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Abstract Ways of producing, the objects of everyday use, and the competence of workers — all these things are changing today. Everywhere, symbolic operations dominate material manipulations, and the exercise of formal technical training is taking the place of routine operations. Neither neoclassical economic theories nor regulation, it appears, can make convincing sense of these changes. The theses of cogitive capitalism, claiming that the laws governing the functioning of capitalism are also being transformed and will disappear, are based on an erroneous understanding of productive relations and a mechanical conception of economic value. The very real changes confronted by this theory are certainly one part of a complex crisis of capitalism heralding the progressive dissolution of work in different programmed collectivities rather than the resurrection of the independent worker.