Mode of Production versus Mode of Information: Marx, Poster, and an Argument for Anti-Capitalist Praxis1

Abstract

While postmodernists hurriedly negate any theories affiliated with the Enlightenment, this paper argues that Karl Marx's prescient analyses of the capitalist mode of production are still fruitful for informing transformative politics. Although questions remain as to the efficacy of Marx's work for theorizing history and the role of the subject, we should not let the freedom of Marxism that ensued after his life mar the great importance of his critique of capitalism and commodity fetishism. Mark Poster, critical cultural historian and former self-described existential Marxist, has been one of Marx's most vehement detractors in the last two decades, arguing the need to displace labour as the first analytic of critical theory. While Poster's focus on discursive and informational practices as constitutive of domination supplements Marx's original castigation of capitalism, Poster's work imports postmodernist tautologies. I argue that Poster's mode of information thesis unnecessarily obliterates a focus on modern subject formation processes, suffers from a hi-technological determinism and lacks a theory of struggle, and thus advocate a retrieval of Marx's critique of capitalism vis-à-vis Foucault's ethics of the self as a means of addressing some of the difficulties in Poster's work.