Postcapitalism?
By Angela Dimitrakaki
All critiques should start with history, including on the entanglement of geopolitics and intellectual histories. This pertains to the uses of the term ‘post-capitalism’ as the first quarter of the 21st century closes with a profitable arms race and a war economy. As capitalism loves war, and often resolves its stagnation issue through war, and as capital is intertwined with imperialism, there is good reason to ask if ‘post-capitalism’ is useful.
The concept of ‘post-capitalism’ became useful to the left in the late 20th century, after capitalism emerged victorious out of the Cold War. This happened around 1990, when the Berlin Wall fell (1989), and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics finally folded (1991). The end of the Cold War was the victory of capitalism, specifically as anti-communism. The murderous anti-communism to which the defenders of the bourgeoisie had devoted themselves since at least the slaughter of the Paris communards in 1871 would be a staple of the 20th century. So many local and regional stories make up the currents of anti-communism – including the brutal torture and hounding of communists or sanctions, attacks, coups d’état engineered in countries that dared to think about a socialist beginning of a communist future. Entities such as the CIA and the Congress for Cultural Freedom would ensure the success of what we might call a specifically anti-communist imperialism. Why such effort?
The main aim of anti-communism has been to make communism unthinkable and unutterable. The concept of post-capitalism came to the fore when the left felt that it could not give the future the name ‘communism’. The capitalist strategy of banning the C word had succeeded. The C word should not be used in any propositional politics that the left could imagine as a large part of it became ‘post-Marxist’. Post-capitalism was introduced as a surrogate, as a hope that could be spoken about the prospect of capitalism’s overcoming. What post-capitalism says is that capitalism will pass because all modes of production eventually do, ‘killed’ by their own evolution, and so the suffering that capitalism dispensed to the majority would also end. But why this attachment to the ‘post’ in the first place?
Cultural historians of the contemporary must recall the successful career of the prefix ‘post’ – a marker of an accelerationist mentality – in Western societies since the 1950s. The second half of the twentieth century was consumed by a millennial angst that wished transcendence and the end of everything, especially of the modern. ‘Post-modernism’ was a devastating and culturally engineered habitat of this ‘endism’, while other terms followed suit: post-feminism, post-artistic, post-contemporary, post-truth are just some such terms, but still they indicate that ‘post’ became a sensibility of resignation: an inability to name what one is doing in relation to a future built through human agency. It is not accidental that new materialism/s interwoven with post-humanism – negating human agency as the agency of labour against capital and imagining agency in the spectrum of existence (from stones to algorithms, from organic to inorganic) – also launched its transnational ideological services at the same time as the prefix ‘post’.
Where then the remnants of the revolutionary left and its history of concepts are concerned, post-capitalism did not remain a placeholder for hopeful futurity for long. In 1993, Peter Drucker, author of Post-capitalist Society, wrote of this ‘transformation’ that he associated with the emergence of a ‘knowledge society’ in the USA and the meteoric rise of ‘information’ and the ‘computer’: ‘if history is any guide, it will not be completed until 2010 or 2020’.
Here we are then, in the mid-2020s. Although I would question that a transformation rather than yet another reform is what we presently endure, mention of ‘knowledge’, ‘information’ and ‘computer’ is far from positive for anyone still capable of thinking. On the contrary, data centres and AI have become symbols of a deeper capture under an accelerated Accelerationism as a pillar of neo-fascism – Nick Land’s philosophical investigations and the neo-reactionaries as well as Silicon Valley’s transhumanism are facilitators that come to mind. Technology and imaginaries of transcendence are about private accumulation of capital which is seen as ‘natural evolution’. But where there is fascism, there is also capitalism. Fascism is, as once remarked, capitalism ‘without the filter’. Capital’s tendency to oligopoly and monopoly does not deliver post-capitalism – which now registers negatively – but a deeper shade of totalitarian capitalism. Finance has been part of capitalism from the outset – when was capitalism not involving assets? From the outset, all this combined with production-based privatised wealth, no matter the division of the planet in industrialised and de-industrialised zones – the latter generating yet another post- impression: post-industrial societies. But, one wonders, does a post-industrial global society have a need to suppress workers’ right to ‘industrial action’ or, simply, to strike? And yet, as the ITUC Global Rights Index 2024 says, now 9 out of 10 countries violate this right.
What the above suggests is that the concept of ‘post-capitalism’ now has a rich history where theorising the contemporary meets geopolitics. This history must be considered when the term post-capitalism enters the political vocabularies of struggle. There is cross-disciplinary interest in the political imaginary that can be connected with post-capitalism – for example, we find the term in Marxist theory of art, as in Dave Beech’s brilliant Art and Postcapitalism: Aesthetic Labour, Automation and Value Production (2019), where imaginaries of ‘noncapitalist’ production are sought. Arguably, we cannot afford to give up on such a prospect. But use of the prefix ‘post’ (rather than merely ‘non’) indicates acceptance of the fact that history is linear and that humanity’s passage through capitalism cannot be undone. This acceptance remains important for how we interrogate capitalism and how we organise against it. At present, capitalism has raised legitimate existential fear through its imperialist war economy, the AI mass theft of human labour for private super-profits, and full-on climate destruction. The question of whether the building blocks of human society and flourishing will be available after capitalism-as-destruction is likewise legitimate. It is a question posed with clarity, amidst capitalism’s first world war, by Rosa Luxemburg: socialism or barbarism – which way to the future? Although posed in 1915, the question finds origins and attributions that take us back to the 19th century, including to the Communist Manifesto, which raises the hope about the revolutionary pursuit of a modernity free from the devastations of exploitation and extractivism. The question ‘socialism or barbarism?’ can be rescripted: which post-capitalism do we struggle for, which post-capitalism do we align with?