It is often supposed that politics operates by way of conscious deliberation and the rational pursuit of an interest of some kind. There are innumerable instances, historical and contemporary, that immediately put this view into doubt. Instances that warrant a closer examination of the nature of the human subject at the centre of such deliberation. It is apparent that in the Westernised world, the working class seldom vote for political parties or pursue political matters representative of their real interests. Indeed, this touches on one of the most pertinent questions of our time: how has capitalism managed to live on and thrive despite the rapid acceleration of its exploitative and destructive tendencies following the 2008 financial crash; despite causing intense techno-scientific transformations that threaten great ecological disequilibrium; despite having caused a deterioration of individual and collective human modes of life; despite prompting a regressive infantilisation of all social relations; despite pushing the world into a new, dangerous form of global apartheid; and despite nullifying creative endeavours by forcing us into a prison of financially expedient cultural codification and standardised mediocrity? My primary and overriding ambition in this book, is to offer a conceptual – that is to say philosophical – answer to this question. In so doing, I challenge the terms by which we have come to understand ‘the political’, political power and political praxis. I push forward a post-capitalist (note: not ‘anti-’) emancipatory project that is a-subjective as opposed to subject-centred; a-systematic as opposed to anti-system; and postidentity as opposed to identity-centred. This is a politics that locates and demands the transformation of our selves within and through capitalist relations of power and the material and social excesses it conjures – below the level of subject positions, identities and institutions – as a prerequisite to the transformation of our ‘politics’, in its more traditional, grander sense.

My ambition is preceded and shaped by Marxist thinking on the one hand, and philosophical matters relating to human ontology on the other. Marx conceptualised the continuation of capitalism in the face of its exploits, in terms of ‘ideology’, i.e.