[...] the social landscape of capitalism has profoundly mutated. From the moment when, despite being ‘capital’s men’, top executives became employees, the original Marxian theory was in trouble. And this trouble kept on growing with what could be called the rise of management: the growing number of employees who partially crossed over symbolically to the ‘side of capital’.

What could it mean to ‘symbolically cross over to the side of capital’, when materially one does not in fact belong to the side of capital, other than that the affective composition of the individuals in question shifted largely to the joyful end of the scale, and they found themselves enthusiastically bringing their power of acting to the enterprise, that is, ultimately, aligning it with the desire of capital? Marxism’s trouble is aggravated by the fact that this crossing is not an all-or-nothing affair, but a matter of degrees that can be laid out in a continuum, going from the lowest – the sullen employee who does the least, and reluctantly – to the highest – those who, albeit instrumentally, devote the totality of their working life, at times their whole life, to the success of the enterprise. The landscape of class is therefore the double of the passionate landscape of employment, and fully reflects the history of its affective enrichments. It has lost the simplicities of its beginnings, and is blurred by the employment relation’s gradient of commitment, which in the final analysis is an affective gradient, a gradient of the employee’s joy (or sadness) at living the life of an employee. This is where Spinoza meets Marx – and changes him, for the transformation can be described synthetically by borrowing from the lexicons of both: to ‘symbolically cross over to the side of capital’ is to have a joyful ‘real subsumption’.