Exploitation of the self in community-based software production - workers’ freedoms or firm foundations?

Braverman and other Marxist analysts revealed inequalities and power relations based upon labour regulation within the industrial capitalist production model. However, it can generally be agreed by both those on the left and right of the political spectrum that such contemporary community-based models of production of software as are found within FS/OS represent dramatically different production techniques than those devised by Ford and Taylor in the industrial age. In the Taylorist industrial model, Scientific Management's conceptualization of the worker demanded that ‘brain work’ should be ‘removed from the shop and centred in the planning or laying-out department’ (Taylor 1903[1998]: 30). By contrast, in sexy new informational-community-based models of production, only ‘brain work’ matters. Despite Foucault’s insistence on the link between knowledge and power within ‘concrete practices', scholars have not adequately considered issues relating to the precise nature of power relations and agency as knowledge is produced in the new accumulation regime of the post-Fordist information economy. Contemporary social science literature frequently makes the assumption that knowledge has become a product in a qualitatively new manner, but tends not to critically examine some of the negative consequences of how lucrative knowledge is formed.