Abstract
Marx’s mature account of capitalism pays attention to the class struggle between ‘living labour’ and capital’s project to transform it into ‘dead labour’. This chapter focuses on the shift in the form of this struggle, from the material world of production to the immaterial world of knowledge. With particular reference to the history of libraries, this chapter casts the struggle for ‘knowledge socialism’ as knowledge workers resisting and reversing capital’s project to transform ‘living knowledge’ into ‘dead information’. By building on Marx’s socialist critique of capitalism, knowledge socialism is writ large. Beyond the principle of the free production and distribution of knowledge, knowledge socialism is understood practically as the project to design, construct and manage a democratic socialist framework of global-local regulation, institutions of cosmopolitan solidarity, and a global virtual civil society.
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Neilson, D., Enright, N.F. (2022). From Dead Information to a Living Knowledge Ecology. In: Peters, M.A., Jandrić, P., Hayes, S. (eds) Bioinformational Philosophy and Postdigital Knowledge Ecologies. Postdigital Science and Education . Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-95006-4_10
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