“It is possible that all humanity is only a phase of development of a certain species of animal of limited duration”[1]. Or a certain type of will of limited duration. Space-time compression is the emergence of industrial singularities that move beyond the individual frame of reference, becoming scalar abstractions ranging from collective arrangements (joint stock companies) to informational-industrial complexes. The unifying aspect of this is capital as an abstracting force.
Capital as an autonomising force precedes capitalism as it emerges in primitive exchange relations and early trade economies like those in North Africa and Mesopotamia. While such relations proceeded on the basis of planning and hoarding of the surplus, the force of capital as a willing actant in relations of production can be seen in the dynamics of agricultural production, where work parties or slave gangs worked the land for the production of surplus to be hoarded by a governing class. This also comes back to Braudel’s view of markets vs. capital, in that market forces (the invisible hand) decentralise and enmesh relations of production, limiting their capacity for centralisation while capital aims at an overarching encoding of relations of production, limiting any exit options and tending toward monopolisation but also crisis (as the rate of profit equalises and new means of capital expenditure/return become scarce).
The beginnings of this abstracting force are visible in the exchange-based frame of reference. Labour is human capital, building blocks in a chain of transactions and contracts that are ultimately replaceable as new inputs and demands emerge that are either labour-saving or elastic. The nature of capital “as a special technological and economic logic of operation that does harness human labour and intellect to an extent, but does not depend on them”[2], creates entirely new frames of reference which dominate primitive cosmologies and omnipotent ethics.
It is an overcoding of lifeworlds, altering ethics toward the exchange-based frame of reference. “Inhuman, indifferent to human intentions and needs”[3], yet enmeshed within human systems as the growth of production and exchange (merchant banking of the 14th-17th centuries, colonial expansion and industrialisation of the 18th-19th centuries, the destruction of feudal and religious privileges, and the techno-industrial monopolisation of the 20th and 21st centuries) integrated and superseded those systems’ semantics.
The creation of wealth and capital follow a scalar expansion. Not-for-profit mutuals will exist because of their efficacy in organising small savings pools that can then hold collective power in healthcare provision and protection of property against damages, theft, etc. However, so long as a profit motive exists and there are varying levels of organisational complexity, other types of capital creation will come about. The arrangement of international shipping in situations outside of state control/protection or conclusion of risky, complex financial contracts will by their nature necessitate third party providers that will want a part of the profit. The development of the early de-risking institutions, whether in the early Pisan or Venetian trading empires and the military orders that became banking institutions (e.g. the Templars and Hospitallers) or later with the Hanseatic League, came about due to the needs of merchants for guaranteeing income streams in extremely risky trading environments. Unless we were to regress to a situation of no medium to long-distance trading, institutionalised de-risking is inevitable.
Inherent within this is growing levels of abstraction as the organisational locus for capital breaks spatiotemporal barriers. Rosa refers to this as technical acceleration, “the intentional, technical, and above all technological (i.e., machine-based) acceleration of goal-directed processes”[4]. The speed of transportation, communication, service delivery and learning processes within networked forms of collaboration and integration, usually encompassed in the concepts of logistics and financialisation. It can also be thought of organisationally, as moving from the local to the global, or from the micropolitical to the macropolitical. The encompassing frameworks of nation-states, communities and culture (as specificity or exclusivity) have become weak fetters, referenced as anachronistic and outdated.
“Acceleration is achieved either by the immediate virtualization and digitization of once material processes (for example, in the development of a model), which indeed allows an acceleration to the speed of light in some areas, or rather by building digital information transmission into analog ones, i.e., material processes and chains of action, which thereby fall under further pressure to accelerate”[5]. Capital is a historical driving force, emerging from the microcosm of temple economies and tributary systems and expanding within the structures of these forms, instantiating itself through the process of commodification of labour and the change of time horizons through the exchange relation. Capital isn’t free of human will in its early history, but rather metastasises across production relations as the complexity of production and trade grow due to demographic pressures, scarcity crises and the interplay of Malthusian limits and labour-saving innovations.
It has a will of its own in that its metastasisation, while initially directed by expedients of convenience and efficiency, grows uncontrollable as its crisis tendencies and distributive inequalities become externalities, for governing forces to solve as exogeneous entities. “’Acceleration’ as it is used here describes the time-structure of capital accumulation. It thus references the ’roundaboutness’ founding Bohm-Bawerk’s model of capitalization, in which saving and technicity are integrated within a single social process-diversion of resources from immediate consumption into the enhancement of productive apparatus. Consequently, as basic co-components of capital, technology and economics have only a limited, formal distinctiveness under historical conditions of ignited capital escalation. The indissolubly twin-dynamic is techonomic (cross-excited commercial industrialism). Acceleration is techonomic time”[6].
Capital’s space-time compression is techonomic, establishing frames of reference alien to human systems. Expansionary bubbles and contractive crises become second nature phenomena as they remain unresolvable for governing institutions, either written off as market corrections or stimulated via monetary creation ex nihilo. Capitalism remains both a wealth-giving force but also an unsolvable contradiction. Forces of capital are multifaceted and cross-institutional, both in the Marxian sense of networked forces of industrial production relations[7] and the techonomic sense of “cybernetic intensification” that “correlates with complexity, connectivity, machinic compression, extropy, free energy dissipation, efficiency, intelligence, and operational capability, defining a gradient of absolute but obscure improvement that orients socio economic selection by market mechanisms, as expressed through measures of productivity, competitiveness, and capital asset value”[8], as well as the monopoly power of techno-industrial complexes.
When we talk of commodity fetishism or financialisation, we mean the abstraction of capital as force for the acceleration of flows within its sphere of activity, encoding a unique semantics of logisticality. They separate control from productive capacity/innovation, or in a more Nietzschean sense they separate will from power. Capital as a willing force creates its own autonomy vis-a-vis production and consumption which increases crises (like climate change) and encircles alternative power structures into a matrix of possibilities that are entirely commensurable to capital.
“The problem of capitalism is not that it would expand everywhere and ‘commodify everything’, leaving people with nothing because this commercial monstrosity would dispossess them of everything. Today it is increasingly obvious that capital rejects many things, for instance ‘jobs’, artisanal techniques of production and traditional money. This does not mean that it ‘takes’ something away from humanity or that it is appropriating, to the contrary: people still have jobs (but in the public sector), they still use simple tools (but as a hobby) and they still shop with traditional money. At the same time, capital has been developing new forms of production, finance and labour power (and intellect—if machines were the arms of capital, it is currently developing an autonomous mind) in an increasingly autonomous way, independently from and indifferently to humanity and humaneness. Machines of the industrial revolution were not simply bigger or composite tools (as extensions of the human arm or an alienating appropriation of human manual dexterity) and the same holds true for artificial intelligence today: AI is not something that was taken away from the human intellect, but has been evolving in a different way and independently of its rules and boundaries. What the development of artificial intelligence also means is that capital can potentially begin to phase out not only human labour power, but markets as well; or rather, it is possible that markets will soon prove to be a primitive, insufficient institution that capital will discard. It could be that markets were only a temporary solution to the problem of fast and efficient communication between individual units of production through quantitative price signals that can be replaced by more efficient IT systems connecting artificially intelligent entities”[9].
Posthuman potentiality of a kind that augurs with the developments of the 21st century. Information expansion has become infinitesimal, a means of wealth creation through intellectual property and rentierism that is entirely unproductive. The same can be said for financialisation – a vast of complex of firms interconnected via debt obligations. This is speculation enhanced purely by signalling. Value, much as productivity, has little meaning. Constant credit swaps and currency trades has moved beyond the language of value or productivity. Arbitrage and hedging hold more importance. “Speculative mania is characterized by a rapid increase in the quantity of debt and an equally rapid decrease in its quality. Heavy borrowing is used to buy up financial assets, not based on the income streams they will generate but merely on the assumption of increasing prices for these assets”[10]. And no crisis has actually dented this expansion into nothing. Financial services are ironically one of the most productive areas in most post-industrial economies.
This comes back to capital as a post-market and posthuman will, one interested in expansion into all areas of exchange activity. The information economy is another paradigm for this expansion, and with it comes the maldistributive effects, in this case vast piles of waste from the discarded materials of data centres[11] which will inevitability inform new means of exchange and capital creation. The post-capitalist dream of controlling the heights of the economy look to be hubristic nonsense. How does one control this willing force? What organisational form, statal or parastatal, would stand above it rather than beneath or within it? Capital is both chaos and its escape, creating wastelands from the speed and complexity of its activities while always searching for new means of exchange (and thereby profit). Every force that opposed it has been overcoded by it.
As a solution, the issue is whether a regulatory framework can encompass these tensions and overcode them with alternative praxes or governing logics that force capital into a general battle of will rather than allowing it to monopolise other forces around it. A huge operation of governance achieved only temporarily and in conjunction with particular capitals (as in the New Deal and the Keynesian settlement). Capital can never be a governing force, only a techonomic one. A force to rival it must exist along the same perturbations[12], not as an anti-capital but as mechanisms for moving beyond crises, beyond the collapse of cultural assurances and values toward a semantics that is commensurate with the speed and logics of capital. Otherwise, it is a force to be looked at as practically astronomical in its extent and disorder. “The reign of the individual has to be brief”[13].
[1] Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human
[2] https://vastabrupt.com/2018/07/11/alien-capital/
[3] https://vastabrupt.com/2018/07/11/alien-capital/
[4] Hartmut Rosa, Social Acceleration
[5] Hartmut Rosa, Social Acceleration
[6] Nick Land, Teleoplexy
[7] Michel Aglietta, A Theory of Capitalist Regulation: The US Experience
[8] Nick Land, Teleoplexy
[9] https://vastabrupt.com/2018/07/11/alien-capital/
[10] https://monthlyreview.org/2008/04/01/the-financialization-of-capital-and-the-crisis/
[11] https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/exponential-abyss
[12] https://diffractionscollective.org/green-accelerationism-multicentrism-and-multipolarity/
[13] Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power
Collapse Patchworks 
Fascinating perspective, as per usual. Glad you see you’re posting articles again!
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