The term “cognitive capitalism” has been proposed as a critical alternative to
overenthusiastic conceptions of the information society, the new economy, or
an economy based on knowledge and information. Theorists using this term
have paid more attention to work relations, exploitation, and distribution of
surplus value. Those coming from the tradition of Antonio Negri have also
been looking for a new revolutionary subject – not the industrial worker any
more but the information worker or “cognitive worker.”
The question of the revolutionary subject has often been closely connected
to the question of a “tendency.” Marx claimed that the proletariat was the
class with the potential to abolish all classes. We know that at the time when
Marx made this claim the proletariat in Europe was a minority. In fact, other
19th century revolutionaries, like the Russian Narodniki, rejected Marx’s
claim and instead placed peasants in the center of revolutionary theory.
Marxists could argue, however, that the proletariat expressed a tendency
for two reasons: first, it was sure to become a majority in the future; and
second, it expressed the characteristics of the new dominant mode of social
organization – capitalism – and therefore moved into the centre of social
conflict, even though it was still a minority.
The problem of the relative importance of “cognitive workers” or “information
workers” in the present or in the future might be easier to tackle if it was
quite clear who these workers actually are. Unfortunately, the concept has
been used in a rather fuzzy way. Sometimes it refers to scientists, journalists,
teachers, artists and maybe engineers, sometimes also to librarians or
call-centre agents, sometimes to everyone working in what the economic
statistics call “services.” All of these notions are problematic. Academic
professions have already existed long before anyone started talking about
“cognitive capitalism.” Of course, one might argue that with the expansion
of higher education they have become more significant for capitalism. On
closer observation, however, it would turn out that many higher education
graduates end up working in places like call-centres where work is hardly
more “cognitive” than in a factory. On the other hand, the statistical
expansion of “services” is often explained not by the disappearance of
industrial production but by statistical effects: the organizational break-up of
the big factories of the mid-20th century has led to situations where fork-lift
drivers now work for transport companies, canteen workers for catering
companies, and assembly-line workers for temporary work agencies. Thirty
years ago they all would simply have worked for the company owning
the factory. Thirty years ago the statistics would have counted them as
industrial workers, now they count as service workers, although materially
their work has not changed. But even according to the official statistics, we
only need to look beyond Europe and North America to find that worldwide
the total number of industrial workers as well as the share of industrial
production have been increasing. And even in the world’s “North” the trend is
not quite clear: industrial production is still fundamental for countries such
as Germany, Japan or Poland. In Poland over 28 percent of all the employed
persons work in the industrial sector, again not counting the hundreds of
thousands of – usually young – workers from temporary work agencies
standing at Polish assembly lines.
More than anything, the concepts of “new economy,” “information society”
or “cognitive capitalism” have been dominating public discourse, while
simultaneously industrial work has disappeared from public imagination.
In 1997, two French sociologists Stéphane Beaud and Michel Pialoux asked
their students about the number of industrial workers in France. After
a long silence these third-year sociology students first said 200,000 and
then after some discussion arrived at 1.5 million. In reality there were 6.5
million industry workers. This anecdote illustrates the phenomenon of
understating the number of workers. According to Beaud and Pialoux, this
phenomenon is closely connected to the defeat of worldwide movements of
industrial workers in the 1960s and 1970s (reaching into the 1980s in the
case of Poland). The break-up and segmentation of the big factory, which
was the power base of the industrial workers, has been complemented by
a discursive turn which has made industrial work and industrial workers
invisible, although they continue to be central for the reproduction of
capitalism. Instead, the discursive sphere has been filled by talk about the
information and knowledge economy.
It is certainly attractive for academics and artists to identify with a future
“tendency” of capitalism. Not only can we feel important for the development
and reproduction of our contemporary society, but also this view puts us in
the driver’s seat of any future social change.
If something actually has changed, what if i
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