Seminar with McKenzie Wark

In Capital Is Dead (Verso, 2019), Wark identifies how digital information and infrastructures are decisive to the economy. She notes that, as opposed to causing superficial variations, they have brought profound changes in aspects such as the forms of value production, the distribution of power, the modes of exploitation, and inequality and class conflicts. Changes that demand new frameworks of understanding and analysis.

In response to a drop-off in imagination, Wark posits the need to create new narratives that work both to critically describe the current situation and to unleash political action. Is capitalism an obsolete term? What new perspectives and categories of analysis do we need in order to address the economic, political, and ecological problems of today’s societies?

The seminar will include participation from the philosophers Toni Navarro and Alejandra López Gabrielidis, the writer and editor Federico Fernández Giordano and the sociologist Antonio Calleja López.

This seminar was organised jointly by the research network Tecnopolítica at the UOC and the collective Vector with the collaboration of the Direction of Democratic Innovation at the Barcelona City Council in the context of Decidim Fest, which will take place on October 20, 21 and 22 at the Canòdrom.