By Mackenzie Wark.
Makes the provocation that maybe attempting to graft the clearly novel features of modern poitical economy onto Capitalism as described by Marx is a flawed endeavour, born of theoretical stagnation - “Maybe this is something worse”. I see this as a different, and honestly more convincing, way to reconcile the informational labour of today to Marx’s industrial-era concepts - I see CCC try to use his theory of circulation the same way.
Her general thrust is that Marx’s revolutionary work was to find the words to accurately describe his present, words which had not been found until he did so. Therefore, by insisting that this is still Capital, and that we should reckon with it in Marx’s tradition and with the words he found (suitably modified), we’re failing to rise to the challenge of describing the novelty of our own present.
Her concept of ‘hacker’ and ‘vectoralists’ describes something that feels like a powerful concepts, but I think it does so quite ineffectively. For one thing, those words don’t feel likely to be effective to me - but naming things is a notoriously hard problem.