It does not provide detailed exegeses of either text in its entirety nor relate them to their respective authors’ wider body of work. This article is more modest in its ambition and aims merely to compare and contrast some key arguments in the two texts. Although less student-friendly in style, Hardt and Negri’s scholarly volume on the apparently seamless integration of global economic and political power in Empire also became an international best seller and was heralded as offering ‘the next big idea’. Castells’ trilogy on The Information Age has been acclaimed as a persuasive interpretation of the contemporary economy, society, and culture and is widely used in teaching. Two recent major studies by Manuel Castells and Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri have addressed the future of the capitalist economy, the modern state, and social struggles in the light of new information and communication technologies, new paradigms of production, and the dynamic of globalization. The imperial machine, far from eliminating master narratives, actually produces and reproduces them (ideological master narratives in particular) in order to validate and celebrate its own power īecause it is so difficult to grasp the complexity of a worldwide network of systemic interactions, one can understand the success of simple ideological arguments aimed at deducing all observed effects from a fundamental cause as the primary source of all contradictions ‘Informational capitalism and empire: the post-Marxist celebration of US hegemony in a new world order, Studies in Political Economy, 71-72, 39-58, 2003. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.This on-line version is the pre-copyedited, preprint version. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. The newly evolving informational economy is a reflection of the social and political changes taking place in the world at large due to various factors, most notably the globalisation of businesses and the increasing global integration of local and national economies and markets. Economic changes do not take place in a political-economic vacuum. The morphing of industrialism into informational capitalism occurred with a fundamental change in the meaning and significance attributed to knowledge as well as the changing relationship between capital, labour and knowledge. It indicates a rupture of industrial capitalism and the evolution of an entirely new economic dynamics. Also, it is not merely a form of hyper-industrialism or post-Fordist flexible production arrangement. Information or knowledge capitalism is not a continuation of industrial capitalism by other means. Information capitalism is referred to as the economic logic of post-industrialism that posits a rupture in the articulation of industrial capitalism, which was based on social labour, industrial capital, manufacturing and bulk production. The far-reaching social, economic and political changes due to recent advances in information and communications technologies (ICTs) in tandem with the globalisation of trade, investment, production and consumption have heralded the rise of ‘information capitalism’, or ‘knowledge capitalism’.
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