Abstract:Theorists of post capitalism have recently argued for a more or less inevitable end to capitalism. They assume that private accumulation is systematically blocked by the inability of capitalist corporations to create revenues by setting prices as they lose control over the reproduction of their commodities and that in this process, capitalist labour will eventually disappear. Drawing on a case study of Amazon and thoughts on the policies of other leading digital corporations, we challenge these assumptions. Key corporate players of digitization are trying to become powerful monopolies and have partly succeeded in doing so, using the network effects and scaling opportunities of digital goods and building socio-technical ecosystems. These strategies have led to the development of in part isomorphic structures, hence creating a situation of oligopolistic market competition. We draw on basic assumptions of monopoly capital theory to argue that in this situation labour process rationalization becomes key to the corporation's competitive strategies. We see the expansion of digital control and the organizational structures applied by key corporate players of the digital economy as evidence for the expansion of capitalist labour, not its reduction.

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This article explores the question of how to understand social media following the Habermasian theory of the structural transformation of the public sphere. We argue for a return to political-economic fundamentals as the basis for analysing the public sphere and seek to establish a characteristic connection between digital-behavioural control and singularised audiences in the context of proprietary markets. In the digital constellation, it is less a matter of immobilising the citizen as a consumer but rather of their political activation – albeit in conditions under which commercial interests have primacy: privatisation without privatism.

In the light of the growth crisis of contemporary capitalism, the digitalisation of the economy fosters hopes for spectacular productivity gains, giving economic growth a new impetus. However, such predictions ignore the fact that the growth crisis of contemporary capitalism is mainly a result of weak private demand. I argue that digitalisation represents a macro-strategy for economic transformation explicitly tackling this aspect. However, while several strategies aimed at rationalising consumption can be observed in leading digital economy companies, instead of solving the consumption problem by increasing demand, they tend to exacerbate the structural weakness of consumption. I coin the term ‘consumption dilemma’ to mark this phenomenon and briefly stress its implications for union policies.

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