The Knowledge Economy and Its Critics

This chapter surveys the dominant landscape of the knowledge economy today, from right to left, via the center. Each recognizes the increasingly central role of knowledge in the production and reproduction of economic value, social relations, and life. Because they’re taking different class viewpoints, however, they tell contrasting narratives, utilize different frameworks, and, clearly, have different goals in mind. Whereas the right wants to understand knowledge production in order to more effectively harness or exploit it for capitalist accumulation, those critical of the hegemonic capitalist takes on the knowledge economy identify and probe at its limitations and restrictions, in which they locate new possibilities for resistance and resources for a movement beyond the accumulation of capital. They do so by diagnosing the new forms of exploitation and oppression in the knowledge economy and the attendant potentialities for resistance and transformation that lie within.