Capital for Tech Workers

Capital for Tech Workers

CfTW is a textbook for tech workers who want to read Marx’s three-volume work Capital. We hope it will also be useful for anyone engaged in a global economy that is increasingly influenced by big tech, regardless of whether they self-identify as a tech worker. Only the first volume of Capital was published in Marx’s lifetime (1867). The second and third volumes were published from Marx’s notes by his friend, patron, and collaborator Friedrich Engels after his death in 1883.

The first half of the first volume of Capital is famously dense. So dense, in fact, that the famous French philosopher Louis Althusser infamously suggested skipping it altogether and picking up the text later on, where Marx’s writing is more lucid [1]. We will not follow Althusser’s suggestion here, exactly, as (we believe that) the first nine chapters of Capital Volume I derive concepts that are essential to Marx’s analysis and argumentation in later chapters. But this textbook in large part exists due to the density of Capital’s opening chapters. CfTW is intended as a cheat sheet of sorts, so readers can pick up the text at chapter 10, where the relevance of Marx’s more philosophical first nine chapters becomes more clear.

In addition to being a glossary and pedagogy of the important terms in the first half of Volume I for readers of all kinds, CfTW also aims to highlight how Marx’s arguments in Capital resonate deeply with the contours, trials, and tribulations of the tech economy in the twenty-first century. The suggestion that the structure of capital that Marx marks out is no longer relevant is a hallmark not only of recent years, in ideas such as Yanis Varoufakis’ ‘techno-feudalism’, but really ever since the late twentieth century swing to neoliberalism (and perhaps even before). An important hinge in the history of Marxist discussion and debate is whether or not capitalism is still present in the form in which Marx originally theorized it, or whether the winds of historical change has blown it away and revealed some different structure at play.

Whether or not you believe Marx’s capitalism is still with us depends on what you believe capitalism to be. At the most basic level, we hope that CfTW offers an exposition of what Marx himself argued capital is. Marx rarely used the phrase ‘capitalism’, as we will see, preferring to theorize a particular kind of social relation that he called capital, rather than the general condition of its prevalence in society as an ‘-ism’.

At the very least, one has to agree that the vocabulary of capital is still with us in the tech world. We talk about ‘raising capital’, about ‘human capital’, about ‘maximizing value’, and so on. What these terms mean in the tech world—in Silicon Valley, China, and beyond—has a strong relationship to how the same terms circulated in the twentieth century, throughout the history of global capitalism. This textbook proposes that we can often better understand how these terms work in the tech world by understanding how Marx understood them, even as the meaning behind the same or similar terms has often changed.

If this approach interests you, we encourage you to read on. Reading (and re-reading) Marx’s Capital is hard work, but it is (as it has been for more than one hundred years) an incredibly valuable way to start thinking seriously about our economic situation.

Bibliography

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