Issue #65 The Vectoralist Class

The Vectoralist Class

McKenzie Wark

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John Churchman’s Magnetic Atlas or Variation Chart was the first chart registered under the Copyright Act of 1790 and the second work of any kind, after The Philadelphia Spelling Book, to be registered under the act.

Issue #65
May 2015










Notes
1

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, “‘Manifesto of the Communist Party,” in Karl Marx, The Revolutions of 1848 (London: Verso, 2010), 70. See also Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity (New York: Penguin, 1988).

2

Richard Barbrook, Imaginary Futures: From Thinking Machines to the Global Village (London: Pluto Press, 2007).

3

Although this was the path taken in my A Hacker Manifesto (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004). See also Richard Barbrook, The Class of the New (London: Mute, 2006), on various past attempts to reimagine class.

4

For example, see Dennis Altman, Oppression and Liberation (Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 2012); Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex (London: Verso, 2015); Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2000).

5

Erik Olin Wright, Classes (London: Verso, 1998).

6

David Ricardo, On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962).

7

J. D. Bernal, Science in History Vol. 2 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1978), 410ff.

8

Timothy Mitchell, Carbon Democracy (Brooklyn: Verso, 2013).

9

For political economies of second and third nature, respectively, see: Michel Aglietta, A Theory of Capitalist Regulation (London: Verso, 2001); Yann Moulier Boutang, Cognitive Capitalism (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2012).

10

See David Noble, America By Design: Science, Technology and the Rise of Corporate Capitalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979).

11

See Manuel Castells, Communication Power (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).

12

Dan Schiller, How To Think About Information (Champaign-Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2010), has a fine account of the struggle to break up America’s telephony monopoly in the late twentieth century, which I read as a failed attempt to curtail the power of a rising vectoralist class.