ABSTRACT
The story of Frankenstein is often taken as a metaphor for capitalism. The idea that revolution means destroying capitalism rests on a concept of duration, that is, on the idea that capitalism now is and will continue to be until we destroy it. The problem is that, by assuming the duration of capitalism, revolutionaries undermine the basis of their own call for revolution. Under capitalism the separation of subject and object, and therefore duration, acquires a peculiar rigidity. This is rooted in the material separation of subject and object in the process of production. A self-determining society is a society in which it is explicit that only that exists which in that moment is being done, a world of verbs. The notion of the culmination of history implies a positive movement, a movement of accumulation of struggle, a movement of extension. Communism would be a self-determining society, that is, a society without duration, without nouns: a terrifying, exhilarating thought.
