ARTICOLI / 3 / Roberto Ciccarelli /
Becoming class. For a critique of the extractivist paradigm applied to digital capitalism
The article aims to investigate the historical reasons and the theoretical-cultural framework underlying the usual intellectual attitudes with which the theme of the pervasiveness of algorithms is addressed. In particular, the main topic is that of the ‘algorithmization’ of the historical-social world with attention to the phenomena related to work, the labour-power and the value extraction, within the field analysis of the economy of digital platforms. The main theoretical perspectives on this subject are analysed, i.e. the utopian, the disutopist and the extractivist one, with numerous insights into the specific literature, including that of surveillance capitalism (Zuboff, with Foucault in the background), a reconstruction of the so-called ‘neoliberal revolution’ of the post ‘68 years, and an investigation of the relationship between labour and capital as the logical centre of the critique of capitalism, according to the theories of Harvey and, basically, of Marx. Actually, a possible answer to the open questions in the first part can still be found in Marx’s analysis of production, where the labour-power from the one hand is the working capacity sold on the market in exchange for a wage, on the other hand, it is the capacity of producing use values embodied in working subjects, and in a pre-logical sense in their ‘corporeity’. Therefore, the essay examines the reason why it is necessary to take up this on-going contradiction, which allows us to conceive the metamorphosis and the change in the balance of power. The life of the human being thus appears structurally and historically to be crossed by new conflicts, starting with that between capital and digital labour, given that the assumption of equivalence between ‘human nature’ and ‘data production’ means imagining a form of subject caught in the work necessary to produce the data expropriated from capital.
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