Capital’s true nature is only visible from a position outside it

Evidence

Insofar as we are programmed by capital, we can’t understand what capital is either. The conditions for understanding capital properly lie outside it, in a communist science that — to hijack a phrase from Nick Land — must create the conditions for its own emergence almost entirely out of its enemy’s resources. From the inside (of capital), capital is an economic system, which relies on politics only contingently; from the outside, capital is an intricate set of (libidinal, ideological, violent) mechanisms designed to block the emergence of Red Plenty. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1982

Categorization

• XREF: Nick Land’s accelerationism and ‘hyperstition’ thread runs through the K-Punk corpus; this foreshadows Fisher’s later work on capitalist realism. — connects to: Capital is constitutively blind to its own nature like a disconnected AI — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1979; Critical distance from capital has been abolished in postmodern space — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 158

Broader Connections

• Capital is constitutively blind to its own nature like a disconnected AI #expands (0.78) — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1979
• Critical distance from capital has been abolished in postmodern space #qualifies (0.74) — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 158