Lan Jiang: From Digital Inequality to a Return to Marx
Since the beginning of the 21st century, the development of contemporary capitalism has exhibited several distinct trends, characterized by the large-scale application of digital technology, communication technology, and intelligent algorithms in the fields of industry, consumption, and logistics. As smartphones and various terminal devices enter the daily lives of people, a vast array of apps and platforms are becoming an indispensable part of social life. One result of these trends is that the power of capital has rapidly entered these new domains, giving rise to a new type of capitalism: digital capitalism. As Étienne Balibar—a student of Althusser and a contemporary French Marxist scholar—pointed out at the beginning of a 2021 article in Radical Philosophy, when the productive forces of capitalism reach a "totalizing stage," the life of every individual becomes directly linked to these total productive forces. Clearly, Balibar is illustrating two points. On the one hand, the large-scale misuse of big data, cloud computing, and intelligent technology by capitalism has resulted in these capital-mediated technologies acting directly upon the life of every individual; we face capitalist plunder and exploitation in an extremely naked manner. On the other hand, the sudden onset of the COVID-19 pandemic seems to have accelerated this process worldwide. Capitalism is mutating; it is not only becoming more monopolistic but is also infiltrating the power of capital into previously untouched fields, such as biological genes, consumption habits, and real-time urban imagery. By digitizing all of this, it has constructed clearer barriers of capitalist inequality. Perhaps, as the contemporary critical theorist Nancy Fraser states in her 2022 book Cannibal Capitalism, capitalism is becoming an Ouroboros devouring its own tail, touching its own foundations and ultimately paving the way for a future socialism. At this juncture, contemporary foreign Marxism has, as if by prior agreement, turned once again to Marx, believing that only Marxism can resolve the predicament brought about by the misuse of technology and plunder in contemporary capitalism.
Digital Capitalism and Expanding Inequality
During the phase of the 20th century dominated by neoliberalism, many liberal and left-wing scholars believed that although capitalism still faced various problems, it could, on the whole, make society increasingly equal through communicative consultation and democratic procedures. This was the origin of the discourse ethics and deliberative democracy of figures such as Habermas. As a representative of the second generation of the Frankfurt School, Habermas hoped that within the framework of multiculturalism at that time, people of different classes, races, and genders could achieve consultative equality under a single communicative procedure. Anthony Giddens, meanwhile, hoped to replace revolutionary emancipatory politics with a reflexive life politics. At that moment, it seemed as if a more equal capitalist society was about to be realized upon the earth.
However, with the arrival of digital capitalism, monopolistic digital platforms control massive amounts of data-traffic and use the intelligent algorithms they develop and monopolize to discipline the daily lives of people. Every individual living within this system inevitably feels that inequality under capitalist society has not been eliminated; on the contrary, it is being daily expanded. In fact, at the dawn of the internet and digital technology, some Western left-wing scholars asserted that the widespread use of the internet would further bring about a "digital divide." Regions capable of extensively using internet equipment and data would form an insurmountable chasm of inequality relative to those regions with impoverished economies and backward communication infrastructure. After the wealthy bourgeoisie and middle class utilize the conveniences brought by digital technology, the gap with those regions unable to use these applications and technologies will grow ever larger. In other words, what digital and communication technologies represent is not only inequality in ownership, but more importantly, inequality in technical means. In the future, those who own intelligent devices and can obtain information instantaneously will more easily secure various opportunities, win more wealth, and obtain better education, while those living on the other side of the digital divide will further "fall into the abyss."
This is merely the prelude to a deeper inequality. For example, after the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, biological and medical data became the targets of competition for future capitalism. Databases of viruses, biological DNA data from different races, and physiological data on various diseases provided the necessary conditions for the next breakthroughs in medicine and biotechnology. But this also means that companies and platforms possessing capital may further use the DNA and data of healthy people to produce "healthier" lives, endowing these lives with stronger intelligence, physical strength, endurance, and reaction speed. More crucially, for the upper class, all of this is purchasable. Yuval Noah Harari's Homo Deus has already depicted such a scenario: because the upper class masters the secrets of genetic and vital data, they can use money and privilege to obtain superior physical constitutions and longevity. Meanwhile, those races and populations of the lower classes become a "useless class," unable to enjoy the dividends brought by the rapid progress of digital technology, artificial intelligence, and bio-genetic technology, left only to eke out a living through short-term gigs and outsourced work. In this sense, they have become the "precariat" [1] in the sense described by Guy Standing. Perhaps, in the era of 20th-century neoliberal capitalism, the distinction between the bourgeoisie and the proletarians was still spatial; a "folded" social space kept different strata of the population isolated from one another. But through the biopolitics and the datafication of life brought by the COVID-19 pandemic, capitalism can distinguish between the bourgeois and the proletarian bodily and physiologically—that is, a shift from spatial inequality to biological inequality. It is precisely this inequality that has caused many foreign Marxist scholars to suddenly awaken to the fact that, under the rule of capitalism, inequality between people has not vanished but has instead increasingly become an unbridgeable chasm.
The Scorched Earth of Life under Digital Capitalism
The greatest problem with the development of capitalism under contemporary digital conditions is not only increasing inequality but, more importantly, that digital technology and biopolitics are stripping away the foundations of human existence, ontologically turning human beings into part of the capitalist digital-technological and biopolitical apparatus. One needs only to look at people's lifestyles under modern digital capitalism for this to become self-evident. People's eyes are glued to various screens; they swipe incessantly with fingers or mice, as if everything within the interface were their life itself. Their bodies, however, are confined to cramped rooms; their work and social interactions can all be completed through a computer and a smartphone. The lives of individuals under contemporary digital capitalism are highly dependent on the interfaces behind the screens. The individual is a "user" of major platforms, a "fan" of various virtual idols, and a "warrior" charging into battle in various games, yet in physical space, they are solitary "shut-ins" (zhaiju zu [2]). This is the lifestyle of people under digital capitalism, and its counterpart is the gradual withering and desolation of the real world—in the words of Jonathan Crary, this is a "scorched earth."
Perhaps this is why Crary titled his 2022 book Scorched Earth! In fact, in his previous book, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep, Crary had already turned his attention to the fate of the human subject under the biopolitical technical control of capitalism. Under new biotechnologies and medical technologies, for instance, drugs can be invented to reduce a person's daily sleep time, allowing employed workers more time for labor and work to serve the capitalist system. The biopolitical control of capitalism is no longer limited to the eight hours inside factories and office buildings, nor is it limited to the control of people's consumption and entertainment during waking hours; it has become a total control of 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Biopolitics has thus entered an unprecedented state of total control—that is, "24/7" total-time control. Under the 24/7 capitalist system, due to the intervention of these new biopolitical technologies, capitalism can directly invade the biological body of the individual, making the laborer's body a body with greater productive capacity, while the subject becomes an obedient subject accepting the control of these new biotechnologies.
In Crary's view, as people in digital capitalist society turn their attention to the screens of various mobile phones and computers, and use digital networks to replace real daily interaction, they undergo a new round of abstraction. That digital network, branded with the mark of capitalism, is causing every person within it to further detach from the shackles of the real world. They are not only abstract lives within subway networks and office cubicles, being used by capitalist bosses through "996" [3] and drug stimulation to continuously produce lives that accept the control of the capitalist biopolitical system; they are also continuously purging their bodily existence within digital networks, allowing the individual to enter a virtual world completely dominated by capitalist digital platforms as "users" and "virtual entities." The rules of that world were long ago defined according to the laws of finance and profit; all subjects who enter this application interface can only walk timidly and slowly upon it. The digitization and abstraction of life cause life to be further stripped from its foundation in the earth. Life becomes rootless, wandering everywhere, flickering and unstable, unable to take root in the soil, capable only of becoming a "virtual entity" composed of a set of data within the digital network. People no longer dwell upon the earth but place their lives within that constantly flowing, "enframed" (apparatus-like) digital network. Through this apparatus, capitalism has implanted its means of control into every body; Blochian "hope" has gradually degenerated into the "traffic" and "attention" of internet celebrities. There, everything becomes traffic, and everything becomes capitalist profit brought by traffic.
Invoking Marx Anew in the Digital Age
How can we resolve the expanding inequality of digital capitalism? How can we prevent future capitalism from turning us into the "scorched earth" of life? Perhaps only by returning to Marx—returning to the questions Marx raised in the Manifesto of the Communist Party and returning to the path of the critique of political economy proposed in Capital and its manuscripts—can we find a way out of capitalism. In September 2022, the contemporary French Marxist thinker Alain Badiou published "Thirteen Theses on Contemporary Politics" in L'Obs, pointing out that after the chaos of the COVID-19 pandemic, the baptism of imperialist wars, and the trade wars brazenly launched by the American capitalist government, we must return to Marx’s Communist Manifesto: "In all these movements, they bring to the front, as the leading question in each, the property question, no matter what its degree of development at the time." The reason Badiou quotes Marx again is not only because he consistently upholds communism as the ideal for the struggle of the European Left and Marxism, but because he clarifies once again that the core issue of the struggle against contemporary capitalism is the inequality of ownership. Even in the era of digital capitalism, the spearhead of struggle must be pointed at capitalist ownership. In other words, in Badiou's view, what is truly problematic is not digital technology itself. Whether it is digital technology or AI technology, they merely fully expose the greedy essence and the secret of inequality of contemporary capitalism. The application of digital technology and the construction of communication infrastructure are not inherently the problem; these technologies and applications are actually meant to serve all of humanity and social stability and development. The problem lies in the intervention of capital—especially finance capital—which monopolizes various data and algorithms, thereby turning them into means for certain large capitals to reap profits. As they extract more value from biological data and intelligent algorithms, the "precariat" at the bottom falls deeper into an inescapable abyss.
Thus, Nancy Fraser emphasizes in Cannibal Capitalism that the greed of capitalism turns it into an Ouroboros devouring its own tail, because capitalism is consuming the social foundations it should not devour—namely, swallowing the vast "precariat" class excluded by capitalist biopolitics and digital platforms. In this sense, Fraser, once a critical theorist of feminism, has abandoned the strategy of understanding feminist liberation from a pure "identity" standpoint. She has discovered that even if Hillary Clinton were to become the President of the United States, it would not bring a shred of hope for the improvement of the living environment or the liberation of grassroots proletarian women. In this sense, Fraser chose to return to Marx. She believes that only by returning to Marx’s critique of political economy and returning to the exposure of the mechanisms of capitalist exploitation, plunder, and oppression can the catastrophes encountered by the impoverished classes living below the poverty line and the propertyless "precariat" be truly resolved. This is also the position advocated in Christian Fuchs’s book Reading Marx in the Age of Digital Capitalism: that by re-reading Marx, we can understand how capitalism, under the dual oppression of digital platforms and biopolitics, creates a "scorched earth" of life. Only by breaking the capitalist private ownership of property and allowing people to equally share the benefits brought by digital technology and artificial intelligence can we emerge from the haze of capitalism and see hope for the future of humanity.