Labour of the Commons as the Communism of Capital

• Article: Knowledge Factories, Creative Industries, Internet Economies. Armin Beverungen.

URL = http://www.ephemeraweb.org/journal/9-4/9-4editorial.pdf

Description

Orsan Senalp:

"Armin Beverungen’s postdoctoral research concerns the labour of the commons taking place within knowledge factories, creative industries and internet economies.

His starting premise is that the neoliberalisation of these spheres stands in stark conflict with the commons it relies on, producing a contradictory “communism of capital”. Universities, the creative industries and the internet rely on a huge amount of sociality, common labour and amassed commons, which neoliberalism both relies on while fundamentally undermining it.

To give an example relevant to hybrid publishing: in scholarly publishing, oligarchies of publishers extract large profits from the productive capacities of collective academic labour and the wealth of universities, without however paying for the former or sustaining the latter.

Armin Beverungen’s research explores how the sociality and mutuality produced in the labour of the commons may produce different economic, cultural and political modalities. For scholarly publishing this may most immediately mean: open access, independent publishing.

This article prefigures Armin Beverungen’s current work and explains it with recourse to the financialisation of the university:http://www.ephemeraweb.org/journal/9-4/9-4editorial.pdf "