The Karl Marx Problem in Contemporary New Media Economy: A Critique of Christian Fuchs’ Account

This article focuses on five flaws of Christian Fuchs’ approach of Web 2.0 economy. Here, Fuchs’ views on immaterial production, productivity of labor, commodification of users’ data, underestimation of financial aspects of digital economy, and the violation of Marx’s laws of value production, rate of exploitation, fall tendency of profit rate, and overproduction crisis are put into question. This article defends the thesis Fuchs fails to apply Marxian political economy to the contemporary phenomena of Web 2.0 economy. It is possible to avoid Fuchs’ errors, and another approach is possible to remake Marxism relevant for an analysis of the new media econom

Property and the Construction of the Information Economy: A Neo-Polanyian Ontology

This chapter considers the changing roles and forms of information property within the political economy of informational capitalism. I begin with an overview of the principal methods used in law and in media and communications studies, respectively, to study information property, considering both what each disciplinary cluster traditionally has emphasized and newer, hybrid directions. Next, I develop a three-part framework for analyzing information property as a set of emergent institutional formations that both work to produce and are themselves produced by other evolving political-economic arrangements. The framework considers patterns of change in existing legal institutions for intellectual property, the ongoing dematerialization and datafication of both traditional and new inputs to economic production, and the emerging logics of economic organization within which information resources (and property rights) are mobilized. Finally, I consider the implications of that framing for two very different contemporary information property projects, one relating to data flows within platform-based business models and the other to information commons

Internet as an ideology nationalistic discourses and multiple subject positions of Chinese internet workers

Ideology works. This article examines how the Internet as a capital actor has become a nationalist ideology in China. Disclosing how nationalism serves to facilitate the expansion of China-based Internet platforms in the age of informational capitalism, we directly confront the Chinese Internet as an ideology apparatus that works to fulfill a dual logic of capital and territorial power. This article contributes to the study of three types of Chinese Internet workers: programmers, white-collar employees (excluding programmers), and assembly-line workers, and focuses on how nationalist discourses are created, which enthrall but at the same time are questioned by different workers who help fabricate nationalism as well as challenge it. We conceptualize topos of threat and referential strategy of collectivization as cultural and media tactics, driven by the nationalistic sentiments that form part of the “common sense” of Chinese users. We further analyze the multiple subject positions of Chinese Internet workers into hegemonic position, negotiated position, and oppositional position to discover the complexity of labor subjectivity which may create discrepancy or sometimes even challenge the Chinese Internet as an ideology. This study sheds light on how subject positions could disrupt a homogenous process of merging nationalism with populist sentiments, a conservative ideology that is prevalent in today’s China

Sean Sayers' Concept of Immaterial Labor and the Information Economy

The concept “immaterial labor” is one of the most hotly debated topics in contemporary social theory. In his 2007 work The Concept of Labor: Marx and His Critics, Sean Sayers offered an extensive response to several critical redefinitions of labor (Habermas, Benton, Arendt) and immaterial labor (Lazzarato, Hardt and Negri). Sayers returned to the subject in his more recent book, Marx and Alienation: Essays on Hegelian Themes.1 As one of the few accounts that contests the contemporary Marx critics with regard to fundamental concepts such as labor and immaterial labor, his contribution should be taken seriously

The Informational Foundation of the Human Act

This book is the result of a collective research effort performed during many years in both Sweden and Spain. It is the result of attempting to develop a new field of research that could we denominate «human act informatics.» The goal has been to use the technologies of information to the study of the human act in general, including embodied acts and disembodied acts. The book presents a theory of the quantification of the informational value of human acts as order, opposing the living order against entropy. We present acting as a set of decisions and choices aimed to create order and to impose Modernity. Karl Popper’s frequency theory of probability is applied to characterize human acts regarding their degree of freedom and to set up a scale of order in human decisions. The traditional theory of economics and social science characterize the human act as rational, utilitarian and ethical. Our results emphasize that the unique significance of an act lies in its capacity to generate order. An adequate methodology is then presented to defend such hypothesis according to which, the rationality respective irrationality of acting, is in fact only a function of the act’s organizational capacity. From this perspective, it has been necessary to define «order» respective «disorder» as operative concepts that allowed the comparison of the organizational differences generated by each kind of act. According to the presented conclusions, the spontaneity of living, as unconscious thinking, dreaming, loving, etc. and the mainstream of the human acts, are utilitarian, but in an irrational way; they are rooted in unconscious drifts and therefore must be considered irrational-utility acts

Transnational Corporations - Key Enablers Globalization

Romania, Romanian economic agents have become in recent years present ever more active in world trade. Association agreements agreed with the European Union and beyond, opening Romania and Romanian participants in international trade relations, prospects of major deep involvement in the world flow of values and knowledge. But it also means aligning our trade laws to European legislation profile, with priority to Community law and assimilation regulatory provisions of international conventions ratified across Romania as part of national law rules. Transnational corporations, which operate in more than one country or nation at a time, have become some of the most powerful economic and political entities in the world today. The United Nations has justly described these corporations as “the productive core of the globalizing world economy.globalization, transnational corporations, global village, ecommerce

FROM “PRE-ECONOMICS” TO THE DEVELOPED INFORMATIONAL ECONOMY – A SCIENTIFIC REVIEW

During the 5000 years of economic evolution (considering the oldest textbooks available today) that produced an organic evolution and economic entanglement, but which led in our days at a turning point for the global economy. Why choose to present the economic spark from the beginning of the first recorded writings? Because we deal with the big picture – a framework that represents “life” and the economy that isn’t loaded with the evolution of ethics, moral and informational, the initial picture shows the purity of the early civilization, naked by the actual’ modernist add-ons. This research paper is an overview of the main ideas that molded the actual economic life by creating a bridge between the “pre-economy” period when trade was based on thievery or unvalued exchange till the development of today’s economic science, that has as defining point Adam Smith and his view on economic development through the its power engine – self interest and the human being.human development, business cycle, utility, enlightenment, consumption, self-interest

Implications of the Information and Communication Technology Development on Firms’ Performance

The society towards we are heading is and will be an Informational Society-Knowledge Society (IS-KS). This mainly relies on using Information and Communication Technology (ICT). The syntagm which designates the new society particularly points out the means on which it will rely on its progress, which, at first sight, gives the impression of one technicist, unilateral name. The syntagms which have defined societies until now, contain a key-word (slavery, feudalism, capitalism), which synthesizes a scale of possible social situations in which people, individual or/and in group, are inevitably placed, according to certain conditions, making a specific economic-social structure. Nowadays, society is defined by the syntagm “new economy”, which clearly presents the message of some profound changes which are taking place. Of course, the new economy supposes a lasting growth, but it induces another approach of this lasting growth, different from the one which was made so far.

Fictitious Commodities: A Theory of Intellectual Property Inspired by Karl Polanyi’s “Great Transformation”

The puzzle this Article addresses is this: how can it be explained that intellectual property (IP) laws and IP rights (IPRs) have continuously grown in number and expanded in scope, territorial reach, and duration, while at the same time have been contested, much more so than other branches of property law? This Article offers an explanation for this peculiar dynamic by applying insights and concepts of Karl Polanyi’s book “The Great Transformation” to IP. It reconstructs and then applies core Polanyian concepts of commodification (infra, II), fictitious commodities (infra, III), and countermovements (infra, IV) to the three main areas of IP, namely copyrights, patents, and trademarks, as they have evolved and are currently regulated in international and selected national laws. The analysis reveals that the history of IP can be told in terms of Polanyi’s famous “double movement”: efforts to commodify virtually every reproducible input/output face equally persistent opposition, which points out the disruption that IPRs inflict upon communication and competition. Whereas IPRs dis-embed informational artefacts from the uninterrupted flow of societal exchange and subject them to prior authorization requirements, IP countermovements call for their re-embedding, i.e. their usability irrespective of authorization. From a normative perspective, a Polanyian perspective on IP suggests that IP law and policy should ensure that market-based transactions coexist with non-market modes of accessing and sharing information so that authors, inventors, and other entrepreneurs have as many options as possibl