Our lives are being destroyed, W. says, as we head back to town on the Metro. For Marx, capital expands across society in two stages, says W. Firstly, there is the formal subsumption of labour under capital, where capital takes over the existing modes of production, such as artisanal work, and extracts profit from them without changing the nature of work at all.
Here the effects of capital are purely local, and it is perfectly possible for capitalist relations to co-exist within non-capitalist modes of production. There comes a certain level of scale – a step-change, Marx calls it - of the first subsumption, when it turns itself into the second. Here, the power of capital becomes global, and not merely local.
We can no longer distinguish between society and capital. Capital invades every particle, element and moment of our lives. It extracts profits constantly, repeatedly, and without interruption. Society is capital and capital is society, and there is now no outside to capital at all.
Even in Canada?, I ask W., when we get off and head back across the moor. Oh no, probably not in Canada, says W. How could you subsume the lakes and the forests? How the Yukon itself, in all its expanse? How the teepees of the Canadians who wander through the Yukon on foot or by bicycle?
For the rest of the world, it's different, W. says. The whole of our lives have been subsumed, and we cannot think of the justification, legitimation or even sanctification of any human activity which is not immediately capitalist.
Later, we hear on the news that a body was found on the rocks, a mile or so down from where we watched the rescue efforts from the railings. A swimmer was swept away. A swimmer, a teenager, was drowned and his body washed up on the rocks, hours later.
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