The Cosmogony of Limitless Capitalism

In his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, Karl Marx discusses, amongst other things, the antagonistic relationship between humanity and their environment. Marx includes the relationship of man to his environment as one of the defining modalities of capitalist estrangement and alienation. Marx stresses not just the alienation of man via the antagonism of product versus producer, but also alienation in the environment via the opposition between nature's physiological support of the "physical subject" and its constituitive affects of "making" the worker (i.e. supplying the worker with resources to produce, permeating the worker in the production process). In his words "in this double respect the worker becomes a slave of his object, first, in that he receives an object of labour, etc. in that he receives work; and secondly, in that he receives means of subsistence. Therefore, it enables him to exist, first, as a worker; and, second, as a physical subject. The extremity of this bondage is that it is only as a worker that he continues to maintain himself as a physical subject, and that it is only as a physical subject that he is a worker."

In the contemporary world, electronics and computers (means of production, as well as, products themselves) have fully permeated the "environment". Further, the individual in the contemporary world is constantly connected to and in contact with, the means of production: wearing communications devices on their person, carrying computers and decision-making business tools anywhere, a computer with a VPN client in every home, in every room even. I question whether there is any physical subject anymore outside of the means of production. The worker is no longer the slave to his object, he is the object. Or rather, there is no time that he is anything other than a slave of his object. There is no dialectic; his being is completely tied to his being as worker not as an economic or a psychological antagonism, as an experience. In the age of information and connection, there is a fundamental change in the ontological and existential relations of the individual. There is no longer any space(metaphorical or geographical) without the means of production of the modern society. There is no openning for a dialectic of social production and social living. No longer is environment what provides nourishment (for the individual qua worker) and resources for production, environment is now completely immersed in the means of production! The modern environment is so saturated by capital and the modern mode of production that it has quite literally become the means of production. The rise of the computer and information technology has completely immersed all spaces into the environment of production.

These hegemony of objects in defining man, his environment and his activity is not unique to modern times. Mircae Eliade throughout his anthropological work details a historical theory of humanity based on man's incessant productive faculties. The product that most intrigues this thinker is the production of the ancient sacred pole or totem. For Eliade, man insists on socially producing a sacred pole, an object that supposedly creates the real and present world and connects it to the divine. This is a product of duality; man's labor and man's uderstanding. Within the ancient mode of production, Eliade posits, the creation of this symbol of connection to the heavans, to a transcendent ground of being, is a tenuous border upon which the economic and semiotic activities of man merge. This claim mirrors Marx's own when he demands that man's metaphysical claims are derivative of material conditions and relations.

If the ancient created a world (and universe) based upon the material and symbol of the sacred pole, in reply, what has the modern created?

Unlike the ancients, the contemporary totem that is carried is not a connection to a root of cosmic being, a divine benevolent power. Also, the communal charecter of the sacred pole has dissolved; there is no single object that communities create and move by which they define themselves and their space. Instead, for us modern nomads, there is only a connection to a greater economic and ontic self-estrangement. The connection to heaven (and likewise their own purpose and root of being) that grounded the ancients, has been transformed into the total alienation within contemporary man. The cosmogony of the information age is the birth of a limitless capitalism, a virulent mode of production that supplants all social, biological, and existential connections in favor of a means of production so present, so ingrained that there is truly no exit.