Post-capitalist anxieties
I never wanted to position myself as an intellectual or as a “vanguardist” of my own political anxieties. But it is difficult not to think more about such questions, and to unpack them in a more structured way, after reading a book like Mark Fisher’s Post-Capitalist Desire.
I wrote a light review of the book here, only skimming the surface of its themes and speaking much more about the author and his importance both in anti-capitalist circles and in the development of new “philosophical” lines in a world where philosophy as a science is already — at least in theory — exhausted and extinguished by the various discussions and lines it created, enjoyed, and dried up.
Here, what I really want is to touch on my interpretations of the themes the book presents and how I deal with them. And also, why not think about plans of action? After all, I think one of the things Fisher would have proposed in his unpublished book, Acid Communism, is precisely the turn that would make thinkers and readers get out of their chairs and go after practical things. Not only limited to what is known as the infamous praxis, but also in the search for more concrete solutions to the endless problems we love spending our time analyzing, unpacking, and criticizing without thinking of ways out of them that are not the commonplaces of “organization,” “union activity,” “activism,” and so on.
Post-capitalist desire
Honestly, questions of desire and longing do not interest me much personally. But I admit this is much more a matter of personality, and even conditioning, as someone who came from the chronic poverty of a “third-world” country, than a sign that the subject is not important.
Because in Fisher’s lectures, and in the texts analyzed on the subject, “desire” is seen as something capitalism is very good not only at satisfying, but also at producing. Who does not feel fulfilled when buying things on Amazon or TEMU? Even if that fulfillment is only a tiny little “I did it!” when your bank balance drops in a not-so-significant way in exchange for something you had desired for a few days, weeks, or even months.
In a post-capitalist world, how would this be satisfied? But at the same time, what post-capitalist world would we actually have?
I will say right away that I am terrible with citations when I am writing freely like this, but I can certainly go back to the text and turn those citations into something concrete. Still, one of the texts from Fisher’s first lecture — Inventing the Future, by Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams — in the aforementioned book discusses precisely the four alternatives we have in an eventual post-capitalism, from the most negative to the most positive.
And in none of them is it easy to see “desire,” whether inherent or provoked by social and economic conditioning, being fulfilled as easily as it is in the capitalist world.
We can always talk about that hierarchy of needs, which many believe to be pseudoscience, but which is still a minimal basis for discussions about desires and longings. And, once again returning to chronic poverty, it is very difficult to feel the tiny but very important happiness of buying some random little thing on Amazon when one is hungry, thirsty, or sleepy.
One does not replace a primary need with something as secondary as online shopping. At least not in theory. In practice, I do not doubt that this is something already well studied and within the realm of possibility, especially in “more” capitalist countries where basic needs are basically taken as given and/or satisfied through diets poor in nutrients but rich in calories.
But does an economic and political system develop solely around “desires”? And what “desires” are these? The individual desire that turns into collective optimization, as economic science dreams? Or the group-based and “democratic” desire that takes us from center to center until we reach the proto-fascisms of the present day?
Because, economically speaking, the world is also already given and resolved. There are no alternatives. We can work at the margins for a better future, but the core is this. Capitalism in its different forms, more or less social-democratic, more or less paternalistic, more or less private, more or less regulated. But capitalist. Always. And constantly creating — and satisfying — desires.
“Capitalism” in the year 2026
Unlike other people, I cannot see us as already living in a post-capitalist world. Even though we are moving toward one at a very fast pace.
I still have not read Yanis Varoufakis’s book on techno-feudalism. But I do not doubt that he has a similar thesis. A thesis that, I admit, I do not think is original, but which I strongly believe in.
Looking at the stock market, we see that the companies with the highest market value are, for the most part, removed from the physical capital that formed the basis of analysis for both the left and the right from the beginning of what we now call economic science. One could even say that there is a true dissociation between raw capital and its formation, and financial capital.
Once again, the thesis is not new. We already hear about this in discussions of the “financialization” of markets in general, especially in the realm of real estate. But the point is that the money sitting there in those stocks, and in inflated properties, and in luxury goods with exorbitant profits, and everything else, does not come from some ether.
That money is somehow produced and directed toward this capital dissociated from the physical and the concrete. And in a perversion of what some thinkers across the political spectrum might have imagined, there is nothing more capitalist than this present state of things.
Much is said about the unsustainability of a system and a situation like this, where companies such as Tesla have a market value far greater than their physical or non-physical assets. It is leverage on a scale never seen before, and also a concentration of the market never seen before, with so few companies being worth so much money. Something also sustained largely by pandemic and post-pandemic monetary policies, and also by private capital acting as it must act: maximizing gains for its stakeholders.
Once again, it is the culmination of capitalism.
But with culmination, what one expects is a fall. However, falls do not mean “ends.” In the book, there are a few mentions of the post-2008 crisis Occupy Wall Street movement and of how tiny its impact was in the end. But before Occupy, we had many other “anti-capital” movements — even if not openly declared as such, they at least were so in their intrinsic values and even in their opposition to the prevailing state of things, or at least to one element of it — which also resulted in little or almost nothing. But which, at the time, caused a certain impact, even greater than Occupy, as in the case of union strikes and protests in the 1960s.
One could even say that movements opposed to the prevailing system made that same system stronger and more resilient. Because the “capitalists” themselves, in response to these events, see that the system cannot be taken as merely given. It must be adjusted in order to be protected. Whether through punctual concessions in response to the rebels’ demands, or through absolute repression against them.
Even so, we are very far from its fall. However...
Accelerationism
The co-optation of accelerationism by the forces of intangible and almost astrological capital, through figures such as Curtis Yarvin, who presumably inspired Mark Fisher in some of his academic texts, is a corruption that could almost have been expected were it not so soap-operatic.
In a very absurd comparison, it is as if the great villain of a television plot looked at the camera and triumphantly said, “Yes! I am the big bad of the story!”
Not that self-reflection was ever these people’s strong suit. But ironic? Definitely.
The question of accelerationism in Inventing the Future is seen as something that will make us “escape” the capitalist world. And I do not know whether those who have taken up that mantle understand this.
As with the issue of standpoint theory, also cited in one of the texts from Fisher’s lectures and by Fisher himself, capital and those created by it cannot see the world in a way disinfected from it. Accelerationism, in theory and I also believe in practice, is only a way of doing away with capital and, consequently, the system that maintains and reproduces it.
No one said accelerationism would be something positive. Which I think is one of the hopes of the authors of Inventing the Future. Not least because, in order for us to leave capitalism, capitalism must collapse, and capital must collapse too. But why assume that such a collapse would happen peacefully when the reproduction of capital and capitalism is always based on violence, repression, theft, and so on?
Both left-wing and right-wing accelerationism have, in my view, similar foundations. In order to get out of the “stagnation” of an endless capitalism, presumably without alternatives, one must take steps larger than one’s legs can manage. Whatever the cost.
It is no wonder that Trump is seen by people like the “thinkers” at Palantir, today the great proponents of a techno-fascist future in a non-ironic way and promoted by this corrupted accelerationism of Yarvin and company, almost as a hero. Because he has an accelerationist essence.
After all, why remain within the confines of institutionalism and governmental standards of conduct when one can start conflicts and declare laws that enable the oppression of others with a few strokes of the pen? Such institutions and their solidity had already been eroded and contaminated from their creation by a society with exclusionary principles based on class and skin color. Why expect such institutions to serve to stop the “leader of the free world” in whatever missions he may have?
Beyond that, even if the current American president has his “reign” interrupted soon, he has already shown the path to the mine. All it takes is the will to follow it. Procedures are for the weak. The world belongs to the strong. It always has and always will.
At the same time, the accelerationism proposed by Palantir and even by the many other right-wing figures currently influencing the US government, even if they do not use a well-defined term for it, can very well be seen as blowback. Because outside the West, life is a constant foot on the accelerator until one is stopped by a motorway barrier.
That is partly what enrages me in this area. Because the world is already very accelerated for those who have no way of steering their own car, much less their own path. And the moment these people begin to feel a little of what the world already suffers at the hands of the US and the rest of the West, through non-existent institutions, procedures worth about as much as used toilet paper, constant oppression and repression, and so many other evils, the whining from the new members of the club is simply unbearable.
However, returning to the merit of accelerationism itself, I do not know whether our “dear” techno-fascists — whether the thinkers, the tech starters, or even those who take up arms and promote the invasion of a natural fortress such as Iran — will manage to bring forth the post-capitalist world they desire. Because, once again, a product of capital does not even have the capacity to analyze it as it really is. Much less bring about its end.
And now?
I still have many readings ahead of me that will take me down very different paths from this one. And, as I said, in the future I may very well return to this text not only to add decent sources but also to revisit the ideas I have left here in a very verbose way, because this blog was made for that, and not to “develop a new political theory” or whatever it is so many others want with scribbles and digressions of the same kind.
But I cannot believe that capitalism is at its end, and that post-capitalism is the next step. I do believe in the culmination of a system that, from the beginning of its fall, will have an impact perhaps never seen before. And I even have doubts as to whether we will be able to perceive and analyze that impact while alive.
Because even without alternatives, it is not as if “capitalism” were an eternal development. Maybe I am just a romantic, but I still believe in dialectics. The contradictions of capitalism will dictate its end. But no systemic or structural end happens overnight. Even if we want to believe that it does.