Predatory economies in the Spodocene

Apr 17, 2026

Cross-posted by GeoPolitiQ

"Thank you, Ismaele! This article captures depleting exergy dynamic in the most dramatic and accurate terms. Every sentence has profound implications!"

- Kathleen McCroskey

Today I am providing my English translation of an article by Hakan Illatikdi, originally in Italian and published on ComeDonChisciotte.org on Wednesday 18th February 2026.
(All emphasis original).

A Typology of Parasitic Forms of Survival in Conditions of Systemic Collapse

Robbery is not a deviation: it is the economic form of a world without a tomorrow.

This article proposes a conceptualisation and an analytical typology of robbery economies emerging in the Spodocene [author’s first article translated here], understood not as a transitory crisis, but as a phase of systemic dynamics characterised by metabolic exhaustion. Unlike approaches that interpret such dynamics as moral deviations, institutional dysfunctions or cyclical anomalies, robbery constitutes a rational survival strategy in a context where the system has lost the capacity to produce socially necessary goods, reproduce life in a stable manner and sustain prospects for the future. Within this framework, the economy ceases to organise production and shifts to managing the accelerated extraction of the remains, normalising multiple forms of structural parasitism. The article develops an extensive typology of these forms and explores their political, subjective and strategic implications.

Introduction: from productive collapse to existential extraction

When production ceases, survival becomes the economy.

Classical economic crises presuppose a horizon of recomposition: collapse, adjustment, recovery. Even in their most traumatic forms, they retain the promise of a return to normality through reforms, innovations or temporary sacrifices. The Spodocene, by contrast, denotes a distinct structural condition: the persistence of collapse as a normalised state.

This is not a prolonged recessionary cycle, but rather a profound mutation in systemic functioning. The system progressively ceases to fulfil its fundamental historical function – organising the social production of life – and reconfigures itself as a mechanism for the violent and competitive redistribution of the remnants. Where production stagnates and the future becomes materially inaccessible, the economy ceases to be oriented towards value creation and shifts to organising strategies of immediate extraction.

We refer to this heterogeneous yet structurally coherent set of practices as predatory economies. Their common feature is neither illegality nor exceptionality, but rather their rational adequacy to a world devoid of a productive horizon.

Theoretical framework: the Spodocene as a state of metabolic exhaustion

When the system ceases to produce, it learns to devour itself.

The concept of the Spodocene differs from categories such as the Anthropocene or the Capitalocene in a crucial respect. Whilst these operate as narratives of cause – attributing the collapse to the human species or to capitalism – the Spodocene functions as a narrative of State. It does not seek to explain why the collapse has occurred, but how one lives within it.

The Spodocene does not designate a new progressive phase nor a “new historical regime”. It designates a specific temporal form of systemic dynamics: the phase of exhaustion. Its radical nature lies in the erasure of the future as an operational economic category. Unlike classical capitalism, which has always promised a future – even through debt, fictitious expansion or violence – the Spodocene brings that promise to an end. There is no horizon in which to amortise investments, nor a long-term future into which to project oneself.

This feature is directly linked to the notion of social metabolism. It is worth distinguishing two levels here:

a weakened metabolism, incapable of expanding but still capable of reproducing a basic social life;
a null metabolism, incapable even of guaranteeing the simple reproduction of the conditions of existence.

The Spodocene corresponds to this second level. We are not facing a crisis of accumulation, but rather a crisis of reproduction. The system no longer fails to grow: it fails to sustain the life it organises. In this context, plunder ceases to be a sectoral aberration and becomes the dominant metabolic form of the economy.

Legal plunder

From law as protection to litigation as a mechanism for liquidity.

One of the most visible expressions of this transformation is legal plunder. Institutions historically conceived as mechanisms of protection against structural abuse are transformed, in conditions of collapse, into mechanisms for extracting liquidity.

The proliferation of serialised litigation, the mass judicialisation of conflicts and the use of legal conflict as a primary source of income do not stem from a moral degradation of the law, but rather from the disappearance of productive alternatives. Conflict ceases to be exceptional and becomes existential. People do not litigate to correct a deviation in the system, but to survive within it.

The law thus becomes a secondary market of collapse, in which what is at stake is not future justice, but present resources.

Financial robbery: extraction of flows without production

Profit is separated from production and anchored to arbitrage.

In the Spodocene, capital loses its investment function and adopts a predatory and nomadic logic. Profit no longer derives from producing goods or developing productive capacity, but from anticipating imbalances, arbitraging financial flows and withdrawing before collapse.

Speculation, debt as a business in itself and induced volatility constitute forms of plunder that depend directly on systemic decomposition. There is no sustained accumulation nor territorial rooting: there is rapid extraction and abandonment.

This transformation marks a decisive decoupling between exploitation and production: it is possible to extract value without producing the world.

State plunder: governing permanent urgency

To govern no longer means to organise: it means to contend with scarcity.

Devoid of productive capacity, the post-industrial State no longer plans development: it administers scarcity. Distorting taxes, structural inflation, borrowing to fund current expenditure and the sale of strategic assets constitute a State economy geared towards postponing immediate collapse, not building a future.

Politics is thus reduced to managing the emergency. The State ceases to be a social mediator and becomes a predatory actor, competing for depleted resources with the very society it is supposed to organise.

Corporate plunder

Extract until it breaks.

Faced with the impossibility of sustaining long cycles of accumulation, business organisations operate in a mode of terminal plunder. The precariousness of work, the systematic reduction in quality, the outsourcing of costs and the abandonment of social responsibilities are not excesses, but rational strategies in a context devoid of any guaranteed future.

The worker ceases to be a productive agent and becomes an immediate adjustment variable. The enterprise is no longer an organisation, but a transitory vehicle for final extraction.

Time robbery: time as an economic resource

Time is privatised: urgency pays.

A less visible but structurally central form is time robbery. In the Spodocene, time itself becomes an object of extraction. Rent is derived from the asymmetry in the capacity to wait.

Those who can postpone, profit; those who cannot, pay. Usurious loans, late payment penalties and discounts for early payment in inflationary contexts do not finance any production: they monetise the urgency of others. Inequality ceases to be measured solely in terms of income and comes to be measured in terms of the ability to withstand time without collapsing.

Logistical robbery: control of the bottleneck

Value shifts from production to enabling circulation.

When production becomes difficult, circulation becomes decisive. Logistical robbery emerges where control of infrastructure – transport, customs, digital platforms – allows rent to be captured through bottlenecks.

No value is added: a fee is charged for passage. Tolls replace production. The economy transforms into a system of administered bottlenecks, where circulation equates to survival.

Reproductive exploitation: the expropriation of daily life

The family absorbs the collapse; the system presents the bill.

The collapse shifts social functions into the domestic sphere: care, health, education, emotional containment. But this shift does not imply autonomy, but rather a silent expropriation of unpaid reproductive labour.

Families turned into infirmaries, homes turned into makeshift classrooms, emotional networks replacing public policies: the system not only abandons, but extracts value from this withdrawal, accelerating the human wear and tear that is no longer capable of reproduction.

Social micro-robbery and spodocenic subjectivity

Survival as social rationality: in-group, urgency and mistrust.

These macrostructural dynamics translate into daily life as forms of micro-plunder: aggressive informality, destructive peer competition, exploitation of regulatory loopholes. From this emerges a defensive subjectivity, in which cooperation becomes risky and the long term unthinkable.

Spodocenic rationality is not that of the classical homo economicus, but rather a rationality of survival without a horizon, in which ethics is re-located within the in-group and anticipation becomes vital.

Credentialist plunder

When knowledge ceases to transform the world, the qualification begins to function as a toll.

In the Spodocene, even educational capital loses its historical link to the production of real capabilities. The massive expansion of qualifications, certifications, diplomas and accreditations no longer corresponds to an actual extension of socially useful knowledge, but rather to a dynamic of symbolic and economic plunder that can be defined as credentialist plunder.

The inflation of qualifications does not imply an increase in knowledge, but rather an artificial raising of the thresholds of access to increasingly scarce resources: work, prestige, stability, an authoritative voice. The qualification ceases to certify knowledge and shifts to regulating exclusion.

The educational institution ceases to be a space for the production of knowledge and transforms into a machine for capturing social anxiety, monetising the fear of irrelevance.

It produces no new knowledge, no new work, no new world. It produces anticipation, guilt and negative selection.

Symbolic and cultural plunder

Monetising residual meaning.

The cultural sphere, too, is absorbed by this logic. Symbolic production is geared towards capturing attention, indignation or identity as monetisable resources, detached from any historical project. Criticism is transformed into performance, activism into symbolic capital and thought into fast-moving merchandise.

Discussion: rationality, totality and blind spots

The risk of totality: when a concept explains everything, it ceases to distinguish.

The economies of plunder do not constitute a deviation from the system, but its mode of operation in its phase of exhaustion. However, the concept entails a theoretical risk: becoming so all-encompassing as to prevent the distinction of degrees, fractures and resistances.

Here a central dilemma arises. Either plunder is total and no external alternative exists, or precisely because the system has abandoned production, uncaptured interstices emerge, zones where economies of subsistence and reappropriation can arise.

Analytical methodology: criteria for identifying economies of plunder in the Spodocene

In the Spodocene regime, plunder is not distinguished by illegality, but by its inability to reproduce the conditions of collective life.

The use of the concept of plunder in this article does not refer to a moral judgement or a legal classification. It is employed as a structural analytical category, aimed at distinguishing between activities that contribute to the reproduction of social metabolism and those which, whilst economically profitable, operate exclusively as mechanisms of extraction in contexts of systemic exhaustion.

Given the risk that the notion of plunder may become imprecise or all-encompassing, a set of methodological criteria is proposed here to identify when an economic activity may be characterised as plundering within the framework of the Spodocene. These criteria do not operate in a binary or exclusive manner, but rather in a cumulative way: the greater the number of criteria an activity satisfies, the more clearly it fits within a logic of plunder.

1. Metabolic criterion: reproduction or exhaustion

An activity is not predatory merely because it extracts value, but when it does not contribute to the reproduction of the material, social or symbolic conditions that make collective life possible. In the Spodocene, the central distinction is not between production and exploitation, but between reproduction and depletion. Predatory activities consume remnants without replenishing them, accelerating the degradation of the system on which they depend.

2. Temporal criterion: erasure of the future

An activity may be considered predatory when it is viable only through the acceleration, anticipation or erasure of future time. Instead of being amortised over the long term, it depends structurally on urgency, deferred promise or permanent indebtedness.

3. Value criterion: production versus reappropriation

An activity is predatory when it does not generate new use-value, but merely reappropriates, captures or arbitrates value previously produced by others. This is not a critique of redistribution as such, but rather of extraction without production.

4. Criterion of dependence on collapse

An activity is predatory when its expansion depends on the deterioration of the system’s general conditions. Not only does it fail to mitigate collapse, but it feeds off it. Collapse is not a side effect here, but a condition of possibility.

5. Criterion of cost externalisation

Predatory activities systematically externalise human, social, ecological or temporal costs, transferring them to other actors, to society as a whole or to a future already written off. Plunder always leaves a bill unpaid: human exploitation, environmental degradation, institutional erosion or social fragmentation.

Final considerations on the methodological approach

These criteria allow us to characterise plunder economies without resorting to moral judgements or legal classifications. In the Spodocene, many predatory practices are rationally inevitable for those who engage in them; their analysis does not aim to assign blame, but rather to describe the structural logic of a system incapable of reproducing itself. Predation is therefore not a marginal pathology, but an analytical indicator of the degree of metabolic exhaustion of a social formation.

Conclusion: robbery as a diagnosis, not as a fate

Robbery is parasitic: when the rest is exhausted, the era changes.

Every economy of robbery is parasitic on a previous productive residue. When that residue is completely exhausted, the system will not reform: it will implode. The Spodocene is not eternal. It is the phase in which capitalism is no longer capable of reproducing life, yet does not even know how to die.

Understanding these economies does not mean justifying them, but mapping the system’s agony to identify, within its folds, the seeds of that which has not yet been named.

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