Strategies and Forms of Capital Accumulation in Transnational Informational

Concepts such as knowledge society, information society, postmodern society, postindustrial society, internet society, network society, etc. fail to grasp the dialectic of continuity and discontinuity of society, they see the changes connected to new media as radical novelties and ignore the continuing dominance of capitalist structures. In order to stress that capital accumulation is transformed by the rise of knowledge and information technologies and to stress the transnational spatial model connected to the flexible regime of accumulation, it is suggested to use notions such as transnational network capitalism, transnational informational capitalism, or transnational knowledge capitalism as key concepts for describing contemporary society. One important principle of gaining profit from information commodities is that such goods are sold at prices that are much higher than the commodityvalues. Informational networks are at the core of the productive forces of informational capitalism. Due to the characteristics of information and networks (global diffusion, intangibility, connectivity) the classical Marxian antagonism of the productive forces and the relations of production takes on a new form: Information in the internet economy is on the one hand a commodity that is controlled with the help of intellectual property rights, on the other hand the informational productive forces point towards the alternative economic model of a gift economy because information is an open, societal good. Hence the informational productive forces collide with the capitalist relations of information production which results in class struggles in which the open or proprietary character of information is contested. The logic of networking has transformed corporations which are increasingly organized on the transnational level and decentralize and flexibilize their internal structures. This is a new strategy that allows accumulation by integration, identification, and a new spirit of corporate ‘participation’ and ‘co-operation’. The new strategies of accumulation are connected to the rise of new scientific models and concepts such as virtual teams, virtual organizations, virtual corporations, knowledge management, or organizational learning, which create the impressions that Postfordist corporations are democratic institutions, but in fact have a very limited notion of participation.