Paraphrasing Adorno, we can give a similar answer to the question “Do we live in a capitalist or digital/information society?”. Contemporary society is an information society according to the state of its forces of production. In contrast, however, contemporary society is capitalist in its relations of production. People are still what they were in Marx’s analysis in the middle of the 19th century. Production takes place today, as then, for the sake of profit and for achieving this end it to a certain extent makes use of knowledge and information technology in production.
In 2018, 26.5% of the world population in employment lived on less than US\$3.10 (PPP).<sup>1</sup> The United Nations considers them as working poor. According to ILO estimates, in the year 2018, there were 3.3 billion employed people in the world.<sup>2</sup> The absolute number of poor employees was around 875 million. Together, these workers earned less than US\$990 billion per year, whereas the total revenues of the world’s largest information corporations<sup>3</sup> were 2.2 times as large as the total sum of these poverty wages. Whereas a small number of companies yields huge profits, billions of humans have to live in poverty. Digital society is first and foremost a global class society.
Let us have a look at a data example that deepens the engagement with the question of what character contemporary society has. Table 4.3 gives an overview of the size, share of sales, profits, and assets of the world’s largest 2,000 transnational corporations. The data are ordered by industries.
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1 Data source: UNDP. 2018. UNDP Human Development Indices and Indicators 2018 Statistical Update. New York: UNDP.
2 Data source: ILO Statistics, https://www.ilo.org/ilostat, accessed on 18 May 2019.
3 Data source: Forbes 2000 List of the World’s Largest Public Companies, year 2018.