Late capitalism is the purest form of capital, colonizing nature and the unconscious

Evidence

This periodization underscores the general thesis of Mandel book Late Capitalism; namely, that there have been three fundamental moments in capitalism, each one marking a dialectical expansion over the previous stage. These are market capitalism, the monopoly stage or the stage of imperialism, and our own, wrongly called postindustrial, but what might better be termed multinational, capital. I have already pointed out that Mandel’s intervention in the postindustrial debate involves the proposition that late or multinational or consumer capitalism, far from being inconsistent with Marx’s great nineteenth-century analysis, constitutes, on the contrary, the purest form of capital yet to have emerged, a prodigious expansion of capital into hitherto uncommodified areas. This purer capitalism of our own time thus eliminates the enclaves of precapitalist organization it had hitherto tolerated and exploited in a tributary way. One is tempted to speak in this connection of a new and historically original penetration and colonization of Nature and the Unconscious: that is, the destruction of precapitalist Third World agriculture by the Green Revolution, and the rise of the media and the advertising industry. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 128

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the three stages of capitalism (market, monopoly/imperialist, multinational) that underpin the whole book’s periodization.
• XREF: Connects to the reader’s stated reading goal of mapping their own position in the world system — this is the economic schema against which a personal cognitive map would be drawn. — 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; Globalised capital has colonised the depths that Freud called the unconscious. — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on…, 531; Bergsonism, not Spinozism, is the true ideology of late capitalism — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1990 (+3 more)
• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that late capitalism is the ‘purest form of capital yet to have emerged’ and that it colonizes Nature and the Unconscious is the paradigm-shifting core of the book; resists easy summary and sits with the reader for days.