Balancing Acts: Self-Employment in the Age of Knowledge

Since 1994 when the first browsers made their appearance the internet became the ‚new medium' par excellence. As is always the case with new media, there was an intense discussion about the future usage and effects of the new technology. One of the central arguments of this discussion was that the new medium might solve the problems of capitalism-Bill Gates coined the phrase ‚frictionless capitalism'. In the first part of my paper some of these discourses are analyzed. These discourses, often publicly uttered by conservative and liberal politicians, try to construct the internet as commercial medium solving problems of late capitalism. But already the dotcom-crash 2001 hinted at problems with that construction. In the second part there is a discussion of a special interpretation of Marx' theory of capitalist crisis. It is arguedalso with recourse to Norbert Wiener-that the internet is part of the third industrial revolution which might lead to a very deep and even terminal crisis of capitalism. Instead of solving the problems of capitalism the internet might deepen them. We are witnessing since 2008 a chain of ever increasing symptoms of a deep crisis. By using Marx' approach some of the important effects of the new medium can be described far more accurately than does the unreflected euphoria of Gates and others.

Yochai Benkler has been called “the leading intellectual of the information age.” His recent work, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom, is, I believe, one of the most important attempts to vindicate a liberal egalitarian perspective in recent decades. Unlike most other advocates of this position, however, Benkler does not remain on the level of the abstract philosophical ideas. In Marxian terminology, he presents what is in effect a historical materialist account of the dialectical interactions of the forces of production and production relations in the contemporary era. Benkler himself does not refer to “socialism” once in his work. Nevertheless, his account implicitly calls into question every element of the familiar picture of socialism sketched above. A critical analysis of The Wealth of Networks therefore provides an exceptional opportunity to consider what, if anything, the socialist project might mean in the present moment of world history. (From Does Socialism Have a Future?, edited by Richard Schmitt, Lexington Books, 2012 (155-84).)

Communication and Capitalism: A Critical Theory, 2020

2 Communication and Capitalism operating under the control of neoliberal managers who have seen students as fee-paying customers yielding profits, knowledge as an instrument of capital, and academics as machines producing outputs, impacts, and grants. Under these conditions, Marx's approach was over decades presented as a failed theory and socialism as a failed model of society corresponding to Marxist theory. The rise of new social movements, individualism, neoliberal pressures on the humanities and social sciences, the long legacy of Stalinism, a flexible regime of accumulation, globalisation, and informatisation all influenced the emergence of postmodern and post-structuralist theory. David Harvey argues that postmodernism is the ideology of a capitalism that has a flexible regime of accumulation. 2 In contrast to Marxist theory's focus on solidarity, class, modes of production, the economy, matter, labour, macro-analysis, totality, production and the dialectic, postmodern theory stresses difference, identity, networks, culture, language, microanalysis, contextualisation/specificity, consumption, and articulation. Knowledge and communication have since the middle of the 20th century played an increasingly important role in the economy and society, which any theory of society must take into account. In his last interview, Stuart Hall said that the problem of the various versions of postmodern theoryhas been, however, that 'in its attempt to move away from economic reductionism, it forgot that there was an economy at all'. 3 As a consequence, postmodern theory has had an anti-Marxist bias. In 2008, a new world economic crisis started. It suddenly became evident that capitalism is not the end of history. The consequence was a renewed interest in Marx's theory and in socialist politics. More and more people became convinced that Marx's theory has something important to tell us about contemporary society. Marx was not just a theorist of capitalism, but also a critical theorist of communication and technology. 4 Marx's thought is therefore an excellent starting point for a contemporary critical theory of communication and communication technology. A Marxist theory of communication aims at showing how capitalist communications work and what antagonisms such communication systems have, and it seeks to inform praxis that points beyond capitalist communications towards socialist communication. This book makes a contribution to such theoretical foundations.

2016

2002

Along with the diffusion of information and communication technologies (ICTs), work processes are becoming ever more knowledge intensive. In keeping with this trend, the number of informational (or knowledge) workers in Finland has more than tripled from 12% in 1988 to 39% in 2000. What makes the Finnish case unique and interesting is the exceptional speed with which the information sector of the economy has grown. A few years after facing the most severe economic recession in its history in the early 1990s, Finland is now considered to have an advanced information economy. However, our empirical analysis-based on survey data from 1988, 1994, and 2000-yields a somewhat more critical picture of the Finnish information society than what usually comes across in the mainstream media. The opportunities for social equality offered by the growth of informational work are far more limited than was the case with the transition from agricultural to industrial production.

This article focuses on five flaws of Christian Fuchs' approach of Web 2.0 economy. Here, Fuchs' views on immaterial production, productivity of labor, commodification of users' data, underestimation of financial aspects of digital economy, and the violation of Marx's laws of value production, rate of exploitation, fall tendency of profit rate, and overproduction crisis are put into question. This article defends the thesis Fuchs fails to apply Marxian political economy to the contemporary phenomena of Web 2.0 economy. It is possible to avoid Fuchs' errors, and another approach is possible to remake Marxism relevant for an analysis of the new media economy. The concept of digital labor is one of the hotly debated issues in contemporary theories on new media economy. Put roughly, digital labor clusters around the questions of how communicative infrastructures of digital media are commercialized and commodified, where the economic value and profit of the new media companies come from, what social consequences the commercial captures of communicative infrastructures imply, and which theoretical paradigm to apply. The last issue involves political assessments that not only analyze the economical nature of digital media but also intervene in social consequences of the very reality of them.

Proceedings of 22nd Chaos Communication Congress, 2005

2009

The “New Economy” consists of Information, Communications and Entertainment (ICE) and is assumed to be free of the constraints of the older and more traditional brick and mortar economy. While the growth of the old economy depended on tangible products and assets such as land and machinery, the new economy produces not only intangible products but also has an invisible asset base. Thus, a software company’s worth is not measured by its tangible assets but from the Intellectual Property it holds. The role of labour in this economy is presumed to be minimal; along with the hype of an unconstrained growth of this economy there are also pronouncements of the end of labour.