Vercellone provides a Marxist reading of cognitive capitalism by returning to formal subsumption, real subsumption and the general intellect. The central idea is that knowledge has become increasingly central to production, but this does not mean that capitalism has become simply a knowledge economy. Knowledge is subsumed by capital. The iconic idea is general intellect as contradiction: collective intelligence, cooperation, science, communication and diffuse intellectuality become productive forces, yet they also exceed the private forms through which capital tries to capture them. Cognitive capitalism is not defined by information alone. It is defined by a new conflict over knowledge, power and labour. Vercellone argues that the diffusion of knowledge transforms the capital-labour relation because value depends increasingly on capacities that are social, collective and difficult to contain inside the firm. This creates new antagonisms around intellectual property, rent, autonomy, cooperation and the measurement of labour time. The text is important because it refuses celebratory accounts of the knowledge economy. It shows that the centrality of knowledge is politically ambivalent: it can deepen capitalist capture, but it also reveals the social and cooperative basis of production.
URBANISM MEETS ART