A Marxist analysis of the "information revolution"

[Louis Proyect]

[From Paul Burkett's review of Michael Perelman's latest book "Class
Warfare in the Information Age." The review will appear in the journal
Capital and Class]

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)