In this final video on McKenzie Wark’s Capital is Dead: Is This Something Worse? I discuss some of the big takeaways I get from the book, and relate Wark’s view of “past masters” and detournement of old ideas to Friedrich Nietzsche’s three types of history in On the Use and Abuse of History for Life. Along the way, we find out why farmers are turning into hackers.

I will make some final observations based on reading McKenzie Wark’s Capital is Dead next weekend. The weekend after that I’ll put up a special topic lecture on Machiavelli. Starting on the third weekend of March I’ll start up on Robyn Eckersley’s The Green State: Rethinking Democracy and Sovereignty. If you’d like to follow along on that book you can get it for under $20 on Kindle or in paperback on Amazon and probably a lot of other sellers.

Thinking about Ch. 5 in McKenzie Wark’s Capital is Dead: Is This Something Worse?, I dwell on how the scientists and technologists might have been able to make the world truly better rather than more dangerous and polluted. We still look at them as our heroes and saviors. But they’ve done more harm than good, at least arguably. Who or what is responsible for their status as tools of corporate profit-seeking and national security? What light does this unorthodox view of scientists (not as our saviors but as a large part of the problem) have to say about if and how we can deal with our environmental problems. Is there any reason to think that the scientific and technical hacker class can rise to the occasion and use their latent imagination to create pathways to a better way of life?

McKenzie Wark argues that capitalists are no longer at the top of the economic food chain, and that this is not good news. It turns out vectoralists can make more money by outsourcing risk and depreciation to manufacturers and contractors and moving the capitalist pieces around on the global chessboard. That makes them, as Cardi B says, “the boss.” In this video I reflect on some of the key insights from Chapter 4 of Wark’s Capital is Dead: Is This Something Worse?For more from me:https://lauriemjohnson.com/https://politicalphilosophy.video.blog/

Ch. 3 of McKenzie Wark’s Capital is Dead: Is This Something Worse? explains why Wark advocates for “vulgar Marxism.” This chapter traces the historical emergence of the scientific class and how its potential via the development of thoroughly socialized labor of all kinds has gotten side-tracked by the vectoralists’ “enclosure” via intellectual property law.

I pause to try to pick apart and better understand some key but often bedeviling Marxist terms that can get in the way of understanding McKenzie Wark and other authors who borrow from Marx’s toolkit. Dead labor, capital, surplus value, commodity fetishization, and the tendency of the rate of profit to fall (and what capitalists tend to do about that) are all touched on in this program.

We move into Chapter 2 of McKenzie Wark’s Capital is Dead: Is This Something Worse. Wark thinks that people on the left as well as the right need to end their love affair with capitalism and summon their inner punk rock goddess and try something new. The something new entails detournement of old ideas–an irreverant use of parts and neglect of other parts in order to account for an economy that Marx would not recognize. There’s a hint that the hacker class should somehow organize by first seeing what they have in common–they do not control the information they manipulate in order to monetize it for the vectoralist class. Wark very clearly explains the connection between the current state of property law and the power of this new class of people, a class responsible for the “disintegrating spectacle” of our world, information, entertainment, commerce and therapy become so intertwined that we are constantly confused, suspicious and mentally exhausted. I comment on that phenomenon and the relative lack of reference to government institutions in this part of the book, but there is the political implication that the hacker class is potentially powerful. Should they take aim at property law? It’s too early to tell, but that’s one possibility.

This is first in a series of videos on McKenzie Wark’s book Capital is Dead: Is This Something Worse? I introduce Wark and some of the main ideas in the introduction, setting the stage for the rest of the book. Wark argues that we should break free from our love affair with capitalism, carried on by both the right and left, that thinks of capital as eternal. Further we should break free of old narratives such as a worshipful loyalty to political theories of the past. We learn a little about how we are both consumer and product, and how the ruling class, in Wark’s view, is no longer land-owning or even factory owning, but information owning. And how is information successfully owned and wielded in a world in which it is so prevalent and seemingly hard to control? Wark promises to show us how.For more from me:https://lauriemjohnson.com/https://politicalphilosophy.video.blog/

The cat makes an appearance in this last video on Walter Brueggeman’s The Prophetic Imagination. I speculate on what a church would look like, and what it could do,if it re-imagined what it was for. I argue that churches and other religious institutions could be half-way houses between liberalism/capitalism and the dreaded and outdated hippie commune.I’ll be moving on to McKenzie Wark’s book https://www.versobooks.com/books/3056-capital-is-deadin the next video.For more from me:https://lauriemjohnson.com/https://politicalphilosophy.video.blog/

In this penultimate video on Walter Brueggemann’s The Prophetic Imagination, I talk about Brueggemann’s view of death as the reality the “royal consciousness” does not want us to notice so that we can live comfortably in the imagination of the powerful. Consumerism and spectacle numb us to the reality of the precariousness and limited nature of our lives. The prophet has a hard time cutting through our dreams to remind us of this. Brueggemann’s view of Jesus is of one who was born an opponent of power and continued to oppose it at every turn throughout his life. In his life and death he shows solidarity with the poor, the low in status, the unpopular and the powerless. Here’s links to things discussed in this video: https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/strange-gods https://www.versobooks.com/books/3056-capital-is-dead For more from me: lauriemjohnson.com politicalphilosophy.video.blog