Grey in Grey, Noys ‘Grey in Grey': Crisis, Critique, Change This essay reflects on the global financial crisis of 2008 as a site from which to assess a number of theorisations of critique and change, based within a broadly-defined Marxism. While the recent crisis has given traction to Marxism as a form of critique, the articulation of that critique to actual change, and especial y to the prospective agents of change, has been left hanging. Charting the work of Fredric Jameson, Hardt and Negri, and others, we find an emphasis on the powers of production and life as a point of excess to fuel anti-capitalist politics. However, these images of dynamism are now forced to confront capitalism in a state of inertia and deceleration, and in so doing, they reveal their dependence on replicating or displacing the supposed ‘productive forces' of capitalism to their own projects. Models of ‘anti-production', such as those derived from Georges Batail e, also tend to converge on models of vital powers, although cast in forms of consumption and excess. Criticising this convergence on a mythical vitalism, this essay suggests a deflationary critique of capitalism's ‘productivism', and explores the potential for an anti-vitalist analysis that might better grasp the ‘mythological displacement' of experience that operates within the frame of capitalist social relations.