If cognitive capitalism became the engine of American prosperity after deindustrialization and the neoliberal turn, McKenzie Wark helps us see why this shift wasn’t merely a change in industrial organization — it was a transformation in the deep logic of value creation.

Wark begins by reminding us that there are multiple ways to understand capitalism’s evolution. Classical Marxists see continuity: capital remains capital, even if the factory floor gives way to the trading desk or the research lab. Others, such as the regulation school, focus on regime change — Fordism to post-Fordism, industrial mass production to flexible specialization. But Wark argues that neither approach fully captures the specificity of our era. We are not simply “after” Fordism; we are in a new terrain where knowledge itself becomes the primary commodity, the primary labor process, and the primary site of extraction.

In Wark’s telling, cognitive capitalism is not just capitalism infused with more ideas — it is a system where thought, communication, and creativity are directly harnessed as productive forces. As he puts it, we now live “in a world where what used to be marginal — information, communication, culture — have become central to accumulation.” In such a world, value is increasingly created through symbolic manipulation, affective labor, and the orchestration of attention and knowledge rather than through the assembly line.

This means that the boundaries between work and life blur; the mind itself becomes a site of production. The general intellect — Marx’s name for the social and cognitive capacities accumulated in a society — becomes a direct force of capital. Wark notes that in this regime, “the property form extends over the very capacity to think and communicate”. Intellectual property, network effects, platforms, and data enclosures replace factories, machinery, and raw materials as the commanding heights of the economy.

That insight dovetails with the story we have been tracing. Once manufacturing left American shores and the state ceded regulatory ambition, what remained was the capture and organization of knowledge work — from finance to software to media. The AI boom, in this light, is simply the next turn of the wheel: if the surplus of cognitive capitalism has historically come from human knowledge workers, the promise of AI is to automate, internalize, and thereby deepen this extraction. What outsourcing did for factories, AI threatens to do for the mind.

Cognitive capitalism does not eliminate labor conflict; it relocates it. Struggles are no longer confined to wages and unions in industrial plants; they expand to fights over data, algorithmic control, digital rights, attention capture, and the ownership of intellectual and communicative capacities. As Wark writes, “the battlefield shifts to the control of information and the vectors along which it moves.” In other words, the new class struggle concerns the infrastructure of knowledge itself.

For a cognitive capitalist, the extraordinary investment in data centers and AI infrastructure is not madness - it is an attempt to own not only the means of communication but the means of cognition.