Lan Jiang: Critique of Digital Capitalism and the Reconstruction of Proletarian Collectivity — An Analysis of New Trends in Foreign Marxism in the 21st Century
The 21st century is just entering its third decade, and the world situation has surged with turbulence over the past twenty years. The end of the Cold War did not bring peace; instead, more than twenty years later, the world has once again fallen into a state of precariousness. Capital still opens its bloody maw, incessantly devouring fresh lives. The triumphant advance of digital technology, biotechnology, and intelligent technology seems to have restructured the world into a highly datafied and intelligent interface, turning every individual dependent upon it into the walking dead. The world remains unequal: while the top 1% of the world’s mega-rich accumulate staggering, massive amounts of wealth, on the other side of the globe, migrants from Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Third World continue to barely survive in the crevices of urban and digital modernization. The world did not, as the neoliberal prophets at the end of the Cold War proclaimed, rapidly move toward the "end of history." On the contrary, capital and power have further centralized their authority, leaving the basic existence of more people in a state of flux and instability. This is the best of times; the technological conveniences of this era have created unprecedented prosperity and spectacles. It is also the worst of times; the condition of the proletariat in the traditional sense is even worse than in the 19th century of Marx’s time. They have become the "precariat" [1], drifting without fixed abodes, living only in a state of "bare life" [2]. It is hard to imagine that this is a world entering the 21st century: while China is in the heat of building Socialism with Chinese Characteristics in the New Era, the major Western countries are trapped in a mysterious, vicious circle, where the disappearance of social welfare has created a larger destitute class and the mass outsourcing of industries has made it impossible for the traditional proletariat to maintain a basically stable life. In other words, for overseas researchers of Marxism, there has never been a moment when Marx was needed more than the present. As the French philosopher Alain Badiou clearly pointed out in a lecture, "history has been reborn"—this is not just the rebirth of history, but the return of Marx. We see Marxism, once considered obsolete by some left-wing thinkers, standing tall before us once again. That class, discarded by some theorists, has resurfaced in the world’s major capitalist countries. Therefore, in the second decade of the 21st century, we hear a calling—whether in North America or Western Europe, East Asia or the Middle East, Latin America or Africa—people living below the poverty line and scholars who once held a Marxist conscience are crying out once more: Today, we still need Marx!
I. The End of the "End of History" Myth
In the 1990s, with the disintegration of the socialist bloc in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, the Western liberal camp saw the arrival of an era of "ending." After this end, the Cold War pattern of confrontation between the Eastern and Western blocs was broken, followed by the victory of liberal democracy represented by the United States. This victory directly ended the history of fragmentation and mutual struggle, replacing it with permanent world "peace." While Western liberal thinkers cheered, they also attempted to establish the authoritative status of liberalism through discourse, thereby burying all challenges to liberalism in the dustbin of barbarism and autocracy. From then on, political and ideological struggles would no longer dominate the world political landscape; instead, people would focus more on economic issues, social issues, and lifestyle issues. Future political struggle would be reduced to identity politics, while the concept of class struggle was cast into the "old papers of history" [3]. People could thereafter only find traces of former socialism and the Left in art and culture; those left-wing Marxist theorists who were once famous mostly retreated into the fields of art and aesthetics, maintaining the final dignity of Western Marxism there.
It was against this background that the Japanese-American political scientist Francis Fukuyama’s "End of History" thesis was concocted. Although Fukuyama himself still believed that capitalist society and the so-called liberal democratic camp still faced many problems, these issues no longer posed a threat to the long-term development of capitalism. Thus, Fukuyama stated with great passion:
The United States and other liberal democracies will have to face the fact that with the collapse of the communist world, the world they live in is increasingly distant from the old geopolitical world; moreover, the rules and methods of the historical world are no longer suitable for life in the post-historical world. For the latter world, the main problems will be economic ones, such as promoting competition and advancing innovation, managing internal and external deficits, maintaining full employment, and collaboratively handling serious environmental problems, etc. In other words, they must acknowledge the following fact: they are the heirs to the bourgeois revolution that began more than four hundred years ago. In the post-historical world, the desire for comfortable self-preservation has been elevated above the absolute desire to risk one's life for pure prestige, and universal, rational recognition has replaced the struggle for dominance.
Fukuyama’s passage contains several important judgments about the world after the end of history: (1) There exists a distinction between the "historical world" and the "post-historical world." Fukuyama believes the world after the Cold War is clearly a post-historical world, a result of the bourgeois revolution that originated over four hundred years ago; thus, when the Berlin Wall fell, the ultimate victors were the heirs of these bourgeois Whigs. (2) The end of history is also the end of politics, as well as the end of class struggle and political struggle. In Fukuyama’s view, once in the post-historical world, political issues are no longer the primary concern. Since there is no political struggle in any real sense, all that remains are economic issues—namely, how to effectively manage and develop the masses and individuals, including how capitalist society should face ecological issues. In Fukuyama’s own words, the post-historical world no longer faces fundamental historical transformation, but rather "prescriptive" problems—questions of how to make the world operate effectively under the same social norms. The history of grand political struggles for unequal strata is gone and will not return.
The most important aspect of Fukuyama’s "End of History" conclusion is not the distinction between the historical and post-historical worlds, or the sharp opposition of economic/social life issues against political/class struggle issues. His more subtle subtext is that categories such as political issues and class struggle have been classified as "traditional" political categories—concepts that are obsolete and untimely—thereby deconstructing the legitimacy of the socialist theory developed by Marx and Engels since the 19th century. For example, Fukuyama explicitly states:
It is not surprising that contemporary liberal democracies like the United States leave wide space for those who desire to be recognized as superior to others. [...] Indeed, the long-term health and stability of a democratic system can be said to depend on the quality and quantity of channels available to its citizens to release their sense of superiority (megalothymia). These channels not only allow the energy latent in passion to be released and converted into productive uses but also serve as underground pipes to vent the excess energy that would tear the community apart.
In this passage, Fukuyama is clearly defending an unequal capitalist system, arguing that the sense of superiority created by this inequality is necessary for the long-term stability of capitalist society. At the same time, class struggle and political struggle in the Marxist context are stigmatized by Fukuyama as "excess energy that would tear the community apart," while the post-historical world uses economic and social management to transform this "excess energy" into something that maintains the long-term peace and stability of capitalist society. In other words, the political problems of exploitation and inequality, alienation and oppression analyzed by Marxists are all transformed by Fukuyama's "End of History" into "economic problems." This is precisely why he says that in the post-historical world, we focus more on the "World Cup" than on "war," because all strife has been immersed in the honeyed juice of entertainment. Wherever capital reaches, there is no longer resistance or socialist spiritual theory; there only remains the spectacle of permanent capitalist prosperity—from anime and entertainment to the NBA, from reality shows to the World Cup, from Printemps to Amazon online shopping. The post-historical world is forged into a giant spectacle of economy and consumption. Classes have disappeared, politics has disappeared, ideology has disappeared, and even history and time are frozen within immersive entertainment experiences. As another liberal intellectual, Daniel Bell, also pointed out during this period:
Politics has ceased to be exciting. Some young intellectuals have found their way into careers in science or the university. But they often do so at the cost of limiting their intellect to narrow technicalities. Others have found opportunities for self-expression in the field of art, but in this cultural desert, the poverty of content also means a lack of the necessary tension to create new forms and styles.
However, just over twenty years after the publication of Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man, it seems the real trajectory of the world has not operated according to Fukuyama’s myth of a post-historical world. The problems of the world today are not just the rise of populism and the ebb of globalization, nor are they just Brexit, the "America First" policy following Trump’s election, and the US-China trade war, or even the global COVID-19 pandemic. Rather, contrary to what Fukuyama, Daniel Bell, and British theorist Anthony Giddens believed—that the life-world after the end of history consists only of economic and social problems—the political movements dissolved by their "end of history" myth are once again surging in the Western world. From the "Occupy Wall Street" movement in 2011 to the "Yellow Vests" movement in France starting in 2018, these movements cannot be simply viewed as economic or social life issues within a post-historical world. The sting of real-world inequality has punctured the soap bubble of the end-of-history thesis held by Fukuyama and others. When people raise the banner of "the 99%," we can understand that inequality and oppression in the Marxist sense did not fade away with the end of the Cold War; instead, they became an inherent symptom of capitalism—a symptom that cannot be eradicated through capitalism's own mechanisms. It can only be re-understood through the political struggles that Fukuyama ridiculed as "artifacts of history."
Thus, it is not difficult to understand where our real problems lie in the first two decades of the new century, as presented by the French left-wing economist Thomas Piketty in his Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Piketty points out:
To return to the "Occupy Wall Street" movement: it showed that, although it might seem abstract at first glance, the use of universal terms—especially the concept of "the top 1%"—helps to reveal the significant intensification of inequality and can therefore serve as a useful tool for interpreting and criticizing society. Even large-scale social movements can use this tool to develop extraordinarily provocative themes, such as "We are the 99%!"
As Piketty’s observations suggest, after the end of the Cold War, major developed countries in Europe did not become more equal; notions of hierarchy did not disappear with the victory of capitalism’s so-called "liberal democratic society." On the contrary, inequality has expanded and increasingly split into two highly unequal tiers: the 1% and the 99%. Compared to the previous terms "serf" and "worker," the current concept of "the 99%" does not specify which class is the main force against capitalism, but "the 99%" implies they have all fallen into destitution. For instance, whether they are white-collar office workers or small business owners, South African miners or workers in Southeast Asian garment factories, they all share an unequal name today—the 99%! Compared to the top 1% who own 20% of the world's wealth, the 99% live precarious lives. Judith Butler refers to this as a "pre-carious" state of existence. She notes: "This is the paradox caused by neoliberalism and its notion of 'responsibilization,' making people think about their own precarious status, or accelerating their fall into this precariousness." In the view of Judith Butler and others, the masses under capitalist conditions have not enjoyed the "end of history" as Fukuyama and others proclaimed; only those 1% at the top of the pyramid...
Only through this can one understand the "end of history" unique to their own stratum. From the very beginning, the end of history was a myth—a myth wherein the bourgeoisie refashioned itself as an eternal ruler. Once the 99% continue to falter in the mire of abject poverty, the myth of the end of history meets the sting of the real world. Thus, twenty-eight years after the publication of The End of History and the Last Man, we can say with total certainty that this is an era of the "end of the end of history." The theoretical power of Marxism has not died in the Western developed capitalist world; rather, it has once again radiated new vitality. As some have pointed out: "Marxism remains the fundamental path for revitalizing philosophy itself." As long as capitalism continues to lord over the 99% and manufacture massive inequality, and as long as oppression and exploitation persist in this world, then history within capitalist society will not end, and the clarion call of the proletariat will once again sound before the throne of the 1%.
II. Platforms and Prizes: The Political Economy of Digital Capitalism
As previously mentioned, Judith Butler argues that the condition of those at the bottom and in the proletarian position today is one of "precariousness." However, this precariousness does not refer to volatility in the political and social environment, nor to fluctuations in the global situation, but specifically to the fact that ordinary people living at the bottom face a state of high instability in both work and life, and in both income and consumption. Butler notes: "When we think about the general ways of humanization and dehumanization, we find an assumption that those who can achieve expression—especially self-expression—have a greater chance of being humanized, while those who have no opportunity for expression are, to a large extent, likely to be regarded as inferior, or rather, not seen at all." Butler’s point is that in today’s capitalist society, people are divided into two types: those who can be seen or expressed, appearing in mass media and various mediums, whose rights and interests are well-protected and maintained within this system of representation; and another type of people whose lives never appear within the scope of media exposure or political expression. No one even knows they exist. They exist in this world in the form of "bare life" [4]; their lives are precarious, they become the most vulnerable of beings, living a precarious existence.
Guy Standing, an economist at the University of Cambridge, combined Judith Butler’s "precarious" with the Marxian "proletariat" to coin a new term: the precariat [5]. This specifically refers to this new proletariat living in precarious conditions. Standing describes the precariat as "not feeling they belong to a solidary labor community. this gives them a stronger sense of alienation and instrumentality when deciding their goals... In a state of instability, their behaviors and attitudes tend toward opportunism. There is no 'shadow of the future' behind their actions; they do not feel that current words, actions, or feelings will exert a powerful influence or constraint on their long-term relationships." Unlike the traditional working class, they lack stable employment relations. They often work odd jobs or part-time, lacking a constant relationship with a single company or capitalist. Their income comes from accidental opportunities scattered across cyberspace and social space—perhaps helping someone distribute advertisements temporarily, or acting as a "power leveler" for others in online games. This fluid relationship of "gigs" and part-time work makes it impossible for them to form the stable employment relations of early capitalism. Compared to the industrial workers described by Marx, they have no fixed boss, nor can they protect their rights through labor unions or social security groups. On the contrary, they are like migratory birds flowing unsettled through this world, eking out an existence on the occasional crumbs dropped in bustling cities and clamorous networks. This is the concept of the precariat, and Butler’s concept of precarious life. When the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman called today’s capitalist society a "liquid society," what he brought to this bottom-level precariat was not happiness but a more indifferent state. They survive as best they can, as if everything in the world has little to do with them; they are simply there, living.
The problem is not merely that the image of the precariat or the precarious proletariat has appeared in 21st-century capitalism. The more critical question is how to analyze and understand this phenomenon—that is, why has the "precariatization" of the proletariat become an inevitable trend after capitalism entered the digital era of the 21st century? We can answer this from two perspectives. First, the change in the mode of production: once digital technology and capitalism converged, they formed a new type of capitalist morphology, which we may call "digital capitalism." Today’s digital capitalism has already developed into a highly monopolized stage, namely the stage of platform capitalism. Second, with the emergence of platform capitalism, the objects of capitalist exploitation are no longer workers or employees with stable employment relations, but rather the precariat dispersed in every corner; every person can become an object of capitalist exploitation. This inevitably produces new relations of production that allow for more flexible exploitation of the precariat. They have invented a new mode of exploitation: the performance-based mode. Under the performance mode, a specific set of relations of production unique to digital capitalism has formed, which we can call "digital relations of production." Digital relations of production have become the new mode of exploitation, predicated on the fact that the large network platforms controlled by capital, having seized all resources, have formed the means to control the precariat.
(1) The New Mode of Production: Platform Capitalism
Beyond doubt, we have entered the era of digital capitalism, and research on this topic has increased. However, today’s digital capitalism differs from the World Wide Web-based digital capitalism announced by Nicholas Negroponte and Dan Schiller at the end of the last century. At that time, networked computers were not yet ubiquitous, and the population capable of owning a computer to go online generally enjoyed good economic conditions. Back then, the internet possessed a considerable degree of freedom; people could appreciate the massive changes this invisible network brought to our actions and perceptions through "being digital." However, today, with the increasing ubiquity of terminal devices like smartphones, we no longer "surf the internet" by typing in a line of address. Our smartphones are installed with square icons for various apps, and our connection to that invisible cyberspace must, in fact, be conducted through these app platforms. In other words, our interactions with others in cyberspace must be mediated by apps. When you, as a teacher during the pandemic, give a lecture to students via Tencent Meeting, it is not just you and the students in that space; there is also the "monitoring eye" behind the digital platform. From this, it is evident that in the era of smartphone ubiquity, all our social behaviors must be conducted through platforms. The platform constructs the framework for our social interaction, and we can only act within the modes set by the platform. Although platforms like WeChat, Didi, Meituan, and TikTok have brought us immense convenience, their apps have become an unavoidable and necessary way for us to construct our social relationships.
The problem is not that the platform has become the mediator of our social life, but that these platforms monopolize the way they structure our social life. We have gradually become unable to think of the possibility of social interaction outside of platforms. A person who does not communicate on WeChat or Tencent virtually ceases to exist; a physical store that does not enter platforms like Taobao, JD.com, or Suning.com finds it difficult to survive as it once did. This monopolistic relationship has created a new type of mode of production, and this mode is entirely possessed by a few platform companies. Upon possessing this monopolistic relationship, platform capitalism is no longer limited to acting as a neutral third party. In the words of Nick Srnicek: "The new business model that eventually emerged is a powerful new form of enterprise—the platform. Platforms generally arise from the internal need to handle data and become an effective way to monopolize, extract, analyze, and use recorded, ever-growing data. Now this model has expanded to the entire economic system." Consequently, platforms continuously collect, analyze, and calculate the data of ordinary users, ultimately making almost all users fundamentally dependent on the platform. In this way, we move from reification to digital alienation, and from commodity fetishism to digital fetishism. Because platforms monopolize massive amounts of data and take the results of processing and analyzing that data as their own, these big data companies (such as Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, Alibaba, Tik Tok, etc.) have become the new fetishes of the digital world. They monopolize the mode of production of the digital era and make all users highly dependent on the platform; correspondingly, all users become zombies under the digital matrix and algorithmic governance.
(2) New Relations of Production: The Prize Mode vs. the Wage Mode
As is well known, in Marx’s work, the capitalist's exploitation of the worker is related to surplus value, the amount of which depends directly on the worker’s wage. Thus, Marx pointed out very clearly: "The rate of surplus-value... depends on the ratio between that part of the working day necessary to reproduce the value of the labour-power and the surplus-time or surplus-labour performed for the capitalist. The rate of surplus-value therefore depends on the extent to which the working day is extended beyond the labor-time in which the worker only reproduces the value of his labour-power or replaces his wage." In other words, during the stage of industrial capitalism, on the one hand, the reason capitalists could appropriate the surplus value created by workers for free was precisely because the production of labor power exceeded the portion of the wage; but on the other hand—and more importantly—through the wage, a relatively stable employment relationship was formed between the capitalist and the worker. Regardless of how the market changed, the capitalist paid the worker a relatively stable wage, and the worker possessed a relatively stable source of livelihood within this employment relationship. With the development of the labor movement, the formation of unions, and the rise of welfare capitalism as the mainstream form of post-war capitalism, the stable employment relationship between workers and capitalists formed through wages was further affirmed. Both labor unions and labor laws under the welfare capitalist system rejected the possibility of capitalists firing workers or lowering wages due to a decrease in the rate of profit. Thus, although the wage was the source of capitalist exploitation, it also became an employment bond that tied the worker and capitalist together. When facing workers and white-collar employees, the capitalist paid a constant wage to maintain the workers' basic livelihood, ensuring that despite being exploited, workers under employment relations could still maintain a stable income status.
American political scientist Jodi Dean found in her recent research that digital capitalism has gradually changed the relatively stable conditions of the industrial capitalist era. Dean argues that with the deepening of platform capitalism, large internet companies and platform companies actually use traditional wage modes and employment relations to maintain the relationship between capitalists and employees less and less. Instead, another mode of exploitation has emerged under digital platforms. Simply put, the platform’s use of traditional employment relations is limited to a small amount of back-end service and R&D; the platform’s primary product is definitely not just an app. As Žižek pointed out in his analysis, if Microsoft’s product were just the Windows system, Microsoft would have gone bankrupt long ago. Žižek says: "Let us look at the case of Bill Gates. How did he become the richest man in the world?..."
His wealth is unrelated to the price of the products Microsoft sells; in fact, paying staggering salaries to senior software development employees means that Gates's wealth is neither the result of producing better software nor the result of ruthlessly exploiting the senior employees he hires. If that were the case, Microsoft should have gone bankrupt long ago, and people would be widely using systems like Linux, which are free and, according to some experts, of better quality than Microsoft's offerings. Why, then, do millions of people still buy Microsoft products? It is because Microsoft has set a near-monopolistic pseudo-universal standard, directly manifested as general intellect. For decades, Gates became the richest man precisely because he extracted rent from millions of people participating in this general intellect—a general intellect he privatized and controlled." In other words, large platform companies create a massive pseudo-universality that forces all users to become dependent on such platforms; they then convert this dependency into a rent model, thereby continuously enjoying the wealth provided by various users.
However, Dean finds that the problem lies not only in platform rent but in the platform's further exploitation of user creativity and labor. Taking YouTube as an example, the platform promotes the idea that outstanding "UP hosts" [6] can receive rewards, and even high-traffic "UP hosts" can obtain substantial advertising revenue. Li Ziqi [7], who recently rose to fame on YouTube, is a typical example; when her videos reached over two million views, she was able to collect significant earnings from them. But a myth remains a myth. Dean finds that high-profile "UP hosts" like Li Ziqi represent only a tiny fraction of the YouTube video platform—the tip of the pyramid—while the vast majority of ordinary "UP hosts," even if they film high-quality videos and gain some attention, cannot earn any income. That is to say, on platforms like YouTube, those who truly benefit are the top 1% of all users, while the filming and uploading behavior of the vast majority actually becomes something provided to the platform for free. The same is true for posting on Twitter, as Dean points out that on the platform, "many novels are written, but only a very few can be published, fewer can be sold, and those that become bestsellers are rare. Twitter has hundreds of millions of users—pop star Katy Perry has 94 million followers, while the vast majority of people have no more than two hundred. Mass media platforms express the power-law structure of this complex network, much like the 80/20 rule, where 20% of the people (the winners) take all or most of the gains." It can be seen that, compared to the wage-labor relationship of industrial workers described by Marx, platform exploitation has actually become a more naked form of appropriation. On YouTube and Twitter, people exert labor expecting to earn a substantial income like Li Ziqi or Katy Perry, but from the platform's perspective, the videos and writing they create have already been seized by the platform. They provide labor to the platform for free without receiving any payment; all they win is the aura of a spotlight, hoping that one day they will be like Li Ziqi or Katy Perry.
This is a new relation of production. People participate in platforms to win a huge jackpot; they are not employed by the platform, nor do they have traditional organizations like labor unions to protect their rights, and the platform has no need to use means such as wages to win their loyalty. Under a "jackpot model" [8] that resembles a bubble, users flock to become laborers within it. Just as the winner in Spielberg's film Ready Player One is promised three keys and control over the Oasis Company, the victor (Parzival) takes all—winner-takes-all—while all other participating players become "cannon-fodder players." Their efforts are entirely absorbed by the platform, becoming the source of its massive wealth. This is a new kind of exploitation, an exploitation that does not look like exploitation, or rather, it is precisely because the jackpot model has increasingly become the platform’s means of control that the platform no longer requires substantive wage-labor relations to dominate the political economy of the digital realm. The result is that more and more "working people" under employment relations are cast out into society, becoming cannon fodder under the jackpot model alongside the social rabble [9]. Thus, stable salary relations in the traditional sense cease to exist, replaced by what Judith Butler calls "precarious life."
III. Reinventing Collectivity
Under the influence of the new mode of production and new relations of production in the era of digital capitalism, the wage-based employment relationship of traditional industrial capitalism is gradually disintegrating, giving way to a "rabble-like" relationship characterized by contingency and randomness. No stable social relationship exists between the platform and the masses, and the users and the masses do not display loyalty to the platform. However, we need to understand this new type of relation of production from two perspectives. On the one hand, from a vertical perspective, because the relationship formed between the platform and the masses lacks stability, the platform does not have to bear the burdens that capitalists did in the era of industrial capitalism. That is, platform users acting as free labor cannot form the powerful labor unions typical of 19th and 20th-century industrial workers to engage in effective struggle against capitalists; they easily become a "disposable" people. In the eyes of Kevin Bales, this has seemingly evolved into a new form of slavery. On the other hand, from a horizontal perspective, because all collaborative relationships are temporary, it is no longer possible for people to form an effective alliance for a workers' movement as they did in the era of industrial capitalism—that is, they cannot form the relatively stable collaborative relations found in productive labor, nor the "comradely" relations among workers based on such collaboration. The Italian Autonomia [10] movement placed great importance on the value of worker collaboration formed within factories for resisting capitalism. For instance, Negri keenly noted early on: "This transition not only provides conditions for a massive increase in surplus value, subjecting a large number of workers to the discipline of capital, but the despotism of the capitalist also transitions further from the factory to the whole of society. Thus, the realization of the surplus value extraction process involves not only the distinction between the necessary labor part and the surplus labor part of the workers' time: it also brings about a revolution in the technical process of labor and social organization from beginning to end." In other words, in the view of Negri and others, large-scale machine industry not only brought huge surplus value to capitalists but also allowed workers working alongside machines to achieve a new union through technical innovation; the hope of overthrowing capitalist despotic rule and moving toward a future society was built upon this union. However, the relations of production in the era of digital capitalism have changed all this. Although Negri and others remain optimistic, believing that internet technology can unite the proletariat across a broader space, Nancy Fraser and Jodi Dean see the opposite process. In the space of the internet, in the digital media mediated by various platforms, people's communication has actually weakened rather than strengthened. The original, living social intercourse between comrades in reality has degenerated into isolation within cubicles and narrow living spaces. Rather than saying that the production union under large-scale industrial production has developed further in the internet age, it is more accurate to say that this superficial expansion of social relations is an illusion. Under the control of digital media platforms, we are more like individuals living in solitary cells within Foucault's Panopticon; what is reflected back from the internet and smartphones is only a projection of the individual, not authentic social relations. In Jodi Dean’s words, this is a more "individualized" process. It is precisely because the era of digital capitalism further strengthens the individualization of every person that in the process of global resistance against capitalist rule, it is difficult for individuals to truly unite into a political group or force, and they are unable to form an effective resistance against capitalist control.
Why is this? Dean points out that the real problem is that we place too much hope in individualized resistance, thereby forgetting that individuality itself is a symptom of capitalism. She says: "The real pathogen is the individual form itself. ... In a sense, the individual is a pathological form, out of step with its environment, unable to face the pressures it encounters without pain, sacrifice, or violence (this is where psychoanalysis originates, and this is the source of castration). The problem of contemporary subjectivity does not stem from the extremes of capitalism—that is, capitalism mixing with the basic elements of digital communication. It is not that the highly saturated, intensified, and unbearable competition of communicative capitalism makes us depressed, anxious, autistic, and distracted, but rather that we are always trying to find various ways to protect our fragile individuality."
Indeed, in today’s era of digital capitalism (which Dean calls communicative capitalism), most individuals are in a state of anxiety and frustration facing endless competition. Almost all the masses exhibit a state of mental distraction and depression when facing competition on platforms and the performance indicators and "jackpot races" set by platform capitalism. When we no longer focus on what creates inequality but instead focus on how many hits and replies our uploaded videos and articles get, or how much tip and advertising revenue they generate, we have already been trapped in the individual cage set for us by the platform and digital capital. Although individual freedom and autonomy are the finest legacies of the Enlightenment—complementing the civil society of free competition in its historical stage of development—today, this individualized form has been pushed to the extreme. This is because the background algorithms of software such as TikTok, Twitter, and Facebook have already categorized every individual; we can only access news and replies that align with our opinions, or even replies made by internet bots. Thus, this kind of reply and communication on digital platforms actually results in a "social communicative illusion." On the surface, we are exchanging thoughts with like-minded people around the world, but in real space, we are locked in even smaller existential spaces. Unlike Foucault's prison cells, which one is cast into passively, the individualization effect of the digital capitalist era is something we fall into actively.
Along with the pathology of individualization in contemporary society comes the near impossibility of thinking about "collectivity." For example, when we think about happiness today, many people focus more on their individual happiness, such as having more money, a large and bright house, a luxury sports car, or a pleasant afternoon sipping ground coffee in the sun. Today, it is difficult for us to imagine the kind of collective happiness described in the Peach Blossom Spring [11], where "paths cross in all directions, the sounds of chickens and dogs are heard," and "the elderly and children alike are happy and self-contented." Nor can we imagine the necessity of sacrificing oneself to protect the happiness of others during the period of revolutionary war. Under neoliberal ideology, the possibility of solidarity for any community can only be built on the basis of contract-style discourse ethics and deliberative politics. The ultimate possibility of collective coexistence depends entirely on the gaming and weighing of various stakeholders, eventually reaching a commonality based on the maximization of each individual's interests. In the eyes of contemporary Marxists like Dean, the loss of collectivity is precisely the greatest tragedy under contemporary capitalist society, and the only possibility of breaking this tragedy is to reinvent a kind of collectivity—to use the collective "we" to replace the individual "I." Dean says:
"I write 'we' because I hope to elevate the partisan significance of collectivity. I want to break with that tradition which defends individualism—a tradition intended to eliminate the possibility of thinking and speaking about a larger collective subject." Contemporary thinkers like Jodi Dean have explicitly pointed out that in the process of breaking the rule of capitalism and moving toward a future society, collectivity must be reinvented. Moreover, the communist revolution in the Marxian sense is itself proposed in terms of collectivity. Dean states: "'The people' is the richest legacy of Marxism; 'the people' is the revolutionary alliance of the oppressed (fundamentally different from populist groups)... and 'the people' is only possible in a collective sense."
However, profound disagreements persist within contemporary Western Marxism regarding how to reinvent collectivity. In fact, during the era of the 20th century when neoliberal ideology held dominance, the concept of the proletarian party was stigmatized. Many left-wing thinkers, such as Laclau, Mouffe, and Negri, actually resorted to a form of spontaneous struggle akin to one without leadership. In Multitude, the representative work by Negri and Hardt, Negri placed his hopes in the "multitude" under biopolitical production brought about by the development of communication and information technologies: "Communication is productive; it produces not only economic value but also subjectivity, such that communication is the core of biopolitical production. ... We can only understand these forms of social expression as a network of the multitude, using this to resist dominant power and attempting to produce alternative expressions from within." Even so, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s proposal for resistance by the multitude has been criticized as a "scattered sand" [12] style of revolution. Even in Assembly, published in 2017, the two realized that the operation of a Marxist revolution cannot rely solely on the spontaneous proletarian union formed by biopolitical production and general intellect; the proletariat requires an organic collective—that is, it requires a leadership to help the multitude resist the highly organized rule of capitalism. Yet Negri and Hardt remain skeptical of leadership, leading them to propose the stance that "leadership is not needed strategically, but is needed tactically."
Another stance of resistance comes from more radical thinkers such as Badiou and Dean. they believe that without the leadership of a vanguard [13], it is effectively impossible to complete an effective proletarian movement or truly defeat bourgeois rule. In his book Logics of Worlds (Logiques des mondes), Badiou uses the Spartacus uprising as an example to emphasize the necessary position of the vanguard in realizing a revolutionary movement: "For instance, the slaves lead by Spartacus formed a specific military detachment (détachement) to face the Roman cavalry. This is why we say that the elements of the body are those things incorporated (incorporé) into the evental present." Meanwhile, Jodi Dean explicitly puts forward the requirement for a party—specifically a Communist Party representing the contemporary "crowd-proletariat": "The Communist Party has the capacity to expand the world. Its unconscious associations open new spaces for communist political subjectivity and produce demands that are constantly yet-to-be-realized. Frankly, the Communist Party must view itself as the people who change the world, making resolute demands of you without any excuses. This is what communists want; we should do this, and then we must face the costs. The stronger the political organization we build, the greater our hope becomes."
It can be said that the turn back toward party organization among contemporary Marxists, and the renewed hope of building a powerful Communist Party to lead the global Marxist revolution, has become a prominent feature of 21st-century foreign Marxist movements. The reason for needing a Communist Party is likewise quite simple: only a Communist Party can unite the highly individualized "crowds" to jointly resist the fate of being enslaved by the bourgeoisie. (Notes omitted)
(Author’s affiliation: Department of Philosophy, Nanjing University) Online Editor: Zhang Jian Source: Journal of Huazhong University of Science and Technology (Social Science Edition), 2021, No. 1.