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: dagaindagando@gmail.com

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.

Abstract

The following article aims to elaborate a new proposal, in dialogue with tradition, starting from a critique of certain theoretical vices. Based on a model grounded in an ontological-economic approach to capitalism, numerical capitalism seeks to highlight certain problems that have worsened in the cultural critique of recent decades, addressing capitalism as a dynamic system, comparable to software that continuously updates itself to adapt to changing social, economic, and cultural conditions.

By criticizing previous qualitative attempts to conceptualize it, a numerical and correlative approach is proposed to record its transformations through historical milestones. Assuming the inevitable flexibility of capitalism to self-replicate and adapt, various utopian perspectives are rejected, attempting to approach a realistic perspective that is methodologically transversal to philosophy and the social sciences.

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

1. INTRODUCTION

The proposal we intend to make in this research does not claim to be disruptive out of arbitrariness. Its eclecticism is the fruit of the need for understanding based on the shortcomings and excesses it aims to remedy. In turn, it also does not intend to fall into the problem it criticizes; on the contrary, its intention is to show the reality of a problem in order to clarify doubts rather than create new ones. It is an attempt to understand our social reality without the political and moral filter, although its consequences inevitably cannot be apolitical.

However, its attempt at clarification seeks to resolve a historical, philosophical, and social problem. The fragmentary multiplicity of our era often becomes a web of nomenclatures and proposals about the present and the future that, instead of enduring, end up being another ephemeral product of our time. Humbly, our proposal aims to remain as long as capitalism endures and, since we do not know that information a priori, its function and intention seek to settle on the most essential aspects of the social reality of our time.

That is why this research points in different directions. It observes the problems and inefficiencies of the past, observes the interpretative imbalances of the present, and, finally, proposes a way to approach the horizon glimpsed in the future.

In the first chapter, we attempt to pose the problem that sustains and encourages our proposal. This problem, as we will see, seems to concern no one but, nevertheless, hinders the interpretative task of our time.

In the second chapter, our mission is to present the best methods that, to date, have been the most precise when trying to determine the sociohistorical reality of our time.

In the third chapter, we carry out a critique of the recent attempts to dodge the reality that occurs in pursuit of a redemption of our social reality.

In the fourth chapter, we will try to expose the reasoning behind our approach, pointing out its necessity in order to escape explicitly politicized approaches.

Finally, we will show our proposal in relation to the problems, critiques, and situations that arise around our historical conjuncture. From this exercise of problematization, critique, and proposition, we intend to unfold an approach that is optimal for analyzing, understanding, and distilling the different gears that make up our social reality. In addition to trying to dialogue with and overcome tradition regarding certain problems, seeking to encode what is central to our time and what will continue to be so in our horizon of possibilities.

2. PROBLEMATIC

CONCEPTUAL INFLATION AND OVERDETERMINATION OF ADJECTIVES

Since the last century, and especially in the middle of it, a great diversity of authors have tried to explain and allude to the social reality that has been forging through social changes of all kinds under a capitalist economic structure. Technological advances, cultural movements, the unprecedented rise of a middle class, consumption, entertainment, and a long etcetera.

After the Second World War, the so-called “welfare society” emerged in the West and capitalism assumed a hegemonic role; a role that would ultimately prove right by force after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. In this shifting society, in constant restructuring of its internal axiomatics, under the pretext of liberal and social democratic societies, and also in the transition from disciplinary societies to societies of control. The reality of our time depends on a multiplicity of forms that are difficult to conceptualize.

Each author, in their respective moment, has tried to provide a version of events, an interpretation of the phenomena that are inscribed in the social reality of our times. At first, this might seem useful and beneficial. Each attempt to explain social reality as a brick with which to build a theoretical and descriptive building.

However, when one reflects beyond the specific work of each of these authors who in recent times have shown a critical, philosophical, sociological, or economic perspective, one will realize that their visions are as dispersed and fragmented as the social reality they try to explain.

At first glance, this shouldn’t be a problem either, since each author approaches the phenomenon and analyzes it by posing and deploying their interpretative power. However, what at first might seem like an interesting theoretical pastime, over the years ends up becoming a heavy burden of accumulation, which far from clarifying ends up sinking us deeper into the fragmentation of our era.

To be more specific about what we are explaining, let’s give concrete 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, extractivist capitalism, algorithmic capitalism, techno-capitalism, techno-feudalism, society of control, consumer society, burnout society, information society, society of the spectacle, society of abundance, risk society, achievement society, algorithmic society, dataist society, liquid society, late modernity, postmodernity, hypermodernity, supermodernity, metamodernity, liquid modernity, or, we have never been modern…

We could continue citing many more concepts from recent times, whether they are derived from these, redundant extensions, variations depending on whether they relate to the social, the economic, or the historical… The point is that if we look closely at all of them and omit the context that makes them possible—and the explanations that the authors show to justify their urgency—we could say that they even border on parody due to inbred reproduction.

Furthermore, they develop and intertwine into endogenous variables that multiply entities as if they all pointed to different realities, sometimes even contradictory ones. If we were on the margins of the reality that forged them, observing as if we were a decontextualized alien, we would most likely believe that all these societies we mentioned are different from each other, as if they referred to parallel universes where essential characteristics are championed at the center of their facade.

Now, the reality is that all these concepts—and the omitted ones—have been created in a period of less than eighty years. Although we know that society changes constantly and at increasingly accelerated rates, what is not compatible, nor should it be, is that the ways in which we refer to society change faster than society itself.

That is, the nouns and adjectives that point to a social reality reproduce and replicate with variations in a matter of decades or five-year periods, overlap with each other, and in the best of cases complement each other. However, when an author points out a new concept and all the explanation surrounding it, they position their concept above the rest, removing from the center the one that until then enjoyed greater respect or adequacy to reality.

We also do not want it to seem that we are criticizing the conceptual and theoretical contributions of all these authors. Not only do we consider that in many cases they have been useful, precise, and clarifying, but their function has been necessary for what they were trying to do: explain the changing mode of social reality at a given stage of capitalism.

Now, whether due to the evidence occurring in the historical and socioeconomic development of capitalism, or because Ockham’s razor can no longer bear to remain unshaven against all these concepts growing like hairs on Marx’s beard, we must put into context and consider a more realistic concept that moves away from previous attempts that operate from critique, ignorance, or historical denial of the ontologically dynamic and immanent process of capitalism.

Before continuing, we want to emphasize that many of the aforementioned concepts have successfully participated in the task of understanding the social reality that surrounded them. Despite this, not all concepts have marked or received the same recognition, nor have they practically and theoretically been capable of articulating a joint vision of the global image of actually existing capitalism.

For these reasons, before showing our view on the matter, we want to focus on two of the concepts that we consider the most important and successful attempts when trying to capture the core of our object of study. These are the concept of “postmodernity” and that of “capitalist realism.”

3. POSTMODERNITY AND CAPITALIST REALISM

ADVANCED STAGES OF CAPITALISM

When speaking of postmodernity, one cannot help but feel the discomfort typical of a vaporous signifier, a signifier that points towards something but, upon subsuming itself in a vortex of connotations and semantic relations, finds itself cornered by the doubt of fully understanding what it shapes. Even so, the concept of postmodernity has been one of the most powerful in announcing the trajectory of our context and determining the volatile sense of our era. The fact that it still holds validity today—albeit with some reluctance or possible misunderstandings—is a sign that it was able to capture something in a totalizing and descriptive way, despite being especially characteristic of the seventies and eighties of the last century. The concept of postmodernity has been associated with different authors and currents, paired with cultural movements, modes of artistic expression, theories of cultural critique, or socioeconomic analyses about the cultural effects of consumer society. Different authors are linked to this label, Jean-François Lyotard perhaps the most recognized for being its father; however, it is Fredric Jameson who best collects and excavates this legacy to try to order the scattered pieces in the attempt to understand the concept of postmodernity.

An element that has always been latent in the concept of postmodernity is the attempt to historically capture a specific period. However, although the event signaled by the prefix “post-” in postmodernity is an “after,” it is still not entirely clear whether postmodernity is a culmination or a break with modernity. It seems to be a historical conjuncture that differentiates it from other moments, as if there were an overcoming with respect to something. Nevertheless, it does not become clear what limit has been crossed and what dictates this presumed structural change. Jameson analyzes that the underlying problem of postmodernity is the search for change born of itself. There is a conceptual intention to point out a change in the face of the continuous fragmentation of events that occur; it would seem that postmodernity is a time in the sense of a climate, rather than a time in the chronological sense. Its attempt to capture events obeys an attempt to capture continuous changes, rather than being a culminating moment that splits a “before and after” in history. Jameson says that the theory of postmodernism is “the effort to take the temperature of the age without instruments and in a situation in which we are not even sure there is so coherent a thing as an ‘age,’ or Zeitgeist or ‘system’ or ‘current situation’” (Jameson, 2015a, p. 13).

Thus, postmodernity attempts to diagnose the sociohistorical environment in which we live; it is an attempt to understand our reality that is traversed by a conflicting temporality. At the end of the day, this crisis of historicity is related to the fragmentation of events; space has subsumed time by interconnecting everything under the same logic: that of advanced capitalism¹. The rules of the game are the same, and this process, far from unifying and giving a narrative coherence to events, rather fragments reality into a set of mixed pieces united in a global economic framework. The experience of individuals in postmodernity has lost a structural narrative that holds it; it is the very act of holding onto itself that allows the multiplicity of heterogeneous narratives. Jameson comments on this problem concerning the subject’s experience:

The subject has lost its capacity actively to extend its pro-tensions and re-tensions across the temporal manifold and to organize its past and future into coherent experience, it becomes difficult enough to see how the cultural productions of such a subject could result in anything but ‘heaps of fragments’ and in a practice of the randomly heterogeneous and fragmentary and the aleatory (Jameson, 2015a, p. 65).

Thus, the temporal distortion of postmodernity could be referred to as a chaosmos, as Félix Guattari pointed out with this concept, a sort of ordered chaotic interaction that presents features of both poles and that, in turn, can hardly be systematically isolated. The mode of being of postmodernity is unsystematic, and it is precisely why its attempt to bind it through schemes and guidelines is difficult. In spite of this, as Jameson mentions, the core of postmodernity lies in the fact that it appeals to a statu quo starred by late capitalism (Jameson, 2015a, p. 15). From this it derives that postmodernity, whatever it may be, will always be an advanced state of the capitalist system and, in its epochal climate, it settles as the cultural guideline of this stage of capitalism.

It is not an absolute novelty but, rather, a subsequent update and modification to previous phases. On this point, Jameson criticizes the Adamic need to conceptualize every moment as if every change implied a radical historical change; it would seem that this very fact would also be a symptom of postmodernity. Jameson exposes in this regard:

The frantic appeal to virtually anything in the present as testimony to the latter’s uniqueness and radical difference from prior moments of human time indeed strikes one as housing a distinctively autoreferential pathology, as though our utter forgetfulness of the past exhausted itself in the vacant but mesmerized contemplation of a schizophrenic present that is, by definition, virtually incomparable (Jameson, 2015a, p. 15).

In this way, it would seem that every cultural change, every technological advance, or unprecedented phenomenon had to generate a change in the formal structure that makes us reference reality. However, postmodernity would conceptually welcome the very fact of having this need. Postmodernity subsumes the tone of the era and its ambiguous but broad character gathers the diversity of phenomena that perhaps other categories—post-industrial society, consumer society, globalization, etc.—tend to limit to a specific field in what they point out. The concept of postmodernity would try to agglutinate the diverse series of elements generated in and by late capitalism, subsuming them in its heteroclite capacity to organize and culturally expand its own axiomatics.

Consequently, we believe that—as Jameson expresses in the title of his work—the clearest and most synthetic definition that records the phenomenon of postmodernity would be to understand it as: “the cultural logic of advanced capitalism” (Jameson, 1991). So we must understand the question of postmodernity through the dialectical tension between the processes of late capitalism and its effects on culture, without attributing exclusive preponderance to either of both parts. Without going any further, Jameson answers a criticism of this assumption:

Featherstone thinks that the use I make of the term ‘postmodernism’ belongs to a specifically cultural category. This is not the case and, for better or worse, it is designed to name a ‘mode of production’ in which cultural production finds a specific functional place and whose symptomatology proceeds above all from culture in my work (Jameson, 2015b, p. 190).

Therefore, the criticism made by Featherstone occurs when assuming that Jameson tries to reduce postmodernity to a cultural category; however, as Jameson indicates, “the cultural” is only a part. Postmodernity would be “the mode of production” of culture but, in turn, this mode of production—a Marxist term consciously chosen—obeys a capitalist structure that produces a cultural broth generating specific effects at a social, economic, and political level. It is precisely this problematic surrounding culture and capitalism that generates the postmodern context.

We could continue exposing certain characteristics of the so-called postmodernity, however, for basic and explanatory purposes the elements we mentioned highlight what we want to notice: the concept of postmodernity as an advanced stage of capitalism and, also, a totalizing conceptual tool of social reality, or, as “the cultural logic of advanced capitalism.”

Now, the problem with this concept—like the rest of the concepts that try to fulfill this function—is that capitalism, understood from its ontological dimension, is a dynamic system that adheres to historical mutations both by its direct influence flows and by the absorption of what happens within it and what it ends up integrating into itself. It is for this reason mostly that any qualitative concept ends up being partial and obsolete.

In light of this event, the second attempt we will analyze is the so-called “capitalist realism” of Mark Fisher. Unlike Jameson and the authors of postmodernity, Fisher writes more than thirty years later. Fisher integrates into his vision the historical change brought about by two of the most important cultural, social, political, and economic phenomena of recent decades: the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and later the economic crisis of 2008.

Beyond other internal mutations of interest that modify the structure and mode of being of capitalist society, the reality is that these two phenomena have a colossal impact in terms of ideological, political, and economic reassignment on the global board. That is why Fisher’s analysis is capable of integrating a more polished vision of social reality and, at the same time, taking to its ultimate consequences what many critics of capitalism have ignored because it is one of their worst nightmares: that capitalism has come to stay.

In dialogue with Jameson, capitalist realism would gather certain key ideas that would go beyond the decades that gave birth to the concept of postmodernity. As Fisher exposes, the concept of postmodernity is in a certain way valid and fulfills a similar function in some aspects to that of capitalist realism². However, its form does not quite fit with the problematic it tries to update. Fisher argues about Jameson the following:

What I am calling capitalist realism could effectively be subsumed under the rubric of postmodernism as theorized by Jameson. And yet, despite Jameson’s heroic and clarifying work, the concept of postmodernism remains contestable; its meanings, both appropriate and useless at the same time, are multiple and fluctuating. I would even want to argue that some of the processes described and analyzed by Jameson came to be aggravated and become chronic in such a way that they also underwent a kind of change in nature (Fisher, 2018, pp. 28-29).

Fisher renounces the concept of postmodernity in pursuit of capitalist realism mainly for two reasons. First, as we said, the idea of capitalist realism assumes behind it the fall of the Soviet bloc and its ideological consequences on a global scale. The capitalist model, as Fukuyama exposed with greater or lesser success, imposes itself as the only alternative. Any other alternative is recognized as undesirable, since “actually existing socialism,” as Fisher exposes, has already run its course. Now, there is no real or nominal alternative to capitalism, “what we are dealing with now, instead, is a deeper, far more pervasive, sense of exhaustion, of cultural and political sterility” (Fisher, 2018, p. 29).

Secondly, Fisher assumes that the horizon upon which capitalism now settles is virgin and victorious for itself. The generations born since the 1990s have grown up without a truly valid alternative in their imaginary. This reality is assumed as given and as preferable in the absence of alternatives: “One way to understand capitalist realism, in what is specially realistic about it, is through its presumption to no longer believe in the big Other” (Fisher, 2018, pp. 78-79).

The concept of capitalist realism settles in as much as a different form of socioeconomic organization is not imaginable, capitalism permeates all layers of reality and, in turn, this fact is normalized by the naturalness of the given. If Fisher is right with this concept, it is because the current stage of capitalism has reached a point of no return, a point that was previously denied in pursuit of radical changes and revolutionary speculations. However, today changes can only occur in the very tentacular structure of capitalism, not in a real and radically different alternative.

4. ANTI-CAPITALISM AND POST-CAPITALISM

MIRAGES OF DESIRE

When Jameson and Žižek asserted the powerful phrase “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism” (Fisher, 2018, p. 2), it subliminally shows us that any kind of ecological or sociopolitical catastrophe is ultimately an immanent problem to capitalism, not transcendent. Far from appearing that nature threatens us from an outside, it is the outside that is yearned for by the different anti-capitalist and post-capitalist stances. The reality is that these problems are problems of capitalism, internal to its processes, produced by its dynamics and ultimately challenges established within its boundaries³. So far from threatening material reality, they threaten capitalist reality; for these reasons, the internal mechanisms of the system will put their different action devices into place to resolve through measures and changes what had been implemented in the past but has now become obsolete.

The biggest problem with left-wing critiques in recent years is that their neo-Marxist nostalgia has not allowed them to adapt to the changes and updates we mentioned. The new structuring of the internal axiomatics is much more powerful and adaptive than the revolutionary pretensions that are revived generation after generation; the “specter of communism” that Jacques Derrida reminded us of. This does not mean that Karl Marx is necessarily obsolete, but that Marxist critique must be sifted and contextualized as just one more reading and critique, among others, since social reality from Marx to the present has mutated radically and even different premises that for a long time were dogmatically believed have proven false.

Ideas like the theory of exploitation—sustained by the erroneous objective theory of value of Adam Smith and David Ricardo—or the predestination of communism have done more harm than good, since to this day some still take them as certain due to a fallacy of authority rather than a critical examination of the assumptions that support them. It is to these effects that Nick Land not only establishes a critique as harsh as it is accurate, but in his stance of enfant terrible through his disruptive capacity and his ideological promiscuity he is capable of disgusting both the stale right and the neo-revolutionary left.

The discomfort of his thought must be viewed in the light of the difficulty of earning the respect of the left in an increasingly sociopolitically polarized world. At the end of the day, Land is the guilty pleasure of the left because anyone who is honest with the programmatic scope of his ideas must review those dusty axioms that currently have lost steam, ideas that are still powerful in their reading but whose correlation with reality currently remains at the level of superstition. That is why Landian accelerationism reflects a critique that forcefully shakes the leftist socioeconomic creed, an invitation to reflect on its foundations, and a starting gun to rethink the assemblages that sustain the ideas of progressivism.

In the brief text Critique of Transcendental Miserabilism, Land sharpen one of the most uncomfortable critiques regarding what has been discussed. First, Land remembers that anti-capitalism is dead, or at least that the pretensions that anti-capitalism has are nothing more than an extinct daydream, a bunch of revolutionary pretensions that currently are nothing more than imaginary narratives seeking, once again, to take control of reality through their fixation on the possibility of bringing about change.

The problem with this is not the presupposed intention of the search for a better world, but the ignorance of the internal dynamic of the capitalist system and the rigid belief that the denial of the only viable alternative will be both better in practice and more desirable in its effects. Anti-capitalism, more than an aspiration, would reveal itself as a pathology of denial in the face of the non-acceptance of certain dynamics that become necessary. It is not that they are necessary because they are definitive, but that they are necessary because they remain in the direction of capitalism. Land says in this regard:

There will probably never cease to be a fashionable anticapitalism, but all its versions will pass sooner or later, and capitalism, identifying itself ever more closely with its own self-overcoming, will always be the ultimate novelty. The ‘means’ and ‘relations’ of production have emulsified into decentralized competitive networks under numerical control, clearly rendering unimaginable the paleo-Marxist hopes of extracting a post-capitalist future from the capitalist machine. Machines have sophisticated themselves beyond the possibility of socialist utility, and in the process have incarnated market mechanics within their nano-assembled interstices, evolving through quasi-Darwinian algorithms that construct hyper-competition within ‘the infrastructure’. It is scarcely society anymore, but rather time itself, that has taken ‘the capitalist road’ (Land, 2019a, p. 273).

The point Land makes is that the path is increasingly sedimented and the direction is set. Far from going off the rails, the train of capitalism shows itself increasingly firm and routed. We are not saying that this will be the last of the directions taken in the future of the species, but it is the only one that will continue in the medium and long term when one observes the horizon of possibilities.

For its part, anti-capitalism virtually as a belief system will always continue. In the best of cases with novel, critical, and astute perspectives. However, it should be remembered that these always operate as a shadow, as the negation of the thesis, as the antithesis of capitalism. If A exists, non-A must exist. If capitalism exists, its negation must exist.

Now, there is a big leap between believing in the necessity of the negation of A—as a logical necessity—to believing that a revolutionary or synthetic outcome will occur to dethrone A. This thought implies not recognizing, consciously or unconsciously, what capitalism really consists of. We will reserve the due explanations for the next section.

Having said the above, it is clear that since the birth of accelerationism from Land and the capitalist realism of Fisher, anti-capitalism has hardly managed to raise its head when it comes to exposing a program that is truly realistic when adopting a plan that leads us to a different path. However, in dialogue with these authors, other thinkers in recent years have developed some attempts at overcoming or programs of adaptation to the possibility of a post-capitalist future.

The so-called left-accelerationism, in opposition to Landian accelerationism which does not deny the process but amplifies it, has gained presence especially from authors like Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams, especially through their well-known Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics. Unlike many of the previous positions, Srnicek and Williams really establish a line of debate of great interest by changing the role of the traditional left and hanging up their boots in those aspects that are known today to have lost the shine they once had.

For example, unlike other previous proposals, Srnicek and Williams make certain concessions to capitalism and seek to start from some of its achievements to try to find a line of flight; they recognize capitalism for having achieved advances that are assumed indispensable⁴ and that will serve as an impulse for the much-desired post-capitalist future. In the words of the authors:

Accelerationists want to unleash latent productive forces. In this project, the material base 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 launchpad towards post-capitalism (Srnicek and Williams, 2017, pp. 40-41).

In this way, the accelerationism promoted by Srnicek and Williams tries to give a twist to mere anti-capitalist negation. In the search for a non-capitalist future, they accept the necessity of capitalism but try to see it as a grotesque period from which to extract what is of interest and discard it when possible. Accelerationist aspirations see redemption in technology; this will be the means that in the future will allow solving the problems associated with the capitalist system and through which it will be transcended.

Other notable aspects are that Srnicek and Williams defend economic calculation⁵ and criticize authoritarian centralization, two features that make them stand out from the socialist projects of yesteryear. In this regard they express the following:

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

Up to here, as we have been able to observe, the accelerationist project of Srnicek and Williams reveals itself not only as renewing but also as critical of different previous models and projects. Without going any further, the authors will say that “sectarianism is the death knell of the left as much as centralization, and in this regard we continue to welcome experimentation with different tactics (even those with which we disagree)” (Srnicek and Williams, 2017, p. 44).

At the end of the day, the search for an escape valve to capitalism makes its concessions to capitalism the means to achieve the post-capitalist goal. However, the accelerationism of Srnicek and Williams, despite being a fresh and interesting program, falls into certain unsolvable problems. Some of them pointed out by Franco “Bifo” Berardi:

The accelerationist hypothesis is founded on 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 in the capitalist form are destined to unfold necessarily. The experience of our time belies the first assumption: capitalism resists because it does not need rational government, only automatic governance, and also because it does not have a desiring body, since it is an abstract system of automatisms. (…) The second assumption completely underestimates the obstacles and limitations that hinder and pervert the process of subjectivation. The immanence of the liberating form (the immanence of communism if you will, or the immanence of the autonomous deployment of the general intellect) implies the possibility of this deployment, but does not imply its necessity (Berardi, 2017, pp. 74-75).

The points raised by Berardi are true; capitalism has demonstrated throughout its history a limitless power when capturing and reconfiguring itself. Any kind of slip or modification in its system far from being an amputation turns out to be a mutation, a change in what is no longer useful and a deployment from its new forms.

In the same way, the potential for deployment of the forms contained in capitalism does not imply the necessity of their deployment. We will take the critique further than Berardi: the deployment of the forms and potentialities of capitalism turn out to be effects of itself, being itself the producer and enhancer of said effects.

Being realistic, it is difficult to think of the necessity for capitalism to step out of the equation starting from the fact that it is the engine of the transformation processes that have given rise to the effects that are sought—even if they are sought through it and then the aim is to deny it—. In light of this question, the problem with the post-capitalist vision is that deep down it slips anti-capitalist pretensions and sublimates post-capitalist desire into a future in which it will be possible not to need capitalism.

The motto of post-capitalism could be the following: “Today we cannot, but someday it will be possible.” We do not want to be misunderstood; we do not believe that there will not be an end to capitalism, a post-capitalist society, or an absolute remodeling that changes our social reality as we know it. Moreover, we believe that quite possibly someday there will be an “after” capitalism. Necessarily if there is a radical change in the system for unknown reasons the prefix “post-” will be realized.

However, the mirage that imagining this scenario entails totally neglects the current problems and the objectives that mark feasible social reality, because post-capitalism today is futurology. Not wanting to assume capitalist realism, necessarily implies the antithesis: assuming an anti/post-capitalist idealism.

In addition, we must also consider other important questions. On the one hand, universal basic income, as rightly defended by Srnicek and Williams, will be a necessary reality in a world where human labor is replaced by robotic labor. This scenario is not only plausible but will be an inevitable reality if we review technological trends.

Now, we find a real argumentative leap in the belief that due to the fact that human labor could be extinguished, capitalism must necessarily be put to an end. This is not developed by Srnicek and Williams and I fear it is not because one cannot predict the future in that way. We cannot presuppose that a scenario like the end of human labor will lead to the end of capitalism, because in that case we also presuppose the end of capital and private property.

These two foundational axioms of capitalism would see their third leg broken: wage labor, that is, labor performed by humans. However, far from the first two legs breaking, automation and the amplification of capital gains would increase production to levels never seen before. A priori there is no element that shows that private property and capital will disappear through the automation of work.

The challenges will rather be focused on how money will be distributed and how booming economic inequalities will be combated, but regarding private property and the investment cycle of capital it would continue to be present. The specter of Marx and the expropriation of the means of production can be glimpsed at the bottom of the proposal. Srnicek and Williams are assuming, covertly, a post-capitalism without private property; they show it when they insinuate the “repurposing” of infrastructures in favor of the collective.

The main problem with this is that, in the same way as happened in previous socialist experiments, by eliminating private property, social organization would become bureaucratic, authoritarian, inefficient, and devoid of innovation. In addition, Srnicek and Williams contradict themselves by advocating for economic calculation and decentralization, since these two social technologies are the fruit of private property and capitalism.

By eliminating private property we eliminate the spontaneous possibility of determining prices based on supply and demand, and as an effect of this we are also eliminating the possibility of decentralization. We cannot organize ourselves decentralized without a price system that regulates changes given in the demand and scarcity of desired products. This would lead us, again, to a scenario in which a central authority would control how much, how, what and where there has to be of everything and, also, what individuals must do at every moment. Regarding this problematic Friedrich Hayek exposes the following:

Planning, in the strict sense of the word, in contemporary controversy implies central planning, the direction of the entire economic system according to a unified plan. On the other hand, competition means that planning is decentralized among many separate persons. (…) Determining which of these systems is more efficient depends mainly on the question under which of them we can expect that fuller use will be made of the existing knowledge. This, in turn, depends on whether we are more likely to succeed in putting at the disposal of a single central authority all the knowledge which ought to be used but which is initially dispersed among many different individuals, or in conveying to the individuals such additional knowledge as they need in order to enable them to dovetail their plans with those of others (Hayek, 2022, p. 96).

The fundamental economic problem, which is related to the economic calculation problem, is that in a complex society individuals have knowledge totally dispersed in the minds of each of them. Their aspirations, desires, projects, tastes, ideas… all those knowledges are distributed in each person, and nobody better than themselves knows what they desire and what they know.

Unless there were an Orwellian Big Brother that through future technology knew at every moment what the best decision is that each of us must make, we cannot allocate resources, forecast supply in relation to demand, and guess people’s preferences without entering into systemic inefficiencies. Besides the fact that we do not believe it would be desirable for an Urstaat to control every millimeter of our actions and thoughts thanks to, or, because of technology.

The post-capitalist project is unviable to imagine if it is not taken as a symptom of a process of creative self-destruction by an *hyper-*advanced stage of capitalism. Meanwhile, any kind of post-capitalist daydream is nothing more than a reformulation or restructuring of a veiled anti-capitalism in the face of the impotence of the path history is following.

We must point out that post-capitalism, if it arrives and when it arrives, will always be due to a mutation of its own structures, and therefore, as a torn and immanent evolution due to its own rearticulation, as if it were a final update.

Those who might believe that in our words there is a presumed naturalistic fallacy when assigning capitalism a need for permanence, we remind you that we are in no way defending such a thing. Furthermore, that capitalism is this way, does not mean it must be this way. On the contrary, it will transform. But also to whoever says that capitalism is, it does not mean it ought to be. We also tell them it is true, capitalism is not and will not be the end of history as long as change exists, and we cannot assure a priori the necessity that the engine of historical change will always be given by this system.

Now, what we can assure is what we can call the voluntarist fallacy: “That a thing might not be so implies that then it must be able to be the way we decide.” That is to say, we cannot modify reality at our whim simply by having the post-capitalist desire. We will be able to modify reality based on the determinations we can assume in the course of the contingencies and needs that surround us, and based on the desires and incentives that determine us.

For this reason, taking capitalist realism to its ultimate expression is assuming it not as destiny, but as a historical necessity in the current stage in which we find ourselves as a species. Only through this assumption and commitment will we be able to affirm the function and necessity of numerical capitalism.

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