Fundamental shift has been occurring today from the economy based on physical resources to the one based on knowledge. The difference in future is likely to be not so much in rules of the capitalist game, but in the equipment used by the players. With the arrival of knowledge-cognitive capitalism the value of immaterial becomes of key importance, becomes value of knowledge. In the paper the author seeks to show (1) Can the new knowledge paradigm helps us to better understand the current crisis of capitalism? (2) How this affects the relation between the capital and the labor?
In the Fordist paradigm the measurment was defined by the content of the labor necessary for the production of merchandise. Since the end of the 70’s the primary force was the endless attempt of companies – demand of their owners and investors – to bring back by different means the high profit rates. Reduction in the cost of labour, attacks on syndicates, automatization and robotization of entire labour processes, delocalization in countries with low wages, precarization were the main sugestions. Obviously there are structural reasons in the firm strategies of putting labour in precarious condition.
However, today the main source of the creativity and value now resides in creativity poses by the knowledge workers and not by physical capital. It is becoming apparent that ownership of the means of production in the knowledge economy is going to be less straightforward than in the past since most valuable assets resides in the brains of the workers. However, knowledge is becoming through the processes of socialization increasingly socially contingent. It is materialized in machinery, teamwork and production process in the firm. Therefore, knowledge ceases to become only a private commodity. Knowledge has become with individual\'s inclusion into the organization and society a common good as well. In this context the old dilemma between labor and capital reaperas in the new form. Capital is obviously loosing control and it has become dependent on the knowledge of laborers and on external providers of knowledge (e.g. public research, mass education).
The authors believe that since knowledge is also the common good, produced by social cooperation, the value cannot simply be the reward of the investment in the physical capital stock. Expropriation of the spillover knowledge effects is no longer confined within the individual or firm but extended to the whole society as well. However, the financial markets represent the privatisation of the reproductive sphere of life in a way that they take all the rent from social cooperation, general intellect and collective inteligence. Capitalistic accumulation is reproduced in the subsumption of the common, it means that crisis becomes a permanent process. The explosion of the crisis was the result of contradictions between social character of production and the private character of appropriation.
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Datum:
23.06.2011.
Br. otvaranja:
716
