Lifted AF

It takes a continual refresh of language to even begin to grasp the world. Concepts wear out. The strangeness they once revealed becomes a commonplace. What I love about Exocapitalism: Economies with Absolutely No Limits by Marek Poliks and Roberto Alonso Trillo is its freshness—although I don’t think it manages this consistently.

To start where the book ends: “All we really have is this: the way that the critical apparatus tends to think about capitalism is wrong and it should be amended.”1 To that end, it has some points to make outside of, even against, what they call the “Marx-pilled canon” (208). Some of which are original, some not. 

The nonrelation of capital to labor is a key part of their approach. To Poliks and Trillo (hereafter P+T), capital is “an algorithmic germ, a mode of thought as enhousable in human form as it could be in a bacterial colony or in silicon. It can lie dormant, a seed, passively anticipating reactivation upon application of sufficient energy, sufficient compute, sufficient time” (115). It isn’t dead labor, congealed labor, as in the Marxist tradition. Capital thrives on the boundaries between any two or more domains. Value derives from friction, from mediation. What P+T are reviving here is a theory of merchant capital, updated. It’s arbitrage all the way down. 

Capital operates on a different scale to humans. Or rather multiple scales; it is trans-scalar in ways that humans aren’t. It is increasingly indifferent to the problems of reproducing organic life. Capital is kinda bored with us and the noise we generate when we have to be organized en masse. Capital would rather not have to be in the business of making actual commodities anymore. Physical products bring with them unpleasantries such as labor, fixed costs, and problems of scaling production. Which is why capital loves software, and the “trans-scalar encounters” it enables (19). 

Some of the most interesting pages in Exocapitalism are about the way a company like Salesforce works. It looks like a “customer resource management tool,” but that just describes how it appears to the user. What’s behind the interface? Should we focus on that as a platform (Nick Srincek), a stack (Benjamin Bratton), or a vector (McKenzie Wark)?2 Each of those terms conjures up connotations which capture part of what Salesforce is, while missing other dimensions. 

P+T use language that invokes the blob-like qualities of entities like Saleseforce, whatever they are. This gets at those entities’ incompleteness, at the way they both compete and collude with each other, at the way their surfaces bristle with niches for other companies to attach to them. 

This framing sets us up for some gorgeous descriptive-conceptual writing, like:

The deeper the crease of the fold or the deeper the reciprocal mutual embedding … the greater the tendency for the two nodes to collapse or absorb into one node. Mergers and acquisitions happen constantly, a wet market where hulking translucent beasts swap organs with each other for liquidity, or where freestanding, inchoate bodies are pulled into endosymbiotic relations. Blobs accrete to titanic scales, at which point they either bud off with parthenogenic thrust or become so dotted with advanced cancers that they cease to be recognizable as single blobs at all. Others just pop into puffs of spores. (30)  

And so, “Competition within this space is always incomplete due to the diffuse character of the objects in play and to their structural incompleteness” (31). In that sense, it’s not exactly platforms, or stacks, or vectors. They continue:

Certainly these companies own “the infrastructures of society,” but as each company lays claim to the world, the ownership of a world by a world, a world bloated with autonomous vestigial organs, a world pastiched from defined and discrete subworlds, a world that bears world-scale complexity, feels tautological. As every engineer knows—software, mechanical, architectural—every joint is also a brittleness. (32)

The aim of these blob-like software corporations is to get big, and to outsource the messy business of actually producing commodities, or even dealing with humans. They aim to become a logistical necessity, a brand, and a site of data extraction. One of P+T’s examples is IKEA, which is not so much a flatpack firm anymore as a furnishings brand, a logistics and data corporation. Another is Boeing, which would rather be in the design engineering and financial engineering business, and which is trying to outsource as much manufacturing as it can, with mixed results.3 

***

I like P+T’s term for what today’s dominant corporate form wants: “lift.” Each company wants “to move itself away from fixed costs, from the soil, the earth, the sphere of human affairs. You can think of lift as the negative definition of financialization” (57). This is hard to do if your business is, say, renting hotel rooms. So rather than running the hotel yourself, become a hotel brand, get into hotel finance, hotel data. Let someone else wrangle the labor that changes the dirty sheets. Uber, Airbnb, WeWork, these exemplify the model. The fantasy is to automate capital accumulation. “The very entanglement with the messiness of human affairs is not a first-party service Meta wishes to provide …,” as “the human animal … poses a threat to velocity” (133–34).

It’s all about abstraction. As P+T write: “Lift hollows out a cavity between material conditions and operational systems by wedging abstraction between the two—a black hole of sufficient alienation such that there exists less and less connection between material labor and managerial autopoiesis” (60).

The part of their argument I’m less sure about is just how lifted lift can get. They write: “A fully lifted marketplace unbinds from the local pressure-systems of good and services, it freewheelingly constructs price and therefore value and therefore capital in an unlimited capacity out of nothing but the relativistic tides” (65). Which is how things appear to capital—as if looking out the window of one of those penthouse apartments on Billionaire Row with a view clear across Central Park.

When popular movements are strong, there are opportunities to learn about the weakness and banal realities of capital and leverage them. When popular movements are weak, capital appears as a mystical force, a divine demiurge, and the sole actor in space and time. To capital, everything is capital; to labor, everything is labor. Part of the neoliberal project was to get us to see ourselves as “human capital.”4 Part of the Marxist project is to see everything as labor. The latter will always be the side that I’m on. 

Today, labor is in a weak position in the overdeveloped world. As P+T note sardonically: “Middle class workers became contractors. Contractors became advertisers for their contract labor. Advertisers became consultants. Consultants became coaches. Coaches became meta-coaches who coach other coaches. And so on, and so on, and so on” (70). At such a time, it’s tempting to internalize capital’s point of view.

WeWork interior in San Francisco. License: CC BY 2.

They continue: “Value isn’t generated by the accelerated force, it is captured by the accelerated force. Value is generated by friction, by interposition, by spread, by connection, by deceleration: lag” (116, emphasis in original). So we’re back to a mercantile, rather than an industrial, theory of capital. Trade makes value, just no longer a trade in things. A trade in tokens with ever more attenuated relations to things, or what Randy Martin called the logic of the derivative.5 

The expansion of tokens derived from tokens creates additional folds upon folds of surfaces for trade where lag and friction might generate value. For P+T, 

The token … doesn’t just mediate between other things … it creates a new commercial dimension within which those mediated things collapse into points. The tokenization of a world literally produces the value of a world. The second order tokenization of the world (the tokenization of a token-space through new, intermediary tokens) unlocks new regimes of value. Each successive layer of the token stack introduces further relativistic volatility, new entropic fields around which arbitrage circulates. (74) 

In short, “this whole thing is lifted af” (78). 

Curiously, this is where P+T reconnect to the Marxist tradition, as when they write:

Token entropy is lift. The downdraft of token entropy is Marxological alienation … If one is remunerated from labor at the grist-mill not with flour, but with a representation of potential flour, a token for flour whose conversion rate into flour is dynamic … the mapping of a worker’s labor agency between flour production and compensatory flour buy-back gets weird, nonlinear, random. (75) 

Although maybe it’s not even alienation anymore. I’m going to call it “dissociation.” Alienation: The worker, firstly estranged from the product of her labor, which becomes abstract labor, compensated for only part of her effort with the wage, is obliged to buy back part of her efforts in the form of commodities. The next order of abstraction, dissociation: abstract labor abstracted into money-tokens, abstracted again into a lifted economy of tokens upon tokens. The “post-productive economy,” as P+T call it (73). Bringing with it “a permutation of labor, from the production of economic content to the execution of economic protocol” (79).

***

The intellectual roots of Exocapitalism are in Deleuze and Guattari’s (D+G) Anti-Oedipus. P+T make Deleuzian thinking useful again, sidestepping what Alex Galloway rather cheekily called the “wet diaper Deleuzian” currents.6 For D+G, capital is an autonomous entity that has always existed, which premodern forms of social-technical organization kept under tight control. It burst out like a cancer on the social body as a generalized decoding of flows. It’s a disrupter of the social body, of what for them are Oedipal orders of hierarchy, boundary, and identity.

As they gloss D+G: “Capitalism doesn’t just destroy social structures but always reconstructs newer, weirder structures” (83). In their thought, the germ of capital is still to be thought in some kind of relation to the desires of the human as social animal. Conversely, “it was Nick Land who began to decouple the machinic fever of Anti-Oedipus from incarceration within social critique” (83). In Land, eternal capital is not from deep time, it’s from a possible future, a techno-semiotic agency replicating itself through host organisms. Land takes the side of capital’s relentless deterrritorialization.7

Like Land, P+T place theory on the side of what assails and afflicts the human. As if one could just ride along with the angel of history, watching the debris pile up. Call that a favor of accelerationism if you like. But they find Land’s “gooning to the erotics of the war zone” cringe (86). Indeed, he isn’t nihilist enough for them: “Land’s machinic unconscious is hardly machinic—it’s just pure lizard brain, and his perversion of D+G’s desiring-machines is actually just goth-coded mid-century orthodoxy” (86).

P+T: “Where we agree with Land … is that the host body for capitalism has moved on—out of the human and into the computer” (86). And so,

from this point onward, we will foreground the term exocapitalism, a homecoming for a self-replicating machine of unknown origin whose internal drives not only contradict but remain utterly ambivalent to the interests of its former dependencies (sun, earth, oil, human). The human’s relationship to capitalism moves from generative to irrelevant. Capital sticks to itself. (87) 

How did we arrive at this fascination with capital, rather that its critique? Maybe it’s not irrelevant that D+G, Land, and P+T write in moments when popular working-class movements appeared to be in retreat. For D+G, after the failure of the 1968 revolutions; for Land, Thatcherite neoliberalism; for P+T, the neofascist turn. Capital emerges as sole divine agency of world-making, and theory becomes its theology. 

***

P+T dismiss the various modifier-capitalism theories—whether platform-capitalism, semio-capitalism, networked-capitalism, digital-capitalism, surveillance-capitalism, and so on. Although strangely enough, they then turn around and use the same tactic. I think they are right to see these linguistic half-measures as not being robust enough at the level of language and the concept. Unlike P+T, I would stress antagonism and popular agency, but where I do have an affinity with them is in pressing language toward the strangeness of <waves hands> whatever the fuck all this is. Maybe the thing we could accelerate is linguistic experiment, to try to keep up.

From the book Exocapitalism: Economies with Absolutely No Limits (2025) by Marek Poliks and Roberto Alonso Trillo.

For P+T, capital is like a virus that can jump between hosts. It turns out what might be worse for the human than being host to the capital-virus is not being the host to capital-virus. Or to switch up the metaphor, capital’s blast-off leaves us in the blast-range. “The supposed digital phase-transition,” they write, “has less to do with a transformation of capitalism … and more to do with the growing visibility of the terrestrial crater left behind by a lifting and departing object, as capitalism moves from human host” (93).

Exocapitalism lifts itself up, up, and away from the social. It refuses to abide by the historic compromises—with the labor movement, the social movements—that are embedded in the modern state. “The state,” P+T continue,

the project (in its many forms) nominally responsible for the infrastructure of human beings at scale, abandons its definitional project in order to sustain an economic object that is categorically oblivious to this responsibility … Exocapitalism recognizes no Westphalian agencies, apart from those it lazily indexes as surface complexity onto which to graft the fractal engorgement of arbitrage. (96) 

The state is just one of the worlds with and where it conducts its mercantile business. 

This leaves those of us resident (for tax purposes) in the United States watching as it disintegrates “into nothing but dedifferentiated spongiform holding the structures of commerce into some kind of temporarily stable position with respect to downstream human activity” (96). On a global scale, we all get to witness a “crisis in the continued social reproduction of the human species” (97). Which is what the “metabolic rift” school of Marxists have been saying for some time.8

And there’s worse: In a callback to Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, P+T distinguish state from empire.9 “Empire is like a colossal, dim-witted, slow-moving slug, carving massive trenches into the earth as it trudges forward,” and empire “is far too blunt to rule: it just randomly levels your city block” with its “hole-making” power (139, 142). ‘Nuff said. 

*** 

In place of a theory of antagonism, we get the symbiotic coupling of the concept of lift with the concept of “drag”: “Drag means both the attempt of humans to embed themselves within the lift process, and the attempts by humans to entrap capital by reconstructing their own social processes in highly lifted ways. Drag, counter-intuitively, accelerates lift” (99). The human social animal tries to get its needs addressed by exocapital, which just unfolds surfaces for the social to attach to, and lift up into exocapital making its exit.  

White collar labor becomes just abstract, fungible, relationship management. “The concept of drag replaces the theory of ideology,” or rather, Mark Fisher’s “capitalist realism,” wherein tepid anti-capitalist feels only accelerate capital (100). For Fisher (cribbing from Žižek), ideology isn’t about being duped by capital.10 It’s about knowing you’re being duped by ideology and letting capital exploit you anyway. For both Fisher and Žižek, the refusal of half measures leaves only a melancholic longing for a total exit from capital. A sort of counter-ideology with the same structure: knowing one’s actions are inadequate to the totality of one’s critique yet writing it anyway.  

All of which obfuscates what’s actually happening. P+T: “We twist Fisher’s lament all the way around” (100). It’s beating a dead horse to lament the lack of escape from capital—exocapitalism is escaping from us. “The malaise of drag has far less to do with a non-possibility of escape, but rather the full and vivid awareness that said escape has already occurred without a replacement for the social infrastructure long-since subcontracted to exocapitalist insouciance” (100).

Social reproduction is abstracted into data and finance management: “The consumer performs the act of a market transaction as a surface-level ritual that masks the underlying financialized infrastructure” (101). This is true even for something like food stamps, which just increases the surface area of a problem in social reproduction to allow more exocapitalism to attach itself, “roughing out the problem of hunger into a highly-dimensional topology of micro-transactions” (102).

There’s a shift in the relationship of capital to state. Whereas for D+G, “capitalism mobilizes the state to access the juicy, supple underbelly of social drives, leveraging the state to tenderize the human as numb producer and as a ravenous consumer,” now “the situation is reversed: exocapitalism has matriculated into a fully autonomous object and it is the state that desperately courts its attention” (45).

The consequences for labor are pretty grim: “Just like with the state, the role of drag in white-collar labor involves edge-roughing, introducing surface complexity to attract proliferating flows” (105). Labor wedges itself where it can into the folds that scale and abstraction create. As exocapital lifts, “the middle class hollows out, leaving a ‘capitalism’ of white-collar labor, and a sharp, eroding cliff to ‘precariat’ for all other labor activity.” 

Within the conceptual armature P+T elaborate, I think you could still make an argument for a kind of reterritorialization. Maybe that’s what neofascism is all about. Exocapital lifts, the state chases after it, neglecting social reproduction. Neofascism is the violent return of hierarchies of access to diminishing social resources during the state’s “fire sale liquidation of its internal organs to categorically indifferent forces” (108).

Although maybe the spectacle of disintegration is just for show. Algorithmically generated memes rendering the inhuman in human terms. Exocapitalism “theatricalizes this activity into the libidinal or behavioral or psychological patterning of a cruder, more recognizable mode of intelligence (ours)” (115). Meet the new god. In a remix of the oft-cited “it’s easier to imagine the end of the world …” line, P+T write that exocapital could “outlive the earth” (115). But it won’t. It’ll take the earth down with it. For P+T, humans have lost. Exocaptialism won’t reterritorialize social reproduction. We’re on our own, gleaning in its gleaming ruins. 

***

And so “capitalism tears off, leaving a wound” (121). For P+T there’s now two separate economies, or as I would say, modes of production. The latter part of the book turns to Silvia Federici, and the violent dispossession of the commons that, in her accounting, got capitalism started, gave it its first chance to feel some lift.11 In place of the commons, the reproduction of labor was outsourced to the family, as Sophie Lewis, Michelle O’Brien, and others point out.12 

Federici thinks that the ruling class is still in the business of the dispossession of people from land, social capacity, etc. P+T disagree: “The last thing a company actually wants to do is control the soil, the subsoil, the trees—those are fixed, limited, resources, they are liabilities at best” (122). The last thing an exocapitalist company wants. But maybe there’s more than one strategy, indeed more than one ruling class, with (partly) antagonistic strategies—what I call capitalist and vectoralist classes. Control through owning the means of production vs. control through owning the vector of information. Capital lifted from the commons, then the vectoral lifted from capital. Creating a mode of production that “looks, interestingly, nothing at all like capitalism” (117). 

The first half of the book proceeds as if capital were the sole agent of time and space. It’s a way of thinking that you can get if you read the first part of Marx’s Capital volume one as a theory of everything. A tendency exacerbated in Georg Lukács, for whom capital has saturated the social totality.13 More empirical Marxist sociology and history usually finds multiple modes of production, in both collusion and tension, meaning that there’s usually more than one exploiting class, and more than one exploited class. Gramsci’s theory of hegemony is mostly about conceptualizing how ruling classes align their interests and attach a patchwork of sectional interests from subordinated classes to that (sometimes uneasy) alliance.14 

P+T declare later in the book that the social body “contains a lot more things than just capitalism” (123). This part is more tenuous and somewhat at odds with the first part. Having “lifted” capital up, up, and away, P+T scratch about for a language for what it lifts away from. “The closer you get ‘to the land’ (at scale), the more feudal the economics, the stricter and more violent the terms of enforcement,” but this has little to do with what actual feudalism was like (127).15  

After describing exploitation in a factory in much the same way that Marx or Engels might, P+T ask: “What is VK Garment factory if not a feudal entity?” (129). Um, no. It’s nothing like feudal entity. That’s just capitalism. We also get nonsensical phrases such as “the feudal sovereignty of the plantation” (131). No, new world plantation economies are not the same as old world feudal economies—not to mention contemporary plantation economies throughout the Global South.16

A theory of exocapitalism seems to me to call, as a supplement, for a theory of endocapitalism. This would be the capitalism from which it’s attempting to lift itself, within which are nested various subsidiary modes of production and reproduction that endocapitalism has absorbed and made functional for itself, much as the cell swallowed up mitochondria and made it an organelle. I took a different route on the tricky path of pressing language to give up the juice of the concept. Endocapitalism is just capitalism in my writing, and exocapitalism is what I called “vectoralism.” 

Where our perspectives are not in alignment is on three main things. Firstly, I retain Marx’s theory of history as the history of class struggles. Capital isn’t magic beans. It crystalizes out of social-technical conflict. Transformation and change arise out of a multipolar clashing and combining of class forces. 

Secondly, capitalism is only one of a series of related but distinct modes of production that emerged out of the decline of feudalism and the discovery of the new world. It helps to parse those out a bit so we’re not tossing around “feudal” and “slave” and “plantation” like they are interchangeable terms which just mean “bad.” Particularly given that from the peasant wars to the Haitian Revolution, each was contested from below in its own way. 

“Feudalism” is often confused with what supplanted it. The enclosure of the commons, the theft of land by a landlord class, the voiding of traditional peasant rights, the transformation from tithe in kind to rent in cash—this prior abstraction, of land and rent, is a precondition for the rise of capitalism. It created the landless mass of dispossessed workers in the first place. It was not feudal, yet not capitalist—rent is not profit.17 There was a long struggle between landlords and capitalists in which the latter eventually prevailed, either by force (France) or assimilation (England). 

Meanwhile, the theft of Indigenous land, to be worked by slaves or indentured labor, created the conditions of possibility for the plantation system. It’s distinct from capitalism as it lacks one of capitalism’s key features: that labor is formally “free.” The transnational, interlocking world system of emerging industrial capitalism, fed by raw materials from the landlord system at home, and then by the plantation system abroad, shaped modern history as we know it. 

Workers at Division of Classification and Cataloging, National Archives, United States, 1937. License: Public domain.

Modes of production have always been plural, interlocking, mutually dependent even if arranged in hierarchies of dominance and compliance. The job is to work out how that’s developed and changed since the days of capitalism as an emerging world system—as it was in Marx’s time. What I think P+T are grappling with, sometimes successfully, sometimes not, is a new mode of production. What we call it matters less than to turn language against itself so that language might yield the concepts that make the world seem strange again, and in need of close attention to even begin to understand. 

Our third misalignment, as I see it, is that there’s a discussion to be had, or rather revisited, about the origins and nature of wealth. The Physiocrats thought land was the origin of wealth—as if it had value without peasants to work it. Adam Smith proposed an understanding of wealth based on capital, which Marx turned on its head, to reveal capital as congealed, abstracted, alienated labor. In the contemporary world, there’s no wealth without the farmer or worker to make it.18 

Both do work that is mostly the repetition of sameness—the plantation and the factory reduce work to sameness to reduce the farmer or worker to sameness—and hence replaceability. But what of the work of making difference? I called those who do that work hackers, who like famers and workers, form a class.19 To make lift happen, it took a lot of hackers a lot of workhours to design the software that lifts exocapitalism up, up, and away. To the benefit of a vectoralist class who capture the value of what the hacker class create.