The distinction Wark makes of the vectoralist class vs. This work is summarily recounted in Capital Is Dead but gone into greater depth in Wark’s earlier book, Molecular Red: Theory for the Anthropocene. Like Foster, Wark retrieves the lineage of left materialists, such as mid-20th-century biologist Joseph Needham and contemporary science and technology scholar Donna Haraway, who have embraced the science that critical theorists have rejected. Here, Wark follows John Bellamy Foster, who in Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature and other books, argues that the error of Western Marxism of the genteel variety has been its focus on dialectics to the detriment of consideration of the material. Instead, Wark offers ‘four cheers for vulgarity’ (the vulgar always goes a step too far) that originates not just from below but from ‘below the below’. These were often-tenured ‘radicals’ ensconced in university comparative literature, philosophy, and cultural studies departments, or what she has time and again referred to as ‘hypo-critical theory’. These truly academic ruminations emerged out of the 1970s with the failure of the New Left. An important part of the book is its critique of what Wark terms ‘genteel’ Marxism.

And it isn’t just workers who are being subordinated, it’s traditional industrialists, too-Facebook has a market value of some $550 billion, nearly ten times that of General Motors, with a fraction of the employees and virtually none of the infrastructure.Ĭoming a decade and a half after A Hacker Manifesto, in a brave new world dominated by platforms such as Facebook, Uber, and Airbnb, and marked by anxiety in the Age of the Anthropocene, Capital Is Dead eschews digital utopianism for a sense of urgency that recognizes things have gotten serious.

The latter not only capture the physical output of the former’s labor, but appropriate their very being, as well. Wark picks up the narrative begun in A Hacker Manifesto in which conflict between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie has been superseded by the domination of the hacker (creators of new concepts and connections) by the vectoralist (so named for their control of the networks through which information flows in space and time). Like its predecessor, Capital Is Dead surveys the mental, social, and physical environment in which the means of economic accumulation and thus power have radically shifted, in which value no longer resides in owning the means of production but in controlling flows of information. Capital Is Dead: Is This Something Worse? is a sequel to McKenzie Wark’s highly influential 2004 book, A Hacker Manifesto.

Capital is dead mckenzie wark