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# Digital Capitalism
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Chapter Two | Friedrich Engels in Digital Capitalism
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Refrences
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Chapter Three History and Class Consciousness 2.0: Georg Lukács in the Age of Digital Capitalism and Big Data
3.1 Introduction
3.2 Ideology and Reified Consciousness
3.3 Journalism and Reification
3.4 The Reification of Communication Technologies
3.5 Conclusion
References
3.1 Introduction
This chapter asks: what elements of Georg Lukács’ History and Class Consciousness can inform the foundations of a critical theory of communication in the age of digital capitalism? To provide an answer, the article proceeds in the following manner: section 3.2 analyses ideology and reified consciousness. Section 3.3 draws attention to the relationship between journalism and reification. Section 3.4 discusses the reification of communication technologies. Some conclusions are drawn in section 3.5. Based on a reading of Lukács, the chapter wants to show Lukács’ analysis can be used for critically analysing contemporary forms of digital communication.
Dannemann (2017) argues that we today “require an updating of Lukács’ phenomenology of reification” in “our brave new digital world” that considers contemporary reification’s “peculiar rationality and irrationality”, “technical dimensions and human particularity”. The chapter at hand understands itself as a contribution to this task.
3.2 Ideology and Reified Consciousness
Reification
Reification is HCC’s key category. With it, Lukács describes and analyses capitalism’s structural effects on human subjectivity and especially consciousness. The notion of reification derives from Marx’s concept of commodity fetishism.
DOI: 10.4324/9781003222149-3
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“The essence of commodity-structure” is that “a relation between people takes on the character of a thing and thus acquires a ‘phantom objectivity’, an autonomy that seems so strictly rational and all-embracing as to conceal every trace of its fundamental nature: the relation between people” (Lukács 1971, 83; henceforth referred to as HCC). Lukács here refers to a passage in Marx’s Capital Volume 1 (chapter 1, section 1.1), where Marx describes commodities as having a “phantom-like objectivity” (Marx 1867, 128). With the metaphor of the commodity as a ghost, Marx expresses that the commodity’s value appears in the money form and the commodity’s price, but its substance – the average labour-time that workers have to expend in class relations for the production of the commodity – remains hidden.
Lukács’ notion of reification and Marx’s concept of alienation have in recent debates featured prominently within philosophy and critical social theory. For example, Rosa (2013) interprets acceleration as a process of alienation. Jaeggi (2014) argues that reification means that human subjects are prevented from appropriating the world and the self. Honneth (2007) is one of the critical theorists who have in recent times worked most directly on actualising Lukács’ concept of reification. He argues that reification means society’s disrespect and lack of giving recognition to human beings. Building on Lukács and Honneth, Fuchs (2020) has identified exploitation, political oppression, and ideology as economic, political and cultural forms of oppression. This argument is in line with recent works by Harvey (2018), who points out that alienation is a universal process that takes not just place in class relations but in many realms of society. Taken together, these authors show that reification means humans face conditions under which they cannot control these conditions, humans’ and society’s potentials cannot be realised, and where certain groups instrumentalise others in order to realise partial interests. This understanding of reification is in line with Lukács’ outline of reification in HCC. His theory remains an important point of reference in 21st-century critical theories of society.
Ideology as Reified Class Consciousness
Class consciousness is “the appropriate and rational reactions ‘imputed’ [zugerechnet] to a particular typical position in the process of production” (HCC, 51). Imputed/ascribed/attributed class consciousness (zugerechnetes Klassenbewußtsein) is objective class consciousness (HCC, 323). Objective class consciousness is defined by the subject’s role in the production process, it is not simply empirical consciousness, but an “objective possibility” of consciousness – the “thoughts and feelings which men would have in a particular situation if they were able to assess both it and the interests arising from it in their impact on immediate action and on the whole structure of society” (HCC, 51). False consciousness is consciousness that “by-passes the essence of the evolution of society and fails to pinpoint it and express it adequately” (HCC, 50).
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Ideology has in capitalist society a double nature:
1) Capitalism has an inherent fetishist character because producers and consumers do not experience the entire social relations and process of commodity production in its totality so that the thing-status of the commodity and money hides the underpinning class relations and makes capitalism appear as a natural and infinite system without alternatives;
2) Naturalisation is an important feature of ideologies in general, an important ideological strategy that makes domination appear necessary, timeless, inevitable, and infinite in order to justify and legitimate oppression. For Lukács, ideology is a necessary legitimating feature of capitalism. The “veil drawn over the nature of bourgeois society is indispensable to the bourgeoisie itself. […] the need to deceive the other classes and to ensure that their class consciousness remain amorphous is inescapable for a bourgeois regime” (HCC, 66).
Just like there is the labour of producing ideology conducted by managers, consultants, bourgeois scientists, intellectuals and journalists, etc, there is the ideology of labour: according to Lukács, the ideology of Calvinism is constitutive for “bourgeois reified consciousness with its things-in-themselves in a mythologised but yet quite pure state” (HCC, 192).
Ideology partly operates with the reification of language. Lukács quotes Marx from the German Ideology and remarks in a footnote: “Marx goes on to make a number of very fine observations about the effects of reification on language. A philological study from the standpoint of historical materialism could profitably begin here” (HCC, 209, footnote 16). Marx argues in the passage mentioned by Lukács that capitalism’s “relations of buying and selling” penetrate and shape language:
For example, propriété – property [Eigentum] and characteristic feature [Eigenschaft]; property – possession [Eigentum] and peculiarity [Eigentümlichkeit]; “eigen” [“one’s own”] – in the commercial and in the individual sense; valeur, value, Wert; commerce, Verkehr; échange, exchange, Austausch, etc., all of which are used both for commercial relations and for characteristic features and mutual relations of individuals as such. (Marx and Engels 1845/46, 231)
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The reified society also brings about reified language. Indicative of this phenomenon is the presence of reified language in the Oxford Dictionary: for example, it defines communication as the “imparting or exchanging of information by speaking, writing, or using some other medium”.1 Exchange is a social relation, in a specific amount of a commodity is exchanged for a particular amount of another commodity: x commodity A = y commodity B (Marx 1867, 163). In communication, you do not expect an “exchange” of 10 words for 10 words. Indeed, one person might utter a sentence consisting of ten words and another person might answer with just one word or a sentence consisting of 20 words. Language is in general, not a commodity, although its objectification can be turned into commodities, as the case of a book that is sold for a particular amount of money shows. The example shows that the commodity form in capitalism not just reifies social relations, but as part of reified social relations also reifies communication and language that mediate the production and reproduction of social relations.
In the English language, “exchange” stems from the Latin word excambiāre, the Anglo-Norman word eschanger, and the Old French verb eschangier2. During the rise of Mercantilism in the 16th century, “exchange” was established as a common word for the “[p]ractice of merchants or lenders meeting to exchange bill of debt” and “building for mercantile business”.3 Fetishism makes the particular appear as general. Communication is a general feature of all societies, whereas exchange only exists in societies shaped by class, markets, and divisions of labour. The linguistic conflation of exchange as commodity trade and exchange as communication creates the impression that markets are a general necessary feature of all societies. As a consequence of capitalist fetishism’s impact on language, the Oxford Dictionary defines exchange simultaneously as a “short conversation or an argument” and “the trading of a particular commodity or commodities”, a “system or market in which commercial transactions involving currency, shares, etc. can be carried out”, and the “changing of money to its equivalent in the currency of another country”.4
Lukács wrote History and Class Consciousness longest chapter “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat” in 1923. Given that Nazis had not yet come to power and just five years had passed since the Russian Revolution, Lukács was at this point of time rather optimistic about the potentials of proletarian revolutions. He argues that the bourgeoisie has necessary false consciousness, whereas the proletariat does not automatically have revolutionary consciousness, but has the possibility to see through fetishism. Lukács’ political optimism is for example present in formulations such as the ones that the “consciousness of the proletariat is still fettered by reification” (HCC, 76) or capitalism keeps “the bourgeoisie imprisoned within this immediacy while forcing the proletariat to go beyond it” (HCC, 164).
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1 https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/communication
2 https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/exchange
3 https://www.etymonline.com/word/exchange
4 https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/exchange
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In the immediate years after the Russian Revolution, optimistic assessments of the proletariat’s actuality were certainly more justified than in the years between 1933 and 1945 or today. But HCC overall avoids overstressing the actuality of the proletariat’s revolutionary consciousness and puts more stress on the proletariat’s reified consciousness. Lukács, therefore, speaks of an “ideological crisis of the proletariat in which proletarian ideology lags behind the economic crisis” (HCC, p.305). Reification is “the necessary, immediate reality of every person living in capitalist society” (HCC, 197). “The danger to which the proletariat has been exposed since its appearance on the historical stage was that it might remain imprisoned in its immediacy together with the bourgeoisie” (HCC, 196). The proletariat can fail “to take this step” of becoming “the identical subject-object of history whose praxis will change reality”. Capitalism constitutes at the same time potentials for the “quantitative increase of the forms of reification” and the “undermining of the forms of reification” (HCC, 208).
Revolutionary consciousness is no automatism, the proletariat “can be transformed and liberated only by its own actions” (HCC, 208). “History is at its least automatic when it is the consciousness of the proletariat that is at issue” (HCC, 208). “Above all the worker can only become conscious of his existence in society when he becomes aware of himself as a commodity” (HCC, 168).
Lukács argues that there are three sources of the “bourgeoisification of the proletariat” (HCC, 310, Verbürgerlichung in the German original): the emergence of privileged sections of the working class (HCC, 304–305), the effects of capitalism’s structures of reification on consciousness (HCC, 310), and the taming influence of reformist social democratic parties and unions. Revisionist social democracy is an ideology with which “the proletariat falls victim to all the antinomies of reification” (HCC, 197). For Lukács, the communist party plays an important role in the development of proletarian class consciousness. “The struggle of the Communist Party is focused upon the class consciousness of the proletariat” (HCC, 326).
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Right-Wing Authoritarianism and New Nationalisms Online: Reified Consciousness on the Internet
Since the new world economic crisis started in 2008, the predominant reaction has not been the strengthening of the political left, but the rise of new nationalism and rightwing authoritarianism (Fuchs 2018a). In many parts of the world, far-right, nationalist ideology finds crucial support among blue-collar workers. Morgan and Lee analysed the relation of voting behaviour and the occupational structure in the USA’s 1,142 geographical units (defined by the American Community Survey). The working class was in this analysis defined as consisting of lower-grade service workers, skilled manual workers, unskilled manual workers, farmers, agricultural workers, and individuals without occupation whose highest educational attainment is a high school diploma. The analysis found that
Trump’s gains in 2016, relative to Romney’s more generic performance as a near-loss Republican candidate in 2012, were most substantial in areas with the largest percentages of eligible voters who can be identified as members of the white working class. (Morgan and Lee 2018, 239)
A complementary areal analysis of 1,142 geographic units shows that Trump’s gains in 2016 above Romney’s performance in 2012 are strongly related to the proportions of the voting population in each geographic unit that was white and working class. This strong relationship holds in the six states that Trump flipped, and it varies little across other types of states. […] the results […] of our analysis support the claim that Trump’s appeal to the white working class was crucial to his victory. (Morgan and Lee 2018, 240)
Similar developments of far-right, nationalist politicians and parties succeeding in elections can be found in many countries. In many cases, blue-collar workers strongly support these types of politics (see Fuchs 2018a), which is an indication that since 2008, there has been an intensification and extension of the tendency that nationalist ideology reifies blue-collar workers consciousness: a significant share of this part of the working class succumbs to the ideology that not class relations and capitalism, but immigrants, refugees and other nations are the cause of inequality and social problems. Nationalist and racist ideologies present a constructed conflict between nations and constructed conflicts between cultures as stratifying divisions in order to distract attention from the class conflict between capital and labour that has in the past decades resulted in rising profit and capital shares (the share of profits and capital in the gross domestic product) at the expense of the wage share (the share of wages in the gross domestic product) (Fuchs 2018a).
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Social media such as Facebook and Twitter are key communication tools of contemporary right-wing politics. In the past couple of years, analyses of the right-wing use of the Internet have become more important (see e.g. Ernst et al. 2017; Müller and Schulz 2019; Stier et al. 2017), which is a consequence of the global proliferation of what Lukács termed reified consciousness. Nationalists communicate four aspects of right-wing authoritarianism over online media: top-down leadership, nationalism, the friend/enemy-scheme, and the need for militant measures against the constructed enemies (Fuchs 2018a).
Let us have a look at an example: Breitbart is a far-right online news portal that frequently features nationalist propaganda and has supported Donald Trump. Its former executive chairman Steven Bannon was the chief executive officer of Trump’s presidential campaign and the Trump-executive’s White House Chief Strategist from January until August 2017. But the relations between Trump and Breitbart are older than that. On 11 July 2014, Breitbart published an article by Trump titled “A Country That Cannot Protect its Borders Will Not Last”. Trump wrote in this article:
USMC [United States Marine Corps] Sgt. Tahmooressi sacrified for our country, and while Obama is welcoming illegals, our Marine is locked in a Mexican jail. Mexico is allowing tens of thousands to go through their country and to our very stupid “open door” at the Mexican border. Frankly, Sgt. Tahmooressi is the only person who can’t come into our country! […] It’s clear to me that a country that cannot protect its borders will not last. What about the people at home? We are not caring for our own. […] We cannot, as a nation, continue this way. The underlying fear now is that Obama has planned it that way. […] The problem is easy to solve with leadership. We don’t have leadership in any capable capacity. It is a sad time for America. (Trump 2014)
In order to promote his piece, Trump shared a link to it on Twitter (see Figure 3.1). The background to this article is that former Marine Corps sergeant Andrew Tahmooressi was jailed in Mexico after he illegally crossed the border with three loaded guns in his car. All four elements of right-wing authoritarian ideology are present in Trump’s piece:
• The friend/enemy-scheme: Trump constructs a national conflict between Mexico and the USA. Mexico is said to allow illegal immigrants to cross into the USA and to jail American soldiers. The channelling of immigrants and the jailing of a former soldier, who was put into prison not in his role as soldier, but as a private individual allegedly violating Mexican law, are presented as Mexican practices that harm US citizens;
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