A Contribution to the Critique of the Political Economy of Transnational Informational Capitalism

Concepts like knowledge society, information society, postmodern society, postindustrial society, Internet society, and network society fail to grasp the dialectic of the continuity and discontinuity of society. These concepts take the changes associated with new media as radical novelties and ignore the continuing dominance of capitalist structures. Contemporary capitalism is highly antagonistic and requires a dialectical analysis. Transnational network capitalism and transnational informational capitalism are used as key concepts for grasping the importance of information technologies and knowledge and their role in a transnational and flexible regime of accumulation. One important principle for gaining profit from information commodities is that goods are sold at prices that are much higher than their value.