Leftist critique in the era of platform capitalism

Abstract

The article discusses the canon of the Marxist critique of capitalism, its methods and means for analyzing economic institutions and the information technologies that affect them. The authors postulate that the Anglo-American academics who remain faithful to this canon are quite leftist in a way that derives from concerns about corporate culture and leads to oversimplifications and distortions of the phenomena in question. For example, economics has turned into an empty concept of capitalism studied through secondary texts and their interpretations in a presentation mode. As the latest failure to link Marxist and managerial discourses in the digital era, the authors cite Platform Capitalism by Nick Srnicek, one of the founders of the accelerationist movement and author of essays on the future of capitalism. The most controversial ideas in Srnicek’s book include the rhizomaticity of the platform model of economics, which he did not himself elaborate but proposed as the typology and genealogy of platforms in recent economic cycles (from the 1970s until the mortgage crisis of 2007 in the USA) when the foundations of the infrastructure and business strategy of the modern digital economy were shaped. The article focuses in particular on the enduring topics of leftist discourse under the new conditions of the digital economy: falling profit margins, deficit, crises of overproduction, exploitation, control, profit-seeking and market competition as explicit motives that supposedly guide the capitalists and managers in addressing new technologies together with the specter of an inevitable apocalypse. The authors question the most popular leftist approaches to critique of digital technologies and of the business models of platform companies and propose a more constructive appreciation of their role in modern society and economic liberalization by taking into account their public benefit and their cultural significance for users.