Co-agency Node Dossier

Diego Giménez Vila (Daga) 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 analysis, reflections, and commentary on the readings that accompany his training and research process. His work is characterized by a defense of eclecticism and freedom of thought, understood as fundamental tools against dogmatism and as pathways for an open search for meaning.

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

Author’s Note

The following text is inscribed in an interdisciplinary approach and methodology that I intend to develop in more detail in my doctoral thesis research. A project framed within different research fields, especially in ontology, economics, cybernetics, sociology, and philosophy of technology as central axes to elaborate a renewing perspective that seeks to reflect on the socioeconomic system in which we find ourselves.

1. ONTOLOGICAL-ECONOMIC APPROACH TO ANALYZE CAPITALIST REALISM

At this point, we have been able to trace a path through the problematic that we are trying to show. However, we have not yet looked deeply at the core of the issue, since up to now we have focused on understanding the problem that concerns us and making a critique of the presumed “solutions” that surround our historical context. It might seem that during this moment our political approach is ambiguous. To leave no doubt, yes, it is. But because our greatest interest in doing this analysis is not to fit ourselves into a wing of the political spectrum, nor to seek a solution to capitalism. Moreover, that would be contradictory with respect to the theses we are showing, since it would once again reveal ignorance about the nature of capitalism. Nor do we intend to present a political or moral program about capitalism; our approach aims to be empirical and transcendental. We believe that capitalism, in its multiplicity and diversity of approaches, suffers from not being sufficiently treated from an ontological perspective. Many times, whether for political or economic interests, capitalism is treated from a harsh critique or an economic apology.

We do not want to be part of that. The fact that political consequences can be deduced from our approach does not imply that our analysis aims to be political or moral. We leave that to the mercy of each person, to do as they wish with our proposal and the ideas we convey. Actually, what moves us to understand capitalism is the inevitable fascination that its functioning exudes¹. An abstract machine of automatisms that works disturbingly well², a process that seems to go beyond our control but that in turn depends on our individual dynamics to sustain itself day after day. In reality, the urgency of our proposal comes from two fronts: 1) The myopia of left-wing perspectives in relation to the economic aspect of capitalism and their tendency towards the uncritical critique of the system’s scope and functioning.³ 2) The economicist reductionism or the absence and disinterest on the part of liberal perspectives—that is, economic right-wing perspectives—with respect to ontology in relation to capitalism.⁴

That is to say, we see the impossible marriage between the left and the right as possible as long as they know how to respect each other; there are concessions that must be made in order to understand capitalism beyond their biases. On the one hand, the left must understand that capitalism is first and foremost an economic system, although its deployment affects other regimes. This is relevant to say because many of capitalism’s critics remain anchored in Marxist economics in order to justify their repugnance towards capitalism. Ultimately, Marxist economics is to modern economics what alchemy is to contemporary chemistry.

Any proposal that seeks to understand capitalism must review its repulsion to economics and not see it as something merely chrematistic, because the reality is that, far from those prejudices, economics implies much more than “money for money’s sake.” On the other hand, the economic right, absorbed in its disinterest towards social movements or moved by the systemic inertia of not considering beyond interpreting economic reality through the lenses of cold and scientistic economics, forgets and neglects that capitalism is not merely the management and allocation of scarce resources.

Capitalism, and economics, involve human beings and their actions at all times. So ignoring or neglecting the ontological facet related to the mode of being and acting of capitalism is to eliminate the meaning of that which exceeds and implies economic theory. In reality, it is uncritically assumed that the economy closes in on itself and ends, when precisely the fundamental ontological problem of capitalism is that where the economy ends, ontology begins, and vice versa. Steven Shaviro, similarly to what we are saying, expresses the following:

Politics, ethics, epistemology, and even ontology, are all subject to a ‘determination in the last instance’ by the forces and relations of production. Or better, if ontology is not entirely determined thus, it is precisely to the extent that ontology is itself fundamentally aesthetic (Shaviro, 2017, p. 167).

Nuancing Shaviro, ontology is not subject to the forces and relations of production, but rather the forces and relations of production are subject to ontology. Ontology precedes economics, and economics is originally ontological. In this way, we believe that to understand our social reality successfully and comprehensively, we must treat it from the ontological-economic prism that pertains to it. That is why our proposal takes ontology to its core in pursuit of understanding capitalism, and not political ideology or moralism as the analytical presupposition to approach this complex phenomenon.

One of the most relevant quotes and reflections that invite us to think about the way we consider correct to understand capitalism, is precisely not understanding it as “Capitalism.” In the words of Deleuze and Guattari, “universal capitalism in itself does not exist; capitalism is at the crossroads of all kinds of formations; it is always by nature, neo-capitalism” (Deleuze and Guattari, 2020, p. 30). By definition, capitalism is always neo-capitalism; it is always modified and updated. Change belongs to it, and its mode of being is realized in constant change; it is a purely dynamic, not static, system.

Each version of capitalism implies a different way of coordinating the assemblages that sustain it. There are as many potential capitalisms as there are modes of being and feasible expressions. That is why capitalism adapts to any culture it applies itself to; it is a framework that depends only on the activation of certain axioms for its functioning. Principally, and in a general way, if private property, capital—whether through savings or debt, as in the current system—, labor, and the institutions that allow certain minimums and guarantees within legality are given, then the necessary conditions of every capitalist society are met.

However, they are not limited only to these. Constant modifications, expansions, and reformulations of propositions and axioms force multiple variations that renew and expand its characteristics, also integrating additional particularities within a global capitalist framework that connects them all. Capitalism must be understood from its pure immanence. Unlike other systems, capitalism operates through an immanence that captures all those flows running through its interior.

Never before has a system been seen that is so totalizing when it comes to organizing, creating, and distributing flows. Its tentacles are capable of reaching the most unexpected parts of the planet; like an oil stain, it expands into all human culture. Globalization is an interrelation of capitalist flows; it is a stage where the advance of capitalism over the face of the earth has expanded its national limits so much that it replicates and restructures itself in other countries, weaving a single supranational market.

Deep down, the immanence of capitalism develops from the immanence of the market. Through technology, cybernetic flows and transport flows provide access and interconnect buyers and sellers in an exponential way never before seen. Corporations become for citizens foreign traditions that are naturalized as local; cultural homogenization unfolds as an effect of capitalism’s immanence through the transmission of industries and consumption of non-indigenous goods.

If both Deleuze and Guattari, as well as Land, were so visionary when analyzing capitalism, it is because they understand it as a machinic process, as a substrate that grows and that in its exuberance is capable of transforming reality to unimagined levels. The point of the ontological analysis lies in the analysis of the internal processes of this machinery, of the dynamic gears that make it move beyond the specific entities it deals with.

As Deleuze and Guattari pointed out, capitalism is primarily a system governed by decoded flows, by movements of deterritorialization and reterritorialization and, therefore, by the production of a surplus value of flow in the unlimited reproduction of flows undetermined a priori. It does not matter which flow it has created or destroyed, it does not matter deep down which one, but it does matter how it does it and in what way it reinvents its dynamics, transferring new fluctuation circuits and restructurings of its axiomatics.

Earlier we spoke of four fundamental axioms—private property, capital, labor, and institutional minimums—however, these axioms are not the same as the axiomatics. Axiomatics rather implies the systemic capacity to create new operating algorithms that, regardless of the particular orders that sustain them, are capable of expanding new channels and new circuits while preserving the hard core of capitalism but, on the other hand, radically renewing the system by creating and destroying processes, or deterritorializing and territorializing new forms. Deleuze and Guattari express ironically:

What flexibility there is in the axiomatics of capitalism, always ready to widen its own limits, to add a new axiom to a previously saturated system! You want an axiom for wage earners, the working class, and trade unions—well then, here you are, and from now on profit will flow alongside wages, side by side, backflow and afflux. An axiom will even be found for the language of dolphins (Deleuze and Guattari, 2010, pp. 383-384).

The fundamental question about the internal processes of capitalism lies in the three aspects we mentioned: immanence, the capacity for decoding and deterritorialization—with their respective recodings and reterritorializations—and axiomatics. Far from what it might seem at first glance, the essential power of capitalism is not defined by the power of money, nor by technological power, nor by the political power that the State captures through its own apparatus.

In reality, the power of capitalism as a system lies in its flexibility. It is like the question Heidegger poses in The Question Concerning Technology, “How does this come about? Above all if we consider what essences in technology, instead of remaining spellbound merely by the technological. As long as we represent technology as an instrument, we remain held fast in the will to master it and we will miss the essence of technology” (Heidegger, 2007, p. 144).

If we reflect on capitalism instrumentally, capitalism is revealed as an unparalleled system of wealth creation. If we reflect on its essence, it is revealed to us that, from its processes, its machinery enables a capacity for unconcealment that is also unparalleled. Heidegger says that the essence of technology is unconcealment, insofar as unconcealment properly implies producing.⁵ In correlation to capitalism, systemic flexibility is what allows absolute production in all kinds of fields.

Technoscientific, economic, social, political, and cultural production. It is not that capitalism produces all this by itself, but rather that it allows the establishment of deterritorializing tools that disinhibit the formation of rigid structures, so that everything is potentially under review as long as the subject’s desire aligns with it.

Everything except capitalism, obviously, but because it acts as a meta-normative framework. The playing field is established, the rules are allowed to be modified intertemporally, and the game varies in its form and content periodically. If the concept of “capitalist realism” has stood to date as the best way to understand the reality of capitalism, it is because its way of doing so implies an ontological outcome.

The realism is due not to reality being given by objective and immutable facts, but rather that reality adapts to the mutable changes of capitalism. It is capitalism that directs the Real. Now, assuming that inexorable realism, we must move on to understand and conceptualize that dynamism that is as realistic as it is inexorable.

2. NUMERICAL CAPITALISM: BEYOND CAPITALIST REALISM

Capitalism identifies with desire to such a degree that it becomes impossible to imagine it being overcome, shamelessly addressing any impulse capable of bringing more economizable drive to its continuously multiplying productive initiatives. Whatever you desire, capitalism is the most reliable way to obtain it, while at the same time, through the absorption of every source of social dynamism, it makes change, growth, and even time itself integral components of its ever-rising tide (Land, 2019a, p. 272).

In Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari deeply explained the changes in the different sociohistorical realities from the concept of the socius. The socius implies the substrate that governs society at a given moment in history, the engine of the social machine. At first this was the earth as the ultimate substrate of the coding of the social, later it was the despot as the figure that ordered and overcoded all flows, and finally, capital as the principle that axiomaticly regulates and conjugates decoded flows.⁶ Broadly speaking, the socius implies the organizational form that operates and is inscribed in every social organization.

It refers us directly to how social reality is inscribed upon physical reality, upon the full body that breathes in a certain substantiality from its determinations. However, when Deleuze and Guattari addressed the concept of the socius, cybernetic reality was still in development and yet to crystallize. That is why, if for Deleuze and Guattari the earth, the body without organs or material reality is the immanent base from which the transcendental that operates in reality is built, now we must take into account another domain that could enrich our interpretation of capitalism.

In 2016, NATO designated cyberspace as a new domain for operations (Fuente, 2022, pp. 84-91). That is, on the same level as land, sea, air, and space. It is important to highlight this, since, although cyberspace seems, at first glance, a multiplicity of data, connections, programs, and information, in reality it is configured as a new realm of the real, with all the implications that this entails.

It is relevant because concepts like the virtual and the actual imply the ontological processes closest to cyberspace and that, in turn, Deleuze embraces as consubstantial parts of his analysis of reality. What we want to say is that, far from virtuality and actuality referring simply to operations specific to cyberspace—updating (actualizando) a web page, for example—in reality, these operate ontologically outside its limits as well.

The virtual-actual dichotomy, far from negating each other, complement each other, since both imply the real. The virtual and the actual are both modes of the real, as Pierre Lévy explains in this regard:

The virtual is not opposed to the real but to the actual. Unlike the possible, which is static and already constituted, the virtual comes to be the problematic complex, the knot of tendencies or forces that accompanies a situation, an event, an object, or any entity, and which calls for a process of resolution: actualization (Lévy, 1999, p. 11).

For this reason, although the Deleuzoguattarian concept of socius remains sincere, we would like to update it in light of the cybernetic progress that folds our entire social reality, since the virtual and the actual operate beyond cybernetics; indeed, it gets blurred in the interrelations of capitalism’s immanent processes.

That is why we can understand the capitalist system from now on as software. Social reality works through this operating system that controls and makes immanent the existing hardware. We could say this same thing with the fact that the capitalist socius controls the full body of the real.

However, we want to note the fact that currently the categories of the virtual and the actual transcend physical bodies, mere earth, or space, since now cyberspace also permeates reality. That is why, virtually, reality finds itself under capitalist systematicity, like software that adheres to physical reality or hardware that constitutes new processes of deterritorialization, reterritorialization, and, therefore, updating of the system.

The use of the virtual-actual dichotomy becomes indifferent to whether its direction is towards cyberspace or physical space, since both regimes are part of the real and both regimes are governed by processes of actualization of the real based on existing virtualities.

In the late nineties, Land already glimpsed that this barrier was dissolving from the very advances of cybernetics:

The hardware/software dichotomy succumbs simultaneously. Nanotechnics dissolves matter into intensive singularities, neutral as to the distinction between signals and particles, and immanent to its emergent intelligence; (…). ‘Even with a million bytes of storage, a nanomechanical computer could fit into a box a micron wide, roughly the size of a bacterium’ (Land, 2019a, p. 81).

If we take the capitalist system as software, as a virtual process that actualizes the real, we can better understand that reality adheres to the same program and that, in turn, it evolves from the internal processes that enable the creations and destructions that push it to update itself.

This points us to the fact that insofar as it is software, it has been installed through individual and collective practices, so that it can potentially be uninstalled and give rise to other software. A sphere, a zone, a node, an information supply chain might be destroyed; there could be all sorts of crises pointing out the holes in the software, but the software will try to re-update itself to continue circulating its flows like blood pumping from the core of the capital-heart.

As Schumpeter expressed, “the end of capitalism will be because of its own success.” However, as we expressed in previous chapters, at this moment this should not be the subject of our musings because it does not correspond to the stage of capitalism in which we find ourselves.⁷

Returning to the problem we posed at the beginning of the research. Capitalism has the irreversible capacity to produce and update structures, in a range of action and power that surpasses the ability to articulate a qualitative concept that does justice to social reality without quickly becoming outdated.

The saturation of events is real; it surpasses conceptualization. However, we can reflexively use the patches that have been applied in each update. Avoiding the conceptual inflation that points to a concrete reality, to a qualitative nomenclature, we should move to a quantitative one. Through sequential numbering based on advanced and more updated stages.

All those that stand out in their novelty and capacity to destroy and build new horizons within the system. All those events that are intense enough to lead to additions and eliminations of practices must be captured as milestones in the updating of the system’s logic.

Beyond whether one is anti-capitalist, post-capitalist, defends it, or criticizes it, we must ontologically assume Fisher’s thesis of capitalist realism as a refined way of referring to our reality. However, once we assume capitalist realism. What else is left for us to refer to the updates of capitalism? Capitalist post-realism? Capitalist meta-realism?

We must stop this now. The intellectual effort ends up becoming a parodic extension of the same thing, sponsored by reformulations and repetitions of prefixes and adjectives. After realism, there is nothing more to say in this regard; let us assume that realism and update its conditions based on the milestones that modify it.

If we look back at our era, we realize that informatics and cyberspace are so integrated into us that we cannot discern the boundary between the virtual-cyberspatial and the virtual-physical. Both form part of the real; they are not different.

Under this assumption, it would be stupid to us if a computer program, a video game, a browser, a social network, etc., completely changed its name every time it had an update. However, its update leads to a numbered patch that includes a series of new attributes it previously lacked, and in turn a total or partial elimination of certain functions that were previously considered relevant but that are now useless or obsolete.

If we are capitalist realists, we will see that there is really nothing more real than marking a serial number in the software update. Like the model of a new iPhone, a new PlayStation, the new version of Chat GPT, or any other product we can imagine.

It’s ironic if we think about it: how could capitalism produce everything it produces and not produce itself? The only way to capture this constant transmutation in an orderly and coherent manner is by understanding the layers it leaves behind like a snake shedding its skin. It’s the same snake but with a different layer. We are not going to stop calling it a snake because of that.

The mutation is faster and more intense every time. However, the hard core always remains: immanence, axiomatics, and deterritorialization and reterritorialization as the components of the purely flexible essence of the capitalist system.

Land exposes in this famous fragment the constant acceleration from the techno-capitalist tangent:

The culture of regressive suppression converges with the terrestrial singularity of collapse and accelerates across an adaptive landscape of digital technology, passing through normalized thresholds of compression in an intensive logistic curve: 1500, 1756, 1884, 1948, 1980, 1996, 2004, 2008, 2010, 2011,… (Land, 2019a, p. 75).

We are going to transfer, add, or transform his thesis on acceleration from a thesis on flexibility-expansion:

“The culture of progressive flexibility converges with the terrestrial singularity of collapse and accelerates across an adaptive landscape of digital technology, passing through normalized thresholds of expansion in an intensive logistic curve”.

Immanence in the deployment processes carries out movements of deterritorialization that push the system’s limits towards new channels, all to generate a rupture in the processes that have been overcome, being replaced by the new ones that expand progressively while the others become residual.

If we do not start right now to stop defining current capitalism under the mantle of a qualitative and partial concept, we will continually return to that disorder that irrevocably awaits conceptual oxidation.

Our quantitative proposal, as opposed to a qualitative proposal, implies starting to call the software we have described as: “Capitalism 1.0”.

Obviously, this is not because capitalism begins from this proposal, but rather it is from this proposal that we can update it from a numerical methodology. Otherwise, we would have to start doing historical revisionism and determine which number corresponds to each previous stage of capitalism.

In our opinion, this, in addition to complicating the interpretative task, ignores the interesting qualitative concepts that have shaped the understanding of capitalism in less advanced stages, since our proposal does not reject those concepts due to their theoretical rigor, but considers them cumbersome and potentially inaccurate due to the passage of time.

Now, numerical capitalism implies at its base the change of the same; it assumes change as central when understanding the functioning of the system, it does not understand capitalism through the adjectives that qualify it, but understands it from the processes that determine it.

Numerical capitalism implies an empirical-transcendental methodology because it tries to assume those ontological features of the system without distancing itself from the empirical determinations that make it what it is. For this reason, only if we understand it from this point of view will we be able to ensure an understanding that is not enclosed in a political, moralistic, or economicist perspective.

Now, the theoretical proposal tries to solve these problems by seeking to transcend the deficiencies of the qualitative ways of qualifying capitalism. All of them are necessarily assigned to and related to an author who gave birth to that way of naming our social reality.

For our part, this is completely irrelevant to us⁸, because we do not intend to seal a unique form on capitalism’s mode of being, nor do we intend our proposal to be rigid in the determinations that concern it and in the updates it proposes.

The proposal of numerical capitalism aims to be an arrow shot into the future that others will collect. If we assume that capitalism will continue for an undetermined amount of time, we must understand it in a determined way during all this time. Those who assume the determinations of this system and reflect on how this process will continue form part of the chain of actualization.

Periodically and inevitably, as long as capitalism exists, new versions will emerge: 2.0, 3.0, 4.0…

In the cybernetic terrain, we talk about Web 2.0, Windows 95 (version 4.0), Photoshop 5.0… Actually, the software numbering system sometimes also impacts a tripartite structure, for example, Minecraft 1.4.16.

However, although we leave open the possibility of generating tripartite updates with minor changes, we believe it is too specific to carry out an appropriate periodicity. We consider that numerically implementing a series followed by “x.0” allows for numerical leaps in a more orderly and generalized manner, since otherwise we would go back to adhering constant variants such as “Capitalism 2.2.4”, “Capitalism 4.22.1”,…

In those cases, it would seem that serialization, far from helping to understand the current stage, would be rather confusing. Even so, we leave open the debate on the possibility of refining the quantification process.

Now, just as updates are made based on events that determine structural changes in the internal dynamics of the system, these changes must also be governed by certain elements that impact what is truly important enough to propel a system update.

We consider that the capitalist system in its immanence comprises certain regimes that would be identified as the devices that propel the updating process. Devices that, although they belong to different regimes, are implicated in each other and often directly and indirectly impact one another.

The update could be inscribed in a new numerical leap at the moment when structural changes in the different regimes occur in a truly drastic way. In that case, we could come to assume a moment of system update.

These regimes are five:

1. Scientific-technological regime: It aggregates a series of technical and theoretical devices that modulate the system to the point of breaking with previous dynamics in a drastic way.
2. Cultural regime: It affects daily dynamics and habits, artistic currents, traditions, and other dynamic devices that are transgressed and preserved generationally.
3. Economic regime: It is the source that organizes and allocates resources in such a way that it sustains the material wealth or poverty of a system based on its internal dynamics of organization and value creation.
4. Political regime: It is the node from which the state apparatus controls and programs social reality based on measures that limit and encourage a series of practices that regulate the organization of societies.
5. Social regime: It represents the set of collective dynamics that slide from the interactions between individuals. All kinds of formations, both conflictive and of social cooperation, are the product of individual dynamics that, upon interconnection, become collective.

Each of them, ordered alphabetically, we consider affects an aspect of social reality that is as indispensable as it is decisive when pushing in a direction to modify and restructure capitalism’s internal axiomatics.

We consider that numerical capitalism has the advantage of understanding capitalist reality as a set of relations interacting in constant change. Our model is a dynamic model; it is not intended to be something fixed, neither in its presuppositions nor in its consequences.

At all times, the way of enabling or disabling functions, of understanding and explaining the processes of the capitalist system, can be modified in the same way that the updates of the very system trying to be explained can be modified.

Ultimately, this proposal seeks to systematize the chronic fragmentation of our time, a fragmentation that qualitative models tend to take a part as the whole.

We believe that numerical capitalism is necessary, not because capitalism is forever, but because, like all software, it will depend on the technological obsolescence that determines it.

Meanwhile, beyond post-capitalism, which is that new “big Other” that has been placed in the beyond of our minds, we must think about the here and now that grounds our reality.

For this reason, taking capitalist realism further will depend on understanding the realism of capitalism based on the flexibility of its adherence to constant change.

From numerical capitalism, we can calculate the changes that take place in the system and, thus, commit to the direction reality takes beyond the utopian or dystopian outcome that virtually comes to be realized.

3. CONCLUSION: NO, IT IS NOT THE END OF HISTORY, BUT NEITHER IS THERE AN ALTERNATIVE

Our theoretical proposal can be summarized in a synthesis or response to two of the great proposals of recent decades, that of Fukuyama and that of Fisher. Indeed, we believe that capitalism is not the end of history, since history does not depend on capitalism; there has been history without capitalism before and there can be history after it. Just as we consider it absurd to think of a utopian post-capitalism, we consider it absurd to believe in the permanence of capitalism by all means. In reality, capitalism potentially has the capacity to remain due to its way of adapting to change, but we cannot ensure that advanced stages of capitalism will end up not configuring something different from itself. Because, although capitalism implies adaptation and change, we do not have an a priori certainty that adaptation will someday transmute into something different from change, that its own process chains another different process from its milestones or its ruins.

On the other hand, we shouldn’t get too excited either. No, there is no alternative. If by alternative we think that things are going to change right around the corner, no. If by alternative we think that capitalism will end someday, yes, it’s quite probable. But far from seeming like an alternative, it’s rather an intergenerational process of waiting for Godot. Death will reach us before we know how, when, why, and at the cost of what capitalism will change. What is truly annoying about post-capitalist desire is not post-capitalism, it’s the desire for it. An alternative is based on deciding between A, B, C, D… But when you cannot decide, there is no alternative.

For these reasons, to have a post-capitalist desire is to have a desire for something that does not depend on you, an impotent desire; we already talked about the voluntarist fallacy earlier. No matter how much we desire it, we cannot change reality ex nihilo, ignoring the reasons that sustain it and presupposing that change must necessarily be for the better.

For the reasons we have considered throughout the essay, we believe that capitalist realism must transform into numerical capitalism to close itself off and begin an era of “post-qualitative” qualification⁹, and start with a quantitative qualification. In this way, not only will we achieve a greater understanding of our social reality in conceptual terms, but on a theoretical level we will assume the way in which our social reality operates.

As we mentioned during the research, one of the fundamental problems of calling the status quo in different ways lies in the non-acceptance of it, since it is sustained precisely in flexibility and change. It is an honest intellectual exercise to understand the reality that has been forging, is forging, and will continue to forge by accepting the determinations that are imposed ontologically.

Now, after that acceptance, each one can interpret what they desire and what it suggests to them. It can be a first step to imagine a techno-socialism, a futuristic communism, or a post-capitalism. In the same way that it can also be a source to imagine a post-state, anarcho-capitalist, or minarchist future.

We are not really interested in our proposal to debate the political and moral goodness or badness of capitalism and its near or distant futures. What interests us is to understand its functioning to be able to interpret its modes of action, its updates, its regressions, its evolutions, its creations, its destructions, and its constant movements in the direction of change.

As Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams expressed, as an adaptation to Spinoza’s famous phrase in their Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics, “we do not know what a modern techno-social body can do” (Srnicek and Williams, 2017, p. 41). It is true, we do not know, but neither should we forget the persistence of capitalism’s conatus, that is, capitalism’s effort to persevere in its being.

Bibliography

• Fisher, M. (2018). Realismo capitalista: ¿No hay alternativa? Caja Negra.

• Fukuyama, F. (1992). The end of history and the last man. Free Press.

• Land, N. (2019a). Fanged Noumena (Vol. 1; R. Mackay & R. Brassier, Eds.; R. Sanchiz, Trans.). Editorial Holobionte.

• Spinoza, B. de. (1988). Ética demostrada según el orden geométrico (V. Peña, Trans.). Alianza Editorial. (Original work published in 1677).

• Srnicek, N., & Williams, A. (2017). Manifiesto por una política aceleracionista. In A. Avanessian & M. Reis (Eds.), Aceleracionismo: Estrategias para una transición hacia el postcapitalismo (pp. 33–48). Caja Negra.