I think there is an implicit ontology baked into capitalist social relations, and it’s a contradictory “practical ontology” that simultaneously upholds a dualism between subject and object, self and other, the intensive and the extensive, mind and matter, etc. while unfolding through time as a tendency towards a monist subsumption of the former (subject, etc.) into the latter (object, etc.). By “practical ontology” I mean a set or system of notions about the fundamental kinds of entities, relations and processes that constitute reality that are not primarily articulated in forms of thought but are at base implicit and presupposed in our actions with each other. In the case of capitalism, there is a practical ontology that spells out how subjects and objects must operate and relate to one another in an ideal sense, that is practically instantiated in how they are made to operate and relate to one another in a real sense. Under capitalism, what is real is subordinated to the ideal condition which preceded it, such that the real is made to be that which conforms to the image and aim of the ideal.
This contradictory practical ontology is reflected on the level of social praxis as the dualism (mutual antagonism) between wage-labor and capital, which develops over time (due to the profit-maximizing imperative of capitalization which aims to reduce costs and increase productivity) as the tendential reduction of wage-labor to zero (therefore the displacement of human labor from production) and the transcendence of capital from human labor in the form of automated labor and speculative finance. This whole dynamic itself is holographically contained in the commodity-form itself: each commodity is at once a qualitative use-value and a quantitative (exchange-)value, and these are by nature incommensurable with one another, yet in their relations with each other a commodity is only expressed as an object for and to be exchanged, which is ideally expressed in money as the common substance by which different commodities can be measured. That the commodity qua object can be something that is independent of its nature as exchangeable (as a unique and irreducible qualitative use-value) is at once presupposed (if the commodity didn’t have a real qualitative utility then it wouldn’t appear in the market or thus created in production) and negated (the price can, and often does, wildly differ, especially through financial abstraction, from its actual cost in matter, energy and labor). The recent historical emergence of the financial derivative (a class of financial instruments which initially depend on real underlying assets but become increasingly abstracted from them over time through layers of self-referential speculation) is both a particular instantiation of this asymmetrical logic that privileges quantitative exchange-value over qualitative use-value, and a universal example of the logic itself, and its recent paradigmatic emergence points to how we are in a very “mature” or “late” stage in capitalist development where the real subsumption of all life-processes into the capitalist valorization process asymptotically reaches near-completion.
In a way this “capitalist ontology” is synchronically dualistic but diachronically monistic, which is to say that the distinction between the categories by which it operates are simultaneously upheld and destroyed over time. It is a contradictory ontology of an eternal dualism in substance and a dialectical monism in process. In this way it actually mirrors, albeit in an inverted way, the paradoxical ontology of Process Buddhism. In Process Buddhism all things are primordially open/empty aspects of a creative process of inclusive-transcendence that is also itself open/empty. The contradictory ontology of capitalism and the paradoxical ontology of Process Buddhism are alike in that they both constitute a unity-in-difference between contrasting polarities at any and every scale of analysis. Yet the key difference is that while capitalist ontology is inconsistent because it aims for completion (the speculative Idea of Capital aims for metabolic independence from human labor even as it presupposes it, therefore it is a fundamentally self-undermining, auto-annihilating dynamic), Process Buddhism is consistent because it does not aim for completion since it functionally presupposes it: since all things are primordially open/empty, all things are internally related with and dependently originated from all other things, therefore the creative advance into novelty is both really possible (in the sense of being undeniably present, even to the clearest yogic awareness) and impossibly unreal (in the sense of being unfindable, even when subject to ultimate dialectical analysis). Capitalist ontology is actually contradictory because it actively undermines what it presupposes; Process Buddhism is paradoxical (i.e. only seemingly contradictory) because it both presupposes and establishes the unity-in-difference of that which is ordinarily and habitually conceived otherwise as inherently distinct and mutually opposed (from its own side, it is neither paradoxical nor non-paradoxical, it just simply is).
One of the advantages of Process Buddhism is that it can account for the possibility of capitalism’s practical ontology as an abstraction from and reification of its own ontology, but capitalist ontology cannot account for the ontology of Process Buddhism. To know things are open/empty is to entertain, at least initially, that there are differential elements that constitute the extensive continuum of the world, yet these elements are seen as open/empty: without an inherent existence or intrinsic nature (svabhāva) of their own, being internally related parts of dependently originating entities and processes that are themselves open/empty. Process Buddhism sees subjects and objects as open/empty and ultimately non-arisen, but capitalist ontology requires them to be inherently existent and eternally co-present. Process Buddhism sees open/empty subjects and objects as reciprocally entangled and mutually transforming aspects of an open/empty process that includes and transcends them, but capitalist ontology requires the asymmetrical dependence of subjects to objects in a process that tendentially displaces the former and valorizes the latter. Process Buddhism reflects a form of life that is metabolically open yet reciprocally engaged with its m/others (giving back to the conditions of its own possibility and offering itself as inheritance to the conditions which will succeed it), while capitalist ontology reflects a form of life that is metabolically closed off from and asymmetrically engaged with its m/others (in a process that is defined from base to fruition as the extraction, exploitation and expulsion of its m/other).
Because Process Buddhism itself is an expression of the life-supporting, life-engendering basis that is the real condition of our existence — a condition itself which is extracted, exploited and expelled by the capitalist mode of production — it is poised to be a subversive force that exposes and resists the operations by which capital dominates and extirpates human and non-human life. Beyond just this negative, critical function, Process Buddhism (because it includes and transcends capitalism’s own practical ontology) can also serve positively to help reconstruct ideally — and really instantiate in actual praxis — forms of life that are appropriate for the global communal re/appropriation the planetary Commons on the basis of real human and non-human fraternity, equality and liberty.
Holopoiesis 