After Capitalism

Žižek and Akomolafe on Collapse and Survival

I write a lot about post-capitalism - what comes after, what new institutions might look like, how community initiatives might operate without a profit motive. Sometimes I think my approach to this question is overly simple. Okay, let’s be real, I know it is. I’ve learned so much over the last few years about why post-capitalism isn’t just business as usual without capital accumulation. Capitalism permeates so much of how we live that suggesting we can just remove money as the focus and call it progressive is naive. Even if every business were a cooperative, even if we redesigned ownership models completely, the rest of capitalist culture would still be there underneath. Even now, well-intentioned projects almost always get pulled back into its current.

While we can list the qualities we’d want in a post-capitalist world (human-centred, grounded in well-being, localised, slow, decolonial, collectively held) and metaphorically stack them all together like the ingredients of something better, it’s unlikely we could build a system strong enough to topple the one in which we are currently stuck.

Capitalist culture is vast and deeply entrenched. It’s fascist, colonial, carceral, and ecocidal. Each day, wealth continues to consolidate with the 1% while the rest of us learn to live inside the fallout. The climate is collapsing, and the people meant to fix it are profiting from the wreckage. It’s incredibly unlikely that anything we build will replace this regime. The reality is that things will likely continue to get worse for most of us, especially for those already marginalized and systemically oppressed. Wars will keep killing our children. State policing will continue beating and disappearing our neighbours and friends. We live in a world where violence is ordinary and survival itself becomes a political act.

Please don’t think that means there’s no hope. It’s that our hope must shift shape. It no longer looks like a plan to win, or a blueprint for a better system, it’s about existing in the cracks.

I think this where thinkers like Slavoj Žižek become hard but necessary to read. Žižek is a somewhat controversial neo-Marxist philosopher who sits at the intersection of capitalism and collapse, writing in the shadow of Marx and Hegel but speaking to the specific contradictions of our present. He argues that capitalism is more than an economic structure; it’s a cultural logic that absorbs everything around it, even resistance. Attempts to fix or reform it often strengthen it.

“The ultimate lesson of global capitalism is that it will survive whatever catastrophe befalls it. Capitalism is an immensely flexible system that can absorb almost any shock. The more it is threatened, the more it reinvents itself, feeding parasitically on its own crises. Even ecological catastrophe or social disintegration are reinterpreted as new fields of investment or opportunity. In this way, the system not only persists through its breakdowns but thrives on them; its logic is to turn every limit into a new frontier. What appears as its death drive is at the same time the secret of its immortality.”

- Slavoj Žižek, Living in the End Times

Žižek isn’t calling for despair, but he wants us to see the system’s almost supernatural ability to regenerate. Capitalism doesn’t end when it fails; it feeds on its failures. Economic crashes, pandemics, ecological disasters - each becomes a new market, another field for investment. For Žižek, genuine transformation can only come through the collapse of this logic from within, when the contradictions become too intense to sustain. He calls this a kind of catastrophic dialectic: the idea that real change often arrives only after things have become unbearable.

“We should gather the courage to fully assume the catastrophe. The underlying message of the protests is that we do not live in the best possible world; the only way to change it is to accept that the system cannot be corrected in a gradual way. The crisis is not a chance to restore balance, but a sign that the game itself is up. What is required is not adjustment, but a new beginning built from the ruins.”

— Slavoj Žižek, The Year of Dreaming Dangerously

It’s a hard idea to accept, especially for those of us who still believe in collective action and slow reform. Žižek forces us to consider the limits of our optimism: that even our attempts to live differently may be folded back into the same machinery of production and control. If capitalism truly “survives whatever catastrophe befalls it” as Žižek suggests, then what does it even mean to resist?

Where Žižek examines this inevitability of collapse, Bayo Akomolafe asks what happens after the collapse has already begun. Akomolafe is a philosopher and psychologist who writes from a decolonial and post-human perspective. If Žižek’s concern is the self-perpetuating logic of capitalism, Akomolafe’s is the broader architecture of modernity itself. He explores the civilizational framework that made capitalism possible describing modernity as the failing system, a project built on faith in endless progress, mastery, and human exceptionalism. Akomolafe invites us to turn toward the cracks rather than pretending they can be either sealed or ruptured.

“Postactivism … is the site where continuity becomes impossible, where ‘the world’ in its colonizing completeness feels less compelling than that one riven place that sprouts alien notions. A frothing crack opens in the ground, enacting a break in the seamless totality and knowability of things.”

- Bayo Akomolafe, What I Mean by Postactivism

For Akomolafe, the collapse of modernity is not something waiting in the future - it is already here, expressed in ecological breakdown, social fragmentation, and spiritual exhaustion. The question is no longer how to prevent collapse but how to live inside it. He suggests that our frantic attempts to fix the world are part of the same mindset that created the crisis: the drive to control and to “fix” rather than accepting the natural state of what is. Akomolafe’s postactivism, then, asks us instead to stay with the trouble, to slow down, listen, and find other rhythms of being that might emerge from the ruins.

“Now we must inhabit the cracks and ask how to make offerings to those cracks. The wall that divided us from the world at large is breached.”

- Bayo Akomolafe, Coming Down to Earth

Exploring Žižek and Akomolafe together offers a strange kind of parallel symmetry. Žižek points to collapse as the necessary consequence of capitalism’s internal logic; Akomolafe begins from the acceptance that the collapse is already unfolding. Žižek stares at the inevitability of failure; Akomolafe seeks what might be growing in that failure.

I find myself caught between them. On one hand, Žižek’s fatalism feels honest: capitalism has a way of surviving every critique, even this one. On the other, Akomolafe’s posture offers a kind of quiet practice, a way to stay present without pretending we can engineer our way out.

So what can be done now? After years of exploring the idea of post-capitalist structures, maybe the task isn’t to design the perfect alternative but to organize around survival. Not a revolution in the traditional sense, but as maintenance of life itself. Community gardens, food networks, mutual aid, art, and care work: these are no longer framed as the blueprints of a new system, they’re acts of persistence within a collapsing one. They don’t topple capitalism, but they keep people alive through its decay.

That might sound small, but perhaps smallness is the only honest scale left. Between Žižek’s recognition of catastrophe and Akomolafe’s invitation to inhabit it, we can find a kind of practice: not to win, not to restore, but to remain capable of love, thought, and attention while the structures around us fall apart.

Maybe that’s what post-capitalism really is, not an end goal to be reached but the way we move through what’s already ending.