“e want to believe this is capitalism even if we hate it…” she says, claiming that “ven its opponents have started to imagine that Capital is eternal”. We must all take stock and shake our heads at ourselves, even and especially those critical of capitalism. What if capital persists in our minds only as a discursive figure, propped up by sheer inertia? She suggests that the continued reference to ‘capitalism’ as the name for the current mode of production is nothing other than nostalgia, and if we could properly open our eyes we would recognize that, as her subtitle helpfully reminds us, “this” is something worse. Initially, she puts this forth in the spirit of devil’s advocacy, a pretense which quickly becomes an afterthought. Her fellow travelers in Theory at the New School all dutifully position their work as anti-capitalist, illuminating the route to innovation (and better sales): tell us that capitalism has already ended! No, Wark was forced to break new ground with her old tools to set herself apart from the pack. No small feat, as her putative audience today must, by this point, have had far more than their share of supposedly groundbreaking re-imaginations of capitalism in terms of hackers, or blogs, or digital life. So, she endeavored to whip these tired concepts into a new narrative, custom-built for a supposedly new world-historical stage.

The hacker (as a political class) appeared in 2004’s Hacker Manifesto, the détournement of Marx in her Situationist “non-trilogy” which culminated in The Spectacle of Disintegration.īut, even for a critical theory éminence grise like Wark, simply making sausage out of your old shit isn’t going to get the books moving off the shelves.

For example, the notion of the vector, central to Capital is Dead, originally appeared in Virtual Geography in 1994. The bulk of the chapters are culled from talks and previous essays, and the operative concepts have all appeared in her previous works. Such self-scavenging is a typical practice in academic publishing, to be sure, but Wark’s performance here is particularly egregious. Every element of this book has appeared elsewhere. This thesis-though Wark herself is only ever comfortable calling it a “thought experiment” or “minimally plausible argument”-is a clever slogan, regurgitating the entirety of Wark’s long and repetitive intellectual life and serving it up as a timely rumination on contemporary political economy. Nowhere in the book’s excruciating length will you find any further nuance or qualification. What you need to remember about Capital is Dead: Is this Something Worse? is that the title is the thesis. McKenzie Wark’s Capital is Dead (Verso, 2019)ĪNONYMOUS ⊕ An IBM punchcard produced for the SS Racial Office.

Wark capital is dead