Accounts of the capitalist knowledge and information economy promise exciting theoretical innovations, and political agendas. At the same time, economic theory as such seems to face problems in the analysis of cognitive (or “immaterial”) goods and resources. Neoclassical as well as Marxist authors find themselves forced to rethink their fundamental categories, scarcity and labour. As has been widely observed, knowledge and information are in many aspects non-scarce, namely insofar as they are non-rival (i.e. not used up when used), and excluding people from accessing them is cost intensive, difficult or even impossible (as in the cases of digitized music or images, scientific results or published news). Neoclassical accounts thus have to introduce trade-off scenarios, network-effects promoting monopolies, public spending, sharing and even gift economies in order to understand how knowledge and information work economically. For Marxists, the equivalent set of problems is which and whose work counts as necessary in order to achieve valuable knowledge, how this labour is measured and where it enters processes of exploitation. Marx himself famously argued that in an economy driven by science and technology, “labour time ceases and must cease to be” the “measure” of wealth, so that “production based on exchange value breaks down”. And while some of his followers conclude that a “post-capitalist” economy is finally within view, others argue that the mechanisms of exploitation have changed fundamentally.

In contrast to neoclassical and Marxist approaches, Polanyi saw the creation of peculiar, “fictitious” commodities at the very heart of the capitalist economy and society. For him, three goods which are not produced for markets but are nevertheless sold on markets – land, labour and money – explain fundamental structures and problems of the modern market economy. Polanyi’s institutionally and politically sensitive theory of fictitious commodities might also offer clues for understanding a capitalism based on knowledge and information. Diverse authors, more or less tentatively, have already dubbed knowledge as the “fourth fictitious commodity”. Just as the commons of land were privatized through enclosures in early modernity, so common knowledge is turned to intellectual property through laws and treaties. Just as manual labour has been subjugated to the discipline of the factory, so intellectual labour is brought under dense quality control and quantified by performance indicators, measuring everything from satisfaction with call centre services to the citation of publications.