>Perhaps it is more of what the Swedish business representative called the
>"networked economy".
>
>Exactly where surplus value goes in such an economy, and how exploitation
>occurs, I suspect is pretty mysterious.
But 'where surplus value goes' is always mysterious. As Marx explains, the deviation of rate of profit from rate of surplus value disguises the origin of the former in labour and exploitation.
A number of Stalinist theoreticians in Britain recently have been trading in mystified versions of the economy. Former Marxism Today writer Geoff Mulgan (now a senior govt. advisor) wrote about the network economy in his book Connexity, where he says, blithely 'a sum of capital expands, the web of trading partners widens, the range of products diversifies'. But Mulgan fails to understand why 'a sum of capital expands'. Similarly Mulgan's old comrade Charles Leadbetter, also know a government advisor at the DTI, has written a book called Living on Thin Air - which is a double joke: he means that profits just come from nowhere, but the consequence is that it is the working class that will be living on thin air.
Leadbetter and Mulgan's prejudice that profits arise on alienation is reinforced by the experience of raising profits by downsizing and through the British economy's dependence upon financial profiteering. The origins of profits in exploitation is heavily disguised. But on top of that is the political excision of the working class from British political life, which serves to make them doubly invisible to the capitalist class, no longer having to register their interests in any collective sense.
-- Jim heartfield