Date: Sat, 23 Nov 1996 12:02:07 +1000
From: rws-AT-comserver.canberra.edu.au (Rob Schaap)
Subject: M-I: Re: Castells and stuff


In response to Jon's post ... is there really a *contradiction* between
Jon's observations and the *tendency* Castells describes?  Or is Jon just
saying this is not a particularly useful way to look at things?

Castells does not question the relations of production, merely describes
changes within that context.  Like: the increasing physical distance
between exploiter and exploited - and between exploited and exploited;
perhaps even a new level of mystifying abstraction - as money, the defining
force of social relations in our world, turns into pulses of light (I don't
know where this line takes us though - perhaps to ever greater
discrepancies between materiality - like physical assets - and 'wealth' as
evinced in stock markets).  Doug might help out here ...

If we're to take information as 'stuff', isn't it the sort of stuff, for
instance, that allows for a new order of labour surplus extraction?  If I
employ ten people to make widgets, they'll make about ten times as many as
one worker.  If I get the time'n'motion people in, I might divide labour
towards a little more efficiency.  But if my workers are producing
information, I'd expect an (admittedly unpredictable) surplus of a whole
different order.  Working in (cyber)unison, the sum of their output
would/could be a gratifying multiple of their sum as individual workers. 
This, to my mind, is why 'information' is not to be uncritically mistaken
for a widget.

It doesn't change the relations of production, it just offers the
capitalist a new magnitude of exploitation.  

The economics gets confusing (or perhaps it's just confusing me), but
here's a thought.  Consider the proposition  that the productive potential
of information (once you apply your workers/sub-contractors to its
transformation/application, of course), assuming a fixed price for that
information (a tenable generalisation), is contingent on *your capacity to
exploit it*.  This, I'd have thought (and I remember Timothy Haight talking
about this), favours big integrated firms.  Simplistically put, in this
case, the bigger/more integrated your productive capacity, the more the use
value of an 'item' of information exceeds its exchange value.  

Even without the labour component (except in its secondary phase, as 'new'
capital investment), if a dodgy jockey sold Rupert Murdoch and me the
winner of the next, we'd both pay $100 for it.  This would leave me $10 to
bet on the horse (which had better be at odds of better than 10/1) and
Rupert $10 billion.

Does this make of 'information' a commodity unlike any other?  Is this why
corporate capital is going into 'Ponzian' debt in its drive to integrate? 
Or is this all old news?

I'd love some thoughts on this ...    Rob




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