Knowledge Socialism

* Book: Knowledge Socialism. Ed. by Michael A. Peters • Tina Besley • Petar Jandrić • Xudong Zhu. The Rise of Peer Production: Collegiality, Collaboration, and Collective Intelligence. Springer, 2020

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Description

From the introduction:

"We now live in the age of global ‘knowledge economy’ and ‘knowledge capitalism.’ According to Peters (2019), these terms ‘have been used with increasing frequency since the 1990s as a way of describing the latest phase of capitalism in the process of global restructuring’. While the mainstream literature usually understands ‘knowledge economy’ and ‘knowledge capitalism’ as inevitable consequences of recent socio-technological developments, Peters explores the term not as a term of approbation but as a disruptor, as a term that first situates knowledge economy as ‘knowledge capitalism’ in an info-tech digital capitalist historical phase that signalled a profound structural transformation and that contained within it also other radical open possibilities that also enhanced free knowledge exchange and approximate conditions of ‘knowledge socialism’ based on collaboration, sharing and the peer economy. (Peters 2019)

In Knowledge Socialism. The Rise of Peer Production: Collegiality, Collaboration, and Collective Intelligence, knowledge socialism is viewed as the next stage in development of knowledge-making and dissemination that disrupts the current stage of development of capitalism. Positioned in, against and beyond (Holloway 2016) ‘knowledge economy’ and ‘knowledge capitalism,’ knowledge socialism refers to a new global collectivist society that is coming online based on communal aspects of digital culture including sharing, cooperation, collaboration, peer production and collective intelligence.

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We can notice that knowledge socialism is always somehow related to technology. Here, we understand technology in the widest sense described by Ellul (1964) (we find Ellul’s definition useful although we disagree with many other aspects of his philosophy). Taking the example of this book, technology is the assemblage of Internet infrastructure which enabled reviewers to read draft chapters and submit their comments; technology is the administrative back-end offered by our publishers; technology is writing and formatting standards applied to abstracts, keywords and references; and technology is the way this book looks and feels in readers’ hands and/or on readers’ screens. Looking beyond production, technology is the requirement that all chapters need to undergo a minimum of two anonymous peer reviews; our ethos that editors and authors should work in a collegial spirit of mutual support and help; and that the book publishes a mix of invited authors and authors who responded to our open calls.

Knowledge socialism described in this book is digitally enabled, but paraphrasing Heidegger (1962), the essence of knowledge socialism which produced this book is nothing digital. In the recent literature, this view to relationships between human beings and digital technologies has been described by the notion of the postdigital.

‘The postdigital is hard to define; messy; unpredictable; digital and analog; technological and non-technological; biological and informational. The postdigital is both a rupture in our existing theories and their continuation.’ (Jandri´c et al. 2018) Knowledge socialism is a postdigital rupture and continuation of global ‘knowledge economy’ and ‘knowledge capitalism’, and chapters in this book explore a number of ways our collective digital tools have the power to create the intellectual commons and reshape our minds."

History

"The concept of knowledge socialism has emerged from the works of Michael Peters and Tina Besley over the past two decades. This is not to say that other people did not write about similar questions—Besley and Peters gladly acknowledge that their work has been influenced by numerous authors and approaches. However, the exact wording—knowledge socialism—has first been used in Peters’ (2004) article ‘Marxist Futures: Knowledge Socialism and the Academy’. Over the years, Peters and Besley have developed a number of related concepts such as knowledge cultures, radical openness and others. They would present these concepts as provocations or McLuhanist ‘thought probes’ (McLuhan 1964), gather authors around journal special issues and edited books and explore theoretical and practical implications of their provocations. These activities have been underlined by academic values such as openness and practically supported by Peters and Besley’s engagement in academic publishing industry.

Alongside their thought probes, Besley and Peters have engaged in various practical projects. They started new publications such as the Video Journal of Education and Pedagogy,

1 which is arguably the first video journal in the humanities and social sciences, and the Open Review of Educational Research,

2 which experiments with novel forms of political economy of academic publishing, and others.

They went even more experimental with projects such as The Editors’ Collective, which is a group of academics working on collective approaches to knowledge-making and dissemination. Recent developments from these groups, such as the ‘Open Access meeting place for those interested the intersections of education, philosophy, technology, indigenous and identity issues, and the environment’ called PESAAgora, explore further practical opportunities for knowledge socialism as we write these words.

These theoretical and practical projects have set a theoretical background and accumulated a wealth of practical experience. Probably most importantly, they have built a large network of scholars who are interested in knowledge-making and dissemination and who are not afraid to experiment, individually and collectively, with novel forms of academic work. In the following sections, we will briefly describe Peters and Besley’s concepts of knowledge cultures, radical openness and knowledge socialism which served as main theoretical influences for development of this book."

Excerpts

• Knowledge Cultures