The logic of positivism neglects society’s qualities and the fact that not everything social and societal is calculable. We cannot properly calculate love, morals, sadness, happiness, (dis)respect, (in)justice, solidarity, etc. Society’s social qualities can only be properly analysed by qualitative social research methods. Marx and Engels are not as such opposed to calculation and quantification, but they are critical of computing as means of domination and exploitation that drives capital accumulation and makes the qualities of society disappear behind things and numbers. This critique of quantification as an aspect of capitalist accumulation has been reflected in Georg Lukács’ (1971) notion of reification and Max Horkheimer’s (1947) notion of instrumental reason.
Computational social science is a paradigm in the social sciences that propagates mathematical models of society that use big data and predictive algorithms. Engels’s scientific socialism is critical of positivism. Computational social science is a neo-positivism that neglects that qualitative features of society such as motivations, norms, moral values, feelings, ideologies, experiences, love, death, freedom, or (in)justice that cannot be reduced to mere quantities. Computational social science poses the danger of turning the social sciences into administrative, instrumental, positivist research that supports domination and exploitation and is a branch of computer science that has colonised the social sciences.
2.3 The Digital Condition of the Working Class Today
The Condition of the Working Class in England (CWCE) is for many Engels’s most influential book. In this section, we will discuss the situation of the working class in digital capitalism. Engels’s book The Condition of the Working Class in England plays an important role as the starting point for such an analysis. The section discusses the relationship of technology and society in Engels’s book (section 3.1), digital technology and relative surplus-value production (section 3.2), absolute surplus-value production at
Chapter Two | Friedrich Engels in Digital Capitalism
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The Digital Condition of the Working Class Today