“How Wearisome Eternity”: A review of ‘Capital is Dead’ by McKenzie Wark

Colin Drumm reviews McKenzie Wark’s latest book, ‘Capital Is Dead: Is This Something Worse’ (Verso Books, October 2019). 

“How wearisome / Eternity so spent in worship paid / To whom we hate.” So grumbles Milton’s Mammon at the council of angels, fanning the flames of their incipient revolt. Even the failure of rebellion must, surely, be preferable to the indignity of mouthing endless praises to an enemy who holds us in subjection — so why not throw the dice? To play the part of Mammon at the council of Marxists is a task that only an especially brave or reckless individual could take up, but that is exactly what McKenzie Wark, in her new offering from Verso, has done. Capital is Dead: Is This Something Worse? is an intervention into the political-economic discourse of the so-called “critical humanities” which is not so much timely as it is long overdue: those who read it should, in the opinion of this reviewer at least, hurry up and listen to what Wark has to say before they waste any more of their time (which is to say, any more of our time, which is precious and dwindling rapidly) chasing the ghosts of dead ideas. If Wark is right — which she surely is, at least in broad outline if not in every proposition or detail — then the “critics of capitalism” are, and have been for some time, laying siege to a heavenly fortress whose treasury has long since been secreted away, elsewhere. Perhaps it is time to pack up our theoretical cannons and redeploy. We should, as Wark almost begs in the book’s opening pages, “at least entertain the thought experiment that this is no longer capitalism at all. Curiously, the attempt to make this thought experiment meets with strong resistance. Even critical theory seems very emotionally attached to the notion that capitalism still goes on, and on.”

Wark’s argument proceeds from this point along two interwoven trajectories, the first of which entertains the “thought experiment,” while the second analyzes the “curious” resistance with which it is met. The claims of the first line of argument are fairly modest, and this modesty is a strength of the book: Wark has some speculations about how we might theorize the “new mode of production” whose existence the thought experiment hypothesizes, but these have more the feel of thinking aloud than of authoritative pronouncements. The stakes of agreeing or disagreeing with Wark’s precise formulations of the “Something Worse” in which we now live are, therefore, fairly low: while there are a lot of interesting and generative ideas here, which I will discuss in more detail below, the most important point is that we feel with Wark the freedom to think beyond “heirloom concepts like ‘capitalism’” which we “did not make ourselves” and thus “have come to take for granted.” If we begin to think in this way, if we burn the inheritance of our received ideas and strike out into the future without them, then we will surely be told “by some professor who has tenure… that Marx already explained everything in some obscure footnote in Volume 2 of Capital and that [we] should read the distinguished professor’s very long exegesis of it” — but what if we just… don’t? What if we resist the demands of what Wark calls the “genteel Marxists” of the university to pay obeisance to their archive, and instead have the courage to think again from scratch? In doing so, of course, we would only be following in the footsteps of the Old Man himself: “Marx,” as Wark notes, “was not a professor, did not have tenure, and was trying to explain both continuity and change in his own historical time.” To anyone truly committed to the ruthless critique of everything existing, there are no concepts and no figures so sacred that they cannot be abandoned like so much ballast, should the need arise: our fidelity to the tradition might demand that we abandon its every letter. Do not think, then, that McKenzie Wark has come to abolish Marxism. She did not come to destroy, but to fulfill.

In contrast to the modesty of its positive political economy, the book’s analysis of the resistance which greets the mere attempt at performing such a thought experiment is incisive and daring — or at least as daring as any attempt to speak open secrets aloud must necessarily be. This open secret is, of course, that Marxism has the structure of a theology:

The end of the dominance of capitalism as a mode of production is not a subject that has received much attention. For its devotees, it has no end, as it is itself the end of History. For its enemies, it can only end in Communism. If Communism — a state that exists mostly in the imaginal realm, always deferred into the future — has not prevailed, then this by definition must still be the reign of Capital… the present is defined mostly in terms of a hoped-for negation of it. Some theology!… The concept of Capital is theological precisely to the extent that questions of its possible surpassing by other exploitative modes of production remain off limits.

Even Marxists who think of themselves as materialists, Wark argues, have become committed to an idealist view of history (which she traces to to the influence of Louis Althusser) envisaging “an eternal essence to Capital” which “until the moment of negation… can change in its appearances but never its essence.” This possibility for a constant play of appearances around an eternal essential core of Capital was “like catnip to academic Marxists” who went on to build an industry of theorizing ‘capitalism plus adjective’: “necro capitalism, communicative capitalism, cognitive capitalism, platform capitalism,” and so on. But this vast terrain of modifications is ‘theologically closed’ in Wark’s terms insofar as it is structured around a negative concept of emancipation: “Emancipation is thought negatively as emancipation from capitalism. Therefore, the negative of emancipation must be capitalism.” What this philosophically idealist conception of history forecloses from the outset, however, is the possibility that capitalism itself has already become historical; that it has already been put into the past but by something other than what we had been expecting. What if the Messiah didn’t come… but somebody else did? “God is dead,” writes Wark. “Communism is dead. It is, at best, the legacy code of the Chinese ruling elite.” Pronouncements which will earn her some derision and hate mail, to be sure. But at the same time, is there not something exciting, something perhaps even a bit liberatory, in being given permission to think anew?

To cross the boundaries of theological closure is to become a heretic. What happens, then, if we become heretics against Marxism by abandoning its most fundamental set of historical-eschatological coordinates? If we cease to believe in the God whose name is Capital and decline to spend eternity in a worshipful critique of its totalizing power and infinite mutability? One possibility would be to become like the “former Marxists” who, as Wark puts it, “made a good living in the ‘free world’ coming up with… alternative epic poems” to the narrative about capitalism and its theological negation being forwarded by the orthodoxy of the Soviet Union:

These former Marxists would sing the glories of the ‘managerial revolution’ of the ‘postindustrial society’… What these epic narratives all had in common was that they accepted the basic Marxist combinatory of terms for understanding History. They conceded its power, its poetry. But they changed the ending. Rather than negation, the story ends with Capital resolving its own contradictions.

It is surely, in large part at least, experience with such ‘post-capitalist’ apologetics for an exploitative and violent social order that explains the fact that “when people hear the beginnings of a story about this no longer being capitalism, their resistance generally rises. Unless you happen to be worth several million dollars, the chances are you do not perceive [our current social order] as something better than capitalism or a capitalism that always improves on itself.” We do not need to spend any time entertaining right-Hegelian apologetics of this kind: obviously, to any intellectually serious and politically engaged observer, contradictions and antagonisms abound. But we can and should, Wark insists, at least explore the option of taking “the other fork of possible epic-poetic combinations of terms. Instead of the line that this is not capitalism, it’s better, what if we explored the line that this is not capitalism, but worse?” We would then find ourselves within the conceptual terrain of an atheism against the God of Capital, a pessimism against the optimism of Cold War revisionists, and an “a-communism” against the messianic expectations of the thesis according to which anything that is not-yet communism must still-be capitalism. 

Once we have become willing to entertain the possibility of such a heresy, what is there to say about its content? What would our new pessimistic political economy look like? Wark’s basic thesis is that the late 20th century marked the emergence of a new mode of production, coexisting alongside others, whose constitutive class antagonism centers not around control of the means of production but around control of “the infrastructure on which information is routed, whether through time or space,” which Wark calls “the vector.” Marx theorized a mode of production based around the accumulation of assets in the form of fixed capital, or machines, the exclusive control of which gave the owner access to an arbitrage play between what Marx called “price” and “cost-price,” or the difference between the average socially necessary labor required to produce a commodity and the actual labor costs of particular producers, who might be able to lower their cost-price below the general market price by investing in machines that gave their production process a technological (by which Marx meant, axiomatically, a labor-saving) advantage. This depends upon the assumption that all instances of a given commodity are identical and substitutable for one another: the argument depends upon the claim that all commodities of a given kind must sell at the same price: a nail is a nail is a nail. What a worker produces, when they produce a commodity, is something that is characterized at an ontological level by absolute identity: “The workplace nightmare of the worker,” as Wark puts it, “is having to make the same thing, over and over, against the pressure of the clock.”

But things are different if we consider not capital but the vector, or the ability to manufacture, control, and exploit situations of information asymmetry. The informational economy, according to Wark, is marked not by an original scarcity which must be overcome by production (a lack of nails solved by the making of nails) but by an original abundance: “Information wants to be free but it is everywhere in chains. Information is no longer scarce, it is infinitely replicable, cheap to store, cheap to transmit, and yet the whole premise of the commodity is its scarcity.” What Wark calls “the vectoralist class” must, therefore, in order to become the class that it is, develop “the legal and technical protocols for making otherwise abundant information scarce.” Part of this set of “protocols,” or what Wark at one point analogizes to the operating system upon which a regime of elite power and accumulation runs, is the legal apparatus of intellectual property, in which the key ontological dimension is not identity, as in the case of the commodity, but difference: “The hacker class produces new information. But what is ‘new’ information? It is whatever intellectual property law recognizes as new… the workplace nightmare of the hacker is to produce different things, over and over, against the pressure of the clock.” This new mode of production, Wark’s thought experiment speculates, has given rise to a new owning class, the vectoralists, who have subordinated the industrialists in the same way that the industrialists subordinated the feudal landlords, and has done so by means of their ability to exploit the hacker class’s production of new information.

Wark’s point is not that the hacker class should replace Marx’s industrial proletariat in its role as the protagonist of history. She does not claim, at any point in the text, that the hacker class carries with it any inherent revolutionary potential. Her point is merely that it exists, and that we might have some good theoretical reasons to believe that what we are looking at is a system quite qualitatively distinct from that which our tradition has been in the habit of theorizing. While Capital, Wark points out, theorizes an ideal-type system with two classes, “in his political writings it is clear that he understands social formations as hybrids of combined and overlapping modes of production… So here I’m simply taking my cue from the political writings and thinking a matrix of six classes, three ruling and three subordinate.” Wark’s sketch of a theory of political economy entails three dimensions of antagonism which are really three different ontologies of labor: “Where the farmer grows crops through a seasonal cycle and the worker stamps out repetitive units of commodities, the hacker has to use their time in a different way, to turn the same old information into new.” Each of these ontologies of labor can be seen as producing its own, qualitatively distinct class antagonism, around which form multiple and socially distinct owning classes: landlords, capitalists, and vectoralists, respectively.

Wark locates the historical rise of the vectoralist class in the crisis of the seventies, when the technological development of a “vast, global infrastructure in which information enabled the control of flows of money, machines, resources, and labor” formed the material basis for the process generally known as neoliberalization “to globalize banking and build vast international supply chains to combine components of a manufacturing process from all over the world.” The development, Wark suggests, marked a transformation by which “the state form of the former East prevailed in the former West. The vector is not just a means of transforming production. It is also a way of transforming state power… The new model worldwide uses the vector to realize the dreams of the KGB of old.” With this transformation, Wark intones, we now find ourselves in a West which has become a “former West,” our economy transformed by the rise of the vector and its owners into something that is no longer capitalism, but worse. “To the vector the spoils.”

Whatever one thinks of the precise details of Wark’s positive argument, the fact that it is presented as a mere thought experiment, in a book of only 169 pages, tends to disarm any impulse to dismiss the book based on disagreement with any particular proposition. The story that Wark tells in the book is, for example, completely devoid of any attention to the macroeconomic and geopolitical context of the structural transformation of the 70s in which she locates the rise of our new vectoralist oppressors, but at the end of the day, this simply does not matter. What does matter about the book is that she demonstrates the possibility, and indeed the immense value, in thinking aloud a possibility which we have thus far generally not permitted ourselves to think: that capitalism might be over even if communism didn’t come. This is, as Wark correctly diagnoses, a theological problem, a conflict between heresy and orthodoxy, and such disputes are not known for their resolution through rational debate and elaboration of evidence. The real value of the book lies in the fact that those who have already found themselves thinking along similar lines might find in it the permission to think freely. Can we, as Wark exhorts us, unleash our “inner punk rock goddesses” and finally, at long last, relinquish Marx? Well. Maybe. It’s at least a possibility.