Mode of Production versus Mode of Information: Marx, Poster, and an Argument for Anti-Capitalist Praxis1
Bibliographic record
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.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.008 | 0.012 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.047 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.023 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".