posthuman capitalism (a working paper)

nick nesbitt, princeton university

Posthuman capitalism is the newly-dominant tendency in 21st century capitalism for living
labor power to become a mere 'infinitesimal, vanishing quantity' (Marx) in the vast
majority of global production processes.
This tendency is by no means contradicted by the fact that since the 1980s, ever-more
people 'work,' (in ever-deteriorating conditions) globally. On the contrary, the two are
arguably corollaries of precisely the same tendency. This numerical, empirical increase
is the immediately perceptible form of this tendency, its appearance in everyday lived-
experience. We live increasingly in an automated planet of slums, in which the majority of
humanity continues to depend for survival on wage labor, even as potentially 85% of
global production suddenly becomes automated. The underlying, structural form of this
tendency occurs as general automation constantly reduces the value of labor power to
'infinitesimal' levels even as what Marx called the ‘valorisation of value’ (i.e., the
production and realization of surplus value) remains a general social compulsion.
Automation in the centers of global capital constantly devalues the labor power not just
of American or German workers in closest proximity, but, most powerfully and
destructively, that of a proletarian global south subject to the constant depression of
international norms of socially necessary labor time.
This ‘reduction in value’ refers not to a decline in the monetary wage living labor receives
in its employment by any specific capital, though this phenomenal form of value (as
money) is indeed tendentially reduced in labor’s global competition with increasingly
automated labor processes. Instead, the reduction of the value of labour power I am
indicating refers more fundamentally to the disappearance of the very capacity of living
labor power actually to produce surplus value. This, in a word, amounts to the
disappearance of its essential value to capital, insofar as machines and all other forms of
constant capital merely relay but are unable to produce any new value, while at the same
time capital continues to demand the constant production and expansion of surplus
value as its life blood, forcing, as a general social compulsion, billions of living human
laborers to continue to toil or suffer violent marginalization across the planet.1

To name the contemporary

era ‘posthuman capitalism,’
as I am proposing here, is not
simply to link a specific notion
of the ‘posthuman’ to
capitalism and its critique
(something notably absent in
previous presentations of the
so-called ‘posthuman’), but,
more strongly, to affirm,
against the techno-futurists,
that despite the astonishing
transformations of automation,
robotics, and AI since 2000
and the enormous
possibilities this implies for the invention, transformation, and super-production of use-
values for humanity, we nonetheless do in fact still live in capitalism; that, in other words,
despite dumbfounding increases in what Adorno and Horkheimer long ago in the era of
high-Fordism, identified as captialism’s regressive negation of ‘the increase in economic
productivity which creates the conditions for a more just world’ (2002: xvii), humanity
remains evermore subject to the general social compulsion to valorize value; that,
moreover, for all its mutations, contemporary late capitalism is in fact still today
characterized by the basic structural features and forms that Marx first identified
(absolute and relative surplus value; constant and variable capital; formal and real
subsumption; and the like), only that their ordering, predominance, and the existence of
counter-tendencies has suddenly been reconfigured as an unchecked tendency to
devalorise the value producing power of living labor itself.

1
Thanks to Max Tomba for suggesting this essential clarification of my argument.

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Capitalism has arguably entered a
new phase in the last 10-20 years,
characterized by the rapid and
general automation of the vast
majority of labor processes, tending to
eliminate living labor from production
not only in the traditional, North
Atlantic centers, but, above all--and
most devastatingly--across the Global
South. The signs of this transformation
are at once everywhere around us, yet
their fundamental nature and the
forces driving them are barely
understood, in my view, on the Left as
much as mainstream neoliberal
economics.

If as recently as 2000, the most

knowledgeable scholars of technology
at MIT predicted that it would be
impossible to make a functional
automated car, today we not only see
these scattered across the California
highways, but witness predictions that some 50% of all production still requiring living
labor could be automated in some 20 yrs. Moreover, it is increasingly clear that the
immense and wrenching changes this will bring to global capitalism will be far more
devastating in the global south.

This process is already well underway and universally visible (a few examples from
multitudes of recent articles):
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/10/23/welcoming-our-new-robot-overlords
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/25/business/india-outsourcing-layoffs-automation-
artificial-intelligence.html?smprod=nytcore-iphone&smid=nytcore-iphone-share

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/29/business/coal-jobs-trump-
appalachia.html?smprod=nytcore-iphone&smid=nytcore-iphone-share

http://www.nber.org/papers/w23285

https://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21616891-ten-years-ago-developing-
economies-were-catching-up-developed-ones-remarkably-quickly-it?frsc=dg%7Ca

For all its shocking and sudden visibility globally, however, this process is in my view not
at all clearly understood as a moment in the historical and structural development of
capitalism. In the many articles one reads, we generally find mere descriptions of new
automation processes and its effects on GDP, workers, wages, and employment, but

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never any explanation of the forces driving these changes beyond the vaguest, most
superficial references to global 'competition' and 'market forces'. Even more rigorously
argued analyses that identify a new tendency fail to see beyond neoliberal shibboleths.
This is why Marx's unparalleled analysis of the structure of capitalism is more urgent than
ever. If Marx understood Capital as what Althusser called a 'structure of structures,' its
previous, 20th century form was dominated by the massive global employment of living
labor in industrial production (Fordist imperialism). Since the 1970s, however, global
capitalism has been restructuring, scientifically automating labor processes and
exponentially expanding its reliance upon financialization to compensate for the
accompanying loss of what Marx called the 'substance' of value in capitalism, living
labor power.
This analysis will be familiar from the writings of Robert Kurz, the post-2000 texts of
André Gorz, and Michel Henry (who derived the equation VC=0 as the historical destiny
of capital a full decade before Kurz put forward his value-form theory of crisis). Since the
year 2000, and even more since Kurz' untimely death in 2012, this process has only
accelerated and become universal, making it more urgent than ever to understand its
nature. And yet Kurz' analysis is in my view weakened by two shortcomings: 1) He, like
Henry, reduces the historical development of capitalism to a unilinear mechanism,
arguing that the collapse of capital will be automatic, due to its structural tendency to
replace living labor power with its newest fixed, automated forms. 2) Kurz had a quite
superficial understanding of the Global South, an understanding generally summarized
by his repeated references to global development as a process of 'recuperative
modernization.'
On both counts, Althusser's more supple reading of Marx's Capital allows us to grasp the
historical development of global capitalism more adequately. For Althusser, Capital
forms a complex structure of structures, one characterized not by a single mechanistic
tendency, but rather by radical historical contingency and the changing nature of its
various 'structures in dominance' (as in the historical shift described above). If Althusser
has long been essential reading on the Left across the Global South, this newest phase
of global capitalism arguably makes it more urgent than ever to return to his conceptual
mode of reading Capital in the current conjuncture and crisis. For although the
contemporary transformations of capitalism since 2000 were not yet phenomenologically
perceptible to Althusser in 1965, they were well-understood by Marx, who clearly
delineated the structural logic of this process as early as the 1858 'Fragment on
Machines' (here I disagree with Michael Heinrich), expanding and systematizing that
analysis over the remainder of his life in what remains his unparalleled masterpiece of
the structural logic of capital.
The political implications of this reading for Latin America and the Global South are
immense, in my view. Theorists such as Kurz and Moishe Postone have concluded from
this structural or 'value-form' reading of Capital that the traditional Marxism of the 20th
century, characterized by the political struggle over the social distribution of industrialist
production, is no longer viable. Instead, we must reinvent a politics adequate to the
contemporary dynamics of global capitalism and late imperialism. To do so, to formulate
what might constitute any conceivable post-capitalist politics, I believe we must first
achieve a clear and adequate understanding of the nature and limits of this newest form
of capital. The place to initiate and to develop this contemporary understanding in all
theoretical complexity and rigor remains Marx's masterpiece.
This, in essence, is the argument on Reading Capital I develop, in more detail and with
requisite references, in my contribution to the book I’ve just edited, alongside the brilliant

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contributions of colleagues such as Alain Badiou, Etienne Balibar, Bruno Bosteels, and
Fernanda Navarro.
https://www.dukeupress.edu/the-concept-in-crisis