Marx in the Age of Digital Capitalism

Abstract

is fashionable again,' declares Jorn Schutrumpf, head of the Berlin publishing house Dietz, which brings out the works of Marx and his collaborator Friedrich Engels. Sales have trebled-albeit from a pretty low level-since 2005 and have soared since the summer. […] The Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, gave him a decent review last month: 'Marx long ago observed the way in which unbridled capitalism became a kind of mythology, ascribing reality, power and agency to things that had no life in themselves.' Even the Pope has put in a good word for the old atheist-praising his 'great analytical skill.' (The Times, Financial crisis gives added capital to Marx's writings. October 20, 2008). No one claims that we're all Marxists now but I do think the old boy deserves some credit for noticing that 'it's the economy, stupid' and that many of the apparently omniscient titans who ascend the commanding heights of the economy are not so much stupid as downright imbecilic, driven by a mad exploitative greed that threatens us all. Marx's work is not holy writ, despite the strivings of some disciples to present it as such (The Evening Standard, Was Marx Right All Along?. March 30, 2009). Karl Marx is back. That, at least, is the verdict of publishers and bookshops in Germany who say that his works are flying off the shelves (The Guardian, Booklovers Turn to Karl Marx as Financial Crisis Bites in Germany. October 15, 2008). Policy makers struggling to understand the barrage of financial panics, protests and other ills afflicting the world would do well to study the works of a long-dead economist: Karl Marx. The sooner they recognize we're facing a once-in-a-lifetime crisis of capitalism, the better equipped they will be to manage a way out of it (Bloomberg Business Week, Give Karl Marx a Chance to Save the World Economy. August 28, 2011). Time Magazine showed Marx on its cover on February 2nd, 2009, and asked in respect to the crisis: "What would Marx think?" In the cover story, Marx was presented as the saviour of capitalism and was thereby mutilated beyond recognition: "Rethinking Marx. As we work out how to

Data Colonialism: Rethinking Big Data’s Relation to the Contemporary Subject

“…Today's exposure of daily life to capitalist forces of datafication might seem similar, first, to arguments from four or five decades ago that the capitalist organization of work had extended from the factory to the whole of society: the well-known Autonomist notion of the "social factory" (Gill and Pratt 2008;Terranova 2000;Tronti 1966; more recently, Hardt and Negri 2017;Lazzarato 2014). Indeed, much important work has been done more recently on the actual exploitation of quasi-labor or playbor, for example, on digital platforms (Fuchs 2017;Scholz 2013), which in turn have their roots often in an alternative strand of Marxist analysis (Smythe 1977). But our argument is not concerned here specifically with the exploitation of labor.…”

O sistema tecnológico digital

“…Outros concentram-se nas qualidades fantásticas da inteligência artificial (IA) e argumentam que, dada sua função substitutiva de trabalho humano, a humanidade estaria rumando para uma reedição da Grande Transformação (BALDWIN, 2019) ou uma Segunda Era das Máquinas McAFFE, 2014). Alguns enfatizam aspectos mais gerais da digitalização de negócios e atividades econômicas e a gênese do capitalismo digital (FUCHS;MOSCO, 2016). Alguns autores argumentam que mudanças socioeconômicas substanciais dependem não apenas de uma, mas de um conjunto interativo de tecnologias.…”

On the issue of noonomy

“…Fuchs C. в работе [31], напротив, дает детальный анализ цифровой экономики с позиции марксистской теории. Он описывает, каким образом трансформируются посредством системной дигитализации труд, класс, товар, эксплуатация, прибавочная стоимость и др.…”