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Those in the field of Marxian political economy are seeing some exciting new work in the political economy of communications and the WWW. Notable examples include applications of Lazzarato's concept of immaterial labor, examinations of new ways of organizing on the Internet, and the possibilities of socialized ownership of communications networks.
This panel, to be held at the 6th Media in Transition conference at MIT (April 24-26 2009), will bring together researchers who are engaged in this work. Questions this panel seeks to answer include:
How can Marxian political economic and social criticism help us understand the rapid and sometimes overwhelming evolution of digital media technologies?
How can we theorize digital archives and the labor that goes into their construction?
How does digital affect labor? How does it affect subjectivity? Are we becoming, as Lazzarato argues, “subjects of communications?”
In what ways do the products of immaterial labor created on the Internet materialize in other settings in the circuits of globalized capitalism?
How can apply Marxian and Foucauldian theories of power to labor on the WWW?
Where are the possibilities of progressive change?
Panelists will be chosen based on how they approach these questions, as well as how they engage with the broader questions of MIT6. The MIT6 CFP is available at
http://web.mit.edu/comm-forum/mit6/subs/call.html
Abstracts of no more than 500 words and 100 word biographies are due by October 15th, 2008 via email to Robert Gehl at rgehl@gmu.edu. Selection of panelists will be completed by November 15th, and then the panel will be submitted to MIT6 for their consideration.
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