writings
knowledge, thus obscuring it from critique. This is ultimately a work not of critical but of hypocritical theory, unable to examine its own conditions of production. [062] Karl Marx, “Critique of the Gotha Program,” in The First International and After: Political Writings, vol. 3, ed. David Fernbach (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1974), p. 347. With the canonization—and commodification—of Marx’s major works as fit matter for the educational process, a crypto-Marxist project of renewal might best look to the texts that the educational apparatus considers marginal. Texts, for instance, that are bound to the events of their time, rather than which could be taken to unfold in something like the universal and homogenous time of the education industry. This particular text has the added joy of being a place where Marx most clearly distances himself from the “Marxists” who were already turning critique into dogma. It is the place where Marx himself is already a crypto-Marxist, differentiating his thought from any callow representation. [069] Alexander Bard and Jan Söderqvist, Netocracy: The New Power Elite and Life after Capitalism (London: Reuters, 2002), p. 107. See also Slavoj Zizek, Organs without Bodies: On Deleuze and Consequences (New York: Routledge, 2004), pp. 192–195. In what B+S propose as an emerging “informationalist” order, the reigning ideology, or “assumed constant,” is no longer God or Man but the Network. As this is a transitional time, there is turbulence, as the Humanist constant collapses and a new constant struggles to emerge. There is the deconstruction of the Humanist constant, its mere displacement as Language or the Subject, and there are desperate attempts to shore it up—what B+S call hyper-egoism, hyper-capitalism, hyper-nationalism. The decline of capitalist era social institutions is the sign for B+S of a rise of informationalism and what they term a “netocratic” ruling class. The media, released from their dependence on the state, devalue politics. Media become a separate sphere, no longer standing in a relation of representation to a bourgeois public