In this manifesto, Massumi proposes that dominant capitalist value theory systematically misrepresents value by reducing it to quantity — exchange value, price, measurable utility. Against this, he argues that value in its most fundamental sense is intensive and processual: it arises in the gap between stimulus and response, in the affective charge of collective experience, in the potentiality of a moment before it resolves into a determinate outcome. Value in this sense is not produced by labor or extracted from exchange but generated in the movement of life itself.
OM’s undercapital thesis draws directly on this argument. The concept of virtual capital — the “generative experience of nondual potentiality” that animates underground events and community life — is a specific application of Massumi’s claim that processual, affective value constitutes the unacknowledged foundation of all economic activity. The goal of process-economies referenced in OM’s writing points explicitly to a social order organized around this form of value.