Th is essay discusses the consequences of the changed relationship between capital and labour after the end of the Fordist post-war boom. As a result of these changes, capital accumulation is no longer predominantly based on the exploitation of labour in the production of commodities like cars, hamburgers, and smartphones but on the massive emission of property titles like shares, bonds, and fi nancial derivatives that represent claims to future value. Th ese changes irreversibly weakened labour power, giving capital a freer hand than ever before. But making large numbers of workers redundant also had consequences for capital. Th e Th ird Industrial Revolution thus marked the onset of a fundamental crisis. Th e production of value through the exploitation of labour has been replaced with the systematic anticipation of future value in the form of fi ctitious capital. However, this form of expansion is reaching its limits and is linked with signifi cant costs to society. Albeit sobering and chilling, this analysis suggests removing the political response of the left from the retrospective romanticising of the Fordist era capitalism and pursue the abolition of labour as a form of social mediation. In other words: pursue liberation from labour and from its dependence on capital accumulation rather than the liberation of labour.
Th e article distinguishes between two fundamental dynamics in Marx’s critique of capitalism: the humanist, cyclical, perpetually-renewed struggle between capitalists and wage labor over profi ts, wages, and the distribution of social wealth more generally and what I term a “posthuman” dialectic between humans and machines, unfolding as the unilinear historical dynamic of automation and the corresponding decreases it brings to the capacity of living labor to produce surplus value. Th e consequence of this posthuman dialectic is both the growing superfl uity of living labor relegated to a planet of slums and the actual and coming collapse of valorization as a global process (as opposed to its operation in any single unit of capital). If the former, humanist dialectic remained predominant in what Moishe Postone has termed “traditional” Leninist Marxism, the contemporary context of the “Second Machine-Age” and the expanding automation of virtually all production and services points to a collapse of valorization that philosophers such as Michel Henry and Robert Kurz identifi ed in Marx’s conceptualization of capitalism as “the moving contradiction.”