Foxconn (section 3.3), play labour at Google (section 3.4), precarious platform workers (section 3.5), and Facebook labour (section 3.6).
2.3.1 Technology and Society
Some observers, such as McLellan (1993, xviii) argue that the underlying Engels approach in CWCE is “a technological determinism that was to remain with Engels all his life”. There are indeed some formulations in CWCE that can create such an impression: The “industrial revolution […] altered the whole civil society” (CWCE, 15); the “proletariat was called into existence by the introduction of machinery” (CWCE, 29)
But Engels leaves no doubt that capitalist relations of production, that is private property relations, the class relation between capital and labour and the profit imperative, shape the development and application of machinery. He says that capitalism is the cause of misery: The “great central fact” is “that the cause of the miserable condition of the working class is to be sought […] in the capitalistic system itself” (CWCE, 314). When discussing machinery, Engels points out that the social conditions under which technology exist are the factors that have a decisive influence on technology’s impacts on society: “The consequences of improvement in machinery under our present social conditions are, for the working man, solely injurious, and often in the highest degree oppressive” (CWCE, 149).
In CWCE, Engels often describes class relations as competition and makes clear that not machines, but the transformation of class relations created the proletariat. Competition – “the battle of all against all” – “created and extended the proletariat” (CWCE, 87). Capitalist competition means a class conflict between capital and labour but also competition between capitalists that results in the centralisation of capital and competition between workers, such as between the “power-loom weaver” and “the hand-loom weaver” (CWCE, 87).
Engels (1848b, 482) inserted a note to the 1888 edition of the Manifesto, saying that by
bourgeoisie is meant the class of modern Capitalists, owners of the means of social production and employers of wage-labour. By proletariat, the class of modern wage-labourers who, having no means of production of their own, are reduced to selling their labour-power in order to live.
Capital means “the direct or indirect control of the means of subsistence and production” as “the weapon with which this social warfare is carried on” (CWCE, 37–38).
46
Theorists