Capital Is Dead. Is This Something Worse? by McKenzie Wark

Because information has “strange ontological properties,” namely that it is “infinitely replicable, cheap to store, cheap to transmit…” its prominent role in production constitutes an entirely new mode of production.

Capitalist and laborer have been replaced by vectoralist (the owner of information) and hacker (the information-worker, employed by the vectoralist). “The dominant ruling class of our time,” writes Wark, “no longer maintains its rule through the ownership of the means of production… The dominant ruling class of our time owns and controls information.” This is Wark’s central thesis, that capitalism as we know it has been superseded by a new mode of production, which she calls vectoralism. This line of attack, which could just as easily be found in the pages of The Economist as in the work of trendy “radical” academics, has most recently been repackaged in McKenzie Wark’s Capital is Dead: Is This Something Worse?

Deindustrialization, developments in information technology, and the collapse of the USSR provided openings to attack Marxism as an obsolete, antiquated theory, no longer suited to the complex and changing world of the 21 st century. It became possible to style oneself as a “radical” while at the same time disavowing socialism, Marx, and the whole idea of revolution. As the working-class Left declined in confidence and organization, the academic Left divorced itself from class politics entirely. The neoliberal era–when organized labor in the imperial core was routed through offshoring and automation, and a new hyper-individualist ethos displaced social democratic aspirations–coincided with a decisive repudiation of Marxism within the Western academy.

Capital Is Dead. Is This Something Worse? by McKenzie Wark