The conclusion recapitulates the central themes of the book as well as the lessons that one can draw from the trajectory of capitalist development. It argues that, in view of the tensions between capitalism and democracy that chapter 7 discussed, further democratization requires the attainment of a democratic classless society consistent with the communist ideal. Noting the potential for an anti-capitalist alliance between “new social movements” and the “old left” that capitalism’s cost–benefit contradiction creates, the book’s conclusion also briefly reviews the obstacles to the formation of such an alliance. Informing this discussion are the historical lessons of the last century, namely the fact that the hope that capitalism can be humanized by democracy has faded as social democracy has retreated and neoliberal restructuring has followed the passing of capitalism’s post-war “golden age.” Facilitated by the end of the Cold War and the capitalist elites’ perceived need to make material concessions to working people, the neoliberal regression reminds us that an effective response to capitalism’s multidimensional crisis requires more than reforming the existing capitalist system. What is needed is a struggle for a democratic classless (as well as genderless and raceless) society conducive to human well-being and the ecological integrity of the planet.

This chapter explores the subterranean politics of anxiety in the student bodies of the USA, UK, and Canada. As a new generation is emerging into adulthood, for whom neoliberalism, financialisation, and its anxieties are all they have ever known, what forms of struggle, survival, and mutual aid are they inventing? Could everyday practices of student self-sabotage become the basis for collective acts of self-sabotage aimed at the financial machinery of the contemporary university?

The push for greater private sector involvement in financing and operating infrastructure has sparked resistance from many quarters, including trade unions, environmental and human rights campaigners, and other social movements. But its trajectory remains largely unaffected. Does the problem lie is a failure of activists to shout loudly enough? Or in the ways that progressive activists are organising (at least in part)? What forms of resistance are failing? What ways of social and political organising are proving more promising in building and strengthening ways of living that respect the collective right of all (not just the few) to decent livelihoods? What oppositional strategies assist elite power? And what strategies unsettle it? To what extent has effective resistance been undermined by the hollowing out of many of the social institutions, such as trade unions, through which elite power has historically been challenged? Or by the often depoliticised organising that has emerged in many countries to fill the vacuum? Challenging the trajectory of contemporary infrastructure finance – and the inequalities and injustices to which it gives rise – is likely to be more fruitful where it is part of wider efforts to foster and support commons-focused resistance to accumulation.

Using Karl Marx’s analysis as its starting point, this chapter argues for the need to define the surplus in an inclusive way that takes into account the wealth and surplus production taking place not just in the capitalist workplace but also in the household and public sectors of the economy. Such a rethinking allows a fuller understanding of the interconnections between these different economic sectors and of the ways the capitalist economic system creates divisions within the producers’ ranks. In particular, a brief overview of some of the dynamics of neoliberal restructuring and austerity shows that labor market competition is not the only structural feature of the capitalist economic system that keeps producers divided. To understand the dynamics that keep producers divided, one has to pay at least as much attention to another structural feature of contemporary capitalist economies: the existence within them of distinct sites of wealth and surplus production.

This chapter examines the hostile dynamics of online communication, linking these to a fragmentation of social reality set in motion by the rise of capitalism. As this is taken to new extremes by developments in digital technology, affective inclinations towards paranoia and conflict come to the fore – hence the mindless antagonism of our moment.

A concrete example of infrastructure-as-extraction is Lesotho’s Queen ‘Mamohato Memorial Hospital. It has been built and is operated by Tsepong, a private sector consortium that includes healthcare group Netcare, under a Public-Private Partnership (PPP) contract. The Chapter traces the flows of money into and out of the project – and highlights who benefits from them. It argues that the PPP arrangement serves to extract considerable wealth from one of the poorest countries in the world and siphon part of it to the elite 1% of the global rich. The central concern is that such extraction is entirely lawful.

The fundamental wager of libidinal economy is that contemporary capitalism can be fruitfully engaged through the lens of desire or ‘libido’. This introductory chapter develops a preliminary account of the relations between libidinal economy and capitalism in three ways. First, it positions libidinal economy at the intersection of economic and psychological thought. Second, it relates the development of libidinal-economic thought to the historical development of capitalism. Third, it emphasises the role of libidinal dynamics in the social reproduction of contemporary capitalism.

This chapter explores the relation between death and economy through an engagement with the work of Georges Bataille, Norman Brown, and Jean Baudrillard. While capitalism is just the latest in a long series of attempts to manage death anxiety, the accumulation of capital fails to alleviate guilt, resulting in an endless thirst for ever more money, wealth, and power.

This chapter explores the erosion of democracy as a result of capital’s undemocratic control of the surplus. Departing from the two different meanings of the term “democratization” in scholarly literature, the chapter explores the paradox of liberal democratic institutions spreading around the world even as the ability of ordinary citizens to have a say on the decisions affecting their lives declines. Adding to this book’s argument that, like the other crises facing humanity today, this predicament requires a classless, non-exploitative society that allows ordinary people to democratically control the surplus, this chapter questions the ideological understanding of communism as antithetical to democracy. Fueling this ideological understanding is the identification, in many people’s minds, of communism with the regimes that consolidated themselves in the Soviet Union and its satellite states. Far from disproving the possibility of a democratic classless society, these regimes’ failure merely signified the inability of the new class order these regimes instituted to compete with the capitalist class order they sought to displace. In advancing a critique of the ideological equation of communism with dictatorship, the chapter shows that the many similarities between contemporary capitalism and the unappealing social model that prevailed in the Soviet Union render problematic the view of communism as the “other” of democracy. Rather than a threat to democracy, the struggle to achieve the communist ideal is the best chance humanity has to reverse the hollowing out of democracy that results from capital’s control over the surplus.