“Xenoeconomics” is a tremendous coinage, if only for placing xenos and oikos in such proximity: identifying capitalism as the stranger at the hearth, the secret sharer of human agency. It suggests that we should have the courage of our fantasy - that “the economy” is something apart from human social relations, something “out there” that alternately pampers and menaces us - and begin to regard “social relations” as a folk-economic miscognition of capital’s inhuman effectivity in much the same way as Thomas Metzinger regards human selfhood as the “user illusion” of anonymous neurobiological mechanisms.

In my view, xenoeconomics entails seeing capital as an effect not of human consciousness but of the parallel operation of vast numbers of instances of the information processing wetware of which human consciousness is itself an effect. In other words, it’s a question of levels: capital doesn’t exist by virtue of our beliefs (although our miscognition, and the subjectivation and social bond it gives rise to, is a necessary element of its functioning) but of our behaviour. This is not an un-Marxian observation to be making, of course; the real argument to be had, it seem to me, is over Marx’s sense of this “behaviour” as “historical praxis” governed by (recognised or misrecognised, conscious or unconscious) class interests. The inhumanism SplinteringBoneAshes gestures towards requires, at the minimum, an eliminationist revisioning of the Marxist vocabulary of consciousness and praxis, interest and conflict.