Abstract
This book provides an authoritative exegesis of the fundamental characteristics of contemporary capitalism. Boutang builds a comprehensive picture of the mosaic of capitalism post-1975. The central hypothesis is that the financialization of the economy is the form through which capitalism has facilitated its transformation into a more advanced third form, after the mercantile and industrial forms of capitalism.
Accordingly, globalization, specified as ‘neoliberal financialization’, provides the matrix for the emergence of cognitive capitalism. In this milieu, information and communication technologies unleash the power of global finance. Work dematerializes. The biosphere can no longer be regarded as a mere externality. Immaterial labour (the hegemony of innovation and knowledge over human labour power) draws on collective intelligence. A new Great Transformation is taking place. The mutating capitalism that emerges is a ‘“cognitive capitalism”, because it has to deal with collective cognitive labour power, living labour, and no longer simply with muscle-power consumed by machines driven by “fossil-fuel” energy’ (p. 37).
We are first guided through what is not cognitive capitalism (the information society, technological capitalism and the knowledge economy, financialization, middle management’s capitalism), and then to what cognitive capitalism is (a dynamic process of a third capitalism). Boutang provides us with 15 markers of cognitive capitalism and, through them, arrives at a definition set at the juncture of new types of accumulation, production and exploitation of living labour. The analysis of these three aspects of cognitive capitalism brings about the identification of two types of contradictions of the system ‘that make this cognitive capitalism as unstable a system as the two types of capitalism that preceded it’ (p. 92): the questions of ‘exploitation at degree 2’ of living labour and that of intellectual property rights.
A significant feature of cognitive capitalism is that second degree of exploitation. Boutang suggests that living labour splits into two during the production process: one is consumed as an expenditure of energy (‘and is crystallized into new machinery in the following cycle’), but also ‘there is living labour that continues to exist as a means of production throughout the cycle’. Thus, the definition of production in cognitive capitalism becomes: ‘whereby the latter produces “living labour by means of living labour” or “knowledge by means of knowledge”’ (p. 93). In contrast, under conditions of an industrial capitalism, production of commodities is by means of commodities.
As far as the second contradiction of cognitive capitalism is concerned, Boutang joins the long line of those who define the battle for intellectual property rights as the battle of the new enclosures.
Further, he discusses briefly the question of social classes in cognitive capitalism and the rise of the ‘precariat’ and inequality, as precarious work becomes a growing characteristic of employment, before he returns to provide a critique of neoliberalism and financialization, under cognitive capitalism. Especially interesting here is the discussion on quantifying the immaterial, or what corporate accountants call intangibles. Towards the end of the book, Boutang moves to provide some policy guidelines (but not ‘ready-made strategies’), in what he poetically calls ‘A manifesto for the Pollen Society’. The final chapter encounters the question of crisis since 2007, and it was written for the English edition in 2009, just before the recession started hitting Europe.
The book is a deeply ambitious project to make sense of the puzzling reality of contemporary capitalism. Theoretically, Boutang draws, broadly speaking, from the Italian autonomist tradition. However, the clarity of expression and analytical depth of argument is not that of Hardt and Negri. This book is not easy to read, nor for the uninitiated. The arguments are complex, at times difficult to follow, and the structure not very helpful. More serious, though, is the almost exclusive reliance on French literature. The book, even though it deals with a truly global issue (what more global than cognitive capitalism?), has been written exclusively for a French audience.
Nonetheless, the book is essential reading for anyone from a social sciences background who wishes to comprehend the cognitive capitalism thesis, with its many intellectual twists and turns and, of course, ambiguities, as has any complex intellectual project-under-construction. The book can be especially valuable for emerging researchers, who may wish to grasp a deeper theoretical understanding of the processes that shape our contemporary economic and social organization, but rather as a complementary reading to Hardt and Negri’s seminal work. I would truly welcome a second, ‘global’, edition that would take the time to explore in depth the arguments, and engage with literature and examples from the English-speaking world, bringing together more streams of thought and literature.