Capital shapes human worlds beyond its economic operations and aims
Evidence
It is simply that capitalism has drives that no discourse can deny … to grow, to reduce input costs, to search out new venues of profit, and to generate new markets, even as the form, practices, and venues for these drives are infinitely diverse and operate discursively. Moreover, capital itself (along with, but not reducible to the specific form of reason advancing, organizing, and generating new possibilities with it) always gives shape to human worlds — relations, arrangements, subject production — in excess of its economic operations and circulations and in excess of its aims: this is the power of its world making that Marx depicted so poetically in the Manifesto and attempted to systematize in the German Ideology. — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos, 152
Categorization
- XREF: The ‘world-making’ power of capital is Marx’s Manifesto point, and it parallels the ADDENDUM framing in ‘Grafting & Growth’ about infrastructure’s hidden world-shaping force — capital as an infrastructure that organizes relations regardless of intention. — connects to: Human experience becomes capital’s next frontier after geography and nature — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 596; Money carries multiple frames of value beyond its economic function — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 386; Capitalism shapes selfhood, ecology, and institutions well beyond economics — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism: A Critique of…, 69 (+7 more)
Broader Connections
- Capitalism shapes selfhood, ecology, and institutions well beyond economics
#corroborates(0.92) — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 69 - Capitalism and materialism shape a society’s entire worldview and value system
#corroborates(0.90) - Data colonialism annexes human life itself to capital
#expands(0.85) — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 28 - Human life as organized through data is the new direct input of capitalism
#expands(0.85) — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 160 - Financialization lets capital extract value from social life without destroying its creative source ecosystems
#expands(0.80) — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 572 - Finance functions to obscure capitalism’s raw dependence on precarious life
#expands(0.80) — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 46 - Social capital accrues value to others beyond those who create it.
#qualifies(0.75) — Coleman, SocialCapitalCreation-1988, 208