Knowledge-Production, Digitalization and the Appropriation of Surplus-Knowledge

Abstract

ABSTRACT According to some commentators, the introduction of digital technologies into the sphere of knowledge-production and the consequent digitalization and computerization of this field have radically changed the nature of knowledge-producing activity and the produced knowledge. At the social level, such a change has allegedly caused the irrelevance of grand narratives and emergence of paralogies or the obsolescence of the labour theory of value, which in its turn signifies the end of capitalism. It is argued that such accounts simply disregard the social form of production of knowledge. The real revolutionary effect of digitalization, in resemblance to the introduction of machinery in large-scale industrial production, is intensification of knowledge-producing labour, which in its turn signifies the various forms of subsumption of knowledge-producing activity under capital and the appropriation of the commonly produced surplus-knowledge by it.