A Post-Marxist Reading of the Knowledge Economy: Open Knowledge Production, Cognitive Capitalism, and Knowledge Socialism

Abstract

This paper starts from Marx’s “Fragment on Machines” in the Grund-risse, that sees workers as linkages in the “automatic system of machines” of “intelligent capitalism.” The paper provides a brief characterization of the concept of knowledge economy as it first developed in the sociological accounts of post-industrial society in the 1960s by Touraine (1969) and Bell (1972). The OECD’s (1996a) influential formulation of the “knowledge-based economy” developed as a combination human capital theory (Becker, 1962), “the economics of ideas” based on endogenous growth theory (Romer, 1990), and national innovation (Lundvall, 1992). In the second part, the paper focuses diverging forms of the knowledge economy, including (i) the creative knowledge economy and the learning economy, (ii) open knowledge production and open science economy, and (iii) cognitive capitalism and (iv) knowledge socialism.