Theories of the Information Society, Third Edition - Cryptome

NETWORK SOCIETY
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Further, while Castells emphasises that informational capitalism is extraordinarily
powerful and pervasive, especially in the ways in which it inhibits actions
that are inimical to market practices, he is also insistent that there is no longer
an identifiable capitalist class. Since capitalism has gone global, individual states
have radically reduced options for manoeuvre, most obviously in terms of
national economic strategies. This is not to say that government actions are
insignificant – actually quite the reverse, since inappropriate steps bring especially
rapid responses from the world economy. However, we would be mistaken
to think that there is a capitalist class controlling this world system. There is,
states Castells, a ‘faceless collective capitalist’ (1996, p. 474), but this is something
beyond a particular class. What one imagines by this is that, for example,
constant trading on world stock markets or in foreign currencies means there is
scarcely room to opt out of the mainstream of capitalist enterprise. Yet the functionaries
of this system are not propertied capitalists, but rather it is informational
workers who are the prime players. This scenario suggests that it is the accountants,
systems analysts, financiers, account investors, advertisers, etc., who run
capitalism today. He insists, however, that there are no ‘grand designers’ around,
since the system has its own inbuilt momentum, the network being greater than
any single or even organised group. Moreover, it must be stressed that these
people are where they are not because they are property owners, but by virtue
of their expertise. That is, they are information workers of one sort or another,
and they announce the end of both the old-fashioned propertied class and the
working class.
Finally, we have the unskilled and/or irrelevant to informational capitalism,
those whom Castells refers to as the ‘fourth world’ and who have no part to play
because they lack resources of capital and/or skills that might make them appeal
to globalised capitalism. Here he writes evocatively about the ghettoised poor
in the United States, those mired in the underclass living cheek by jowl alongside
the informational labour that is so central to the new world system, and often
working in unenviable circumstances as waiters, nannies, janitors and servants
of this new class. Castells notes the fear that generic labour may, in the longer
term, sink into this underclass if its members cannot come to terms with the
flexible demands of the new economy.
To sum up: Castells considers that the stratification system has been radically
transformed by informational capitalism. Above all, this is manifested in the
emergence of the 30 per cent of the occupational structure of OECD (Organisation
for Economic Cooperation and Development) countries accounted for
by informational labour. In an argument which echoes a great deal of current
thinking, from the enthusiasm of Robert Reich (1991) for ‘symbolic analysts’,
through Peter Drucker’s (1993) belief that ‘knowledge experts’ are now the
‘central resource’ of capitalism, to Alvin Toffler’s (1990) identification of the
centrality of the ‘cognitariat’ in the ‘knowledge society’, Castells contends that
informational labour is that range of jobs which generates change, holds together
the new economy, and generally does the thinking, conceiving, planning and
operationalising required by informational capitalism.
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