Digital Capitalism

We need a fair and controlled Australian style pointsbased immigration system.

that a Labour Party government would vastly increase immigration (“uncontrolled”, “unlimited”). The formulation of a “huge pressure” on housing and public services implies that immigrants are a danger that weighs down the social system. Immigrants are constructed as outsiders who only have a negative function and threaten the nation’s welfare and social cohesion. It is not mentioned that they also pay taxes, pay for housing, etc. The NHS wouldn’t exist without immigrant nurses and doctors because there is a shortage of both. The friend/enemy-scheme here plays the ideological role of distracting attention from the neoliberal politics of Thatcher, the Conservatives, and New Labour whose austerity politics have limited and cut investments into public services and have resulted in various privatisations, including of council housing. Johnson promises tough immigration laws in the form of an “Australian-style points-based system”.

The friend/enemy-scheme not just takes on the form of racism and xenophobia, but is frequently also expressed as the scapegoating of political opposition and investigative media. Figure 4.4 shows an example.

In his ideological logic, Trump identifies himself with the US people. It is a frequent claim of populists that they alone authentically and absolutely Represent the people and the nation. Based on this logic criticism of Trump is presented as anti-American and directed against the American people. Trump, therefore, presents media that have reported critically about him, namely New York Times, NBC, ABC, CBS, and CNN, as “the enemy of the American People!”.

116

Theorists

Boris Johnson @BorisJohnson

Trump claims that criticisms of him are “fake news” although he himself has spread false stories such as the one that Barack Obama a Kenyan Muslim who never attended Columbia University, the one that Hillary Clinton was very ill and therefore couldn’t have served as US president, etc. (see Holloway 2017).

Adorno explains the ideological logic of the friend/enemy-scheme:

So, the group to which they count themselves – and it does not matter which people it is – is presented as being endowed with all kinds of good qualities and is counted among those who can be saved, while the others that they reject as negative and whom they either have to psychologically foreclose or at least do not want to have there, are considered as the wretched. This is the outgroup or at least the minority in their own area with which they are currently dealing. (Adorno 1960, 253–254, translation from German)

Right-wing authoritarians construct out-groups such as illegal immigrants, Mexico, China, Muslims, oppositional politicians, and critics. They are presented as threatening the greatness of the nation. According to Adorno, identification with the leader and hatred against the out-group allows emotional release (Adorno 1975, 16–20). Such a release of aggression encourages “excess and violence” (17). Violence is the fourth characteristic of right-wing authoritarianism.

4.4.4 Violence and Law-and-Order Politics

Donald Trump frequently expresses his admiration of the US army on Twitter and considers armament and nuclear weapons as appropriate means of political communication (see the examples in Figure 4.5).

Chapter Four | Adorno and the Media in Digital Capitalism

117

Digital Authoritarianism

Trump sees violence as an appropriate means for solving conflicts. He is a militarist who worships soldiers and the army. Armies fetishise male military strength. As a consequence, militarism is closely entwined with patriarchy. In militarist and patriarchal ideology, to the male soldier as an ideal citizen who takes up arms to defend the nation corresponds the female role model of the housewife who gives birth to and brings up new soldiers. Trump expresses his belief in violent retaliation: “When somebody screws you, screw them back in spades. […] When someone attacks you publicly, always strike back. […] Go for the jugular so that people watching will not want to mess with you” (Trump and Zanker 2007, 199).

As a teenager, Donald Trump attended New York Military Academy, which partly explains why he is so fond of the army and hierarchies. From a psychoanalytical perspective, one can speculate about whether a feeling of a lack of parental love may have resulted in love of the army and military drill as attempted flight and compensation mechanism.

Adorno argues that there is a logic that connects the friend/enemy-scheme to violence: the right-wing authoritarian “cannot help feeling surrounded by traitors, and so continuously threatens to exterminate them” (Adorno 1975, 78). Trump sees war, violence, weapons, and guns as a generally appropriate means of handling conflicts. The “model of the military officer” is “transferred to the realm of politics” (Adorno 1975, 49). Love to the leader is an “emotional compensation for the cold, self-alienated life of most people” (Adorno 1975, 37). In Trump’s world, survival, toughness, strength, and the willingness to fight, lead and compete are moral norms. Any “reference to love is almost completely excluded”, and the “traditional role of the loving father” is replaced “by the negative one of threatening authority” (Adorno 1991, 137).

118

Theorists

Adorno helps us to critically understand top-down leadership, nationalism, the friend/ enemy-scheme, and militant patriarchy as principles of right-wing authoritarianism and as ideological moments that distract attention from the complexity of society’s problems and from their aspects of capitalism and class. Next, we will have a look at how Adorno helps us to answer the question of whether we live in an information/digital society or digital capitalism.

4.5 Digital Society or Capitalism?

The main question of the information society debate is: in what kind of society do we live? Is it an information and digital society? Or a capitalist society? Or something different?

Theodor W. Adorno (1968/2003) argued that the “fundamental question of the present structure of society” is “about the alternatives: late capitalism or industrial society” (111). He asked if society was a capitalist society or an industrial society. Today, Adorno’s question can be reposed in a slightly altered form: do we live in capitalism or an information/digital society?

The information society debate’s dominant narrative is that a radically new society has emerged. For example, Daniel Bell (1974) spoke of the emergence of a post-industrial information society that “is based on services” in “health, education, research, and government” and where what “counts is not raw muscle power, or energy, but information” (15). This is a subjectivist view with a focus on radical change: for Bell, information/knowledge work constitutes “a vast historical change” (37).

Adorno gave an answer to the question of whether society was at the time he lived capitalist or industrial:

In terms of critical, dialectical theory, I would like to propose as an initial, necessarily abstract answer that contemporary society undoubtedly is an industrial society according to the state of its forces of production. Industrial labor has everywhere become the model of society as such, regardless of the frontiers separating differing political systems. It has developed into a totality because methods modelled on those of industry are necessarily extended by the laws of economics to other realms of material production, administration, the sphere of distribution, and those that call themselves culture. In contrast, however, society is capitalist in its relations of production. People are still what they were in Marx’s analysis in the middle of the nineteenth century […] Production takes place today, as then, for the sake of profit (Adorno 1968/2003, 117).

Chapter Four | Adorno and the Media in Digital Capitalism

119

Digital Society or Capitalism?

Paraphrasing Adorno, we can give a similar answer to the question “Do we live in a capitalist or digital/information society?”. Contemporary society is an information society according to the state of its forces of production. In contrast, however, contemporary society is capitalist in its relations of production. People are still what they were in Marx’s analysis in the middle of the 19th century. Production takes place today, as then, for the sake of profit and for achieving this end it to a certain extent makes use of knowledge and information technology in production.

In 2018, 26.5% of the world population in employment lived on less than US\$3.10 (PPP).¹ The United Nations considers them as working poor. According to ILO estimates, in the year 2018, there were 3.3 billion employed people in the world.² The absolute number of poor employees was around 875 million. Together, these workers earned less than US\$990 billion per year, whereas the total revenues of the world’s largest information corporations³ were 2.2 times as large as the total sum of these poverty wages. Whereas a small number of companies yields huge profits, billions of humans have to live in poverty. Digital society is first and foremost a global class society.

Let us have a look at a data example that deepens the engagement with the question of what character contemporary society has. Table 4.3 gives an overview of the size, share of sales, profits, and assets of the world’s largest 2,000 transnational corporations. The data are ordered by industries.

120

Theorists

1 Data source: UNDP. 2018. UNDP Human Development Indices and Indicators 2018 Statistical Update. New York: UNDP.

2 Data source: ILO Statistics, https://www.ilo.org/ilostat, accessed on 18 May 2019.

3 Data source: Forbes 2000 List of the World’s Largest Public Companies, year 2018.

Let us have a closer look at the structure of the structural distribution of profits of the world’s 2,000 largest corporations according to the data in the table. Finance capital controls 33.7% of these corporations’ profits, the culture and digital industry 17.7%, manufacturing and construction 13.1%, energy and utilities 9.8%, and the mobility and transport sector 9.4%.

These data show that it is an exaggeration to claim that digital capitalism is capitalism’s dominant moment. There are multiple, intersecting, and interacting capitalisms. Capitalism’s “individual sectors […] are themselves economically intertwined” (Horkheimer and Adorno 2002, 96). Digital capitalism is linked to finance capitalism via venture capital investments into digital start-ups and the listing of digital corporations on stock markets. Digital and cultural capitalism requires energy inputs, which links to classical resources and hyper-industrial capitalism. Global communication advances the increased transportation of people and goods, which is why the digital/culture industry and the mobility/transport industries are interacting. Contemporary capitalism is at the same time finance capitalism, digital capitalism, hyper-industrial capitalism, mobility capitalism, etc. All of these dimensions interpenetrate.

Adorno’s insight that we need to look at society from the perspectives of the productive forces and the relations of production is complicated by what Marx termed the antagonism between the productive forces and the relations of production. There is an antagonism between the informational, networked productive forces and the digital and informational class relations. This relation is antagonism between digital capital and the digital commons. It becomes evident in phenomena such as intellectual property rights VS. digital gifts/non-commercial Creative Commons, for-profit open access VS. non-profit open access, ad-funded for-profit Internet platforms VS. nonprofit Internet platforms, capitalist platforms VS. platform co-operatives, etc.

Chapter Four | Adorno and the Media in Digital Capitalism

121

Digital Society or Capitalism?

Digital capitalism at the same time deepens exploitation and creates new foundations for autonomous realms that transcend the logic of capitalism. Marx argued that the “material conditions for the existence” of “new superior relations of production” mature “within the framework of the old society” (Marx 1857/58, 263). With digitalisation, “the commodity becomes increasingly transparent” (Negri 2017, 25), “there begin to emerge sectors that are increasingly sensitive to the autonomy of social cooperation, to the self-valorisation of proletarian subjects” (Negri 2017, 25).

4.6 Conclusion

Scholars in media/communication/cultural studies have often vilified Theodor W. Adorno, which has hampered engagement with the complexity of his works and theory. This chapter has shown some aspects of why Adorno is relevant today for a critical understanding of digital capitalism. Based on Adorno, it has outlined the following aspects:

• Digital capitalism is based on a complex culture industry;

• We are experiencing the rise of authoritarian capitalism. Right-wing authoritarians use the Internet to communicate nationalism, leadership ideology, the friend/enemy-logic, and militarism;

• Contemporary society is a digital society at the level of the productive forces and a capitalist society at the level of the relations of production;

• There is an antagonism between the digital commons and digital capital.

Capitalism entails the tendency of the “self-destruction of enlightenment” (Horkheimer and Adorno 2002, xvi). We today experience a surge of new nationalism and new authoritarianism. Far-right movements and new nationalisms are the “wounds, the scars of a democracy that, to that day, has not yet lived up to its own concept” (Adorno

122

Theorists

1968/2020, 9). They are the result of the negative dialectic of neoliberal capitalism and the new imperialism.

The commodification of everything, entrepreneurialism, privatisation, deregulation, financialisation, globalisation, deindustrialisation, outsourcing, precarisation, and the new individualism have backfired. These are developments that have extended and intensified inequalities and crisis tendencies, which created a fruitful ground for new nationalism, right-wing extremism, and new fascism.

How can nationalism and right-wing authoritarianism be counteracted? Adorno stresses that one should point out that authoritarianism’s consequences mean disasters for everyone, including war: one should “warn the potential followers of rightwing extremism about its own consequences, to convey to them that this politics will lead its own followers to their doom too” (Adorno 1968/2020, 17).

Adorno also mentions that reason and facts should be used to counter “fake news” and”post-truth”. Anti-fascism and anti-nationalism should not “fight lies with lies”, but “counteract it with the full force of reason, with the genuinely unideological truth” (Adorno 1968/2020, 49–50).

Horkheimer and Adorno (2002, 60) speak about the “ambiguity of laughter”:

If laughter up to now has been a sign of violence, an outbreak of blind, obdurate nature, it nevertheless contains the opposite element, in that through laughter blind nature becomes aware of itself as such and thus abjures its destructive violence.

Authoritarianism online and offline is emotional and irrational, which is why authoritarians often do not listen to rational arguments. Making fun of right-wing authoritarianism should be part of its deconstruction.

Contemporary digital technologies such as social media should be used for advancing the anti-fascist strategies that Adorno had in mind, namely reminders about authoritarian capitalism’s consequences, rational arguments opposing it, and satire that deconstructs its logic.

Adorno’s theory allows us to understand why neoliberalism has backfired and turned into authoritarian capitalism. These changes are mediated by and expressed in digital means of communication. The struggle for defending and extending the democratic public sphere is key to resisting authoritarian capitalism.

Chapter Four | Adorno and the Media in Digital Capitalism

123

Conclusion

References

124

Theorists

Chapter Four | Adorno and the Media in Digital Capitalism

125

References