Digital socialism or knowledge capitalism?

Introduction

An understanding of the strategic economic significance of higher education has been fundamental to understanding the new global knowledge economy at least since the early 1990s. The OECD, World Bank and IMF have all stressed the significance of higher education as one of the keys to participation in the new global knowledge economy that will increase the skills and competencies of knowledge workers, enhance productivity and the production of research and scientific knowledge thus speeding up the innovation cycle. Neoliberalism guided by theories of human capital, public choice and new public management have fundamentally shifted away from the old liberal metanarratives of neutral and disinterested knowledge based on truth pursued for its own sake to the new ethos of managerialism and knowledge capitalism, where ‘knowledge managers’ increasingly make decisions about what research academic staff will pursue and where they will publish in order to maximize institutional rankings in the new global rankings regime. Neoliberal policies stripped out the non-productive subjects, especially in the humanities, developed instrumental strategies to lift reputation, and digitalized the university administration – a seemingly endless process – to create a new central system based on the application of digital processes to govern curriculum, evaluation, course development, student and staff management with an accent on DIY digital administrative practices.

Increasingly, the emphasis has fallen on knowledge exploitation with an accent on encouraging growth in high-tech investments and industries. The OECD published three influential studies in 1996: The knowledge-based economy; Measuring what people know: human capital accounting for the knowledge economy; Employment and growth in the knowledge-based economy. By the end of the 1990s most Western countries were engaged in building the knowledge-based economy in the search for greater productivity. The term ‘knowledge economy’ decisively entered educational policy discourse and there was accordingly close attention paid to growing intellectual capital as the source of competitive advantage through investment in human rather than physical capital not on in higher education but also formal education, school quality and lifelong education (Peters, 2001). Much was made of unlocking the creative synergies of human capital through ‘ICT’ and, later, the application of new digital technologies that had developed quickly after the invention of the internet in the early 1990s. The new digitalism went hand in hand with neoliberalism with a close alignment between new digital technologies and the development of finance capitalism.

Without doubt, knowledge economy highlighted the general importance of symbolic, immaterial and digital goods and services for economic and cultural development that resulted in the demand for analytic skills and the exploitation of new markets in tradable knowledges. Developments in digital technologies contributed to various forms of globalization, changing the format, density and nature of the exchange and promoting global flows of knowledge, information and data, especially in extending the speed and reach of finance capitalism. The digitization, speed and compression of communication also reshaped delivery modes in higher education, reinforced the notion of culture as a symbolic system and led to the spread of global knowledge and research networks. This new understanding had its base in the theories of Machlup’s studies of distribution of knowledge, Drucker’s ‘knowledge management’, Bell’s ‘’postindustrial society’, and Granovetter's work on the role of information in the market based on weak ties and social networks that developed through the 1960s and 1970s. Porat (1977) defined the US ‘information society' and Toffler (1980) talked of the 'Third Wave’ economy. In the 1980s Coleman analyzed the importance of social capital, which was explored by Bourdieu and Putnam who also emphasized the significance of cultural capital. Most importantly, Paul Romer (1990) argued that growth is driven by technological change arising from investment decisions where technology as an input is a non-rival, partially excludable good. By the 1990s the endogenous growth model adopted by the OECD was well established and by the end of decade public policy applications and developments of the ‘knowledge economy’ concept was well received and the new accepted wisdom (Rooney, Hearn, Mandeville, & Joseph, 2003; Hearn & Rooney, 2008).

Knowledge had also been defined as a global public good exhibiting the following characteristics: 1) knowledge is non-rivalrous: the stock of knowledge is not depleted by use, and in this sense knowledge is not consumable; sharing with others, use, reuse and modification may indeed add rather than deplete value; 2) knowledge is barely excludable: it is difficult to exclude users and to force them to become buyers; it is difficult, if not impossible, to restrict distribution of goods that can be reproduced with no or little cost; 3) knowledge is not transparent: knowledge requires some experience of it before one discovers whether it is worthwhile, relevant or suited to a particular purpose. An interesting theoretical moment occurred when similar principles were applied to digital information goods insofar as they were seen to approximate pure thought or the ideational stage of knowledge. Digital information goods helped to undermine traditional economic assumptions of rivalry, excludability and transparency, as the knowledge economy was seen to be about creating intellectual capital and the way that information goods differ from traditional goods: digital goods can be copied cheaply, so there is little or no cost in adding new users. Knowledge and information production led developments in desktop and just-in-time publishing substantially lowered fixed costs. Information and knowledge goods typically have an experiential and participatory element that increasingly requires the active co-production of users creating new content and digital goods can be transported, broadcast or shared at low cost, approaching free transmission across bulk communication networks. Since digital information can be copied exactly and easily shared, it is never consumed. In short, digital goods are non-rivalrous, infinitely expansible, discrete, aspatial, and recombinant (Quah, 2003). The ‘information revolution’ in its successive generations pictured a deep structural transformation from the industrial to the knowledge economy which led to an acceleration of the speed at which knowledge was created and huge decreases in the costs of codification, transmission, and acquisition of knowledge (Peters, 2008). This new understanding dominated the education policy agendas everywhere.

In light of profound digital transformation, Tapscott and Williams (2007: 1) suggested ‘profound changes in the nature of technology, demographics, and the global economy are giving rise to powerful new models of production based on community, collaboration, and self-organization rather than on hierarchy and control’. It was surprising to some that in middle of the neoliberal restructuring that new more democratic and decentralized models of production came to the fore. Tapscott and Williams (2007) placed the emphasis on peer-to-peer collaboration and smart new web companies that invented and harnessed digital architectures for collaboration focused on the new ethos of participation and openness, with the aim of realizing real value for participants. They argued that we are entering a new phase of economic participation in the economy ‘where new forms of mass collaboration are changing how goods and services are invented, produced, marketed, and distributed on a global basis’ (p. 10). The new information service corporations like Google, Facebook, YouTube, Linux, Wikipedia, Amazon.com and eEay certainly utilize and depend for business on the principles of mass global participation and collaboration. The new digital economy depended on openness, peering, sharing, and acting globally. The contradiction was that these digital opportunities were the product of the massive information utilities, a group of US corporations each approaching a trillion dolaars that represented the leading edge of the information economy. Critics like Fuchs (2008) argued ‘wikinomics’ was a form of exploitation of unpaid labour and also an ideology (‘digitalism’) leading to an increase in precarious and unpaid labour. Mass collaboration has traditionally been associated with socialist self-management. The emergence of the cooperative economy, social media and peer-based commons production transcended 'the instrumental 1ogic of competition and instrumental reason and anticipate a society that is based on cooperation, sharing, and participation’ (Fuchs, 2008, p. 8). There is a well-established literature now twenty years old that argues for anti-capitalist or social democratic potential of public goods inherent in the Internet (Atton, 2004; Barbrook 1998; 1999; 2007; Benkler, 2006; Lessig, 2006; Soderberg, 2002). In the bowels of digital capitalism was a deep socialist sharing tendency that gave expression through new technology to the truism that knowledge and the value of knowledge is rooted in social relations.

This seem to state an ironic turnaround. What started out as neoliberal managerialism that restructured higher education in the name of productivity gains and ruthlessly cut non-productive departments and made staff redundant, became the savior of the Left by imprinting a form of ‘digital socialism’. While the new digital technologies promoted collaboration peer-to-peer production and the production of social goods, it did not necessarily flourish in universities, event although the university was traditionally the home of transnational research relationships. New digital applications became highly concentrated in departments of computer science and depended on a new Technorati often recruited from industry and sympathetic to the administration, who managed staff and assisted them to load all courses on new delivery platforms and administered staff and student management systems. There were large-scale changes in academic publishing especially in online journal systems, digital books and digital library outreach that provided full-text searches of large data bases from the 1990s onwards. Big academic publishers and internet aggregators made available new online journal systems and databases. The big academic publishers were quick to exploit the network effects of online systems and made substantial profits through bundling. Some, like Elsevier, the world’s largest scientific journal publisher, were accused of price gauging and became the subject of an boycott organized by the Cambridge mathematician Timothy Gowers in 2012 not to publish or do any editorial work for the company's journals, including refereeing papers.

The concept of openness considered in the light of the new ‘technologies of openness’ of Web 2.0 promised to promote interactivity and encourage participation, collaboration and helped to establish new forms of the intellectual commons now increasingly based on models of open source, open access, open archives and open education. The underlying argument focused upon the ways in which new forms of technological-enabled openness, especially emergent social media that utilizes social networking, blogs, wikis and user-created content and media, provide new models of openness for a conception of the intellectual commons based on peer production. These models were radically decentralized, genuinely interactive, and a collaborative form of knowledge sharing that could usefully serve as the basis of ‘knowledge cultures’ (Peters & Besley, 2006).

Evgeny Morozov (2011), the author of Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom and sometime columnist for The Guardian, is sanguine about claims from the Left that the internet has the potential to socialize and democratize the digital economy. By comparison he sees that authoritarian governments (and institutions) around the world in effect can undertake surveillance more easily, propagate State propaganda and suppress free speech. Morozov (2015) is openly skeptical of the prospects for ‘digital socialism’ where the tech entrepreneurs devise a ‘sharing’ or ‘gift’ economy to balance the ruthless capitalism of Wall Street. The internet now seemingly offers free access to information services and basic free online platforms for listening to music (Spotify), doing research (Google), or viewing video (YouTube). The claim is that once education migrates to the Cloud then socialism will really begin to flourish. But for Morozov ‘user empowerment’ is an empty promise build on false assumptions: an ‘increase in equality of consumption does not always entail a corresponding increase in individual autonomy’; ‘equalising access to communication services does not in itself eliminate or even weaken other types of inequality’ and if basic services can be provided free then why do we need a State at all. While radical democratic socialists might argue that the digital economy has the potential to transform access to knowledge and information services by empowering those traditionally excluded from labour markets, it is not clear that anything like this scenario has transpired since the invention of the internet some thirty years ago. If anything industrial employment opportunities have diminished and new digital employment opportunities have not yet materialized. As Morozov (2018) remarks elsewhere ‘From Airbnb to city bikes, the ‘sharing economy’ has been seized by big money’.

Despite Morozov’s misgivings there has been a great deal of discussion about ‘digital socialism’ that also goes by a variety of other terms: the ‘new new economy’, ‘gift economy’, ‘open knowledge production’, ‘peer production’, ‘collective intelligence’, and ‘postcapitalism’. These’ are a few of the more resilient terms to survive in the literature. Yet these terms while attempting to name the Zeitgeist of the digital age and the form of economy in-waiting, have very different emphasizes. The extent to which these terms understand that ‘digital socialism’ is fundamentally an argument about intellectual property and the ownership of the means of digital production is most unclear.

We might accept the principles of the knowledge economy expressed in digital terms as a form of technological utopianism and the basis of a post-capitalist society. The now-traditional argument is that knowledge and information do not behave like other commodities that are depleted when used, rather in an economy of abundance, information and knowledge goods can grow through shared use and therefore do not suffer the same economics of scarcity characterizing the industrial economy. Based on this simple truth Paul Mason (2015) argues that we are entering the ‘postcapitalist era’, the sharing economy and new ways of working that arise in a dynamic form from the old capitalist system. Advances in information technology have

reduced the need for work, blurred the edges between work and free time and loosened the relationship between work and wages…

corrod[ed] the market’s ability to form prices correctly. That is because markets are based on scarcity while information is abundant…

[led to] the spontaneous rise of collaborative production: goods, services and organisations are appearing that no longer respond to the dictates of the market and the managerial hierarchy

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/jul/17/postcapitalism-end-of-capitalism-begun

we are told that the signs are there but you have to look hard for it: new currencies, time-banks, new style cooperatives, local exchange banks, novel forms of ownership and lending, new business models, reinvention of ‘the commons’, peer production, the production of new social goods and social innovation. Mason refers to Marx’s Fragment on Machines (http://thenewobjectivity.com/pdf/marx.pdf) that has inspired a generation of digital theorists from Manuel Castells to Yochai Benkler who dream of free networked collaborative production of social goods. Marx’s ‘Fragment on Machines’, a section of the Grundrisse, has become a crucial text for the analysis and definition of the Postfordist mode of production, especially by those thinkers influenced by the Italian postoperaismo conception of capitalism developed by Paul Virno, Hardt and Negri and other scholars (Pitts, 2017). Virno (2001) suggests that Marx

claims that, due to its autonomy from it, abstract knowledge – primarily yet not only of a scientific nature – is in the process of becoming no less than the main force of production and will soon relegate the repetitious labour of the assembly line to the fringes. This is the knowledge objectified in fixed capital and embedded in the automated system of machinery. Marx uses an attractive metaphor to refer to the knowledges that make up the epicentre of social production and preordain all areas of life: general intellect (http://generation-online.org/p/fpvirno10.htm).

Where capitalism was structured around the market that gave us massive and increasing global inequalities, postcapitalism, whose precondition is abundance, is (hopefully) to be structured around human liberation. Mason’s (2015) PostCapitalism: A Guide to our Future records the threat of the digital techno-revolution to capitalism in the tradition of Marx, Kondratiev, Hilferding and Schumpeter as well as Rifkin, Drucker, and Romer. The full vision imagines an information economy where social goods are produced at virtually no cost. Yet some Left critics argue that Mason has mischaracterized digital capitalism, misdiagnosed the inevitable decline of capitalism, overestimated the role of information technology and underestimated the role of finance, and ignores the green alternatives (http://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Main_Page).

Yet the concept has taken hold. The full vision is also given expression by the web project ‘Envisioning a Post-Capitalist Order’ which is

is a cooperative, nonsectarian venture of left journals, popular education centers, and electronic media. Our goal is to make easily available the wide range of new programs, experiments, and theories analyzing the transition beyond capitalism toward a socialist future, recognizing that “socialism” is a protean concept encompassing many different historical experiences and future possibilities.

http://postcapitalistproject.org/about

In these web pages Michael Albert and Robin Hahnel’s model of the ‘participative economy’ figures largely as part of the quest for a viable vision to replace neoliberalism. Peter Drucker (1993) was the first to use the term ‘post-capitalism’. In an interview with Peter Schwartz in Wired he opined

International economic theory is obsolete. The traditional factors of production - land, labor, and capital - are becoming restraints rather than driving forces. Knowledge is becoming the one critical factor of production. It has two incarnations: Knowledge applied to existing processes, services, and products is productivity; knowledge applied to the new is innovation.

https://www.wired.com/1993/03/drucker-2/

Drucker’s Post-Industrial Society, along with works of Daniel Bell, Marc Porat and Alain Touraine plotted the shape of post-industrial and post-capitalist society. Some might say it’s been a long time coming but the outlines are clear enough and our grasp of economic and social fundamentals are clearer now than any time in the past. The information revolution in its fifth generation has made the contours easier to understand: a deepening of neoliberal capitalism as a form of financialization – a highly symbolic mathematical game of trading futures with widening global inequalities as well as an incipient socialization and democratization of knowledge through new brave social experiments involving participation, collaboration, peer production and collective intelligence that characterize the so-called knowledge economy with the capacity to transcend the paradigm of intellectual property.

One savvy tech commentator Kevin Kelly (2009), the founder of Wired magazine, used the term ‘digital socialism’ to proclaim that a new global collectivist society is coming online and he goes on to list communal aspects of digital culture based around sharing, cooperation, collaboration, and collectivism. He characterizes the differences between the old and the new socialism in the following way:

Table

The Old Socialism	The New Socialism
Authority centralized among elite officials	Power distributed among ad hoc participants
Limited resources dispensed by the state	Unlimited, free cloud computing
Forced labor in government factories	Volunteer group work a la Wikipedia
Property owned in common	Sharing protected by Creative Commons
Government- controlled information	Real-time Twitter and RSS feeds
Harsh penalties for criticizing leaders	Passionate opinions on the Huffington Post

https://www.wired.com/2009/05/nep-newsocialism/

He provides a history of socialism that begins with Thomas More’s Utopia in 1516 that after the Communist Manifesto and Russian Revolution jumps into the information register by recording the birth of Blogger.com (1999), Google’s one billion indexed pages (2000), Wikipedia (2001), Twitter (2006), Facebook’s one hundred million users (2008) and YouTube 100 million monthly US users (2008). He is motivated by Clay Shirky’s (2009) Here Comes Everyone and Yochair Benkler’s The Wealth of Networks. He ends his brief essay with

We underestimate the power of our tools to reshape our minds. Did we really believe we could collaboratively build and inhabit virtual worlds all day, every day, and not have it affect our perspective? The force of online socialism is growing. Its dynamic is spreading beyond electrons—perhaps into elections.

https://www.wired.com/2009/05/nep-newsocialism/

In The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future, Kelly (2016) – becoming, cognifying, flowing, screening, accessing, sharing, filtering, remixing, interacting, tracking, questioning, and beginning. He speaks to the ‘technological convergence’ between communication and computation that resulted in the ‘internet/web/mobile’ system as a basis for the momentum that now sweeps everything before it. Kelly as one of the fiercest advocates for interpreting the open-source movement as a form of socialism that repeats the basic evolutionary mechanisms of ubiquity and complexity. His latest Wired article prediction is that augmented reality will spark the next big tech platform (Kelly, 2019), a kind of ‘mirrorworld’ that shifts the dominant technology from phone to camera – an all-seeing camera network.

Without doubt, there has been massive technological change but it is unclear to what extent ‘digital socialism’ has matured or, indeed, exists outside small resilient pockets to create the ‘intellectual commons’ with its new institutional possibilities. Can it really achieve its potential as a locus of true social and intellectual inclusion, and social and economic creativity? There is a deep transformation occurring wherein the Web has become a truly participatory media; instead of going on the web to read static content, we can more easily create and share our own ideas and creations. The rise of what has been alternately referred to as consumer- or user-generated media (content) has been hailed as being truly groundbreaking in nature. The contrast is clear in terms of a distinction between ‘industrial media’, ‘broadcast’ or ‘mass’ media which is highly centralized, hierarchical and vertical based on one-to-many logic versus social media which is decentralized (without a central server), non-hierarchical or peer governed, and horizontal based on many-to-many interaction. The intellectual commons provides an alternative to the currently dominant ‘knowledge capitalism’. Whereas knowledge capitalism focuses on the economics of knowledge, emphasizing human capital development, intellectual property regimes, and efficiency and profit maximization, the intellectual commons, let’s call it ‘knowledge socialism’, shifts the emphasis towards recognition that knowledge and its value are ultimately rooted in social relations, a kind of genuine knowledge socialism that promotes the sociality of knowledge by providing mechanisms for a truly free exchange of ideas (Peters, 2014).

To be sure, one of the biggest hurdles to openness are publication paywalls. As Marc Schiltz (2018) President of Science Europe, argues under the head ‘Open Access is Foundational to the Scientific Enterprise’:

Universality is a fundamental principle of science (the term “science” as used here includes the humanities): only results that can be discussed, challenged, and, where appropriate, tested and reproduced by others qualify as scientific. Science, as an institution of organised criticism, can therefore only function properly if research results are made openly available to the community so that they can be submitted to the test and scrutiny of other researchers. Furthermore, new research builds on established results from previous research. The chain, whereby new scientific discoveries are built on previously established results, can only work optimally if all research results are made openly available to the scientific community.

Publication paywalls are withholding a substantial amount of research results from a large fraction of the scientific community and from society as a whole. This constitutes an absolute anomaly, which hinders the scientific enterprise in its very foundations and hampers its uptake by society. Monetising the access to new and existing research results is profoundly at odds with the ethos of science (Merton, 1973). There is no longer any justification for this state of affairs to prevail and the subscription-based model of scientific publishing, including its so-called ‘hybrid’ variants, should therefore be terminated. In the 21st century, science publishers should provide a service to help researchers disseminate their results. They may be paid fair value for the services they are providing, but no science should be locked behind paywalls!

https://www.coalition-s.org/why-plan-s/

Openness is more than just a notional global public good as ‘Plan S’ demonstrates: ‘Plan S is an initiative for Open Access publishing that was launched in September 2018. The plan is supported by cOAlition S, an international consortium of research funders. Plan S requires that, from 2020, scientific publications that result from research funded by public grants must be published in compliant Open Access journals or platforms’ (https://www.coalition-s.org/). The main principle is uncompromising: ‘By 2020 scientific publications that result from research funded by public grants provided by participating national and European research councils and funding bodies, must be published in compliant Open Access Journals or on compliant Open Access Platforms (https://www.coalition-s.org/about/). National research funding organisations in Europe with the support of the European Commission and the European Research Council (ERC), announced the launch Plan S based on ten principles enumerated here:

1. Authors retain copyright of their publication with no restrictions. All publications must be published under an open license, preferably the Creative Commons Attribution Licence CC BY. In all cases, the license applied should fulfil the requirements defined by the Berlin Declaration;

2. The Funders will ensure jointly the establishment of robust criteria and requirements for the services that compliant high quality Open Access journals and Open Access platforms must provide;

3. In case such high quality Open Access journals or platforms do not yet exist, the Funders will, in a coordinated way, provide incentives to establish and support them when appropriate; support will also be provided for Open Access infrastructures where necessary;

4. Where applicable, Open Access publication fees are covered by the Funders or universities, not by individual researchers; it is acknowledged that all scientists should be able to publish their work Open Access even if their institutions have limited means;

5. When Open Access publication fees are applied, their funding is standardised and capped (across Europe);

6. The Funders will ask universities, research organisations, and libraries to align their policies and strategies, notably to ensure transparency;

7. The above principles shall apply to all types of scholarly publications, but it is understood that the timeline to achieve Open Access for monographs and books may be longer than 1 January 2020;

8. The importance of open archives and repositories for hosting research outputs is acknowledged because of their long-term archiving function and their potential for editorial innovation;

9. The ‘hybrid’ model of publishing is not compliant with the above principles;

10. The Funders will monitor compliance and sanction non-compliance.

https://www.coalition-s.org/10-principles/

The battle with big academic publishers is becoming more intense. Sarah Zhang (2019) asks ‘Is this the end of a very profitable business model?’ after the University of California has broken with Elsevier, one of the world’s largest academic publishers. As she indicates: ‘The university would no longer pay Elsevier millions of dollars a year to subscribe to its journals. It simply walked away’ (https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/03/uc-elsevier-publisher/583909/). She goes on to report:

Not so long ago, blowing off a publisher as important as Elsevier would have been unthinkable. But academics have been joining in an open revolt against Elsevier’s extremely profitable business model. In 2012, mathematicians started a petition to boycott the publisher that has since been signed by more than 17,000 researchers. In December 2016, universities in Germany stopped paying for Elsevier’s journals. In 2018, the same thing happened in Sweden and then Hungary.

Brian Resnik (2019) argues there is a global push for open access science and that scientific publishers are increasing bypassing publishers. The Office of Scholarly Communication, the University of California, reports that the Academic Council

signals its collective and resolute commitment to support UC’s negotiating position with Elsevier in order to advance UC’s mission as a public institution, make the products of our research and scholarship as freely and widely available as possible, and ensure that UC spends taxpayer money in the most ethically, morally, and socially-responsible way when entering into agreements with commercial publishers.

UC was looking for an agreement where their Elsevier authors would retain their copyrights and articles would become open access. The Council statement goes on to say: ‘Most significantly, a successful agreement would align closely with the mission of the University to provide “long-term societal benefits through transmitting advanced knowledge, discovering new knowledge, and functioning as an active working repository of organized knowledge.”’ https://osc.universityofcalifornia.edu/open-access-at-uc/publisher-negotiations/uc-and-elsevier/

While Plan S and journal Open Access does not exhaust the concept of ‘digital socialism’ or even approximate to a political system, it does provide a massive watershed to academic publishing that threatens to destablize the market and the neoliberal idea of the university insofar as it impinges of the paradigm of intellectual property and checks the dominance of big publishers in the West that props up a hegemonic system of global journal knowledge. As for ‘digital socialism’ or ‘post-capitalism’ more broadly within academia, we might have to wait a while for the main revolution.

[Ed. I’m also aware that EPAT is not an OA journal, although it does have the Gold ‘author –pays’ option. Through our journal returns PESA has funded almost $200,000 in student scholarships and also seeding funds for research as well as assistance to conferences. The question of so-called ‘hybrid’ publishing model and its continued appropriateness has been raised in the Society and it is an issue that the Society needs to examine closely in the coming years].

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.