NEOCLASSICAL AND MARXIAN PERSPECTIVES ON CAPITALISM'S INFORMATION ECONOMY

Definitions of Marxian and Neoclassical economic perspectives.

Neoclassical economics focuses on the notion that agents attempt to maximize individual utility -- minimizing their costs and maximizing their gains -- by making decisions about the allocation of scarce resources, based on perceptions of supply and demand. Marxian economics, on the other hand, focuses on classes, production, and exploitation: factors of production (knowledge, machinery, materials, labor power) are what determine the relations of production (i.e., the societal composition of ownership).

Digital technologies offer increased economic efficiencies.

As Lawrence Lessig points out, digital technologies make both the production and the distribution of information more efficient, and distribution and production are both economic acts, whether you're a Neoclassical economist like Milton Friedman or a Marxian economist like J. K. Gibson-Graham.

These increased economic efficiencies can lead to unequal economic gains among different social classes.

According to Ian Angell, "The future is inequality; at the very bottom of the heap, western societies are already witnessing the emergence of a rapidly expanding underclass. Now we can see that knowledge workers are the real generators of wealth. The income of these owners of intellectual and financial wealth will increase substantially, and they will be made welcome anywhere in the world" (emphasis mine). Note the disparity: training students to be better knowledge workers -- the symbolic analysts described by Robert Reich -- may only help them to put more money into the hands of the knowledge-owners like turnitin.com, who appropriate students' surplus labor in writing scarce papers for their own profits. Plagiarism is a product of competition, not cooperation. (Angell's "Winners and Losers in the Information Age" quoted in Dion Dennis, "The Digital Death Rattle of the American Middle Class.")

With increased digital efficiencies in information distribution, Neoclassical economics indicates that scarce intellectual labor will be performed by the lowest bidder.

To quote Dennis again: "With the availability of cheap, young, talented global intellectual labor, U.S. intellectual labor is seen by transnational capital as a liability, as not economically viable. And if U.S.-based "symbolic analysts' are economically less desirable and less viable as employees in a global system of intellectual labor, certainly their training in mass numbers is also economically less viable." In such a context, we may want to develop a larger stake in the debate over the purposes of education, since -- under the neoclassical economic model -- students' upward class mobility is predicated upon their becoming more productive writers / knowledge-workers. (Note that what neoclassical economists call "increased productivity," Marxian economists call an increased rate of exploitation.)

Complications associated with producing, distributing, and consuming information.

Economist Yanis Varoufakis remarks that consumers "buy commodities and then proceed to consume them. In effect the consumer acquires property rights over the consumption 'inputs'" (123). In other words, neoclassical economics expects consumers to own commodities before consuming them. But, again, information is a strange commodity, whether it's a student paper, an instructor's lecture, a peer's comments, or a weblog entry. What if I didn't have a Creative Commons license: would you have "owned" this entry before "consuming" it? What did you exchange for it? What would your marginal rate of substitution have been for this presentation versus Charlie's presentation? Are you maximising your individual utility by listening to this presentation? And what about me? What's my opportunity cost for writing this presentation? Since it's an information good, even I can't know until after I've distributed it. Writing does an interesting job of blurring the lines between the benefits of production and the benefits of consumption, and perhaps points towards a less reductively binary economics, towards an economics of circulation rather than of production and consumption.

Introduction: turnitin dot com

1. Writing as Process and Writing as Product

2. Neoclassical Economics and Marxian Economics

3. Market Transactions and Gift Transactions

4. Use Value and Exchange Value

Conclusion: sharingwriting dot net

Definitions of Marxian and Neoclassical economic perspectives.

Digital technologies offer increased economic efficiencies.

Increased economic efficiencies can lead to unequal economic gains among different social classes.

With increased digital efficiencies in information distribution, Neoclassical economics indicates that scarce intellectual labor will be performed by the lowest bidder.

Complications associated with producing, distributing, and consuming information.