A class arises—the working class—able to question the necessity of private property. A party arises, within the worker’s movement, claiming to answer to working class desires—the communists. As Marx writes, “in all these movements they bring to the front, as the leading question in each, the property question, no matter what its degree of development at the time.” This was the answer communists proposed to the property question: “centralize all instruments of production in the hands of the state.”¹Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, “Manifesto of the Communist Party,” in The Revolutions of 1848: Political Writings, vol. 1, ed. David Fernbach (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978), pp. 98, 86. Karatani … Continue reading Making property a state monopoly only produced a new ruling class, and a new and more brutal class struggle. But is that our final answer? Perhaps the course of the class struggle is not yet over. Perhaps there is another class that can open the property question in a new way—and in keeping the ques- tion open end once and for all the monopoly of the ruling classes on the ends of history.

There is a class dynamic driving each stage of the development of this vectoral world in which we now find ourselves. The vectoral class is driving this world to the brink of disaster, but it also opens up the world to the resources for overcoming its own destructive tendencies. In the three suc- cessive phases of commodification, quite different ruling classes arise, usurping different forms of private property. Each ruling class in turn drives the world towards ever more abstract ends.

First arises a pastoralist class. They disperse the great mass of peasants who traditionally worked the land under the thumb of feudal lords. The pastoralists supplant the feudal lords, releasing the productivity of nature that they claim as their private property. It is this privatization of property—a legal hack—that creates the conditions for every other hack by which the land is made to yield a surplus. A vectoral world rises on the shoulders of the agricultural hack.

As new forms of abstraction make it possible to produce a surplus from the land with fewer and fewer farmers, pasto- ralists turn them off their land, depriving them of their live- lihood. Dispossessed farmers seek work and a new home in cities. Here capital puts them to work in its factories. Farmers become workers. Capital as property gives rise to a class of capitalists who own the means of production, and a class of workers, dispossessed of it—and by it. Whether as workers or farmers, the direct producers find them- selves dispossessed not only of their land, but of the greater part of the surplus they produce, which accumulates to the pastoralists in the form of rent as the return on land, and to capitalists in the form of profit as the return on capital.

Dispossessed farmers become workers, only to be dispos- sessed again. Having lost their agriculture, they lose in turn their human culture. Capital produces in its factories not just the necessities of existence, but a way of life it expects its workers to consume. Commodified life dispossess the worker of the information traditionally passed on outside the realm of private property as culture, as the gift of one generation to the next, and replaces it with information in commodified form.

Information, like land or capital, becomes a form of property monopolized by a class, a class of vectoralists, so named because they control the vectors along which information is abstracted, just as capitalists control the material means with which goods are produced, and pastoralists the land with which food is produced. This information, once the collective property of the productive classes—the working and farming classes considered together—becomes the property of yet another appropriating class.

As peasants become farmers through the appropriation of their land, they still retain some autonomy over the disposition of their working time. Workers, even though they do not own capital, and must work according to the clock and its merciless time, could at least struggle to reduce the working day and release free time from labor. Information circulated within working class culture as a public property belonging to all. But when information in turn becomes a form of private property, workers are dispossessed of it, and must buy their own culture back from its owners, the vectoralist class. The farmer becomes a worker, and the worker, a slave. The whole world becomes subject to the extraction of a surplus from the producing classes that is controlled by the ruling classes, who use it merely to reproduce and expand this matrix of exploitation. Time itself becomes a commodified experience.

The producing classes—farmers, workers, hackers—strug- gle against the expropriating classes—pastoralists, capital- ists, vectoralists—but these successive ruling classes struggle also amongst themselves. Capitalists try to break the pasto- ral monopoly on land and subordinate the produce of the land to industrial production. Vectoralists try to break cap- ital’s monopoly on the production process, and subordinate the production of goods to the circulation of information: “The privileged realm of electronic space controls the physi- cal logistics of manufacture, since the release of raw materials and manufactured goods requires electronic consent and direction.”²Critical Art Ensemble, The Electronic Disturbance (New York: Autonomedia, 1994), pp. 16-17. See also Critical Art Ensemble, The Molecular Invasion (New York: Autonomedia, 2002). This group discover, … Continue reading

That the vectoralist class has replaced capital as the dominant exploiting class can be seen in the form that the leading corporations take. These firms divest themselves of their productive capacity, as this is no longer a source of power. They rely on a competing mass of capitalist contractors for the manufacture of their products. Their power lies in monopolizing intellectual property—patents, copyrights and trademarks—and the means of reproducing their value—the vectors of communication. The privatization of information becomes the dominant, rather than a subsid- iary, aspect of commodified life. “There is a certain logic to this progression: first, a select group of manufacturers tran- scend their connection to earthbound products, then, with marketing elevated as the pinnacle of their business, they attempt to alter marketing’s social status as a commercial interruption and replace it with seamless integration.”³Naomi Klein, No Logo (London: Harper Collins, 2000), p. 35. See also Naomi Klein, Fences and Windows (New York: Picador, 2002) . This exemplary work of journalism discovers the nexus between the … Continue reading With the rise of the vectoral class, the vectoral world is complete.

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 some- thing amenable to accelerated innovation—and conflict. Class conflict fragments, but creeps into any and every relation that becomes a relation of property. The property question, the basis of class, becomes the question asked everywhere, of everything. If “class” appears absent to the apologists of our time, it is not because it has become just another in a series of antagonisms and articulations, but on the contrary because it has become the structuring principle of the vectoral plane which organizes the play of identities as differences.

The hacker class, producer of new abstractions, becomes more important to each successive ruling class, as each de- pends more and more on information as a resource. Land cannot be reproduced at will. Good land lends itself to scar- city, and the abstraction of private property is almost enough on its own to protect the rents of the pastoral class. Capital’s profits rest on mechanically reproducible means of production, its factories and inventories. The capitalist firm sometimes needs the hacker to refine and advance the tools and techniques of productions to stay abreast of the compe- tition. Information is the most easily reproducible object ever captured in the abstraction of property. Nothing pro- tects the vectoralist business from its competitors other than its capacity to qualitatively transform the information it pos- sesses and extract new value from it. The services of the hacker class become indispensable to an economy that is it- self more and more dispensable—an economy of property and scarcity.

As the means of production become more abstract, so too does the property form. Property has to expand to contain more and more complex forms of difference, and reduce it to equivalence. To render land equivalent, it is enough to draw up its boundaries, and create a means of assigning it as an object to a subject. Complexities will arise, naturally from this unnatural imposition on the surface of the world, although the principle is a simple abstraction. But for some- thing to be represented as intellectual property, it is not enough for it to be in a different location. It must be qualita- tively different. That difference, which makes a copyright or a patent possible, is the work of the hacker class. The hacker class makes what Bateson calls “the difference that makes the difference.”⁴Gregory Bateson, Steps Towards an Ecology of Mind (New York: Ballantine, 1972). Bateson grasped the link between information and nature on an abstract level, even as he shrank from ex- amining the … Continue reading The difference that drives the abstraction of the world, but which also drives the accumulation of class power in the hands of the vectoral class.

The hacker class arises out of the transformation of information into property, in the form of intellectual property This legal hack makes of the hack a property producing pro- cess, and thus a class producing process. The hack produces the class force capable of asking—and answering—the property question, the hacker class. The hacker class is the class with the capacity to create not only new kinds of object and subject in the world, not only new kinds of property form in which they may be represented, but new kinds of relation, with unforseen properties, which question the property form itself. The hacker class realizes itself as a class when it hacks the abstraction of property and overcomes the limita- tions of existing forms of property.

The hacker class may be flattered by the attention lavished upon it by capitalists compared to pastoralists, and vec- toralists compared to capitalists. Hackers tend to ally at each turn with the more abstract form of property and commodity relation. But hackers soon feel the restrictive grip of each ruling class, as it secures its dominance over its predeces- sor and rival, and can renege on the dispensations it ex- tended to hackers as a class. The vectoralist class, in par- ticular, will go out of its way to court and coopt the productivity of hackers, but only because of its attenuated dependence on new abstraction as the engine of competi- tion among vectoral interests. When the vectoralists act in concert as a class it is to subject hacking to the prerogatives of its class power.

The vectoral world is dynamic. It puts new abstractions to work, producing new freedoms from necessity. The direc- tion this struggle takes is not given in the course of things, but is determined by the struggle between classes. All classes enter into relations of conflict, collusion and com- promise. Their relations are not necessarily dialectical. Classes may form alliances of mutual interest against other classes, or may arrive at a “historic compromise,” for a time. Yet despite pauses and setbacks, the class struggle drives his- tory into abstraction and abstraction into history

Sometimes capital forms an alliance with the pastoralists, and the two classes effectively merge under the leadership of the capitalist interest. Sometimes capital forms an alliance with workers against the pastoralist class, an alliance quickly broken once the dissolution of the pastoralist class is achieved. These struggles leave their traces in the historical form of the state, which maintains the domination of the ruling class interest and at the same time adjudicates among the representatives of competing classes.

History is full of surprises. Sometimes—for a change—the workers form an alliance with the farmers that socializes private property and puts it in the hands of the state, while liquidating the pastoralist and capitalist classes. In this case, the state then becomes a collective pastoralist and capital- ist class, and wields class power over a commodity economy organized on a bureaucratic rather than competitive basis.

The vectoralist class emerges out of competitive, rather than bureaucratic states. Competitive conditions drive the search for productive abstraction more effectively. The development of abstract forms of intellectual property cre- ates the relative autonomy in which the hacker class can produce abstractions, although this productivity is con- strained within the commodity form.

One thing unites pastoralists, capitalists and vectoralists— the sanctity of the property form on which class power de- pends. Each depends on forms of abstraction that they may buy and own but do not produce. Each comes to depend on the hacker class, which finds new ways of making nature productive, which discovers new patterns in the data thrown off by nature and second nature, which produces new ab- stractions through which nature may be made to yield more of a second nature—perhaps even a third nature.

The hacker class, being numerically small and not owning the means of production, finds itself caught between a poli- tics of the masses from below and a politics of the rulers from above. It must bargain as best it can, or do what it does best—hack out a new politics, beyond this opposition. In the long run, the interests of the hacker class are in accord with those who would benefit most from the advance of abstrac- tion, namely those productive classes dispossessed of the means of production—farmers and workers. In the effort to realize this possibility the hacker class hacks politics itself, creating a new polity, turning mass politics into a politics of multiplicity, in which all the productive classes can express their virtuality.

The hacker interest cannot easily form alliances with forms of mass politics that subordinate minority differences to unity in action. Mass politics always run the danger of sup- pressing the creative, abstracting force of the interaction of differences. The hacker interest is not in mass representation, but in a more abstract politics that expresses the pro- ductivity of differences. Hackers, who produce many classes of knowledge out of many classes of experience, have the potential also to produce a new knowledge of class formation and action when working together with the collective experience of all the productive classes.

A class is not the same as its representation. In politics one must beware of representations held out to be classes, which represent only a fraction of a class and do not express its multiple interests. Classes do not have vanguards that may speak for them. Classes express themselves equally in all of their multiple interests and actions. The hacker class is not what it is; the hacker class is what it is not—but can be- come.

Through the development of abstraction, freedom may yet be wrested from necessity. The vectoralist class, like its pre- decessors, seeks to shackle abstraction to the production of scarcity and margin, not abundance and liberty. The formation of the hacker class as a class comes at just this moment when freedom from necessity and from class domination appears on the horizon as a possibility Negri: “What is this world of political, ideological and productive crisis, this world of sublimation and uncontrollable circulation? What is it, then, if not an epoch-making leap beyond everything humanity has hitherto experienced? . . . It constitutes simul- taneously the ruin and the new potential of all meaning.”⁵Antonio Negri, The Politics of Subversion: A Manifesto for the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge: Polity, 1989), p. 203. Negri’s is a living Marxism, but one that seeks to graft the new onto the … Continue reading All that it takes is the hacking of the hacker class as a class, a class capable of hacking property itself, which is the fetter upon all productive means and on the productivity of meaning.

The struggle among classes has hitherto determined the disposition of the surplus, the regime of scarcity and the form in which production grows. But now the stakes are far higher. Survival and liberty are both on the horizon at once. The ruling classes turn not just the producing classes into an instrumental resource, but nature itself, to the point where class exploitation and the exploitation of nature become the same unsustainable objectification. The potential of a class- divided world to produce its own overcoming comes not a moment too soon.