COGNITIVE CAPITALISM

Abstract

In order adequately to define the third type of capitalism that is in the process of formation, we need to bring together three things: a type of accumulation, a mode of production and a specific type of exploitation of living labor. By accumulation we understand the investments that a society makes both via its public authorities and via the behavior of private agents, whether in businesses or in households. Accumulation is thus not reducible to the ‘gross fixed capital’ of the economists. When we refer to a system of accumulation, what we mean is the association of what the regulation school calls a mode of production with a type of accumulation. Whereas industrial capitalism can be characterized by the fact that accumulation was based mainly on machinery and on the organization of manual labor, understood here as the organization of production and the allocation of workers to fixed jobs, cognitive capitalism is a different system of accumulation, in which the accumulation is based on knowledge and creativity, in other words on forms of immaterial investment. In cognitive capitalism, the capture of gains arising from knowledge and innovation is the central issue for accumulation, and it plays a determining role in generating profits.
By cognitive capitalism we mean, then, a mode of accumulation in which the object of accumulation consists mainly of knowledge, which becomes the basic source of value, as well as the principal location of the process of valorization. Issues, such as property rights, positioning in networks, alliances and project management become major institutional and organizational factors. Their role is crucial. The strategies of this capitalism are determined by the quest for a spatial, institutional and organizational positioning likely to increase its capacity for engaging in creative processes and for capturing their benefits. Cognitive capitalism is not only a type of accumulation oriented towards the valorization of knowledge and innovation. It is also a new mode of capitalist production. It would not be accurate to say that our era has become a world of abundance in terms of either material goods or information and knowledge. The fact is that there is still plenty of work for economists, because other forms of scarcity - depletion of scarce resources, non-renewable resources and hard-to-renew resources - are now appearing as a result of ecological disequilibria. But the three key resources that now appear to be scarce are: cognitive attention; time; and what people call ‘care’ (affective attention).
The real challenge is thus to minimize as far as possible this phase during which cognitive capitalism and industrial capitalism can build anti-natural alliances in order to control, restrain or break the power of liberation of the knowledge society. And this will depend on the intensity and quality' of societal pressure - in short, on collective intelligence, once again.