Exocapitalism: Economies with Absolutely No Limits

by Marek Poliks, Roberto Alonso Trillo, Charles Mudede (Foreword)

There is a touch of destiny with this one. We have really pushed it as far as we can, and as we stay up all night trying to put the final touches on everything, the reverberations are starting to return. It’s been called, provocative, emancipatory, cutting-edge, and even, in some places, a bit caustic. Perhaps it is provocative because it begins to depart from Marxism as-we-know-it, and, with all the relevant necessary reverences applied, it attempts, dare I say, to step forward from the discourse of labour & production—not that what follows is somehow simpler, because it’s not. Yet as the authors contend, the world has already moved on, and capital, that same old capital, continues to do what it has always done, at myriad different scales, and in myriad worlds. Capital may well have already broken free of us, and so where exactly does that leave you, homocapitalus?

It would be in-keeping with the style of Charles Mudede to raise the question of whether we are on the cusp of a second ejection from Eden, and that means that whether we are ready or not, we have to step through the looking glass into a new conversation. That is what the authors wish to do here, to push the conversation to a new position, a position which understands DoorDash drivers, MMORPG gold farmers, and remote workers, accounts for AWS architecture, for memecoins and blockchain, for BlackRock, for the Internet (but for reals this time), for High-Frequency Trading and the LinkedIn economy, for Scale, for Airplane Miles and Club card points, and for ADHD & Adderall.

This book is provocative because it is the proverbial elephant in the system, but it is nonetheless rigorous, and written in good spirit—this isn’t a downer, this is cleaning up after a bender, after a 500-year drug-accelerated romance with a creature that counts its age in millennia. So what is left in this wasteland? Well, Arbitrage for one; other monumental processes like Lifting, Holding, Dragging and Folding roam around above our heads.

These two researchers have an enormous insight into contemporary economics, technology and finance, and yet they write as musicians, as the poetic theorists of antiquity, which, for us, makes this text epic. With Charles Mudede and Alex Quicho holding Exocapitalism down, it looks as though Marek Poliks & Roberto Alonso Trillo are here to stay.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction, Economics

218 pages, Paperback

Published August 1, 2025

Reviews

[Alienated Cú Chulainn · Rating 5 out of 5]

man this was a banger, a theory of capitalism that feels refreshingly new and genuinely relevant. "lift" as a conceptual framework for describing the increasingly human-independent, fragmentarily arcane world of tech as engine for value generation without that nasty wetware we call humanity in the way was pretty revelatory for me. salesforce was the perfect case study for this new era of capital divorcing itself from labor and growing tumorously monstrous and cthuluian. the healthy dose of levity in the whole affair was needed - i cackled at the description of land "gooning to the erotics of the warzone". definitely want to see where these ideas are taken by others - they're desperately needed.

[Steven Marcinkus · Rating 5 out of 5]

Emphasizing the comment calling this book an “info-hazard.” The content of Exocapitalism is likely going to get under the skin of any and all readers, from Marxists to Duginists and Laurellians to Yarvinites and Landians, due to its neutral and unaffected, un-embracing and un-emancipatory presentation of the idea that capitalism is very disinterested in their bodies, their politics, their labour, their… planet?

The authors do not interpret this through a progressive humanist sense where capitalism is a mere evil exploitative force that allows for a wealth-hoarding elite, nor is it a Landian accelerationist sense where capitalism wants to convert human flesh into battery-juice for the fueling of robotics projects that expand its reach to an inter-planetary scale. No, no. This is all much too concerned with the human and with materiality itself. If anything, capitalism sees the material world itself as a burden to be overcome.

In Exocapitalism, Trillo and Poliks reveal aspects of capitalism that have been neglected by economists and continental philosophers alike. This is not a new stage of capitalism and the “exo” should not be interpreted as the ‘exo-skeleton’ composing the emperors new clothes; rather, “exo” here is more about Capitals exothermic process—its infinite process of shedding-off the physical weight of material bodies.

This shedding of physical skin is inherent to capitalisms production of value through abstraction. Abstraction, or “lift” is primary in Trillo and Poliks reworking of the theory of value, while labour has taken an insignificant backseat. Capitals Lifting process is like a space elevator. Although, rather than a bridge constructed through space that stops at different floors on various planets, this space elevator only goes “up” in any direction that AVOIDS any and every material body. Capital increases its magnitude of distance from the restrictive body of the Earth, desiring to eventually take out that last screw pinning it within a light year of the planets core, and especially in any proximity with the wonky, perverted bodies of humans.

Capitalism has BEEN trying to move away from us, we are always-already dead weight. Yet, because of its reliance on our labour and attentive investment in its processes to get its foot out the door, it has been cornered into a position where it must make concessions to us through meaningless goods, entertainment slop, social media platforms, and now robotics in the forms of sex-bots and models based on I, Robot for Kai Cenat to cosplay physical assault on a livestream.

This is what the book coins as the “drag” humans impose on capital. In order to fuel its abstraction process, it must allow humans to enjoy through means that are meaningless to its ambitions, but that promote us to self-userize and self-extract data. We progressively abstract more of our behavior and cognition into neutral nodes that compose what Benjamin Bratton calls the “User” layer of The Stack. Yet, with the dawn of advanced LLMs, even this data-abstraction is probably becoming just another anthropocentric move for maintaining some importance to the operation of capital. We must remain in some self-relation to capital, even as the victims of its evil exploitation.

This challenges nearly every existing theory of Capitalism, subjectivity, emancipation, etc. It pulls from a very unique line of influences(many of whom can be found in the duo’s previous book of compiled essasies, Choreomata), such as Luciana Parisi, Reza Negarestani, Ray Brassier, Benjamin Bratton, Baudrillard, and especially Deleuze and Guattari. By radicalizing David Graebers notion that abstract-value, or virtual tokens, historically predate barter, Trillo and Poliks argue that capitalism has been around for a lot longer than we recognize it—and it is in a unique position where it is self-aware that capitalism itself can be done on anything.

[Thomas Cafe · Rating 5 out of 5]

I made a joke that this was 'Roko's Basilisk for Marxists.' This book is a genuine info-hazard and I'm still processing not only what it all meant, but it's implications.

A lot of the critical theory went over my head but I'd still say it is remarkably accessible. Luckily for me, its a short book so I'll be giving it multiple read-throughs. What I can say is that this is easily the freshest, albeit terrifying, take on capitalism I have maybe ever read. The exocapitalist discourse is still clearly very fresh and I await with bated breathe in seeing where this project takes both scholarship and struggle.

[mara · Rating 5 out of 5]

this was such a refreshing read, and a refreshing way of thinking. it has become increasingly clear these years, post-covid, post-hardware, post-Post, that capitalism is more than a just an economic systemic process we actively participate in; it is its own Intellect. and it is not tied to the Earth, it springs from physical laws in our Universe that make it impossible for UCI not to work itself into our complexities and the complexities, the microscopical folds and layers, we've built into our greatest, largest, our most at-scale & scalable invention: software.

after software comes AI, and ive seen how things fold more and more around me in its presence. the LLMs, their wrappers, their connections to third parties, allowing for the AI now to buy-hold-sell. for everything to fall into newer, higher hands. i feel my own hands and realize theyre bound to something unearthly. inside the one machine, we're all bound to each other. and since this is Nature, thats all right, right?

[Renaud · Rating 4 out of 5]

Une nouvelle façon, captivante, de voir le capitalisme. Un livre purement théorique qui ne prétend pas proposer de solution. Explore des philosophies assez extrêmes, certaines un peu déplorables (que les auteurs analysent comme il se doit) à mon humble avis, mais tout de même fascinantes. C'est un travail de lire ce livre, surtout sans familiarité avec l'approche du sujet.

[Adrian Corrales · Rating 4 out of 5]

When this is doing anything other than the post-marxist reduce capitalism and capital into each other
there's a fantastic culturakl critique of the digital era, the way current tech companies organize themselves and how they actually derive revenue the b-b' => b''' - c formula as well as the Federici section is definitely a highlight. The introduction of Lift and especially friction(even tho it implies labor has no affect on capital) are something I need to think about but I think it could be a wonderful tool in the contemporary moment. (Exo)capitalism is bullshit, but there is genuine analysis here worth reading.

See here this camattian critique -
https://quassine.substack.com/p/some-...

[Cole Blouin]

Essential.

[Mihai Tapu · Rating 1 out of 5]

attempting intensely to lift itself above a clichéd 'theorybro' space
blatantly dragging itself within the same murky swamp

[Nicholas · Rating 5 out of 5]

Here are my “notes to self” as I read this sometimes dense but really fascinating and rewarding work. I may get some of this wrong, of course.

Classically, capitalism is construed as surplus value extracted from labor. In that sense, as David Graeber noted, it's been with us for a long time, longer than Marx acknowledged, from the development of the idea of credit (an early form of futures trading) back in the distant days of barter to the North Atlantic slave trade that bled every penny of surplus value from the people in its concentration camps. But Trillo and Poliks argue that the seed of capitalism is and always has been what they term “lift,” a tendency towards increasing abstraction from labor and product.

Take even the classical Marxist analysis: we're not paid in flour for the time we spend working in the grist mill; we’re paid a token (money) for flour. The token bears an inevitably arbitrary “exchange value” that is assigned independent of the “use value” of the product that produces it and the product it can buy; this exchange value should include not only the materials cost but compensation for the time we spend earning it. Yet in a modern capitalist system, the private owner of the means of production extracts more of that surplus value than the wage laborer who is often paid pennies for creating it. That capitalist can also gin up the cost of things, extracting more surplus value from it. Ownership becomes increasingly dissociated from labor even as the worker too becomes “alienated” from the thing she produces, the rewards of her work, and finally her own dignity.

Poliks and Trillo read all this as a story about abstraction. Inherent in the token was always the sense that we’re borrowing against a future purchase. Today, through practices of speculation, futures trading, interest accrual, and so on, time is all the more obviously a unit of value. This is obviously the case for the oligarch reaping interest, but it exists all around us. For instance, airlines don’t buy fuel; they buy credits that can be used to buy fuel later, like how we buy forever stamps at a certain fixed price, allowing us to hedge against the volatility of the market. This is exponentially more important with so much of the world’s money invested in the stock market, venture capital, and so on rather than in stably priced materials.

Furthermore, of course, the airlines make most of their money on airline points and seat upgrades with no actual material substrate. These sales rely instead on abstract (“lifted”) processes managed by whole classes of intermediary companies that negotiate the sale of fuel and credit card companies who sell them airline points. Meta, Salesforce, and Nvidia are all examples of “platforms” (an incredibly elastic term, the book argues) which are defined at once by their indispensability and by their incompleteness; they oversee companies that oversee companies that oversee companies that only far downstream of them manage the actual data centers or physically produce the GPUs. The more inefficient layers there are of folded-in “software as service” modules, the more value can be created. Hence, though exocapitalism isn’t a new phase of capitalism, the transition from an age of hardware to one of software -- “the transfer of the host body of capitalism from the human to the computer” -- allows capitalism to reach its epitome as a regime of self-generating value independent of the laws of supply and demand.

Of course, exocapitalism indulges us when we create white collar jobs to give a semblance of relevance to our labor -- what Poliks and Trillo call “drag” (a bid to counteract the lift of capitalism) and what I think Graeber would call “bullshit jobs.” It indulges our production of things that make our pitiful embodied selves feel embodied pleasure, maybe a little like what Marcuse calls “repressive desublimation”: if we think we’re getting what we want, we won’t revolt. But this vertical organization of labor into successful levels of middle management is purged on a regular basis (the 2008 financial crisis, the end of DEI initiatives, the bloodbath enacted by Musk and DOGE) as exocapitalism repeatedly sheds its winter coat.

What OF our bodies? The authors have an intriguing, and respectful, debate with Silvia Federici, the best representative here of an old-school anti-capitalist (in the sense that capitalism is synonymous with empire). Federici also pushes back on Marx's idea that capitalism was a late invention -- in her case, by pointing out the millennia of patriarchal civilizations that have chronically appropriated surplus value from women's unpaid social and reproductive labor. Yet Trillo and Poliks deny that exocapitalism has an ultimate interest in controlling the reproductive economy or “reterritorializing” (per Deleuze and Guattari) the Earth. Those who are focused on their little turf wars are dismissed as remnants of feudalism who, significantly, often "supercede state sovereignty," as when sweatshops in the majority world skillfully avoid labor laws. Furthermore, local labor disputes are growing increasingly easy to resolve by companies whose profits are buoyed by the ascending scale of lift. To their credit, Poliks and Trillo do acknowledge the contemporary world’s atrocities even as they deny that their continued existence is the point of exocapitalism. Exocapitalism has, as it were, a mind of its own.

A great example of such an indignity existing only as a byproduct of the abstracting lift of exocapitalism comes in the authors’ account of JP Morgan Chase’s eight-year tenure “performing financial processing operations on behalf of 24 US states for the SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, aka ‘food stamps’). According to an issue of The American Prospect in 2014: ‘In New York alone, J.P. Morgan Electronic Financial Services (EFS) holds a nine-year, $177 million EBT services contract with the State Office of Temporary and Disability Services (OTDA). New York currently pays $0.95 per month for each of its 1.7 million SNAP cases. In addition, J.P. Morgan EFS collects penalties and fees from benefit recipients: $5 to replace a lost EBT card, $0.40 for each balance inquiry, $0.50 each time their cards are declined for insufficient funds, and $1.50 per withdrawal if they use ATMs to get cash more than once a month.’” (101-102)

The company’s administrative apparatus has no actual interest in hungry people; its paperwork evidently deters 40% of eligible participants from signing up for the program. Even so, “the population that participates in SNAP has increased by as much as 200% since the year 2000,” providing enough opportunity for “fully-lifted corporate vehicles [to] continue to disinvest from a largely vestigial front-line workforce who in turn increasingly depend on these programs, [while] financial services entities like FIS passively collect on underlying microtransactions” (103).

I don’t know yet whether I feel convinced enough by this book’s account of lift to deny the usefulness of classical “capitalism” as an object of resistance -- that is, I don’t know yet whether I agree that exocapitalism is not, in fact, a distinct new stage in the history of capitalism that shed Keynesian state regulation in favor of a laissez-faire version that so enriched the owners of the means of production that they could buy off the state to re-intervene in their favor with the full flourishing of so-called “late capitalism.” But my point in regurgitating that history is to say, pace those who argue how good capitalism is at “creating jobs and wealth,” that it always carried the seeds of an oppressive order that would eventually flourish if left unregulated. Poliks and Trillo are also telling a story about the germ or seed of historic capitalism, and their account is quite compelling.

[- · Rating 5 out of 5]

I know a video game about this, it's called Bloodborne

[matt · Rating 4 out of 5]

The idea we’re all rational actors making decisions in our own best interests is obviously broken, but we persist in a notion of capitalism built on that same aspirational view of humankind via corporate leadership. Instead this deeply through the looking glass take on capitalism replaces the idea of hegemonic all seeing capitalist titans with a more complex idea of worlds governing worlds, maybe even something closer to an emergent mathematical property of the system, supported by insights that feel right, and ideas like lift and drag - ideas that will worm their way into your brain, reshaping the way you think about the way our society works.

[Tommy Menace · Rating 4 out of 5]

yeah why the hell not

[Eli Duggan · Rating 2 out of 5]

Some of the ideas were an interesting way to reframe my understanding of capitalism, i.e. the "lifting" of exocapitalist companies away from physical encumbrances and the introduction of "drag" by states and labor to maintain relevance. However, this was a pain to read because of the excessive use of fancy words. It oftentimes felt like the authors were more focused on demonstrating their large vocabularies than clearly conveying an idea. This tendency also served to distract from a lack of evidence or clear argumentation for their conclusions.

[Ondřej · Rating 4 out of 5]

A lucid Marxist nightmare fused with cyberpunked philosophy. A tough, dense read, both abstract and detailed. Captures a lot of important stuff, though. And you still get the basics even if you haven’t read the whole Das Kapital. Just watched bits of Aronofsky’s AI zombiefication of US history and you know whose logo popped up? Salesforce.

[Kip · Rating 5 out of 5]

Such a fascinating, important theory of capitalism, in all its intangibles and effects on different scales. Extremely succinctly written, entertaining yet well placed in the cultural critique analysis.

[Sam]

SaaSes passing organs between each other will stick with me as an image but overall a little limpid. Other writers they cite come at the same set of questions with either more rigour or more ecstasy.

[Oliver Finne · Rating 5 out of 5]

swag