Marx is in the air

Marx is staging a comeback. The philosopher and social revolutionary, not the comedians. His analysis keep coming up in conferences and articles as a useful framework to read and understand some of the transformations occurring in today's networked world. At Reboot in Copenhagen in June, professor Adam Arvidsson spoke about the concept of "general intellect" introduced by Marx in 1857 - what we would today call "social intelligence". Chris Anderson's recent bestseller "The Long Tail" makes a strong case for how culture has been shaped by the physical infrastructure of distribution and access, reflecting classical Marxist thinking that the "infrastructure" determines the "superstructure". Now Kenneth Cukier, who's a tech correspondent for the Economist, sees a "postmodern form of Marxism" in Yochai Benkler's book "The Wealth of Networks". As he writes in a discerning review published this week in the New Statesman: "Like Marx’s social revolution, Mr Benkler’s technical one promises to bring out man’s better nature, forgoing self-interest for the benefit the community (through sharing open-source software, contributing to Wikipedia, penning blogs, etc.)".

Comments

[DT]

I have not read the books you mention. However, I take the opportunity to make a clear distinction between Marx's concept of "infrastructure" and the developping web 2.0. For Marx, infrastructure is a social way of organizing wealth attribution. Web 2 is but a technology. Many want to believe that the latter will have an impact on the former, which can be true, but very indirectly and on the very long run.
I think that the web 2 cannot be expected to be subversive the way Marx would have hoped. On the contrary, like for web 1, one will soon discover that the market is bound to have the last word.
What is true is that web 2 will have an impact on a large number of business models. But this is a typical creative destruction process at work, according to the Schumpeter pattern.