Capital capitalizing on its own critique may appear to be an invariant feature of its operation (as a process of creatively re-self-constituting itself from the very destruction of its own constitutive ground of possibility, being itself), but the degree to which such a feature is self-conscious is the degree to which it realizes that its operation is not an effect of some blind economic material calculus of value but thoroughly contingent upon the exercise of willful power in all of its institutional and non-institutional expressions.
At this point it would have far surpassed the need to produce complex institutional arrangements to obfuscate the basis of its operation as a system of exploitation and domination since it must lay bare the truth of this basis in order to even begin to exploit it at all. Exploiting the fact that it exploits others to make a profit in order to make a profit is only a game that someone who thinks you’re a loser for even playing plays. It is capital laughing at the fact that we cannot defeat it even as it—and because it—at last finally admits the sheer contingency of its own-being, laying bare that it was only ever a matter of exercising willful power from the very start, and never ever was, in any meaningful sense, an epiphenomenal matter of the calculus of meeting economic need.
This final laying bare of the true basis of its underlying operations can only arise after the historical failure of all the various competing means that were hoped to establish a different kind of world to succeed it, failures which not only failed to even slightly shift the direction to something completely other than what we find at present, but failures which (contrary to their original motivating intentions) fulfilled a necessary function (contrary to their resolute expectations) for capital’s inevitable and inexorable march into the present moment. Only by first making possible to itself the impossibility of a communism to replace itself would capital even dare to admit to itself and others its own inhumanity and negligence for other life, and then to start cannibalizing on this recognition of inhuman cannibalization in a sense-numbing fractal sequence of derivative auto-cannibalizations.
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