Capitalism: Some disassembly required

Abstract

Capital’s critical standpoint relies on keeping rmly in view this vast reservoir of internal social variability. It refuses to look through this complex, chaotic content, in order to reductively grasp capitalism as a system de ned only by the reproduction of a small set of social forms. Instead, it sees the reproduction of capital as dependent on a vast assemblage of social practices that possesses high internal variability. rough a process of selective inheritance, it is possible to mobilize this internal variability, adaptively improvising new forms of collective life. Communism would be capitalism, some disassembly required: a speciation from our existing form of social life, which would creatively adapt existing social potentials to emancipatory ends.