Abstract
This chapter historicises Michael Peters’ concept of knowledge socialism and situates it in a wider postdigital context. Looking at theory, the chapter shows that our analyses of knowledge socialism should reach beyond dichotomy with knowledge capitalism. Knowledge socialism does not need to be digital, but the digital has significantly and irreversibly shaped knowledge socialism. The chapter identifies the need to develop a distinct philosophy of knowledge socialism based on a complete erasure of borders between low and high theory. Through an examination of historical struggle over freedom and openness of information, the chapter shows that the dynamic between knowledge capitalism and knowledge socialism is a never-ending story of appropriations and re-appropriations of concepts and ideas. Analysing examples of knowledge socialism in educational practice, the chapter shows that present technological affordances for knowledge socialism are much more advanced than its theory and political economy. Based on these analyses, the chapter warns against repeating errors made by earlier generations of leftist scholars and practitioners such as a strong orientation to the immaterial aspects of digital cultures, a dualistic approach to our postdigital reality, a disconnect between high and low theory, and a disconnect between theory and practice.
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Notes
- 1.
See http://editorscollective.org.nz/. Accessed 12 February 2020.
- 2.
Over the years, the quoted definitions of free software and copyleft have been reproduced all over the Internet, often with slight modifications. This text reproduces the most recent definitions available at the GNU Operating System website sponsored by the Free Software Foundation.
- 3.
See https://creativecommons.org/. Accessed 12 February 2020.
- 4.
See https://www.coalition-s.org/. Accessed 12 February 2020.
- 5.
See https://github.com/. Accessed 12 February 2020.
- 6.
At the time of writing this text, Kleiner works on the second, expanded edition of The Telekommunist Manifesto.
- 7.
See https://platform.coop/who-we-are/pcc/. Accessed 12 February 2020.
- 8.
See https://woolf.university/. Accessed 12 February 2020.
- 9.
As one of the editors for this volume, I had an 'unfair' advantage of reading the majority of contributions before I wrote my own chapter.
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Acknowledgements
I wish to thank Gordon Asher for pointing me towards Andreas Wittel’s (2017) chapter ‘The political economy of digital Technologies: Outlining an emerging field of research’ used in the Conclusion. I am also grateful to Sharon Rider for her valuable feedback to earlier versions of this chapter.
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Jandrić, P. (2020). Postdigital Knowledge Socialism. In: Peters, M.A., Besley, T., Jandrić, P., Zhu, X. (eds) Knowledge Socialism. East-West Dialogues in Educational Philosophy and Theory. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-8126-3_5
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