[...] Over the last thirty years or so it has become standard wisdom, both inside and outside business, that capitalism requires the appliance of more and more brain power in conjunction with information technology--the construction of collective intelligence in order to run complex operations, in order to foster innovation, in order to provide better service experiences, in order simply to reproduce. Much of what we regard as the domain of business corporations has run to this particular tune for some time now, from the early days of the so-called knowledge economy to the current circumstances, in which knowledge is regarded as just a factor of production like any other, there to be mined and made over into all kinds of complex collective goods.

From 1975 onwards the pace of economic growth in the developed countries slowed considerably. It fell by at least half and found itself back at the levels prevailing prior to the 'thirty glorious years'. In some years there was virtually zero growth, a situation that would have been unthinkable in the 1960s. Unemployment became omnipresent and structural. The growth model of the western economies had been based on various factors: very cheap energy supplies; importation of foreign labour; cheap raw materials; virtual full employment; fixed exchange rates between currencies; negative real interest rates; price inflation; and wage increases that followed increase in productivity, but with a six-month time-lag. This growth was underpinned by a very rapid salarisation of an originally agricultural population, an abundant supply of family dependants and a demand that was driven first by postwar reconstruction, and then by wars taking place in the Third World (Korea, Vietnam). This model finally ran out of steam more or less abruptly in all countries [...]

[...] Taylorism in the organisation of work and Fordism in the wage levels of workers. Then the Keynesian compromise, in other words vigorous counter-cyclical operations conducted via government spending and the maintenance of wage increases within the margins of productivity increases. This challenge to the traditional rules of financial orthodoxy (as they existed prior to the Great Depression of the 1930s) was accompanied by a change of scale in the institutional mechanisms governing the redistribution of income. There was a marked general increase in taxes and social security deductions [...] The welfare state, the founding principles of which had been laid down by Beveridge in 1943, was an unprecedented socialisation of the maintenance and reproduction of the workforce within a coherent system of social protection. [...] The vast majority of the countries of the South remained as 'developing' countries, because their resources were used to lower the cost of manufactured goods in the North rather than to build self-reliant economies--economies based on the development of their own domestic consumption. As a result, decolonisation was very soon replaced by economic dependence, which very soon turned into bondage to external debt. [...]

The rise of both negative and positive externalities together with their growing interference in transaction cost--and therefore in the institutions charged with minimising their cost--are substantial trends. Political economy can no longer report them merely in passing, without saying more, as if they were exceptions and picturesque curiosities. Especially since the new production model, which has been emerging for thirty years now, is, furthermore, characterised by the rise of immaterial labour and collective intelligence as a primary factor of production and as the real substance of wealth and value. [...]

[...] we can say that most of the exchange value or market value derives from the value of the brand, and thus from a factor which is immaterial or intangible. It is also clear that, in terms of crystallised labour, of average social time for capitalism, the brand is the result of hours of labour undertaken not only by designers, but also by stylists and by lawyers in big firms, who are charged with protecting intellectual property rights. It even incorporates taste, in other words the willingness [...] of the public to pay anything from tens to hundreds of euros, for a brand-named product. Ah, the power of the Veblen effect! [...]

[...] Production begins to mimic, in its material organisation, the versatility of taste. This is what Robert Boyer has called the 'variety economy', which has led to a decline in the rule of economies of scale; these are still sought after, but now they have to take into account variety economies (multi-purpose equipment) and learning economies. The latter involve capturing and retaining a maximum number of users in networks that provide their subscribers with positive externalities, in other words with free services or goods in exchange for loyalty to norms or technical standards that constitute a guarantee for future sales of products or services. If the economy is becoming increasingly flexible (a transition that many industries are finding very hard to make), it is because the central core of value rests now on immaterialities.

[...] If capitalism is new in its modes of accumulation, in its centres of initiative, in its ideology, this is not because it is itself creative, innovative and revolutionary. It is because it is forced to mutate in order to survive. In vain does capitalism multiply Darwinist declarations among the snows of Davos; it is subject to the law of Darwin--adapting to its environment in order to survive. [...]

[...] Just as industrial capitalism had broken with the substance of slavery-based merchant capitalism, 'cognitive' capitalism, which is now beginning to appear and which produces and domesticates the living on a scale never before seen, in no sense eliminates the world of material industrial production. Rather it re-arranges it, re-organises it and alters the positioning of its nerve centres. Financialisation is the expression of this remodelling, of this reformatting, of material production. [...]

[...] supposing masses of waged workers suddenly started going to university? Well, that's exactly what happened. As Carlo Vercellone has correctly pointed out, cognitive capitalism, in which we include its impressive transformation technology apparatus, is the historical product of a profound movement of working-class rebellion. This took various forms of refusal of work (absenteeism, sabotage, wildcat strikes), but mainly it fed a continuous pressure for the democratisation of access to universities and institutes of technology.

[...] If developers work for free today, it is because they are hoping to increase their reputations, so that tomorrow this may result in better paying jobs. So everything goes back to normal. There is no place for altruism [...]