Absolute Capitalism
In this essay, a tentative effort is made to adapt key categories of Marxism to the understanding of the world characterized by financialization and globalization. Looking for what David Harvey has called the “points of stress” in Marx’s theory of accumulation and crisis, the chapter explores two main issues: first, the withering away of the political (articulated around nations, classes, sovereignty, and antagonism) in a general economy of violence; and second, the articulation of “ecological debt” and “anti-planning” through the domination of liquidity over the organization of productive processes. Instead of focusing on the ideological category of “neo-liberalism,” the essay proposes to analyze the Great Transformation that leads from Historical Capitalism to a postcolonial and postsocialist Absolute Capitalism, the central “contradiction” of which reside in the structural and anthropological limits of commodification.