Capital Is Dead

Notes

Introduction

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I always thought of privacy as a bourgeois concept. What is dystopian here may be less the sharing of information than the asymmetry of the sharing.

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The evil genius of the postbroadcast-era media is that it not only holds our attention, it also records it.

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The organized labor movement had struggled hard for free time for working people. Capital was forced to compromise, but it found a way to commodify leisure time as well as work time.

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In the postbroadcast era, the culture industries are superseded by the vulture industries. They don’t even bother to provide any entertainment. We have to entertain each other, while they collect the rent,

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not just our leisure—something else is being commodified here: our sociability, our common and ordinary life together, what you might even call our communism.

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Because this vast, wonky information commons that we are all producing is privatized, it can be very hard to know how accurate or useful any of that information actually is.

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What we think of as “technology” these days very often means technologies that instrumentalize information.

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quite novel kinds of problems for those who had (or aspired to) power: how to maintain forms of class inequality, oppression, domination, and exploitation, based on something that in principle is now ridiculously abundant. My proposition in this book is that resolving this contradiction called into being a new mode of production. This is not capitalism anymore; it is something worse.

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The dominant ruling class of our time owns and controls information.

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one has to at least entertain the thought experiment that this is no longer capitalism at all.

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Walmart’s infrastructure has a hub and spoke form, with box stores clustered around distribution centers. What is less well known is that it has almost as many data centers as physical distribution centers, and they are about as large.

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the extraction not just of physical labor from the bodies of workers, but the extraction of information from shoppers that Walmart does not even pay in exchange.

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a unique vector through a layered space that can fulfill an almost infinite number of desires, so long as they all take the form of a user asking an interface to satisfy a demand with a commodity. It does not really let you want or be much else.

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Not just the exploitation of labor through the owning and controlling of the forces of production, but also the extraction of what you might call surplus information, out of individual workers and consumers, in order to build predictive models which further subordinate all activity to the same information political economy.

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this really does seem a bit odd. Even its opponents have started to imagine that Capital is eternal. Perhaps it’s time to ask whether the concept of Capital has ended up being rather more of a theological production than Marx would have intended.

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If Capital is to function as a historical concept, then the question of how and when it ends has to be an open one.

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I call the emerging ruling class the vectoralist class, because their class power derives from ownership and control of the vector of information. The vector of information includes the capacity to transmit, store, and process information. It is the material means for assembling so-called big data and realizing its predictive potential.

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One thing that is distinctive about an information political economy is the way it instrumentalizes difference rather than sameness.

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Part of the struggle of our time is to see a common class interest in all kinds of information making, whether in the sciences, technology, media, culture, or art. What we all have in common is producing new information but not owning the means to realize its value.

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the selective tradition within which we think about the twentieth century. 41 What we imagine happened, and who we imagine are the committed writers who struggled in and against it, is a picture mutilated by the Cold War. 42 The scientific left was stripped from the picture. They were Communists or fellow travelers. Their legacy has been suppressed, even on the left.

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the result of a lost struggle over the form of technology and the labor of creating new information

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A commodity today appears as nothing but a vector, as a potential fulfilled through the interface of your phone or tablet or computer.

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We just don’t live in Foucault’s Panopticon. It’s far worse.

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how the transformation of Capital beyond itself, into Vector, comes in contact with the very thing it lacks the means to properly know: the earth as the home from which it has expelled us.

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Sometimes the moment comes to summon your inner punk rock goddess and do things differently. Make some noise. Our knowledge-production methods might have become a bit too genteel for the times.

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the genteel forms of Western Marxist thinking taught in universities for several generations now are not good at understanding how the forces of production actually work.

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1 The Sublime Language of My Century

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The reality the term tried to describe is, of course, far from comfortable. Capitalism is a world of exploitation, domination, and oppression. Capitalism, if this is what this still is, appears to be like a steam- hammer smashing not only the social but also the natural conditions of its existence to pieces.

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Here I think is his greatest hit, his epic track, the one that has become something of an earworm. Here’s how it goes: this is capitalism. It has an essence and it has appearances. Its appearances are false, a phantasmagoria of fetishes, in which commodities appear as if endowed with self-moving spirit. Its real essence is defined by these things: the commodity form, with its doublet of use value and exchange value; by labor’s double form, as concrete labor and abstract labor; by the extraction of surplus value in the production process, by the wage relation, by the rising organic composition of capital, in which more and more of it is made up of dead labor rather than living labor, by the crisis caused of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. And finally, by negation.

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until the moment of negation, capitalism can change its appearances but never its essence. Its essence can only be negated by contradiction or struggle.

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thus a provocation: to think the possibility that capitalism has already been rendered historical but that the period that replaces it is worse.

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the most vigorous attempts to tell a different story, to strike a different tune, were made in bad faith.

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Capital affirms itself continually by negating itself continually. It negates itself, and in an affirmative way, as “creative destruction.” It can “disrupt” itself! Indeed, its essence becomes its self- disruption. And it is our sacred duty never to get in its way. In our own times this old story was adapted into the belief system of the so-called tech industry, as a part of what Richard Barbrook calls the California Ideology.

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There really is something fundamental to the myth that this is capitalism, as if Capital were the name of a God.

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One ends up saying, with Foucault: “Marxism exists in the nineteenth century like a fish in water: that is, unable to breathe anywhere else.”

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Détournement is the antithesis of quotation, of a theoretical authority invariably tainted if only because it has become quotable, because it is now a fragment torn away from its context, from its own movement

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“The object of Marx’s satire on abstract human labor is not the worker reduced to a condiment but the bourgeois consumer who eats him for breakfast.”

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start with Marx’s sketch of how to think about modes of production.

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it is always hard to distinguish between the material transformation of the conditions of production, which can be determined with the methods of a social science, and the legal, political, religious, artistic, or philosophic—in short, the mythic or ideological forms in which humans sense and feel this conflict and fight it out.

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2 Capitalism—or Worse?

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Nobody else gets to be Google’s Sergey Brin precisely because there is a Sergey Brin, who is not the avatar of the hacker class, but of its opposite— the vectoralist class. He is the real unicorn: the hacker become owner. The one that perpetuates the myth that drives a million start-ups on the path to the same desire, not realizing that it is the very thing that now blocks that desire. It is highly unlikely that your start-up will be the next Google. At best, you might sell it to Google or to some other avatar of the vectoralist class.

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If one takes a look at the top Fortune 500 companies, it is surprising how many of them are really in the information business.

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as we learned in the 2008 crash, even the car companies are in the information business—they made more money from car loans than cars.

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Just as the capitalist class sought to dominate the landlord class as a subordinate ruling class, so too the vectoralist class tries to subordinate both landlords and capitalists by controlling the patents, the brands, the trademarks, the copyrights, but more importantly the logistics

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We have a hard time thinking what the writer and the scientist and artist and the engineer have in common. Well, the vectoral class does not have that problem. What all of us make is intellectual property, which from its point of view is as equivalent and as tradable as pink goo.

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class consciousness is always a rare and difficult thing. Unlike other identities, it has to be argued contrary to appearances.

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The thrift; theypreach bourgeoisculture with which generations of Marxist aesthetics had a love—hate relationship is effectively extinct.

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name those whose location in the political economy of information is the making of new information.

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it is possible to hold onto a feeling about what it’s like to make elegance appear that wasn’t there before with a technique for transforming information, and to do it on one’s own time, with one’s own goals and objectives. That is what it might mean to hack.

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the present is defined mostly in terms of a hoped-for negation of it.

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in this focus on the relations of production, the forces of production receive very little attention. We don’t spend enough time on how the brain-fryer is a different machine from the meat grinder.

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where the relations of production can be understood theoretically, the forces of production cannot.

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while you get that little piece of information, this ruling class gets all of that information in the aggregate.

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the vectoralist class has subsumed and outflanked capital in a more abstract form.

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In the usual historical narrative, by the end of the seventies, the forces of labor had fought capital to a standstill in the overdeveloped world. In this story, financialization and neoliberalism come to the rescue. But how?

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Here’s the twist: what at first appeared to assist capital to defeat labor in the overdeveloped world was also a defeat for capital. The novel forces of production that enabled this outflanking of labor became themselves the new dominant forces of production.

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This, after all, was Marx’s great achievement. He thought his moment. His present did not look to him like his past.

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the paradoxical and provocative thought that any theory in which the present appears as in essence the same as the past of Marx’s time, only different in a few matters of appearance, can’t really be a “Marxist” one, as such fidelity is necessarily a betrayal of his achievement. Debord: “And theories are made to die in the war of time.”

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3 The Forces of Production

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To put it simply: the content of technology is labor; the form of technology is capital.

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reach for labor-saving devices to increase output and drive down costs, replacing living labor with dead labor, but in the long run putting a squeeze on profits, as surplus value is extracted from exploiting human labor alone.

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Labor makes the machine, but not in the design of its own choosing.

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Technology is made of, and remakes, nature itself. Technology’s content is sensuous materiality, iron and coal and so forth, mixed with labor; its form is once again the form of capital. Rimbaud: “If the brass awakens as a horn, it’s not to blame.”

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practiced science at a transitional moment, after the era in which science was the pastime of gentlemen and before the rise of big science. 18 The element of free, self-directed discovery in their practice was qualified and hemmed in on all sides, but it was palpable nonetheless. This hint of a life without alienation provided part of the leverage against what science was becoming

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the Cold War left progressive scientists with no choice other than to present themselves as apolitical servants of ethical causes,

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a whole other kind of industry in its own right, one that can dominate manufacturing through the control of information.

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I want to stress the vulgar-Marxist aspect of Haraway.

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opened the prospect of self-organized peer-to-peer production. 37 There really could have been a telecommunism

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On the technical level, what developed in place of a peer-to-peer network was a client–server network, built around privately owned hubs

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We now have the information commons as a form of disintegrated spectacle, owned by the vectoralist class.

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What Kleiner advocates as a counterstrategy is what he calls venture communism: “Politics is not a battle of ideas it is a battle of capacities.” The hacker class has to create its own autonomous forms.

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identification of the California Ideology as the worldview of this emerging ruling class, one whose success is to be measured by the sad fact that even critics of “bad technology” take it for gospel.

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Shorn of its more radical edge, the counterculture became merely cultural, and its anti-state posture made its peace with free market libertarian enthusiasms.

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California Ideology proposed a world in which technology itself was the sole transformative force of history.

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conspiracy theory, in which the public was allegedly duped by a cabal of “Silicon Valley” entrepreneurs. To mask their intention to unleash powerful tools of monopoly and political control, they lulled everyone into thinking technology was in essence good when it is in essence bad.

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these developments could have led to a digital agora or commons as well as (or as an alternative to) new forms of class power based on information asymmetries and the surveillance state.

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the struggle over the form the technologies of Internet would take.

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In the nineties it still seemed possible to shape a different future for the Internet, and there were many struggles around its emerging form: technical, political, legal, and cultural. We won some battles; we lost the war.

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Marx saw capitalism as evidence in the negative that the problem of material scarcity was potentially solvable. We now see that information scarcity is in principle solved already.

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4 The Class Location Blues

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It is a universal law that before it disappears, every class must first disgrace itself completely. —Aimé Césaire

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approach this now by describing relations of exploitation and domination in the present, starting with the emerging features, and work back and out and up from that?

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Wittgenstein’s contribution to communism was his robust proof of the proposition that there is no private language, but in our time, privatized languages are everywhere.

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private property shapes what we imagine the limits and possibilities of this information to be.

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Information is a relation between novelty and repetition, noise and order.

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the figure of the hacker, producer not of repeated content but of novel form,

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It seems no longer necessary to directly own the means of production.

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perhaps the rise of finance is really just a symptom.

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exchange value in an age where the forces of production are extensively and intensively controlled by information: nobody knows what anything is worth. Financialization is a perverse socializing of the problem of the uncertainty of information about value.

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became increasingly anchored in global financial transactions and speculation and less connected to the economic conditions and rhythms of their national bases or any other specific geographical location.”

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This theory of history can be summed up as: shit happens.

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We have decided not to be Marxists, in other words. We have decided not to subject the language of the times to its own critical pressure.

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Wright thinks that the opportunity for game-changing by the working class, for overthrowing capitalism, is not present.

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A key to Weberian theories is opportunity hoarding or social closure, by such means as credentialing, licensing, the color bar, or gender exclusions. One could even see labor unions as a form of opportunity hoarding from the point of view of precarious workers,

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a specific form of opportunity hoarding enforced by the legal rules of property rights.”

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Weber was much less inclined to think classes would polarize and become the key social dynamic.

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Class is thus part of rationalization, part of the abolition of the traditional peasantry, part of the transition from landed aristocracy to agricultural landlords. Class is part of the rise of the calculation of material interest.

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the idea of opportunity hoarding as that which defines the “middle class.”

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antagonistic relation between a hacker class tasked with making novelty out of information (the condition of it becoming property) and a vectoralist class

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Each successive form of class rule may be more abstract than those it subsumes, but it isn’t more rational.

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the technical dimension of class antagonism, where it is built into the form of the information vector itself.

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development of object-oriented programming environments, which allow for the rationalization of the production of component parts of programming by a dispersed and disempowered hacker class while preserving central control of proprietary code.

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Thomas Piketty deserves credit for putting inequality back on the agenda

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the rise of super salaries rather than income on capital. The CEO “class” is setting its own pay.

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As growth declines, the capital:income ratio rises.

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joint managing of appearances between those who represent a firm to the market and the market that is supposed to value it. But how to value a company when so much of its asset base takes the form of information?

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workers and the precariat might have different interests about the rules and moves of the game). Unionization, for example, can secure some sort of steady work for the workers in the union, but whether it benefits those outside of it is an open question.

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Capital seeks to remove constraints to augment its power even past the point where these are economically inefficient.

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The regulatory regime emerging in the last quarter century favors the mobility of information, and not just finance, as a means of coordinating economic activity transnationally, at the expense not just of workers but of those forms of capitalist enterprise tied to physical plant and infrastructure, and thus with an interest in local, regional, or national relations of trust, legitimacy, and responsibility.

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capitalists tied to actually producing things in a particular place already know this, but they have lost power to a quite different kind of ruling class, which operates at a higher level of abstraction, or in Weberian terms, at a new stage of rationalization? They own or control the information about things, rather than the things themselves. This is not inherently more rational, but it is more abstract, and hence more powerful.

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the information vector greatly lowers the cost of geographic dispersal and puts the old capitalist manufacturing firms and regions in direct competition with each other on a global scale.

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Trebor Scholz proposes a form of platform cooperativism as a more contemporary approach. The vectoralist stack needs to be countered with a counterstack on the infrastructural level.

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the Brooklyn-effect, after the boom in small business, even manufacturing, there. 49 But while the actual products have some connection to locality, such localism relies on an information infrastructure or vector stack owned and controlled by the vectoralist class: Google, Amazon, Paypal, and so forth all get their cut.

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the other ways of thinking class categorize people into clusters. They are indeed things that the vector of information technology can track and manage. It can tell you how many women earn how much money, or how many employees report being something other than white. Class in the Marxist sense is harder to make palpable.

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class means class antagonism. It’s not a category, it’s a relation.

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What it means to be a boss is now modeled on the vectorialist rather than the capitalist class. It’s about accumulating asymmetric relations of information. It is about commanding and monopolizing attention. It’s about monetizing appearances. The thing to aspire to own is a brand,

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Failure to live up to your own understood personal brand is understood through languages that are medical, therapeutic, or “spiritual.”

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5 A Time Machine Theory of History

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We no longer know what socialism is, or how to get there, and yet it remains the goal. —Deng Xiaoping

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But if you told the neoliberals, they would get it.

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when they talked about information, they really only meant markets.

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contributing factor to the partial success of social democracy and civil rights in the West was the need to compete for loyalty with international communism,

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argued that Soviet style socialism had failed but that the state ownership of the means of production should make possible a new kind of socialization, not just of labor and its product, but of the totality of knowledge.

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what was still a very real fear up until the ’70s: that the East rather than the West would figure out how to turn the scientific and technical revolution into a new mode of production.

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It is ironic that the Soviet Union failed to build the Internet; the Soviets went at it like Americans, whereas the Americans succeeded because they went about it like Soviets.

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computation enables operations to be performed on what would now be called “big data.” 29 That makes possible the simulation of really complex things, like organic molecules or even whole economies.

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thought that Soviet-style socialism could be made to work if prices were made variable and computation introduced into resource allocation decisions. But the powers that be nixed it.

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big science really was now a creature of massive state support as Bernal had predicted, but the ideology of science made to prevail was not Bernalism, but an image of science as a “market of ideas” cooked up by his ideological nemesis Michael Polanyi.

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just how much coercion and co-option it took to blunt the power of progressive and leftist science in the West after the war. Polanyi’s group was even the beneficiary of what we now know to have been a CIA front, the Congress for Cultural Freedom.

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told an ailing Bernal that by the early twenty-first century there would be left-Heideggerians, it might have caused him another stroke.

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wonder whether nuclear détente between the United States and the Soviet Union came out of a mutual interest in suppressing working class discontent within those empire’s respective home worlds.

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The myth of neoliberalism is that the idea of neoliberalism came first, and then politicians like Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan made it policy and then law.

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The clue is already there in the stray fact that Microsoft came into existence in the mid-seventies. It was not information as an idea—free markets—that changed the mode of production. It was a vast, global infrastructure in which information enabled the control of flows of money, machines, resources, and labor.

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use it to calculate a global production system that routes around the power of militant labor in a factory in Detroit.

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It is an error to call our times neoliberal when its politics are not “neo” and its politics are not “liberal,” anyway.

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alt- fascist. 50 It is all about securing ruling class power through the manipulation of racial and ethnic prejudice and the use of surveillance and overt violence to suppress dissent. It is centrally about the prison—industrial complex, expanded now on a global scale, as Angela Davis reminds us. 51 What is new is not the politics at all, which is a farcical double of the superstructures of old, but rather the mode of production underneath it.

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an infrastructure—what Benjamin Bratton calls the stack, what I call the vector—for a systematic and global privatization of objects, subjects, and the information in between them.

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What started out as the means to beat the Axis powers, and then contain the Soviets, and then to compete with Japanese industry, was in the end the means to globalize production, exploit the newly available cheap labor of the People’s Republic of China, and destroy the power of organized labor within Italy, the United States, and throughout much of the overdeveloped world.

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the capitalist class too ended up being subsumed under that power. The capitalist class became a subsidiary ruling class to the vectoralist class. Capital is dead; the Vector lives.

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A capitalist class owns the means of production, the means of organizing labor. A vectoralist class owns the means of organizing the means of production.

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if one looks at the world’s biggest corporations these days, a lot of their power and property is in vectoral form. Many of them don’t actually make the things they sell. They control the production process by owning and controlling the information. Even when they do still make the stuff, a quite remarkable amount of the valuation of the company comes from portfolios of intellectual property, or proprietary data about their customers, and so on.

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able to extract value not just from labor but from what Tiziana Terranova calls free labor. 55 Even when you just stroll down the street, the phone in your purse or pocket is reporting data back to some vectoralist entity.

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vectoralist class seems to be able to extract revenue out of qualitative information in much the same way as banks extract it out of quantitative information.

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The vectoralist class still sits atop a pyramid of exploited labor, but it depends also on extracting a surplus out of another, fairly privileged but still subordinate class. I call it the hacker class.

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The new model worldwide uses the vector to realize the dreams of the KGB of old, an information state. This is what Guy Debord called the stage of the integrated spectacle,

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In the West, vectoral power has so routed the working class and driven down its wages that it can no longer consume what China manufactures.

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Sensing a crisis of overproduction looming, the Chinese Communist Party directed its matrix of state and corporate actors to embark on an extraordinary plan to restart the silk road and open new markets for its manufacturers across central Asia and beyond. The dominant idea still seems to be, as it was under Deng, to expand the forces of production, this time beyond the borders of China itself—and this time allied to control of the vector.

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a distinctive kind of geopolitics, one in which the former sovereign states have to negotiate with a kind of power based in distributed information infrastructures,

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the “First Sino-Google war of 2009.” The vectoralist class in the former West seems to be detaching itself from the space of the representative state and investing in transnational vectors. Meanwhile, China’s ruling class is building something different, in which state territory and stack territory coincide.

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think they keep alive the flame of an “orthodox” Marxism—some of them even extinct flavors of westernized Maoism. This is a strange conceit when seen from the point of view of the existence of the hundred-million-member Communist Party of China. While one might want to dissent strongly from their version of it, orthodox Marxism today is really whatever that party says it is.

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The ambition of the Chinese ruling class seems to be the control of a transnational value chain more through ownership and control of the vector of information than through ownership and control of the means of production.

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There is not enough world out of which to build China’s ambitious global vector or anyone else’s.

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6 Nature as Extrapolation and Inertia

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The problem of what nature might be returns from exile among the hippies.

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destruction of natural conditions of existence is an inbuilt feature of how commodified modes of production have always worked, starting with the earliest colonial exploitation projects.

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French philosophers of the seventies, and you can find an alternative way of thinking about collective action in history forged as a response to this impasse. Rather than negate capitalism, was it possible to accelerate it? Perhaps its own internal revolution would lead to its demise.

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Far from being the perfect form for all time, property is always contingent and awaits the exceeding of its fetters by some fresh hack.

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Nowhere does it appear that there is a movement of the subordinate classes with the power to negate Capital. And even if there was, the negation of Capital is not in itself a solution to the problem of feeding seven billion people (and rising) without crashing the planet.

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What stands in the path of recovering the thought of Heidegger’s lost whole is the inauthentic; what stands in the way of the consciousness of a totality to be made in Lukács is reification, of which commodity fetishism is just one instance.

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If for Heidegger the inauthentic masks a basic unity, for Sartre, it becomes a terrible chasm. Nothingness is all there is at the heart of being. The subject confronts the object as something irredeemably foreign.

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The conscious human subject, the for-itself, is not an identity. It is nothing but a difference, a lack. The for-itself depends on its desire for what it is not. The lack that the for-itself feels can never be overcome, as there is no prior unity to uncover, nor is there a final form to posit as a goal

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nondialectical nature permeates the human, in the form of the body, troubling the for-itself.

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We are confronted by the facticity of an alien world that is not for us. And yet we must act, and we are responsible for all our acts: we are condemned to freedom.

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What we must do is choose a project and embark on it. The goal of such projects is however an impossible one:

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history’s intractable institutional quality, of the residues and detritus within which any attempted collective action has to summon the energy to come into being.

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we who have witnessed a Marxist revolution well know that revolutionary society has its weight, its positivity, and that it is therefore not the absolute Other.”

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History cannot replace God as the objectifying gaze.

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almost Hobbesean world, except that in Sartre it is not human nature that is violent, it is the situation.

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being is not reducible to thought; thought is integral to the world in the form of activity. We make our own history, but not in situations of our own choosing.

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Worked- matter shapes activity, and the subjectivity that results is seriality, which is a side-by-side anonymity and indifference—like those moments when a homeless person begs for change on the subway and everyone just pretends they are not being addressed by this other person’s entreaties. In seriality, “everyone is the same as the Others in so far as he is Other than himself.”

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In the fused-group, everyone is the center, and otherness becomes identity.

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The fused-group is temporary and something of an illusion. Belonging is defined by its nonexistent totality.

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the fused-group binds itself to a future appointment with History by a blood oath.

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Critique of Dialectical Reason is a profound response to Stalinism. But I think it’s more than that. It is as if he was already describing the Anthropocene as we now feel it, where objects are already worked-over by past praxis into a practio-inert and force us into relations of seriality and passivity.

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Acceleration and negation actually share an optimism about a purely social totality that can be rationalized;

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In the Anthropocene, the key tension is not between acceleration and negation, but between acceleration and inertia.

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Out of a praxis, in and against the practico- inert, might come not so much the fused group as something more like the constructed situation.

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In the same way as one is an atheist, maybe it’s time to be an acommunist (always lower case). This is not capitalism, it’s worse. We’re free to desire another project for what might come after capitalism. It won’t be Communism; as it turns out, the exit from Capital through external revolution was an off-ramp not taken. God is dead; Communism is dead. It is, at best, the legacy code of the Chinese ruling class. But that does not exhaust the imaginal faculty of the subordinate classes, whose vulgar energies may even in this practico-inert world have some surprises in store.

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7 Four Cheers for Vulgarity!!!!

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the removal of the elevated point of view, which adds immeasurably to the number of things and their names —Pier Paolo Pasolini

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Social movements such as feminism and gay liberation refused to settle for secondary status as mere epiphenomenon to the class struggle.

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Lukács disqualified the sciences as fetishes of the particular, unable to grasp the totality, over which only the nonscience of philosophy had dominion.

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There can be no end of history in Platonov’s world, because nature never lets up, is never conquered, is never providence. Time wears everything away.

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Davis: “If I still retained any of the elitism which almost inevitably insinuates itself into the minds of college students, I lost it all in the course of the [Black Panther Party] political education sessions.”

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It was not the secular nature of the blues that drew church ire, but their sacred quality.

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In the blues, love is not idealized. Freely chosen sexual love is a mediation between emancipation from slavery and new forms of class oppression.

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if all else fails, move on.

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distinction between what he calls spoken-written language and spoken-only language. Spoken-written Italian is an artifact of the superstructures, of education, literature, administration. Spoken-only language in the Italy of the sixties still included its numerous dialects. These remain from premodern forms of social production. Spoken-only language is the language of the base.

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what he jokingly called a creative elite. The term is ironic. Artists are the opposite of a power elite.

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Where Pasolini was disturbed by the expansion of wealth under neo- capitalism, Jorn saw no expansion of wealth at all. What has value in Jorn is difference, whereas commodity production just makes more and more sameness. Capital has impoverished the world.

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all fractions of the hacker class face similar problems. Our work is made routine, is deskilled, becomes precarious and casualized.

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made it difficult to keep abreast of developments in the forces of production. It takes actual technical knowledge or situated experience to understand how these things work.

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It takes a whole practice of collaborative intellectual labor to pool such knowledge and understand the shape of the forces of production as they emerge, in terms other than those favored by the ruling class. This is a major front in the politics of knowledge of today. And so: four cheers for vulgar Marxism!!!!

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Conclusion: A Night at the Movies

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Let us admit, comrades, that we are a defeated people. There will be no second coming for us. And to try to remain in fidelity to something whose core myth lies in History is always to betray it anyway. The whole is to be begun again, and from the beginning.

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