2.5 Conclusion
Engels 200th anniversary is an excellent occasion for the analysis of life and the conditions of the working class in digital capitalism. This article contributed to this task by dealing with the question: How relevant are Friedrich Engels’s works in the age of digital capitalism?
This paper showed that Friedrich Engels’s works remain highly relevant in 21st-century society and can inform the critical analysis of digital capitalism, technology and society, computational social science, digital positivism, digital labour, digital labour struggles, and the digital commons.
It is a mistake to assume that Engels is to blame for Stalinism and was the first vulgariser of Marx. But it is also an error to assume that his works are flawless. There are problematic, deterministic formulations in his works. But by and large, he has stressed the importance of class struggles in and against capitalism and that the basic social law of society is that humans make their own history based on and shaped by given conditions. Engels did not formulate a theory of the automatic collapse of capitalism. Scientific socialism is not a natural science theory of society, but an antipositivist dialectical social analysis the uses the dialectics of subject/object, agency/ structures, practices/conditions, experience/reason, empirical research/social theory, chance/necessity, discontinuity/continuity, disorder/order, diversity/unity, individual/ society, local/global, spontaneity/organisation, etc.
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Theorists