One can frequently hear that the thought of Marx and those inspired by him is outdated and is no longer relevant today. Thinkers such as Marx, Engels, Lukács, Adorno, and Smythe were not just analysing the time they live in but also provided concepts that are relevant for the general analysis of capitalism and can therefore be updated for the analysis of digital capitalism. Given that capitalism has taken on peculiar forms in the 21st century, Marxian analysis continues to be of high relevance in the age of digital capitalism.
1.2 This Book’s Chapters
Chapter 2 is focused on “Friedrich Engels in the Age of Digital Capitalism”. It asks: How relevant are Friedrich Engels’s works in the age of digital capitalism? It shows that Engels class-struggle–oriented theory can and should inform 21st-century social science and digital social research. Based on a reading of Engels’s works, the chapter discusses how to think of scientific socialism as critical social science today, presents a critique of computational social science as digital positivism, engages with foundations of digital labour analysis, the analysis of the international division of digital labour, updates Engels’s Condition of the Working Class in England in the age of digital capitalism, analyses the role of trade unions and digital class struggles in the digital age, engages with platform co-operatives, digital commons projects and public service Internet platforms are concrete digital utopias that point beyond digital capital (ism). Engels’s analysis is updated for critically analysing the digital conditions of the working class today, including the digital labour of hardware assemblers at Foxconn and Pegatron, the digital labour aristocracy of software engineers at Google, online freelance workers, platform workers at capitalist platform corporations such as Uber, Deliveroo, Fiverr, Upwork, or Freelancer, and the digital labour of Facebook users.
Chapter 3 is titled “History and Class Consciousness 2.0: Georg Lukács in the Age of Digital Capitalism and Big Data”. It discusses the relevance of Georg Lukács’ 1923 book History and Class Consciousness in the context of digital capitalism. It does so by analysing how Lukács’ concepts of the dialectic of subject and object, ideology, reification, reified consciousness matter today in the context of big data and digital capitalism. The essay shows that History and Class Consciousness’ critique of reification, ideology, and reified consciousness remains highly topical in the age of digital capitalism and big data. Lukács’ analysis allows us to critically analyse how social media, big data, and various other Internet technologies are used as tools of reification. At the same time, Lukács reminds us that only human praxis can establish alternatives.
Chapter One | Introduction: What is Digital Capitalism?
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This Book’s Chapters