In the preceding sections I have tried to defend two "postmodernist" theses: first, that the techno-scientific transformation of the mode of production has extended the power of capital to reproduce itself beyond the dialectical limits which Marx sought to impose; and second, that if we are to inherit what Derrida has called the 'spirit" of Marx's revolutionary politics, we must seek to transform the fundamental categories of historical materialism. This brings me back to the question of ontology. As we have seen, the postmodernist critique of Marxism has in general focused on the violence which plays around materialist constructions of historical necessity; and so the Marxist discourse of social being (i.e. the immanence of man's communal productivity within the exploitative regime of capital) is expounded as a totalizing power which draws its authority from the interlacing of performative concepts (class, resistance, identity, value, production, solidarity) with the negative evolution of the mode of production. This tendency to treat the operative regime of capital as the true foundation of politics has been a recurrent theme in the preceding chapters: the concepts of simulation, différance and machinic desire which I examined in a number of different theoretical contexts, all present "capitalism" as a regime which indefinitely defers the revolutionary exchange between the object (the commodity form and its institutions) and its "alienated" forms of subjectivity.