The ultimate fantasy here – the ultimate fantasy of Capital ‘itself’ – is of cutting workers away altogether. Capital’s libidinal metaphysics is a kind of cosmic libertarianism: Capital identifies itself as a force of unbounded energy, whose capacity for infinite accumulation is obstructed only by political contingencies. Soon, always soon, Capital dreams, I will be free of the need for politics … and free of the need for humans too … (“… liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate farmers, liquidate real estate… “) Capital’s realised utopia would be a burned-out planet full of fully-automated factories turning out shit that no-one wants to buy, with no-one left to buy it any way, because the conditions for the continued existence of these factories is the destruction of an environment humans can live in.

Capital is nothing if it is not parsimonious, and for the last thirty years it is has sustained itself by relying on readymade forms of existential affiliation. This reliance on already already-existing forms of identification—all those nationalisms and religions, with any number of archaisms ready to crawl out of the crypt—is what postmodernism has been. There are no ‘pure’ archaisms, nothing ever repeats without difference, and ISIS is properly understood as a cybergothic phenomenon which combines the ancient with the contemporary (beheadings on the web). It faces not a confident capitalist modernity, but a capitalism that has retreated from the present, never mind the future. Left to its own resources—or rather, left to the resources it retains from previous forms of exploitation—capital can never come up with anything new. Postmodernism was its ideal form, and the naturalised postmodernism of capitalist realism was its optimal solution to political and cultural antagonism. The UK has specialised in developing the steampunk model: Victorian social relations, but now with iPhones.

The problem with late capitalism is not the greed of capitalists. That's the difference between a Marxist analysis and an ethical one - the Marxist one will focus on systems, forms of organisation are central. Capitalism is not bad because CEOs are uniquely evil. It's the other way around. Anyone who's in the position of CEO would act as CEOs do. It's just a systemic pressure that produces that kind of behaviour. Part of the problem is that we are looking at systemic tendencies here. [...]

[...] what's involved in re-floating this concept of paternalism is defending the concept of education, and also defending the concept of authority; and differentiating the concept of authority from that of authoritarianism. Authority based on expertise, knowledge, skills - there's nothing wrong with that, providing it isn't abused. That needs to be abused to be authoritarianism, which is simply power based on fear. Part of a democratic political project is not eliminating authority, but constituting authority collectively. The best way of fighting authoritarianism is not abandoning the question of authority - which will always re-assert itself in one form of another, if one simply ignores it - but of constituting authority in this colletive way. [...]

[...] we have to remember that the policy aren't the enemy, they are the servants of the enemy, and if all of our energy is taken up struggling against them, then they are doing their job for their masters very effectively. Ultimately, it must be far better if the servants are turned against their masters.

Can we be guided by these lights, instead of by the Olympic flame, a symbol of a capital now more globalised than ever, the ultra-bright striplights drawing planetary destiny into an eternal shopping mall surrounded by a sweatshop?

But the rejection of identitarianism can only be achieved by the re-assertion of class. A left that does not have class at its core can only be a liberal pressure group. Class consciousness is always double: it involves a simultaneous knowledge of the way in which class frames and shapes all experience, and a knowledge of the particular position that we occupy in the class structure. It must be remembered that the aim of our struggle is not recognition by the bourgeoisie, nor even the destruction of the bourgeoisie itself. It is the class structure – a structure that wounds everyone, even those who materially profit from it – that must be destroyed. The interests of the working class are the interests of all; the interests of the bourgeoisie are the interests of capital, which are the interests of no-one. Our struggle must be towards the construction of a new and surprising world, not the preservation of identities shaped and distorted by capital.