Abstract
The fundamental premise of this article is that capital thrives on contradiction, that the contradictions of capital are social rather than logical, that they are constitutive of the capital form of value, and that Marx was the first to grasp capital itself as a “moving contradiction” (Grundrisse). The article then explores one of neoliberalism’s prime governance objectives: the further entrenchment of consensual ‘public–private partnerships’ and profit-driven techno-managerial ‘fixes’ to crises of (over-)accumulation. Using Microsoft’s “cybercrime” strategy and PR campaign as a case in point, it argues that the ongoing capitalization of the intellectual commons is best understood as a post-Fordist regime of “accumulation by dispossession” (Harvey 2005) which is itself premised on the global consolidation of capitalist class power in the wake of the “long downturn” (Brenner 2006; Mattick 2011; Chuang 2016). Critiquing the naturalization of capital in the field of information and communication, it explores value and class struggle under neoliberal capitalism in the ‘digital’ conjuncture through the Marxian concept of “general intellect.” Over and against a virulent cyber-optimism propagated by Big Tech and governments alike, it engages Jodi Dean’s concept of “communicative capitalism” (Dean 2010, 2014) in order to explicate the disavowed contradictions at the heart of this formation and the ideological ‘commonsense’ it engenders.
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Notes
- 1.
Marx uses the formula M-C-M’ in Capital, Vol. 1 to model the reproduction and accumulation of capital, which moves in circuits of money (M) as an investment into commodity production (C) and exchange on the market for money prime (M’), i.e., profit. Proletarians are caught up in the accumulation of capital and forced to reproduce it because they need to sell their labor power as a commodity (C) for a wage in the form of money (M) to buy what they need to reproduce themselves (C). The result is what Marx called a Zwickmühle as the reproduction and accumulation of capital (M-C-M’) grinds against the social reproduction of the proletariat, which follows the logic of (C-M-C).
- 2.
Endnotes’ reconstruction of the Marxian systematic dialectic of capital in many respects follows that advanced by Christopher Arthur in The New Dialectic and Marx’s Capital (2004): “In Arthur’s elaboration, value is a provisional foundational category in a progressively self-concretising and retro-actively self-grounding dialectic, where internal contradictions generate the movement from one category to the next” (Endnotes 2010).
- 3.
Marx analyzed the production of “relative surplus populations” (vulgo: structural un-/underemployment) alongside the reproduction of the wage-relation in chapter 25 of Capital, Vol. 1, where he used the term to describe that part of the workforce which is “no longer directly necessary for the self-valorization of capital” (Marx 1976 [1867], 557). Rather than absorbing more and more labor, capital increasingly ejects workers from the immediate process of production into the sphere of circulation (cf. Marx 1976 [1867], 764). While some (non-)workers find employment in new sectors of the economy and are re-absorbed into the wage, others are not. In an age of stagnation, digitalization needs to be understood as a form of automation that increases superfluity, as the anxious debates about universal basic income (esp. among Big Tech capitalists and governments in the capitalist core) paradoxically indicate (see Smith 2020).
- 4.
Dean argues that Lacan’s version of the psychoanalytic concept of drive expresses the reflexive structure of complex networks: “For Lacan, drive is ‘beyond the instinct to return to the state of equilibrium.’ It’s very excess renders it akin to a ‘will to create from zero, a will to begin again.’ […] Lacan conceives drive as necessarily death drive (rather than agreeing with Freud’s view of Eros as also a drive). This death drive ruptures equilibrium […]. Although typically associated in the theoretical literature with biopolitics or biopower, the elision from biological metaphor to networked communication appears throughout popular techno-utopianism, particularly that techno-utopianism blending neoliberalism (entrepreneurialism, free markets, anti-regulation) and the internet. I see this rather unexpected union of computers and bios as symptomatic of a new essentialism: network logics are dictates of nature, a new form of natural law that immanently and necessarily yields the unity and convergence of all things to the extent that they are allowed to flow freely. […] Conceived in terms of drive, networked communications circulate less as potentials for freedom than as the affective intensities produced through and amplifying our capture” (Dean 2010, 30–31).
- 5.
Following Marx, Žižek challenges the vulgar Marxist division between ideological appearances and material reality. Drawing on the work of Jacques Lacan as well as Alfred Sohn-Rethel, Žižek argues that social reality is itself ideological, to the extent that it is symbolically structured by a web of social fantasies—bound up with reified capitalist social relations—that protect the subject from the “Real.” The Real is thus posited as a traumatic and unrepresentable presence-absence excluded from our symbolically constituted reality. As the emergent ‘automatic’ subject of global capitalism, capital itself, in the words of Moishe Postone, is “blind, processual and quasi-organic […] an alienated, abstract self-moving Other, characterized by a constant directional movement with no external goal” (Postone 1993, 270, 278).
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Büscher-Ulbrich, D. (2023). Capitalizing Contradiction, Capitalizing the Commons: Big Tech’s Neoliberal Commonsense and Marx’s “General Intellect”. In: Febel, G., Knopf, K., Nonhoff, M. (eds) Contradiction Studies – Exploring the Field. Contradiction Studies. Springer VS, Wiesbaden. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-37784-7_15
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