Capital Is Dead

Is This Something Worse?

McKenzie Wark

• Publisher: Verso
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781788735315
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Politische Philosophie

In this radical and visionary new book, McKenzie Wark argues that the all-pervasive presence of data in our networked society has given rise to a new mode of production, one not ruled over by capitalists and their factories but by those who own and control the flow of information. Yet, if this is not capitalism anymore, could it be something worse? What if the world we're living in is more dystopian than the techno utopias of the Silicon Valley imagination? And, if this is the case, how do we find a way out? Capital Is Dead offers not only the theoretical tools to analyse this new world of information, but the ones to change it, too.Drawing on the writings of the Situationists and a range of contemporary theorists, Wark offers a vast panorama of the contemporary condition and the classes that control it.

1

The Sublime Language of My Century

I wanted to speak
the beautiful language
of my century.

—Guy Debord

One thing that the left and right now seem to agree on is that the society in which we live is called capitalism.¹ And strangely enough, both now seem to agree that it is eternal. Even the left seems to think that there is an eternal essence to Capital and that only its appearances change. The parade of changing appearances yields a series of modifiers: this could be necro capitalism, communicative capitalism, cognitive capitalism, platform capitalism, neoliberal capitalism, or computational capitalism.² But short of an increasingly allegorical or messianic leap into something other, it is as if this self-same thing just went on forever.

I have a taste for the writerly tactics of modernism, so whenever I come across a piece of language about which there is such wide consensus I want to trouble it somehow.³ This capitalism that we have all agreed that we live in, has it not become too familiar, too cozy, too roomy an idea? Why are we so devoted to its name? The reality the term tried to describe is, of course, far from comfortable. Capitalism is a world of exploitation, domination, and oppression. Capitalism, if this is what this still is, appears to be like a steam-hammer smashing not only the social but also the natural conditions of its existence to pieces. But then maybe this is the thing to ask about. Why have we become so comfortable with a way of describing an uncomfortable reality? Do we want a certainty in language that can’t be had anywhere else?

That the world we live in is capitalism has become a familiar way of describing something that destroys what is familiar.⁴ Capitalism atomizes and alienates. It renders everything precarious—except its own hold on the imagination. If the greatest trick of the devil was to persuade us that the devil does not exist, then maybe the greatest trick of capitalism is to gull us into imagining that there is nothing but eternal capitalism.

It is hard to describe things that change imperceptibly.⁵ Some changes are like the crack in the china cup that just appears one day.⁶ This may well be the level of language on which the problem rests. Language has to describe change using the combinations and permutations of terms that language offers: the combinatory. This combinatory of terms always has something of a binary quality.⁷ If this is not capitalism, well then it must be communism, the term that negates it. Since this is obviously not communism, then it must still be capitalism after all. But what about when the change to be described doesn’t correspond well to the neat digital chop between one term and another? Perhaps it is as hard to describe transitions between modes of production as it is to describe changes in mood.

There was once a language about transitions between modes of production. There’s an elaborate argument about how feudalism became capitalism, about whether there might be multiple routes toward capitalism, about whether there could be more than one kind of socialism to come after. The debates about where capitalism came from are fascinating but mostly of academic interest.⁸ The debates about where it might go got caught up in Cold War discourse; with the demise of the Soviet Union, they appear to be moot. With the truncating of the historical time line to the chunk in the middle called capitalism, the historical imagination finds itself reduced as well.

That language tends to work this way leaves us with a very odd situation. Now, both the left and the right alike end up working within the same language about this being capitalism. It was surely not Marx’s intention that the language he brought together to get critical leverage on his times would become commonplace terms also used by our enemies. Among other qualities as a writer, Marx really was one of the great modern poets.⁹ He made modifications to the language that have stuck. Of course he worked with the materials of the languages he had at hand, but he wrought something lasting: a combinatory of terms, a matrix of concepts, for describing History.¹⁰ Like any great poetic corpus, his work contains multitudes. But a few standard permutations came to stick in the mind, like great pop songs, although maybe with misremembered lyrics.¹¹

Here I think is his greatest hit, his epic track, the one that has become something of an earworm. Here’s how it goes: this is capitalism. It has an essence and it has appearances. Its appearances are false, a phantasmagoria of fetishes, in which commodities appear as if endowed with self-moving spirit. Its real essence is defined by these things: the commodity form, with its doublet of use value and exchange value; by labor’s double form, as concrete labor and abstract labor; by the extraction of surplus value in the production process, by the wage relation, by the rising organic composition of capital, in which more and more of it is made up of dead labor rather than living labor, by the crisis caused of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. And finally, by negation.¹²

One could debate endlessly whether this is what Marx really meant, but I think that’s a fair condensation of how many have heard him. It’s a sort of ur-version of Marx that has become something of a refrain. Or even a myth. There are actually two main variants of the myth here about negation. Either capitalism negates itself, brought to ruin by its own contradictions. Or it is negated by a subject that it produces as its own negation, the working class. In either variant, one thing is key: until the moment of negation, capitalism can change its appearances but never its essence. Its essence can only be negated by contradiction or struggle. Assorted variant tunes spill out of this rhetorical frame, mutating like genres of techno music.

There are other ways to perform variations on Marx’s combinatory of terms. For instance, one can swap out the abstract verb negation and replace it with acceleration. This approach was popular again in the early twenty-first century, as it was in the early twentieth century.¹³ Here the idea is that there’s nothing that can negate capital, either in its own contradictions or in the force it produces in and against itself. Rather, the best one can do is accelerate it to its end, toward a Promethean leap into another mode of production.¹⁴ But note that this is not as much a change in tune as its advocates like to imagine. It leaves intact the mythic form of Capital as an essence.

Yet faith in either the negation or acceleration of Capital has grown faint. The essence of Capital is eternal—this is the striking feature of how it is now imagined.¹⁵ Naturally, those who love it embrace this thought. It needs merely to be perfected by our love. This is sometimes called (with a stunning lack of imagination) neoliberalism. But what is even stranger is that those who do not love it seem to agree.¹⁶ The essence of Capital is eternal. It goes on forever, and everything is an expression of its essence. Capital is the essence expressed everywhere, and its expression is tending to become ever more total.

The other side of the eternal essence of Capital is its ever-changing appearances. Change is accounted for through the use of modifiers. Its appearances can even be periodized. There was merchant capitalism, then liberal capitalism, then monopoly capitalism, then neoliberal capitalism. (Let’s not even mention that other and more problematic category, the Asiatic mode of production, because that was not supposed to have a history.¹⁷)

There’s some ambiguity as to what to call the current stage, however. It could be disaster, cognitive, semio, neuro, late, biopolitical, neoliberal, or postfordist capitalism, to name just a few options.¹⁸ Note that the last two are temporal modifications to a modifier: neoliberal, postfordist. Could there be any better tribute to the complete enervation of the imaginal faculty by capitalism, or whatever it is, that this is the best our poets can do?¹⁹ Modify the modifier?

Besides adding modified modifiers to the sacred category of Capital, another variant is worth a mention, one that works on different terms within the combinatory. This is a poetics that opens a split within its essential categories. Its partisans tend to go a bit overboard with the binary difference between two terms that emerges out of the split, although they have not been so bold as to break too much with the essence of capitalism. Rather, it worked like this: there used to be material labor; now there is immaterial labor. It’s a different kind of labor. It’s the opposite! But what this labor produces, and is exploited by, is still only a modified capitalism, a cognitive capitalism.²⁰ It’s not material any more. Capitalism itself is about ideas.

It’s striking how much one can get carried away with the play of language and forget to look at the world. Somehow, I don’t think the tens of millions of industrial workers in China perceive their work as immaterial.²¹ Nor does this strange immaterial labor of the overdeveloped world happen without an extensive technical apparatus, indeed a whole new suite of forces of production, a stack of vectors, an infrastructure—call it what you like.

The task of this little book is thus a provocation: to think the possibility that capitalism has already been rendered historical but that the period that replaces it is worse. That it could be worse gets us away from the happy narratives in which latter-day capitalism is the magic kingdom, free from contradiction and class struggle, where History ends.²² Rather, in this thought experiment, I propose to write the present as including a new kind of class conflict, including new kinds of class, arising out of recent mutations in the forces and relations of production. By putting this pressure on our received ideas and legacy language, perhaps we can begin to see the outlines of the present afresh, estranged from our habits of thought.

There was once a grand attempt to have done with at least part of this great epic-poetic edifice. It started with questioning the idea of Capital as having an essence and an appearance. What if appearances were as real as the essence? Before addressing that, let’s add just a little more nuance. There were actually two versions of the essence–appearance structure. One took the economic to be the essence, but in the sense of being the base, and everything else is built upon on it. This rather vulgar version is called economism. In the other version, it’s not the economic, but the commodity form that is the essence, one that has come into being in history and then become the essence of history, which records its forms of appearance as a false totality or as spectacle.²³

Against this, Louis Althusser took the view that the economic base only determined everything else in the last instance. The political and cultural superstructures were not mere appearances. They have their own material form, but one whose function is the reproduction of the essential economic form of capitalism.²⁴ Whatever its merits, this version was like catnip to academic Marxists looking for ways to fit into conventional academic disciplines, because it allowed for three distinct objects of study: the economic, the political, and the ideological (or cultural). These conceptual objects conveniently correspond to those of existing academic disciplines.

If things like politics or culture are relatively autonomous superstructures of an economic base, and if they have their own material form, maybe they even have their own essence! It did not take long for culture to have its own essential categories, borrowed from linguistics: the signifier and the signified were just like exchange value and use value. An abstract essence! A different one! So one could just specialize in singing the song of this (relatively) autonomous world of essences and appearances, while still gesturing to the master narrative, that this is indeed and will remain capitalism.²⁵

If the economy has an essence and appearances, and culture has an essence and appearances, then maybe politics does too. The wonderful thing about language is that if you seek it, you can find it. Yes, politics has an essence too! It is The Political, the great fundamental drama of friend versus enemy, or maybe it’s dissensus, or something.²⁶ The main thing is that we can sing the song of the essence and appearances of politics, while still gesturing to the master narrative, that this is indeed and will remain capitalism.

I have to say that my inner modernist finds this all rather banal. Is this the best we can do to speak the sublime language of our century?²⁷ Why does it all seem the same, like pop music? Variations on themes, all leading back to the same old note, that capital is eternal? One day (that never comes) there will be a messianic leap into something else.²⁸ It seems to me that our poetry of capitalism, or whatever this is, shows all the signs of being a culture industry. Nowhere in these tunes is there that striking note of nonequivalence or that moment of defamiliarization when the roof falls in.²⁹

One has to ask: what is the emotional attachment that we have to the idea that this is capitalism and that it is eternal?³⁰ It has to be said that the most vigorous attempts to tell a different story, to strike a different tune, were made in bad faith. There was a time when it was a popular art form. While the Soviet Union claimed ownership of the narrative of capitalism and its coming negation, you could make a good living in the “free world” coming up with a diff...