Information Society through Marxian Looking Glass

Reading Marx in the Information Age: A Media and Communication Studies Perspective on Capital, Volume 1; by Christian Fuchs, Routledge, 2016, xiii + 401 pages, ISBN 9781138948563 (paperback). 

An agrarian or agricultural society is one relying for its subsistence on the cultivation of crops using plows and animals. The first agrarian societies arose approximately 5,000 to 6,000 years ago in Mesopotamia and Egypt while slightly later in China and India. Change in agrarian practices occurred first in England in the 18th century, with the industrial revolution, and then subsequently later spread to the rest of Europe, Asia, and the United States. This society was characterized by limited production and hence limited division of labour and limited variation in social classes. The dominance of Parochialism specifically marked agrarian societies. Very few people had the opportunity to see or hear beyond their own village. In contrast, industrial societies grew with the help of faster means of communication, having more information at hand about the world, allowing knowledge transfer and cultural diffusion between them. Parochialism was a feature of agrarian society, while universalism is the feature of the industrial and post-industrial information society. Adam Smith [1] analysed agricultural economy in his masterpiece The Wealth of Nations. The analysis recognized the ideal agricultural economy as one of perfect liberty. Smith observed two government-imposed constraints that contradicted perfect liberty and injured agricultural economy. It was on the sale of land and the free movement of labour.[2]