Late capitalism is defined by the difficulty of identifying exteriors to capital.

Evidence

Our context, which we might term “late capitalism” following the Marxist theorist Ernest Mandel, is a moment in which everything begins to appear as capital and social forces previously beyond the boundaries of capital appear as part of production. “Late capitalism” refers not to a period approaching the end of capitalism but the moment in which possible exteriors of capital seem difficult to identify. The social forces once thought of as human community appear as technology, as machinery, designed to commodify all that exists. “Subsumed under capital the workers become components of these social formations,” Marx says in the “Results of the Immediate Process of Production,” his unfinished chapter of Capital, “but these social formations do not belong to them and so rise up against them as the forms of capital itself, as if they belonged to capital, as if they arose from it and were integrated within it.” — Grant Bollmer, Katherine Guinness, The Influencer Factory, 52

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines ‘late capitalism’ via Mandel: not immanent collapse but the erasure of capital’s outside.
• XREF: Mandel’s account of capital subsuming the human community directly feeds the reader’s analysis of who realizes surplus value in the influencer economy.