Social media platforms present life as a networked space of possibility, where one chance encounter with a former colleague or contact might open new opportunities and life paths. This chapter shows how the desire for serendipity reworks neoliberal myths of entrepreneurship while further enriching those who control the mapping of social networks.

As potent new cultures of desire take shape around the intersection of digital technology and finance, this very site is beginning to take on the qualities of a fantasy, structuring ever more lives around recursive forms of emotional capture and release, while at the same time fuelling a lucrative game of anticipating and capitalising on such cycles. The result is a kind of runaway abstraction that applies not only to money and technology, but also perhaps to desire itself. What if the libidinal economies of digital and financial capitalism run best when detached from definite aims, ends, objects?

Following the discussion, in Chapters 3 and 4, of the negative effects of capitalism’s consumerist culture, this chapter continues the analysis of capital’s destructive uses of the surplus. Introducing the term “forces of destruction,” it highlights the increasingly destructive employment of capitalism’s rapid scientific and technological advances. In particular, the chapter pays special attention to capitalism’s rapid development and regular deployment of increasingly lethal military technologies, as well as to the ways in which capital’s productive technologies contribute to a deepening ecological crisis. By advancing a critique of market-oriented strands of the environmental movement, the chapter also initiates this work’s analysis of “new social movements” as, in part, a reaction to capitalism’s increasing destructiveness. In this respect, this critique also forms part of a recurring theme in this work, namely that new social movements cannot pursue their objectives effectively without also challenging capital’s undemocratic control of the surplus. Last but not least, the chapter argues for the need to analyze social and historical development through a complex three-way interaction between capitalism’s (or any other class society’s, for that matter) forces of production, forces of destruction, and relations of production. In so doing, it also lays the ground for reformulating the contradiction underlying contemporary capitalism.

When global stock markets plunged during the onset of the 2020 pandemic, young South Koreans took out loans to fund risky personal investments. This chapter relates the lure of speculation at work here to a fantasy of escaping the hopeless realities produced through financial capitalism, in South Korea and elsewhere.

This chapter examines the psychic life of global inequality through the phenomenon of ‘compassionate consumerism’. Drawing on the psychoanalytic critique of ideology, it shows how explicit ethical appeals to assist those less fortunate than ourselves are underwritten by invitations to participate in a disavowed enjoyment of relations of inequality.

Building on previous chapters’ discussion of capital’s destructive uses of the surplus, this chapter reformulates the contradiction underlying contemporary capitalism’s operation. This reformulation does not assume that capitalism is becoming an insuperable obstacle to further productive development. Instead, it argues that capitalism’s continuing development of the forces of production runs parallel to an equally rapidly development of its forces of destruction. The thrust of that system’s cost–benefit contradiction then consists in the long-term tendency of the benefits from productive development to decline even as the threats from the simultaneous development of capitalism’s destructive forces escalate. This contradiction creates the potential for a broad anti-capitalist coalition between all the social groups and social movements fighting against both the various manifestations of capitalist destruction and the various forms of injustice that capitalism helps to reproduce. At the same time, however, the social, economic, and geographic divisions that capitalism’s operation imposes on the different segments of the world population obstruct this anti-capitalist convergence. Thus, this chapter does more than just analyze the conditions that make it possible to envisage a democratic classless society capable of overcoming the multidimensional crisis we face. It also illuminates some of the obstacles that an anti-capitalist movement would need to overcome in order to turn such an alternative society into a reality.

This chapter interprets the rise of consumerism as the result of capital’s subsumption of consumption. Adapting Marx’s original distinction between capital’s formal and real subsumption of labor, this chapter shows how capitalism has, over time, not only commodified the means of subsistence, thus achieving capital’s formal subsumption of consumption; it has also used scientific research, advanced techniques, and cultural resources to reconstitute consumer preferences in ways that serve capital. The chapter traces this process to the dynamics of capitalist competition and the pursuit of profit, while also discussing its negative impact on human well-being and the ecological integrity of the planet. In this sense, this chapter represents a first step in the analysis of the destructive ways that capitalism uses the surplus it extracts from workers.

For investors, ‘infrastructure’ is now an ‘asset class’, the boundaries of which are limited only by the ability of finance to build new contracted income streams that extract wealth from funding, constructing and operating infrastructure facilities. What started off with investments in so-called economic infrastructure (utilities, roads, ports, airports) now include investments in resource/commodity infrastructure (oil and gas facilities, mining, forests), social infrastructure (hospitals, public housing, schools, prisons, law courts, military bases), information infrastructure (big data harvesting) and, still in its infancy, natural infrastructure (payments for so-called environmental services). This Chapter looks at the many new investment vehicles – from private equity infrastructure funds to venture capital funds – that are being used to profit from infrastructure, and attempts to quantify the amount of money now being extracted. The trajectory is not only towards increased inequality: it is also profoundly undemocratic, elitist and unstable. Undemocratic because a handful of fund managers now increasingly determine what gets financed and what does not. Elitist because the facilities that would most benefit the poor do not get built. And unstable because infrastructure-as-asset class is a bubble that is set to burst.

This Chapter seeks to understand the structural forces behind the emergence of infrastructure-as-asset-class and the vulnerabilities of capital that these reveal. It takes a global tour of the massive infrastructure corridors – from the IIRSA programme in Latin America to the 'spatial development initiative’ (SDI) in Africa to China's One Belt, One Road project – that are being planned to enable further economies of scale in the extraction, transportation and production of resources and consumer goods by compressing space by time. The Chapter argues that dominant forms of industrial capital cannot easily expand without massive expenditure on these corridors. But the planners’ plans are bumping up against the frontiers of traditional infrastructure finance. The money simply is not available without tapping a wider pool of finance beyond the state, private banks and multilateral institutions: global capital markets are the target source, Public-Private Partnerships the inducement, and infrastructure-as-asset class the currently-favoured (if often faltering) means of delivery.

Finance views infrastructure very differently from ordinary people. Yield is the determinant of what is or is not an infrastructure asset. For finance, a road, hospital or oil pipeline is not ‘infrastructure’ unless it provides a stable, contracted cash flow for the long-term. This Chapter examines how infrastructure is being reworked to provide what finance seeks of it. One focus is the contractual arrangements – Minimum Revenue Guarantees, Take or Pay contracts and stabilisation clauses – that investors are putting in place through Public-Private Partnerships to ensure guaranteed high rates of profit. Such guarantees are a crock of gold, providing legally-enforceable liens on future public flows of money that are irrevocable for the length of the contract. Even though the state remains the major financier and operator of public services, the relatively small space that has now been opened up for private investors has enabled finance to construct a multi-billion-dollar extraction machine, with major ramifications for inequality.

The introduction offers a sketch of the current conjuncture, while also providing an outline of the book’s argument. It begins with the contrast between the capitalist triumphalism that accompanied the end of the Cold War and the setbacks that capitalism has faced at the beginning of this century. The capitalist world’s main superpower, the United States, has faced a number of challenges, from the World Trade Center attacks to the military fiascos in Afghanistan and Iraq that followed it; but also economic challenges, as manifested by the rise of China and the global financial crisis of 2008. This latter crisis and the global coronavirus pandemic have also adversely impacted the rest of the capitalist world, notably Europe. At the same time, a deepening ecological crisis and a crisis of political democracy are also manifestations of capitalism’s increasingly destructive implications. After the brief overview of the current conjuncture, the introduction outlines how each of the book’s chapters adds to the analysis of capitalist destruction, to the cost–benefit contradiction that capitalism generates, and to the political implications of this contradiction and of its experience by diverse segments of the population for the formation of an anti-capitalist coalition fighting for a more humane, less destructive society.

Drawing on Heinz Kohut’s conception of narcissistic development, this chapter situates the phenomenon of defensive intransigence within contemporary economic life. The ‘avocado toast’ stereotype – in which millennials are poor because of one brunch too many – represents a disavowal of worsening intergenerational inequality that is symptomatic of the rage that occurs when sustained beliefs about oneself and one’s place in the world are threatened.

This chapter examines the interface between desire and money infrastructures in the new crypto economy. Focusing on NFTs, utility tokens, and interoperability technologies, it argues that economic investment in monetary technologies is tantamount to a libidinal investment in technological designs and the forms of capitalisation they enable.

This chapter explores how capital’s real subsumption of consumption, as well as its use of science and technology more generally, also undercuts democracy. It does so by paying special attention to the role the media play in this process. In particular, the chapter examines how the increasing dependence of the media on advertising skews their coverage to suit the sensibilities and interests of capitalist advertisers and of the affluent audiences these advertisers often target. This means that the dynamics of competition within an increasingly monopolistic capitalist system contributes in yet another way to the difficulty of perceiving the exploitative nature of capitalist society. In this respect, this chapter adds another dimension to classical Marxism’s account of the reasons that make exploitation in capitalist societies so hard to recognize. Finally, the chapter also discusses other ways that capital’s use of science and technology undercuts democracy. These include its adoption of technologies that confine large numbers of people to routine, repetitive jobs that do not encourage them to develop the skills and self-confidence necessary for effective political participation, as well as capital’s use of parts of the surplus to bankroll “scientific” research and lobbying campaigns designed to promote capitalist profit rather than our knowledge of the world.

This chapter explores the effects of social hierarchies on identity formation, tracking the rise of neoliberalism in the USA through a dynamic of unconscious group formation and reaction in which categories of race and class are central. It argues that America’s long history of White anti-Blackness is in this way integral to the emergence and ongoing vitality of its more openly declared commitment to neoliberal capitalism.