Capital is Dead: Is This Something Worse?

Introduction

The distinctive mode of self-enrichment and domination today depends not on the production of commodities, but on control over information. A major (class) divide has emerged between who produce new information out of old information, and thus who profit from it. Many industries are built on information: not only tech, but also logistics, many nominally-productive industries (e.g. car-manifacturer making most of their money from insurance or consultancy), finance, etc. Sure, there are still landlords and capitalists, but a new layer has been added to the system, and with it new class relations. A vectorialist class (that controls the infrastructure through which information flows) has emerged, and come to dominate the other ruling classes. Capital is dead, and we got something even worse. Vectorialism relies not on scarcity but abundance (information is cheap and abundant, and that only makes it more valuable), and not on sameness (industrial standardisation) but difference (information 'new enough' to be protected by copyright laws).

Marxist scholars are very resistant to even contemplating the idea that we move past capitalism, as if this was a betrayal of Marx. Instead, they explain away any transformation through the use of modifiers: this is still capitalism, but it is: infrastructural, digital, neoliberal, postfordist...But aren't these scholars holding on to a language that Marx invented to describe the specific relations of his times, while forsaking the underlying intention? Why not hold on to the fundamental insights that material relations of production shape politics and culture, that struggle between classes differently positioned within these relations is what engenders change, but being open to the idea that those relations have fundamentally changed? One way to approach this is to draw inspiration from De Bord's detournament thinking/writing strategy, i.e. hack and hijack Marx's texts, playfully deleting or replacing what is no longer relevant.

The sublime language of my century

That capitalism is eternal is the one thing everyone (right and left) seems to agree on, which is reason enough to dispute it. There are two main visions of how capitalism could eventually vanish: through self-destruction and through a workers' revolution. The assumption is that what will come next is communism. Since clearly this is not communism, then it must be capitalism.

This way of thinking relates to debates among Marxist about the relation between the economy, politics, culture and society. Some Marxist believe that the economy (or, for some, specifically material commodities) constituted the basis on which everything else rests. In this sense, capitalism as an economic system is the essence, and its socio-cultural-political manifestations are just its 'apparences'. Against this view Althusser proposed that the economic base determines everything 'in the last istance', but that society, politics and culture are to some degree independent from it. This opened up the possibility of thinking of culture and politics and society as also having an essence distinct from their appearances. This led to (1) academic specialisation (2) general sense that studying language/culture/etc can also be a way to study capitalism and (3) theories that look for 'the essence' behind appearances, e.g. search for the Political (4) a certain monothony in Marxist-inspired scholarship, since everything seems to be a reiteration of the same 'tune' in different realms. Overall, when this is the approach, when Marx's analysis doesn't apply, one can just explain it away as 'Marx was essentially right, even if the appearances have changed'.

Applying detournament to Marx's preface to a critique of the political economy, we can take as a staring point that, in any [socio-technical] system, humans enter into relations with each other in ways that are beyond their control, and that depend on material forces of production and reproduction. The totality of this relations is the infrastructure of society, on which arises a legal, political and cultural superstructures. This infrastructures shapes the superstructures, i.e. (re)productions shapes ideology, rather than viceversa.

When the forces of production clash against these relations, the system changes. Thus changes in the superstructures are most likely to be symptoms rather than the primary cause of structural change.

This framework works as a method, and does not requires insisting on capitalism being eternal.

Capitalism - or worse?

One can find the first signs of the rise of vectorialism in shows representing office work in the 1950s, such as Mad Men. In these shows, characters are chasing upward mobility: for the secretaries, that means become a creative worker, for the creative workers, becoming the boss. The same aspirations also pervade the tech sector, where produces (developers, designers) are generally making money for someone else, and dream of selling their start-ups and becoming CEOs. One can also see the pervasive anxiety around this form of exploitation in the recurrent (film/book) plots featuring some sort of system holding human captives to exploit their brains (see Matrix) - from manual labor to intellectual labor, from bodies to brains.

The capacity to exploit intellectual labor stems from ownership of what MW calls the vector, i.e. 'the infratructure on which information is routed, whether through time and space'. Another way to think of The vector is as 'the legal and technical protocols for making otherwise abundant information scarce'(45). To some extent, information was always central to capitalism, but we are now in a situation where it is not necessary to own the means of production: control over information is arguably the most lucrative and powerful means to dominance.

Of course, intellectual labourers are still relatively privileged (not as much as 'we' hoped though: increasingly precarious and, in some cases, underpaid), and there still exists many manual workers, in the factories and on the fields. Thus it isn't capitalists against workers, but many classes: landlords, capitalists, vectorialists, farmers, workers, hackers. Politics is not about friends vs enemies, but relations between nonfriends and nonenemies (p.49).

'In practice, this emergent ruling class of our time insists on the confinement of particular acts of creation within the property form and access to collective creative action, from which to harvest information in the aggregate. This is the vectorialist class'. (p. 55)

This framework allows to explain phenomena such as the emergence of neoliberalism and financialisation as originating in material changes in the mode of production (rather than ideologies or idiosyncratic innovation born out of nothing). In this interpretation, neoliberalism and financialisation were how the capitalist class sought to respond to the demands of labour: reshoring production, financing consumption through credit, and monetising non-work; however, the capitalist class was itself weakened by these changes, and overpowered by the new vectorialist class that controlled the value chain through control over the information vector. [my simplified summary]

Quoting Debord 'And theories are made to die in the war of times'. (59). In short, we can throw out Marx's critique of capital while hanging on to his thinking methodology. What are the current forces of production, and which (new) concepts can we use to understand them? Under which conditions can the subordinate classes rise up? What other words are still possible?

The Forces of Production

Marx is also a useful resource for thinking about technology, moving beyond the straightjacket of moral judgement (is it good or bad) and instead investigating what in modern parlance we could call 'affordances' - something without an essence and shaped by historical circumstances. For Marx, technology is connected to humans in two ways: it is 'congealed dead labour' produced by living labour (workers) in content, and it is capital (something designed to effectively extract value from people and nature) - or to weaken labour resistance) in form. In addition, a divide emerged between 'genteel' approaches that thought of it in philosophical term, and 'vulgar' approaches that approached it techno-scientifically, i.e. in terms of how things practically work.

Marxist perspectives about tech can be thus organised through a matrix with two axes:

• Positive (dead labour) vs negative (capital)
• genteel (pro or again) vs vulgar (pro or against)

Responses to what to make of Marxist theory in the face of changing tech can also be conceptualised through a similar grid:

• Marxism as philosophy vs Marxism as a praxis for organising knowledge
• genteel vs vulgar

What follows is a sort of literature review that sums up various classics though this matrixes, including Haraway is inspired by Marx in her ironic use of life sciences language, and attempt to recognise the duality of tech (dead labour & capital) through the figure of the cyborg.

Fast forward to emergence of the internet. At first, arguably most productive thinking about it (from a Marxist perspective) came from the vernacular movement enthused with the possibilities of peer-to-peer communication and organisation, captured by concepts such as telecommunism.

Technology changed to foreclose this possibility: what ended up developing was a client-server network (rather than peer-to-peer), built around privately owned stacks (referencing Bratton). MW highlights here role of states (note relevance for frontier argument):

Meanwhile, states engaged each other in trade agreements, which produced transnational regimes of intellectual property designed to secure surplus information within novel forms of private property. The free creation of information would be alternately policed and encouraged: policed where it infringed on corporate monopolies; encouraged where free labor or nonlabor could be captured as information that had value.

Later on, also notes contribution of the state in the form of funding university labs that developed a large amount of these techs. In a different future, this could have resulted in open public/common internet infrastructure.

Dominant ideology of vectorialist class is the so-called ‘California ideology’, which asserts that technology is the sole transformative force of history. Its subject and agent is the entrepreneur, battling against both labor and the state to free technology’s ‘natural’ potential.  This ideology is so successful is that even its critics embrace it to some degree (i.e. tech as good or bad). What gets lost here is an understanding of the (class) struggle that led to existing socio-technical landscape, and thus also the sense that it could be otherwise:

What is good or bad about technology is the outcome of class conflict over its form, and between more than two classes

The class location blues

This chapter plays with the sociological imagination, i.e. ‘the ability to conceptualise [problems] syncronically’, as if taking a snapshot, ignoring how things developed over time. The premise is that there is a class of people that produces relatively new information from old information, and this relatively new information is then captured and monetised by a different class. The first of these classes can hardly be characterised as ‘labor’, because labor classically entailed producing the same thing over and over, whilst the point here is precisely to always produce something new-enough. One characteristic of information is that it is difficult to estimate its value - according to MW (drawing on Boutang), we can understand financialisation as a socialisation of this problem, a distribution of the risk that arises from this uncertainty. Globalisation can also be explained / related to this: the capitalist class pushed for expanded networks of production in order to circumvent the demands of labour, but this also opened them up to competition from producers in countries where production costs are cheaper. Controlling the infrastructure that support these extended value chains became a new source of economic power, giving raise to the vectorialist class. This not-quite-Marxist political economy approach has the merit of presenting a coherent story about what happened since the 1970s, and the relation between what could be considered the key phenomena of these decades: globalisation, financialisation and digitalisation.

From p. 83 onward, the chapter becomes a discussion / elaboration of a book by Erik Olin Wright, Understanding Class. Wright is a Marxist, but does not consider Marxist theory as the metanarrative that can explain everything. Instead, he sees it as an approach to sociology that can provide a distinctive contribution, illuminating certain aspects that remain hidden from other perspectives. He focuses here on three traditions: Marx, Weber and Durkenheim, suggesting that each illuminates a different scale: Marx focuses on macrostructure, Weber on the meso, institutional level, and Durkenheim on the micro, situational level. Put differently, Marx is interested in structural change, Weber in how people can negotiate the rules within the system, and Durkenheim on how people navigate and circumvent those rules. All three are useful and, especially at a time when structural change is unlikely to happen, it would be silly to dismiss the other two. Each of these perspectives also entails a different conception of class: for Marx, classes are relations of antagonism defined by a group’s position within networks of production. For Weber, classes are relational, but the emphasis is less on antagonism than it is on rationalisation. As far as I understand, Weber thinks of class as a modern phenomenon, related to the rise if the calculation of material interest. In as far as Weber is interested in labor, is in terms of work discipline and compulsion to work (rather than exploitation). For Durkenheim, class is quite neatly defined by one’s profession.

In Wright’s framework, class is defined along three dimensions: relations of property, relations of authority and relations of expertise. So, for example, the class difference between factory owners and factory workers stems from the first set of relations, between managers and workers from the second, and between skilled workers (say an engineer) and so-called unskilled (say, a manual worker) from the latter. Wright acknowledges that other categories, notably race, inform class position and social mobility, but notes that class is at least as good a predictor.

The antagonism internal to the vectorialist-hacker class relation has all three components of a class relation: property, authority and expertise. It emerges in the first instance out of a rationalization of so-called intellectual property law, which increasingly encloses information in something close to a private property right. Vectorialist domination over all subordinate classes is sustained by the automation of relations of authority, which take the form of pervasive surveillance and quantification - a rationalization of all aspects of human activity. (p. 88

MW suggests that this class relation has an additional, technical dimension, which is baked into the algorithms themselves (eg. biases and discrimination, predictive screenings, etc.)

An important point and mechanism for class formation is that the same individual can occupy contradictory class locations (MW drawing on Wright). For example, many people are lured to jobs through ‘bait and switch’ - because they aspire to be creatives, and are ready to perform manual labour to sustain that dream / illusion. Examples include women working in fashion (hoping to be designers but in practice performing mostly manual labour) and coders (hoping to develop new, shiny software, but mostly performing repetitive, non-creative tasks). Thus,

What I would call vectoral culture encourage everyone to imagine that they are entrepreneurs of the self, playing the stakes of their own animal spriti in the great casino of life. (…) Failure to live up to your own personal brand is understood through languages that are medical, therapeutic, or ‘spiritual’ (p. 98)

If these cultural trends are understood at all, is through the lens of feminist theory or critical race theory - which is great but often underplays their relation to class.  

A Time Machine Theory of History

If the previous chapter is a sociological analysis, this is an historical one, but built through playful though experiments that involve considering how unlikely this present future would have seem from the perspective of particular pasts (1970s USSR/China/US/Italy). For my purpose, the fundamental point being made is that the emergence of the vectorialist class is not driven by (neoliberal) ideology, but by changes in the political economy. An important part of the puzzle here is that the West took an Easter (socialist) approach to technology development: driven first by WWII, then the Cold War, and then the threat of competing economic powers (notably Japan), it put generous public funding into scientific and technological development, and made those discoveries and inventions available, creating the conditions for the construction of a global information infrastructure, the vector/stack.

In this sense, there is nothing neo or liberal about our times: economically, the dominant form is not the capitalist commodity (but information), and politically the level of surveillance resembles more communist authoritarian regimes than liberal democracies.

Nature as Extrapolation and Inertia

This chapter is apparently about nature, in fact seems mainly about Sartre, and I confess she lost me here.

Four Cheers for Vulgarity!!!!

A bit of a tangent but an interesting one, starts from the premise that ‘vulgar’ is, for many Marxists, a paradoxically pejorative adjective. A review ensues, featuring big names such as Lukacs, Althusser, Benjamin and Adorno. This rhetorical move works to distinguish ‘my brand of Marxism, which is the right one’ from yours, which is naive or sold-out. Mostly, this is done by accusing the other of lacking a sense for the whole (missing the big picture in favour of gradual / partial reforms) or of not being philosophical/historical enough (applying a Marxist lens to a special domain, such as cultural analysis or science, rather than thinking about structure and superstructures).

General Marxism is a wannabe sovereign discourse, usually a traditional one, like philosophy, rather than a more collaborative and comradely production of knowledge (p. 151)

MW presents four positive examples of vulgar Marxists, inspired by Marx but ‘dirtying their hands’ by messing with ‘the real’ (my wording):

• Platanov, an early soviet writer who wrote about the Bolshevik revolution from the perspective of peripheral peasants largely excluded from relations of production but holding a sense of comradery because of the shared suffering

• Angela Davis, and her analysis of women blues singers as articulating the subjectivity and struggles for women free from slavery but trapped in new class relations (must reed?)

• Pasolini, and his cinematic work, which sought to engage with a relative new media to articulate a vernacular language and thus a vernacular subject different from that produced by consumer culture

• Jorn, an artist who conceptualised his own experience as an artist as one distinct from labour but as that of another subordinate class

Genteel Marxist, by contrast, has retreated into ‘the superstructure’, the academic realms of philosophy and history, whilst projecting itself onto labour:

The genteel Marxist claims to know and negate bourgeois culture and then to represent it metaphorically to the working class. By identifying metaphorically with labour as a whole, Marxist intellectuals evade the question of their own class ocation and the extent to which it may be shared with others whose immediate labour processes are otherwise quite different. The metaphoric inversion impedes the possibility of thinking metonymically, that they are just part of some other subaltern class (p. 161)

… in virtually every respect very close to the technician (engineers, coders) they dismiss…fellow hackers.

Conclusion: a Night to the Movie

A summary of a film about Marx