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(CWCE, 242). Already in this early work by Engels, it becomes evident that he did not understand communism as a totalitarian state but as a democratic socialist society. Consequently, Marx and Engels in the Manifesto of the Communist Party spoke of communism as “the struggle for democracy”⁴ (Marx and Engels 1848a, 481).

The struggle for the reduction of the working day is the practical combination of economic and political struggles. In England, the 1847 Ten Hours Bill was the result of the combination of the socialist, the union and the Chartist movement. In the 1860s, the First International, in which Marx and Engels were key figures, formulated the demand of “eight hours work as the legal limit of the working day” (International Working Men’s Association 1868, 5).

In 1919, the International Labour Organization passed the Hours of Work (Industry) Convention and in 1930 the Hours of Work (Commerce and Offices) Convention that defines the standard working week as not exceeding 48 hours per week and eight hours a day. In 2020, 52 countries had passed the first convention and 30 the second. Given there are 193 member states of the United Nations, it is evident that only a rather low number of countries have signed these international conventions. The prevalence of temporary work, zero-hours contracts, part-time work, freelance labour, etc. shows that labour-time remains a key dimension of the class antagonism between capital and labour in the 21st century.

In 2020, the digital productive forces are developed to a high degree so that labourtime could be significantly reduced and everyone could work fewer hours but lead a better life. But digital technologies are embedded into what Marx and Engels termed the antagonism between the productive forces and the relations of production.

In the Communist Manifesto, they speak of the “revolt of modern productive forces against modern conditions of production” in capitalist society “that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange” and “is like the sorcerer, who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells” (Marx and Engels 1848b, 489). In digital capitalism, the antagonism between the digital productive forces and capitalist relations of production takes on the form of an antagonism between digital capital and the digital commons. On the one hand, there are new forms of capital accumulation in the digital industries that combine a variety of digital commodities and digital labour. On the other hand, there are new forms of the digital commons – such as not-for-profit online platforms, non-commercial news media, Wikipedia, the free and open-source software, non-commercial Creative Commons, platform co-operatives, the free software movement, radical open access, etc. – that go beyond digital capital and practically question capital accumulation. The antagonism between the digital machines and class relations has advanced the radical asymmetrical distribution of labour-time. Whereas some workers are highly stressed, have no leisure time and work very long hours, others are unemployed, underemployed, or precarious workers. The productive forces enable a substantial reduction of the standard working day that allows a more symmetrical distribution of labour time and a good life for all. Establishing a reduction of the working week without wage cuts requires class struggles for radical reforms of labour legislation. Just like the labour movement struggled for first for the ten-hours- and then for the eight-hours-working day, in digital capitalism, we need struggles for the five-hours-working day and a fourday-working week with full wage compensation. Such struggles point towards a postscarcity society, in which digital technologies are used to minimise necessary labour time and maximise free time and the good life for all.

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4 Translation from German: “die Erkämpfung der Demokratie”

Writing in 1845, Engels says that a “mass of Acts for enclosing and cultivating commons is passed at every session of Parliament” (CWCE, 287). Communism “does away with all class antagonisms” (CWCE, 301). In the early phase of capitalism, common land was enclosed and peasants were forced into wage labour. Marx (1867) terms this phase of primitive accumulation. But primitive accumulation never ended. It continues in the form of imperialism, attempts of capital to make use of violence and other means for turning non-commodified spheres of society and nature into realms of capital accumulation. That is why digital capital seeks to colonise non-capitalist spaces such as the digital commons and turn them into spheres of digital capital accumulation. Engels pointed out that non-capitalist alternatives are possible and needed. For example, in the realm of media and education, he argues that radical media and education are important intellectual means of struggle. He saw the Chartist newspaper Northern Star as “The only sheet which reports all the movements of the proletariat” (CWCE, 232). He stressed the importance of educational institutions such as the Chartist institutions where “the children receive a purely proletarian education, free from all the influences of the bourgeoisie” and one finds “reading-rooms” with “proletarian journals and books” (CWCE, 245).

We need concrete utopias of digital socialism. I see two potentials: On the one hand, the renewal of the movement of co-operatives and self-managed companies in the form of platform co-operatives, that is, Internet platforms that are self-managed by users and digital workers. On the other hand, the creation of public Internet platforms through a network of public service media.

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Examples of platform co-operatives are the music platform Resonate, Fairbnb (an alternative to Airbnb), Taxiapp (an alternative to Uber), the photo platform Stocksy and the cooperation platform Loomio (Fuchs 2021, chapters 12, 14, and). Many platform cooperatives do not make it from concept to reality and many soon disappear again. Those that do exist usually remain small and insignificant, so they cannot challenge the digital capital. The Marxist social scientist Marisol Sandoval (2019) analyses how some of the platform co-operatives use the capitalist language and logic of “shareholders”, “profits”, “investments”, “creators”, “entrepreneurs”, “innovation”, etc., thus displacing radical politics.

Socialism is neither an app nor a platform. It cannot be downloaded from the Internet or clicked on a mobile phone. It is not enough to organise platforms as co-operatives. In order to survive and create a better society, platform co-operatives must politicise themselves and act as part of radical social movements that fight collectively and politically against capitalism and for socialism. Socialism is not an app and not a platform, but a political movement. Sandoval (2016a, 2016b, 2019) argues that platform co-operatives should play an important role in this movement and that we need class struggle co-operatives. By class-struggle co-operatives, Sandoval means that cooperatives become parts of socialist movements fighting for redistribution, capital taxation and socialism. They are part of what Bhaskar Sunkara (2019) calls classstruggle social democracy, whereby social democracy is to be understood in the sense of Luxembourg as a democratic socialist movement and party.

In order to prevent new fascism, it is necessary to defend and renew democracy. Public media should play an important role in this. They are non-capitalist because they are not profit-oriented. And they can only act critically and as public media, if they are not controlled by the state, that is they are not state media. The strengthening of noncapitalist media is an aspect of the class struggle in so far as the power of the capitalist media is pushed back. But today we see that right-wing forces are attacking the public media and would like to abolish them. One strategy against this is the renewal of the public media in the Internet age.

There are initiatives like Public Open Space (https://public-open-space.eu) and discussions about the need for public media and international networks of public media as operators of public Internet platforms. For example, a public YouTube, jointly operated by the BBC, ARD, ORF, etc., on which the archive material of the public media is offered with Creative Commons licenses for remixing for non-commercial purposes (Fuchs 2017c, 2018b, 2018d). Or a new edition of the legendary debate format Club 2 of the Austrian Broadcasting Corporation (ORF) in the form of an Internet-based Club 2.0, in order to counter the lack of debate culture that prevails in mediatised, digital capitalism. The principle of Club 2 was that it was a live discussion without censorship, without advertising and with open air time. Club 2 was a public sphere.

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In today’s highly accelerated capitalism there is hardly any time and space for complex arguments and debates. The acceleration logic of capital has also colonised culture, leading to the acceleration and boulevardisation of the public sphere. More and more experiences are squeezed into short time spans, leaving hardly any time for reflection and reflected discussion. The result is the boulevardisation of the media. Reality TV is one example of this. In my opinion, Hartmut Rosa (2013) correctly points out the alienated aspects of acceleration. It is crucial in this respect to see that acceleration under capitalism is driven by the logic of accumulation.

Club 2.0 is the digital public sphere in the age of user-generated content and social media (Fuchs 2017c, 2018b, 2018d). We need to strengthen and update the independence of public media from the state and capital and empower them to act as operators of digital platforms on the Internet and to use these platforms for further developing public service media’s remits.

Concrete utopias of digital socialism need concrete initiatives and projects that should be part of broader movements and struggles for socialism and the rescue and strengthening of the commons and the public sphere.

In CWCE, Engels gave significant attention to working-class struggles. One can draw important lessons from Engels’s insights for the analysis of digital working-class struggles. Engels stresses the importance of trade unions, strikes, and radical political reforms as aspects of class struggles. In digital capitalism, we need new forms, strategies and methods of trade unions and class struggle. 21st-century society trade unions need to take serious housework, freelancers, the unemployed, platform labour and other forms of digital labour, the tendency of production and consumption to converge, digital surveillance, etc. In digital capitalism, many consumer rights issues are labour rights issues. In digital capitalism, strikes need to add new digital dimensions of struggles in order to be effective. There are two implications: First, class struggles and strikes should make use of digital platforms as means of organisation, mobilisation and communication. Second, strikes should also take place online and disrupt value production on digital platforms in order to exert digital power against digital capital. Engels stresses that questions of labour time are an important aspect of working-class struggles. 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 stressed the need for alternatives to capital and capitalism. In a digital society, platform co-operatives, digital commons projects and public service Internet platforms are concrete digital utopias that point beyond digital capital(ism). Such projects and demands to implement and support them should be part of struggles for a good life for all and 21st-century socialism.

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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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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.

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• The exploitation of digital labour:

Engels points out the inhumane consequences of absolute surplus-value production, that is, the lengthening of the working day. In digital capitalism, absolute surplus-value production takes on the form of highly exploitative Taylorist work organisation in Chinese hardware assemblage factories owned by companies such as Foxconn or Pegatron, where workers toil long hours to produce the profits of transnational digital corporations such as Apple, Dell, or HP. In digital capitalism, one also finds a form of absolute surplus-value production in software and other companies that employ highly skilled and highly paid engineers, who are incentivised to spend long hours and their life in office complexes such as the Googleplex where the boundaries between labour/ play, working time/leisure time, office/home, workers/friends and family blur. The result is that the digital labour aristocracy works very long hours and has high wages but suffers from social poverty, i.e. a lack of work/life balance, friendships and social life outside of the workplace. Digital platform workers are what Engels and Marx characterised as piece-wage workers.

• The Condition of the Working Class in England:

In CWCE, Engels gave significant attention to working-class struggles. One can draw important lessons from Engels’s insights for the analysis of digital working-class struggles.

• Trade unions in the digital age:

Engels stresses the importance of trade unions, strikes, and radical political reforms as aspects of class struggles. In digital capitalism, we need new forms, strategies and methods of trade unions and class struggle. 21st-century society trade unions need to take serious housework, freelancers, the unemployed, platform labour and other forms of digital labour, the tendency of production and consumption to converge, digital surveillance, etc. In digital capitalism, many consumer rights issues are labour rights issues.

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• Digital working-class struggles:

In digital capitalism, strikes need to add new digital dimensions of struggles in order to be effective. There are two implications: First, class struggles and strikes should make use of digital platforms as means of organisation, mobilisation and communication. Second, strikes should also take place online and disrupt value production on digital platforms in order to exert digital power against digital capital.

• Alternatives to digital capitalism:

Engels stressed the need for alternatives to capital and capitalism. In a digital society, platform co-operatives, digital commons projects and public service Internet platforms are concrete digital utopias that point beyond digital capital(ism). Such projects and demands to implement and support them should be part of struggles for a good life for all and 21st-century socialism.

In The Housing Question, Engels (1872, 324–325) argues:

And it is precisely this industrial revolution which has raised the productive power of human labour to such a high level that – for the first time in the history of mankind – the possibility exists, given a rational division of labour among all, of producing not only enough for the plentiful consumption of all members of society and for an abundant reserve fund, but also of leaving each individual sufficient leisure so that what is really worth preserving in historically inherited culture – science, art, forms of intercourse, etc. – may not only be preserved but converted from a monopoly of the ruling class into the common property of the whole of society, and may be further developed.

Computing has helped to create foundations for a highly productive post-scarcity socialist society, where wealth for all is possible and culture is the common property of the whole of society. Writing in the 19th century, Engels wrote of science, art (and more general forms of intercourse) as aspects of culture that in socialism benefit all. Today, he would also include digital technologies such as the Internet and would demand the creation of digital commons. If Engels were alive today, he would criticise all digital capital accumulation models and argue that digital technologies shouldn’t be capital and commodities but common properties available without payment to the whole of society and benefiting everyone. Engels would certainly support the creation of a public service and commons-based Internet (see Fuchs 2021, chapters 14 and 12).

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