This claim is based on their retreat from a concern with the historical specificity of capitalism, the role of form analysis as critique, and the value theory of labour (and what these categories imply for class struggle and capitalist competition) toward a concern with technological change, the role of the network form as metaphor, and knowledge work and/or a political theory of value (and what these categories imply for social resistance and capitalist rivalry).
#MONEYHOUSE INFORMATIONSKAPITALISMUS UPDATE#
The second claim is that, in seeking to move beyond and/or to update Marx in analysing the current situation, both studies move backwards in key respects rather than forwards. This claim is based on the theoretical problematics and textual strategies that underpin these studies rather than their authors’ intentions, declarations, or use of empirical material. The first claim is that these studies tend respectively towards a rightwing and leftwing celebration of (or, at least, apologia for) the new economy and network state associated with contemporary, global capitalism. It is on the basis of one such reading that I will advance two main claims.
Both studies can nonetheless be read on their own and in their own terms. Some key arguments in these texts must therefore be ignored and my critique cannot benefit from putting them into their authorial contexts. It does not provide detailed exegeses of either text in its entirety nor relate them to their respective authors’ wider body of work. This article is more modest in its ambition and aims merely to compare and contrast some key arguments in the two texts. Although less student-friendly in style, Hardt and Negri’s scholarly volume on the apparently seamless integration of global economic and political power in Empire also became an international best seller and was heralded as offering ‘the next big idea’. Castells’ trilogy on The Information Age has been acclaimed as a persuasive interpretation of the contemporary economy, society, and culture and is widely used in teaching. Two recent major studies by Manuel Castells and Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri have addressed the future of the capitalist economy, the modern state, and social struggles in the light of new information and communication technologies, new paradigms of production, and the dynamic of globalization. The imperial machine, far from eliminating master narratives, actually produces and reproduces them (ideological master narratives in particular) in order to validate and celebrate its own power īecause it is so difficult to grasp the complexity of a worldwide network of systemic interactions, one can understand the success of simple ideological arguments aimed at deducing all observed effects from a fundamental cause as the primary source of all contradictions ‘Informational capitalism and empire: the post-Marxist celebration of US hegemony in a new world order, Studies in Political Economy, 71-72, 39-58, 2003. This on-line version is the pre-copyedited, preprint version.
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