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.
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.