Nihilist Optimism

To read Workers and Capital today is to confront a provocation that has lost none of its force: that capital does not develop autonomously, according to its own internal logic, but is compelled, reshaped, and reorganised by the struggles of the working class. What appears as the rationality of capital – its planning, its institutions, its capacity for coordination at the level of the whole of society – is, in fact, the historical product of antagonism. At a certain level of development, capital no longer appears as a fragmented set of individual enterprises but as a social power . The emergence of what Mario Tronti calls the collective capitalist marks this transformation: capital becomes capable of organising itself as a totality, a “functionary of the total social capital,” coordinating production, circulation, and reproduction across the entire social field. This is not simply an economic shift but a political one. The “plan” of capital – its capacity to govern itself and, through...

Review of Abolishing Capitalist Totality. What Is to Be Done under Real Subsumption? Jason Bonilla This book, comparable to a grenade, was published in 2026 by Minor Compositions, founded on collective intelligence. It is an ambitious anthology, eagerly awaited for a decade, whose war machine – borrowing from Deleuzian-Guattarian terminology – traces lines of flight that unfold from communist theory and the problem of communization – Théorie Communiste and Endnotes – to critical philosophy and the problem of totality – Kant and Hegel – , revolving around a relatively obscure but enormously powerful concept: subsumption in Marx, specifically the distinction between formal and real subsumption of labor as stages in the organization of productive processes under capital. Although the volume does indeed revolve around the concept of subsumption, in my view the two vital concepts that run through the discussion, across its nearly 600 pages, are communization and totality. Communization, fol...