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From the Collective Capitalist to Working-Class Strategy

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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...
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Totality Without Exit? Abolition After Real Subsumption

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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...
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More Smiles, More Money? The Politics of Making Housework Visible

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Louise Toupin’s Wages for Housework: A History of an International Feminist Movement, 1972–77 arrives as both an archival excavation and a provocation, as an invitation to re-enter a field of struggle whose coordinates feel uncannily contemporary. What Toupin reconstructs is not merely a campaign organized around a contentious demand, but a political experiment that sought to recompose the very terms through which labour, value, and subjectivity are understood. In this sense, the book operates in a register that is at once historiographic and strategic: it is concerned not only with what happened, but with what remains possible. At the centre of this reconstruction lies a deceptively simple gesture: to take seriously the proposition that housework – long dismissed as natural, private, or pre-political – is in fact “multi-faceted, invisible, and unrecognized labour” that is indispensable to capitalist accumulation. From this starting point, the Wages for Housework current unfolds less a...
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Minor Communism, or Inventing the People

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There is a recurring tendency in contemporary debates about communism to oscillate between two unsatisfying positions. On one side lies a melancholic archaeology of lost revolutions: the twentieth century revisited as a graveyard of organizational forms, exhausted strategies, and failed futures. On the other side is a speculative enthusiasm for post-political transformation – networked uprisings, decentralized swarms, and algorithmic collectivities – that sometimes dissolves politics into a metaphysics of circulation. What tends to disappear between these poles is the question of how revolutionary thought mutates as it travels through different historical and geographical conditions. Alex Taek-Gwang Lee’s Communism After Deleuze is a fascinating intervention precisely because it situates itself in that terrain of mutation. The book asks what it might mean to think communism through the philosophical work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, but it does so by displacing the familiar E...
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Waiting for Frances

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Characters • LEX – a tired lecturer holding a placard. • PAT – another lecturer, equally tired, eating a slightly stale biscuit. • A PASSING ADMINISTRATOR – occasionally appears with confusing updates. • A VOICE FROM MANAGEMENT EMAILS – disembodied. Outside the gates of the university. A picket line. A banner flaps in the wind: “SAVE OUR JOBS.” A coffee thermos sits between them like a sacred object. LEX: Well? PAT: Well what? LEX: Has she gone yet? PAT: No. LEX: Ah. (Pause.) PAT: Maybe today. LEX: You said that yesterday. PAT: Yesterday had promise. LEX: So does a restructuring document, apparently. (Pause.) PAT: What are we waiting for again? LEX: Frances. PAT: Right. (They stare at the university buildings.) PAT: You’d think if someone threatened half the place with redundancy and hinted at shutting a campus, they might… I don’t know… appear? LEX: Communication is happening. PAT: Where? LEX: In principle. (Pause.) PAT: I heard she said she can’t take a pay cut. LEX: Yes. PAT...
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Islam as Rhizome: Heresiology after Deleuze

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Michael Muhammad Knight’s Sufi Deleuze: Secretions of Islamic Atheism arrives less as a contribution to “Islam and philosophy” than as an intervention into how theory travels, who it forgets, and what it cannot see from where it stands. Published by Fordham University Press in 2023, the book refuses the polite format of comparative theology. It stages instead a set of collisions: between shrine and seminar, baraka and assemblage, the Qur’an and the Orientalist residue sedimented even in radical European thought. If Deleuze once treated the Qur’an as the exemplary authoritarian “root-book,” Knight answers not by defending Islam within Deleuze’s schema but by prying Deleuze loose from his own archive and forcing him to think from the dargah outward. The book opens at a tomb. Knight purchases the musty orange paperbacks of the Inayati order and approaches the grave of Inayat Khan, remembering that his former mentor Hakim Bey had stood there decades earlier. The scene is intimate and crac...
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When the Factory Disappears. Does the Most Developed Explain the World?”

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Today we’re reading two sections from Workers and Capital : “Marx Yesterday and Today” and “Factory and Society” by Mario Tronti. What strikes me immediately is that Tronti is not trying to interpret Marx historically. He’s issuing a methodological and political challenge. He writes that any research project concerned with the contemporary validity of Marxism “has to engage with Marx not in his time, but in our own.” Capital should be judged on the basis of the capitalism of today. So the question is not: what did Marx mean in 1867? But: what does Marxism become when confronted with the most developed form of capitalism now? Tronti insists on a key methodological principle taken from Marx: it is the most developed point that explains the backward, not vice versa. Capital explains ground rent, not the reverse. This becomes a way of thinking politically: the highest development of capitalism reveals its inner structure most clearly. That means analysis must begin from the advanced forms ...
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