Method Against Tradition

Programmatic Notes

“SD: How important is it to continue focusing on the production, exchange and consumption (or otherwise) of physical objects, when it’s increasingly the production, exchange and consumption of information that drives the capitalist system?
“BG: I do not see much difference: Information is also material. Information carriers are material (stone, paper, electric cables, electromagnetic waves etc.) and information itself is material – being a fragment of language. Everything is material. Everything can be stored, archived. And that means that everything can survive its capitalist use and be used in a different way – not only in the museums but also under different political and economic conditions.”

^{Boris Groys, interviewed by Simon Dawes for Theory, Culture & Society}

The right application of method means parsing what is and isn't essential to Marx’s approach, the categories of which invariably change along with circumstances (what was inessential yesterday might be essential today, etc). In every iteration of Marxism, certain lines of inquiry and theoretical presuppositions must be sacrificed, excised, or recontextualised beyond intention in service of other aspects. To take Marx in his entirety, or even to privilege an ideal figure of the “young” or the “old” Marx, would be to contravene method, to totemise Marxism or restate his work as an instance in the history of political thought rather than a living weapon. As you likely know already my Marx owes a significant debt to the one read by Mario Tronti in his youthful Operaisti work. The axiom of working class determination of the movement of capital and the epistemological division between the standpoint of capital and the standpoint of labour offer a clarity of method which more ‘neutral’ views eschew. The worst Marxism is what I've loosely called ‘classical' Marxism, meaning the constant recourse to the dead letter of the text, supplemented by doctrines emergent to the historical development of the movement, articulated as ‘the tradition’. Method necessitates throwing the congealed axioms of past processes into question, theoretically washing-away the “muck of ages,” the “traditions of dead generations,” in preparation for the actual washing-away of history in the conscious material overturn of the present state of things.

Marx’s conception of productive labour definitively belongs to the standpoint of capital, as in for the explicit and singular ends of profit. The concept read neutrally would lead the reader to consider Capital something like an addendum to Smith/Ricardo, nothing more than a contribution to the tradition of classical economics – the concept read as epistemically implicated not only in the ‘theory’ but in the practice of bourgeois economics reveals the distinct character of the capitalist and working classes, the threshold of the bourgeois and his capacity to act in the world for which the proletariat is its actual, living barrier (similar in form to the ‘Master’ in Hegel whose knowledge is essentially partialised and constrained by his not working, rendering the slave the actual site of knowledge, Marx's proletariat is the real site of the possibility for forward movement, therefore necessitating a demarcation between the bourgeois and proletarian epistemes. The working class point of view is by nature partial, but its partiality is determined by the existence of the capitalist who can go no further than where they are, who requires the worker to overthrow them). The determinacy of the ‘classical’ proletariat is in their productivity, their material relationship to production – more relevant is that all classes are ultimately constituted “only insofar as they have to carry on a common battle against another class; otherwise they are on hostile terms with each other as competitors.” Without a (local) proletariat, our (local) Marxism is inevitably thrown into crisis, the ‘classical’ question then being whether to reconstitute the class as a prerequisite to waging world-historical political struggle, or to pursue the political struggle in the knowledge of our local de-proletarianised non-class, a large and diverse group of impoverished individuals. The latter has been the main purview of the broad left in the west for some time, tending to locate alternative revolutionary subjects elsewhere, which doesn't need addressing as it reflects a complete abandoning of method in favour of abstract procedure. Regarding the former, the manner in which a class might be reconstituted after being obsolesced or transformed beyond prior determinations is an interesting problem. Marx only discusses the reconstitution of vestigial or decomposed classes in the context of Bonapartism, such as that of the “lumpenproletariat reborn at the heights of the bourgeoisie,” or the elevation of the small-holding peasant to political centrality (“Just as the Bourbons were the dynasty of the big landed property and the Orleans the dynasty of money, so the Bonapartes are the dynasty of the peasants”). In both instances Marx clearly finds the ‘reappearance’ of such classes reactionary, almost comical – in the case of the productive proletariat the problem is immensely more significant, with the purport of ‘classical’ Marxism being that the continuity of civilisation hinges on their constitution into a revolutionary working class, the dissolution of the whole of society, and so forth.

The world-historical explosion of third world proletarianisation which facilitated the de-proletarianisation of the local west has as its physical correlate the immense expansion of data infrastructure, the elevation of data brokers to a determinate position in the world economy, and the dissolution of the political prestige of domestic trade unions and other traditional organs of working class political representation. As a result, a number of Marxists have countered this objective tendency with a call for re-proletarianisation, to eschew the ‘fake’ economy by reinstalling a ‘real’ economy which would serve to reforge the working class along materially determinate lines. This reconstitution, being conditioned on the productivity of the working class, is proposed within the epistemic logic of capital; more significantly, it serves to dismiss or relativise the significance of another core tendency in Marxism, being the socialisation of capital, and the germinal form of Communism therein. In the plainest of terms, no singular capitalist can “own” the total infrastructure for data production/exchange, yet this same infrastructure in its totality is necessary for the further function of the capitalist class. Data infrastructure is then the most immediate, cognisable evidence for the advanced stage of the socialisation of capital in our period. The construction of data infrastructure is at once a (local) intensification of the organic composition of capital alongside a (world-historical) material proliferation of numerous countervailing tendencies to the falling rate of profit. Data infrastructure has enabled an unprecedented rise in productivity by the rapid diminution of socially necessary labour time alongside the drastic reduction in logistical costs for the movement of labour and raw materials, expanding the socialised capitalist system across the absolute widest possible space while collapsing the time barrier for the sending of production signals, for monetary exchange, etc. (paradoxically, this very infrastructure which renders labour-time increasingly superfluous becomes the primary mechanism for the intensification of exploitation and further rendering-superfluous and that same labour-time). For our current purposes it suffices to say that data infrastructure is obviously necessary for production, and while the potential for immense devaluation, overcapacity, and crises of realisation are inscribed therein, all this is circumstantial to the primary point that data infrastructure does not merely represent the mark of a ‘fake economy’ opposed to a ‘real economy’, but is the actuality of the ‘real economy’ of capitalist production in our period: you couldn't build a bridge today without data centres as much as data centres couldn’t exist without bridges. That data centres also facilitate AI slop is irrelevant to their necessity in the production process from the capitalist point of view. In a similar manner by which automation discloses possibilities for non-labouring production, data infrastructure is another marker of the incubation of Communism within the present economic arrangement: The economy of data necessarily socialises information, gesturing at the separation of production from the dictate of profit – Amazon, UPS, DHL, etc. use data to plan and coordinate production and distribution on a massive, quasi-social scale within their own domains, dissolving the internal market for their own operations. From the working class point of view, data and data infrastructure disclose premises for circuits of production, exchange, and consumption unmediated by money, inscribing the dissolution of the market from within the market itself. From the standpoint of capital, automation plus data infrastructure permits an unprecedented explosion in productivity without necessarily reducing labour time; from the standpoint of the working class they present the burgeoning material potential for an actual seismic reduction of labour time, the germinal possibility of the overcoming of exploitation altogether – the figure of the ‘general intellect’, social knowledge crystallised as determinant element of the production-reproduction process incubated in capital’s advanced stage of socialisation.

Derision of ‘data centres’ from certain Marxists betrays a fear of the imminent real possibility of Communism, and therefore a shirking of responsibility – on the surface, a stubborn reticence to engage in (apparently) heterodox thinking, but more crucially the mark of an existential anxiety regarding the veracity of ‘classical’ Marxism when met with the very forms the method exists to interrogate, that which actually emerges by the passage of capitalist development. ‘Data’ as accelerant for the socialisation of capital is the physical, infrastructural correlate to the Metacartel, wherein “[the] binding of concentrated industrial capital to banking capital persists, but both are subordinated in term to what is loosely (and misleadingly) called ‘asset management’, which has likewise further reduced the role of market competition in lieu of widespread planning. The capitalist shrinks before the manager and the ‘universal owner’ takes as its object the impossible totality of the system and its reproduction. What asset management is, in reality, the management of the ever-expanding mass of superfluous capital” (EdBerg). The emergence of the ‘universal owner’ figure is inexorably linked to the mass construction of data infrastructure, the transformation of a productive economy to a financial-rentier-service economy sustained by the artificial suspension of class struggle at home with the intensification of proletarianisation, looting, and plundering in the third world. The Metacartel's own solution to these daunting contradictions is to re-proletarianise the west, ‘bringing globalisation home’. Palantir's Shyam Sankar has advertised his forthcoming book Mobilize as a guide on “how to reboot the American Industrial Base and Stop World War III” (announced, incidentally, in a comically warmongering tweet reading “For the CCP, it is not enough for China to prosper… America must fall”). Palantir is the most apparent disclosure of the unity of data infrastructure and the historically particular form of Metacartel governance, an entity increasingly integrated into almost every facet of Anglo-American administration, “assisting” Washington in “[streamlining] data collection across all agencies to increase government efficiency,” along with the equally unsettling prospect of “[making] the UK its European HQ for defence” and to “develop AI-powered capabilities already tested in Ukraine.”¹

Rather than a suspension of the omnipresence of data-determined economy, the Palantir option entails its further consolidation on the foundation of a reforged domestic manufacturing sector, a Great Leap Forward for our period's inverted socialism. The transformation from the phase of globalisation to the late-imperialist phase, globalisation plus intensified domestic production in the west plus further consolidation of the determinacy of data-money, offers a possibility for Communist intervention to interrupt the circuit of profitability as it undergoes this significant and necessary adaptation. In respect of China's rapid development, Deng Xiaoping spoke to a modernisation that “must flow from Chinese realities. No matter if it is revolution or construction, we should pay attention to, learn from, and borrow from foreign experience. However, copying other countries’ experiences and models has never been successful. We have learned a lot in this respect.” Proposing that the path to Communism necessarily requires mass re-proletarianisation effectively constructs a schematic, derived consciously from past experience and subconsciously from misplaced identification with the standpoint of capital, purporting a reasoned necessity without recourse to the real possibilities of our period or the unique partiality of Communism. Our politics aims to overcome the regime of socialised capital through socialised command, more viable now than in any other period, yet the recourse to other states and other examples, the commitment to the ‘tradition’ which weighs on the minds of Marxists, renders the present theoretical and strategic proposals of the movement unreasonably constrained. ‘Tradition' was the precise thing that was disrupted and overturned in the Leninist, Maoist, and Dengist experiences; every world-historical development in this disclosure of the real movement has been initiated by the suspension of ‘classical' thinking and ‘traditional’ axiomatics. Communists have always made immense gains when they've concerned themselves with moments wherein the regime engenders a leap in its own economic-political order, that at every possible juncture when contradictions become plainly observable the working class position against its own reproduction within the bounds of capitalist profitability can be advanced.

* * *