 The "wage/labor relations" in neoliberal cognitive capitalismAntonella Corsani ()
Post-Print from HAL Abstract: I suggest to interpret the present state of capitalism from the point of view of hypothesis of cognitive capitalism. That means a great transformation in the course of long-term dynamics of capitalism, prefiguring the overcoming of logic and modes of valuation and accumulation of capital which were characteristic of industrial capitalism. While in industrial capitalism the production of "goods by goods" prevail in creation of value and in the industrial areas of the "center", in cognitive capitalism, capital moves towards the sphere of production of "knowledge by knowledge" according to unstable borders redefining center and periphery of the global economy. The adjective "cognitive," attached to capitalism, indicates this displacement and a new centrality of the knowledge in the processes of valuation of capital. However, the importance of the scientific knowledge for the accumulation of capital does not establish a novelty of the history of the capitalism: the passage from commercial to industrial capitalism is inseparable from the original link which is formed, from XVII century, between scientific knowledge and production of goods. The link of science and capital is at heart of what some historians called the industrial revolution. Industrial revolution and industrial capitalism are inseparable. However, against any thesis which attributes primary and leading role to scientific knowledge and technological innovations, the industrial capitalism was able to emerge only due to the institutional innovations introduced by the liberal conceptions of the market and the State. Also, the transition towards the cognitive capitalism is inseparable from "great transformation" which established the neoliberal conceptions of the relationship between economy, society and the State. I thus suggest a sketching the features of the neoliberal cognitive capitalism, understood as an agencement of both mode of production and mode of government. This approach allows to grasp the global finance not as exogenous towards the wage/labor relations but as an essential device for the configuration of a new shape of wage/labor relations and to grasp the territory as an institutional mixture, accelerating or slowing down time of this configuration and adopting or inventing local solutions. By wage/labor relations I mean an institutional terrain characterized by modes of arrangement of work and determination of wage, by forms, which are more or less socialized by composition of the income. This relation is also characterized by forms of division of labor and configurations of power inside of business enterprise. Finally, while leaving the theme of the neoliberal mode of government (the first part) and metamorphosis of the wage/labor relations (the second part) I will conclude on specificity of knowledge, which is highly important in cognitive capitalism, and, simultaneously, of modes of control of working process in production of knowledge. Keywords: neoliberal cognitive capitalism; wage/labor relations (search for similar items in EconPapers) Published in Economic Culture of Modern Capitalism, Jun 2012, St.Petersburg, Russia There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it. Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hal:journl:halshs-00684845 Access Statistics for this paper More papers in Post-Print from HAL |
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