Rumors by Mladen Dolar (Review and Implications for the Contemporary Left)
Salvador Medina Ramírez
11th March 2025
Karl Marx thought rumors were just "background noise" and he didn't think they were important. He wrote in the preface to the first edition of Capital: "[e]very opinion based on scientific criticism I welcome. As to prejudices of so-called public opinion, to which I have never made concessions, now as aforetime the maxim of the great Florentine is mine: Follow your own course, and let people talk!"
However, Mladen Dolar's book Rumors (2025) has made an important intervention that should be considered: rumors have been a shadow that has accompanied reason and even turned out to be a weapon against it. Socrates' condemnation to death by drinking hemlock, which originated in a rumor, is an example of the dramatic, material consequences of rumors.
According to Robin Dunbar (1996), gossiping is a basic form of everyday communication that allows for social bonding and group building. It is a way of "managing" reputation. Gossip is transmitted easily and very quickly. It happens in all social classes and in all societies.
Herein lies the difference with rumors, that are unverified information, whose source is anonymous, and it doesn't matter whether they are true or not, because they leave a "stain" on the reputation of the person to whom they are directed.
Rumors are a kind of knowledge that, although no one believes this knowledge to be true, has some credibility and works, even if it is not proven. This is different from conspiracy theories, which are fervently believed. Rumors spread using the mechanism of gossip and social networks, hence their great effectiveness in spreading. Rumors have real effects, and the left is not invulnerable to them. Even more so in today's capitalism, where rumors have become fully connected with market forces, which amplify their pernicious political effects, as Mladen Dolar points.
There is a dialectical relationship between the reason for and proliferation of rumors in everyday life and on a large scale. Mass literacy, the emergence of the printing press, and the circulation of mass media allowed rumors to spread immediately. Without the need for a specific source or author, these rumors had greater dissemination efficiency and served to destroy reputations and careers. Gossip columns from show business or politics have ensured large audiences and media sales are examples of this.
Today, the internet and social media have elevated this phenomenon exponentially. They have become the ideal platform for creating and spreading rumors and gossip. They lack a single center of transmission and a common space of meaning. Hundreds of new rumors emerge daily, but few become important; many circulate continuously and become political weapons, especially of the right. The rest remain online, leaving a trail that can be maintained indefinitely.
Social media companies design their platforms to keep their users engaged for as long as possible via manipulation of their enjoyment, and both gossip and rumor are excellent for this purpose. They keep their users uploading information to the networks, discussing it and sharing it, and creating and consuming information at the same time. Information that social media companies exploit for profit with minimal production costs.
So, it should come as no surprise that social media owners are keen to remove content moderation and news verification, under the discourse of freedom of expression (as has recently happened on Facebook and Instagram). These apparent of political righteousness are in fact just a means to increase profit.
Social networks are perfectly suited to the needs of capital, as they encourage immediate consumption and shorten the cycles of capital accumulation. Immediacy becomes predominant, a form of style within contemporary capitalism, as points out Kornbluh (2023). No mediation of what is transmitted, no filters. Because of this, they are the perfect media for the dissemination of rumors.
But this has wider political implications. It is not just that the social networks that dominate the internet today exploit rumors, but the way they exploit information for the accumulation of capital implies the erosion of the use of reason. As Dolar mentions (p. 105):
The inherent tendency in the digital world is for information to be broken down into a set of facts that are treated as separate entities and packages, extricated from their context, detached from reason and justification, from discursive mediation, form their internal connections and contradictions, from their wider implications, their evaluation, their genesis and their development - from everything that constitutes basis of knowledge, with the extensive intellectual labor it requires. Once the information is broken down and singularized in this way, it can be easily conflated with opinions, so the facts, information, opinions and knowledge start function at the same level, as interchangeable or equivalent. In this neutralization and equalization, the authority of knowledge is hardly recognizable and extremely difficult to impose.
This creates an environment in which opinion and rumor have the same level of social acceptance as reason. They create a continuous background noise, an immediate flood of public and private information into our lives, which allows right-wing discourses based on individualism and irrationalism as matters of personal will to take hold. In this way, the mobilizing capacity of rational arguments and political organization is diluted. It is no coincidence that populist discourses are so successful as a political strategy in this situation.
Similarly, this model of isolated and immediate production and consumption of information, whether rumor or fact, serves as a basis for the construction of conspiracy theories. Theories that have been used by the right, as QAnon and Trump have shown.
Finally, Dolar stresses that, although communication is facilitated today, this is weakening social ties. A cacophony of heterogeneous images, content and information is created, creating isolated social bubbles. The daily production, circulation and consumption of politically motivated rumors only further fuels fragmentation and depoliticization.
In this context, we find more isolated groups and more alienated individuals, where acceptance of capitalist logic and individualism has become the norm. This creates a new obstacle for the left in the quest for emancipation from capital. Against this backdrop, it is more necessary than ever to understand the political implications of the explosion of rumors in everyday life and to understand that social networks are designed to exploit them, making them an ideal way for the right to communicate, but not for emancipatory left movements.
References:
Dunbar, Robert (1996). Grooming, Gossip and the Evolution of Language. Harvard University Press.
Kornbluh, Anna (2023). Immediacy or, The Style of Too Late Capitalism, Verso Books.
Dolar, Mladen (2025). Rumors. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Marx, K. (1975). Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Book one: The Process of Production of Capital.
Salvador Medina Ramírez is an economist from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), with a specialisation in Financial Economics from the Complutense University of Madrid and a Masters in Urban Planning from UNAM. I work on issues related to urban planning and urban mobility. I also write on public policy issues, theory and critique. His latest book is "El socialismo no llegará en bicicleta" (ITACA, 2022).
