Table 2.1 shows productivity growth data for the G7-economies. It uses labour productivity growth as a measure of productivity. Labour productivity is a statistical measure of the gross value added (measured in constant US\$) produced per hour worked in a particular industry. It calculates labour productivity by diving the total value added in the industry during one year by the total amount of working hours in that industry. The data in Table 2.1 shows the ten-year growth rate of labour productivity. Not all data was available, so some fields have been left undefined. In advanced capitalist countries, labour productivity has more than doubled over a time period of forty years (1970–2010). In the analysed national economies, it takes on average between 26 and 44 years to double the productivity of manufacturing. This was also the time when computing was introduced in manufacturing as a production technology. Capitalist digitalisation has resulted in large productivity growth in manufacturing and other industries.
Industry 4.0 is about technologies that combine the Internet of Things, Big Data, social media, cloud computing, sensors, artificial intelligence and robotics in the production, distribution and use of physical goods. The bourgeoisie has declared the fourth industrial revolution to try to automate the production, distribution, handling, repair, and disposal of industrial goods such as cars (Fuchs 2018c). It hopes to increase the profit rate of the manufacturing industry.
Engels pointed out that the capitalist shaping and use of industrial technologies turned workers into “machines pure and simple” (CWCE, 17). The capitalist shaping, development, design, and use of digital technologies has contributed to forms of alienation such as the enslavement of mineworkers who extract the physical resources out of which digital hardware is manufactured, long working hours in the assemblage of hardware and in the software and creative industry, an always-on-work-culture mediated by laptops, phones and tablets as means of production, precarious freelancing in the digital industries, etc.
2.3.3 Absolute Surplus-Value Production at Foxconn
Engels gives a picture of the terrible conditions that members of the working faced in England in the 1840s. One of his examples is the dress-makers in London:
Chapter Two | Friedrich Engels in Digital Capitalism
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The Digital Condition of the Working Class Today