In particular, intellectual property law takes a key role in creating new relations of production. One wins by controlling the server, the wiring, the code. What becomes key is the power of ‘asymmetries of information’ and their manipulation due to control of ‘vectors’. Just as capitalism co-exists with earlier forms of serfdom and land-lordship, so too do the new classes engage in struggle among capitalists and landlords. It is to assert these new relations are emerging within and across existing political conflicts. This is not to suggest that somehow Siri and Amazon succeeded where left wing movements failed and abolished capitalism. Through this shift, the world is experiencing new classes, new politics, and most importantly, new opportunities. These technologies have emerged as a new force of production. Instead the information technologies that organise the means of production are central. The ownership of the means of production is now less important. So, if capital is dead, what replaced it? Wark argues key elements of the world system rely on information technologies to extract value without capital. Consequently, I began reading Capital is Dead with the same hope. Absorption, especially of ideas, takes time and I now find myself starting to attempt to borrow (or detourn as Wark prefers) her concepts. Luckily, in the intervening years, I have found its ideas slowly dissolving into my thinking. A smart-alec undergrad student, I initially failed to appreciate the numerous insights the book offered. My introduction to Wark was Molecular Red her work focusing on climate change and its relations with critical theory. The thinking which first gave birth to capitalist language is borrowed and turned against their creation. What distinguishes Wark’s theological critique is a focus on the current forces of production themselves, just as socialists did in originally articulating capitalism. For example, Bertrand Russel was famous for making such a comparison.
Such a theological analysis of Marxist thinking is not new. Capitalism, even critiques of it, have become like theology, with an ahistorical and unchanging god central to all thinking. Wark argues that not only do we face a failure to articulate alternatives to capitalism, but we often fail to analyse the present outside of the frame of capital. McKenzie Wark finds herself engaged in an act of self-professed heresy within Capital is Dead. A near wholescale rejection of an intellectual tradition always upsets.
Most of the time, individuals find themselves rejecting out of hand the initial message, but slowly over time they begin questioning and probing. It feels like a pressure washer to the brain. There is something quite refreshing about heretical writing.
Image credit via Gerd Leonhard, Creative Commons
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