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. "synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.Image credit via Gerd Leonhard, Creative Commons Drawing on the writings of the Situationists and a range of contemporary theorists, Capital is Dead offers a vast panorama of the contemporary condition and the classes that control it. 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 also to change it.Ī follow-up to her groundbreaking A Hacker Manifesto, Wark takes us on a tour of our information age. 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 flows of information. It's not capitalism, it's not neoliberalism - what if it's something worse?
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