According to Žižek, the subject is a ‘vanishing mediator’.39 This concept is adopted from Jameson. In the latter it refers to any phenomenon that allows another phenomenon to emerge and disappears once it has performed that task.

A careful reading of the Manifesto, however, suggests a somewhat different way of thinking about Marx's view of capitalism as a stage, for it can be grasped as a kind of enormous black box or "vanishing mediator,"