Joseph Vogl (2022), Capital and Ressentiment: A Brief Theory of the Present. Cambridge: Polity Press.
What is the relationship between information, financial capitalism, social media, and the “new” right, from Bolsonaro in Brazil to Meloni’s Fratelli d’Italia, from Orbán to Trump and the emerging “national conservative” movement in Britain? In this book, originally published in German in 2021, Joseph Vogl, professor of modern German literature at Humboldt University in Berlin, argues that we live in an age characterized by ressentiment, in which both Silicon Valley and liberalized financial capital play decisive roles.
Vogl offers a largely thought-provoking analysis of the complex interplay between financial capitalism, information technology, and the rise of right-wing movements. Vogl's work delves into the concept of ressentiment, a term associated with Nietzsche, to elucidate the underlying dynamics of our political landscape. Vogl claims that our current era is marked by ressentiment, a pervasive sense of grievance. He argues that Silicon Valley and the liberalized financial sector are instrumental in fueling and exploiting ressentiment, ultimately contributing to the ascendance of right-wing movements across the globe.
The book also asserts that financial capitalism has evolved into an information-oriented system where information is the most valuable resource. Digital technology plays a crucial role in accelerating the circulation of financial capital. Vogl's analysis of the “financialization of information” and “informatization of finance” is a core constituent of the book. He delves into the historical evolution of financialization and its cultural and economic ramifications. The book also emphasizes the significance of information in modern capitalism, emphasizing that it necessitates an incessant flow of data. Information, he posits, replaces objective truth in financial markets, and this shift toward post-truth is paralleled with the rise of “fake news” in media discourse and the realm of politics.
Vogl argues that financial markets are driven by “doxological” considerations rather than objective truths, as financial actors operate on the basis of perceptions of perceptions, such that, “information circulating on the market is justifiable only in ‘doxological,’ not epistemological terms. It is not possible to ascertain or ground the ‘real,’ ‘true,’ or ‘fundamental’ value of things. Instead, valuations emerge from opinions mirroring opinions about opinions” (p. 34).
The book scrutinizes the major players in the (supposedly) novel political-economic regime of information/financial capitalism, focusing on Big Tech companies like Facebook, Google, and Apple. But Vogl largely skirts the role of human labor in these digital platforms and how they contribute to creating value. Vogl distances himself from Marxist value theory by claiming that Big Tech’s “meta-platforms” are not “value-creating” but “value-extracting,” i.e. that they extract rent rather than accumulate profits on the basis of workers’ value-production (p. 62).
To this one can object that enormous amounts of human labor are nevertheless embodied in an apparently abstract, digital platform: Don’t these human workers create value? This of course applies to the programmers, but also to the users of these platforms: The content on many of the sites or services in question are often created by users, without any form of payment, as Jaron Lanier and others have pointed out. Google’s search engine, for example, is operated by an estimated, and almost unfathomable, two billion lines of code: It therefore requires a great many (salaried) “hands and brains” for an apparently immaterial, abstract “sociotechnical ecology” to arise, and the transition from value appropriation to interest is perhaps not as obvious as several critical theorists, such as Negri and Žižek, have made it out to be. Although there may not be a clear correlation between working time, amount of code and profit rates, the platform theorists have not thought enough about the role of the worker as a value producer also in the creation, operation and daily maintenance of these platforms or “ecosystems”. (Facebook is estimated to use the services of 15,000 content moderators , for example; therein also lies the potential for labor struggle, as the 43 Kenyan contractors who sued Meta in March 2023 show.) If the platform is a seemingly natural “ecosystem”, rather than a worker-made product, the political class struggle also disappears from the analysis.
In the final chapter, Vogl delves into ressentiment, drawing on Nietzsche's concept to highlight the characteristics of aggrieved subjects. These include a tendency toward reactive attitudes, external objects serving as reminders of loss and trauma, and a focus on personal grievances rather than structural analysis. Vogl ties these characteristics to the hyper-personalized, reactive actions of right-wing movements worldwide, which often focus (obsessively and pathologically) on ethnic, gender, and religious minorities rather than economic elites.
While Vogl makes a compelling case for the role of financial capitalism, information technology, and ressentiment in contemporary politics, Vogl’s narrative about finance and digital technology is still not entirely convincing. Why should we be wary of the thesis of a financialized information capitalism and digital financial capitalism? A significant part of capitalism still revolves around elements that, strictly speaking, have no place in Vogl’s analyses, such as heavy industry, traditional raw materials (coal, iron and steel), and pre-digital commodities (from food to textiles and cement). As Jacques Rancière points out in a recent interview, [1]there are still huge swaths of traditional industrial proletarians in the world today, and the very precondition for the so-called knowledge economy remains industrial production, which continues apace on a mass scale. The notion that capitalism now predominantly consists in the manipulation of “signs” is largely the “spontaneous philosophy” of the intellectual class.
Vogl is too sophisticated a thinker not to understand this. Nevertheless, he appears to inflate the importance of “Silicon Valley” (digital technology) and displaces other aspects of capitalism in his rather one-sided focus on “Wall Street” (finance). Is there nothing beyond this new Athens and Jerusalem? In the midst of all the new, perhaps the most surprising thing about our time is how much of the old, albeit outwardly transformed in form, remains. The truly striking thing about our time is not the new, but the reproduction of well-worn, well-established historical and structural patterns. Everything that once was repeats itself – first as tragedy, then as farce (but what about the nth time)? Workers are exploited, capital is accumulated, crises polarize populations, ideologies are reproduced. Behind the outwardly new, the old and familiar political-economic elements remain in place.
[An expanded version of this review was first published in Norwegian in Agora: Journal for metafysisk spekulasjon (2023, issue 2-3).]