Digital capitalism at the same time deepens exploitation and creates new foundations for autonomous realms that transcend the logic of capitalism. Marx argued that the “material conditions for the existence” of “new superior relations of production” mature “within the framework of the old society” (Marx 1857/58, 263). With digitalisation, “the commodity becomes increasingly transparent” (Negri 2017, 25), “there begin to emerge sectors that are increasingly sensitive to the autonomy of social cooperation, to the self-valorisation of proletarian subjects” (Negri 2017, 25).
4.6 Conclusion
Scholars in media/communication/cultural studies have often vilified Theodor W. Adorno, which has hampered engagement with the complexity of his works and theory. This chapter has shown some aspects of why Adorno is relevant today for a critical understanding of digital capitalism. Based on Adorno, it has outlined the following aspects:
• Digital capitalism is based on a complex culture industry;
• We are experiencing the rise of authoritarian capitalism. Right-wing authoritarians use the Internet to communicate nationalism, leadership ideology, the friend/enemy-logic, and militarism;
• Contemporary society is a digital society at the level of the productive forces and a capitalist society at the level of the relations of production;
• There is an antagonism between the digital commons and digital capital.
Capitalism entails the tendency of the “self-destruction of enlightenment” (Horkheimer and Adorno 2002, xvi). We today experience a surge of new nationalism and new authoritarianism. Far-right movements and new nationalisms are the “wounds, the scars of a democracy that, to that day, has not yet lived up to its own concept” (Adorno
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Theorists