The Political Economy of Software: Foreword to Exocapitalism (2025)
This book is a trip—and this would not be the case if its subject, capitalism, was not in itself and in every way, very trippy. What the authors of Exocapitalism attempt to describe is nothing less than the present state of a system that has evolved within a space that is delimited by the logic of value extraction. If, in the theory of General Relativity, “spacetime tells matter how to move [and] matter tells spacetime how to curve,” — to use the words of John Wheeler — then we can say something of the sort pertains to value and capitalism as well: the former tells the latter where to move, how to curve and so on. The two cannot be separated and they co-evolve in what can be pictured as a configuration space.
This space remains the same in all of its defining points as Newtonian space, however the form of the contents it holds changes continually. In short, the form the elements of capitalism assume may result in liberalism, or Keynesianism, or neo-conservatism, or, in the near future, the ICE Keynesianism established by the Big Beautiful Bill. In this book, its form, shaped by forces that appear to be aleatory, is exocapitalism, a configuration which in many ways is both very new and very old. The old part relates to capitalism as an economic system, and the new part to a reconfiguration and, as a consequence, reassertion of its key category, value. In Marxist political economy, this category is represented by the equation that exposes the source of profit, whose value form, surplus value, eluded classical political economy. In exocapitalism—the moment when the machine and value accumulation become almost (or appear to be) one—the worker is removed from this equation and what we are left with is capital in a state that, by itself, by its own lifting activities, believes that nothing more is required for its maintenance and expansion until the end of all time. This is the software economy.
Marxists would have seen this fantastic jump (or, to use the language of Poliks and Trillo, lifting) coming if it had taken seriously a theory that Tugan-Baranovsky presented in the closing years of the 19th century: “the [potential/possibility] of the self-expansion process [Verwertungsprozess] of capital.” Rudolf Hilferding called this “Marxism gone mad.” And though he was right in one respect (what mirrors Marxism and capitalism is, according to Baudrillard, production itself); he was wrong to see the jump/lift as a form of madness. It’s perfectly rational. No markets, consumers, no contracts – capitalists can do with just machines producing machines. What William Blake described with horror as “these dark Satanic Mills” has reached a state of perfection in today's software economy.
But it doesn’t end there. The status of value in exocapitalism, which draws primarily from early Deleuze and Guattari, with splashes here and there of Nick Land, is that it’s completely divorced from the conventional view of labor. “This is a weird way to think about labor,” write the authors, “admittedly, instead of labor producing value – e.g. assembling wood into a chair – we propose thinking about labor constructing volatility in the translation between capital exchanged for wood and capital received for chair.” Why? Because the value labor adds to a product is not in the form of ever-accelerating time (the key to the labor theory of value, which is socially necessary labor time) but actually in what might slow down its realization: friction. These interruptions result in volatility, the essence of Exocapitalism’s value theory.
Now this conception, as far as I can tell, is entirely new. Or, it’s related in some ways to a concept that, in its design, validates capital’s contribution to an economy, which is waiting. But the waiting described in Alfred Marshall’s Principles of Economics, was, for one, about adding moral value to a part of the system that seemed to do nothing: it didn’t lift boxes, turn screws, stack shelves, and what have you. What did capitalists do? They waited.
In exocapitalism, waiting has evolved into holding, which causes a kind of friction that generates value. This is the nut of this work. The “time (the hold), and the frictions and latencies through which time is accessed, is quite literally money.” And from this nut we get this conclusion: “Value-production within the hold phase is simply and directly a by-product of time, and the relationship between buy, hold, and sell are literally determined by prediction tools and applied Brownian motion (random action within a substrate).” Waiting becomes holding, holding results in the new source of value, which is volatility. Capitalism has never been and could never be a smooth criminal. It needs the hold, the friction, the instability to generate surplus value. An efficient market hypothesis is nothing more than the chattering that zombies make with their teeth.
But there is still more (SPOILER ALERT): Poliks and Trillo end their work with no prescriptions. This has two important consequences. One, it means that, despite Nick Land’s influence on this book’s model of capitalism as it is today, liberation can’t be identified with accelerationism, which, after all, has its deep roots in Marxism. The theorists of exocapitalism want, rightly, nothing to do with crises: the crisis of the state, the crisis of legitimacy, the crisis of the last crisis. In this respect, Poliks and Trillo break fundamentally not only with accelerationism but with the late theorists of the Frankfurt School as well, particularly Habermas. The earlier theorists, Adorno and Horkheimer were much more interested in reification, as developed in György Lukács’s History of Class Consciousness, and this position is not at all foreign to the capitalism conceptualized by Poliks and Trillo. Reification and lifting are close rather than distant cousins. Indeed, at the heart of reification is the most famous line in the Communist Manifesto: “All that’s solid melts into air.” This is lifting.
Exocapitalism is also a close cousin of Jean Baudrillard’s “transeconomics.” Winking to Baudelaire, he wrote in La transparence du mal: essai sur les phénomènes extrèmes: “Money is now the only genuine artificial satellite. A pure artifact, it enjoys a truly astral mobility; and it is instantaneously convertible. [It is] the orbit in which it rises and sets like some artificial sun…” But what about the workers? What about labor? What is to be said about this class in Exocapitalism? Nothing. And with good reason. There is nothing to say about labor in an analysis of capitalism that can consider itself at all rigorous. What one must wake up to is the fact that for a while labor has been, and, for the most part, still is, irrelevant. The wage is not even yours. To feel in ownership of it, is to accept the concept of distribution first formalized/fantasized by Adam Smith (though it has its roots in Locke’s theory of property) and reasserted by David Ricardo: The wage is like capital and rent.
Each stream is claimed by revenue as a part of the national product. But only the mid-century Kozo school of Marxism, which is not taken seriously by orthodox Marxists, saw the flaw in the steps of this kind of thinking. Wages were never owned by the workers. Those who grabbed rent and profits with their grabbing hands always grabbed your wages because it was, in essence, their property. If this is understood, then you will see why social democracy as it is classically understood, and in some states practiced, was doomed to fail.
In exocapitalist economics, wages are only about lifting capital, about leaving what was once theorized as the base to the stars, and from there (the stars), to forever. With this understanding, the non-importance of labor can finally be seen as liberatory. There is no need to put the writing on the wall; just describe the space that informs daily experience in the third decade of the 21st century. Welcome to the software economy.
Charles Mudede, June 2025
©2026, Berlin/Nicosia
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