In a way, many of these people were very private. They didn’t think of themselves in terms of career, success, and so on. None of this existed for them; they had been through too much. They cultivated themselves as people who simply lived, who simply took pleasure in life. What I mean is that there were many people in Koktebel who had chosen this kind of extra-historical, anti-historical, alternative way of life, something I was not capable of. And I looked at them with admiration because I myself was not capable of it. All these social and political situations, national and other problems, did not affect them. They were in contact with the sea, with the air, with the sand, with something completely different—they lived a cosmic life. This always fascinated me. It is the real alternative: an extra-historical mode of existence.

Beyond the case of Sweden and the Cold War, what is an adequate ethical response, from within the imperial center, to the experience of imperial decline? There is not only one adequate response, and it is not possible to socially prescribe an affective or moral posture, even if we had one in mind. But pondering it is necessary in order to find ways for the current transition to be less violent—no matter how unlikely a nonviolent outcome might seem at the moment.

I want to suggest that Sam Altman’s arithmetic, the seizure of Venezuela, and the demand for Greenland all depend upon the same underlying structure, on two ways of ordering the world that operate in tandem. I call them counting and clearing. The former literally takes everything into its energetic accounting, living or inert, bison or bauxite, the child and the server. Energy-as-currency is indifferent to whether the energetic quantity was ever alive; indeed, that indifference is the whole point. Clearing acts on what is already there, which is almost always the living: people, prior use, historical metabolic relations, coral, olive groves. Often, the living is cleared in order to count the matter. While counting presents itself as a given, or as a law of nature, clearing declares a decision and presents itself as an act of sovereignty.

We finally knew what we were talking about when reading Octavia Butler, listening to Drexciya, or watching Black Panther. Despite the success of this unification, the definition of Afrofuturism proved over the years to be a loose bag. And a good part of this looseness can be attributed to the fact that the initial codification of Afrofuturism, though highly theoretical, still lacked an adequate theory of technological development, which capitalism does not at all lack. Why has technology progressed so rapidly and so continuously in capitalist culture? Nothing like “better, stronger, faster” exists anywhere else in our historical or archeological records, whether in dirt or in books.

Given its pervasive visibility and disproportionate resources, populism appears to be the cultural logic of late fascism. Yet populism is better understood as a contested terrain rather than a settled formation. The question then becomes how this struggle might unfold further within the cultural sphere, and under what conditions might a left populism emerge as a compelling political and aesthetic project.

Modes of production have always been plural, interlocking, mutually dependent even if arranged in hierarchies of dominance and compliance. The job is to work out how that’s developed and changed since the days of capitalism as an emerging world system—as it was in Marx’s time. What I think Poliks and Trillo are grappling with, sometimes successfully, sometimes not, is a new mode of production. What we call it matters less than to turn language against itself so that language might yield the concepts that make the world seem strange again, and in need of close attention to even begin to understand.

The concept of spatial composition is developed from the operaist conceptions of class composition and “the tendency,” as well as from Marxist urban theory, particularly the notion of the tendential urbanization of capital. These ideas are described in depth in the first half of the book, providing a theoretical framework for the more historical work in the latter half. Since class composition analysis has not been broadly surveyed in English-language publications, I aimed to provide a relatively comprehensive summary, believing, like Steve Wright, that it is the most important of all the concepts developed within Italian operaismo.