Independent Publisher ✱ Minor Theoretical Literature ✱ Berlin/Nicosia
First introductions to Exocapitalism (2025)
Exocapitalism: economies with absolutely no limits (2025) by Marek Poliks & Roberto Alonso Trillo is composed of five movements: Scale, Fold, Lift, Drag, and The Last Mile. Here, the authors have distilled these parts into five blurbs, giving a surface level overview of the book’s contents.
Scale:
Exocapitalism is the idea that capitalism isn’t socially constructed (sociogenic).
It’s all about price. Price is a kind of immanent thing. Price emerges through the invariances that occur in mathematical randomness. (Anyone can look at a random curve and use math to make an informed, statistically advantageous wager about its next step.) Exocapitalism makes more of itself by staging a diversity of random fields (price) through which it can inject and withdraw capital at statistically advantageous moments. For Marx, value is a connection between price and an underlying asset. In exocapitalism, value flows downstream from price, and the connection to an underlying asset is broken. In exocapitalism, value is the ‘capture’ of price that accrues when capital is injected into a price-generating field.
Fold:
While the world economy is still largely a hardware economy, the software economy is a good indicator for capital’s future. (We are aware that the future is unevenly distributed). The software economy presents a situation where price is not determined, but generated. It consists of fungible modules with highly flexible price structures. Each Software as a Service module is itself also composed of other Software as a Service modules, arranged in a modular way. Every Software as a Service module can thus be thought of as an abstraction of its constitutive array of modular softwares with an intangible representational overlay against which price is generated. This arrangement of modular, recursive structures is attractive to capital precisely because of its topology.
The motto of exocapitalism is ‘inefficiency = value’ – capital generates more of itself by building these recursive structures. This is the type of production that occurs under exocapitalism, not commodity production but rather the production of intermediaries through which price is decoupled from material value.
Lift:
Capital hates fixed costs. Fixed costs (e.g. in the production of material goods) derandomize the flow of capital. Hardware means fixed costs – price is largely pre-determined. Software does not mean fixed costs necessarily – price can be more fluid. Humans reproduce themselves through processes that involve fixed costs. Capitalism resists (at all costs) involvement in human social reproduction.
Lift is the pulling-away of capital from the sphere of human affairs. Lift is the idea that all businesses want to be banks. An example of the lift process could be a business that shunts subcontracted intermediaries between capital and humans until something breaks and the enterprise can fully morph into a superscalar bank. Tokenization is a form of lift – consider the first order representation of a good in its commodity form as the initial motion of lift, then consider the second order representation of that commodity form as a derivative. At each level, price is further decoupled from value and rather affixed to the interplay of stochastic processes.
Drag:
There is a dramatic failure of imagination by the human species when it comes to facilitating its own social reproduction. Humans leverage the stochastic price-production engine of capital to create its internal vehicles of exchange. This is a really crazy thing to do. Coaxing capital, especially lifted capital, to perform as a medium for interhuman relations is really difficult – we call this coaxing process drag. Drag means both the attempts of humans to embed themselves within the lift process, and the attempts by humans to entrap capital by reconstructing their own social processes in highly lifted ways. Drag, counterintuitively, accelerates lift.
We know capital is not interested in regimes of production and consumption (lift). In turn, we are learning that capital has an inbuilt immunity to labor, since the character and affordances of labor are not manifestly productive to capital. Exocapitalism has no theory of ideology. The theory of drag replaces the theory of ideology. Again, exocapitalism, by definition, is not hosted within the social field.
The Last Mile:
Humans exist and need to reproduce themselves at scale. We only know one way to do this – slavery (coerced labor). While contemporary coerced labor certainly resembles what Marx describes as capitalism, it doesn’t actually constitute a regime change from what Marx called ‘primitive accumulation.’ There is no real proletariat that forms, there is instead a growing, distributed ‘surplus population’ of refugees, victims of trafficking, and precarity laborers leveraged specifically by the state in collusion with extranational feudal entities (e.g. private prisons, sweatshops, slave contractors) to execute the labor required for human social reproduction. These are not ‘technofeudal’ or ‘neofeudal’ entities in that they are not capitalist objects, instead they are ancient expressions of land-based sovereignty that pre-exist and supersede even nation-state based sovereignty. (Technofeudalism or neofeudalism cannot exist because of lift).
Empire is also not a capitalist object, it is also a massively scaled expression of land-based sovereignty that supersedes all others. Empire is indistinguishable from geotrauma, empire is the metabolization of geotrauma. Nation-states come and go but empire is forever. Feudal encampments nest in deepest inflections of imperial topography, creating more humans through unimaginable amounts of pain. Capital is the glitter in the sky.