Exocapitalism (2025): Interview with Marek Poliks & Roberto Alonso Trillo
Davide Tolfo:
When I first approached Exocapitalism, I have to admit I came in somewhat prejudiced. I was wary of stumbling upon yet another shiny neologism to describe the current state of capitalism, usually framed through some already-assumed theoretical dichotomy. On one side: the semio-techno-post-gore-platform-capitalism. On the other a loosely defined bloc of social and political agents, conceived alternately as both the passive substrate upon which capitalism imposes itself and the very condition that enables its functioning. Needless to say, precisely because this ensemble fuels capitalism - because it is what allows the system to run - it is also what might, in principle, blow it apart. A variation, in short, on the classical logic of labor power as Marx understood it. Your thesis seems to move beyond, or perhaps beneath, this distinction. Capitalism is exo not simply because it cannot be directly reduced to the social sphere and to labor power (we might return to this point later, I can already see eyebrows raising), but because, more radically, it can be applied to virtually anything:
“Capitalism is a mode of description that can be applied when an object from one world (situation, relational matrix, representational layer) is transcoded into an object in another world, and when the status of reciprocal representation between those worlds is in some kind of flux. The greater the flux, the greater the representative tension, the greater the possibility of identifying a moment as a representative maximum or minimum, the greater the opportunity to articulate that moment and, in so doing, return from one world to the other world with a surplus of representative potential” (Exocapitalism, 52).
I would like you to dwell on a passage in your text that I find crucial, and from which I can then move toward other questions. Because your account of exocapitalism is not just a reformulation of the tired opposition between productive and anti-productive forces, or between the social and the economic sphere, you end up arguing that capitalism has always been, since its very inception, exo. This is interesting, because in order to sustain that thesis you refer to a passage in David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years, where Graeber dismantles the common narrative that barter preceded money, and money in turn preceded credit systems. On the contrary, what recurs historically are credit systems and virtual payment structures, founded, for instance, on a promise of future repayment or exchange.
Marek Poliks & Roberto Alonso Trillo:
Right, so we are trying to reframe capitalism. At the moment, it feels like the only approach people take is though the immediacy of human experience, looking at how capitalism affects humans. Instead, we want to ask what capitalism actually is. The question becomes ontological rather than phenomenological. What happens if capitalism is a kind of being, or form, or algorithm, or transcendent thing? And what if it could exist without us, even before us, or irrespective of our involvement? For us, capitalism is a bundle of formal principles deeply related to abstraction, representation, language, and even mathematics in some way — it’s none of those things itself, but it’s potentially part of that class of things, things that we actualize as humans in local and specific ways, but certainly things that feel like they could happen elsewhere.
And so for us capitalism is a very, very deep problem. There are a lot of people, people we love (like Mark Fisher or Ursula K LeGuin) who suggest that the capitalism we live in is every bit as arbitrary as any other regime of social organization, and is therefore exchangeable, perhaps even easily so — that maybe the obstacle for us is to understand the simple arbitrariness of this condition and give ourselves the permission to imagine an alternative, perhaps by looking backwards to the past and recognizing the great diversity of social systems that came before the present moment, maybe even specifically by looking outside of the West.
This brings us to the question of whether or not the condition of capitalism is really arbitrary. We give ourselves the luxury of defining capitalism a little differently than most people do, where instead of looking purely at commodities markets, industrial-scale surplus value extraction, and conventional labor exploitation (all appearances or actualizations of what we call capitalism), instead we have our eyes squarely on the automatic generation of more capital from capital, the Marxian M -> M’ equation (money to more money) as the most important bit.
And for us the response is that, well, it seems like a lot of the underlying characteristics of the present can be found also in the deeper past — looking into the Andean Caravan Trade, the Parthian Silk Road, the Champagne Fairs, the Cowrie Share trade — and that maybe it’s worth asking ourselves if capitalism is a deeper problem than we might think it is, that imaging ourselves out of it might not just involve rejecting some ideological conditioning, that it might involve a far deeper cut or sacrifice than we might expect. Like, it seems like the Han Dynasty in the 2nd century BC was already struggling to control rampant arbitrage practices of salt merchant middlemen. I mean, one of the provocations of the book is that already with language you can find yourself trapped in the cancerous loops of capitalism, where simply through the process of elevation from a referent into a surplus of representational positions you might begin a cycle that leads all the way to high frequency trading.
This isn’t to suggest that this problem is necessarily inescapable — we were talking to Ruben Steinem and Kornelia Remø Klokk and they suggested that the issue might be crafting the appropriate sigil for capitalism (calling it by its right name and therefore protecting ourselves accordingly), or we were talking to Mohammad Salemy and then Simon Denny who both suggested that there might be some opportunity to ride these cancerous flows in really intentional ways, or Hito Steyerl has suggested that maybe one has to become utterly prelinguistic, thoughtless almost, egg-like, or Maks Valenčič could suggest that the answer might be a bit more violent, through the application of more extreme social controls — but regardless, we are excited by the prospect of taking the question of escapability extremely seriously and examining the question through its worst case scenarios.
D.T.:
That brings me straight to a second question. After years of theory that granted ontological dignity and independence to every nonhuman entity, the fact that we’re now returning to the idea that capitalism itself might have a kind of autonomy beyond the human sphere only feels strange up to a certain point. I say returning because, as you also note, this perspective was already partly present in Nick Land’s Machinic Desire, even if, in your view, Land wasn’t nihilistic enough in following through the implications of finance’s autonomous movements.
Now, once we admit this ontological independence of capitalism, the very idea of crisis starts to fall apart. We know how essential this concept is: it always signals a turning point, a moment when, to put it simply, things could begin to move in a different direction. Even in the most optimistic accelerationist theories, the concept of crisis is internalized as a phase in which capitalism, driven by its own forces, turns back upon itself, a kind of self-overturning that still preserves the idea of transformation. In that sense, crisis remains a way of imagining change, of maintaining the belief that the system can somehow reconfigure itself.
Yet, as you point out, “there are no crises in exocapitalism, it is just an algorithm. Algorithms do not have crises.” Crises, on the other hand, are deeply tied to the social and political fabric. Or, to put it more plainly, to the human sphere. And here, I think, we reach one of the most controversial aspects of your argument: if these two planes remain separate - if we can no longer even hope for the redemptive potential of a crisis - then the role of human forces and productive spheres seems reduced to that of mere observers.
M.P./R.A.T.:
This is where we split from both Marx and from accelerationism. If capitalism has to be a social thing, or a psychosocial thing, or a historically situated thing (e.g. exclusive to this or that series of historical conditions), or an ideological thing only, then we can understand how its underlying contradictions might give rise to some kind of break. But even then, why would the be the last break? Why would capitalism not just start itself up again? Why would it not require constant vigilance, constant suppression, constant maintenance, constant intervention in order to keep capitalism at bay? The spell is just broken, just like that?
In the book, it’s our allegation that since capitalism is a member of some transcendental class that exists outside of human temporalities then therefore it must be always available. So long as there exists some being somewhere that is engaging in abstraction there is also the potential for capitalism; capitalism can erupt from the collision between abstraction and real ontological difference in the world, blooming like a fungus or growing like a cancer or accumulating like a flood. And of course it can lead to crises, but these crises do not affect capitalism itself, capitalism is simply a blind instruction-set, nestled within a problem.
We should think about crises as matters of perspective and scale. The argument in the book is that crises are ripple effects, surface disturbances of deeper structural folds that do not alter the ontological status or underlying mechanisms of capital. In other words, crises 'exist' and acquire meaning within the immediacy of human experience, yet their supposed transformative or redemptive potential in relation to capitalism is, at best, apophenic. What is being questioned is not human agency vis-à-vis the human, but human agency vis-à-vis capital itself. The cumulative and redemptive paradigms of crisis emerge from Marxist thought; however, for us, a crisis represents less a turning point than the potential for an epiphany if you will – an occasion to recognise that capitalism remains fundamentally indifferent. Consequently, our agential attention should shift elsewhere: toward the persistent, quasi-feudal forms of human enslavement that continue to sustain reproductive labour and that, in our view, cannot be traced through any causal chain to capital, but only to human action itself.
And here is where we really call out accelerationism. The flagellar motor of capitalism is lift, right, it’s the cascade of abstractions that compound themselves away from materiality. In the case of humans, we know that capitalism does not ‘want’ anything to do with humans, it ‘wants’ to get away from the messiness of our reproductive mechanics — there’s just not enough speed, intensity, unpredictability, or volatility there in order to excite capitalism’s attention. And so then, if you are an accelerationist you are making two mistakes: a) that capitalism will reach some frenzied breaking point due simply to contradictions that it itself is not aware of and not concerned with and then just give up forever, and b) that in this process we may reach certain levels of automation and technological sophistication that ultimately bring us to some kind of luxury gay space communist utopia, despite the fact that capitalism is categorically not interested in labor automation, industrial automation, or the automation or enhancement of the administrative complexities of human social welfare. We don’t want to conflate technology itself with capitalism, certainly that is not the case, because of course we see technology (e.g. computation) as also connected to certain transcendental classes that humans are in the process of discovering and formalizing, but it is not through the intensification of capitalism that we reach the type of end-stage we hear expressed in accelerationist discourse.
D.T.:
There’s a passage toward the end of the book that I find particularly compelling. You write that, rather than techno-feudalism, what we are actually witnessing - if we shift our attention away from the erratic movements of capitalism and toward what remains here on Earth - is mere feudalism, “under the signs of classical colonialism, classical enslavement.” I’d like to start from this description to outline three actors orbiting around exocapitalism. First, there are the feudal territories and powers that continuously exceed the boundaries of state sovereignty. Or rather, they seem to move in and out of what remains of the state’s ability to oversee these dynamics as niches of violence and usurpation. Second, there is state sovereignty itself. You describe it as an evanescent entity, overturning the opposition proposed by Deleuze and Guattari between the State - sedentary and territorialized - and the nomadic war machine. You suggest that, if there is any truly nomadic entity in its exercise of power in the twenty-first century, it is precisely the State. Finally, the third actor is Empire. For Italian readers, this concept immediately recalls Negri and Hardt, but you displace it - this time toward the past - to encompass megamachines and pre-Enlightenment empires such as Persia and Turkey. Empire, as you define it, is “an object whose history predates the state and is a precondition for the state, as it is for human social reproduction at scale.” Now, if state sovereignty ceases to be of interest - since its role seems limited to attracting the volatilizations of exocapitalism - what, then, connects Empire and the feudal territories?
It seems to me, though I may be mistaken, that they not only operate together, but at times even tend to merge or coincide.
M.P./R.A.T.:
Yes, we want to break up singularities of power into something more dimensional, something we call a demonology, something that includes empire, the nation state, the feudal apparatus, the enslaved masses, the exocapitalism machine, and broader strains of technology all as different actors, each of which can be further diffracted into even more speciated points of particularity or actualization or articulation while adhering to some kind of principles or axioms or behavioral tendencies.
Something we really want to correct is any unnecessary conflation between the nation state and empire, between the ways they think and the ways they move.
Empire for us correlates to geotrauma, to faultiness, to topography, to minerals, to continental shelves. It carves its way through the earth like a giant slug. Empire is stupid, its libidinal drives are as elemental (literally geological) as possible. Empire is absolutely predictable.
But the nation state is an arbitrary vandal (we call it a raccoon, but even this is too cuddly), that lurks in the crevasses cut by empire. It’s crafty, opportunistic, but not empowered at scale. It becomes most visible when it acts in ways that resonate with imperial geotraumatics, that move with the grain of imperial peristaltic motion, but the state contains its own classes of interests and capabilities.
For us, the contemporary state correlates very well to D&G’s war machine – the irony being that D&G were writing at a local apogee of resonance between the state and empire. For us, in the US for example but also almost everywhere (from Mexico to South Africa to India to Afghanistan), the nation state more closely correlates to the police, the narcos, the militias, the armed gangs who most elegantly describe the opportunities D&G were describing (and, ironically, Hardt and Negri’s masses). In the US, truly, we just have roving bands of gangs (the police, ICE), who move anarchically through only ostensibly federated space. It feels like a mistake or psyop to attribute strategic capacity to almost any nation state, and that it might be better to understand states strictly as a certain register of class of violences that exist within a certain scale.
And then the feudalism we’re describing is another anarchic mode closer to social reproduction — it’s less directly about the war machine and more concretely about the regrettable forms of social reproduction available to humans at scale. This is what bubbles up at the borders of the nation state (gangland), and empire (glaciation) as they modulate the flows of resources and labor as those flows in turn intersect with the raw necessities of meat.
Empire carves the world but at very large, dumb, nonhuman scales. The nation state is not about creating firm borders, but precisely about creating and managing grey areas — like in the border between Ukraine and the Schengen Zone, or Thailand and Myanmar (Burma), or India and Bangladesh, or Israel and Gaza — typically along the faultlines of empire, establishing a kind of charged, almost capacitative porosity. This isn’t intentional or intelligent; it’s simply opportunistic. And then the feudalism we describe is the opportunity that erupts along those spaces (sweatshops, brick kilns, human trafficking, mining). We’re using feudalism almost in a tongue-and-cheek way, contrary to Varoufakis’ technofeudalism, but we are speaking about the primacy of relationship to land, physical reproduction, and the anarchy (or, straight up violent chattel slavery practices) that ultimately exists at that layer.
Sure, there are moments of tremendous, tremulous, geopolitically critical overlap. But that does not mean inter-scalar communication, intention, or drive; it does not mean anything but a kind of vague, stochastic, downstream determinism to local minima.
D.T.:
I’d like to move now to a last question, a bit more direct than the others. I know it might sound almost paradoxical after what you’ve just said, but what comes after exocapitalism? Let me clarify. You’ve mentioned that exocapitalism has, in a sense, always been here. That capitalism itself has always contained these tendencies. At the same time, your analysis, your book, after tracing the contours of this transcendental object, leaves open a great number of perspectives and directions, which, to my mind, is one of the most fascinating aspects of the text. In part, it’s what you alluded to in your first answer, and what has emerged in the various discussions that followed your presentations and the circulation of the book. So, to put it more simply: what should we expect after a kind of Critique of Pure Reason of exocapitalism? If you prefer, take this as a somewhat baroque way of asking how your project is evolving, and what you’re working on now.
M.P./R.A.T.:
We’ve found that the book can have a brief, paralyzing effect that many people find uncomfortable. You just have to work through it; it’s a somatic acknowledgment of the fact that the system doesn’t return your gaze. (On the tour, Jul Marian Schadauer and Lisa Maria Schmidt described the feeling as something like harboring frustration or longing against an ex-lover who doesn’t think about you, let alone care about you, at all).
And the immediate question that follows is always: what next? But from the internal logic of Exocapitalism, that question is already misplaced. If capitalism operates as a transcendental entity — or at least as something that exceeds historicization — then the idea of 'afterness' becomes irrelevant. What follows exocapitalism is not what comes after but that which has always been. The book proposes that the human metabolic domain at scale is always grounded in relations of enslavement. From that perspective, to look backward (or simply around us) is to return the question of the human to itself, that is, to think the human vis-à-vis the human, rather than vis-à-vis capitalism. Capitalism has long functioned as the alibi for the exploitation of humans BY humans.
Over the past weeks, in conversation with readers and colleagues, we’ve received different responses to this problem. Once we accept the impossibility of countering capitalism on its own terrain, political agency as traditionally conceived must move elsewhere, and the question of escapability becomes central. We had a great chat with Ruben Steinem and Kornelia Remø Klokk in Oslo, who suggested that the task might lie in crafting the proper sigil for capitalism, naming it correctly might function as a form of protection. Mohammad Salemy and Simon Denny have argued that there may be ways of riding these cancerous flows intentionally, turning pathology into navigation. Hito Steyerl speculated that perhaps one must become utterly prelinguistic, thoughtless almost, egg-like. Maks Valenčič suggested a more violent alternative, e.g. extreme social control.
The other concept that emerged repeatedly during the tour is agency. And yes, in Exocapitalism, agency suffers. Agency flickers at the edge of traceability; it’s constantly undermined by the structural discontinuities of scale.
Our next project begins precisely there. The question might be less about who acts, but how action persists across conditions of disconnection, automatic determination by strong up- and downstream currents, and geological-scale inertia. Or the question might be if agency is really the right way of thinking about any of this stuff, and whether we can reanimate the search for alternatives to present-day socioeconomic orders by dismantling this concept altogether (particularly its post-Enlightenment formulation – for much of the world, the question of agency at scale is at best naive and at worst violent) and building something new.
On the tour, Carly Busta asked us if exo might usher in a new era of thought. And, no lol, we’re just intellectual parasites, we’re not remotely the flag-bearers here – but it does feel like a new era in thought is taking form. We are optimistic that the era of flat ontologies, networked relations, naive materialism, media theory (at least the hard and nonnegotiable primacy of the social and social media when discussing technology), and the general posthuman assault on ontological difference is over, and that maybe a new type of structuralism is taking hold, a new focus on mechanics, an invitation to the possibility of transcendent forms, an invitation to magick and spirit and spirituality that looks more like specific demonology than ambiguous pantheism, an explosion of attention in the more structural approaches to psychoanalysis, a resurgent but redirected interest in speculation (this time not obsessed with the fetishes of materiality or thing-ness as such) alongside new energy for rethinking what things like history might look or act like (less linear and less causal and less decisional, more geometric and reconfigurable and contingent). The tagline of the tour has been “transcendence is so back.” We’re cheering it on.