Capitalism in Marx is a process that reprograms peoples, not a stage

Evidence

A careful reading of the Manifesto, however, suggests a somewhat different way of thinking about Marx’s view of capitalism as a stage, for it can be grasped as a kind of enormous black box or “vanishing mediator,” one extraordinarily complex and temporally distended and developed laboratory, through which precapitalist peoples must pass in order to be reprogrammed and retrained, transformed and developed, on their way to socialism. This reading (which, although structural, remains dialectical) now redistributes the features of radical difference of the older series; it excludes questions about what kind of society, collective character, and culture capitalism itself involves, since this last is now seen as a process rather than a stage in its own right; finally, it obligates us to reconsider the features attributed to Postmodernism in a functional way, as new and intensified forms of a structural tendency Marx famously described in terms of separation and disjunction, reduction, disaggregation, divestment, and the like. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 807

Categorization

• DEFINE: Introduces the ‘vanishing mediator’ reading of capitalism — a crucial reframing that casts capitalism as instrumental process rather than end state, which reframes why postmodernism’s features matter functionally.
• XREF: Directly feeds the reader’s push on the ‘cultural dominant’ thesis: if capitalism is a process not a stage, then postmodern aesthetic features are functional intensifications — giving the whole periodization claim a causal backbone to test. — connects to: Capitalist economies chiefly shape people, not commodities — Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, Schooling in Capitalist America:…, 576; In Marx’s Capital, persons are personifications of social relations rather than economic agents — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1980
• ADDENDUM: The ‘separation, disjunction, reduction, disaggregation, divestment’ tendency offers a structural mechanism that could support the Grafting and Growth piece’s treatment of infrastructure as forms of disaggregation/divestment.