“This Shit is Fucked Up and Bullshit” by McKenzie Wark: Summary and Critique

Introduction: “This Shit is Fucked Up and Bullshit” by McKenzie Wark

Table of Contents

“This Shit is Fucked Up and Bullshit” by McKenzie Wark first appeared in Theory & Event, Volume 14, Issue 4 (Supplement) in 2011, published by Johns Hopkins University Press. This pivotal work of political and cultural criticism responds to the 2008 financial crisis and the emergence of Occupy Wall Street, blending memoir, theory, and manifesto. Wark identifies the ruling elite not merely as a capitalist class, but as a vectoralist class—those who control information, communication channels, and intellectual property, thus extracting value through rent rather than labor. She integrates Marxist, anarchist, and Situationist traditions to examine how class struggle, debt, and digital technologies intersect in contemporary life. By locating solidarity not in ideological purity but in shared precarity and everyday acts of resistance—from mopping floors to running Tumblr blogs—Wark critiques neoliberalism’s hollow promises and calls for a renewed politics of the commons, care, and collective creativity. Her work is essential in literary theory and cultural studies for re-theorizing class, affect, and political subjectivity in the post-Fordist, networked economy. It resonates with both traditional critiques of capitalism and newer concerns about the commodification of culture and knowledge, positioning literature, affect, and media as battlegrounds in the 21st-century class struggle.

Summary of “This Shit is Fucked Up and Bullshit” by McKenzie Wark

🔥 1. Class, Work, and Pride in Labor

Wark centers the essay in the lived experience of the working class, asserting the dignity of work not as a privilege but a right:

“To have work, security, a little left over at the end of the week. This is not privilege. It’s a right” (Wark, 2011, p. S5).

She critiques performative work ideologies (e.g., “110% effort”) as elitist nonsense from non-workers:

“When you hear that sort of bullshit you know it’s coming from people who aren’t workers” (Wark, 2011, p. S4).

Wark reflects on working-class solidarity as fragile yet vital, orbiting what it is not—namely, the ruling class (p. S5).

💰 2. The Rentier Class and Structural Inequality

The ruling class is no longer just capitalist; it is a rentier class profiting from ownership rather than production:

“Nobody is quite ready to call the 1% what they are: a ruling class. Nor…a rentier class” (Wark, 2011, p. S11).

She references Ricardo and Joan Robinson to show how ownership of land has morphed into ownership of capital and infrastructure.

The modern ruling class now profits from “interest” rather than productive labor—echoing a shift from Fordist to financial capitalism.

📉 3. Debt, Jobs, and the 99%

Debt and jobs are central to the narratives of the 99%:

“‘Jobs’ and ‘debt’ are the two most frequent salient terms” (Wark, 2011, p. S17).

The slogan We Are the 99% exposes a divide, not of envy for the rich, but desperation among the rest:

“They are not concerned about someone else’s wealth, they are concerned about everyone else’s impoverishment” (Wark, 2011, p. S10).

Wark draws on Graeber’s theory from Debt: The First 5000 Years to articulate how debt restructures social relations (p. S14–16).

🧠 4. The Rise of the Vectoralist Class

Wark introduces the idea of a vectoralist class, a ruling elite controlling the flows of information, culture, and digital infrastructure:

“It collects a rent by controlling the ‘vectors’ along which information shuttles” (Wark, 2011, p. S13).

The ruling class splits into three branches:
1. Financial: Extracts value through debt and interest.
2. Military: Produces weapons and controls force.
3. Vectoralist: Manages information, intellectual property, and media (p. S13–14).

🖥️ 5. Media, Spectacle, and Symbolic Occupation

Drawing on Debord’s Society of the Spectacle, Wark asserts we live in an aesthetic economy, not a political one:

“The whole of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles” (Wark, 2011, p. S22).

She praises Occupy Wall Street’s symbolic occupation of both physical and digital spaces like Tumblr:

“It also occupies an abstraction… appropriated as if they were common property” (Wark, 2011, p. S17).

💥 6. Horizontalism and the Commons

Influenced by Situationist practices, Wark sees hope in horizontalist structures like the General Assembly and decentralized social media activism:

“The idea of the General Assembly revives the structural principles of the councilist tradition” (Wark, 2011, p. S24).

She sees these moments of generosity and care (like shared meals or gifts in occupied spaces) as a reawakening of communism in practice (p. S25).

⚠️ 7. Neo-Fascism and the Coming Crisis

Wark warns of an impending neo-fascist backlash:

“What has to frankly be described as a neo-fascist backlash was already underway” (Wark, 2011, p. S26).

This includes attacks on science, reason, and rising demands for sacrifice by the poor under the guise of national security and moral debt.

🔧 8. Towards a New Class Analysis

Wark proposes a three-pronged analysis of class:
1. Marxist: Focused on labor.
2. Anarchist (à la Graeber): Focused on debt.
3. Post-Situationist: Focused on media and communication vectors (Wark, 2011, p. S20).
She suggests that political change requires an updated understanding of labor, debt, and symbolic power—beyond older Marxist frames.

❤️ 9. The Value of Care, Solidarity, and Everyday Life

Wark closes with a reflection on solidarity through everyday acts—cleaning, caring, sharing—inside occupied spaces:

“Every day, people discover solidarity through camping together, cooking together, and picking up the trash” (Wark, 2011, p. S25).

The Occupation is more than protest—it’s a living experiment in alternative social relations and mutual aid.

Theoretical Terms/Concepts in “This Shit is Fucked Up and Bullshit” by McKenzie Wark

🔤 Term / Concept	📘 Explanation	🔎 Citation (APA Style)
🏴 Class Struggle	Central Marxist concept framing the conflict between workers and the ruling class. Wark emphasizes that this struggle continues under new guises: financial, military, and informational.	“The Marxists are right. It’s a class struggle, and we workers have been losing it” (Wark, 2011, p. S12).
💸 Rentier Class	A dominant elite that earns not from labor or production but from owning capital, property, or infrastructure. Wark links this to financialization and interest extraction.	“Nobody is quite ready to call the 1% what they are: a ruling class… a rentier class” (Wark, 2011, p. S11).
📡 Vectoralist Class	A class that controls the “vectors” of information, communication, and intellectual property. This is Wark’s key theoretical innovation beyond traditional capitalism.	“It collects a rent by controlling the ‘vectors’ along which information shuttles” (Wark, 2011, p. S13).
💥 Thanopower	A concept contrasting with biopower (Foucault). Thanopower refers to a ruling class indifferent to life and invested in death, decay, and extraction without development.	“Their MO is ‘thanopower.’ They have no interest in the care and feeding of populations” (Wark, 2011, p. S12).
💡 General Intellect	A Marxist term expanded by Wark to include collective human and machine intelligence. She relates it to the design and control of knowledge production systems.	“It is about the form of the relations which mesh human and machine intelligence together” (Wark, 2011, p. S18).
📉 Financialization	The dominance of finance over production in capitalism. Wark critiques how the 1% now accumulates wealth via interest, debt, and speculative markets.	“Financialization is just part of a wider ‘vectoralization’…” (Wark, 2011, p. S21).
🌀 Détournement	A Situationist term for hijacking symbols or media to subvert dominant messages. Wark applies this to the Occupy movement’s symbolic and spatial occupations.	“What transpired is a brilliant example of détournement… as if they belonged to us all” (Wark, 2011, p. S17).
🕳️ Aesthetic Economy	Wark reworks Debord’s spectacle into an “aesthetic economy” where appearances replace politics. Media and consumer culture become the terrain of struggle.	“We live inside an ‘aesthetic economy’, not a political one” (Wark, 2011, p. S22).
🎁 Gift Economy	Refers to social relations based on generosity and reciprocity rather than market exchange. Wark sees the Occupation as reviving this alternative economy.	“The Occupation is a living workshop… in the gift economy of exchange” (Wark, 2011, p. S25).
🔀 Horizontalism	A form of organizing based on non-hierarchical structures. Wark connects this to Situationist ideas and practices of the Occupy movement’s General Assembly.	“The Situationists were ‘horizontalists’ before there was such a term” (Wark, 2011, p. S24).

Contribution of “This Shit is Fucked Up and Bullshit” by McKenzie Wark to Literary Theory/Theories

📘 📖 Marxist Literary Theory

Reinvigorates the class struggle narrative by updating Marxist analysis for the digital and post-industrial era.

“The Marxists are right. It’s a class struggle, and we workers have been losing it” (Wark, 2011, p. S12).

Expands class categories to include the vectoralist class—those who extract value from control over information.

“The ruling class… owns information and collects a rent from it” (Wark, 2011, p. S13).

Critiques commodification and how surplus is diverted from labor to finance and rentier elites.

“The part of the surplus diverted to an unproductive ruling class isn’t rent any more, its interest” (Wark, 2011, p. S11).

🌐 📡 Media and Cultural Theory

Introduces the idea of the ‘aesthetic economy’, where culture and spectacle replace political reality.

“We live inside an ‘aesthetic economy’, not a political one” (Wark, 2011, p. S22).

Draws from Debord’s Society of the Spectacle to analyze how the Occupy movement used images and signs as weapons.

“What transpired is a brilliant example of détournement” (Wark, 2011, p. S17).

Analyzes symbolic occupations (e.g., Tumblr, Zuccotti Park) as part of cultural resistance in literary space.

“It also occupies an abstraction” (Wark, 2011, p. S17).

🤝 💬 Affect Theory

Centers emotional and bodily experience (fear, precarity, debt, exhaustion) as the basis for political consciousness.

“Popular revolt runs on affect, and affect runs on images and stories” (Wark, 2011, p. S11).

Frames solidarity as relational affect, not ideological doctrine.

“Our solidarity, that fragile thing, orbits what it is not” (Wark, 2011, p. S5).

🧠 🔁 Post-Situationist Theory

Proposes a third lens alongside Marxism and anarchism, emphasizing media, knowledge, and the general intellect.

“To the Marxist and anarchist forms of analysis I want to add a third, which… I’ll call post-Situationist” (Wark, 2011, p. S21).

Revives concepts like horizontalism, détournement, and psychogeography in the digital context.

“The Situationists were ‘horizontalists’ before there was such a term” (Wark, 2011, p. S24).

🎭 🧩 Identity, Community, and Everyday Life

Refuses abstraction in favor of lived experience, especially that of workers, caregivers, and the precarious.

“To love and be loved. To belong somewhere… To work at something that seems worth working at” (Wark, 2011, p. S8).

Challenges traditional binaries of individual vs. collective, proposing new modes of interdependence and community.

“Communism… because people did things for each other and made a ‘community’” (Wark, 2011, p. S6).

🔐 📚 Critical Theory of Power and Knowledge

Identifies a shift in power from capitalists to vectoralists—those who control flows of data and meaning.

“The ruling class in the United States is… one that owns information and collects a rent from it” (Wark, 2011, p. S13).

Highlights knowledge as a battleground in both economic and symbolic terms.

“The third component… is the struggle over the means of inventing and communicating” (Wark, 2011, p. S18).

🧱 🎁 Gift Economy and Communism as Practice

Reimagines communism not as ideology, but as practice of care, sharing, and solidarity.

“The Occupation is a living workshop in ‘communism’, but also in the gift economy of exchange” (Wark, 2011, p. S25).

Critiques neoliberalism through narratives of mutual aid, resisting the reduction of human relations to transactions.

“People discover solidarity through camping together, cooking together, and picking up the trash” (Wark, 2011, p. S25).

Examples of Critiques Through “This Shit is Fucked Up and Bullshit” by McKenzie Wark

📖 Recent Novel	🧠 Critique via Wark’s Concepts	🔎 Wark Reference (APA)
*1. Yellowface* by R.F. Kuang (2023)**	Through Wark’s lens of the vectoralist class and cultural rent, June Hayward is not a creator, but a vector pirate—extracting prestige from another’s story. The novel critiques the commodification of identity and authorship.	“It collects a rent by controlling the ‘vectors’… and information itself” (Wark, 2011, p. S13).
*2. Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow* by Gabrielle Zevin (2022)**	This novel illustrates Wark’s general intellect and affective labor, showing how game design as labor is entangled in emotional trauma, exploitation, and digital aesthetics. The creative laborers are alienated even as they shape culture.	“It is about the form of the relations which mesh human and machine intelligence together” (Wark, 2011, p. S18).
*3. Trust* by Hernan Diaz (2022)**	Diaz’s layered critique of finance mirrors Wark’s rentier class concept. The illusion of genius wealth is revealed as the effect of narrative control, privilege, and financial abstraction—not productive value.	“The 1%… a rentier class… makes even the robber barons look good” (Wark, 2011, p. S12).
*4. The Ministry for the Future* by Kim Stanley Robinson (2020)**	Wark’s ideas about thanopower and financialization can be applied to critique how the climate crisis is handled by systems focused on control and speculative profit rather than collective care.	“Their MO is ‘thanopower’… extracting the rent… not caring if we get sick” (Wark, 2011, p. S12); “Financialization… part of a wider ‘vectoralization’” (p. S21).

Criticism Against “This Shit is Fucked Up and Bullshit” by McKenzie Wark

❗ Overreliance on Personal Narrative

Wark’s blending of memoir and theory, while powerful, may blur the boundaries between subjective experience and structural critique, risking anecdotalism.
Critics may argue this weakens the analytical rigor typically expected in theoretical essays.

⚖️ Underdeveloped Engagement with Race and Gender

While class is central, Wark largely sidelines race, gender, and intersectionality.
Critics may find her treatment of oppression overly class-reductionist, failing to account for how class interacts with other identity categories.

🌀 Ambiguity of the ‘Vectoralist Class’

The concept of a vectoralist class is original but lacks empirical grounding or systematic elaboration.

Some readers may find it too abstract or overlapping confusingly with existing categories like “cognitive capitalism” or “technocrats.”

🔄 Repetition of Situationist Tropes

Wark heavily draws on Situationist International concepts like détournement and spectacle, which some critics see as dated or romanticized.
These references may not fully account for today’s more complex digital ecosystems.

💢 Anti-Institutional Bias

Wark is skeptical of both state and private institutions, but offers limited concrete pathways toward sustainable change beyond symbolic resistance.
Critics may see this as idealistic or even nihilistic, offering critique without strategy.

🧠 Dismissal of ‘Privilege Discourse’

Wark resists framing labor security as privilege, calling it a right—however, this can be seen as a dismissal of important conversations around structural privilege, especially within academia or media (Wark, 2011, p. S5).

🗃️ Lack of Theoretical Synthesis

While drawing on Marxism, anarchism, and Situationism, Wark does not fully synthesize these traditions into a unified framework.
This makes the essay feel fragmented or rhetorically sprawling to some scholarly readers.

Representative Quotations from “This Shit is Fucked Up and Bullshit” by McKenzie Wark with Explanation

Quotation	Explanation
“To have work, security, a little left over at the end of the week. This is not privilege. It’s a right.”	Wark rejects neoliberal narratives that frame labor security as privilege. Instead, she asserts that material stability should be understood as a basic human right, not an exceptional condition.
“Our solidarity, that fragile thing, orbits what it is not.”	Solidarity, for Wark, is defined not by a fixed identity or ideology, but by collective exclusion from power. It’s about shared precarity and absence from elite privilege.
“The ruling class in the United States… owns information and collects a rent from it.”	This line introduces the concept of the vectoralist class—those who profit by controlling information, rather than producing material goods.
“This shit is fucked up and bullshit.”	A protester’s blunt slogan that Wark elevates as a crystallization of mass political feeling. She treats it as a moment of radical affect and shared truth.
“Popular revolt runs on affect, and affect runs on images and stories.”	Wark links emotional energy to symbolic action. She argues that storytelling and media imagery are central to how resistance works in the digital age.
“What makes our current rentier class even worse than the robber barons is that they are not even building anything.”	A scathing comparison between past industrial capitalists and today’s elites, who Wark accuses of pure extraction with no productive investment.
“There could be other social relations, besides finance, security and the commodity.”	Wark imagines alternatives to neoliberalism, suggesting that the Occupy movement opens up experimental spaces for new ways of living and relating.
“We all hack the workplace, just to make it work at all.”	She redefines labor in the post-industrial world as a form of improvisation—where workers constantly adapt and reconfigure systems not designed for them.
“We live inside an ‘aesthetic economy’, not a political one.”	Politics, Wark argues, has been replaced by spectacle. This reflects a post-Situationist view where appearances override material substance.
“Debt and jobs. That’s what makes people part of the 99%.”	Wark highlights the core economic burdens of modern life as captured in Occupy’s narratives—employment precarity and financial entrapment.