Marx saw the concept of class as hinging on 'the property question'. The commodity economy develops through the progressive application of the abstraction of private property to land, capital, and increasingly, information. Just as the enclosure of the commons and the rise of the joint stock company led to class conflicts over land and capital, so too the privatisation of information gives rise to new class relations, perhaps even a new branch of the ruling class and a new subordinate class of information producers.
I would argue against economic reductionist theories that view media and culture as epiphenomenona of capital accumulation. Those theories miss the new class relations emerging out of intellectual property. But media studies inspired by Althusser or Gramsci put too much emphasis on the relative autonomy of the cultural. A new synthesis of culturalist and economist critical theory is possible if the specific property forms now developing in the information economy become the object of examination.
Thinking this through provides a threefold opportunity: (1) to grasp the emergent forms of commodified power that are now appearing that extend or perhaps transform capitalism into even more unequal and unjust forms of commodity economy (2) to identify the emergent social forces -- even new class forces -- that have a generalised interest in constructing alternatives to the commodification of information, and (3) to offer a resounding critique of the false utopias of 'one market under god', realised through commodified cyberspace, and resume instead a critical, radical and perhaps even utopian vision of a world beyond the commodity, where in the exchange of information at least, the gift economy can displace the outmoded forms of the exchange economy.
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