Rereading Marx in the Age of Digital Capitalism by Christian Fuchs

Author:Christian Fuchs
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Pluto Press

Marx not only describes the importance of the means of communication in capitalism, but also how the production of knowledge and communication develops due to capitalism’s need to increase productivity. Increasing productivity requires scientific progress and expert knowledge in production. The rising importance of knowledge and communicative labour is a consequence of the capitalist development of the productive forces. Marx in the Grundrisse anticipated the emergence of what some today term informational capitalism or digital capitalism or cognitive capitalism. He speaks in this context of the general intellect: ‘The development of fixed capital indicates to what degree general social knowledge has become a direct force of production, and to what degree, then, the conditions of the process of social life itself have come under the control of the general intellect and been transformed in accordance with it’ (Marx 1857/58: 706).

Also in Capital, Marx stresses the importance of the communication industry for capitalism. He argues that the ‘communication industry’ that focuses on ‘moving commodities and people, and the transmission of mere information – letters, telegrams, etc.’ is ‘economically important’ (Marx 1885: 134). He writes that there are capitalists who ‘draw the greatest profit from all new development of the universal labour of the human spirit’ (Marx 1894: 199). Today, these capitalists are CEOs, managers and shareholders of transnational communication corporations such as Apple, AT&T, Verizon, Microsoft, China Mobile, Alphabet/Google, Comcast, Nippon, Softbank, IBM, Oracle, Deutsche Telekom, Amazon, Telefónica, etc.

Theories of the information society, whose ideal-type is Daniel Bell’s (1976) approach, claim that information production has become dominant in the economy and has radically transformed society into a new formation. Marxists are often critical of such claims that entail the danger of overlooking and downplaying the continuities of capitalism. Consequently, neoliberal ideologues often celebrate new technologies as radically transforming everything towards the better. But in wanting to avoid technological determinism and idealism, Marxists often simply ignore the role of communication technologies and information production in the economy and society. The point is that today we experience the interaction of many capitalisms, including digital capitalism, communicative capitalism, finance capitalism, mobility capitalism, hyper-industrial capitalism, etc. (Fuchs 2014a: chapter 5).

Autonomist Marxism, especially the version advanced by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, is based on the notion of Marx’s general intellect and stresses the rise of knowledge in capitalism. ‘General intellect is a collective, social intelligence created by accumulated knowledges, techniques, and knowhow. The value of labor is thus realized by a new universal and concrete labor force through the appropriation and free usage of the new productive forces. What Marx saw as the future is our era’ (Hardt & Negri 2000: 364). ‘Just as in a previous era Lenin and other critics of imperialism recognized a consolidation of international corporations into quasi-monopolies (over railways, banking, electric power, and the like), today we are witnessing a competition among transnational corporations to establish and consolidate quasi-monopolies over the new information infrastructure’ (Hardt & Negri 2000: 300). Hardt and Negri are among the limited number of radical theorists who have taken the role of communication in capitalism seriously.

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