platform towards postcapitalism (Srnicek & Williams, 2017, pp. 40–41).

The accelerationism proposed by Srnicek and Williams therefore attempts to move beyond straightforward anticapitalist negation. In seeking a non-capitalist future, they accept the historical necessity of capitalism while regarding it as a grotesque period from which what is useful may be extracted before the system itself is discarded once conditions allow. Their accelerationist aspirations locate redemption in technology, which is expected to provide the means through which the problems associated with capitalism may eventually be resolved and capitalism itself transcended.

Another significant feature of Srnicek and Williams’s position is their defence of economic calculation⁵ and their critique of authoritarian centralisation, two characteristics that distinguish them from earlier socialist projects. They write:

We must establish a collectively controlled vertical authority alongside distributed and horizontal forms of sociality, so as to avoid becoming slaves either to a totalitarian and tyrannical centralism or to a capricious emergent order escaping our control. The authority of the Plan must be assembled with the improvised order of the Network (Srnicek & Williams, 2017, p. 44).

Thus far, as we have seen, Srnicek and Williams’s accelerationist project appears not only innovative but also critical of a number of previous models and political programmes. Indeed, they argue that “sectarianism is the death sentence of the left just as much as centralisation is, and in this respect we continue to welcome experimentation with different tactics (even those with which we disagree)” (Srnicek & Williams, 2017, p. 44). Ultimately, the search for an escape valve from capitalism makes their concessions to capitalism itself a means towards achieving a postcapitalist objective.

Nevertheless, despite being a fresh and intellectually stimulating programme, Srnicek and Williams’s accelerationism encounters a number of problems that remain difficult to resolve. Some of these were identified by Franco “Bifo” Berardi:

The accelerationist hypothesis is founded upon two central points: the first is the assumption that accelerating the cycles of production makes capitalism unstable; the second is the claim that the potentialities contained within the capitalist form are destined necessarily to unfold. The experience of our time contradicts the first assumption: capitalism endures because it does not require rational government, only automatic governance, and also because it has no desiring body, since it is an abstract system of automatisms. (…) The second assumption radically underestimates the obstacles and limitations that obstruct and distort the process of subjectivation. The immanence of the liberatory form — the immanence of communism, if one prefers, or the immanence of the autonomous unfolding of the general intellect — implies the possibility of such an unfolding, but it does not imply its necessity (Berardi, 2017, pp. 74–75).

Berardi’s observations are correct: throughout its history, capitalism has demonstrated an apparently limitless capacity to capture, absorb, and reconfigure itself. Any deviation or modification within its system, rather than functioning as an amputation, tends to operate as a mutation — the transformation of what is no longer functional and the deployment of new forms.

Likewise, the potential for forms contained within capitalism to unfold does not imply the necessity of their unfolding. We may take Berardi’s critique one step further: the unfolding of capitalism’s forms and potentialities constitutes an effect of capitalism itself, since capitalism is simultaneously the producer and intensifier of those very effects.

From a realist perspective, it is difficult to see why capitalism would necessarily remove itself from the equation when it is itself the motor of the transformative processes that have produced the very effects being sought — even when those effects are pursued through capitalism only for capitalism subsequently to be negated. The problem with the postcapitalist perspective, then, is that it ultimately displaces anticapitalist aspirations and sublimates postcapitalist desire into a hypothetical future in which capitalism will supposedly no longer be necessary.

The slogan of postcapitalism might therefore be formulated as follows: “We cannot do it today, but one day we will.” This should not be misunderstood as a claim that capitalism will never end, that a postcapitalist society will never emerge, or that no absolute transformation of social reality as we know it will ever occur. On the contrary, it is highly probable that one day there will indeed be an “after capitalism”. If a radical transformation of the system occurs for reasons that remain unknown to us, the prefix “post-” will necessarily be realised.

Yet imagining such a scenario as if it constituted an available political horizon neglects both the problems of the present and the objectives that structure presently feasible social reality. Postcapitalism today remains an exercise in futurology. To refuse capitalist realism necessarily entails its antithesis: the embrace of an anti- or postcapitalist idealism.

A number of additional questions must also be considered. The provision of a minimum income, for example, as Srnicek and Williams correctly argue, will become necessary in a world in which human labour is increasingly replaced by automated labour. This scenario is not merely plausible but is likely to become unavoidable if current technological trends continue.

What remains problematic, however, is the substantial argumentative leap involved in assuming that the disappearance of human labour would necessarily entail the end of capitalism. Srnicek and Williams do not fully develop this claim, and perhaps cannot do so because the future cannot be predicted in this manner. We cannot assume that the end of human labour will automatically produce the end of capitalism, because doing so would also require us to presuppose the disappearance of capital and private property.

These two foundational axioms of capitalism would, under such conditions, lose what might be considered their third pillar: wage labour, understood as labour performed by human beings. Yet far from eliminating the first two pillars, automation and the amplification of capital accumulation could increase production to unprecedented levels. A priori, there is no clear reason to assume that private property and capital would disappear simply because labour became automated.

The principal challenges would instead concern how money is distributed and how increasingly pronounced economic inequalities are addressed, while private property and the cycle of capital investment could remain firmly in place. The spectre of Marx and the expropriation of the means of production can nevertheless be discerned in the background of the postcapitalist proposal. Srnicek and Williams implicitly presuppose a postcapitalism without private property, as becomes apparent when they suggest the “redirection” of existing infrastructures towards collective ends.

The principal problem with this position is that, as occurred in previous socialist experiments, the abolition of private property would risk rendering social organisation bureaucratic, authoritarian, inefficient, and deficient in innovation. Moreover, Srnicek and Williams appear to contradict themselves when they defend both economic calculation and decentralisation, since these two social technologies are themselves products of private property and capitalism.

By eliminating private property, we eliminate the spontaneous possibility of determining prices according to supply and demand and, as a consequence, also undermine the possibility of decentralisation. A decentralised system cannot function without a price mechanism capable of regulating changes in demand and the scarcity of desired goods. This would return us to a scenario in which a central authority determines how much of each good should exist, how it should be produced, what should be produced, where it should be located, and ultimately what individuals should be doing at any given moment. Friedrich Hayek formulates the problem as follows:

Planning, in the strict sense of the term as used in contemporary controversy, implies central planning: the direction of the entire economic system according to a unified plan. Competition, by contrast, implies that planning is decentralised among many individuals. (…) Determining which of these systems is more efficient will depend, fundamentally, upon which makes fuller use of existing knowledge. This, in turn, depends upon whether we are more likely to succeed in placing at the disposal of a single central authority all the knowledge that ought to be used but is initially dispersed among many different individuals, or in transmitting to individuals the additional knowledge they require in order to adapt their plans to those of others (Hayek, 2022, p. 96).

The fundamental economic problem, closely related to the problem of economic calculation, is that in complex societies knowledge is dispersed across the minds of individuals. Their aspirations, desires, projects, preferences, ideas, and other forms of knowledge are distributed across persons, and no one knows better than individuals themselves what they desire and what they know.

Unless some Orwellian Big Brother were to emerge, equipped with future technologies capable of determining at every moment the optimal decision each of us ought to make, resources cannot be allocated, supply cannot be accurately forecast in relation to demand, and individual preferences cannot be anticipated without producing systemic inefficiencies. Nor would an Urstaat capable of controlling every millimetre of our actions and thoughts through technology necessarily constitute a desirable outcome.

The postcapitalist project is therefore difficult to imagine as viable unless it is understood as the symptom of a process of creative self-destruction taking place within a *hyper-*advanced stage of capitalism itself. Until such a transformation occurs, every postcapitalist reverie remains a reformulation or restructuring of a concealed anticapitalism confronted with the apparent impotence generated by the historical trajectory itself.

Postcapitalism, if and when it arrives, will necessarily emerge through a mutation of capitalism’s own structures and therefore as a violent and immanent evolution produced by capitalism’s own rearticulation — as though it constituted a final update.

Those who might detect in this argument a naturalistic fallacy, insofar as capitalism is supposedly granted a necessary permanence, should note that no such claim is being made. The fact that capitalism currently is in a particular form does not mean that it ought to remain in that form. On the contrary, it will transform. Likewise, those who argue that the fact capitalism is does not entail that it ought to be are entirely correct. Capitalism neither is nor will necessarily be the end of history so long as historical change persists, and we cannot establish a priori that capitalism must always remain the motor of historical transformation.

What we can identify, however, is what may be termed the voluntarist fallacy: “If something could be otherwise, then it must be possible for it to become whatever we decide it should be.” In other words, reality cannot be reshaped at will merely through the possession of postcapitalist desire. It can only be transformed within the determinations made possible by the contingencies and necessities surrounding us, and according to the desires and incentives that themselves determine historical action.

For this reason, taking capitalist realism to its fullest implications means understanding capitalism not as destiny, but as a historical necessity within the present stage of our existence as a species. Only by accepting and confronting this condition can we properly articulate the function and necessity of numerical capitalism.

References

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