Digital Capitalism

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Introduction

Chapter One | Introduction: What is Digital Capitalism?

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References

Part II

Theorists

Chapter Two Friedrich Engels in the Age of Digital Capitalism

2.1 Introduction

2.2 Computational Social Science and Scientific Socialism

2.3 The Digital Condition of the Working Class Today

2.4 Working-Class Struggles in Digital Capitalism

2.5 Conclusion

Refrences

2.1 Introduction

28 November 2020: Friedrich Engels was born 200 years ago on 28 November 1820. Together with Karl Marx, Engels was the founder of the critique of the political economy. He was a theorist, historian, journalist, philosopher, politician, and entrepreneur who used the money capital he accumulated to support Marx and the international socialist movement. In 2020, capitalism has changed but is still around. Engels’s 200th anniversary is a good occasion in order to ask: How relevant are Friedrich Engels’s works in the age of digital capitalism? This essay deals with this question.

Engels together with Marx wrote the Manifesto of the Communist Party, The German Ideology, and The Holy Family. Engels also helped out Marx with writing newspaper articles that appeared under Marx’s name. And he made a genuine contribution to critical theory with works such as Anti-Schelling (Schelling and Revelation), Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy, The Condition of the Working Class in England, The Housing Question, Anti-Dühring, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, Dialectics of Nature; The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State; Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy. This article discusses the relevance of a variety of Engels’s works for the critical analysis of digital capitalism with a special focus on The Condition of the Working Class in England because we are interested in the condition of the working class in digital capitalism today.

Section 2.2 outlines a critique of computational social science based on Engels’s understanding of scientific socialism. Section 2.3 analyses the digital condition of the working class today. It uses Engels’s works, especially his book The Condition of the Working Class in England, for analysing the digital labour of hardware assemblers, Google software engineers, platform workers, and Facebook users. The section also analyses the role of productivity gains achieved by digital automation and robotisation and labour. Section 2.4 discusses working-class struggles in digital capitalism. Section 2.5 draws conclusions.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003222149-2

2.2 Computational Social Science and Scientific Socialism

To speak of “scientific socialism” does not automatically and not necessarily apply a mechanistic and deterministic theory of society that assumes that capitalism automatically breaks down and society is determined by natural economic laws. The scientific understanding of socialism is not a natural science applied society but rather a social science of society (Gesellschaftswissenschaft) that stresses the key role of the conscious human being, social practices, social production, and social relations in society. Natural science theories are not necessarily deterministic and mechanistic. The point is that in the social sciences, the positivist tradition treated society based on natural science methods and mathematics, which focuses on pure quantification and assumes that everything can be calculated. The logic of positivism neglects society’s qualities and the fact that not everything social and societal is calculable. We cannot properly calculate love, morals, sadness, happiness, (dis)respect, (in)justice, solidarity, etc. Society’s social qualities can only be properly analysed by qualitative social research methods. Marx and Engels are not as such opposed to calculation and quantification, but they are critical of computing as means of domination and exploitation that drives capital accumulation and makes the qualities of society disappear behind things and numbers. This critique of quantification as an aspect of capitalist accumulation has been reflected in Georg Lukács’ (1971) notion of reification and Max Horkheimer’s (1947) notion of instrumental reason.

In the contemporary social sciences, computational social sciences have emerged as a dominant paradigm that attracts lots of attention, support, funding and has increasingly been institutionalised.

David Lazer et al. (2009, 722) define computational social science as a social science that “leverages the capacity to collect and analyze data with an unprecedented breadth and depth and scale” and operates with “terabytes of data”. In the textbook Introduction to Computational Social Science, Cioffi-Revilla (2014, 2) defines computational social science:

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Theorists

The new field of Computational Social Science can be defined as the interdisciplinary investigation of the social universe on many scales, ranging from individual actors to the largest groupings, through the medium of computation. […] Computational social science is based on an informationprocessing paradigm of society. (Cioffi-Revilla 2014, 2)

The Manifesto of Computational Social Science (Conte et al. 2012) argues that computational social science operates with “massive ICT data” (p. 327), conducts “massive data analysis” (p. 330) that operates “up to the whole world population” (p. 331). It is “a new field of science in which new type of data, largely made available by new ICT applications, can be used to produce large-scale computational models of social phenomena” (p. 333). The Manifesto claims that computational social science constitutes “a new era” (p. 327).

Computational social scientists set out to radically transform the social sciences. Computational social science is new positivism. Its methods cannot understand the qualitative features of society such as motivations, norms, moral values, feelings, ideologies, and experiences.

Cioffi-Revilla (2014, 1) explicitly situations computational social science in the context of Auguste Comte’s “natural science of social systems, complete with statistical and mathematical foundations”. Comte was the founder of positivism. Computational social science explicitly stands in the context of positivism. The Manifesto of Computational Social Science argues for turning sociology and the social sciences into a natural science: “sociology in particular and the social sciences, in general, would undergo a dramatic paradigm shift, arising from the incorporation of the scientific method of physical sciences” (Conte et al. 2012, 341).

The danger is that computer science colonises the social sciences and leaves no space and time for critical theory, social theory, and philosophy. The main danger of computational social sciences is that this paradigm makes the social sciences uncritical and turns them into administrative sciences (see Fuchs 2017a). Engels warned in a different context of the dangers of positivism. He argues against a mathematical method that is

reducing qualitative differences to merely quantitative differences […] As Hegel has already shown (Encyclopädie, I, S. 199), this view, this “one-sided mathematical view”, according to which matter must be looked upon as having only quantitative determination, but, qualitatively, as identical originally, is ‘no other standpoint than that’ of the French materialism of the 18th century. It is even a retreat to Pythagoras who regarded quantitative determination as the essence of things. (Engels 1925, 534)

Chapter Two | Friedrich Engels in Digital Capitalism

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Computational Social Science and Scientific Socialism

For Engels (1925, 469), such reductive approaches are a form of “naïve materialism”.

Engels criticises mechanical materialism that does not see and analyse the qualitative and dialectical aspects of the world. Engels in this passage refers to the first part of Hegel’s Encyclopaedia, where Hegel discusses dialectical logic. The reference is to the discussion of pure quantity as an aspect of quantity. Hegel writes in this passage that

when we look closely at the exclusively mathematical standpoint that is here referred to (according to which quantity, which is a definite stage of the logical Idea, is identified with the Idea itself) we see that it is none other than the standpoint of Materialism. (Hegel 1830 [1991], 159, addition to §99)

He stresses that “freedom, law, ethical life […] cannot be measured and computed or expressed in a mathematical formula” (Hegel 1830 [1991], 159, addition to §99) and that

we know very little about these things and the distinction between them, if we simply stick to a ‘more or less’ of this kind, and do not advance to some grasp of specific determinacy, which is here in the first place qualitative.

(Hegel 1830 [1991], 160, addition to §99)

Hegel and Engels remind us that computational social science cannot grasp society’s dialectical relations that are not easily quantifiable. It cannot understand, model, calculate freedom, law, moral judgement, love, etc. Its analyses are one-dimensional. Critical social science should certainly adopt and experiment with data-driven methods, but not at the expense of the engagement with and application of critical theory (Fuchs 2017a). Digital data gathered on social media and other data-intensive environments can reveal important aspects of life in contemporary societies. What is needed are not simply new forms of prediction and quantification, but critical, creative and experimental methods that combine aspects of quantitative data with a qualitative understanding of humans’ motivations, experiences, interpretations, norms and values (Fuchs 2017a). Whereas Marx and Engels were social scientists who wrote the Communist Manifesto, some contemporary social scientists write manifestos for new positivism and many more believe in what such manifestos postulate, which results in the institutionalisation of computational social science and big funding for big data-based methods and project. Big data analytics and computational social science miss the difference between society and nature that Engels points out. The danger is that they reduce society to quantitative data and neglect its indeterminate, open, dialectical qualities.

To speak of “scientific socialism” doesn’t automatically and not necessarily apply a mechanistic and deterministic theory of society that assumes that capitalism automatically breaks down and society is determined by natural economic laws. The scientific understanding of socialism is not a natural science applied society but rather a social science of society (Gesellschaftswissenschaft) that stresses the key role of the conscious human being, social practices, social production, and social relations in society. Natural science theories are not necessarily deterministic and mechanistic. The point is that in the social sciences, the positivist tradition treated society based on natural science methods and mathematics, focuses on pure quantification and assumes that everything can be calculated.

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Theorists

The logic of positivism neglects society’s qualities and the fact that not everything social and societal is calculable. We cannot properly calculate love, morals, sadness, happiness, (dis)respect, (in)justice, solidarity, etc. Society’s social qualities can only be properly analysed by qualitative social research methods. Marx and Engels are not as such opposed to calculation and quantification, but they are critical of computing as means of domination and exploitation that drives capital accumulation and makes the qualities of society disappear behind things and numbers. This critique of quantification as an aspect of capitalist accumulation has been reflected in Georg Lukács’ (1971) notion of reification and Max Horkheimer’s (1947) notion of instrumental reason.

Computational social science is a paradigm in the social sciences that propagates mathematical models of society that use big data and predictive algorithms. Engels’s scientific socialism is critical of positivism. Computational social science is a neo-positivism that 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 mere quantities. Computational social science poses the danger of turning the social sciences into administrative, instrumental, positivist research that supports domination and exploitation and is a branch of computer science that has colonised the social sciences.

2.3 The Digital Condition of the Working Class Today

The Condition of the Working Class in England (CWCE) is for many Engels’s most influential book. In this section, we will discuss the situation of the working class in digital capitalism. Engels’s book The Condition of the Working Class in England plays an important role as the starting point for such an analysis. The section discusses the relationship of technology and society in Engels’s book (section 3.1), digital technology and relative surplus-value production (section 3.2), absolute surplus-value production at

Chapter Two | Friedrich Engels in Digital Capitalism

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The Digital Condition of the Working Class Today