Let us summarise the main findings of this article:
• Scientific socialism:
Scientific socialism doesn’t mean that society is governed by mechanical laws, but that socialist research studies society based on the combination of critical social theory and critical empirical social research. For Engels just like for Marx, there is a difference between natural dialectics and societal dialectics. The basic law of society is that humans make their own history under given conditions. In class society, class and social struggles are the processes, by which humans make their own history.
• The critique of computational social science as digital positivism:
In the contemporary social sciences, computational social sciences have emerged as a dominant paradigm that attracts lots of attention, support, and funding. Engels understood scientific socialism as a critique of positivism. Computational social science is digital positivism that poses the danger of turning the social sciences into administrative, instrumental, positivist research that supports domination and exploitation. It 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 quantities and computation.
• The international division of digital labour:
Digital capitalism is based on an international division of digital labour, where a variety of workers is exploited under a variety of working conditions in different countries and working spaces so that transnational digital corporations accumulate capital. The international division of digital labour means transnational digital corporations’ global outsourcing of labour in order to maximise profits. Engels in The Condition of the Working Class in England outlines concepts and analyses that can inspire digital labour analysis in the 21st century.
• The antagonism between the digital productive forces and the capitalist relations of production:
Engels shows how capital uses technology as a method of relative surplus-value production. In digital capitalism, digital technologies constitute a technological paradigm that advances new forms of automation and rationalisation of labour that have resulted in significant productivity increases so that more capital can be accumulated in less time. Digital capitalism is shaped by the antagonism between the digital productive forces and the capitalist relations of production. In 21st-century digital capitalism, the digital productive forces are so highly developed that the struggle for a five hour-working day and a four hour-working week is a realistic and necessary demand for improving the quality of life of the working class that today suffers from the precarity caused by the antagonism between the digital productive forces and the capitalist relations of production. Engels stresses that questions of labour time are an important aspect of working-class struggles.
Chapter Two | Friedrich Engels in Digital Capitalism
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Conclusion