Capital is Dead by Mckenzie Wark

Author:Mckenzie Wark
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso Books

6

Nature as Extrapolation and Inertia

it is some nature to conjure with amidst

the fry up formally unfurled as progress

—Drew Milne

Ours is an era in which startlingly powerful forces of production are ripping the planet to pieces at a faster rate than ever before, but the very same technology driving the disaster is also the basis of sophisticated ways of knowing the extent of the damage. This is Cassandra with augmented reality, and it leads to all sorts of ugly feelings.1 The problem of what nature might be returns from exile among the hippies. For a long time, it seemed like a critical gesture to insist that reality is socially constructed. Now it seems timely to insist that the social is reality constructed.2

This pessimism can quickly flip into panic, dread, resignation, or cynicism. It seems that the 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.3 Exchange value subordinates any other value to its own reproduction.4 If this is all imagined to be capitalism, then it becomes pressingly urgent that it be superseded by another mode of production, one without its exterminist drive.5 And yet Capital appears in this conception to be eternal; it changes only in appearances. The possibility of its negation appears ever more remote.

The sixties were perhaps the last years in which the negation of capitalism by an external revolution even seemed possible. Capitalism in the overdeveloped world and imperialism in the underdeveloped world looked for a moment as if they could be overturned by a new kind of proletarian militancy and a new kind of anti-colonial movement, respectively.6 These external revolutions did not come to pass. Both Marxism and postcolonial theory retreated into their genteel phase.7 If the capitalist-imperialist base was to march on for eternity, then perhaps there were ways to turn the cultural or political superstructures against it.

Take the tome machine back to the world of 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. It was an idea that had occurred before, but accelerationists do not usually stop to look back. The new wave of acceleration began with Deleuze and Guattari’s book, Anti-Oedipus (1972), and in its most charmingly delirious form, Jean-François Lyotard’s Libidinal Economy (1974).8 It took a right-accelerationist turn in the writings of Nick Land, collected in the book Fanged Noumena (2011). I offered a left-accelerationist version in A Hacker Manifesto (2004).9

Here is the accelerationist theme from A Hacker Manifesto: “A double spooks the world, the double of abstraction. As private property advances from land to capital to information, property itself becomes more abstract. Capital as property frees land from its spatial fixity. Information as property frees capital from its fixity in a particular object. This abstraction of property makes property itself something amenable to accelerated innovation—and conflict.

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