Description
Book SynopsisWe live in a time of transition, argues Yann Moulier Boutang. But the irony is that this is not a transition to a new type of society called socialism , as many on the Left had assumed; rather, it is a transition to a new type of capitalism. Socialism has been left behind by a new revolution in our midst.
Trade Review"The most systematic and comprehensive account of the economic position developed by the autonomist school of thought."
Political Studies Review"Valuable for the way it prompts readers into asking uneasy questions about the nature of the economic system we live in."
LSE Politics Blog"What drives contemporary capitalism? Moulier Boutang provides a convincing answer in his account of the rise of a turbocharged complex of practices which he calls cognitive capitalism which is intent on calling the collective intelligence provided by brainpower and computing power to its cause. A theoretical must for anyone who wants to understand the modern world."
Nigel Thrift, University of Warwick "Yann Moulier Boutang presents a bold analysis of the ongoing 'great transformation' of capitalism. Writing from the perspective of the socialization of labor, he offers a systematic examination of the dense, complex, and contradictory relation between emergent modes of capitalist control and appropriation and collective cognitive labor-power expressed through new information and communication technologies. This new terrain of confrontation conceptually and practically subverts our received understandings of labor, property, and value. Relations between material and non-material, mental and manual, economic and social, individual and society are recast in unprecedented ways that transform the conditions and possibilities of social life. Cognitive Capitalism is essential reading."
Dale Tomich, Binghamton University
"This book counters the risk society's negative externalities with the possibility of positive externalities of information. This is cognitive capitalism's new, networked public space, an informational commons. In the terminal crisis of neoliberalism, Moulier Boutang gives us a new critical political economy - and a media theory - of hope."
Scott Lash, Goldsmiths, University of London
Table of ContentsPreface to the English edition
Introduction
Chapter I
The New Frontiers of Political Economy
Chapter II
What cognitive capitalism is not
Chapter III
What is cognitive capitalism?
Chapter IV
New capitalism, new contradictions
Chapter V
The question of social classes and the composition of cognitive capitalism
Chapter VI
Macroeconomic dynamics: going beyond the critique of neoliberalism and financialisation
Chapter VII
Envoi: A Manifesto for the Pollen Society
Chapter VIII
Does the financial crisis sound the knell of a capitalism cognitive that is stillborn?
