Contenu du sommaire : Capitalisme cognitif

In récent years the Israeli economy has undergone fundamental changes. An entirely new class composition was created by the ex-Soviet migrations of the 1990s. Markets for traditional Israeli produce became more restricted. The Internet created the conditions for transnational exports of high-value immaterial labour (knowledge) products to replace previous low-value products with high transit costs. And the nature of the new knowledge economies opened new interstitial possibilities for insertion. A new and technically skilled workforce proves capable of creating the flows of innovation that are the precondition for the survival of the large capitalist firms of this and the preceding era (head-hunting of promising new start-ups). Among other things, Israeli companies are particularly well-suited to meet the new demand for biomedical products.

This article discusses changes in post-apartheid South Africa's economy and society in relation to the country's re-insertion in the Empire. South Africa's specificity in the African context is largely related to the crucial role played in this case by the factory proletariat in defining the collapse of apartheid. Therefore, neoliberalism and the entry in the Empire in this case have to be understood in terms of state responses to a class composition that starting from workplace organisation has expressed a resistance to the imposition of wage labour discipline. While the government of the African National Congress has successfully recodified its nationalist discourse to suit the requirements of capitalist globalisation and liberalization, this process has also been very contradictory. The adoption of a neo-liberal agenda has, in particular, emphasized the ANC's abdication from state sovereignty as a vehicle of strategies of control based on social citizenship. New movements, largely made of multitudes left out of waged employment, have therefore emerged to challenge the ANC's pro-Empire choice. However, these movements are not based on a « souverainniste » agenda, or on delegation to the state of resistance to the Empire. Rather, in their conscious departure from nationalist and wage-based mythologies, they clarify the biopolitical nature of current processes of contestation and are able to combine grass-roots struggles with cognitive abilities of reappropriation.

If cognitive capital is a regime commodifying digitalized and networked processes, video and computer games are among its most important components. The article examines the transnational constitution of the game industry in which software plays a central role. The composition of the class formed by information workers, prosumers and the new proletariat of the hard-drive is explored, as well as the practices of struggle and resistance proper to this sector. The article concludes with the subversive and transformative virtualities of games.

It is commonly assumed that whilst fundamental worker's rights are well respected in the industrialised countries, they are scorned in the developing world. In so far as the reality is really far more complex, this analysis, if it cannot stand up to reality, lays itself open to sometimes unintended consequences when it ties the application of social norms to commercial sanctions through social clauses or codes of practise. We move on to a comparison of the application of seven fondamental working standards in order to evaluate the consequences, which could result from the application of clauses or codes of conduct.

This article examines the crisis of sovereignty currently sweeping South America. Argentina's instability is compared to Brazil's apparent and precarious stability. As the monetary crisis grinds the Argentine economy and society, Brazil is shaken by an undeclared civil war. The confidence lacking in the Argentine currency takes the form of an absence of society in Brazil, resulting in an inequality, which traverses the different phases of the country's development. We analyse here the specificity of the form of the developmentalist state, which develops itself out of a syncretism of the colonial tradition and corporatist modernism; and finally, the theoretical and political ambiguities of the left, vis-à-vis a system of privilege which permits the perpetuation of an iniquitous social system.

Forget the technology, and ask instead about the sampler's gesture. For a long time, like Mozart's « Don Giovanni », all citation supposed an instrument, an orchestra. Then, with the first recording technology, came the possibility of using tape recorders or analog turntables. But ultimately, the gesture is the same : overtly drawing upon a work for its creation. In itself, the act of pillaging is not condemnable. Better, the détournement of advertising and of those artists like Michael Jackson who flood our ears are indispensable acts of resistance and humour. Ariel Kyrou — the author of Techno Rebelle, Un Siècle de musiques électroniques (Denoël, X-Trême), from which this « elegy to pillage » comes — prefers a scathing recycling to the recitals of the market, prefers the « loan » that one goes way beyond by rage and talent to the application of painless recipes for success.

The results of the French elections force the « progressive » forces to confront certain key questions. It will not suffice to say that the rise of populism and victory of the conservatives are the effects of the ravages of globalisation and the incapacity of the traditional left to face them. We must ask ourselves what the current historical period shares with, and what distinguishes it from, earlier periods; we must ask questions about the evolution of forms of oppression, and equally about the struggle for liberation, and the modes of organisation and political expression of the social movements. This questioning can only take place in the light of the current experiences of the new popular movement developing across the globe.

April 21 marked the end of a political cycle in which the Left was identified with the workers' movement. Communism and the party-form which became integrated into the state are now exhausted. The divide between the new social movements and the traditional sectors of the working class has widened. A party can no longer gather into itself the multiplicity of forms of politicization. This crisis of representation is a result of an ignorance of the new ways of constructing the common. It is necessary to pose the question of a political constitution of the people that would correspond to the new forms of subjectivity. The refoundation of communism necessitates both the definition of a specific project and a politics of unity.

Preceded by an introduction by Noortje Marres and Patrice Riemens that stresses the reconstitution of a national communitarianism around the elections, the article analyses the assassination of Pim Fortyn and the rise of a populism of the extreme-right. It is based upon an analysis of the media and of the relative back-wardness of Dutch society with regard to the question of technology. According to the author, Pim Fortyn is essentially a media phenomenon made possible through the complicity of TV journalists. The populist demonstrated the crisis of democracy and how out of touch traditional politicians are in the Netherlands, but with a project that brought about political regression and social division.

The true significance of the general strike in Spain last June 20th lies more in the effects of redundancy, condensation and proliferation of a multiplicity of struggles and subjectivities which it strengthened, and whose composition is not really part of the workerist and corporatist framework of the main trade unions, and less in the meaning of the strike itself. On the contrary, the coincidence of heterogeneous actors and struggles seen to emerge during those weeks of diverse battles and initiatives allows us to glimpse perhaps the beginning of a real change in the fortunes and opportunities for the constituent struggle of the multitudes in Spain and throughout Europe.

At Seattle, as at both Genoa and Porto Allegre, the Italian component of the Anti-globalisation movement was significant. Andrea Fumagalli reconstructs the genesis of the movement in Italy through an analysis of three of its fundamental elements: the network of Social Centres; the critical reviews born in the 1990s; the development of underground music. After Genoa and New York, and faced by the Berlusconi government's offensive, the Italian movement seemed to be riven by a profound crisis, but the demonstration of 20 July 2002, clarified the nature of the crisis as a gap between the multitudes and the representation-organisation of the antagonistic movements.

Ten years of employment policies have demonstrated two fundamental discrepancies: a job is not a guarantee of a satisfactory income and growth does not guarantee the creation of jobs. In proposing a necessary displacement of the angle of approach to the dynamics of liberal globalization, and of the relation of capital/labor to the antagonism of capital/life, the article supports the demand for a guaranteed income : guaranteed income as a constituent process, that is, in order to open a constituent phase at the level of social and economic institutions.

Ilan Pappe, one of the New Historians in Israël, answers Amaya el Bacha's questions concerning the disciplinary proceedings initiated against him by the administration of the University of Haifa. Pappe argues that the measures taken against him were the result of his critique of Israeli academia for its lack of independence, as well as of his scholarly work on the « Nakba » and, in particular, the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian village of Tantura at the founding of the state of Israël. In an academic milieu characterized by conformism and cowardice, the work of the New Historians is less and less tolerated by the Israeli authorities.