Spectral Capitalism: After Late, the Haunting

Capitalism Isn’t Dying. It’s Haunting Us.

When Ernest Mandel wrote Late Capitalism in 1972, he was not writing an obituary but a diagnosis. He observed a system that had not reached its end, but rather its most expansive phase. Capitalism had metastasized—spilling across borders through transnational monopolies, intensifying its grasp through militarized planning, institutionalizing crisis through permanent inflation, and extracting value not only from labor but from life’s total surface area. For Mandel, “late” was not a prophecy of demise, but a warning: capitalism had entered a new metabolic regime, more systemic and recursive, less vulnerable to simple collapse.

Fifty years on, the phrase “late capitalism” still lingers, drained of its analytic potency, now deployed as irony or lament— shorthand for absurdity, injustice, or exhaustion. It persists like a tic in our cultural speech, like “literally” being misused for emphasis or “definitely” for probably unlikely. “Late” is no longer the appropriate term. We are not witnessing a system in its twilight, but one that has already crossed into another phase— dead but not dead, more like a spectral condition. A capitalism that no longer merely lives through contradiction but survives like a vampire by converting contradiction into its life-blood? This is not a system that governs through production or even speculation—it endures as a haunting.

If The Communist Manifesto declared that a specter was haunting Europe—the specter of communism—then we must now reckon with a reversal: a specter of capitalism haunts the globe. Derrida, in Spectres of Marx, urged us to attend to the ghosts of history not as residues of the past but as unfinished tasks—reminders of the justice that remains unfulfilled. But where Marxism once haunted capitalism with the promise of its undoing, today it is capitalism that haunts us—undead, recursive, unburied. No longer the dynamic, revolutionary, historical function that Marx admired for dissolving “all that is solid,” nor the creative-destructive engine Marshall Berman dissected in his book of the same name, capitalism has become spectral: not alive, not dead—a ghost-machine simulating futures it will never allow to be born.