What comes after real subsumption?

I've been thinking (tentatively and still unsure about this direction) about real subsumption -- the term from Marx, emphasized by Negri, that I render as communicative capitalism.

What comes next? What comes after? 

I think it's too easy and determinist to say that communism comes after real subsumption (in the switch of the common).  

Communicative capitalism encloses communication in capitalist networks. Political speech (discussion, opinion) is captured and made to serve capitalist ends (whether as content, traceable data, generator of the one, dispersed multiplicity). This poses new challenges for political organizing (that is, for political organizing that understands itself as operating within a democratic imaginary). 

It seems to me like we actually get something like "after real subsumption" when we see capital flight and abandonment, environmental desolation, even capital's investment in class maintenance rather than production (stock buybacks, executive compensation, speculative finance, charitable foundations). There are moments of localized capitalist breakdown which the system routes around, often doubling in on itself in the process. Over the last several hundred years, capital has been able to destroy much of what it has accumulated and begin again. These cycles have a limit point, a point where what's been destroyed creates such waste that it's no longer worth trying to do anything with it. Capital would just rather leave -- abandoned buildings, towns, cities, regions, continents. 

For now, I'll call this phase after real subsumption "absolute subsumption." Capital goes through itself and turns into an execrable remainder, the non-capitalizable, that which is completely without use or value. It can't be exchanged. In fact, it stains, corrupts, or damages whatever it touches -- like nuclear waste. It is utterly bereft of potentiality. Rather than being completely after real subsumption, absolute subsumption emerges within it over time.

In this inversion of capital into its opposite, the opposite of capital isn't labor, it's the non-capitalizable remainder that lacks potential. Does  this lack imply that absolute subsumption is without people or that it's a condition in which people find themselves? It could be that proletariat is an appropriate name for the people of absolute subsumption.

I think that this non-capitalizable remainder appears to us in images, the frequently circulating images of abandoned buildings, ecological devastation. The image is recuperated for exchange, while the real remains. Disaster porn hints at this real even as it mobilizes state and capital in dispossession projects. 

Another angle on absolute subsumption: I've been arguing lately that the actual movement Marx has in mind when he talks about the actuality of communism is the becoming voluntary of cooperation (as opposed to the determination of cooperation by the division of labor). Communicative capitalism involves voluntary cooperation -- we build the networks that enclose us (no one forces us to use Facebook, Twitter, etc). This suggests a limit point to voluntary cooperation, the point where it becomes its opposite, a trap: when we all communicate, we get trapped in our communication. Communication becomes excessive, and this very excess makes it execrable. Lately, I've been taking the idea of voluntary cooperation in a different direction, the direction of the party, but I'm concerned that voluntary cooperation may itself be already contained (unable to address absolute subsumption). On that score, I think refusal is also already contained insofar as it simply repeats the gesture of abandonment.

The wager of big data is that the mass of communication is information that can be mined -- that it still has potential, or that there is potential in the algorithm. This is a capitalist gesture, but it's also a state gesture (NSA). If it doesn't provide information that can be capitalized, it still provides information that can be used by the state as an instrument of coercion. 

Perhaps this points to the direction of states and inter-states, that is, political relations as determining in an era of absolute subsumption. I am tempted to say that the issue then becomes a distinction between coercion and cooperation (voluntary acts). Bad states coerce; good ones are born of consent. If communicative capitalism already demonstrates that voluntary relations entrap, that there is nothing about the fact that we individually choose to engage in activities that erases or negates the way they constitute collective traps, then this distinction breaks down.

And so the party isn't just a form of voluntary cooperation -- it's a form for coercion.

(If this is the way the argue ends up, I expect that it will not find many supporters -- or maybe the supporters would not be those I would want as allies. I expect that the problem or the way out will have to be more substantive and less formal. Maybe that is the stain of the real.)