“Capital is Dead—as in Freud’s Dead Father? Marx in the Era of Informatized Capital” in “Capital is Dead—as in Freud’s Dead Father?”
Capital is Dead—as in Freud’s Dead Father?
Marx in the Era of Informatized Capital
A. Kiarina Kordela
We—our attention, our time spent on these sites and apps—
are the product that Facebook sells to advertisers. We must
demand accountability. Congressional and anti-trust action is needed
now, to rein in this sprawling, global monopoly that profits off pain.
—Amy Goodman and Denis Moynihan, “After Whistleblower Revelations, It’s time to unfriend Facebook,” Democracy Now!
In this piece I engage with McKenzie Wark’s Capital is Dead: Is this Something Worse? in an attempt to clarify certain central concepts in Marx’s theory that I consider indispensable to understanding today’s era of informatized capital. While Wark claims that we are past capitalism and that, accordingly, Marx is obsolete in grasping and acting within today’s socio-economical world, I argue that today we are actually experiencing a culmination of capitalism as conceived by Marx and that, accordingly, his work could not be more apposite. In the first section I set Wark’s argument in dialogue with Kojin Karatani who has already addressed the question regarding Marx’s relevance to informatized capitalism. In the second section I address the meaning of and the relation between the concepts of, on the one hand, essence, abstract, and eternity, and, on the other hand, change, concrete, and historical time, as they present themselves in Marx’s historical materialism. The last section argues that informatized capital amounts to the overlap of the forces and relations of production, and that this overlap enables unforeseen levels of economico-affective exploitation, as anticipated by Marx’s concept of surplus labor.
Wark’s contention is that “capital is dead,” and that what we experience today “is no longer capitalism but something worse” (90).1 This death of capitalism, is caused by “the emergence of information as a material force of production” (54), which amounts to “sufficient transformations in the forces of production to break out of the fetters of a strictly capitalist mode of production” (53–54). Reading this makes me wonder: what is a strictly capitalist mode of production? Historically, capitalism has involved various modes of production, and the dominance of each over the others characterizes distinct historical phases of capitalism—which is why we speak of mercantile or industrial or today’s informatized capitalism. Yet, regarding the latter, Wark argues that “what has emerged, in addition to . . . a capitalist mode of production, is something qualitatively different . . . which generates new forms of . . . extraction of surplus . . . even new kinds of class formation” (54; emphasis mine). I have no intention to challenge Wark’s very compelling depiction of this new class, which she calls the “vectoralist class,” and which “controls the patents, the brands, the trademarks, the copyrights . . . [and] the logistics of the information vector” (47). But the emergence of a new dominant capitalist class is nothing new in capitalism: the industrial era replaced the merchant with the industrialist as the new dominant capitalist class, just as the vectoralist class may replace the industrialist class as the dominant one. So, when Wark juxtaposes “the vectoralist class [that] owns the vectors of information” to the “capitalist class [that] owns the means of production” (55), I think that a conceptual slippage occurs between what constitutes the capitalist class in any possible phase of capitalism and historically specific manifestations of the capitalist class. The capitalist class in the abstract is the class, to put it in Wark’s aforementioned expression, that profits from the “extraction of surplus”—regardless of the forms in which this surplus-value is extracted. By contrast, the concrete capitalist class is defined precisely by the form of the extraction of surplus-value. This is why the industrialist is a historically different type of capitalist than the merchant, as is today the vectoralist a different type of capitalist than the industrialist. In short, the capitalist class today is the one that owns the vectors of information precisely because the capitalist class is always the one that both profits most out of the extraction of surplus and owns the forces of production, which today, as Wark herself told us, consist of information.
Although Wark acknowledges “information as a material force of production” (54), she nevertheless wants to distinguish the “capitalist class [that] owns the means of production” and produces “stuff,” from the “vectoralist class [that] owns the means of organizing the means of production” (114 and 115). Vectoralists “don’t actually make the things they sell. They control the production process by owning and controlling the information” (115). So, one could think, Google is a vectoralist corporation, unlike, say, a company producing cars. Here Wark commits the error, pointed out by Hardt and Negri among others, of assuming that “an auto factory built by Ford in Brazil in the 1990s might be comparable to a Ford factory in Detroit in the 1930s”—that is, following Wark’s purported distinction, that both factories are based on capitalist/industrialist means of production and not on information. However, unlike the factory of the 1930s, today’s factory in Brazil is “based on the most advanced and most productive computer and informational technologies available,” so that the “technological infrastructure of the factory itself would locate it squarely within the informational economy” (2000, 287). The distinction between information and the means of production in the era of informatized capitalism is as untenable as is that between the capitalist and the vectoralist classes.
To clarify, I am not saying that there is no difference between channeling information in order to produce a car and channeling information in order to control the circulation and accessibility of information itself. Rather, what I argue is that the informatization of the mode of production, including its purely vectoral domain, does not constitute a mode of production that is “qualitatively different” from that of capitalism.
First of all, capitalism is defined not by any specific mode of production but by capital, that is by an economy in which “money is worth more money, value which is greater than itself” (Marx 1990, 257). Marx makes it amply clear that whether money comes from rent, from selling stuff, from interest-bearing capital, or, as we shall see, in fact, from information, is capital as long as it “increases its magnitude, adds to itself a surplus-value, or is valorized (verwertet sich)”—only “this movement converts it [money] into capital” (1990, 252). This is why “the general formula for capital” is “M—C—M′,” or in its “concise style . . . M—M′,” where “M′ = M + Δ M, i.e., the original sum advanced plus an increment” that Marx called “surplus-value” (1990, 247, 257, and 251). What really defines capital is this increment or “Δ”—Διαφορά, difference. As Kojin Karatani puts it, “value productivity is not determined by what it produces, but by whether or not it produces difference”; “capital . . . lives on by the difference,” that is, “surplus value,” regardless of “whether it gets [it] from solid objects or fluid information” (2003, 267). This is something of which Marx is acutely aware to the point of using even the term “industrial” in a much broader sense than the one assumed by Wark, as the following passage makes amply clear:
Industrial [is used] here in the sense that it encompasses every branch of production that is pursued in a capitalist basis . . . [including] particular branches of industry in which the product of the production process is not a new objective product . . . [such as] the communication industry, both the transport industry proper for moving commodities and people, and the transmission of mere information—letters, telegrams, etc. (Marx 1976, 133 and 135)
I do not see any reason why Marx would object to including in this “etc.” digital information. “So it is that the nature of capital is consistent even before and after its dominant production branch shifted from heavy industry to the information industry” (Karatani, 2003, 267). And this is a major reason why Marx’s account of capital remains pertinent today—if it does not in fact become more pertinent than ever before.
For, “as the father of cybernetics, Norbert Wiener, suggested, information is originally nothing but difference” (Karatani, 267). Even as capital is indifferent to the mode of production that produces the difference, its vocation is ultimately to produce this difference out of difference itself, that is, out of information. Capital is a “tautological” process (Marx 1990, 250–251), which is why “M—C—M′” tends toward “M—M′” (257), and what better commodity—C—can facilitate the historical actualization of the capitalist tautology than a commodity that is itself difference, namely digital information? Rather than inferring that the shift to the informatized mode of production means that “[c]apital was subsumed under a more abstract form of technical power [information]” (Wark, 115), we should understand that informatized capital constitutes the historical actualization of capital at its most abstract—exactly as conceived by Marx in his method of historical materialism, to which we shall shortly turn. It is this actualization of the abstract that makes today’s capitalism worse than its past manifestations.
As a historical materialist, I welcome Wark’s gesture of correlating a thinker’s thought with the products and technology that the forces of production of their time could produce. As she rightly remarks, “what we now think of as technology was for Marx a question of the machine. His was an era of steam” (62). But from this, Wark infers that “Marx took a thermodynamic concept of labor as an expenditure of energy and an image of capitalism as a gigantic steam engine that would either break down or run down” (64; referencing Wendling 2011). What Wark has in mind is the first law of thermodynamics regarding the conservation of energy in any given system—i.e., the homeostatic principle. The steam engine is indeed intertwined with thermodynamics, but the second law of the thermodynamic theory, formulated by Rudolf Clausius in the 1850s—i.e., during the time Marx was working on Grundrisse and Capital—states that in any irreversible process a small amount of heat energy—symbolized as ΔQ—is incrementally dissipated across the system boundary. This disequilibrium of energy in the system eventually led Clausius to the concept of entropy. It is precisely disequilibrium that Marx discovers at the heart of capitalism. For, while capital is supposed to occupy the exclusive position of the equivalent value—i.e., to play the role of money—and thus be the exception to the set of commodities, Marx realizes that capital is at the same time itself a member of the set of commodities since “capital . . . is bought and sold as stock” (Karatani 1995, 70) like any other commodity. This is why the set of commodities has no center—which is not to say, in customary postmodern fashion, that it is “devoid of center,’” but, rather that it is “a relational system in which innumerable centers coexist, none of which can be considered primary” (Karatani 1995, 69).
It is because of capitalism’s disequilibrium and innumerable centers that Gerald Raunig can speak of “dividuals” that can constitute an individual like any of us, each of our dividuals pertaining to different classes, so that one’s class location can include contradictory classes (see Raunig 2016). This conception of class explains, as Wark notes, “the tension people feel about parts of their existence, as worker and hacker, or hacker and aspirational vectoralist (and so on),” as well as the fact “that the way people think about their experience of class is often conflicted” (98). Therefore, as Wark states, we need “a language about power that can address these experiences,” as long as we do not forget that “class means class antagonism” (98–99). To this purpose, I think it would be much more productive to focus on the continuity between Marx’s conception of capital and our cotemporary mode of production and class antagonism, rather than advocating Wark’s position that: “The language of class analysis (in the Marxist sense) appears outdated because it is” (99). Rather, what we really need is to figure out how to read Marx from the perspective of, and for the era of, informatized capitalism. It is Marx’s own analysis of capital that invites us, to do exactly what Wark wants us to do, namely, to “think synchronically about a matrix of antagonistic classes that includes emerging ones” (99). This is the way that “capitalism can be returned to historical thought from its holiday in eternity” (99)—the relation between history and eternity being the topic to which we are now turning.
Historical Materialism: Time and Eternity
In the introductory pages of Grundrisse, Marx encapsulates the core of the historically materialist epistemology as follows:
even the most abstract categories, despite their validity—precisely because of their abstractness—for all epochs, are nevertheless, in the specific character of this abstraction, themselves likewise a product of historic relations, and possess their full validity only for and within these relations. (1993, 105)
Transhistorical and universal validity can apply only to an abstract concept, whereas full validity applies to something that is both this abstract concept and a concrete reality. The abstract concept has validity for any historical relations, yet, it is actualized in reality as such only within the historical relations under which this concept is produced. This means that, for historical materialism, abstract concept and concrete reality, eternity and time, are intertwined like the two sides of a coin, whereby any possible Platonic associations are immediately dissipated by the fact that the eternal is itself, to repeat Marx’s words, “a product of historic relations,” a product of concrete reality in time.
Let us explain this relation between history and essence on the basis of a concrete case. As Althusser has argued, “Marx’s . . . real discovery” is “surplus-value” and, ultimately, “value” in general (Althusser 2009, 161). But in order “to find out what value was” Marx had “to ascertain what labour it was that produced value, and why and how it did so” (166–167; citing Engels, Preface to Capital, Volume 2, 14–15). Starting with surplus-value—“the transformation of money into capital”—Marx “demonstrated that this transformation is based on the purchase and sale of labour-power” (167; citing Engels ibid). Simply put: no wage labor-power, no surplus-value. “Value [is] nothing but congealed labour of this kind” (167; citing Engels ibid), that is, congealed wage labor-power, not of any specific kind but abstract labor counted in terms of time. “As exchange-values, commodities are merely definite quantities of congealed labour-time,” and, therefore, “the substance of value . . . is labour-time” (Marx 1990, 130–131). But this quantification presupposes the absolute abstraction of labor from any of its specific qualities. Because in capitalism, “labour in reality has . . . become the means of creating wealth in general, and has ceased to be organically linked with particular individuals in any specific form,” Adam Smith was able to conceive of “abstract labor” as “the abstract universality of wealth-creating activity . . . [and] the universality of the object defined as wealth” (Marx 1993, 104). Only a thought produced within capitalism—where labor is abstract in reality—can conceive of the abstract transhistorical concepts of wealth as objectified labor, and of labor as an abstract wealth-creating activity. “The simplest abstraction [“of the category ‘labour’”] . . . ,which expresses an immeasurably ancient relation valid in all forms of society, nevertheless achieves practical truth as an abstraction only as a category of the most modern society” (105).
And the same applies to conceiving of capitalism as information: only a thought produced within informatized capitalism—where “information [has become the] dominant force of production” (Wark, 46), and the dominant mode of labor is informatized labor in actual reality—only under these historical conditions can thought conceive of the abstract concept of capital as information.
These two examples—the concept of labor as abstract wealth-creating activity, and the concept of capital as information—are indicative of the two senses of the term “transhistorical” and “eternal” in Marx (which, although philosophically not synonyms, in this context can be treated as such). Sometimes, as in the case of labor, a concrete phenomenon within historical reality (abstract labor within capitalism) can yield an abstract concept (labor qua abstract wealth-creating activity) that is valid transhistorically or eternally in the strong sense of the word—i.e., throughout all history. At other times, as is the case with capital qua information or Marx’s own “eternal laws of commodity-exchange” (Marx 1990, 301), transhistorical or eternal is meant in the relative or historical sense of the word, that is, as valid only as long as we are within the historical era of capital and commodity exchange (but throughout all of this era). It would be preposterous to speak of “eternal laws” in the absolute sense when talking about something pertaining only to the specific historical era of capitalism, such as capital itself or commodity exchange—unlike labor that is an activity that has existed in all forms of society. As I have put it elsewhere, where I spoke of historical “blocks” rather than eras: “Historical eternity coincides with the duration of the block to which it pertains” (2013, 53).
Wark indeed contemplates the identity of capital and information as a possibility: “One could make the case here that information was always central to capitalism and that this is just capitalism. To some extent, that may be the case” (46). But then she proceeds to object:
However, to even think that capitalism is about information is a fairly recent perspective. It ends up being a way of retroactively seeing the whole course of capitalism in terms of something that only emerged as a concept and an instrumental reality as one of its late products. (46)
While dismissing it, Wark offers an entirely accurate description of the historical materialist conceptualization of the relation between the concrete and the abstract, history and eternity. Far from hovering in some Platonic or other transcendent realm of Ideas, the eternal abstract concept is nothing other than the concept naming the actual instrumental reality that a historical epoch produces as one of its late products. To repeat more concretely: the eternal abstract concept (capital = information) is nothing other than the concept (information) naming the actual instrumental reality (informatized capitalism) that a historical epoch (capitalism) produces as one of its late products. Needless to say, “eternal” is meant in the same way as when Marx speaks of, for instance, “the eternal laws of commodity-exchange” (1990, 301)—that is, an eternal law as long as commodity-exchange or capital is a historical reality.
And, as Wark’s book indicates, an historical epoch reaches that point at which it can produce one of its latest and most abstract products when it [the epoch] can also be mistaken for already dead. At that point of advanced development, the epoch evidently appears to possess incommensurable powers compared to its past phases—powers that only the dead could have, according to Freud’s logic of “deferred obedience,” whose famous motto is: “The dead father became stronger than the living one had been” (Freud 1913). Indeed, as we shall see in the last section, capitalism has never been as powerful as it is today.
Wark rightly remarks that a mode of thought that on the basis of the fact that “Communism . . . has not prevailed” infers that “then this by definition must still be the reign of Capital”—that is, a mode of thought that defines “the present . . . mostly in terms of a hoped-for negation of it”—amounts to “Some theology!” (52). But whether one announces a hoped-for negation of the present—like Hardt and Negri did in their Empire (see Hardt and Negri 2000)—or the advent of an even worse negation of the present—like Wark does—in both cases we remain within the theological parameters of the negation of the present and continue to cater to the messianic expectation of the end of our time and the beginning of a new one. If we really want to extricate ourselves from theology, Christian and capitalist alike, the first thing to do is to conceptualize the relation of essence and appearance in non-dualist terms—and, as I hope to have shown, historical materialism has already paved this path.
Informatized Capital, or, Exacerbated Exploitation and Conformism
The term “affective labor” is often used in the narrow sense, as a form of so-called immaterial labor, within the branches of advertisement, domestic work, and care and service industries. For instance, Michael Hardt calls “immaterial labor” the form of labor that is dominant since the advent of the third paradigm of capitalism—after “the passage from the first paradigm to the second, from the dominance of agriculture to that of industry”—that is, since “the passage . . . from the domination of industry to that of services and information, a process of economic postmodernization, or rather informatization” (1999, 90). And while the “model of the computer . . . can account for only one face of the communicational and immaterial labor involved in the production of services,” there is also the “other face of immaterial labor,” namely, “the affective labor of human contact and interaction,” which is dominant in “health services . . . the entertainment industry and the various culture industries,” but it also, “to one degree or another, . . . plays a certain role throughout the service industries, from fast-food servers to providers of financial services, embedded in the moments of human interaction and communication” (95–96). In contrast to this sense of affective labor, as the dominant form of labor within the specific historical era of informatized capitalism, I use the term in the sense that any form of labor is affective, insofar as labor-power is the power to act upon and affect the world and other individuals, while being oneself acted upon and affected by other individuals.2 This conception of labor as affective draws on Spinoza’s conception of affect as a transindividual power, insofar as, in Gilles Deleuze’s words, every “individual is first of all . . . a degree of power” of “acting” or affecting other individuals and “a certain capacity for being affected” by other individuals (Deleuze 1988, 27), in a process in which individuals are being produced in the first place. Since it is the interplay between the affective capacities of all individuals that constitutes each of these individuals, every individual is, in Étienne Balibar’s words, “transindividual” (see Balibar 1997). What is more, by “individuals” we should understand not just humans but anything that is capable of affecting and being affected. It is because of his conception of labor as affective in precisely this Spinozian sense that Marx states that when “producing their means of subsistence men are indirectly producing their material life” (Marx & Engels 1998, 37), that is, their “mode of production must not be considered simply as being the reproduction of the physical existence of the individuals,” as if they were pregiven.
Rather it is a definite form of activity of these individuals, a definite form of expressing their life, a definite mode of life on their part. . . . What they [the individuals] are, therefore, coincides with their production, both with what they produce and with how they produce. (Marx & Engels 1998, 37)
For Marx, labor-power is affective insofar as it is the power of the transindividual production and constitution of individuals (human and not). And this is something that should guard us against economic reductionism—by which I mean not that economy is inessential or irrelevant or secondary or anything of the kind, but, rather, that economic exploitation can proceed through means that appear to not be economic. In short, we should conceive of economy as Freud conceived of sex (i.e., not as something limited to the sexual act). At least this is what Marx does when he writes:
all the progress of civilization, or in other words every increase in the powers of social production . . . in the productive powers of labour itself—such as results from science, inventions, division and combination of labour, improved means of communication, creation of the world market, machinery etc.—enriches not the worker but rather capital. (1993, 308)
The “productive powers of labor itself” enrich “not the worker but rather capital” certainly because it is not the workers who collect the surplus-value of their labor; but if their labor yields surplus-value in the first place it is because it produces the entire “progress of civilization”—”science, inventions, division and combination of labour, improved means of communication, creation of the world market, machinery” and all bodies of knowledge and practices that are part of the transindividual affective constitution of individuals. The underside of the capitalist quantitative exploitation is the appropriation of labor qua affective capacity for the production of life. And this economico-affective exploitation of labor reaches its apogee in today’s informatized capitalism.
What characterizes the informatized era of capitalism is that all branches of the forces of production—from agriculture, commerce, and industrial production, to transportation, communication and all services—and all relations of production—that unfold themselves in our so-called leisure, entertainment, recreation, edification, and generally culture, whose institutions have been multiply named by Marx, Althusser, and others—are mediated through information. In other words, we educate, enculturate, play, and kill time during our so-called leisure time with the same material that we use during our so-called work time: information.
Informatized capitalism obtains unforeseen high levels of economic exploitation, as well as of political conformism, because it is the first era that has succeeded in maximizing its affective exploitation due to the convergence of the relations of production and the forces of production (information), to the point of indistinguishability. When Wark states that “theories of the eternal quality of Capital’s essence, its unity and identity through time, tend to focus on the analysis of the relations of production,” and she invites us to focus instead on history and “the forces of production” (53), she overlooks the fact that informatized capitalism consists precisely in the convergence and ultimate identity of relations and forces of production. This convergence leads to an indiscernibility between labor and leisure, and this indiscernibility is a structural tendency of capital, that is, it, too, is as much historically new as it is part of the essence of capital, as we can learn from Marx’s concept of surplus labor. This Marx defines as follows: “If the worker needs only half a working day in order to live a whole day, then, in order to keep alive as a worker, he needs to work only half a day. The second half of the labour day is forced labour; surplus-labour” (1993, 324)—a labor that drastically contributes to the accumulation of surplus-value because it is unpaid labor. What “appears as surplus value on capital’s side appears identically on the worker’s side as surplus labour” (324–325). And, since the more the surplus-labor the more the surplus-value, the drive of capital is to maximize surplus-labor, while minimizing (ideally eliminating) necessary (i.e., paid) labor. In Marx’s words, the best way for capital to realize its “sole driving force, the drive to valorize itself, to create surplus-value,” is “to make . . . the means of production . . . absorb the greatest possible amount of surplus labour” (1990, 342).
However—and herein lies a central tension of capital—at the same time that capital’s drive is to absorb the greatest possible amount of surplus labor:
Capital’s ceaseless striving towards the general form of wealth drives labour beyond the limits of its natural paltriness [Naturbedürftigkeit], and thus creates the material elements for the development of the rich individuality which is as all-sided in its production as in its consumption, and whose labour also therefore appears no longer as labour, but as the full development of activity itself. (1993, 325)
That is, precisely because labor is affective—producing not just means of subsistence but modes of life—capital drives labor way beyond necessity, towards becoming the expression of the individuals’ creative capacity for the sake of the enrichment of every individual, and not for the sake of the accumulation of surplus-value. Or, at least, this could be one potential of capital’s development.
However, in this labor that “appears no longer as labour” may lie the Hegelian ruse, namely: the conflation between appearance and appearance-qua-appearance. The question is whether “labour . . . appears no longer as labour” because it actually is not labor or whether the fact that “labour . . . appears no longer as labour” is due to an illusion, as opposed to reality. For instance, once humanity has produced the information technology required to search a vast supply of data, our activity searching and finding these data appears no longer as labor but rather as the manifestation of our rich and all-sided individuality that we can actualize for our own recreation. Yet, every time that during our so-called leisure time we search on the internet in order to find something, we are actually giving back to the platform feedback through which it can increase its effectivity, productivity, scalability, and ultimately profit. All feedback-based platform models, as Andrea Righi observes, “capitalize on the information they glean and the network affect they generate” through the unpaid labor of the contractor or the client as internet searchers and feedback-givers” (2021, 139). The extraction of value in the form of surplus-labor—from crowdworking and Turking to our everyday hour-long internet finding-qua-feeding the system—constitutes the culmination of what Marx famously called “the vampire thirst for the living blood of labour,” because of which “capitalist production . . . drives, by its inherent nature, toward the appropriation of labour throughout the whole of the 24 hours in the day” (Marx 1990, 367). Or in Righi’s application of Marx’s dictum to contemporary informatized capital: “The vampire-like character of capital is better explained by the necessity of an absolute round-the-clock activity which is engrained in the very concept of the feedback” (2021, 68).
Moreover, a society, in which there is no contradiction between (surplus, i.e., wage, yet unpaid) labor and the “full development of activity itself” as recreation, is the same society in which “there exists no contradiction between freedom and regulation”—that is, the society in which “surveillance and freedom are inextricably linked” (Schrape 2014, 36 and 41). As Niklas Schrape remarks in his analysis of the relation between gamification and the liberalist mode of governmentality (Foucault) with its positive feedback of rewards, rather than punishment: in order to get my rewards for my actions, the latter must be constantly surveyed, just as they must be the kinds of actions that my rewarder is willing to reward. This means that, on the one hand, I must be granted “the freedom of choice,” while, on the other hand, the rewarder must be able to survey my options and design “all possible options in such a way that [I] will decide in an intended way” (Schrape, 35). The Benthamian/Foucauldian panopticon and governmentality designate “not only . . . a disciplinary technology but also . . . one to produce freedom” (41)—in precisely the sense of libertarian paternalism that makes us experience the intended choice as a “free choice.” And just as for “Bentham, only omnipresent surveillance . . . guarantees freedom” (41), so, too, only incessant (surplus) labor guarantees my individual creative expression. These are two inseparable sides of liberalism, because of which, as several analysts have observed, many working-class people today are willing to work in the fashion or “tech industry in the so-called start-up culture,” “despite low pay, long hours, and precarious employment,” because “they don’t want jobs, they want to be creative. They want to be hackers, not workers. Whole industries now function on the promise of creative activity and effect a bait and switch” (Wark, 96). Whether you call it neoliberal or “vectoral culture” or California ideology, it is a culture that “encourages everyone to imagine that they are entrepreneurs of the self, playing the stakes of their own animal spirits in the great casino of life” (98). And this is possible only because informatized capital makes labor appear no longer as labor.
If surplus-labor appears increasingly today as not labor, then who would be aware of the fact that their labor is appropriated and exploited? This is why at the same time that today’s capitalism has obtained unforeseen levels of economico-affective exploitation, it also has surpassed itself in terms of its ability to hide this exploitation. Thus, we find ourselves in the fulfillment of liberalism, as the exacerbation of both exploitation and conformism.
Because the forces of production have become the relations of production Wark is right in arguing that the control of “the information vector extends even into life itself” (Wark, 57). But it is misleading to claim, invoking Marshall McLuhan’s rhetoric, that “not capital but the vector enters the flesh and commands it, and not just as meat, but also as information” (57). And this not only because “actually all corporations”—i.e., all cites of production and extraction of surplus-value—”become increasingly organized around the ownership and control of information” (57), i.e., not only because experience shows that the relation between capital and information evidently cannot be that of a dualistic “not capital but the vector.” The conceptual repertory of Marx’s theory also corroborates the empirical evidence that capital or information extends into life and commands it. Marx’s theory also shows us that to catch up with the times of informatized capitalism we must first grasp that dualism is not an adequate model for conceiving either the relation between capital and information, or between essence and appearance, or between forces and relations of production.
A. Kiarina Kordela teaches at Macalester College, Saint Paul, Minnesota, and is the author of Epistemontology: Spinoza—Marx—Freud—Lacan (Routledge, 2018), Being, Time, Bios: Capitalism and Ontology (SUNY Press, 2013), and Surplus: Spinoza, Lacan (SUNY Press, 2007), and the co-editor of the two volumes of Spinoza’s Authority: Resistance and Power (Bloomsbury, 2018), and Freedom and Confinement in Modernity: Kafka’s Cages (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2011).
Notes
All references to Wark pertain to Capital Is Dead—Is this Something Worse?
Of course, everything that is said in the present work about affective labor in the broad sense of the fact that all labor is affective labor applies also to the specific, postmodern kinds of labor often referred to as affective, and I think that the consideration of the latter within the wider framework of an ontology of labor-qua-affect would contribute to a more accurate conceptualization of the particularities of such forms of labor. The same, as I have argued elsewhere, is the case with the designation of labor as “immaterial,” that is, discussions of certain contemporary forms of labor as immaterial tend to forget that labor-power itself is immaterial, since, as Marx has put it, it is the sheer “potentiality” or “capacity” (1993, 267; see also, for instance, the chapter “Materialist Epistemontology: Marx and Sohn-Rethel with Spinoza and Psychoanalysis,” in Kordela 2018).
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