If it only analyzed the contradictions of markets in information and information technology, this book would still be a significant contribution. But Perelman's project is deeper than this. He reveals the roots of modern informational problems in the basic tension between the communal character of information and the hierarchical, exploitative, and private character of capitalist relations. Not content to treat information as just another case of market failure, Perelman demonstrates how the class structure of capitalism prevents society from realizing the human developmental potential of information technologies. Essentially, he reinterprets the standard economics of information in terms of the Marxian thesis of social production versus private appropriation under capitalism. But his style is non-dogmatic, matter-of-fact, short and snappy, making the book readable by anyone having the equivalent of an introductory microeconomics background. Although Perelman's main reference point is the United States, his overall analysis is increasingly applicable world-wide.
Class Warfare begins with "a skeptical reading of the information revolution". The futurologists' projection of a computerized world of highly educated, materially secure and communicative symbolic analysts -- a creative world free of physical drudgery -- is contrasted with the continued economic insecurity and overwork, social division and isolation, and private affluence alongside public squalor, characteristic of the actually existing information age under capitalism. Based partly on a critical review of the literature estimating the size of the "information industry" relative to GNP, Perelman argues that the real "information revolution" does not involve advances in information technology as such but rather the treatment of information as a commodity and as private property. Even though the conflicts and struggles associated with this revolution have not yet taken on classical Marxist forms (as opposed to reactionary anti-government ideologies and other simplistic scapegoating devices), class is still relevant because it helps explain unequal access to commodified information as well as the inability of society to apply the new technologies in human developmental fashion. Phenomena such as the glut of trained scientists unable to find productive employment, and reductions in education budgets alongside growing outlays for prisons, suggest that capitalism's competitive, profit-driven priorities contradict the development of the social framework needed for people to convert information technologies into truly human-social productive forces.
Turning to the systemic origins of the information revolution, Perelman treats the commodification and capitalization of information as an outgrowth of the deskilling of labor à la Marx and Braverman. (An interesting sidelight here is that mainstream economists for the most part only became interested in issues of information and organization after capital had alienated productive information from productive labor.) Perelman shows how the separation of productive (including scientific) knowledge from labor hampers human-social adaptation to, and control over, the new information technologies. While information is crucial for use value in the sense of a sustainable development and satisfaction of human needs, firms' managers are driven to restrict workers' access to information in order to maintain control over use value as a vehicle of competitive monetary accumulation. This helps explain why, even as information technology advances to the point of causing an information overload, and even as we find ourselves dependent on increasingly complex information systems, more-and-more workers are shunted into routinized, low-wage service jobs, while "we have deadening schools to prepare workers for deadening work" (p.50).
In short, while computers and software seem to be everywhere, capitalism increasingly "denies people access to information" at a central social site -- the point of social production (p.63). For Perelman, this is the ultimate basis of many broader social malfunctions characteristic of the commodified-information economy. More directly, capitalism's hierarchical production relations distort the development of information technology itself. The production of computer software, for example, is an intrinsically cooperative and creative activity which can only be perverted by its hierarchical routinization in the service of capital. Referring to the U.S. and Japanese software industries, Perelman draws some convincing connections between capitalist managerial practices on the one hand, and errors and delays in new product development as well as the growing brittleness of information systems on the other.
With information becoming a privately appropriated commodity, we are witnessing the development of a "panoptic society," i.e., an "asymmetric situation in which those who control information have virtually unlimited information about individual people, while they erect dense curtains of secrecy around their own activities" (p.79). (This analogues Bentham's panoptic prison in which an overseer monitors all the inmates without being seen.) Of course, the panoptic society involves a centralization of informational power in government as well as in private media and other corporate monopolies, and Perelman takes due note of the information stockpiles and secret practices of the U.S. national security state. At the same time, he shows how the private-corporate component of social panopticism relies heavily on the privatization of public resources (schools, communication networks, military and other R&D subsidies, etc.). Capitalist panopticism also depends on government enforcement of "intellectual property rights". One of Perelman's central arguments in this connection is that the privatization of information paradoxically leads to increasingly intrusive government, due to the difficulty of enforcing private monopolies over information which, once produced, is in essence a free public good. This is over and above the growth of repressive government activities (prisons, for example) associated with the worsening of class-based inequalities by unequal access to information technologies.
Among the other analyses which make this book worth reading are: (1) the treatment of transnational capital's monopolization of productive information (including the plunder of species varieties in the third world) as a form of primitive accumulation; (2) the critique of Hayek's idealized argument for the competitive price system and private property as the only institutional set-up adequate to the informational tasks of resource allocation in modern society. With respect to the latter, Perelman is undoubtedly right to emphasize not only the continuous efforts of profit-seeking enterprises to conceal and/or distort information, but also what may be termed the "systemic self-referentiality" of information under capitalism. The fact is that a growing share of "information" generated by pecuniary competition either has little meaning in terms of use value or is directly antithetical to human development. The explosion of financial-market indicators resulting from increasingly finance-led accumulation, and the accelerating growth of the electronic media-advertising-entertainment complex, are the two most prominent examples of such redistributive, wasteful and/or destructive "information".
Perelman's analysis calls for a system which, instead of misguidedly trying to adapt information technology to private property, markets, and profit-driven competition, develops and applies information in line with democratically determined use value goals. The quandary here is that such a use-value oriented system (one could call it communism) requires human beings and a social framework that are congenial to cooperative-democratic behavior as well as the maintenance of individual freedom, diversity and mutual respect -- and capitalism contains no in-built tendency to produce such human-social conditions. These conditions can only be forged in the class struggle itself. In this book, Perelman considers information technology mainly as a tool of class warfare from above. Perhaps in his next work he will more closely analyze its potential as a terrain and weapon for class warfare from below.
Louis Proyect (http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)