Cognitive Capitalism, Welfare and Labour

The Commonfare Hypothesis

Andrea Fumagalli, Alfonso Giuliani, Stefano Lucarelli, Carlo Vercellone

• Editore: Routledge
• Anno: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781317225669
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Business
• Categoria: Business generale

This book deals with the transformations of both accumulation process and labour in the transition from a Fordist to a cognitive capitalism paradigm, with specific regard to Western economies. It outlines the advent, after industrial capitalism, of a new phase of the capitalist system in which the value of cognitive labour becomes dominant. In this framework, the central stakes of capital valorisation and forms of property are directly based on the control and privatization of the production of collective knowledge. Here, the transformation of knowledge itself, into a commodity or a fictitious capital, is analyzed.

Building on this foundation, the authors outline their concept of "commonfare." This idea of commonfare implies, as a prerequisite, the social re-appropriation of the gains arising from the exploitation of those social relations which are the basis of accumulation today. This re-appropriation does not necessarily lead to the transition from private to public ownership but it does make it necessary to distinguish between common goods and the commonwealth. This book explains this distinction and how common goods and the commonwealth require a different framework of analysis.

This volume will be of great interest to all scholars and researchers, as well as a more general readership, who wish to develop a critical thinking of the mainstream analysis of this topic. Contributing to the "Marxism-heterodox" approach using rigorous theoretical analysis and empirical evidence, it is aimed at all those who act socially and aspire to a better understanding of the development and the contradictions of contemporary capitalism.

1 An introduction to cognitive capitalism

A Marxist approach

Carlo Vercellone and Alfonso Giuliani

Introduction

This chapter outlines some elements of a research program organized around the thesis of cognitive capitalism, a project that insists upon rereading the historical development of the capital–labour relation from the point of view of the knowledge economy. This research program is a product of the particular historical and theoretical context that has emerged since the crisis of the Fordist growth regime.

Since the Fordist crisis, capitalism has entered a period of major transformation that has affected the modalities of valorisation, the forms of property and the division of labour. This “new capitalism” has called into question many of the most essential aspects of the logic of development that emerged after the first industrial revolution. At the heart of this transformation is the growing importance of knowledge and the immaterial. This is not to say that the centrality of knowledge to capitalism is in itself new. Rather, the question we must ask is to what extent we can speak of a new role for knowledge in the economy and, more importantly, how we can conceive its relationship to transformations in the capital–labour relation.

The thesis of cognitive capitalism has been developed in response to a double imperative: the need for a critique of the theorizations of the knowledge-based economy, and, above all, the elaboration of an approach that considers the meaning of the contemporary transformation, taking as a starting point the centrality of the capital–labour antagonism as it relates, to borrow an expression from Marx, to the mastery of the “intellectual powers of production.”

The first part of the chapter outlines a method of analysis in terms of cognitive capitalism by insisting on the critique of conventional theories of both the economics of knowledge and the knowledge-based economy. This is done in order to explain the role of knowledge in the long-term development of capitalism, while providing a Marxian theoretical map of historical time in the process.

The second part of chapter will be devoted to explaining the methodological choice in favour of an approach that combines theory, history, and transformations of social relations and shares a central concern with the initial research program of French Regulation School.

We will make clear our theoretical position vis-à-vis the Regulation School approach. Particularly, we will highlight the heuristic value of new intermediate categories of the analysis of capitalist dynamics and of its “major crises” and phases of historical transformation. These categories will allow us to propose a periodisation based upon the identification and succession of three “historical systems of accumulation”: mercantile capitalism, industrial capitalism, and then cognitive capitalism.

The third part of the chapter dedicated to providing an historical perspective for the crisis of industrial capitalism and the transition towards cognitive capitalism. Our thesis is that the “nature” of the Fordist crisis is not simply one of a “major crisis” of transformation internal to industrial capitalism. The crisis of Fordism, usually characterised as a crisis of the mode of development, corresponds in fact to a higher level of crisis affecting some of the most essential aspects of industrial capitalism itself. Finally, by cognitive capitalism we mean the emergence of an “historical system of accumulation” in which the cognitive and intellectual dimensions of labour become dominant and the central stake over the valorisation of capital become directly related to the transformation of knowledge into a fictitious commodity, in the sense of Polanyi.

From knowledge-based economy to cognitive capitalism

To understand the specificity of the cognitive-capitalism thesis, we must first of all dissipate the theoretical misunderstanding that assimilates it to a variation on the theories of the knowledge-based economy. To do so, in this section we will begin by characterising certain limitations of the contemporary theorisations of knowledge, limitations we consider fundamental. We will then show that the thesis of cognitive capitalism rests on a method of analysis that is able to perceive the meaning and stakes of the current mutation of the place of knowledge in the economy, on the basis of the primary role played by historical transformations in the capital–labour relation.

Limitations of the contemporary theories of knowledge

Contemporary theory perceives knowledge either as the object of a new subdiscipline (the economics of knowledge) or as the index of a shift to a new stage of economic development (the knowledge-based economy). Two series of closely associated critiques can be addressed to these theorisations.

The first critique concerns the tendency to approach the question of knowledge by starting from general theoretical models that would be valid at all times and in all places and are founded on a separation between the economic domain and that of social relations. This tendency to reject the historicity of economies is particularly clear in Howitt’s work. In his view (Howitt 1996, 2004) nothing really new characterises the place of knowledge in economic growth. The only real novelty resides in the current capacity of theory to better discern its functions and primary role, neglected by former theories of growth. In short, the historical novelty is not to be found in a new phase of capitalism or even in the shift to a knowledge-based economy. It is to be found exclusively in the formation of an economics of knowledge, that is, of a subdiscipline of the science of economics specialized in the study of the mechanisms governing the production, distribution, and appropriation of knowledge. This is the way Howitt interprets the birth and development, through gradual improvements, of the theories of endogenous growth, without any reference to the historical transformations in the accumulation of capital and the wage relation. In this kind of conception, the theoretician seems to ignore or deny the importance of the underlying structural changes that provide the foundation for the emergence of a new field of research.

The second critique concerns the reductive vision of the place of knowledge and its new role, a vision on which most interpretations of the emergence of a knowledge-based economy are founded. These approaches have the unquestionable merit of foregrounding the idea of a historical break, and for that reason they will receive the most attention in the rest of this subsection. However, their conception of historical time skips over the transformation of social relations and relations of knowledge and power that structure the development of the productive forces, both material and immaterial.

The origin of a knowledge-based economy is essentially explained as a change in the magnitude of the phenomenon, a kind of Hegelian shift from quantity to quality. It is seen as the result of the encounter or indeed, the clash, between two factors: (1) a long-term trend towards a rise in so-called intangible capital (education, training, R&D, health) which from the mid-1970s onward (in 1973 in the USA, for example) has overcame the percentage of “material” capital in the stock of capital and now asserted itself as the key variable in growth; and (2) the sweeping change in the conditions of the reproduction and transmission of knowledge and information resulting from the “spectacular spread” of the information and communication technologies (ICT) (Foray 2006).

Finally, for the hard core of this vision, today broadly shared by the theorists of the knowledge-based economy and by numerous international institutions (OECD, EU), the rise of a knowledge-based economy is still essentially considered as an effect of crossing a threshold. The social determinants that are at the origin of the social crisis of the Fordist model and on the historical bifurcation towards an economy founded on distribution and the primary role of knowledge remain largely hidden. More precisely, in our opinion two obstacles keep the theories of a knowledge-based economy from accounting for the new and contradictory place of knowledge in the “new capitalism.”

First, the reductive nature of a characterisation of the knowledge-based economy centred on activities devoted to the deliberate production of knowledge. Thus, for example, the research of the OECD (1996) remains essentially anchored in the “Fordist” conception that emerged from of Arrow’s model (1962), where the production of knowledge is the privilege of elite R&D workers, scientific research, and the knowledge industries.

This interpretation obscures the most important phenomenon to have taken place since the crisis of Fordism, namely the return in force of the cognitive dimensions of labour, which are apparent at almost every level of production, material and immaterial alike.

The technological determinism that lends ICT a primary role in the shift to the “mass production” of knowledge and immaterial goods, adopting a mechanistic theory similar to approaches which, according to Thompson (1963), made the steam engine into the vector of the first industrial revolution, leading to the formation of the working class and the mass production of material goods.

Let us note that this tendency towards technological determinism and the underestimation of social causalities is also found in analyses that nonetheless develop a wider vision of the knowledge-based economy, integrating the problem of non-deliberate forms of knowledge production (Foray and Lundvall 1997). Despite the sophistication of such work, the principal explanation of the growing importance taken on by these non-deliberate forms still appears to rest in fact on the primary role of ICT. The latter is in effect understood as the major vector for the effectuation of mechanisms of horizontal coordination and networked organisation at the origin of historically unprecedented modes of “collective invention.”

Despite changes in detail, the shift towards a knowledge-based economy is always conceived via an interpretative grid that casts it as the product of a happy encounter between the information revolution and a long-term trend towards the increase of intangible capital.

In this way, even the most highly articulated theories of the rise of the knowledge-based economy are led to omit certain elements necessary for understanding what we see as the origin, the meaning, and the stakes of the current transformation of capitalism. A few preliminary observations will allow us to measure the breadth and importance of these omissions.

No real reference is made to the social conflicts at the origin of the crisis of Fordism and the transformations of the relations of knowledge and power that structure the division of labour and the regulation of the wage relation. The interpretation of the stylised fact relative to the primacy of the new so-called intangible capital, embodied for the most part in human beings, systematically ignores a key element: this dynamic is linked above all to the development of collective services furnished historically by the welfare state. To forget the largely non-commodified nature of these collective services and their role as a motive force in the new capitalism of knowledge is all the more astonishing when the institutions of the welfare state are now being powerfully destabilized by austerity policies and falling prey to creeping privatisation.

In our view, it is not so much in ICT as in the development of a diffuse intellectuality that one should seek the primordial factor of the transition towards a capitalism founded on knowledge and towards new forms of the division of labour. We will advance this hypothesis: the departure point of the formation of cognitive capitalism is to be found in a process of the diffusion of knowledge, engendered particularly by the development of mass education and a formidable rise in the average level of training. What is more, this phenomenon, which has played a key role in raising the percentage of so-called intangible capital, does not only correspond to the slow deployment of a long-term trend. Instead it is a historically accelerated process driven to a large extent by the social demand for the democratisation of the access to knowledge conceived at once as a means of self-realisation and of social mobility for the popular generations of the baby boom.

The constitution of the figure of a diffuse intellectuality, which finds its first form of social expression in the events of 1968, not only precedes the “information revolution” from the logical and historical point of view but is also partially at its origin. It is enough to consider the fact that some of the major innovations of the aforementioned “revolution” come out of the ideals and practices of the protest culture of the years 1960–1970.

Moreover, where ICT is concerned, one must also make two other remarks. On the one hand, ICT can only function correctly on the basis of a living knowledge capable of mobilising it, because it is knowledge that governs the treatment of information: otherwise it remains a sterile resource, like capital without labour. On the other hand, its role can be profoundly ambivalent depending on its use and on the technical support structures into which ICT is integrated, favoring either the operation of neo-Taylorist forms or a requalification and de-hierarchisation of labour relations.

Finally, the technological determinism of the theorists of the knowledge-based economy refers back to a positivist conception of science, knowledge, and technological progress. This perspective leads to the abstraction of the social relations and conflicts surrounding the question of the control of the “intellectual powers of production” that have marked the entire history of capitalism. Indeed, the proof of this is the recourse to the colourless notion of the knowledge-based economy, to which one could apply the same remark made by Gailbraith (2004) when, in his last work, he stigmatised the “lie” that consists in speaking of a market economy instead of capitalism, with the aim of erasing the power relations which the latter word conveys.

Ultimately, these approaches overlook the fact that the novelty of the contemporary historical conjuncture does not involve the simple creation of a knowledge-based economy. The meaning and stakes of the current transformation of capitalism are not to be found, in fact, in the simple constitution of an economy founded on knowledge but in the formation of a knowledge-based economy framed and subsumed by the laws of capital accumulation.

The approach of cognitive capitalism vis-à-vis mainstream theorizations of the knowledge-based economy constitutes a double reversal at both the conceptual and methodological levels.

On the one hand, the neutral concept of the knowledge-based economy is justly replaced by that of cognitive capitalism. This concept throws into relief the historical dimension and conflictual dialectic between the two terms of which it is composed. The term “capitalism” indicates the permanence, beyond all variation, of the invariants of the capitalist system; in particular the determining role of profit and the wage relation or, more precisely, the different forms of labour on which the extraction of surplus value rests. The term “cognitive” brings to light the novel nature of the labour, the sources of value and the forms of property that support the accumulation of capital and the contradictions that this engenders. These contradictions are made manifest both in the relationship between labour and capital (in the sphere of production and circulation) and in the increasingly acute antagonism between the social nature of production and the private nature of appropriation.

At the methodological level, the approach of cognitive capitalism places knowledge at the heart of the concrete historical development of conflictual relations of knowledge and power that have forged the development of the capitalist division of labour and the transformation of the wage relation.

Knowledge and the dynamics of the capital–labour relation: a Marxian approach

To better understand this problematic, it is important to recall that for Marx, labour as a cognitive activity—understood as the inseparable unity between thought and action—is the very essence of man (Capital, Book I, Chapter 7). It seems to us that the crucial point is the following: if the cognitive dimension of labour is the very essence of human activity, awareness of this might be understood as an impediment to the capitalist control of production and, therefore, accumulation. From this, it is clear why the relationship between knowledge and power constitutes an essential element in the class struggle resulting from the organization of production. This struggle is articulated around two...