Knowledge Economy and the Commons

Introduction

Knowledge is increasingly imagined and projected as a common good. Different political and academic disciplines now refer to the rise of “knowledge-based economies.” Considered as a resource, knowledge exhibits all the features of a common good, in terms of its production and use. In fact, the processes of knowledge production and use are increasingly intertwined. This is because knowledge as a resource is an inexorable component of social relations. Furthermore, the relationship between economy and knowledge has grown over time; economy is becoming a cognitive process in which value creation is not so much the result of the transformation of material resources through a work process involving the use of physical energy, but rather through thoughts, emotions, and identities. But to what extent does the confluence between these two processes allow us to consider new social and economic realities?

This article explores the extent to which the enhancement of knowledge as a common good, and the articulation of an economy that supports its development in cognitive processes, can open up new possibilities to improve the living conditions of human societies. To develop this perspective, it is necessary to problematize conventional approaches that address both processes of production and use. First, we will reconsider the theories and governance mechanisms related to the commons. In this regard, our interest is not so much the best management strategy to ensure the preservation of a common resource, but to improve our understanding of how the social construction of knowledge as a common good translates into higher levels of wellness and quality of life. Second, it is essential to perform a theoretical critique of conventional approaches to the knowledge economy. This is based on a change in the departing hypothesis: that we should stop considering knowledge as a resource hampered by imperfections, which requires “improvement” by way of conversion into either public or private good. This then necessitates an analytically coherent account of how and in what ways work processes, production, and consumption are reliant on knowledge.

To address these issues, we draw on the works of Rullani (2004) on the concept of creativity and value in the knowledge economy, of Lazzarato (2002) on the economic psychology of Gabriel Tarde, and of Hardt and Negri (2009) on the new commons. The first two sections will function as a dialogue between the above authors, so that the theoretical underpinnings of the governance of the knowledge commons aimed at improving the living conditions of humanity can be laid down. To further advance this concept of governance, it is necessary to analyze its main challenge and obstacle: the financialization of economy and the neoliberalization of governance based on the expropriation and privatization of common goods (Marazzi 2010; Rose 1996). Ultimately, the purpose of this paper is to define a political strategy consistent with the development of a diffuse knowledge economy that promotes cognitive mediations to articulate heterogeneous communities into non-hierarchical meshworks.

1. The Social Construction of Knowledge as Common Good

In examining how a resource such as knowledge—that diverges from the defining traits of the traditional commons—can be governed, Hess and Ostrom state that “the costs of sustaining large and diverse resources are much higher than when governing small and relatively homogeneous resources,” because “when a resource is large and complex, users may lack a common understanding of resource dynamics, and they frequently have substantially diverse interests” (2007: 44). They consider that the institutional analysis and development (IAD) framework can be used “to analyze dynamic situations where individuals develop new norms, new rules, and new physical technologies” (2007: 44). Taking on the challenge of addressing these situations, they acknowledge that studying them is “very important for an understanding of the knowledge commons given the fast rate of change related to the physical world, the rules that are crafted to cope with new situations, and the enlarged community of producers and users” (2007: 41-42).

However, Hess and Ostrom do not take into account the differences between both kinds of commons to question the validity of the IAD framework. In general, they argue that the “potential problems in the use, governance, and sustainability of a commons can be caused by some characteristic human behaviors that lead to social dilemmas such as competition for use, free riding, and over-harvesting” (2007: 5). For them, the vulnerability to social dilemmas is the key to identify a shared resource as a common good. In fact, they consider that “typical threats to knowledge commons are commodification or enclosure, pollution and degradation, and nonsustainability” (2007: 5). By framing the commons in terms of economic and rational behavior characteristic of the homo economicus, Hess and Ostrom preclude the emergence of alternative forms of commons management. In this framework, the analytical treatment of the knowledge commons rests on two problematic assumptions. First, that common resources, however dynamic and changing, are a “given.” Second, that the function of communities is reactive: they adapt their rules to the quickly changing circumstances of the knowledge commons. Hardt and Negri (2009) also distinguish two kinds of commons, but from a different standpoint. They refer, on the one hand, to the wealth of the material world that is often claimed as a heritage of humanity to be shared. On the other, they consider as common goods the results of production derived from social interaction, e.g. knowledge, codes, information, language, or affect. This perspective “does not position humanity separate from nature, as either its exploiter or its custodian, but focuses rather on the practices of interaction, care, and cohabitation in a common world, promoting the beneficial and limiting the detrimental forms of the common” (Hardt and Negri 2009: viii).

In this conception, the commons are not necessarily a given. Accordingly, the debate can move beyond the choice of appropriate governance mechanisms to preserve these resources. What matters is no longer to identify the most appropriate rules to address social dilemmas that can extinguish these resources, but to explain the wide variety of complex processes involved in the social construction of these commons. In fact, knowledge production is not constrained by the logic of scarcity—that tends to subordinate the creation of the new (invention) to that which already exists (repetition)—but rather by all the social barriers limiting the social ability to share and exchange.

The social construction of knowledge commons results from a process of cooperation that exceeds the division of labor. This process brings together different forms of acting together. In it, strict business activities are just one of the possible modes of engagement in social cooperation. According to Tarde, the creation of new forms of knowledge is based on the principle of cooperative multiplicity, whereby new desires and common beliefs form a wide process of social interaction that takes place in the realms of economics, science, aesthetics, and the media (Lazzarato 2002: 148). The dynamic and active principle of this social construction is the cooperation between brains (or between different forms of social desire, to avoid the anatomic metaphor). Actually, the “inter-psychology” developed by Tarde implies a new understanding of the social forces, their forms of cooperation and coordination, which challenges directly the centrality of the division of labor and the market. The foundation of cooperation does not reside in capital or work, but in some prior, a “primitive social fact”: the multiplicity of social relations between creative brains.

Inventions do not come out of nowhere; they always result from processes of co-production involving a series of brain forces that are not functionally subordinated to the reproduction of capital or labor. Inventions result from an encounter and collaboration between multiple flows of ideas, habits, behaviors, perceptions, affects, and sensations that are rearranged in novel ways. For Schumpeter (1934), the invention of a product, a technique, or a new form of organization is the result of the agency of great men and ideas. Instead, Tarde starts from the cooperation between a multitude of social actors and their infinitesimal contributions in terms of creativity and invention. In fact, individual genius should be understood within the logic of a dynamic multiplicity of heterogeneous contributions of the multitude (Lazzarato 2002).

Even if these goods are subject to private or public property as a way of avoiding the social dilemmas that would lead to their hypothetical exhaustion, their production would be negatively affected thereof, because their capacities of expression, creativity, and communication would be curtailed. The first models designed to respond to social dilemmas, such as the logic of collective action (Olson 1965), the tragedy of the commons (Hardin 1968), or the prisoner’s dilemma (Cunningham 1967), opt for governance mechanisms that lead to recurring crises of underproduction in such commons (Hess and Ostrom 2007: 10-12). In fact, Foray (2004: 121-122) recognizes that certain processes of control from the sphere of the market and the public sector can result in scenarios of knowledge production where tragic dynamics prevail. For instance, Heller and Geisler (1998) discuss how in the field of biomedical research, excessive control of intellectual property rights, or the overuse of patents, have involved the underuse of scientific knowledge.

According to Lazzarato (2002: 149), knowledge escapes the logic of scarcity and economic measurement for two reasons. First, because knowledge is the outcome of a collaborative process of production, independent and autonomous from the division of labor. Both ontologically and historically, knowledge results from the action of networks of assembled brains, and not exclusively from the processes of socialization occurring in the bounded context of the enterprise and the market. The linguistic, aesthetic, and scientific creations, public opinion, affects, and emotions, imply forms of acting together that cannot be reduced to the logic of material production or the market. Neither the hierarchical logic of the division of labor can be imposed to control the development of inventions, nor can the market replace the collective devices that allow for the development of languages, know-how, passions, and communication. These multiple forms of knowledge production are combined in various forms with the structures of capital. However, even when the knowledge commons are expropriated and artificial scarcity is imposed by capitalist elites limiting the public use of knowledge, the private appropriation remains always partial. This is so because the properties of knowledge cannot be only fixed in the material vector and in property relations, but are also retained by the social actors involved, which makes possible new inventions.

Second, because interbrain cooperation operates from the principle of creation rather than from reproduction. Unlike the issue raised by Smith (2000 [1776]) in his famous example of the pin factory, the creation of the new is ontologically incommensurable in the conditions of its own production. In a similar fashion, in artistic, linguistic, intellectual, social, and media productions, the creation of the new is ontologically incommensurable in the conditions that existed before its production: there are no pre-existing factors that explain the emergence of the new. We need to leave the factory to understand the creation of knowledge.

For Rullani (2004: 289-291), knowledge is characterized by a specific quality: when used it is not consumed or exhausted, and remains available for other uses that in turn multiply its potential future use. On one hand, this is because the reproduction of knowledge does not undergo the same operations as in the original process of knowledge production. Thus, the difference between the costs of production and reproduction is closely related to the intrinsic characteristics of knowledge, whose generation involves a rupture between the past and the future. Furthermore, all knowledge contains a potentially infinite reservoir of use value, which corresponds to all potential future uses. In short, the more knowledge spreads, the more it grows in value. Any new use involves a higher degree of usefulness with little or no costs of reproduction. Put another way: knowledge is valued when it spreads, and is common. This understanding moves beyond the orthodox attempt to deal with the increasing value of knowledge through the concept of network externalities, which still considers that the creation of knowledge is bounded to the productive unit.

The knowledge economy does not entail a process of dematerialization of value, rather, it generates value in the “friction between the free reproducibility of knowledge and the non-reproducibility of the material” (Pasquinelli 2010: 296). It is no longer enough to transform the raw material into a product, but it is necessary to endow material products with meanings that make them desirable and sharable by consumers. The creation of value rests less in the functional improvement of a material product, but in the creation of meaningful experiences that converge with the collective desires of people. For instance, a CD must be physically produced and consumed; we need our bodies and our time to produce and consume music. When the CD-form is dematerialized by the evolution of digital technology, the only change in terms of material production is that the body and the time of the artist are subject to a stronger competition, which forces them to work more intensely on the provision of new and changing meanings to the product. At the material level, however, new technological devices such as iPods or MP3s thrive and increase profits. Thus, there is always an asymmetry between immaterial and material production, because value is accumulated on the immaterial level but the profits are made on the material one (Pasquinelli 2008: 150-51).

Knowledge creates value, drawing on the existing social interaction, due to the characteristics of its production (Lazzarato 2002) and propagation (Rullani 2004). That is, value does not simply derive from an investment of capital (Fumagalli 2007: 21-22). From this standpoint, knowledge cannot be considered another factor of production that can be simply added to capital, labor, and land. Instead, knowledge can be considered an anti-economic resource, a non-resource or, as Rullani puts it, a “perfectly imperfect” resource. The economic features of knowledge make this clear (Rullani 2004). First, knowledge is not a scarce resource; its potential users do not compete among themselves because its consumption is not characterized by rivalry. Second, it is not a divisible resource, which makes it difficult to allocate costs and benefits for each knowledge producer and user. Third, it is a non-excludable good, because it is difficult to prevent non-owners from using knowledge by means of copy or imitation. Finally, knowledge is not instrumental, because the cognitive processes involved in its production and propagation also act upon the purposes and identities of the subjects concerned. Knowledge is not a means to satisfy some pre-given ends. On the contrary, knowledge is a self-reflexive resource that transforms its own premises in the process of propagation.

These features make knowledge a common good par excellence, situated in a different and autonomous plane to the private and public spheres (Hardt and Negri 2009: 281). In reality, knowledge is a “rebel” resource, hardly tamed under the capitalist order of production and the state. This has to do with the process of subjectivation of knowledge in society. On the one hand, the human perception that emerges in the production of knowledge differs from the experience of producing other commodities. Although knowledge production involves discipline and high opportunity costs, knowledge producers are not solely motivated by the economic compensation that work will entail. Rather, the production of knowledge, as with cultural and artistic production, usually brings satisfaction for the subjects involved beyond economic remuneration (which, in many cases, does not even exist). This also rests on the common assumption that the potential uses of knowledge are severed when they are enclosed and appropriated privately. In this regard, Akbulut and Soylu (2013) provide some interesting reflections on the construction of Gezi Park in Istanbul as a common good and its relation to knowledge, while Harvey (2012: 67-89) addresses the development of urban commons from a similar perspective. Social groups develop emotions and values that are not subordinated to the logic of economic valorization, but can decisively influence it. For example, aesthetic and creative workers can establish links between territories and global market dynamics, facilitating the production of certain elements that satisfy and connect with popular desires. In addition, they can produce immaterial meanings that increase the value of the material vector, such as making documentaries about wine that have a greater impact in the increase of the added values of wine than its organoleptic qualities.

Therefore, the social construction of knowledge as a common good is grounded on a very different logic to that of the traditional commons. In the latter, the maximization of value is achieved by exploiting a resource at a similar rate to its capabilities of reproduction. In some cases, when resources are non-renewable, or when renewable resources have been overexploited—such as with whaling—the best option might be putting a halt to its exploitation. Instead, the logic is reversed with knowledge: the maximization of value is reached when it is spread and its uses are multiplied as much as possible. Thus, although knowledge can hardly be defined as a common good in traditional terms, the underlying ideas concerning its use and the practices adopted for its production underpin its social construction as a common good. Moreover, the production and use of knowledge are increasingly intertwined in practices and experiences that mark knowledge as a component of social relations. Thus, knowledge is not constructed as a common good by property rights provisions governing social dilemmas that may jeopardize its conservation (David 2001; Rose 1986), but rather through the patterns of use and social relations arising from the practices and experiences associated with its production and use. This includes, for instance, the qualities of a city that emerge from social practices in its various spaces (Harvey 2012). Thus, a city park can become a common good depending on the practices developed by the social actors involved in its use. The park can be used as a common garden by the neighbors, or conversely, exploited by real estate speculators to increase the prices of nearby houses. Similarly, a street can be used for strolling and promoting social interaction or jammed with cars and polluted.

2. The Theoretical Challenges of Knowledge-based Economies

Although the relation between knowledge and economy is increasingly tight, the incorporation of knowledge in the theoretical framework of economy is problematic and contradictory, and even contains glaring omissions.

3. Moving Towards a New Framework for the Governance of the Commons

Two theoretical remarks are essential in the development of new strategies of commons management. On the one hand, the production of knowledge builds on a social process of cooperation between multiple social actors and their specific beliefs and desires, always assembled in novel forms. Moreover, the process of knowledge valorization is the result of its own creative propagation. The process of propagation is underpinned by shared common cultural and social values, as well as by the coordination mechanisms of the market and the division of labor.

Consequently, knowledge emerges and spreads as a diffuse and distributed phenomenon in society conceived as an open system. The diffuse and distributed character of knowledge cannot be considered as something to be controlled through interventions “establishing something like command outposts by which private and/or state agencies monitor and regulate social production processes through various techniques of discipline, surveillance, and monitoring” (Hardt and Negri 2009: 144) in the context of technocapitalism (Suarez-Villa 2009). From our epistemological standpoint, the maximization of knowledge production is more related to extensive processes of diffusion and socialization than with processes of intensification and enclosure, such as clusters, business incubators, scientific or technological parks. Notwithstanding this fact, most orthodox governance paradigms seek to create closed circuits of intensive knowledge. In some cases, it is considered obvious that knowledge is generated by private companies and, from there, it may spill into other spheres. Accordingly, these governance paradigms highlight the need to protect and compensate companies that concentrate the production of knowledge (Foray 2006). In other cases, it is recognized that the generation of knowledge can rely on external economies (Dunning 2002; Lundvall 1992). When this occurs, strategies of territorial clustering are developed to support companies in their attempt to attract such external economies to their advantage (Porter 1998).

In both cases, capitalist elites are increasingly turning to strategies based on rent in order to transform into profit the value produced by the knowledge commons (Vercellone 2008). Thus, they preclude the generation of a higher overall value, which would derive from the propagation of knowledge throughout the territory (Magnaghi 2010). In return, however, capitalist elites have a simpler and more direct form of value extraction, because closed circuits enable them to generate scarcity artificially, and to control the process of production. Although strategies of rent extraction are not a historical novelty (Braudel 1982), they have changed under anthropogenetic capitalism and have thus affected the logic of economic governance (Marazzi 2010).

As Harvey (2002) points out, neoliberalism has not led to an expansion of the value creation capabilities within companies. To explain this, “economists are recognizing the increasing importance of factors external to capital because … capital is increasingly external to the productive process and the generation of wealth” (Hardt and Negri 2009: 141). Thus, the intrinsic relation described by Foucault (2002) between elite power structures and the privileged production of certain forms of knowledge becomes more complex. Rather than focusing on the establishment of disciplinary regimes connected with specific knowledge productions, the elites in cognitive economies focus on the appropriation of the knowledge produced by social cooperation. For Hardt and Negri (2009), capitalism captures the common produced autonomously by society.

Today, capital and entrepreneurship increasingly focus on “capture” of already existing values rather than on their invention or production. Consider, for example, how peer production commons such as open source software are increasingly harnessed by firms (Benkler 2002), the corporate focus on the expansion of copyrights over the production of the new (Perelman 2003), the innovative processes amongst consumers aside from the firm (Oliveira and von Hippel 2011), or the need to develop copyleft licenses to prevent corporations from prohibiting knowledge produced on the basis of common cooperation in different material and digital realms where corporations extract value (Lerner and Tirole 2005; O’Mahony 2003; Perlin 2012).

In our view, the production of knowledge is an ambivalent, dynamic, and bi-directional process whereby capitalism becomes increasingly parasitic and the workforce increasingly autonomous. For Serres (1982), these parasitic dynamics do not extract surplus via a direct profit from labor and the organization of the productive sphere, but through the extraction of rents that allocate surpluses to other economic entities. Parasitic rents favor stronger intellectual property rights and patents, but are most clearly applied to the digital sphere. As Pasquinelli argues, in the internet economy

users are placed in charge of content production and web management, but do not share any profit. Major corporations like Google, for instance, make money over the attention economy of user-generated content with its services Adsense and Adwords [but only] a small part of the value is shared with users. (2008: 93)

To understand these new forms of extraction of common surplus, it is necessary to shed light on the origins of common wealth. Indeed, the common can be external from the perspective of the mechanisms of capitalist organization, but it is completely internal to the processes of biopolitical production (Hardt and Negri 2009).

In the abstraction, capture, and privatization of the common wealth, the financialization of the economy plays a decisive role (Marazzi 2010). The significance of this process can only be understood if we look at the ways in which the logic of financial markets has changed. Currently, the financialization process cannot be conceived merely as a process of deviation of increasingly larger amounts of surplus value and collective savings towards the elites. Financialization also represents a form of value accumulation, symmetric to the new processes of value production. Under the anthropogenetic paradigm, value cannot be exploited by the traditional forms of value extraction of Fordism or industrial capitalism. Only the financialization of economy enables capital to burst invasively in all areas of life, with a wide range of instruments for the privatization of common value generated in social life. In the field of knowledge, these instruments have a clear impact, from productive to usage processes. Thus, venture capital funds are created to finance scientific-technological research, crowdsourcing strategies are developed, while markets and market indexes are created in connection to knowledge-based economies. At the same time, traditional systems of enclosure, such as patents or intellectual property rights, are subsumed more tightly to the logic of financial valorization. For example, the share price evolution of a pharmaceutical company may be conditioned by the recognition of a patent or the approval of a certain drug by the respective authorities.

The financialization of economy has consequences in terms of governance as well. Because of its focus on redistribution rather than production, the self-referential dynamics that increasingly occur in financial markets result in fictitious profits and speculative bubbles (Marazzi 2010). This generates a context of continuous financial instability that creates more uncertainty and distortions in the dynamics of emerging knowledge economies, such as became clear in the dotcom crisis at the beginning of the century. These systematic transformations require us to reframe the debate on the governance of the commons in general, but particularly of the knowledge commons. In this context, Harvey (2012) realizes that the intensification of capitalist exploitation under neoliberalism renders insufficient the governance mechanisms analyzed by Ostrom to address the management of new commons. For him, leftist approaches should have fewer qualms about defending the adoption of exogenous state hierarchies to manage common goods in larger scales than the local cases studied by Ostrom. He advocates a symmetric model to the capitalist enclosures, but from a common perspective. When the scale of the common good is large, Harvey considers that the processes of communalization cannot be sustained over time relying solely on the spontaneous logic of social relatedness, although he recognizes that the latter underpins the creation of social commons.

Harvey’s timely approach raises a number of questions. First, whether it is true that Ostrom rejects the imposition of exogenous political authorities, and rules out the adoption of any other type of hierarchy for managing common goods. Second, in addition to avoiding the reduction of the properties of hierarchies to their ability to coerce the community, we face the question of whether all social order in systemic stability is grounded solely on hierarchical structures. Finally, we wonder if the problem is the scale of the goods to be managed or, as Marazzi (2010) notes, the challenges posed by neoliberal financialization, and the need to develop alternative strategies to appropriate the value generated in common.

Regarding the first question, it is true that Hess and Ostrom (2007) limit their theoretical perspective to argue that the fluidity and changing nature of the rules governing the knowledge commons represent a drawback for community management. Ostrom (1990) considers that the governance of the commons is more sustainable when the management of these resources is territorially bounded and the rules do not change, i.e. when they are operated as routines. From the perspective of traditional commons, this position is justified: it would be easier to protect common resources and sustain processes of communalization when these circumstances apply. What if, however, we reverse this argument? Perhaps, these bounded routines of reproduction render more stable the management of traditional commons because they ease the articulation of hierarchical and coercive structures within communities (Nelson and Winter 1992: 98). Accordingly, it would not be stable rules which provide sustainability to the exploitation of common goods, but rather the hierarchical power structures established as a result of the transformation of rules in routines that generate a habitus (Bourdieu 1973). In fact, as Deleuze (1988) argues, all order in equilibrium is the by-product of articulations of power and desire.

This has to do with the second question, because when communities develop routine procedures of decision making, the choices of individuals become severely limited (Nelson 1982). It is therefore legitimate to ask whether sacrificing freedom for the sake of stability is the best choice in the case of the knowledge commons, given that this will have a negative impact on creativity (Hardt and Negri 2009). The creativity that is associated with this freedom would be sacrificed for the benefit of a systemic stability, grounded on hierarchical power structures, that guarantee that rules endure and are adhered to through a system of coercion. Are there any other alternatives to this scenario? For De Landa (1996) there are other logics of socio-economic reproduction that generate meshwork structures. These are not necessarily hierarchical, and result from the decentralized assembling of heterogeneous actors. Meshwork structures are self-organized and decentralized, emerging spontaneously without a coercive exogenous authority organizing collective life from above. On the contrary, they emerge by creative leeway (Jacobs 1984: 133). Under what conditions can such structures develop in social life? Basically, when the reproduction of multiple social processes at work in a community do not result in copies or replicas of these same processes, that turn the agency of the actors into mere routine. Moreover, when social life is created and reproduced beyond routine, the imposition of hierarchical structures becomes more difficult.

This leads to the last question: can we conceptualize the transition to a knowledge economy based on forms of creative propagation that are not the result of elites reinforcing their economic power? To begin with, we face a paradox. In the context of anthropogenetic production, the capacity of the knowledge commons to generate wealth is higher than ever. At the same time, wealth has never been so easily at risk of being appropriated by capitalist elites. Therefore, the terrain of political struggle lies in the necessity of building a diffuse knowledge economy to face the distributive regression imposed by neoliberal financialization. Doing this implies the development of alternative analytical frameworks to devise the most appropriate governance mechanisms for a communal management of the knowledge commons. A bottom up approach based on anthropological and sociological research is required to shed light on the economic dynamics of specific social processes on the ground. New theoretical models need to be imagined for the economy as a discipline to understand the functioning of the knowledge commons. Moreover, these models should be open to interdisciplinary dialogue, enabling us to understand the socio-cultural processes intrinsically connected with the knowledge commons.

4. Final Reflections: Towards a Diffuse Knowledge-based Economy

The current crisis in the capitalist model of growth and accumulation “characterized by capital’s growing un-interest in the how or where of production in favor of the capture of already existing value” (Hanlon 2014: 178) reflects a tension and difficult coupling between processes of social reproduction and capital production. This situation of social stability crisis cannot be reduced to a cyclical recession of over-accumulation that can be solved through the relocation of investment or the devaluation of assets and wages (De Angelis 2007: 17). Capital needs to reinvigorate and domesticate the commons, to both strengthen the social generation of value and make common dynamics resemble the hierarchical forms of production promoted by capital. A diffuse knowledge economy could pave the way for the development of new logics of economic reproduction and value creation, which can generate non-coercive meshworks to ensure sustainability. Moving in this direction would probably undermine the increasingly prevailing rent strategies of capitalist enclosure and privatization.

This may open up new scenarios of equality and collective wellbeing, which are based on the greater capacity to generate and distribute value (knowledge) that has been freely created, and propagated as a common good. The present study has set out to improve our theoretical understanding of the potential political content of an alternative model of knowledge economy, and question its more orthodox conceptions. To move forward, we need to develop theory from real-world experience, exploring transitions to knowledge economies of different kinds and in different communities, as well as learning from mistakes. Herein consists the creative leeway: to understand that in the process of change itself, new skills and knowledge emerge in meshworks that underpin the consolidation and reproduction of the communalization of knowledge.

The current discourse of the entrepreneurial society hides the common roots of value generation and legitimizes the capture of value by a “finders-keepers” model of entrepreneurship (Burczak 2002), “where existing opportunities and value are captured by the entrepreneur rather than created or produced by them” (Hanlon 2014: 178). It is therefore essential to promote the politicization and development of “cognitive mediators,” conceived as “producers-keepers.” Instead of capturing already existing values and redirecting them to the sphere of capital accumulation, they would promote the generation and maintenance of value for the reproduction of the commons in the transition towards common knowledge-based economies. According to Rullani (2004: 226-230), interpretive mediators decisively influence the effectiveness of the uses of knowledge, allowing new creative potential of use to emerge. Among them are “creative” professionals who develop discourses and practices enabling the sharing and communication of emotions and meanings through aesthetics, design, advertising, fashion, film, music, peer production, etc. Multiplicative mediators, meanwhile, act upon the propagation of knowledge, reutilizing the same pool of knowledge commons in many different uses. Their main task is to ensure the validity of the knowledge employed, overcoming the differences between specific real-life contexts. This includes professionals in the fields of statistics, software programming, and information management, among others. Finally, the circuit of knowledge propagation should be regulated through institutional mediators capable of channeling the rights, obligations, and general behaviors of those involved in the process of knowledge creation. This includes managers of industrial districts, clusters of innovative companies, societies of authors and creative artists, as well as protected designations of origin. Some of these roles can be assumed by multifunctional mediators, which can engage in the creation, multiplication, and propagation of knowledge at different scales, such as public universities (Kauffeld-Monz and Fritsch 2013).

The task of all these mediators should be politicized, because they engage not only in the management of knowledge commons, but also in their projection beyond their socio-economic and instrumental functions. The ontological status of these workers should be the focus of academic analysis, along with the ways in which communities and social movements can participate in the process of knowledge propagation and communalization. How knowledge economy takes grip and generates meshworks in assembling heterogeneous communities should be a fundamental focus of academic inquiry. This is so because the politicization of knowledge-based economies involves showing that it exists in down-to-earth processes rather than in technology-mediated realizations of abstract value, either in the unbounded flow of market dynamics, or in the closed circuits of corporations and clusters. A new theory of value generation should emerge from the inquiry that does not conceive it in terms of the exploitation of human labor, recognizing that knowledge creates value in a larger scale when it does not involve exploitation, enclosure, and control.

Furthermore, a feedback effect will enable us to overcome the alienation to which the capitalist system subjects us, for the production of common knowledge may contribute to an enlarged and more sustainable reproduction of the human forces and their wellbeing. To achieve this, it is necessary to devise a set of empirically grounded strategies of value appropriation that are shorn of the characteristics of the rentier, i.e. strategies that do not seek to channel the generation of value to the elites by creating artificial scarcities and hierarchical structures that diminish the overall social capacity of generating value. This theoretical and pragmatic approach could help us advance a new strategy to counteract the neoliberal attack on the commons, and open new scenarios of greater social welfare for the whole of humanity.