Zhou Shaodong and Zou Sai: Research on Digital Capitalism by Foreign Marxist Scholars
Digital economy was first proposed by Don Tapscott to highlight the tremendous impact that the Internet and digital information technology have exerted on traditional economic development [1]. Through the work of scholars and practitioners, the concept of the digital economy has acquired a richer connotation. The digital economy is an extension of the information economy; it has completed the leap from "humans using information for production" to "machines using information for production" [2]. This development process involves not only the intellectualization of the instruments of production but also the intellectualization of the factors of production.
Digital capitalism refers to the digital economy under the form of capitalism. Digital capitalism germinated in the American information industry after World War II. According to the definition by Takeshi Mori and Hiroyuki Nitto, digital capitalism refers to a "system that utilizes digital technology to obtain profits by discovering, utilizing, and creating differences, pursuing the continuous accumulation of capital" [3]. Dan Schiller points out: "Under the influence of an expansive market logic, the Internet is driving a transition in the political economy toward so-called digital capitalism" [4]. Although digital capitalism appears as an economic phenomenon at the level of productive forces, from the perspective of the unity of history and logic, it presents the realistic possibility of the development of the relations of production exerting a counter-reaction upon the productive forces. Dan Schiller examined the developmental history of the 18th-century American postal industry and the 19th-century telegraph and telephone industries, summarizing the decisive roles played by state power and commercial users in the transformation of the information industry. After World War II, as the new dominant instrument of production, digital technology served not only as an economic tool bringing about the rapid development of productive forces but also as a political tool to strengthen political control over the relations of production. Along with the expansion of the capital empire, the digital economy has integrated into the development of capitalism, becoming a part of it. Therefore, the rapid development of the digital economy is essentially an economic innovation induced by political necessity under state intervention, reflecting the powerful counter-reaction of the superstructure upon the economic base.
The speed at which digital capital has developed is astonishing; however, "every gift of technology or science has its dark side, and digital existence is no exception" [5]. Following the historical development of digital capitalism, this article combs through the relevant research results of foreign Marxist scholars across three stages—the germination and emergence, the expansion and crisis, and the recession and recovery of digital capitalism—summarizing the characteristics and deficiencies of existing research, distilling the laws of development of digital capitalism, and offering prospects for its future.
I. The Germination and Emergence of Digital Capitalism
The information revolution of the 20th century provided the technical foundation for digital capital; however, this process was not a natural derivation but was embedded in the historical process of imperial expansion. Led by state power and driven by commercial users, digital capitalism germinated in the American information and communication industry. Starting from the 1980s, the tentacles of digital capitalism were able to extend into the populace. It was not until the bursting of the Internet bubble in 2001 that digital capitalism encountered its first crisis. During this period, the development of digital capitalism was marked by the combination of data and capitalism and the popularization of digital technology. Foreign Marxist research during this period focused on the dissection of digital technology and digital labor, excavating the role that capital plays in technological development.
(1) State Power and Commercial Users’ Joint Selection of Digital Technology
In the process of American hegemonic expansion, the military and commercial demands for data grew daily. The U.S. government facilitated the institutionalization of computer communications, pushed information providers to accelerate their development, and deployed information communication systems into every major social institution. By 1970, the U.S. government had become "the primary source of information in almost every field" [6]. The United States treated digital technology as an economic growth point to evade social contradictions, abolished welfare responsibilities in the information technology industry, weakened the power of traditional industrial unions, and created conditions for manufacturing outsourcing, thereby depriving industrial workers of job opportunities and political power. Dan Schiller argues that in this process, hidden dangers such as cultural barriers and political alienation between the "intellectual class" of the new technology field and the traditional working class grew quietly, sewing the seeds for the destruction of capitalism [7]. In the short term, this barrier promoted the fragmentation of the working class and hindered the unity and revival of the workers' movement; in the long term, with the development of the digital economy, artificial intelligence continuously replaces the work of the "intellectual class," causing the latter to fall into the status of ordinary workers, which in turn will promote the awakening of the entire working class and advance the socialist movement.
The alignment of the interests of Internet giants and the government helped them obtain sufficient political support, thereby dominating the development of the information and communication industry by depressing the price of network services and promoting technological innovation. In the operating logic of commercial users of network services, the audience is the greatest source of profit. Dallas W. Smythe argues that the audience’s activities of watching, reading, and listening to commercial media create value and can be sold by commercial media as "commodities" to advertising clients [8]. As Marx once pointed out, the invention of machinery can "give a form to substances which in their existing form were previously useless in the new production" [9]; digital technology has renewed the social form. However, "in itself, machinery shortens working hours, while its capitalist application prolongs the working day; in itself, it lightens labor, while its capitalist application increases the intensity of labor" [10]. The capitalist application of digital technology has increased labor intensity and blurred the boundaries between labor and leisure. The selection of digital technology by political forces and commercial users was not accidental, nor was the result of enhanced labor intensity; both stem from the logic of capital’s valorization and expansion.
(2) Digital Media in the Culture Industry
In 1991, Theodor Adorno proposed that the "culture industry" is an industry produced by mass media combining standardized expression with rationalized distribution, which severely limits social imagination [11]. As Christian Fuchs points out, mass culture inevitably involves economic factors [12]. As the roles of media and information gained attention from Western governments, commercial media began a wave of mergers in the creative industries. The scholarly defenses that followed—such as John Hartley’s proposal that the Internet brings about the democratization and popularization of creative products [13]—further concealed the nature of digital media using popular creativity as a profit strategy. Thus, while digital media became a new arena for capital competition, it donned the mantle of a "driver of social change." "Overestimating the role of the Internet... logically inherits a short-sighted concept of time and an insufficient analysis of the rapid recovery capacity of unequal structures themselves and the continuous internal factors within the power structure," leading to a situation where "no matter what form it takes, this will inevitably lead academic analysis toward the direction of technological determinism, believing that social change is produced by new communication mechanisms" [14].
The fact is that digital media has not truly brought about the democratization or popularization of culture; on the contrary, it has brought about the intensification of conflicts and the eclipse of culture. At the level of digital labor, it has transformed part of the proletariat into a "cyber-proletariat" [15]: a large surplus population existing outside of formal employment, engaged in various forms of informal and precarious employment due to the substitution of human labor by digital equipment, causing fragmentation within the proletariat. At the level of knowledge acquisition, it has brought about a "general proletarianization of knowledge" [16]—under the control of capital, digital technology has deepened the deprivation of an individual’s general intellect, and "tertiary retention" technologies [17] intended to assist human memory and thinking lead to the gradual loss of human knowledge and capability.
(3) The Production and Impact of Immaterial Labor
The Italian scholar Maurizio Lazzarato first proposed the concept of "immaterial labor" [18], namely labor that produces the informational and cultural content of commodities. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri refined this theory and extended it into new forms of Empire and the proletariat based on immaterial labor—the "multitude." They believe that the transition from an industrial economy to an information economy has caused the hegemonic position of industrial labor to shift toward immaterial labor. Immaterial labor accelerated the global expansion of capital and the formation of Empire, and the composition of the proletariat shifted from the "working class" to the "multitude" [19].
The formation of immaterial labor superficially creates labor freedom, but in reality, it makes capital’s exploitation of labor more concealed, turning people into "one-dimensional men" [20] who have lost their transcendence and critical capacity; the forms of class conflict have changed accordingly. The new labor forms have not changed the essence of capitalism. Nick Dyer-Witheford, through empirical research, proved that class conflict still existed in capitalist society at that time, confirming the continued relevance of Marxism. Borrowing the concepts of class composition and cycles of struggle from Autonomist Marxism, he listed four aspects of class struggle: struggles at the site of production, struggles at the site of reproduction, struggles in the process of interaction between nature and humanity, and struggles at the site of consumption. Drawing on the biological concept of "genetic mutation," he proposed the possibility of using technology to achieve political transformation and move toward communism [21].
II. The Expansion and Crisis of Digital Capitalism
In order to alleviate the crisis caused by the bursting of the Internet bubble, digital capital initiated a deep expansion through technological substitution and a broad expansion through spatial-temporal extension as a means to conduct a new round of capital accumulation. However, history has confirmed that the expansion of digital capitalism launched in 2001 to alleviate the crisis ended with an even larger crisis in 2008; capital cannot save capital. During this period, foreign Marxism began to focus on the spatial imbalances caused by the temporal continuity of digital capital; meanwhile, the predicament of human beings in the era of digital capitalism entered the researchers' field of vision.
(1) The Deep Expansion of Digital Capital: Technological Substitution
Technological substitution refers to the replacement of old technologies by new ones. The iteration of digital technology has made production and life more convenient, but it has also refreshed our modes of existence, challenging original existential space and security. The widespread application of digital technology is a technical choice made by capitalist states and capital, and so is the iteration of technology. According to the development of the capitalist division of labor, Marx divided the labor process into three stages: simple cooperation, manufacture, and modern industry. The process from simple cooperation to manufacture is a transition from independent labor to combined labor, where workers begin to submit to the discipline of capital. The process from manufacture to modern industry ensures that "along with the tool, the skill of the workman in handling it passes over to the machine. The capabilities of the tool are emancipated from the personal limitations that are inseparable from the help of human beings. Thereby the technical foundation on which is based the division of labor in Manufacture, is swept away" [22]. As a new tool, digital technology has further deepened the separation of labor power from personality, increasingly transforming "the instruments of labor into instruments of labor only usable in common" [23]. The continuously strengthening and expanding information and communication technology has attracted unrestrained financial speculation, which, "together with capital, comprehensively integrates the digital system into the current political-economic structure" [24], jointly gestating a massive crisis of financial expansion.
New digital technology brings more choices to consumers, but at the same time, it crowds out the space for employment and investment, which is particularly serious for developing countries with large populations and heavy reliance on investment. Because big data and real-time platforms further increase the profit rate of the circulation process, productive capital is lost, circulation capital overflows, and emerging investments shift from the real economy to the virtual. This is essentially caused by the mismatch between productive forces and relations of production; the relations of production that had already matured within the womb of developed countries were forced upon developing countries, inevitably leading to "rejection reactions" that only occur in developing countries.
(2) The Broad Expansion of Digital Capital: Spatial-Temporal Extension
"Science and technology give to the functioning capital a power of expansion which is independent of the given magnitude of the capital" [25]...
This expansion subjects capitalism to continuous periodic crises; as Fredric Jameson points out, "capital is an infernal machine that regularly breaks down and can only repair itself through the exertion of expansionary convulsions" [51]. Herbert Schiller argues that the 20th-century industrial-electronic complex replaced the traditional 19th-century geopolitical imperialism of the United States. This complex relies on a powerful capacity for technological expansion to conduct global cultural manipulation and penetration, thereby strengthening America’s unipolar hegemony in both spatial and ideological dimensions [52]. Amidst this frantic expansion and outward suppression, the U.S. backbone network (NSFNET) evolved into the global Internet, with international governance mechanisms for the web firmly controlled by capital. What followed was the daily widening of the global "digital divide" [53]. This occurs because within digital capitalism, the "nature of the relations of production in which the bourgeoisie moves is by no means unitary or simple, but twofold: in those same relations in which wealth is produced, poverty is also produced; in those same relations in which productive forces are developed, a force that produces oppression is also developed" [54]. According to International Telecommunication Union statistics, the internet penetration rate in developed countries reached 86.6% in 2019, while in developing countries, it was only 19.1% [55]. This vast chasm allows workers within the core countries of external expansion to share in a portion of "imperialist dividends," thereby alleviating class contradictions within those capitalist nations. Conversely, it causes class and national contradictions to accumulate continuously within the peripheral countries being expanded into.
Capital does not stop at spatial expansion; the extension of time is also utilized to expand capital accumulation and profit, an extension achieved through the combination of digital capital and financial capital. Following the Second World War, the widespread application of digital technology and the institutionalization of venture capital brought massive speculation to the stock markets. Once the derivative nature of finance and the expansionary nature of the digital collided, they released a tremendous force that instantaneously swept the globe. Catalyzed by finance, neoliberalism penetrated the sphere of social life, evolving into a "new consumerism" through which digital capital extended its domain of valorization into the future. Digital technology has not only accelerated the turnover of capital but has also broken the spatio-temporal limitations of communication media, achieving an expansion of the medial boundary. Wayne Hope proposed the concept of "synchronicity" to define the reshaping of historical moments by digital media. Synchronicity "opens the door to understanding otherwise unrelated ways of life within the same epochal context" [56]. Moreover, "in an economically interdependent world driven by the instantaneous transmission of knowledge and information, the orientation of an individual’s own life is likely to be imperceptibly linked to the lives of people elsewhere; the emergence of real-time alternative news forums, such as independent media, has also forced global power structures and simultaneous disparities between rich and poor into the public eye" [57].
III. The Recession and Recovery of Digital Capitalism
The recession of digital capitalism began with the 2008 international financial crisis. The bursting of the financial bubble also shattered the myth of the infinite expansion of digital capital, leaving digital capitalism mired in a slump. The recovery of digital capitalism began in 2014 with the popularization of mobile internet technology, which brought new vitality to digital capital. During this period, foreign Marxist scholars were able to examine digital capitalism and its development from broader spatio-temporal dimensions, more deeply revealing the macro-laws of development and the micro-logic of exploitation within digital capitalism.
(i) The Digital Recession of the Human Being
As digital capital permeates every corner and field of the world, human beings become increasingly dependent on information technology, existing in a state of "digitalized existence" [58], with social life being pushed forward by invisible forces. Beneath the intelligent and efficient shell of digital technology lies the compression of time; beneath the free and flexible appearance of digital media lies the domination of behavior. The human brain seems to have become a "brain in a vat" composed of code [59].
Due to the large-scale use of intelligent machinery by digital platforms, the subjectivity of the laborer is obscured, and labor actions are transformed into prescriptive operations that cater to the needs of the machine. Ultimately, the new jobs created by digital information technology are far fewer than those eliminated. As Nicholas G. Carr illustrates, the emergence of Wikipedia left those who compiled encyclopedias unemployed [60]. If this is seen as the unavoidable growing pains of economic development, then the financial "shock therapy" [61] created by the United States to protect the interests of major investors and the exposure of digital companies stealing user information to manipulate politics [62] undeniably symbolize the recession of digital capitalism. As Dan Schiller remarked, "The era we inhabit is marked not by expansion, but by contraction; not by stagnation, but by dizzying structural change" [63].
(ii) The Robust Recovery of Digital Capitalism
Summoned by military and financial demands, the technological carriers of digital capitalism are constantly updated. The widespread deployment of fourth-generation mobile communication technology (4G) and the formal popularization of the fourth-generation iPhone were milestones in the development of digital technology, leading to the rapid advancement of the digital economy. In this context, the application of digital technology by private capital has enriched the forms of digital capitalism. Mori Ken and Hito Hiroyuki argue that digitalization, through the "sharing economy" and other means, has solved capitalist social problems such as idle assets and labor shortages while increasing consumer surplus; thus, a post-capitalist form of a "gift economy" is gestating within digital capitalism [64]. As of January 2022, network access has brought the number of global social media users to 4.62 billion—nearly 60% of the world's population—while internet users have reached 4.95 billion, nearly 5 billion [65].
(iii) The Further Deepening of the Internal Crises of Digital Capitalism
The capitalist application of digital technology has deepened the crises of "digital recession," including the "dot-com bubble," the intensification of social wealth polarization, and the widening of the global digital and distributional divides [66]. Digital capitalism "accumulates wealth at one pole, while at the other pole—that is, on the side of the class that produces its own product as capital—it accumulates poverty, the agony of toil, slavery, ignorance, brutality, and mental degradation" [67]. It is precisely the recovery of digital capitalism that has left people unaware that they are trapped in the "digital enclosures" [68] and the recessionary whirlpool of financial expansion. Behind the convenience of digital technology is the invisible control of labor through digital surveillance; behind the increasingly rich promotional means of platforms is the pursuit of the commodification of digital activities; and behind flexible and free time schedules is the "unfreedom" of being constantly online [69].
While technological changes bring convenience to information dissemination and accelerate knowledge sharing, "information cocoons" and their attendant "echo chamber effects" have intensified capital's control over ideology. The ease of accessing knowledge has brought about a mass dependency on knowledge, causing individuals to fall into the abyss of "cultural degradation." As Giovanni Cesareo argues, the complex social power relations behind networked information consumption under oligopolistic systems, User-Generated Content (UGC) by "prosumers," and the self-media phenomenon represented by "citizen journalism" have brought about a chaotic state where "democratization and authoritarian tendencies coexist" [70].
IV. An Appraisal of Foreign Marxist Research on Digital Capitalism
Accompanying the actual development of digital capitalism, foreign Marxist research has followed its developmental trajectory and used Marxist methods; it is highly reflexive but lacks foresight. In this regard, we offer an evaluation across four dimensions.
(i) A Trend Toward Emphasizing Cultural and Ideological Factors on the Basis of Adhering to Historical Materialism
After the 2008 international financial crisis, a wave of "returning to Marx" swept through academia. In theoretical circles, voices using Marxist methodology to reveal the essence of digital capitalism and conduct critical reflection have grown louder. Marx's theory of economic crisis has received immense attention, and many scholars have applied Marxist theory to study the impact of digital technology on society, reveal the living conditions of digital laborers, and encourage their resistance.
Looking at the research on digital capitalism by foreign Marxists, their research methods remain grounded in historical materialism, focusing on the interactive perspective of productive forces and relations of production, as well as the economic base and the superstructure, to understand the processes of digital technology and the information industry, thereby delineating the logic of the emergence and development of digital capitalism. Through the analytical method of historical materialism regarding the interaction between productive forces and relations of production, the political considerations and the role of the state in the birth and expansion of digital capitalism have received full attention. Through the interaction between the economic base and the superstructure, the internal mechanisms hidden within the digital recession of the human being have been revealed.
Regarding solutions to the digital recession, Slavoj Žižek argues that the "liberal democratic solutions" proposed by some new forms of flexible capitalism [71] are crude and simple, and need to be replaced by innovations in the Marxist concept of class [72]. Eric Hobsbawm argued that contemporary global capitalism is riddled with contradictions, crises, and socio-economic inequality, and only Marxism can answer these questions [73]. Jameson believes that global unemployment is a crisis of global capitalism, which once again proves the contemporary relevance of Volume I of Capital [74]. Christian Fuchs utilizes historical materialism and the labor theory of value to demonstrate the working conditions of digital labor and the modes of resistance of digital workers, emphasizing that capital is the common enemy of the broad masses of workers, and that overcoming capitalist rule requires economic globalization and networked struggle [75].
In recent years, foreign Marxist research has mostly revolved around superstructural factors such as "digital fetishism" and "digital cultural hegemony" to understand digital capitalism, gradually detaching from the production of material goods itself. Consequently, the foundation for the growth of culture and ideology has been weakened in these studies. Criticism at the superstructural level is conducive to reflecting on digital capitalism, but it offers few useful opinions or suggestions on how to construct a new economic base. As a vital component of the economic base, digital technology provides powerful technical support for improving the "plannability" of the economy and offers a path toward achieving human consensus and a community for global development. Therefore, foreign Marxist research should, on the basis of criticizing digital capitalism, think more about how to build a socialist digital ideology and a socialist digital culture, and advocate for the construction of digital socialism through reflection on the economic base.
(ii) A Tendency Toward Generalizing the Category of Labor and Dissolving the Concept of the Proletariat
In the analysis of the capitalist labor process, foreign Marxist researchers have, on the one hand, expanded the breadth of analysis by incorporating the "multitude" or "masses" into their scope, given that digital capitalism has generalized daily human activities into labor. On the other hand, existing literature also exhibits a tendency to dissolve the concept of the "proletariat," merging it with the "multitude" in analysis.
In the view of foreign Marxist researchers, the primary root of the dissolution of the "proletariat" concept lies in the "laborization" of daily activities within the digital capitalist environment, which ultimately stems from the capitalist application of data. Nick Srnicek argues that data is a material that is extracted, refined, and used in various ways—a raw material that must be abstracted in the era of digital capitalism—and that users' digital activities, such as browsing web pages and using various applications, are the natural source of this raw material [76].
The dissolution of the concept of the "proletariat" is, in essence, the inevitable result of digital capital's dominance over industrial and financial capital under the condition of "general data." In digital capitalism, as all activities related to data are incorporated into the category of living labor, data becomes a form of dead labor. The speed of data production is so rapid that it permeates every inch of the atmosphere, becoming a cloud hanging over the heads of the "multitude" [32]; consequently, alienation has expanded from the sphere of labor into everyday life. For example, consumption on digital platforms creates value, becoming productive consumption. In reality, many digital platforms use a portion of these profits to stimulate further productive consumption through rebates. Furthermore, with the aid of digital tools, traditional enterprises have developed flexible employment methods and unpaid "crowdsourcing," rendering labor even more precarious and exploitation more invisible. Both laborers and consumers, as long as they come into contact with digital capital, are governed by an "invisible hand" like marionettes. This leads to the dissolution of a core concept of the Marxist theoretical system—the "proletariat"—as labor and activity merge into one, and the proletariat degenerates into the "multitude." While foreign scholars find it convenient to use "multitude" to analyze new forms of employment, it is clear that the "multitude" cannot alter the objective existence of the proletariat. In fact, this trend of generalizing the "proletariat" into the "multitude" represents a regression in class analysis; the concept of the "proletariat" dissolves into the milder concept of the "multitude," class exploitation is diluted, and thus the concept of class itself is weakened.
(3) Excessive Exaltation of the Historical Status of Digital Capitalism
The pervasiveness of digital technology is intertwined with the derivative nature of financial products, sowing new seeds for capitalist economic crises. Therefore, a crisis of digital capitalism remains hidden behind the digital technological recovery; a surplus of social wealth and knowledge coexists with a deficit of individual wealth and knowledge.
Precisely because digital capitalism exhibits great differences from industrial capitalism at the levels of both the technological base and economic interest relations, a significant amount of foreign Marxist literature tends to view digital capitalism as an independent historical formation distinct from previous economic modes, treating it as a new developmental stage that transcends the capitalist industrial economy. We believe that although the digital economy has had a tremendous impact on the organizational forms of social production and the various economic actors therein—altering traditional forms of labor and blurring the silhouette of "class"—within the framework of the Marxist historical materialist outlook, the digital labor process still belongs to the stage of large-scale machine industry. The digital economy has not broken away from the essence of industrial civilization; rather, the forms of production organization have undergone profound changes. At the stage of digital capitalism, "it is no longer the worker who inserts a modified natural object as an intermediary between himself and the object; rather, he inserts the process of nature, transformed into an industrial process, as a means between himself and inorganic nature, mastering it. He steps to the side of the production process instead of being its chief actor" [33]. However, the fundamental reason that "digital [elements]," participating in production as a factor of production, are transformed from information into "data" usable for production and daily life—and thus capable of possessing "value" in the sense of political economy—is that people expend a vast amount of labor to collect, organize, screen, and integrate this information into "data." This process is itself a labor process requiring a significant expenditure of human and material resources; therefore, behind the formation of valuable data, a large amount of investment is still required. It is in this sense that capital still lies behind digital factors. In other words, digital-intensive industries are necessarily capital-intensive industries, and digital enterprises are necessarily high-capital-investment enterprises. Similarly, within the three social formations categorized by Marx—"relations of personal dependence," "personal independence based on objective [material] dependence," and "free and comprehensive human development"—digital capitalism, despite containing some embryonic elements of the third social formation, still generally belongs to the second social formation: the capitalist commodity economy. Its inherent principal social contradiction remains the contradiction between the private ownership of the means of production and the socialization of production, except that the "means of production" here include more "digital capital." Of course, this also means that future research can further explore the paths and methods by which the digital economy promotes the free and comprehensive development of human beings.
(4) Adherence to a Western-Centric Research Position
The research on digital capitalism by foreign Marxist scholars still follows a narrative logic dominated by Western-centrism. Not only do they, intentionally or unintentionally, ignore the theories and practices of human liberation in 20th-century socialist countries when selecting national and regional studies, but the scholars themselves tend to be more concerned with the continued existence of Western society. Although the research on digital capitalism is primarily critical, the lack of a response [strategy] makes one feel that the "communist horizon" is disappearing, and the real-world harms of digital capitalism are obscured by the "beautiful side" of digital technology. However, "national liberation movements and socialist revolutions did not occur where capitalism succeeded, but where it failed completely. Therefore, capitalism was not, and cannot be, the only path to modernity and development, let alone the only form" [34].
As a new manifestation of capitalism, digital capitalism will likewise not achieve self-transcendence in the places where capitalism has succeeded. Even if capitalism is granted stronger powers of expansion, digital capitalism has still not escaped the inherent laws of capitalist crisis. We can also see that the potential of "the digital" as a tool for proletarian struggle is bursting forth. The "cyber-occupy movement," using digital technology under the guidance of platform cooperativism, is a precursor of this potential. The prospects for digital socialism are embedded in the practices of developing countries. In the development process of China’s digital economy, the scale and direction of capital investment in the digital economy are subject to policy constraints, and the development of the sharing economy and digital commons has begun to show results. Looking toward a digitized future, the public ownership of data and the use of digital technology for centralized planning and dynamic adjustment may be the trend of digital socialism; this is also a feasible path to break through "digital existence" [35] and reconstruct human subjectivity.
"Digital capitalism is not only a new stage of capitalism, but also a rehearsal of past capitalist history within digital space" [36]. Where will capitalism go after digital capitalism? Digital capitalism has dragged mathematical methods and information technology—which were originally devoid of ideology—into a political vortex; where, then, will capital's keen scent for profit reach next? Will it be the biological organisms nurtured by the Earth over billions of years, extra-terrestrial physical space, or even the Metaverse in a virtual context? We do not know. Perhaps it is already budding in some place invisible to us, brewing a new round of waves.
Drawing on the core concepts and research paradigms of the Marxist political economy of communication, foreign scholars have conducted in-depth explorations into the essence of digital capitalism, the accumulation of digital capital, and the labor processes involved. Although there are differences in their specific analytical perspectives—ranging from the focus on the "logic of capital" and the "logic of technology" to the "logic of communication"—these scholars generally maintain a critical stance toward the expansion of digital capital and its socio-economic consequences. Their research provides important theoretical references for our understanding of the new changes and characteristics of contemporary capitalism.
First, by analyzing the "technological-economic" paradigm of digital capitalism, foreign scholars have revealed how information and communication technologies have been internalized as a core element of the productive forces [37] under capitalism. This internalization has not only altered the relations of production but has also fundamentally reshaped the economic base and the superstructure. Dan Schiller and others have pointed out that digital capitalism is not a departure from the laws of capitalist motion but rather a continuation and intensification of those laws in the digital era. The "digitalization" of capital has enabled it to penetrate more deeply into everyday life, realizing a transition from "formal subsumption" to "real subsumption" of labor and life by capital.
Second, the study of "digital labor" has enriched the Marxist theory of surplus value. Scholars like Christian Fuchs have applied Marx's theory of exploitation to the digital realm, arguing that the "free labor" performed by users on social media platforms constitutes a new form of value creation and extraction. By analyzing how platform owners appropriate the value generated by users' data and content, these scholars have exposed the persistent nature of exploitation in the digital economy, despite its "participation" and "sharing" rhetoric. This research underscores that even in the New Era of high-technology, the contradiction between capital and labor remains the fundamental contradiction of the capitalist system.
Third, the critique of "digital hegemony" and the "digital divide" [38] highlights the global dimensions of digital capitalism. Foreign scholars have noted that the expansion of digital capital is inextricably linked to the reinforcement of global power hierarchies. The dominance of a few multinational tech giants over core technologies and data resources has led to new forms of "informational imperialism." This not only exacerbates social inequality within nations but also widens the gap between the Global North and the Global South, creating a digital divide that hinders the achievement of common prosperity on a global scale.
In conclusion, while foreign Marxist scholarship on digital capitalism offers valuable insights, it must be integrated with the specific realities of Chinese-path modernization. As China advances its own digital economy, it is essential to uphold the fundamentals and break new ground, ensuring that the development of new quality productive forces serves the goal of socialist construction. By adhering to the mass line and promoting whole-process people's democracy in the digital sphere, China can navigate the challenges of digital capitalism and contribute to the building of a community with a shared future for humanity.
(Author’s Affiliation: School of Marxism, Wuhan University) Web Editor: Zhang Jian Source: World Socialism Studies, Issue 3, 2023