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Vectoral power can thus dispense with much of the machinery of the old capitalist ruling class. It is a matter of indifference who actually owns a furnace or an assembly line. The vectoral class contracts out such functions. The rise of the manufacturing industry in China and of the service industry in India is not the sign, then, that these underdeveloped states are joining the capitalist developed world. Rather, they now confront an overdeveloped world ruled by vectoral power.
The vectoral class has few fixed assets. It tries to avoid actually owning factories. It avoids paying wages directly. It has less and less interest in the viability of national spaces of production and consumption. Fordism is dead. [...]
[...] Facebook, where the proposition is that we should all entertain each other and put up with advertising merely for this privilege. Far from being a step forward, such media are a decadent form of the “society of the spectacle.” Not only are we to passively consume these images, we have to make them ourselves.
Parts of the vectoral class are heading in quite the opposite direction—to completely closed, proprietary worlds. Online gaming is usually like this. In a game like the popular World of Warcraft, you pay for the privilege of laboring to acquire objects and status that are only artificially scarce. And you never get to own them. They remain private property. You rent back the product of your own labor. World of Warcraft is the nullity of the commodity economy perfected. World of Warcraft is the fantasy version of the power of the vectoral class perfected. You pay to rent everything, and they can deport you at any time.
relevant for my (perpetually in progress) ruminations on Runescape
It’s a question of pushing the often local or issue-based approach to hacker class consciousness into an entire worldview, or rather, worldviews. The challenge is to think the whole social totality from our point of view—to imagine worlds in which our own interests and the interests of the people are aligned. The way to do this, I think, is to push beyond the compromise formations of things like creative commons. What would it mean not to liberalize intellectual property but to conceive of the world without it altogether? What would it mean to really think and practice the politics of information as something that is not scarce and has no owners?
fucking hell
So there could be reasons for the decline of the public intellectual, and not all of them self-inflicted. Those who think the problem is that today’s academics write too much “jargon” should look at the business press. Was ever there a language more filled with spurious, made-up words of indeterminate meaning? But rather than engage with the standard stories of the public intellectual, let’s think instead about general intellects. By general intellects, I mean something a bit different to Marx’s formula of the general intellect, although they might be connected. By general intellects, I mean people who are mostly employed as academics, and mostly pretty successful at that, but who try through their work to address more general problems about the state of the world today.
They are, on the one hand, part of the general intellect, in that they are workers who think and speak and write, whose work is commodified and sold. But they are, on the other hand, general intellects, in that they try to find ways to write and think and even act in and against this very system of commodification that has now found ways to incorporate even them. They try to address a general situation, one that many people find themselves in today. And they try to do so intelligently, by applying their training and competence and originality.
It may be a good thing to know and cite leading authorities, but the paradox is that the reason someone like Marx becomes an authority is because of their ability to break with the authorities of their own time and formulate a new problematic within which to think and act. It has to be said that much of this work has tenuous and distant relations to social movements and sites of struggle. There is a tradeoff between intellectual rigor, power and coherence and capacity to engage directly in the issues of the hour. In a more subtle way, there’s a hardening of the division of labor, wherein general intellects lose touch with other kinds of labor, even intellectual labor, or even other kinds of work in the same universities, such as in the sciences, engineering and design.
There is a tension in this philosophical reading of Marx. It wants to hang on to some way of using the category of eternal capital. It does not quite want to admit that if capital is indeed continually mutating and self-modifying, then it has no essence, and “appearances” need to be taken seriously as not mere phenomenal forms but as actual forms in the world. In short: there can be no “Marxism” as a philosophy produced by means of philosophy, which takes the essence of capital as its subject. The modifications in so-called phenomenal forms need to be understood as more than mere phenomena, and that requires a more modest approach to the forms of knowledge it might possess of those modifications.
In short, intellectual work after Marx could only be a collaborative practice of knowledge among different but equal ways of knowing, where philosophy is not the ruling party. Or to put it in a quite different language: the statement “the essence of technology is nothing technological” is fundamentally untrue and a barrier to thought.11 Technology really does need to be understood through the collaboration of specialized forms of knowledge about what it actually is and does. The attempt to make philosophy a ruling “technology of essence” is retrograde: the technology of essence is nothing essential.
For what Marx could have no inkling of, given his times, is the way science itself would become not just a force of production, but in its own right a kind of industrial system, and one which works quite differently to the factory system. The factory system is based on quantified labor time, making standardized products. But what of those (non-)labor processes that make nonstandard things? New things? Or as Asger Jorn understood it: What about those who make not content but forms?15 To what class do they belong?
I was not the first to propose that we think of these people as belonging to another class, although I did attempt to come up with a contemporary-sounding name for them: the hacker class.16 JD Bernal, for example, had already come close in his theory of the scientific worker.17 But I did at least offer a thought about how the relations of production mutated to absorb them into the commodity system: the rise of intellectual property as a mutation in the private property form, that encloses the commons of information and spawns whole new categories of potential commodities.
One task for general intellects might be to imagine a kind of common hacker class interest among those whose efforts end up being commodified as some sort of intellectual property: artists, scientists, engineers, even humanist and social science academics. We could imagine all of these as belonging to the same class from the point of view of the commodification of information. We all process information that is part of a complex natural-technical-social-cultural metabolism. But nearly all of us get to see a ruling class of a rather unprecedented kind extract most of the value from the combined efforts of hackers and workers worldwide. As general intellects, maybe we could stick our heads above our little cubicles, look around, and figure out how to cooperate with others who understand different parts of the labor process.
Marx did not have the intellectual tools to think about information as a regulator, and he was only just beginning to grasp how metabolic rifts were opening up due to commodified production’s disregard of its natural conditions of existence. Without input from those with more practical knowledge of those emerging developments, Marx allows his conceptual apparatus to overshoot the available data, and in the end to become a hostage to philosophizing. He constructs a false relation between a partially grasped totality and a future conceived via a merely abstract, formal, dialectical negation. He tries to do alone what only the cooperation of many kinds of general intellects could really do.