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ABSTRACT
According to some commentators, the introduction of digital technologies into the sphere of knowledge-production and the consequent digitalization and computerization of this field have radically changed the nature of knowledge-producing activity and the produced knowledge. At the social level, such a change has allegedly caused the irrelevance of grand narratives and emergence of paralogies or the obsolescence of the labour theory of value, which in its turn signifies the end of capitalism. It is argued that such accounts simply disregard the social form of production of knowledge. The real revolutionary effect of digitalization, in resemblance to the introduction of machinery in large-scale industrial production, is intensification of knowledge-producing labour, which in its turn signifies the various forms of subsumption of knowledge-producing activity under capital and the appropriation of the commonly produced surplus-knowledge by it.
Acknowledgment
I thank the two anonymous referees of the Social Epistemology for their firm yet constructive criticism, comments and suggestions that rendered this article publishable.
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Correction Statement
This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.
Notes
1. It is important to note that ‘materiality’ here does not signify a ‘substance’, say, ‘matter’, in contrast to some ‘immaterial’ or ‘incorporeal’ substance, say, idea or mind. Rather, it signifies the dependence of the emergence of any artefact, physical or non-physical, on human activity and its ‘material’ conditions. Furthermore, physicality and ideality are not mutually exclusive; a painting is ideal as much as it is physical/material, so is a sculpture or a composition. One aspect that is tacitly subject to criticism in this paper is such a presumed dichotomy between the ‘material’ (physical) and the ‘ideal’ (incorporeal) as much as the duality between the ‘abstract’ and the ‘concrete’. For a succinct introduction of the problem of the relation between the ‘material’ and the ‘ideal’ see Ilyenkov (Citation2012, 149–156).
2. In a similar vein, Gigi Rogerro (Citation2011) quotes sympathetically Albert Chang, a programmer at an Indian company, who has witnessed in less than a decade many multinational computer companies that vanished overnight, stating that ‘“my knowledge will go with me” … “It won’t be transferred by anyone else”’ (103–104). This quotation succinctly manifests the core of Rogerro’s understanding of knowledge. Surely, one’s ‘knowledge’ does go with them but only as a potential, as a capability to produce new knowledge. Moreover, the whole process of digitalization and automation of the algorithmic part of thinking processes and of production of knowledge makes the immaterial labourer less valuable and leaves them with the option of complying with worse working conditions.
3. Elsewhere, Murray also elaborates on Marx’s notion of ‘non-formal subsumption’. Non-formal subsumption is the subsumption of some product, which have never taken on the value form, never been sold, under capital (Murray Citation2009, 174).
4. Cooperation, according to Marx and Engels, is one of the four moments or aspects of the primary historical process. Accordingly, ‘a certain mode of production, or industrial stage, is always combined with a certain mode of co-operation, or social stage, and this mode of co-operation is itself a “productive force”’ (Citation1976, 43).
5. Elsewhere, Vercellone states, ‘until the arrival of the mechanisation of the process of production, the system of “concentrated manufacture” experienced only a weak development and the merchant entrepreneur, rather than turning himself into a captain of industry, continued to privilege the model of the putting-out system’ (Citation2007, 22).
6. ‘For, all rational beings stand under the law that each of them is to treat himself and all others never merely as means but always at the same time as ends in themselves … A rational being belongs as a member to the kingdom of ends when he gives universal laws in it but is also himself subject to these laws. He belongs to it as sovereign when, as lawgiving, he is not subject to the will of any other’ (Kant Citation1998, 41).
7. Christian Fuchs also considers free labour of the Internet ‘prosumers’ productive. He writes, ‘if Internet users become productive prosumers, then in terms of Marxian class theory this means that they become productive labourers who produce surplus value and are exploited by capital because for Marx productive labour generates surplus value’ (Citation2016, 556). However, ‘prosumers’ do not become productive since they are not in exchange relation with capital. As Fuchs himself admits, they are not paid wages. Thus, in Marx’s terms, they are not under formal or real subsumption of capital. Similar to Terranova, Fuchs confuses use-value and value and thus disregards the differences between productive and unproductive labours.
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Siyaves Azeri
Siyaves Azeri is an associate professor of philosophy at the Faculty of Theatre and Film, Babes-Bolyayi University in Cluj-Napoca, Romania. Azeri is the primary investigator of the project “Philosophy in Late Socialist Europe: Theoretical Practices in the Face of Polycrisis” (F104/15.11.2022), which is funded by the European Resilience Fund. He is also the Co-Editor in Chief of the journal Marxism & Sciences and an associate of the “Theses Twelve: Mardin Value-form Circle.” Azeri writes on a large gamut of subjects in different international journals and books. His areas of interest include Marxian materialism, the critique of epistemology, the problem of consciousness, philosophical psychology, Kant’s transcendentalism and Hume’s empiricism.