The Ontology and Social Dimension of Knowledge: The Internet Quanta Time

ABSTRACT

The increasing saturation of all facets of contemporary capitalism, including human labour, with computer and digital technologies, has given rise to a number of apologetic concepts, variously termed the information society, cognitive capitalism and digital capitalism. These concepts are ideological in nature. They have gained wide acceptance because of the underdevelopment of Marxist epistemology. This article submits a Marxist theory of knowledge accounting for modern developments in the natural sciences from the standpoint of the the materiality of knowledge and of its class content. It deals at length with two important examples: the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum physics and the internet. It shows that the generation of knowledge on the internet is at the same time, a battle for knowledge. It is part of the wider cognitive class struggle between capital and the rationality of labour in its multifarious and ever-changing forms.

KEYWORDS:

• Knowledge
• capitalist production relation
• law of value
• computer and digital technologies
• Marxism

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 A complete critique of workerism is beyond the scope of this work (see Carchedi 2012; Henninger 2007; Starosta 2012). For some authors, especially of a workerist persuasion, “immaterial” seems to resemble that of “mental” in this work. But immaterial reality does not exist.

2 Marx uses the term reflection, but in a very concise paragraph to explain the essence of the difference between Marx’s own and Hegel’s epistemology,

To Hegel … the real world is only the external, phenomenal form of “the Idea.” … With me, on the contrary, the ideal is nothing else than the material world reflected by the human mind, and translated into forms of thought. (Marx 1967a, 19)

Reflection is only a shortcut summarizing the complexity of the mental labor process to be analysed shortly.

3 See https://encyclopedia2.thefreedictionary.com/Soviet+Encyclopedia.

4 This is the thesis of the social and thus class determination of knowledge, which is developed at length elsewhere (see Carchedi 2005, 2012, 2014).

5 As we shall see, potentialities can either retain their realized form or become formless (the interesting case for an ontology of knowledge). The former is the outcome of pre-determined dialectical processes, the latter of open-ended dialectical processes.

6 The article Carchedi (1975) is one of the first works that stress temporality in the analysis of the labour process. But it is the only work that supports temporalism from a dialectical perspective.

7 In a previous work (Carchedi 2012, 37–38), I questioned whether dialectics applies to the natural world. Kangal (2017) disagreed. I now submit that dialectics does apply to natural phenomena but that it differs radically from the dialectics of the social world.

8 See Carchedi (2012, 39–44) for a more detailed treatment.

9 For example, “the plant, the animal, every cell is at every moment of its life identical with itself and yet becoming distinct from itself, … by a sum of incessant molecular changes … even in inorganic nature identity as such is in reality non-existent” (Engels 1987, 49).

10 There is a branch of formal logic, fuzzy logic, that claims to reproduce human thinking better than classical binary logic because the human brain can reason using vague assertions or claims that involve uncertainties or value judgments (Kosko and Isaka 1993). In this fuzzy area, statements can be both true and false. The point here is quantification; statements are to some extent true and to some extent false, e.g., a statement can be 60% true and 40% false. But then one returns to the binary system. Gerla gives a more formal demonstration that “a fuzzy logic cannot be alternative to classical logic since it is a construct of this logic, and at the same time fuzzy logic is an attempt to extend classical logic” (Gerla 2017, 442). If fuzzy logic is not an alternative to binary logic but an extension of it, fuzzy logic is no more able to approach human thinking than is classical binary logic.

11 Interpretations alternative to that of the Copenhagen school have been formulated, both in the West and in the former Soviet Union (see Cross 1991; Kojevnikov 2013). For example, Blokhintsev in 1944 accepted the CI view, but in 1949 rejected it, arguing instead that the wave-function provided an objective description of an objective phenomenon (Cross 1991, 740). Fock “argued that the wave-function described observer-independent ‘potential possibilities,’ one of which was ‘actualized’ as an objective state when a measurement was made. Thus, he took the controversial step of extending materialism to potential situations” (Cross 1991, 741). In 1955, Lurçat stressed that it was “important to distinguish the physics of the theory from the idealistic philosophy of some physicists” (Cross 1991, 749). We will return to this point in the section below. Modern alternative views are discussed later on.

12 Everett speaks of “a philosophic monstrosity with a ‘reality’ concept for the macroscopic world and denial of the same for the microcosm” (Everett 1957).

13 Lukács speaks of the “irrationalist upsurge in imperialist times” ([1952] 2021, 16).

14 This second part is a revised version of Carchedi (2012, chapter 4, 2014).

15 For Bauchspies, Croissant, and Restivo (2006, 46), knowledge is explained in terms of “networks and connections.” This is similar to the approach in this work inasmuch as it stresses the social determination of knowledge.

16 See Lenin’s use of Taylorist techniques in Carchedi (1977).

17 Gramsci (1971) applied the notion of organic intellectuals only to the representatives of the working class. It is here extended to all classes.

18 Further details and examples can be found in Carchedi (1983).

19 Capital does not have the knowledge necessary to develop the science and techniques it needs. It must therefore direct the collective mental worker to do that. For an analysis of how this is possible, see Carchedi (2012, 246).

20 The reader is referred to Braverman (1974) and to the discussion that followed that publication, known as the Braverman debate. See Carchedi (1989) for details.

21 More realistically, when wear and tear have depleted the objective means of production, new fixed constant capital has to be invested. Even before physical depreciation has completely worn out the fixed constant capital, intense competition means that demand for the replicas falls to the point at which it is no longer profitable to produce them. In the videogame sector, this causes a “high rate of business failures” (Dyer-Witheford and de Peute 2009, 64).

22 Certain positions entail both the coordination of labour and, at the same time, its control. In some cases, it might be impossible to separate the two functions, but analytically this separation can and should be made.

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Notes on contributors

Guglielmo Carchedi

Guglielmo Carchedi is a retired professor at the University of Amsterdam. His research interests are Marxist economics, Marxist sociology and Marxist epistemology. He is the author of many articles and books, among others: On the Economic Identification of Social Classes (Routledge, 1977), For Another Europe (Verso, 2001), Behind the Crisis (Haymarket, 2012), and (with Michael Roberts) The World in Crisis (Haymarket Books, 2018).