Sometimes I dream that I can write with the effortless elegance, total lack of pretentiousness or self-righteousness, theoretical insight, and sly wit of McKenzie Wark. And then I wake up and cry.

big "say more" vibes

I was skeptical going in but found Wark ultimately very persuasive about, at the very least, the need to renegotiate what it is were fighting against. She makes the excellent point that aspects we generally consider essential to capitalism really belong to the longer history of class domination and further arguments that 1) there is no longer just one (or two) owning classes (there are at least three, owners of land, of means of production, and of what she calls information vectors) and 2) that just as the new capitalist class came into conflict with the rentier class, the vector class generates new conflicts with both (since we never got rid of the rentiers). If your communism is in favour of the abolition of private property rather than just the particular historical organization of it that we call capitalism, this argument is worth taking seriously.

That being said, I have some quibbles. One is the prioritizing of information over money. If there's a weak point in her argument it's that you can't do much with information if you don't have capital as well - capital only needs a little information to be effective, information needs a lot of capital to be the same. A second is a feeling of some ungenerosity to my particular favourite parts of Marx that I feel also create problems in her argument. There's a part of Volume 1 where Marx talks about the miser, the hoarder of capital, and how without recirculating it the capital will just disappear. This is part of a larger argument he is making about the impersonal drive of capital. Capital wants to circulate and one way to read economic crises (even taking the falling rate of profit into account) is as capital struggling against its avatars who don't know how to circulate it as well as it can. This is only a slight critique of Wark's method as I think this understanding of the drive of capital is another way to make her argument concerning the vector, financialization, and globalization in the neoliberal period. A third is some vagueness in how she describes the "hacker" class and just how capacious that category is - I know if I read the Hacker Manifesto I might not see this as a problem but it did bristle for me a bit. Finally, and this is a problem I have with Wark more generally, is the way she sees language as opposed to the bodily or the ordinary. I just don't think it's a stance that works when ultimately the forms of organization she's calling for will require us talking to each other.

But, on the whole, I don't think this is a book that is as easily ignored as more Orthodox Marxists might initially assume.

Marxism in the post-capital world. Very theory. Very brain.

The book put up little substantive argument for why capitalism is "dead". Instead Wark examined Marxism's ideations of capitalism for the half of the book I could stomach. The small bits that did examine present day conditions were interesting, however.