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Skepticism

15 January, 2016 - 09:14

Castells’ theory revisits Marxist skepticism regarding industrialism. The theory of the network society uses many concepts and viewpoints traditionally held by Marxists. Castells replaces the position of capital in industrialism by the concept of information. In his analysis, Castells recognizes that the rise of informationalism and the nature of networks has led global societies toward inequality and social exclusion, widening the cleavage between generic labour and self-reprogrammable labour, global city and local city, information-rich and information-poor. Thus, Tony Giddens, Alain Touraine, Peter Hall, and Chris Freeman compare Castells to such sociologists of importance as Marx and Weber (Cabot, 2003). During the 1970s, Castells exhibited a Marxist intellectual trajectory, and he confessed that he felt the need of Marxism for probing political change in information age.