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Wikipedia: An Info-Communist Manifesto

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Television & New Media

Published online on

Abstract

The task of this article is to analyze the political economy of Wikipedia. We discuss the specifics of Wikipedia’s mode of production. The basic principles of what we call the info-communist mode of production will be presented. Our analysis is grounded in Marxist philosophy and Marxist political economy, and is connected to the current discourse about the renewal and reloading of the idea of communism that is undertaken by thinkers like Slavoj Zizek and Alain Badiou. We explore to which extent Wikipedia encompasses principles that go beyond the capitalist mode of production and represent the info-communist mode of production. We present the subjective dimension of the mode of production (cooperative labor), the objective dimension of the mode of production (common ownership of the means of production), and the subject–object dimension of the mode of production (the effects and products of the mode of production).