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Capital is Dead: Is This Something Worse?
It’s not capitalism, it’s not neoliberalism—what if it’s something worse?
In this radical and visionary new book, McKenzie Wark argues that information has empowered a new kind of ruling class. Through the ownership and control of information, this emergent class dominates not only labour but capital as traditionally understood as well. And it’s not just tech companies like Amazon and Google. Even Walmart and Nike can now dominate the entire production chain through the ownership of not much more than brands, patents, copyrights, and logistical systems.
While techno-utopian apologists still celebrate these innovations as an improvement on capitalism, for workers—and the planet—it’s worse. The new ruling class uses the powers of information to route around any obstacle labor and social movements put up. So how do we find a way out? Capital Is Dead offers not only the theoretical tools to analyze this new world, but ways to change it. Drawing on the writings of a surprising range of classic and contemporary theorists, Wark offers an illuminating overview of the contemporary condition and the emerging class forces that control—and contest—it.
In this radical and visionary new book, McKenzie Wark argues that information has empowered a new kind of ruling class. Through the ownership and control of information, this emergent class dominates not only labour but capital as traditionally understood as well. And it’s not just tech companies like Amazon and Google. Even Walmart and Nike can now dominate the entire production chain through the ownership of not much more than brands, patents, copyrights, and logistical systems.
While techno-utopian apologists still celebrate these innovations as an improvement on capitalism, for workers—and the planet—it’s worse. The new ruling class uses the powers of information to route around any obstacle labor and social movements put up. So how do we find a way out? Capital Is Dead offers not only the theoretical tools to analyze this new world, but ways to change it. Drawing on the writings of a surprising range of classic and contemporary theorists, Wark offers an illuminating overview of the contemporary condition and the emerging class forces that control—and contest—it.
209 pages, Kindle Edition
First published October 8, 2019
185 people are currently reading
3521 people want to read
About the author
McKenzie Wark
68 books447 followersMcKenzie Wark (she/her) is the author of A Hacker Manifesto, Gamer Theory, 50 Years of Recuperation of the Situationist International, and The Beach Beneath the Street, among other books. She teaches at the New School for Social Research and Eugene Lang College in New York City.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 108 reviews
December 10, 2019
This is a bit hard to rate, because it's not the most consistent text. It zigzags between wading deep into academic debates over interpretations of (e.g.) Marx, and lucidly illuminating modern-day economic phenomena using concepts from critical theory. I liked A Hacker Manifesto a lot, and this text definitely builds on the ideas introduced there, but there's also a lot that will likely confuse anyone who isn't well-versed in the literature on topics ranging from vulgar Marxism, to what is sociology, to how planning worked in the Soviet Union. There's also an analysis of The Young Karl Marx (a film), in the last chapter, which I found surprisingly thoughtful, but which felt a bit out of place as a closing chapter.
Overall, I wish there was more critical analysis of what the author describes as the vectoralist class, which may have replaced (or superseded) what we usually think of as the 'capitalist class' through attaining control or ownership of information. That was what I found novel about Hacker Manifesto, and I had hoped that this book would take the opportunity to sketch out the concept more fully. For people with a tech background who are unfamiliar with Wark's work, I'd probably recommend A Hacker Manifesto over this book.
(This review is based on a complimentary pre-release copy of the book, provided by the publisher.)
Overall, I wish there was more critical analysis of what the author describes as the vectoralist class, which may have replaced (or superseded) what we usually think of as the 'capitalist class' through attaining control or ownership of information. That was what I found novel about Hacker Manifesto, and I had hoped that this book would take the opportunity to sketch out the concept more fully. For people with a tech background who are unfamiliar with Wark's work, I'd probably recommend A Hacker Manifesto over this book.
(This review is based on a complimentary pre-release copy of the book, provided by the publisher.)
April 12, 2020
Vulgar Marxist extraordinaire Mckenzie Wark wrote a bullshit book that tries to invalidate Marx's 'genteel' ideas on capital simply for being outdated i.e. we don't have steam engines nowadays, what we have are computers. She wants everyone to live in the present yet she kinda contradicts herself in the last part of the book where she cites OUTDATED vulgar Marxists and put them in the present. This book is too alienating for Third World Marxists because of its narrow band of engagement with information capitalism (or she calls it political economy of information). This book is written by a crybaby who cannot even get the basic definition of a vector. In this climate of discontent, fascism, and neoliberal violence, I cannot just stomach works born from the author's publication privilege in the academia. People like Wark will most likely align with rejectionist ideologues & centrist Marxists and would most likely redtag their militant comrades simply for being too hardlined in the people's struggle.
February 6, 2021
This reminds me a lot of James Burnham's The Managerial Revolution, a comparison which I doubt Wark would appreciate and which she goes to some lengths to discount (though if she has actually read Burnham, she engages in flagrant intellectual malpractice at multiple points in this book, when she represents his claims as being basically the opposite of what they actually are). What unites the two is that they are both books pretending to be about capitalism when they are actually about communism. Thoroughly disillusioned with the possibilities for success of the traditional organised left, yet unable to prove definitively that communism is unachievable, both Burnham and Wark settle for the argument that capitalism doesn't exist anymore, so communism (which for them only exists in opposition to capitalism) is neither relevant nor necessary. The two books perform a sort of synchronised intellectual gymnastic routine to arrive at this conclusion: they overdefine "capitalism," limiting it to basically mean "19th century British industrialism" and exclude everything else; they deliberately misinterpret Marx's understanding of the relationship between mode of production and class rule, etc.
What is funny is that on the surface their arguments seem like opposites. Burnham's post-capitalist mode of production is the mid-century managerial state, whereas for Wark it's the neoliberal economy that has defined itself against that state. But I think this is mostly down to their writing 80 years apart. Again, these books are really about politics and not economic theory, and any current trend can be extrapolated to seem "anti-capitalist," whether it's the state stepping in to restore profitability to the economy or commodity exchange extending itself to encompass nearly all spheres of human activity.
This is not to say that Wark has become a neocon. I don't think she has. They both are frustrated by the flagging fortunes of the left, but while Burnham was solidly anti-communist by the time he wrote The Managerial Revolution, Wark proposes an "a-communist" politics still focused on liberation and egalitarianism, rather than all the authoritarian conservative hokum Burnham was into. I think the difference is real, and in fact I'm very sympathetic to Wark's point, as I share her criticisms of the organised left's hidebound allegiance to archaic texts and rituals, and also am invested in finding a way out.
This makes it very frustrating that I find Burnham's book to be the better of the two. While Capital Is Dead makes a lot of good points, they don't grab you by the lapels in the way Burnham's do; and when it's wrong it's just normal-wrong, not gobsmackingly wrong. It's tough to diagnose, but I think there's a degree to which Wark is caught in a trap of her own making. She spends much of the book criticising ivory-tower intellectuals for their impotence, but that's both her class positioning and her audience; her recommendations at the end are largely for how ivory-tower intellectuals ought to behave. It's like, we can't theory our way out of this problem, now here's how we theory our way out of it! And the prose is such that you need to machete your way through a whole thicket of over and againsts to get from one place to another.
As I alluded to before, I'm wildly ambivalent about typing this, because I like Wark's project! I like her thinking, and I think this book was written with the best of intentions. But despite some very good material, it doesn't hold up in its entirety as the thing it's promising to be. For the curious I would recommend going first to "The Vectoralist Class" (a two-part article Wark published in e-flux, which distills Wark's main thinking on this topic, and has a greatly expanded explanation of what she calls "first, second, and third nature," which I find one of her most useful ideas), and then reading this if you really liked that.
What is funny is that on the surface their arguments seem like opposites. Burnham's post-capitalist mode of production is the mid-century managerial state, whereas for Wark it's the neoliberal economy that has defined itself against that state. But I think this is mostly down to their writing 80 years apart. Again, these books are really about politics and not economic theory, and any current trend can be extrapolated to seem "anti-capitalist," whether it's the state stepping in to restore profitability to the economy or commodity exchange extending itself to encompass nearly all spheres of human activity.
This is not to say that Wark has become a neocon. I don't think she has. They both are frustrated by the flagging fortunes of the left, but while Burnham was solidly anti-communist by the time he wrote The Managerial Revolution, Wark proposes an "a-communist" politics still focused on liberation and egalitarianism, rather than all the authoritarian conservative hokum Burnham was into. I think the difference is real, and in fact I'm very sympathetic to Wark's point, as I share her criticisms of the organised left's hidebound allegiance to archaic texts and rituals, and also am invested in finding a way out.
This makes it very frustrating that I find Burnham's book to be the better of the two. While Capital Is Dead makes a lot of good points, they don't grab you by the lapels in the way Burnham's do; and when it's wrong it's just normal-wrong, not gobsmackingly wrong. It's tough to diagnose, but I think there's a degree to which Wark is caught in a trap of her own making. She spends much of the book criticising ivory-tower intellectuals for their impotence, but that's both her class positioning and her audience; her recommendations at the end are largely for how ivory-tower intellectuals ought to behave. It's like, we can't theory our way out of this problem, now here's how we theory our way out of it! And the prose is such that you need to machete your way through a whole thicket of over and againsts to get from one place to another.
As I alluded to before, I'm wildly ambivalent about typing this, because I like Wark's project! I like her thinking, and I think this book was written with the best of intentions. But despite some very good material, it doesn't hold up in its entirety as the thing it's promising to be. For the curious I would recommend going first to "The Vectoralist Class" (a two-part article Wark published in e-flux, which distills Wark's main thinking on this topic, and has a greatly expanded explanation of what she calls "first, second, and third nature," which I find one of her most useful ideas), and then reading this if you really liked that.
August 16, 2020
McKenzie Wark tells us that capital is dead, on the basis that a new generation of capitalist has displaced an earlier one; however, in Capital, Karl Marx describes the conflict between various types of capitalist and the tendency to concentrate wealth and economic power in fewer hands. Wark also tells us that there have been radical changes in the nature of work; the precarious nature of much work is not, to be frank, all that different to a lot of insecure work in 19th Century Britain. Wark is upset that capitalists can make substantial profits from labour that is not even paid for; but capitalism has always enjoyed the benefit of unwaged labour, notably from women. Wark tells us that capitalism now controls abstract information rather than physical commodities, but does not explain why either is less of a fetish than the other, or why either is any more or less a transient form taken by capital as it extracts surplus value from the labour of the workers by a magical (that is, unexamined) process culminating in the growth, and concentration, of capital.
It’s no secret that Marx died with his life’s work incomplete, and no surprise either that he could not possibly have completed his analysis of the capitalist economy without the facilities (and the material comforts) of a modern university. For academics in America’s corporate sponsored universities, you might imagine there is a golden opportunity to continue with Marx’s analysis and clarify its full implications. I think you could identify David Harvey as a model of this process. His excellent series of lectures on Marx’s Capital is readily available on YouTube and he offers a whole range of promising lines for investigation, always staying consistent with what we know and can demonstrate of Marx’s lines of thought. Just from memory, I recall Harvey suggesting that Marx focused on Manchester, where Engels had his business, and might have drawn some different or more sophisticated conclusions had he examined capitalism in Birmingham. Harvey also discussed how Marx treated the conflicts between forms of capital, for example between banks and manufacturers. These are what I will call good faith readings of Capital, making some claim to remain Marxist while going beyond what Marx had time to write.
Far more common, sadly, is the academic who fills Marx’s silences with all sorts of alternative, and often utterly inconsistent extrapolations from what Marx (possibly) wrote, supposedly justified with the claim that things are different today and that, in any case, Marx was wrong, while retaining the proud claim to be authentically Marxist and genuinely of the left. These are bad faith writings, and as a rule of thumb, anyone who tells us that Marx was wrong and needs to be revised is probably not going to turn out to be a Marxist after all. The idea that this slim volume was about to displace Marx and offer an entirely fresh understanding of 21st Century Capitalism was always going to be hard to swallow.
Some representative and very tiresome quotes
The workplace nightmare of the worker is having to make the same thing, over and over, against the pressure of the clock; the workplace nightmare of the hacker is to produce different things, over and over, against the pressure of the clock. [p43] Note: nothing in this sentence demonstrates the least difference between both types of worker in terms of alienation from the task, exploitation of surplus value, or reduction of value to a standard measure of labour time largely without reference to the potential value of anything produced in that time.
Just as the capitalist class sought to dominate the landlord class as a subordinate ruling class, so too the vectoralist class tries to subordinate both landlords and capitalists by controlling the patents, the brands, the trademarks, the copyrights, but more importantly the logistics of the information vector. [p46] Note: conflict and competition between different fragments of the capitalist class are not an original insight, and are accounted for in Capital.
There is still a hardy band of bearded old professors and votaries of various sects who think they keep alive the flame of an “orthodox” Marxism – some of them even extinct flavours of westernized Maoism. This is a strange conceit when seen from the point of view of the existence of the hundred-million-member Communist Party of China. While one might want to dissent strongly from their version of it, Orthodox Marxism today is really what that party says it is. One’s heretical version might best take the thorough critique of “Xi Jinping Thought” as its point of departure now, rather than the ancient quarrels dormant in dead tomes. [p118] Note: this is not an objective commentary, it is a predictable piece of hackery from an American academic pretending to have read Marx.
God is dead; Communism is dead. It is, at best, the legacy code of the Chinese ruling class.[p142]
Sartre thinks a rational history is possible...But he is nervous about History as the last court of appeal, as in Lukacs, and is well aware of the tendency to make the ends – History – justify any means to the party. History cannot replace God as the objectifying gaze. [[p134] Note: this is arguably a valid comment on Stalinist rhetoric at the time Sartre was working, but quite insulting if it is intended to refer to Marx, as illustrated in his famous 18th Brumaire comment “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; ...”
Far from being a critique, Marx’s scientific socialism reduces the complexity and difference of form to a rational essence. Marx lacks a sense of the materiality of forms (or one might say, information: the form of materiality is information). [p159] This is piffle.
Let us admit, comrades, that we are a defeated people. There will be no second coming for us. And to try to remain in fidelity to something whose core myth lies in History is always to betray it anyway. The whole is to be begun again, and from the beginning. [p169] This is absolutely representative of the entire tradition of “cultural Marxism” from the Frankfurt School onwards, based on defeatism and a refusal to analyse the origin of past failures or the options for renewal: ‘If at first you do not succeed, give up and join the other side’. This is what American academia has done to defang and emasculate Marxism; because in America’s co-opted academic system, you can be sure that their style of Marxism is a zombie. Capitalism, however, is thriving there.
It’s no secret that Marx died with his life’s work incomplete, and no surprise either that he could not possibly have completed his analysis of the capitalist economy without the facilities (and the material comforts) of a modern university. For academics in America’s corporate sponsored universities, you might imagine there is a golden opportunity to continue with Marx’s analysis and clarify its full implications. I think you could identify David Harvey as a model of this process. His excellent series of lectures on Marx’s Capital is readily available on YouTube and he offers a whole range of promising lines for investigation, always staying consistent with what we know and can demonstrate of Marx’s lines of thought. Just from memory, I recall Harvey suggesting that Marx focused on Manchester, where Engels had his business, and might have drawn some different or more sophisticated conclusions had he examined capitalism in Birmingham. Harvey also discussed how Marx treated the conflicts between forms of capital, for example between banks and manufacturers. These are what I will call good faith readings of Capital, making some claim to remain Marxist while going beyond what Marx had time to write.
Far more common, sadly, is the academic who fills Marx’s silences with all sorts of alternative, and often utterly inconsistent extrapolations from what Marx (possibly) wrote, supposedly justified with the claim that things are different today and that, in any case, Marx was wrong, while retaining the proud claim to be authentically Marxist and genuinely of the left. These are bad faith writings, and as a rule of thumb, anyone who tells us that Marx was wrong and needs to be revised is probably not going to turn out to be a Marxist after all. The idea that this slim volume was about to displace Marx and offer an entirely fresh understanding of 21st Century Capitalism was always going to be hard to swallow.
Some representative and very tiresome quotes
The workplace nightmare of the worker is having to make the same thing, over and over, against the pressure of the clock; the workplace nightmare of the hacker is to produce different things, over and over, against the pressure of the clock. [p43] Note: nothing in this sentence demonstrates the least difference between both types of worker in terms of alienation from the task, exploitation of surplus value, or reduction of value to a standard measure of labour time largely without reference to the potential value of anything produced in that time.
Just as the capitalist class sought to dominate the landlord class as a subordinate ruling class, so too the vectoralist class tries to subordinate both landlords and capitalists by controlling the patents, the brands, the trademarks, the copyrights, but more importantly the logistics of the information vector. [p46] Note: conflict and competition between different fragments of the capitalist class are not an original insight, and are accounted for in Capital.
There is still a hardy band of bearded old professors and votaries of various sects who think they keep alive the flame of an “orthodox” Marxism – some of them even extinct flavours of westernized Maoism. This is a strange conceit when seen from the point of view of the existence of the hundred-million-member Communist Party of China. While one might want to dissent strongly from their version of it, Orthodox Marxism today is really what that party says it is. One’s heretical version might best take the thorough critique of “Xi Jinping Thought” as its point of departure now, rather than the ancient quarrels dormant in dead tomes. [p118] Note: this is not an objective commentary, it is a predictable piece of hackery from an American academic pretending to have read Marx.
God is dead; Communism is dead. It is, at best, the legacy code of the Chinese ruling class.[p142]
Sartre thinks a rational history is possible...But he is nervous about History as the last court of appeal, as in Lukacs, and is well aware of the tendency to make the ends – History – justify any means to the party. History cannot replace God as the objectifying gaze. [[p134] Note: this is arguably a valid comment on Stalinist rhetoric at the time Sartre was working, but quite insulting if it is intended to refer to Marx, as illustrated in his famous 18th Brumaire comment “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; ...”
Far from being a critique, Marx’s scientific socialism reduces the complexity and difference of form to a rational essence. Marx lacks a sense of the materiality of forms (or one might say, information: the form of materiality is information). [p159] This is piffle.
Let us admit, comrades, that we are a defeated people. There will be no second coming for us. And to try to remain in fidelity to something whose core myth lies in History is always to betray it anyway. The whole is to be begun again, and from the beginning. [p169] This is absolutely representative of the entire tradition of “cultural Marxism” from the Frankfurt School onwards, based on defeatism and a refusal to analyse the origin of past failures or the options for renewal: ‘If at first you do not succeed, give up and join the other side’. This is what American academia has done to defang and emasculate Marxism; because in America’s co-opted academic system, you can be sure that their style of Marxism is a zombie. Capitalism, however, is thriving there.
July 21, 2023
While the thesis of this work was extremely interesting and salient, unfortunately the book itself is poorly organized and often feels very off-topic. It’s jarring how quickly it turns from concrete, accessible information supporting her hypothesis to highly abstract theoretical cultural Marxism. I wish it had been a work more like The Age of Surveillance Capitalism but with an explicitly Marxist POV, because had I not read that book first, I would not have been nearly as convinced by Wark’s argument (nor understood it, tbh) due to the lack of specific technical information and concrete examples.
October 25, 2020
Sometimes I dream that I can write with the effortless elegance, total lack of pretentiousness or self-righteousness, theoretical insight, and sly wit of McKenzie Wark. And then I wake up and cry.
May 5, 2021
"provocative and compelling" are terms that have been used to market this text, and it is certainly ambitious in its reach and in the promises it makes. Wark's move towards a class relation between 'hackers' and the 'vector' class is quite compelling, but it is greatly under-theorised and gestured towards without ever being fully conceptualised or expanded upon. Much of the content of this book is posturing, with Wark very keen to impress upon us the discontinuity between her position (as ill-defined as it is) and the kind of Marxism that worships the notion of capitialism so as to make it a new deity. This text is full of incredible insights and moments of really insightful framing - but it is self-indulgent to the point of almost total fragmentation. Perhaps Wark would not see this as a problem, given her focus on detournment as method, but again - this is a gesture that is continually made, supposedly pointing towards something important, but we never get a clear picture of what she's trying to say. In short - this could have been an introductory paper for a project that has not yet been finished. It's not a complete book, and is nowhere near as "explosive" as the marketing would have you believe.
June 8, 2021
I'm no expert on classical Marxism and I'm sure that there'll be many angry and educated Marxists rightfully finding fault with this book because the author sometimes seems to oversimplify for the sake of edge. I found it enlightening though. Wark is able to give a new perspective on class (antagonisms), which seems to be closer to the living reality of most readers of leftist stuff nowadays - educated, "privileged" people trapped in the gig economy, without secure social benefits, sometimes with solid wages, whose weekend has disappeared. Her concept of a "hacker class" of course predates this book, but I feel it still has a lot to offer.
January 25, 2021
it’s strange to leave a rating for a book where honestly half of it went over my head, but I spent nearly all the time I was reading Capital Is Dead fantasising about the moment that it would be over and I could pick this star rating, so I’ve decided to do it.
mostly beef between different strands of Marxism that I hadn’t heard of, but the book is put together from a series of essays and lectures so just when I was ready to throw it out the window a mildly more interesting section would come along.
I am intrigued by the idea of new hacker/vectoralist classes, and super struck by the idea that information capitalism/the information political economy/whatever u wanna call it “instrumentalizes difference rather than sameness”. units of commodity must be different (unlike the factory line) in order to be intellectual property. would not go through the process of reading this again for the small nuggets I gained though.
mostly beef between different strands of Marxism that I hadn’t heard of, but the book is put together from a series of essays and lectures so just when I was ready to throw it out the window a mildly more interesting section would come along.
I am intrigued by the idea of new hacker/vectoralist classes, and super struck by the idea that information capitalism/the information political economy/whatever u wanna call it “instrumentalizes difference rather than sameness”. units of commodity must be different (unlike the factory line) in order to be intellectual property. would not go through the process of reading this again for the small nuggets I gained though.
February 24, 2023
Marxism in the post-capital world. Very theory. Very brain.
August 5, 2023
I did not finish this book. I couldn't get through the last 40 pages. The premise was so fascinating to me; McKenzie Wark argues that capitalism has ended and been replaced with something new. Something worse. While I found the introduction and the first two chapters interesting, I lost interest fairly quickly by the mid-way point. The beginning introduces some really engaging ideas regarding how our society has evolved to create something worse than capitalism by way of the Vector class. The Vector class, which owns information rather than capital, has replaced the Capital Class as the most powerful class in society. I felt there were a few times the author contradicted themselves. When faced with the argument that capitalism still exists by ways of labor exploitation and the existence of money, the author notes that two economic systems can exist at the same time. However, within the next few pages, the author will emphatically state that capitalism has died and a new, more evil system has replaced it entirely.
By the mid-way point, the author begins to get into dense, academic analysis of Marx, vulgar versus genteel Marxism, people who've written about vulgar or genteel Marxism; it honestly read more like a dissertation and I wasn't sure what it had to do with the original premise. It got to the point where I just didn't understand what I was reading anymore.
It did feel a bit pretentious in parts as well. There's one point where the author mentions that most American college students "cannot even pronounce bourgeoisie, let alone conceptualize it." Girl what.
By the mid-way point, the author begins to get into dense, academic analysis of Marx, vulgar versus genteel Marxism, people who've written about vulgar or genteel Marxism; it honestly read more like a dissertation and I wasn't sure what it had to do with the original premise. It got to the point where I just didn't understand what I was reading anymore.
It did feel a bit pretentious in parts as well. There's one point where the author mentions that most American college students "cannot even pronounce bourgeoisie, let alone conceptualize it." Girl what.
September 25, 2023
Ideas principales
-----------------
La principal crítica del libro es sobre la asunción, tanto por parte de la derecha como la izquierda (p. 33) de que seguimos habitando un régimen capitalista. Este podría ser el mayor truco del capitalismo (p. 34). Además, los comunistas tradicionales plantean el comunismo como la negación del capitalismo, produciéndose así un doble bloqueo: hemos de seguir en el capitalismo, puesto que esto no es comunismo, y cuando salgamos de él será para entrar inevitablemente en el comunismo. (p. 106) La tesis principal del libro es que quizá ya no estamos en el capitalismo, sino en algo peor, una evolución del mismo, y por tanto nuestro horizonte emancipatorio ya no puede ser el comunismo como tradicionalemente se ha planteado.
Uso del lenguaje
----------------
El libro da mucha importancia al concepto situacionista de «détournement». Si Marx inventó un nuevo lenguaje y dió nuevos usos al lenguaje de su época, ¿por qué hemos de seguir usando su lenguaje sin alterarlo? ¿Por qué no inventar un lenguaje, propio de nuestro momento; por qué no reutilizar de manera novedosa el lenguaje marxista? (p. 45). El détournement le parece una práctica útil para trabajar en y contra términos heredados de conflictos históricos anteriores. (p. 98)
También le interesa lo vulgar. «Encontrar desagradable lo vulgar es quizás el gesto característico del así llamado marxismo occidental» (p. 184). Bien sea por carencia de sofisticación política, conocimiento científico, cercanía con la baja cultura o falta de formación académica, el marxismo gentil acusa al marxismo vulgar de ser insuficiente. (p. 188-9). Wark propone su propio desfile de marxistas vulgares, más afirmativos, experimentales, colaborativos —que delatan al marxismo gentil como producto de sus propios hábitos de trabajo: el estudio de textos en filosofía, historia o literatura—. Características del marxismo vulgar son la orientación hacia las dificultades de organizar el mundo mediante el trabajo (Platonov), la preocupación por las fuentes del cambio social que emanan de los oprimidos y marginados (Davis), la manera de trabajar en y contra las formas técnicas de la época (Pasolini) y en pensar la propia experiencia creativa si bien no como trabajo sí como la de otro tipo de clase subordinada (Jorn). (p. 204)
El marxista gentil se sitúa en una posición problemática respecto a su propia pertenencia a una clase, ya que denuncia a la burguesía pero no pertenece al proletariado. La figura que le resta es la de una especie de mesias, por encima de los trabajadores, que puede guiarles hacia su propio bien. Sin embargo, realmente todos los intelectuales marxistas son hackers, y el marxista hacker puede resolver la cuestion reconociendo claramente su pertenencia a esta clase. (p. 206-7)
Necesitamos conceptos que nos permitan aprehender la articulación de las fuerzas abstractas que articulan los conceptos, las que se dan en nuestro presente concreto. Esto no se puede hacer únicamente con palabras, las palabras han de conectar con lo vulgar en toda su gloria e idiotez, y hacerlo en el punto en que las fuerzas de producción dan lugar a la vida cotidiana. (p. 214)
La información como mercancía
-----------------------------
Wark propone una evolución del tipo de propiedad privada que domina en la economía. Cada tipo de propiedad privada da lugar a unas relaciones de producción y explotación que se estabilizan en dos clases que se oponen: propietarios y explotados. En un primero lugar fue la propiedad de la tierra, que generó terratenientes y granjeros, en un segundo la propiedad de los medios de producción, lo que conocemos como capitalismo, que generó capitalistas y trabajadores. Hoy en día estamos viviendo la transición a un tercer tipo, la propiedad de lo que ella llama el vector, que da lugar a los vectorialistas (propietarios) y los hackers (explotados).
El vector es la infraestructura que vehicula los flujos de información. (p. 62) Tiene una dimensión extensiva (controlar la transmisión de información) y una intensiva (almacenar y computerizar la información. (p.148-9) Regula la producción, establece los transportes de mercancías, orienta el mercado, etc. Los capitalistas poseen los medios de producción, los vectorialistas los medios para organizar los medios de producción. (p. 148) Su explotación por parte de la clase vectorialista no es tanto en términos de apropiación de la plusvalía de trabajo como en términos de asimetría de información (p. 74-5, 116-7). Normalmente parece que la parte del vector a la que se da acceso al consumidor es un regalo (buscar en Google es gratis), casi en el sentido de Mauss, ya que la información que ofrece a cambio el usuario es muchas veces invisible para él mismo. La ganancia del vectorialista reside en que tiene acceso a mucha información de muchos consumidores (inaccesible para cada uno de ellos como individuos) y desde esa materia prima articula un sistema de producción de nueva información (privativa del vectorialista) que emplea en el mercado. Esta es la asimetría de información.
La información es algo extraño como mercancía (p. 58-9): es barata de almacenar, barata de transportar, infinitamente replicable (solo artificialmente se puede lograr su escasez). La base de la mercancía pensábamos que residía en su escasez. Esto resulta en que la clases vectorialista y hacker son cualitativamente distintas a las anteriores. La clase hacker produce nueva información, su trabajo no se basa en la repetición (como el de granjeros y trabajadores) sino en la innovación, y justamente por este motivo se adapta mal a las jornadas fijas de trabajo. El hacker trabaja también estando fuera del trabajo, la creatividad puede presentarse en cualquier momento, y no necesariamente es más productivo durante la jornada de trabajo.
La información y el diseño siempre ha sido importante en el capitalismo, de hecho el germen del sistema vectorialista existe desde hace mucho tiempo (de la misma manera que los restos del sistema de propiedad de la tierra no han desaparecido todavía). Los tres regímenes se solapan, pero su dominancia cambia. Hoy en día domina el vector.
Siendo marxistas, «Marx no era capaz de pensar críticamente en la información, en el sentido contemporáneo del concepto, porque este no era uno que las fuerzas de producción de su tiempo hubieran producido.» (p. 79).
Dinámica de clases
------------------
La relación entre las clases no se reduce a una dialéctica entre propietarios y explotados. Las clases propietarias también pugnan entre sí por dominar, los capitalistas sometieron a los terratenientes como clase auxiliar y lo mismo les están haciendo los vectorialistas. Hoy en día las grandes empresas no producen materialmente , son vectorialistas, relegan esa producción a las empresas de la clase subalterna de los capitalistas. (p. 64, 149) Los vectorialistas usan el control de la propiedad intelectual (patentes, etc.) y su dominio sobre la infraestructura de los flujos de información para subordinar a la clase capitalista.
De la misma manera hay una dinámica entre explotados. Los granjeros, con la llegada del capitalismo, migraron a las ciudades para ser trabajadores en las factorías. Más tarde los hijos de los trabajadores estudiarían carreras universitarias para poder ascender a la clase hacker, tener trabajos creativos. De hecho, como se muestra en el mundo del arte o la moda, los individuos están dispuestos a sufrir peores condiciones laborales con tal de pertenecer a la clase hacker y no a la trabajadora. (p. 126)
Los trabajadores soñaban con autoorganizarse. Los hackers no son capaces de ello, el único sueño que tienen es el de convertirse en jefes. Todos nos imaginamos como jefes, aunque sea de nosotros mismos en nuestro trabajo actual, todos autónomos pero en realidad siguiendo los caminos que marca el vector.
Según Wright la relación de clase se basa en tres dimensiones: propiedad, autoridad y experticia. Wark añade una cuarta: asimetría de información. La opresión de género y de raza se interconecta con todas estas. (p. 128)
Temas sueltos
-------------
Siguiendo a Marx, podemos decir tanto que la tecnología en contenido es trabajo (pues el trabajo vivo la produce) como que en forma es capital (pues está conformada con el objetivo de extraer plusvalía en la manera óptima). (p. 83)
Ser ateo siginifca rechazar la existencia de Dios. Y sin embargo ese rechazo se define de manera negativa respecto a algo de lo que no se sabe ser real o posible. De la misma manera se define ser «acomunista», el prefijo implica «sin» y no «contra». (p. 213)
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21 09
January 1, 2020
As the title of McKenzie Wark's Capitalism Is Dead suggests, we are, despite what we might think, no longer in the throes of capitalism, instead, "This...is something worse." Wark continues, "The dominant ruling class of our time no longer maintains its rule through the ownership of the means of production as capitalists do. Nor through the ownership of land as landlords do. The dominant ruling class of our time owns and controls information." Wark argues that using older, more established models of analysis to understand this moment of surplus information extraction, misses the mark because it fails to account for the new ruling class: the vectoralist class. Wark writes of the vectoralist class:
"But maybe there is something else here as well. Not just the exploitation of labor through the owning and controlling of the forces of production, but also the extraction of what you might call surplus information, out of individual workers and consumers, in order to build predictive models which further subordinate all activity to the same information political economy. One where you are nothing but a user, and everything you do within hearing range of [an] Echo, or every movement you make with your cellphone, or everything you do on your laptop, or everything recorded of you or about you as you go about your daily life, is captured by a vector and fed into computation to figure out how better to use you for the greater glory of Amazon, Google, Apple or some other company."
Operating alongside the vectoralist class is the hacker class, a collection of individuals who produce "new information out of old information, and not just people who code for a living." Our common goal, Wark argues, "is to see a common class interest in all kinds of information making."
Wark's thesis is certainly a provocative one. Instead of assuming that capitalism is endlessly adaptable and impossible to kill (think Mark Fisher's Capitalist Realism), Wark imagines that capitalism can die. By arguing that what follows is potentially worse than capitalism, Wark antagonizes orthodox Marxist historical materialism. As Wark suggests, the death of capitalism did not create the conditions for communism; it merely produced something far worse.
Capitalism Is Dead is an interesting polemic that takes the foundational ideas of Marxism seriously. Its moment of departure, however, challenges not only Marxist orthodoxy but any analytical position that assumes capitalism is as bad as it gets.
"But maybe there is something else here as well. Not just the exploitation of labor through the owning and controlling of the forces of production, but also the extraction of what you might call surplus information, out of individual workers and consumers, in order to build predictive models which further subordinate all activity to the same information political economy. One where you are nothing but a user, and everything you do within hearing range of [an] Echo, or every movement you make with your cellphone, or everything you do on your laptop, or everything recorded of you or about you as you go about your daily life, is captured by a vector and fed into computation to figure out how better to use you for the greater glory of Amazon, Google, Apple or some other company."
Operating alongside the vectoralist class is the hacker class, a collection of individuals who produce "new information out of old information, and not just people who code for a living." Our common goal, Wark argues, "is to see a common class interest in all kinds of information making."
Wark's thesis is certainly a provocative one. Instead of assuming that capitalism is endlessly adaptable and impossible to kill (think Mark Fisher's Capitalist Realism), Wark imagines that capitalism can die. By arguing that what follows is potentially worse than capitalism, Wark antagonizes orthodox Marxist historical materialism. As Wark suggests, the death of capitalism did not create the conditions for communism; it merely produced something far worse.
Capitalism Is Dead is an interesting polemic that takes the foundational ideas of Marxism seriously. Its moment of departure, however, challenges not only Marxist orthodoxy but any analytical position that assumes capitalism is as bad as it gets.
December 27, 2022
Wark begins this class analysis with the premise—capitalism is not eternal even though we imagine it to be. He proposes a superstructure overlaying our world society called vectoralism, which privatizes information and consequently exploits the capitalist class. The capitalist class eats our bodies and the vectoralist class eats our brains.
May 31, 2024
Um livro mais sobre marxismo e seu presente do que capitalismo e seu presente, que presentifica o capitalismo para presentificar o marxismo. Por isso, muito inspirador, mas um pouco decepcionante.
March 7, 2021
The central thesis of the book is that the infrastructure and science of data, information, communications, and media have effectively imposed another strata onto the earth which beyond capitalism, and causes a new class relation to emerge. While Wark's "vectoralist-hacker" pair isn't particularly catchy, I think there is something quite correct about this.
Is the control that media and information giants like Google/Amazon/Twitter/Facebook have over what people see, read, and think really quite the same thing as production of commodities to sell at a profit to be reinvested in further productive capital? Perhaps nothing has changed, private businesses have always sought to monopolize communications, and both Television and newspaper media is old at this point, and has again, long been private.
Yet, the power of data processing software's capability of pattern recognition has only recently exploded, as has the amount of data being fed into this software. Naturally, every website you visit is recording what you are doing and saying there, where you are, and how long you stay. Nevermind that your smartphone's microphone is always on, as is its GPS tracking. This massive amount of data and computing power provides predictive power, and the future now impinges upon the present, creating a closed loop. What happens in the future is now the product of the present's prediction of the future.
What one reads, sees, hears, and says is within a controlled system, mediated by all of this predictive data stored up from the past, and these actions are what determine what they think the future will be. The past becomes the present, which becomes the future, which comes back to impinge upon the present, which is then logged as the past.
But again, data has always driven capital. Capitalist firms have always been relentless data hoarders and processors, what has changed? A critical mass? A threshold has been crossed? Every bit of space has been invaded and closed back in on itself? Historically, capitalism was more of a substratum to human activity, there was a radically open present of new wants, new needs, new tomorrows, industrial dreams. But this has disappeared, hasn't it?
Is the control that media and information giants like Google/Amazon/Twitter/Facebook have over what people see, read, and think really quite the same thing as production of commodities to sell at a profit to be reinvested in further productive capital? Perhaps nothing has changed, private businesses have always sought to monopolize communications, and both Television and newspaper media is old at this point, and has again, long been private.
Yet, the power of data processing software's capability of pattern recognition has only recently exploded, as has the amount of data being fed into this software. Naturally, every website you visit is recording what you are doing and saying there, where you are, and how long you stay. Nevermind that your smartphone's microphone is always on, as is its GPS tracking. This massive amount of data and computing power provides predictive power, and the future now impinges upon the present, creating a closed loop. What happens in the future is now the product of the present's prediction of the future.
What one reads, sees, hears, and says is within a controlled system, mediated by all of this predictive data stored up from the past, and these actions are what determine what they think the future will be. The past becomes the present, which becomes the future, which comes back to impinge upon the present, which is then logged as the past.
But again, data has always driven capital. Capitalist firms have always been relentless data hoarders and processors, what has changed? A critical mass? A threshold has been crossed? Every bit of space has been invaded and closed back in on itself? Historically, capitalism was more of a substratum to human activity, there was a radically open present of new wants, new needs, new tomorrows, industrial dreams. But this has disappeared, hasn't it?
November 14, 2020
A provocative challenge to the poetics of old-fashioned Marxism. Apart from a few stylistic quibbles, I found myself puzzled by the book’s advocacy of acommunism, along the lines of atheism (and, one imagines, aletheia). The prospect of rejecting “communism” comes at the cost of affirming a God that Failed narrative; while this analogy contains a germ of truth it frames communism as a question of belief. While faith in communism is essential to any militant, this need not calcify into the kind of religion she is concerned with. Having said that, the book does not hang on this detail, and it is insightful and bracing for anyone interested in what it means to call oneself a Marxist today. The chapter on genteel and vulgar marxism is especially helpful, in arguing for a materialist attitude to life as going hand in hand with a materialist worldview.
October 18, 2020
...woof. Pre-recs: an economics degree and mild schizophrenia.
January 14, 2020
A somewhat scattershot collection of essays gathered together into a loose framework arguing that our classical understanding of what "Capitalism" entails has been left so completely behind by the changing times that it is no longer useful to refer to what we live under as such. Honestly, I find these kind of largely semantics-based discussions utterly tiresome, and don't find it particularly constructive to be so laissez-faire with a term that is recognizable and understandable worldwide.
Having said this, when she isn't quibbling over semantics and assuming that "Marxism" still means exactly what it meant when Capital hit the streets and no more or less, much of what Wark argues is compelling and well-argued, but not quite to a degree that I was able to follow it fully to her conclusion, at least for the first couple of chapters.
However, later in the book, where Wark expands her thesis to a more general argument about the necessity of accepting when the time for a certain idea or mode of thought is passed in order to reconstruct it into a more relevant and modern idea, and also just accepting change and adapting to it overall, I found extremely compelling and insightful. If the book started with this before building to it's "Capital is Dead" argument, I think I may have bought into it more readily, but as it stands it was too much of a stretch for me to accept immediately.
Anyway, I thought it was decent! It's been a while since I read a book like this so I'm obviously a little rusty, as I did find it a little confusing and hard-to-read at times (get the distinct impression I should have read The Hacker Manifesto first) but overall once it got out of semantic territory and into the later essays I found it interesting and thought-provoking, which is really what you want from this sort of thing. As much as I may not fully agree with her assertion that Capital is Dead, I do think her comments about not allowing ourselves to remain completely stuck within the same unmoving theoretical paradigm as the world continues to change around us is well-argued and spot-on.
Hard read, almost certainly read it wrong because I'm dumb but still thought it was pretty good!
Having said this, when she isn't quibbling over semantics and assuming that "Marxism" still means exactly what it meant when Capital hit the streets and no more or less, much of what Wark argues is compelling and well-argued, but not quite to a degree that I was able to follow it fully to her conclusion, at least for the first couple of chapters.
However, later in the book, where Wark expands her thesis to a more general argument about the necessity of accepting when the time for a certain idea or mode of thought is passed in order to reconstruct it into a more relevant and modern idea, and also just accepting change and adapting to it overall, I found extremely compelling and insightful. If the book started with this before building to it's "Capital is Dead" argument, I think I may have bought into it more readily, but as it stands it was too much of a stretch for me to accept immediately.
Anyway, I thought it was decent! It's been a while since I read a book like this so I'm obviously a little rusty, as I did find it a little confusing and hard-to-read at times (get the distinct impression I should have read The Hacker Manifesto first) but overall once it got out of semantic territory and into the later essays I found it interesting and thought-provoking, which is really what you want from this sort of thing. As much as I may not fully agree with her assertion that Capital is Dead, I do think her comments about not allowing ourselves to remain completely stuck within the same unmoving theoretical paradigm as the world continues to change around us is well-argued and spot-on.
Hard read, almost certainly read it wrong because I'm dumb but still thought it was pretty good!
October 17, 2020
I immensely did not enjoy this book. Part of the problem is that I am not well versed enough in political philosophy to understand the bulk of her references and arguments, but I think this text will be highly inaccessible to the vast majority of readers. While an interesting premise, the book came across as an argument of semantics and self indulgent posturing of the author’s extensive research on this topic. I mean, maybe what we are experiencing is no longer capitalism, but what was your point? Where is the proposed solution or call to action? It was mostly a lengthy literature review repeatedly coming back to her thesis of “told you so, it’s not capitalism anymore, it’s actually worse!” There are so many references to bodies of work that most people probably haven’t read and unfamiliar terms, including those made up by the author for the sake of her pointless argument, that this book is ridiculously inaccessible, unrelatable, and confusing. I am relieved to be finished with this.
January 25, 2020
Wark proposes completely new theoretical underpinnings to understand the socio-economic system of the present. She
suggests that we now live in a post-capitalist society. Far from being an utopia it is worse. A new dominant class: the vectoralists and a new dominated class the hackers have emerged. Wonderful thought experiment that should be read by all futurists out there.
suggests that we now live in a post-capitalist society. Far from being an utopia it is worse. A new dominant class: the vectoralists and a new dominated class the hackers have emerged. Wonderful thought experiment that should be read by all futurists out there.
March 4, 2021
Best book about capitalism and not capitalism ever written to date. Recommended for Marxists and non-Marxists alike. Academics and non-academics. You just have to read slowly and participate in the thought experiment.
Read
February 6, 2022Big brain meme: the book
i wish that the focus of this book was the really interesting stuff on reconceiving vulgar marxism instead of just the last chapter. otherwise idk i respect the intellectual moves wark makes, following them tho is pretty difficult
i wish that the focus of this book was the really interesting stuff on reconceiving vulgar marxism instead of just the last chapter. otherwise idk i respect the intellectual moves wark makes, following them tho is pretty difficult
November 16, 2022
Mah, spunti interessanti accecati da mancanza di analisi. Terribile la parte sul marxismo volgare, peccato.
March 26, 2023
I thought this was pretty good but I also think that if you're going to make the claim that capitalism is dead you need to write a book that's a little bit longer
January 5, 2020
Impressively bad. But then again maybe a taste for coherent use of concepts, good writing and some kind of argumentative or rhetorical structure is just evidence of "gentility" on my part.
I'm not an expert on or huge fan of Debord by any means but I feel like part of the reason that his "detournements" were more successful is that they were born out of an intimate familiarity with his sources and their ways of thinking. That's not in evidence here.
The key thesis about "vectoralists" vs "hackers" gets pretty lost amongst the digressions on vulgar Marxism, Pasolini, Joseph Needham and what have you. But what there is isn't very convincing or fleshed out. One suspects that the whole conceit that this is just a "thought experiment" serves in part as a defence against criticism of this lack of substance - maybe the gaps are to be filled in by people who actually know about these topics through a process of "comradely knowledge production".
Despite disparaging the idea of "cognitive capitalism" as "bad poetry" (funny considering this is a book which tries to make the case for using "hackers" as a political designator) Wark seems to assume a lot of its arguments e.g. the increasing role of information in the economy bringing about a crisis of measurability which renders the labour theory of value obsolete.
A polite round of applause for gentility!
I'm not an expert on or huge fan of Debord by any means but I feel like part of the reason that his "detournements" were more successful is that they were born out of an intimate familiarity with his sources and their ways of thinking. That's not in evidence here.
The key thesis about "vectoralists" vs "hackers" gets pretty lost amongst the digressions on vulgar Marxism, Pasolini, Joseph Needham and what have you. But what there is isn't very convincing or fleshed out. One suspects that the whole conceit that this is just a "thought experiment" serves in part as a defence against criticism of this lack of substance - maybe the gaps are to be filled in by people who actually know about these topics through a process of "comradely knowledge production".
Despite disparaging the idea of "cognitive capitalism" as "bad poetry" (funny considering this is a book which tries to make the case for using "hackers" as a political designator) Wark seems to assume a lot of its arguments e.g. the increasing role of information in the economy bringing about a crisis of measurability which renders the labour theory of value obsolete.
A polite round of applause for gentility!
October 16, 2019
An academic paper pusher applying the only skill he has: filling up paper.
February 13, 2022
Tedious word salad of semantics.
October 27, 2020
This text blew my mind, but was frustrating to read. I entirely disagree with Wark's central thesis, but it is so compellingly argued that it has changed my thinking about digital capitalism. That must warrant a five-star review.
What is her argument? In short, our thinking about capitalism is outdated and riddled with the orthodoxy of the Party School. While Marxists point to a contradiction between capital and labour at the heart of capitalist society, the last forty years has seen this world change beyond recognition. What we have instead is a growing 'hacker class' of white collar creative workers. Indeed, much employment in advanced economies is now represented by hacker jobs. Their creative and intellectual efforts, however, alongside the value they produce, are persistently enclosed, misdirected, and appropriated by the new 'vectoralist' class. The vectoralists own the data infrastructures which now command so much of our lives -- Google (which controls information flows), Apple (which polices our communications), and Amazon (in charge of our consumption). The working class is not gone (though it has increasingly gone East), but industrial and service capital are now subordinated to this new vectoralist mode of production -- just as agricultural capital was once subordinated to the logic of the new industrial cities. Harvesting and enclosing access to ever greater quantities of data to predict, control and police human behaviour is the core microfoundations of this new class. To this end, the fulfillment of the profit motive by the thousands of sellers and their supply chains on Amazon, for instance, is basically incidental to the core dynamic of digital capitalism.
In this regard, it would have been opportune to engage at some length with Zuboff's Surveillance Capitalism as the ur-text of this mode of thought. Most critically, for me, the proposed new mode of production may elide the existing tension between capital and labour (I am in no doubt that confounding contradictory class locations are being produced by digital capitalism -- the UK, for instance, had 5 million managers in 2013, almost 20% of the workforce https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-2...). But digital capitalism definitely does not negate Marx's other key distinguishing feature of capitalism's political economy: competition between capitals. Indeed, despite cries of 'monopoly', the turnover of large firms in the digital age seems greater than ever. Who had ever heard of Uber back in 2010? What happened to WeWork? But the driving force of competitive accumulation doesn't seem to figure in Wark's new schema.
More generally, the book is at once deeply frustrating and a pleasure to read because it is filled with what appear to be distant diversions from the core argument. A significant section of chapter 6, for instance, details the conceptions of subjectivity and objective nature ('inertia') in twentieth century philosophy, from Heidegger through Sartre. The final chapter, meanwhile, traces the history of the charge of 'vulgar' Marxism and mounts a defence of Angela Davis' archaeology of womens' blues music, Pasolini's films, Platonov's fiction and Asger Jorn's art as vulgarians prepared to break with inherited shibboleths. As much as I enjoyed these excursions, they plainly distract from and muddle the thread of the argument being made. On the other hand, some of the highlights of the text are its treatment of the Social Relations of Science movement and its contradictory relationship with the postwar US military-industrial complex; and a fascinating reading of contemporary China which deftly characterises the radical nature of its divergence from an emergent planetary 'Stack' (see Bratton, 2015) controlled by US tech giants. Wark concludes with a dis/spiriting reading of Raoul Peck's 'The Young Marx', calling upon readers to at once abandon any possibility of communism in an age where capital no longer prevails, while simultaneously living up to the revolutionary ideals of the young Marx (and Engels, Burns and von Westphalen) in expunging intellectual catechisms and figuring out anew how to break the existing power system. Whether such a-communism (as in a-theism) is in any way helpful, I am not clear on -- nor do I really understand the proposed nature of the contribution of this text to such a project.
What is her argument? In short, our thinking about capitalism is outdated and riddled with the orthodoxy of the Party School. While Marxists point to a contradiction between capital and labour at the heart of capitalist society, the last forty years has seen this world change beyond recognition. What we have instead is a growing 'hacker class' of white collar creative workers. Indeed, much employment in advanced economies is now represented by hacker jobs. Their creative and intellectual efforts, however, alongside the value they produce, are persistently enclosed, misdirected, and appropriated by the new 'vectoralist' class. The vectoralists own the data infrastructures which now command so much of our lives -- Google (which controls information flows), Apple (which polices our communications), and Amazon (in charge of our consumption). The working class is not gone (though it has increasingly gone East), but industrial and service capital are now subordinated to this new vectoralist mode of production -- just as agricultural capital was once subordinated to the logic of the new industrial cities. Harvesting and enclosing access to ever greater quantities of data to predict, control and police human behaviour is the core microfoundations of this new class. To this end, the fulfillment of the profit motive by the thousands of sellers and their supply chains on Amazon, for instance, is basically incidental to the core dynamic of digital capitalism.
In this regard, it would have been opportune to engage at some length with Zuboff's Surveillance Capitalism as the ur-text of this mode of thought. Most critically, for me, the proposed new mode of production may elide the existing tension between capital and labour (I am in no doubt that confounding contradictory class locations are being produced by digital capitalism -- the UK, for instance, had 5 million managers in 2013, almost 20% of the workforce https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-2...). But digital capitalism definitely does not negate Marx's other key distinguishing feature of capitalism's political economy: competition between capitals. Indeed, despite cries of 'monopoly', the turnover of large firms in the digital age seems greater than ever. Who had ever heard of Uber back in 2010? What happened to WeWork? But the driving force of competitive accumulation doesn't seem to figure in Wark's new schema.
More generally, the book is at once deeply frustrating and a pleasure to read because it is filled with what appear to be distant diversions from the core argument. A significant section of chapter 6, for instance, details the conceptions of subjectivity and objective nature ('inertia') in twentieth century philosophy, from Heidegger through Sartre. The final chapter, meanwhile, traces the history of the charge of 'vulgar' Marxism and mounts a defence of Angela Davis' archaeology of womens' blues music, Pasolini's films, Platonov's fiction and Asger Jorn's art as vulgarians prepared to break with inherited shibboleths. As much as I enjoyed these excursions, they plainly distract from and muddle the thread of the argument being made. On the other hand, some of the highlights of the text are its treatment of the Social Relations of Science movement and its contradictory relationship with the postwar US military-industrial complex; and a fascinating reading of contemporary China which deftly characterises the radical nature of its divergence from an emergent planetary 'Stack' (see Bratton, 2015) controlled by US tech giants. Wark concludes with a dis/spiriting reading of Raoul Peck's 'The Young Marx', calling upon readers to at once abandon any possibility of communism in an age where capital no longer prevails, while simultaneously living up to the revolutionary ideals of the young Marx (and Engels, Burns and von Westphalen) in expunging intellectual catechisms and figuring out anew how to break the existing power system. Whether such a-communism (as in a-theism) is in any way helpful, I am not clear on -- nor do I really understand the proposed nature of the contribution of this text to such a project.
May 2, 2023
Das Kapital is dead: Is this book something worse?
WARNING: This book is not what it seems.
It is not very often that I am compelled to write a review, but in this case, I feel it a public service to inform potential readers that this book is very poorly marketed and incredibly misleading.
From its cover, Capital is dead… positions itself as a book that engages with a certain realm of academic discourse relating to technology studies, surveillance capitalism and digital citizenship. Each word on the front cover is highlighted like a keyword you might see online, transporting the reader into a realm of information, digital technology and social media.
Indeed, the back cover highlights several key themes that the book claims to engage with directly, namely: tech, theory, data, capital, information, disruption, control.
And yet, dear reader, this book simply does not engage with any of these issues. Indeed, it is nothing about the digital world at all. Rather, it is a book about Karl Marx.
What this book is really about
Capital is dead… is a collection of essays on Karl Marx and the internal debates within the Marxist community around what Marxism is, and what exactly it refers to.
Unfortunately, these essays don’t really fit together very well, and so the book itself functions less as a ‘book’ (with a single cohesive argument), and more rather a collection of thoughts written at different times and for different audiences.
Already then, this format sets the reader on edge. Of course this is not helped by the way the book is marketed. Nowhere on the cover, inside or out, are the words ‘Karl Marx’ or ‘Marxism’ mentioned once. Indeed, the cover quotes talk about a digital world crashing towards ecological disaster, and yet the author never actually engages with said digital world, and barely even mentions ecological disaster.
The big problem with this book, alongside the way it has been marketed is the same problem with Marxism as an academic discourse. Namely, that it seems to be the exclusive preserve of the intellectually snobbish sorts who aren’t even of the same class as the people they supposedly stand to defend. For much of the book then I found myself getting angrier and angrier. Not with the concept of Marxism as such, but with the whole group of people who claim to take ownership of Marxism and the defence of the common people.
Indeed, much of the 169 pages (of content), the writer adopts a position of intellectual superiority to the reader, writing in an increasingly complex and inaccessible style that is incredibly off-putting to the generalist reader who bought a book on digital culture, but instead found a book about Satre, Heidegger and a collection of obscure Marxist scholars.
As a fellow academic myself [though not in the same field], I do have particular issue with the author’s concepts of the vectoralist class and the hacker class, and the way these ideas of presented. It is quite ironic that the author talks about the poetry of the language around class, and then comes up with two quite unpoetic terms of their own that are never justified beyond the overly simplistic argument that ‘information is important, therefore the people who control said information are a new class’.
And this is the problem with Capital is dead… The author makes a lot of claims but doesn’t support any of these claims with evidence. If you happen to already inhabit the same world as the author and are already well read up on all of the particular writers and debates that the author refers to then you might find some value from this book. However, as with so much of Marxism and studies in this area, there is a certain intellectual snobbery in the way this book is written that excludes the very people you would hope/expect the writer to be trying to persuade.
WARNING: This book is not what it seems.
It is not very often that I am compelled to write a review, but in this case, I feel it a public service to inform potential readers that this book is very poorly marketed and incredibly misleading.
From its cover, Capital is dead… positions itself as a book that engages with a certain realm of academic discourse relating to technology studies, surveillance capitalism and digital citizenship. Each word on the front cover is highlighted like a keyword you might see online, transporting the reader into a realm of information, digital technology and social media.
Indeed, the back cover highlights several key themes that the book claims to engage with directly, namely: tech, theory, data, capital, information, disruption, control.
And yet, dear reader, this book simply does not engage with any of these issues. Indeed, it is nothing about the digital world at all. Rather, it is a book about Karl Marx.
What this book is really about
Capital is dead… is a collection of essays on Karl Marx and the internal debates within the Marxist community around what Marxism is, and what exactly it refers to.
Unfortunately, these essays don’t really fit together very well, and so the book itself functions less as a ‘book’ (with a single cohesive argument), and more rather a collection of thoughts written at different times and for different audiences.
Already then, this format sets the reader on edge. Of course this is not helped by the way the book is marketed. Nowhere on the cover, inside or out, are the words ‘Karl Marx’ or ‘Marxism’ mentioned once. Indeed, the cover quotes talk about a digital world crashing towards ecological disaster, and yet the author never actually engages with said digital world, and barely even mentions ecological disaster.
The big problem with this book, alongside the way it has been marketed is the same problem with Marxism as an academic discourse. Namely, that it seems to be the exclusive preserve of the intellectually snobbish sorts who aren’t even of the same class as the people they supposedly stand to defend. For much of the book then I found myself getting angrier and angrier. Not with the concept of Marxism as such, but with the whole group of people who claim to take ownership of Marxism and the defence of the common people.
Indeed, much of the 169 pages (of content), the writer adopts a position of intellectual superiority to the reader, writing in an increasingly complex and inaccessible style that is incredibly off-putting to the generalist reader who bought a book on digital culture, but instead found a book about Satre, Heidegger and a collection of obscure Marxist scholars.
As a fellow academic myself [though not in the same field], I do have particular issue with the author’s concepts of the vectoralist class and the hacker class, and the way these ideas of presented. It is quite ironic that the author talks about the poetry of the language around class, and then comes up with two quite unpoetic terms of their own that are never justified beyond the overly simplistic argument that ‘information is important, therefore the people who control said information are a new class’.
And this is the problem with Capital is dead… The author makes a lot of claims but doesn’t support any of these claims with evidence. If you happen to already inhabit the same world as the author and are already well read up on all of the particular writers and debates that the author refers to then you might find some value from this book. However, as with so much of Marxism and studies in this area, there is a certain intellectual snobbery in the way this book is written that excludes the very people you would hope/expect the writer to be trying to persuade.
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