Antonio Negri,Spinoza,Marx,and Digital Capitalism

Abstract

This paper asks: How can Spinoza help us to better understand digital capitalism? The article engages critically and constructively with the philosophies of Spinoza, Marx, Hegel, and Antonio Negri in order to combine elements from their works. It focuses on a particular aspect of digital capitalism, namely the antagonism between digital labour and digital capital. Spinoza did not directly analyse class relations. Nonetheless, his philosophy can help us to indirectly analyse contemporary capitalism. This paper undertakes an analysis of digital capitalism by taking Spinoza’s concepts of power as potentia and potestas as a starting point. Antonio Negri has stressed the dialectic of potentia and potestas as part of the analysis of class and capitalism. This paper connects Spinoza to Marx’s and Negri’s analyses of capitalism and the working class. It analyses digital capitalism’s antagonisms between digital labour and digital capital, digital commodities and digital commons, and the networked digital productive forces and the digital relations of production as the antagonism between digital potentia and digital potestas.

I Introduction

This paper asks how selected aspects of Spinoza’s works can help us to better understand digital capitalism. Talking about capitalism requires us to take a Marxist perspective and to link Spinoza to Marx. In Marxist theory, Antoni Negri is the major theorist who has been inspired by both Spinoza and Marx and has based on these foundations contributed to the analysis of communication and the digital in capitalism by establishing and further developing categories such as the general intellect, immaterial labour, the informatisation and postmodernisation of production, and cognitive capitalism. In Marxist theory and philosophy, there is in general not much focus on the analysis of the digital in society and capitalism. Rather, there is much more focus on other important topics such as crisis dynamics, financialisation, neoliberalism, class analysis, etc. without touching on issues having to do with the media and digital technologies. Negri’s works and the works he co-authored together with Michael Hardt are an exception to the rule as they integrate analyses of information, communication, and the digital into the analysis of capitalism.

Given Negri’s importance for a Marxist–Spinozist analysis of digital and communicative capitalism, this paper draws particularly on Antoni Negri’s Spinoza interpretation. The article engages critically and constructively with both Spinoza’s and Antonio Negri’s works in order to reflect on the question: How can Spinoza help us to better understand digital capitalism? Hardt and Negri’s works constitute a prominent and widely read Spinoza-inspired philosophical approach, which justifies that particular attention is given to them.

This paper gives particular attention to one important aspect of digital capitalism, namely the antagonism between digital labour and digital capital. This means that its focus is on class in digital capitalism. There is a multitude of phenomena that make up digital capitalism. The work at hand can only focus on a selected dimension, without claiming that the antagonism between digital labour and digital capital is the only aspect of digital capitalism that requires analysis.

The paper proceeds in the following methodological manner. It starts with a more general discussion, namely an analysis of how Marxist authors have used Spinoza to analyse communication. This analysis shows that thus far little focus has been given to the Spinozist analysis of communication in capitalism. The rest of the paper tries to contribute to overcoming this knowledge gap by engaging with both Spinoza’s and Negri’s works. To do so, we focus on the notion of power in section 3. A reading of both Spinoza and Negri suggests that Spinoza’s notion of power as potentia and potestas is an important starting point for the analysis of communication in capitalism and digital capitalism. We know from Marx that there is no capitalism without capital’s exploitation of surplus-value-generating labour. Labour-power is the heart of capitalism as it produces capital. Therefore, Marx writes that capital exists ‘only in connection with’ labour as ‘not-capital’ (Marx 1857/1858, 274) that is ‘the living source of value’ (296). Advancing from the abstract to the concrete, the analysis therefore proceeds with a focus on labour-power and the relationship of labour and power in the capitalist economy (section 4). Further concretising the analysis, we focus on the relationship between labour in power in digital capitalism’s economy). The thereby advanced analysis of digital capitalism is based on a combination of Spinoza, Marx, and Negri. The analysis of digital capitalism is conducted in three steps organised in three sections: the class relation between digital capital and digital labour is analysed in terms of digital potestas and digital potentia (section 5), the notion of immaterial labour is critically examined (section 6), and the antagonism between the productive forces and the relations of production is set in the context of digital capitalism (section 7). What holds these three sections together is the combined focus on the antagonism between digital potestas and digital potentia. Finally, some conclusions are drawn (section 8). The paper starts with the most general aspects and proceeds to more concrete ones. This means that it follows the epistemological method that Marx termed the advancement from the abstract to the concrete. For Marx, the advancement from the abstract to the concrete is Political Economy’s method (see (Marx 1857/1858, 100–108). He argues that the concrete ‘is concrete because it is the concentration of many determinations, hence unity of the diverse’ (Marx 1857/1858, 101). In order to analyse digital capitalism as a concrete contemporary organisational form of the capitalist formation of society and the capitalist mode of production, we need to advance from Spinoza via Marx to Negri and from power to labour-power and digital labour.

The novel aspect of the approach taken in this paper is that it thinks together Spinoza, Marx, and Negri in order to analyse the class relationship between digital capital and digital labour as a power relationship that involves both digital potentia and digital potestas. These are categories that have not been introduced in other works.

This paper is a theory paper, which means that it uses theory construction as a method. My understanding of theory uses dialectical philosophy as a method and epistemology. Specifically, this means that I engage with previous works by other authors that are relevant to the discussed topics, work through them, and conduct a philosophical Aufhebung (sublation) of these works. Aufhebung as a dialectical method includes the elimination of knowledge (Aufhebung as Eliminierung), the preservation of knowledge (Aufhebung as Bewahrung), and the uplifting of knowledge to a new level (Aufhebung as Höherheben).

In the Science of Logic, Hegel outlines the rich meanings of the term Aufhebung:

“To sublate [Aufheben] and being sublated [das Aufgehobene] (the idealized [das Ideelle]) constitute one of the most important concepts of philosophy. It is a fundamental determination that repeatedly occurs everywhere in it, the meaning of which must be grasped with precision and especially distinguished from nothing. – What is sublated does not thereby turn into nothing. Nothing is the immediate; something sublated is on the contrary something mediated; it is something non-existent but as a result that has proceeded from a being; it still has in itself, therefore, the determinateness from which it derives. The German ‘aufheben’ (‘to sublate’ in English) has a twofold meaning in the language: it equally means ‘to keep,’ ‘to preserve,’ and ‘to cause to cease,’ ‘to put an end to.’ Even ‘to preserve’ already includes a negative note, namely that something, in order to be retained, is removed from its immediacy and hence from an existence which is open to external influences. – That which is sublated is thus something at the same time preserved, something that has lost its immediacy but has not come to nothing for that. – These two definitions of ‘to sublate‘ can be cited as two dictionary meanings of the word. But it must strike one as remarkable that a language has come to use one and the same word for two opposite meanings. For speculative thought it is gratifying to find words that have in themselves a speculative meaning” (Hegel 2010, 81-82).

In this paper, Aufhebung is used as a methodological procedure. I eliminate knowledge from the discussed works and approaches that does not help to gain insights into digital capitalism, which means I do not focus on such knowledge in the discussion. In contrast, elements that help us to better understand digital capitalism are preserved and at the same time transformed and reconstructed so that they together make up a new, qualitatively different level of analysis that contains new, emergent knowledge about digital capitalism that cannot be reduced to the knowledge contained in the works that form the foundation of this article and the novel knowledge produced by it.

II How Not to Relate Spinoza’s Philosophy to Communication

The digital is an aspect of the emergence of new means of information and communication that are not just means of consumption but also means of production. Therefore, relating Spinoza to digital capital and digital labour is an aspect of the philosophy of communication. Not much has been written on Spinoza and the digital. In critical social theory, there are important exceptions, such as the essays by Kalpokas (2021) and Finelli (2021). ¹ There is a more established and more discussed body of literature on Spinoza and communication. As a starting point of our discussion, we want to have a look at secondary literature that has discussed how we can use Spinoza to think about communication.

Spinoza lived in the Netherlands in the 17th century, a time when colonialism, agricultural production, and (sea) trade (grain, timber, salt, wool, linen, hemp, beer, liquor, fish, sugar, tobacco, tar, soap, silk, yarn, iron, glass, chemicals, diamonds, needles, etc.) dominated the Dutch economy (Thalheimer 1928). Therefore, he obviously could not analyse the digital economy. But even when a thinker does not directly address a contemporary issue, his ideas might indirectly and based on a reinterpretation and further development help us to better understand contemporary society. Doing so requires setting such a thinker in relation to other thinkers. For a Spinozist analysis of digital capitalism, an articulation of Spinoza’s thought with Marx and Negri is helpful. Therefore, we briefly want to give an overview of how contemporary authors have related Spinoza to communication. There are three logics that can be found in such works: (a) the focus on the communication of bodies in nature, (b) human imagination, and (c) freedom of speech. We focus on some key works on Spinoza and communication, especially Matthew S. May’s (2009) essay ‘Spinoza and class struggle’ published in the journal Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, Toni Negri’s (2017) book Spinoza: Then and Now where he relates the notion of immaterial labour to Spinoza’s work, which is evident from one of the book’s chapter titles – ‘Reflections on the Immaterial: Spinoza, Marx … and Today’ (Negri 2017, chapter 7), Étienne Balibar’s (2008) book Spinoza and Politics (Balibar 2008) that contains the chapter ‘Politics and communication’ (Balibar 2008, chapter 5), and Balibar’s essay ‘Spinoza’s Three Gods and the Modes of Communication’ (Balibar 2012).

First (a), there is the argument that the communication of bodies that Spinoza describes is a foundation for explaining class struggles (May 2009). May writes that ‘Marx reads labor power in the same way that Spinoza reads substance’ (May 2009, 205) and that Spinoza sees ‘the body as compositional’, which is the ‘basis for a Spinozist approach to class struggle’. Workers’ refusal to work may be ‘translated practically into any number of practices of non-collaboration provided that they are deployed with an eye toward affects as the anonymous forces that communicate across bodies as they encounter and transform each other in a process of revolutionary composition’ (207). May argues that just like in Spinoza’s works bodies ‘communicate’, in a workers’ rebellion, workers’ bodies communicate and form a revolutionary subject. This connection is very far-fetched. Spinoza did not talk about labour and class struggles. His notion of the communication of objects is not a good starting point for thinking about labour struggles. Furthermore, to argue that all sorts of objects ‘communicate’ anthropomorphises nature and does not adequately distinguish between human and non-human matter.

Second (b), some approaches argue that Spinoza’s notion of imagination can be used to justify the notion of immaterial labour (Negri 2017, chapter 6). Negri (2017) takes Spinoza’s notion of imagination as a starting point. He writes about ‘imagination, which I and Spinoza can qualify with the adjective “immaterial”: that of making present to us, and disposing towards action, the things we face. Common notions, which are constructed by reason and imagination, thus become a constituent power’ (Negri 2017, 63).

In his works, Spinoza says, for example, that ‘the human mind is able to imagine simultaneously and distinctly as many bodies as there are images that can be formed simultaneously in its body’ (Spinoza 1677/2002, 266). He writes that imagination means that we form notions from ‘symbols. For example, from having heard or read certain words we call things to mind and we form certain ideas of them similar to those through which we imagine things’ (Spinoza 1677/2002, 267). Spinoza uses the notion of imagination in the context of images and calling things to mind, but not the terms ‘immaterial’ and ‘immateriality’. There is no real connection between imagination and immaterial labour.

Both Spinoza’s notions of the ‘communication’ of bodies and imagination are not suited for the analysis of communication in capitalism. The first argument’s logic is focused on general objects in nature (which includes society), that is, a naturalistic logic. The second argument’s logic is based on a particular feature of the human individual’s mind, namely imagination. Both logics are too abstract and, therefore, not suited for explaining aspects of communication in capitalism.

Third (c), there is a focus on Spinoza’s notion of freedom of speech (Balibar 2008). The ‘essential element in Spinoza’s conception of democracy is freedom of communication’ (Balibar 2008, 98). Balibar says that ‘Spinoza’s philosophy is, in a strong sense of the term, a philosophy of communication’ (101; see also Balibar 2012, 1989). For Spinoza, desire is the human being’s essence. ‘Now desire is the very essence, or nature, of each individual insofar as that is conceived as determined by some given state of its constitution to do something’ (Spinoza 1677/2002, 308). Spinoza does not separate the body and the mind, rather for him the human being is only a unity through soul and body. The implication is that social relations between humans are at the same time relations between human minds and human bodies (Balibar 2008, 106–107). Ideas and affects (joy or sadness, love or hate, hope or fear, etc.) accompany each other (108). For Spinoza, there are three types of knowledge: reason, imagination, and intuition (109). Democracy is for Spinoza constituted by the freedom of expression and the expression of political ideas (114) as well as the ‘circulation of information’ (121) in the public sphere.

Freedom of speech is a question of politics and democracy, which are important aspects of society. Balibar does not relate Spinoza’s notion of freedom of speech to capitalism, but stays purely focused on the realm of politics, which is on the one hand no surprise because his book holds the title Spinoza and Politics, but on the other hand is a surprise because Balibar has a history as Marxist political economist. Balibar makes an argument at the level at the level of society, which is progress in comparison to the first and second logics that are focused on nature, respectively, the individual. Missing is the insight that also the market can limit freedom of speech. Evident examples are capitalist press monopolies that give media owners the power to privilege particular interests in reporting and the popularity of the tabloid press that simplifies and distorts news, which limits freedom of speech. Such arguments can be found in Habermas’ (1991) analysis of the structural transformation of the public sphere but not in Balibar’s book on Spinoza. Freedom of speech certainly is a very important topic. However, given its political nature, it is not so well suited as a starting point for the analysis of capitalism’s political economy.

All three discussed strategies fail to relate Spinoza properly to the analysis of capitalism. A fourth, more promising, strategy is that we start from Spinoza’s notion of power.

III Power as Potestas and Potentia

Toni Negri has convincingly shown that there are two notions of power in Spinoza’s writings. In Spinoza’s works, there is ‘the separation between potentia and potestas, power and Power’ (Negri 2004, 15). Negri stresses that this distinction is best visible in Spinoza’s Political Treatise (Tractatus politicus, TP). ‘In the TP this development reaches its conclusion. The relationship between Power and power is completely overturned: only power, by constituting itself: only the power of the many, by making itself collective constitution, can found a Power. In this framework, Power is not seen as a substance, but rather as the product of a process aimed at collective constitution, a process that is always reopened by the power of the multitudo’ (Negri 2004, 15). ‘Most European languages have two words for power – potestas and potentia in Latin, pouvoir and puissance in French, poder and potencia in Spanish, Macht and Vermögen in German – whereas English has only one. This might seem at first sight an example of the poverty of the English language, and in the past we have tried to remedy it rather inelegantly with capitalization, distinguishing between Power and power, using Power to name the vertical, centralized ruling powers, capitalist command, and biopower while employing power for the horizontal processes of resistance, the force of living labor, and the creative aspects of biopolitics’ (Hardt and Negri 2017, 70).

In the Political Treatise, Spinoza speaks of potestas as Power from above, dictatorial Power (dictoria potestas): ‘So since dictatorial power [dictoria potestas] is absolute, it is bound to be a terror to all, especially if, as is here required, there is a fixed time for a dictator to be appointed’ (Spinoza 1675-1677/2002, 747–748). Arguing more generally, Spinoza defines Power as exerting domination and control over someone (sub potestate habere):

“Furthermore, it follows that every man is subject to another’s right for as long as he is in the other’s power, and he is in control of his own right to the extent that he can repel all force, take whatever vengeance he pleases for injury done to him, and, in general, live as he chooses to live. One man has another in his power if he holds him in bonds, or has deprived him of the arms and means of self-defence or escape, or has terrorised him, or has so attached the other to himself by benefit conferred that the man would rather please his benefactor than himself and live as the other would wish rather than at his own choosing. He who holds another in his power in the first or second way holds only the other’s body, not his mind; in the third or fourth way he has made the other’s body and his mind subject to his own right, but only as long as fear or hope endures. When one or the other is removed, the man remains in control of his own right. The faculty of judgment, too, can be subject to another’s right to the extent that one man can be deceived by another. Hence it follows that the mind is fully in control of itself only to the extent that it can use reason aright” (Spinoza 1675-1677/2002, 685-686).

Spinoza here distinguishes between two basic means of domination, namely the use of violence that threatens to create bodily and psychological harm and the use of ideology that tries to manipulate human consciousness in the interest of the dominant group.

Spinoza opposes Power (potestas) to the multitude’s power (potentia). ‘The same power that they need in order to begin to exist, they also need in order to continue to exist’ (Spinoza 1675-1677/2002, 683). Potentia means that humans ‘hold their rights in common’. Potentia is the multitude’s power, ‘the power of a people’ (potentia multitudinis). ‘This right, which is defined by the power of a people, is usually called sovereignty’ (Spinoza 1675-1677/2002, 687). ‘If this charge belongs to a council composed of the people in general, then the state is called a democracy’ (Spinoza 1675-1677/2002, 687). In a dictatorship, there is supreme Power that is detached from and dominates the multitude. In a democracy, ‘the supreme Power is fully constituted by the power of the multitude’, and Power is ‘constituent Power, completely and freely constituted by the power of the multitude’ (Hardt 1991, xvi).

In his interpretation of Spinoza, Toni Negri stresses that all power requires a foundation that works bottom-up, which is what he terms constituent power (potentia) that is opposed to and dialectically related to constituted power (potestas). Power from above (potestas) is always the product of power from below. “In other words, the new cooperating and immaterial subject of society expresses itself essentially through constituent power. Constituent power against constituted power, constituent power as singular subjectivity, as productivity and cooperation, that asks how to be situated in society - and how to develop its own creativity. Democracy thus appears as constituent power. It is a power expressed by the multitude of singular subjects that excludes every transfer of powers” (Hardt and Negri 1994, 310). Jason Read (2022, chapter 10) stresses that Negri interprets Spinoza by applying the notion of power as potential (potentia) to living labour: Autonomous Marxism stresses that capital is constituted by and emerges from the working class and that the ‘starting point must be labour and not capital’ (Read 2022, 220). Read (2022, 221-222) points out that Negri argues that the capitalist economy is based on the antagonisms between labour/capital, living labour/dead labour, life/death, wealth/poverty, etc.

In his Ethics, Spinoza simply opposes pain to pleasure, hate to love, fear to hope, despair to confidence, and disappointment to joy (Spinoza 1677/2002, 287–288). But there is no transformative project of social and class struggles that he identifies as important for such societal transformations. Struggle and praxis do not feature prominently. In the Political Treatise, Spinoza conceives of potentia as the multitude’s power from below. Toni Negri has interpreted this power as a concept of class and social struggle. Negri (2017, chapter 9) notes that it is not knowledge and wisdom, as Spinoza and Goethe assumed, that helps overcome fear. Rather, ‘only struggle […] will give us a way out of fear’ (Negri 2017, 107). He says that the ‘hatred of the bourgeois against the workers’ (Negri 2017, 120) has to turn into the ‘hatred of the proletariat against the exploitative tyrant’ as a condition for emancipation (121). Hatred as a societal condition ‘can turn into love through the construction of the common by the multitude’ (123). ‘Today, in an epoch characterized by the crisis of capitalism, this rupture between (capitalistic) relations of production and (proletarian) productive forces has again reached a point of extreme tension. Potestas and potential are presented as an absolute antagonism’ (Negri 1991b, 229).

Power on the one hand often is used to mean control and domination. On the other hand, there is the notion of empowerment, which implies grassroots power, the oppressed and the exploited groups’ social struggles, etc. In well-established concepts of power, the Spinozist duality and dialectic of power and Power are often not present. For example, in one of the most famous definitions of power, Max Weber does not adequately distinguish between power and domination. For him, power is the ‘chance of a man or a number of men to realize their own will in a social action even against the resistance of others who are participating in the action’ (Weber 1978, 926). He defines domination as the ‘probability that certain specific commands (or all commands) will be obeyed by a given group of people’ (Weber 1978, 212). Weber’s definition implies that power is something that is necessarily coercively defended by one group against other groups. This also means an unbridgeable gap and relationship of domination between the powerful and the powerless. Weber’s definitions of power and domination are overlapping and strongly related, which means that he does not make clear the difference between the two notions.

Foucault is weak in providing precise definitions. The one thing he is remembered for concerning power is that he stresses that power is not simply Power that ‘represses’ (Foucault 1977, 250). He adds that Power ‘produces things, it induces pleasure, it forms knowledge, it produces discourse; it must be considered as a productive network which runs through the entire social body much more than a negative instance whose function is repression’ (Foucault 1980, 119). Influenced by Nietzsche, Foucault seems to assume that everyone has a will to Power and that Power is not just exerted by the powerful but requires also subjects who submit to Power, obey it, try to become the new controllers of Power, etc. ‘If power were never anything but repressive if it never did anything but say no, do you really think we should manage to obey it?’ (Foucault 1980, 119). For Foucault, Power is related to human bodies, sexuality, consciousness, and everyday life. For him, a society without domination is not possible. In such a nihilistic conception of society, there can just be the deconstruction of and challenge to dominant Power by groups who want to gain Power and define new truths.

Negri’s interpretation of Spinoza in contrast to Weber and Foucault stresses the dialectic of power and Power. There is no Power without power that constitutes/produces and reproduces Power. Given that Power cannot exist without a societal power base, this base that acts from below reproduces Power. It always has the potential to challenge and radically transform society, as well as to abolish the dominant Powers as well as Power in general. Collective resistance is not an automatism but always a potential, which is why power is potentia and transformative potential. A ruling class or group enforces Power as domination with means such as violence, the state, markets, and ideology. Power is reproduced in the form of hegemony from below, which means that the individuals and groups living in society accept the dominant rules and enact them in their everyday lives. Thereby their everyday practices that are a form of power reproduce Power. At the same time, they have the power potential (potentia) to collectively say ‘no’ and to transform society or those parts of it they are unhappy with.

Having focused on the question of power in Spinoza’s philosophy, we can next ask what the roles of power and Power are in capitalism.

IV Power and Labour in the Capitalist Economy

Capitalism is a societal formation (Gesellschaftsformation) that is based on the accumulation of capital in the economic sphere, decision-power in the political sphere, and reputation in the cultural sphere (Fuchs 2022). A Structuralist interpretation of Marx proceeds by analysing the capitalist economy by focussing on commodities, money, capital, absolute surplus value, relative surplus value, capital accumulation, primitive accumulation, etc. It focuses on economic Power in capitalism and at best derives the analysis of the working class from the analysis of capital. It overlooks that there is also the power of the working class that needs to be understood right from the start. Wherever there are capital and commodities, there is labour that produces capital, commodities, and surplus value. Marx indeed begins the analysis of capitalism in Capital Volume I with the Structuralist suggestion that the investigation of the capitalist mode of production ‘begins by analyzing the commodity’ (Marx 1867, 125). He then introduces use-value and exchange-value as the commodity’s two dimensions. After that, he says that if ‘we set aside the use-value belonging to the physical bodies of commodities, just one quality remains: they are products of labor’ (Marx 1867, 16) and that commodities are an expression of ‘abstract human labor’ (Marx 1867, 16). This means that together with the Structuralist element of the commodity, Marx introduces the Humanist element of labour in his analysis of the capitalist economy. Marx’s analysis of capitalism starts with the analysis of the ‘two factors of the commodity: use-value and value’ (section 1.1 in Capital Volume I’s chapter 1), followed by the analysis of ‘the double character of the labour embodied in commodities’ (section 1.2 in chapter 1): concrete work and abstract labour. Furthermore, Capital Volume I’s first chapter also contains an analysis of commodity fetishism (section 1.4), which is not accidental. Section 1.4 relates the analysis of commodities and labour: Capitalist production hides the class relations and human labour behind things so that capitalism does not appear as a class system but as an immense collection of things (commodities, money, and capital). The most important sociological insight we can learn from Marx is that everything in society is a social and societal relation. Capital and commodities are not things but social and societal relations. Capital is a relation between capital and labour. For analysing the capitalist mode of production, we need to bring together at once Humanist and Structuralist analysis. This means that we need to analyse the capitalist economy as a class system, a system of class relations and associated practices and struggles.

To say that wherever there is capital there is labour means that wherever there is capital there is the exploitation of labour by capital in class relations. Expressed in Spinozist terms: Wherever there is the economic Power of capital, there is the power of the working class that produces capital and surplus value. The economic Power of capital is based on and produced by the economic power of labour. The dialectic of working-class power and capital’s Power is most powerfully expressed by Marx in a passage in the Grundrisse:

“Separation of property from labour appears as the necessary law of this exchange between capital and labour. Labour posited as not-capital as such is: (1) not-objectified labour [nicht-vergegenständlichte Arbeit], conceived negatively (itself still objective; the not-objective itself in objective form). As such it is not-raw-material, not-instrument of labour, not-raw-product: labour separated from all means and objects of labour, from its entire objectivity. This living labour, existing as an abstraction from these moments of its actual reality (also, not-value); this complete denudation, purely subjective existence of labour, stripped of all objectivity. Labour as absolute poverty: poverty not as shortage, but as total exclusion of objective wealth. Or also as the existing not-value, and hence purely objective use value, existing without mediation, this objectivity can only be an objectivity not separated from the person: only an objectivity coinciding with his immediate bodily existence. Since the objectivity is purely immediate, it is just as much direct not-objectivity. In other words, not an objectivity which falls outside the immediate presence [Dasein] of the individual himself. (2) Not-objectified labour, not-value, conceived positively, or as a negativity in relation to itself, is the not-objectified, hence non-objective, i.e. subjective existence of labour itself. Labour not as an object, but as activity; not as itself value, but as the living source of value. [Namely, it is] general wealth (in contrast to capital in which it exists objectively, as reality) as the general possibility of the same, which proves itself as such in action. Thus, it is not at all contradictory, or, rather, the in-every-way mutually contradictory statements that labour is absolute poverty as object, on one side, and is, on the other side, the general possibility of wealth as subject and as activity, are reciprocally determined and follow from the essence of labour, such as it is presupposed by capital as its contradiction and as its contradictory being, and such as it, in turn, presupposes capital” (Marx 1857/1858, 295-296).

Marx here forcefully argues that the class antagonism between capital and labour is an antagonism between the economic Power of capital and the economic power of labour so that labour’s power (labour-power in practice) produces wealth that capital because of its Power (the control and ownership of the means of production that disempowers labour’s ownership and separates the working class from the control of these means) appropriates and owns so that labour is at the same time poverty. In capitalism, labour is at the same time, as Marx says, the ‘general possibility of wealth’ and ‘absolute poverty’. Mario Tronti (2019, 214) points out that Marx in this passage foregrounds labour’s ‘wholly contradictory’ character, ‘precisely due to the fact that labour itself is a contradiction of capital – and, even before that, a contradiction for itself’. Toni Negri stresses that this passage means that Marx stresses labour as the ‘potential of all wealth’ (Negri 1991a, 69). The ‘abstract collectivity of labor is subjective power (potenza)’ (Negri 1991a, 70). Labour is ‘a general power (potenza)’ (Negri 1991a, 70).

The power of labour is that it is ‘the general productive force of wealth; activity which increases wealth’ (Marx 1857/1858, 307). In the work process, ‘the main force of production’ is ‘the human being himself’ (422). But in capitalism, capital ‘is the all-dominating economic power of bourgeois society’ (107). As a consequence of capitalist class relations, the economic Power of capital results in conditions where the working class ‘surrenders its creative power’ to capital (307). The ‘creative power of […] labour establishes itself as the power of capital, as an alien power confronting’ labour (307). ‘The collective power of labour, its character as social labour, is therefore the collective power of capital’ (585).

In class relations, the working class is at the same time the powerful producer of wealth and the disempowered class of the dispossessed that is stripped of ownership and forced to sell its labour-power as a commodity and to produce surplus-value in order to survive. Capital’s economic Power depends on the working class’ power to create wealth. Therefore, the working class is not just disempowered and dispossessed by capital but also has the power to bring down capital by stopping to work. The strike is the working class’ power of resistance against capital. In this context, Hardt and Negri stress that the power of the working class to create wealth and capital’s dependence on labour is also a threat to capital: ‘Like Machiavelli and Spinoza, Marx links the proletariat’s poverty directly to its power in the sense that living labor is “the general possibility of material wealth” in capitalist society. […] Marx conceives this explosive combination of poverty and power as the ultimate threat to private property, one which resides at its very heart’ (Hardt and Negri 2009, 54).

Working-class struggles and working-class resistance are, however, no automatisms, but economic potentia, a mere potential. There is the danger of over-optimism, of assuming that the working class must resist and does resist by necessity. In some formulations, Hardt and Negri seem to assume that there is an automatism of revolutionary subjectivity. For example, ‘This double character of poverty and possibility defines the subjectivity of labor increasingly clearly in the immaterial paradigm. The wealth it creates is taken away, and this is the source of its antagonism. Yet it retains its capacity to produce wealth, and this is its power. In this combination of antagonism and power lies the makings of a revolutionary subjectivity’ (Hardt and Negri 2004, 153). This passage can be read as meaning that revolutionary praxis emanates automatically from capitalism’s antagonistic class relations.

Such over-optimism can also be found in some passages of Mario Tronti’s works who writes, for example, that ‘the incessant development of the productive forces cannot but provoke the incessant development of the greatest productive force, the working class as revolutionary class’ (Tronti 2019, 32). The formulation that capitalist development ‘cannot but provoke’ the development of the ‘revolutionary class’ can be read as meaning that revolutionary developments emerge by necessity. But such formulations are also corrected by more careful formulations such as the one that the ‘working class within capitalism is the only irresolvable contradiction of capitalism – or, better, it becomes irresolvable the moment it self-organises as revolutionary class’ (Tronti 2019, 34). Working class struggles are a mere potential that becomes a powerful reality when the working class organises itself by going on strike, creating self-managed companies, making political demands for better working conditions, etc. Having focused on labour and power in capitalism, we will next discuss power and labour in digital capitalism based on the combination of Spinoza, Marx, and Negri. This will be accomplished in three steps by analysing the digital class relation as digital potestas and digital potentia (section 5), the notion of ‘immaterial’ labour (section 6), and the antagonism between the digital relations of production and the digital productive forces (section 7). What holds together and connects the analyses that follow in sections 5, 6, and 7 as a red thread is the insight that the combination of Spinoza, Marx, and Negri provides a good understanding of class relations and capitalism as a dialectic of working-class potentia and capital’s potestas, which we reconceptualise as the antagonism between digital potentia and digital potestas. Next, we will therefore focus on a section that engages based on the combination of Spinoza, Marx, and Negri with the analysis of the class relation between digital labour and digital capital.

V Digital Capitalism 1: Digital Class Relations as Digital Potestas and Digital Potentia

Digital capitalism is a dimension, aspect, and dimension of 21st-century capitalist society. Digital capitalism means aspects of the capitalist societal formation where digital technologies mediate the accumulation of capital in the capitalist economy, the accumulation of decision-power in the political system, and the accumulation of reputation in the cultural system (Fuchs 2022). Digital capital is the structural economic dimension of digital capitalism. Digital capital is digital potestas, economic Power in the digital capitalist economy that is imposed on workers, consumers, citizens, and society from above. Digital potestas dominates and exploits digital potentia, that is, digital labour’s potentials. Digital capital is a form of exploitation and domination, a political economy that constitutes and governs the class relation between the owners and organisers of the digital means of production and those who as digital workers produce and put to use these means of production in order to create digital commodities. Digital capital is capital that takes on the form of digital commodities. Digital capital appears in social forms such as digital advertising capital (Google/Alphabet, Facebook/Meta Platforms, ByteDance/TikTok, etc.), software capital (Microsoft, Oracle, etc.), digital hardware capital (Apple’s iPhone, Taiwan Semiconductor, Cisco Systems, Hon Hai Precision, Intel, etc.), telecommunications capital (Verizon Communications, China Mobile, Deutsche Telekom, Comcast, Nippon Telegraph and Telephone, Charter Communications, China Telecom, AT&T, etc.), digital merchant’s capital (Amazon, Alibaba, etc.), digital finance capital (PayPal, eBay, etc.), etc. This means that digital capital is a unity in diversity. All the companies just listed have in common that they turn the digital into commodities and digital capital and for producing digital commodities exploit a variety of forms of labour. However, the digital commodity takes on a variety of forms and capital accumulation models.

Digital capital is a powerful capital faction in the contemporary capitalist economy. The two main geographical locations of digital capital’s headquarters are the USA and China (Fuchs 2021). One of the features of digital technologies and networked computer systems is that they support networking and help transcend boundaries, including spatio-temporal boundaries, which is why digital capital operates transnationally, internationally, and globally.

From Spinoza, we learn that potestas requires potentia. From Marx, we learn that capitalism should be analysed as a class system, which requires uniting Humanist and Structuralist analysis. From Negri, we learn that labour as potentia and power constitutes capital’s Power and potestas, which implies that the working class is not just alienated but holds the power to disrupt and bring down capital by refusing to work in the form of the strike action. Analysing digital capitalism in a Spinozist–Marxian–Negrian way means stressing that the Power of digital capital (digital potestas), that is, the accumulation of digital capital, is the product of digital labour (digital potentia). Digital labour produces digital capital. There is no digital capital without digital labour. Digital labour is labour that produces digital commodities, that is, commodities that take on digital forms. The digital working class includes all workers who contribute to the production of digital commodities.

Labour is potentia because it constantly realises economic potentials that as constant work result in use-values and as abstract labour produce commodities. Economic potentials are turned into capitalist actualities in the form of commodities’ use-values, values, and exchange-values. Digital labour as digital potentia produces a variety and different forms of digital commodities and digital capital. This means that digital potentia produces digital potestas. Just like there are different forms of digital capital, there is also a variety of forms of digital labour that is organised in the form of an international division of digital labour (Fuchs 2014, 2015):

• Extractive digital labour is labour that extracts minerals out of which components of digital hardware are created.

• Industrial digital labour is labour that manufactures and assembles digital hardware.

• Digital knowledge labour is labour that uses digital hardware for producing digital content and digital knowledge such as software, websites, digital music, digital videos, digital images, digital games, digital animations, data, meta-data, social data, etc.

• Digital service labour is labour that uses digital hardware and digital software for producing services such as the delivery of food and parcels, the transport of humans from location A to location B by taxi, care work, the delivery of parcels to customers who ordered commodities online, online attention to digital advertising, call centre labour, content moderation (the digital cleaners), etc. Digital service labour does not create digital content but a wide range of services that are produced with the help of digital means of production.

• Digital disposal labour is labour that decomposes electronic waste in order to extract components and precious metals that are reused.

This list shows that for the digital capitalist economy to exist, a variety of forms of digital labour that are all exploited by digital capital is needed. The diverse forms of digital labour have in common that they are all exploited by digital capital. They differ in terms of the digital commodities they produce and the concrete form the class relation takes on. For example, Silicon Valley software engineers are highly paid and heavily overworked wage-workers. They face a management style that stresses that software production is a culture of fun, self-determination, and self-fulfilment, which results in a heavy culture of overtime and digital workers who tend to think and feel like managers but suffer from the lack of free time and friendships and life outside of the company (Fuchs 2024). In contrast, Chinese hardware assemblers in Foxconn factories are digital workers who face Taylorist management methods that work with surveillance, threats, and punishments in addition to relatively low wages (Chan et al. 2020; Qiu 2017). For using a computer and a mobile phone, both types of digital labour, the play labour of the Silicon Valley software engineers and the labour of Foxconn workers, who face ‘bloody Taylorization’ (Lipietz 1987, 76), are required so that digital capital exploits a variety of forms of digital labour that have in common that they produce digital capital.

Digital labour has an internationally networked character, which means that digital knowledge labour that creates digital content and digital service labour are based on and cannot exist without extractive and industrial digital labour. The result of one type of digital labour enters as a means of production into other forms of digital labour. One type of digital potentia calls forth and in objectified form enters into another type of digital potentia. Most digital workers do not know each other and do not encounter each other. Their labour is related via an anonymous international division of digital labour that creates the Power of digital capital. While digital capital is networked and organised globally, digital labour is as such dispersed, anonymous, fragmented, and unorganised.

Given that entire economies and the capitalist world economy depend on digital capital that is created by workers in the international division of digital labour, the digital workers of the world possess tremendous power (digital potentia), that is, the potential to bring the world economy and the digital economy to a halt when they go on strike. When digital workers become a digital working class in-and-for-itself they realise their power potentials to resist digital capital. Digital workers become an organised and self-organising digital working class when they organise collectively as a political subject against digital capital in the form of digital labour unions, digital labour refusals, digital labour strikes, self-manged digital worker co-operatives, and political demands such as the taxation of digital capital, wage increases, and labour time reduction with full wage compensation for digital workers, a social wage for unpaid digital labour in the form of an unconditional basic income guarantee, etc. The Power of digital capital, that is, the accumulation of digital capital, is produced by digital labour’s power to create digital wealth. Digital wealth is, however, privately owned and therefore primarily benefits the digital bourgeoisie. It takes on the form of digital capital, digital wealth that benefits the pockets of the few. The digital working class has a tremendous power potential to resist and appropriate digital capital so that it is turned into digital wealth and digital commons for all that benefit all.

The working class’ power, its potentia, entails that in producing capital it can take the action to refuse production, to go on strike. To stop production is the working class’ political potential. To do so, it must become a critical, class-conscious force that opposes capital’s Power (potestas). The digital working class as digital potentia has the political power to stop producing the Power of digital capital by going on a digital strike and refusing to do digital labour. In digital class struggles, digital labour as politically organised digital potentia has the power to question and practically criticise digital capital’s potestas. This requires new forms of (digital) class struggles and (digital) strikes.

Digital labour is based on traditional and relatively new forms of labour. Extractive digital labour is traditional agricultural labour where humans work directly with and in nature from which they extract minerals. Industrial digital labour and digital disposal labour are forms of manufacturing labour. They are often organised in Taylorist and Fordist ways that feature highly coercive forms of labour control. Digital knowledge labour and digital service labour feature relatively new forms of labour. They form the realm where new management techniques such as so-called ‘participatory’ management are often applied. Such management experiments that are new forms of absolute and relative surplus value production are possible in these new realms of labour because digital knowledge labour (a) features highly skilled labour that has significant degrees of creativity, self-reliance, and self-realisation, (b) requires a high level of co-operation, and is (c) based on the human brain as a means of production. As a consequence, such labour involves a high degree of affectivity where workers identify positively with the products they produce and see these products as part of their selves.

Autonomist Marxist theorists such as Hardt/Negri and Lazzarato have analysed the subjectivity of labour in the age of digital capitalism as ‘immaterial labour’. In the next section, we will focus on this category.

VI Digital Capitalism 2: ‘Immaterial’ Labour

Hardt and Negri see digital knowledge labour and digital service labour as part of what they call ‘immaterial labour’. They build on Maurizio Lazzarato (1996, 132), who defined immaterial labour as ‘labor that produces the informational and cultural content of the commodity’. They define immaterial labour as ‘labor that produces an immaterial good, such as a service, a cultural product, knowledge, or communication’ (Hardt & Negri 2000, 290); ‘labor that produces immaterial products, such as information, knowledges, ideas, images, relationships, and affects’. (Hardt & Negri 2004, 65); labour ‘that creates immaterial products, such as knowledge, information, communication, a relationship, or an emotional response’ (Hardt and Negri 2004, 108).

Hardt and Negri (2004, 108) distinguish between two forms of immaterial labour: intellectual labour and affectual labour: ‘The first form refers to labor that is primarily intellectual or linguistic, such as problem solving, symbolic and analytical tasks, and linguistic expressions. This kind of immaterial labor produces ideas, symbols, codes, texts, linguistic figures, images, and other such products. We call the other principle form of immaterial labor “affective labor.” Unlike emotions, which are mental phenomena, affects refer equally to body and mind. In fact, affects, such as joy and sadness, reveal the present state of life in the entire organism, expressing a certain state of the body along with a certain mode of thinking. Affective labor, then, is labor that produces or manipulates affects such as a feeling of ease, well-being, satisfaction, excitement, or passion. One can recognize affective labor, for example, in the work of legal assistants, flight attendants, and fast food workers (service with a smile)’.

Immaterial labour is a misnomer because the term suggests that materiality means physicality. The concept implies that matter and spirit are two opposed substances, which is a dualistic conception of the world. Immaterial labour is also a quite non-Spinozist concept. For Spinoza, ‘in the universe there is only one substance, and this is absolutely infinite’ (Spinoza 1677/2002, 224); there is ‘no other substance but God’ (224); and Nature is God (‘the eternal and infinite being, whom we call God, or Nature’, Spinoza 1677/2002, 321). Taking these propositions together means that nature is substance and that all matter emerges from and is part of nature. Against his own Spinozist philosophical base and Spinoza’s materialist monism, Negri implicitly and perhaps unwillingly separates spirit and matter, mind and body, intellect and physicality.

Spinoza is a materialist monist who stands in contrast to Descartes’ substance dualism where there are two substances, the mind and physical bodies. Spinoza questions dualist solutions to the mind/body problem. For him, there is ‘the union of Mind and Body’; ‘the human Mind is united to the Body’ (Spinoza 1677/2002, 251). Negri 1991b, xvii) himself acknowledges that ‘Spinoza founds Modern materialism in its highest form’. For Spinoza, there is the extended substance that is also called ‘corporeal substance’ and the ‘thinking substance’ (Spinoza 2002, 208). The latter consists of ‘human minds’ (208) and is ‘matter of the human condition’ (10-11). For Spinoza, the human mind is not separate from nature and matter, but one specific form of matter and nature. Therefore, it is better to avoid the term ‘immateriality’ and to speak of knowledge labour or informational labour instead of ‘immaterial labour’. Jason Read (2024) stresses in this context that what connects Marx and Spinoza is that both see politics as immanent to the economy and the economy as immanent to politics as well as the material immanent to the mental and the mental immanent to the material. Read calls this the double shift between the economy and politics, the material and the mental, the body and the mind. These pairs of categories are ‘two different ways of understanding the same thing’; there is the ‘identity and nonidentity of mind and body, habits, and the imagination’ (Read 2024, 8). Thinking this assumption to the end, Raymond Williams (1977, 190) has formulated the approach of Cultural Materialism that argues that ideas and the ‘modes of consciousness are material’ (Williams 1977, 190; for a discussion of the relevance of Cultural Materialism in the age of digital capitalism, see Fuchs 2017 & Fuchs 2023).

What Hardt and Negri term ‘immaterial labour’ should better be referred to as knowledge labour. Knowledge labour is more general than digital labour. It also includes, for example, the labour of actors performing a theatre play live or the labour of a sales assistant who tries to convince customers in a shop that they should buy certain commodities by arguing that the purchase will positively enhance their identities and style, etc. While all digital knowledge labour and all digital service labour are what Hardt and Negri term ‘immaterial’ labour, not all ‘immaterial’ labour is digital. Digitalisation, however, in one way or another influences most forms of contemporary labour. Digital workers are not part of an immaterial working class but rather of the working class faction of knowledge workers who not just produce digital commodities but all sorts of informational commodities. Knowledge workers as potentia produce knowledge capital that as potestas dominates and exploits knowledge labour. Knowledge labour, however, also has the political potential to undermine knowledge capital by refusing labour and politically organising, which makes the question ‘Will knowledge workers of the world unite?’ that was first posed by Vincent Mosco and Catherine McKercher (2009) a key political question of knowledge and informational capitalism.

Hardt and Negri (2004, 108) write that most ‘actual jobs involving immaterial labor combine these two forms’ of immaterial labour, namely intellectual and affectual labour. Many forms of highly skilled digital knowledge labour do not just create digital knowledge products but are also highly affectual in character. Although conceptually confusing, Hardt and Negri’s notion of immaterial labour points in an important direction, namely the importance of focussing on how capital in contemporary capitalism manages workers’ emotions and affects. This means that many digital knowledge workers feel a special affectual connection to their labour and their products of labour. They see themselves as artists who are highly creative and who have a job that is fun and a form of pleasure. They feel privileged and have an artistic ethos. Typically, digital knowledge workers describe their labour in the following ways: You are ‘being paid for your hobby’ (Gill 2007, 14); ‘It’s a hobby and work combined’ (Gill 2007, 14); ‘It is so much fun’ (Gill 2007, 14).

In digital knowledge labour, the Power of digital capital (digital potestas) appears to be invisible to workers. Exploitation and self-exploitation do not feel alienated but like fun, self-fulfilment, play, and pleasure. In digital knowledge labour, the boundaries between labour and play, labour time and leisure time, the workplace and the home, production and consumption, professionalism and hobby, etc. are often blurred and indistinguishable. It is, therefore, no surprise that such labour has been one of the primary sites where new management methods that organise the workplace as a playground, stress teamwork, participation, informality, fun, co-operation, self-determined start times of labour, etc. have been explored (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005). As a consequence, digital knowledge labour is often at the same time highly self-fulfilling and highly stressful. Under capitalist conditions, it is labour that is at the same time pleasurable but induces the pain of a poor work-life balance.

Digital knowledge labour is often project-based: ‘In the new world, anything is possible, since creativity, reactivity, and flexibility are the new watchwords. Now no one is restricted by belonging to a department or wholly subject to the boss’s authority, for all boundaries may be transgressed through the power of projects’ (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005, 90). Precisely because it presents itself as opposed to Taylorist forms of management and as a form of humane management, post-Fordist management is so inhumane. It uses fun and the affectual attachment of workers to their labour as means of absolute surplus value production (overtime, longer working times) and relative surplus value production (higher intensity and productivity of labour). ‘The Taylorization of work does indeed consist in treating human beings like machines. But precisely because they pertain to an automation of human beings, the rudimentary character of the methods employed does not allow the more human properties of human beings – their emotions, their moral sense, their honour, their inventive capacity – to be placed directly in the service of the pursuit of profit. Conversely, the new mechanisms, which demand greater commitment and rely on a more sophisticated ergonomics, integrating the contributions of post-behaviourist psychology and the cognitive sciences, precisely because they are more humane in a way, also penetrate more deeply into people’s inner selves – people are expected to “give” themselves to their work – and facilitate and instrumentalization of human beings in their most specifically human dimensions’ (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005, 98).

Digital knowledge labour appears to be fun, self-fulfilment, pleasurable, and self-determined. At the same time, it creates a new form of poverty as a form of social pain, namely social poverty where humans work long hours, do not have enough time for hobbies, friends, and family, have a poor work-life balance, etc. Post-Fordist management methods work by blurring the affectual boundaries between pleasure and pain, joy and sadness, love and hate, hope and fear, despair and confidence, etc. Spinoza (1677/2002) defines the human being as an emotional being and stresses that “emotions are related to desire, pleasure or pain“ (Spinoza 1677/2002, 310). Post-Fordist management is Spinozist management in that it manages affects and tries to integrate workers’ entire subjectivity, including their affects, emotions, and minds into the labour process. Digital potestas as capitalist management form targets digital labour’s emotions, feelings, minds, and affects. Digital capitalist management is among other things also affectual management. Building on Spinoza and Marx, Jason Read (2024, 84) argues that contemporary capitalism ‘reorients pleasure toward work’ and ‘the pleasure of employment itself’. Post-Fordist management is a type of management that works by ideology and, in contrast to Taylorism, not primarily by violence, strict rules, and punishment. Post-Fordist management integrates, disembeds, encourages, supports, rewards, etc. in order to positively appeal to and manage workers’ affects. It is affectual management that targets workers’ affects in order to try to make them work longer and more productively.

‘Now desire is the very essence, or nature, of each individual insofar as that is conceived as determined by some given state of its constitution to do something’ (Spinoza 1677/2002, 308). If what Spinoza says is true, then humans strive to conduct work that they find self-fulfilling, purposeful, and pleasurable. As a consequence, creative and artistic work is desirable, which explains why many young people today want to work in the realms of culture and the media.

Google is a typical example of a digital corporation that uses new management methods. Its office complexes often look like playgrounds and affects are managed by the integration of leisure facilities, restaurants, free food, informality, invited speakers, team-building activities, etc.

Glassdoor is a platform that features company reviews. I searched for Google job reviews on Glassdoor. The period I focused on was from the start of January until the end of May 2023. I selected all postings that contained the keyword ‘hour*’, which resulted in 145 postings about working hours at Google. 112 out of the 145 comments (77.2%) criticised poor work-life balance and long working hours at Google. Here are some typical comments by Google workers: ‘Long hours tiring and stressful’; ‘toxic work culture that leaves people working all hours. Recent layoffs have left people at all levels afraid to say no, making everything worse’; ‘I guess the old “Don’t be evil” mantra died a long time ago here. Get ready to work long hours and have no vacation time, too’; ‘Lots of hours Always working Never off’; ‘Bad managers and long hours’; ‘High pressure environment and long hours’; ‘People who push back on only working 100% of the time are seen as “not a team player.” Don’t be fooled – free lunches, remote work setups, and massages are just ways to keep you overworking’; ‘horrible work-life balance and bad hours’; ‘Work lots of hours. Meetings all day and evenings spent following up in email. Constant fires that disrupt your day and everything is urgent’; ‘mentally draining long hours no work life balance’; ‘Advice to Management: More time off’.

Google workers are highly paid and socially poor. Many of them are rich in monetary terms but poor in social terms. They lack free time and time for social relations outside the company. Google management uses the strategy of absolute surplus value production. Management does everything to get workers to stay in the office and work long hours.

Networked digital technologies support the transcendence of boundaries. They are boundary-transcending technologies. With the help of digital technologies, consumers of information become producers of information. By utilising digital technologies, workers can work from home and from everywhere. Mobile phones, tablets, and laptops are mobile offices. As a consequence, it is easier for management to attempt to blur the boundaries between home/office, labour/play, labour time/leisure time, etc. The long-hours culture is not built into digital technologies or the digital industries as such. Rather, managers in the capitalist digital media industries create working conditions that transcend social boundaries so that digital workers, who utilise digital media as a means of production and produce digital commodities, are coerced into working long hours, ignoring the boundaries between labour and leisure, etc. and produce ever more surplus value. The long-hours culture is a strategy of absolute surplus value production, which means the lengthening of the working day. Given that digital media support networking and boundary-transcendence, management strategies that utilise networking and boundary-transcendence as methods of absolute and relative surplus value production might be used particularly frequently in the digital industries. Digital knowledge workers require social networking as part of their skills, which is why they might be particularly prone to transcend social boundaries (between labour/leisure, home/workplace, pleasure/pain, etc.) in their labour practices when they are hailed by network-based and boundary-transcending management strategies.

One key aspect of a Marxian analysis of capitalism is the investigation of the antagonism between the productive forces and the relations of production. In digital capitalism, this question needs to be posed concerning digital capital and digital labour.

VII Digital Capitalism 3: The Antagonism Between the (Digital) Relations of Production and the (Digital Productive) Forces

A key feature of the capitalist economy is what Marx (1867; 1857/1858) terms the antagonism between the relations of production and the productive forces. The development of the productive forces on the one hand makes labour more productive whereby the latter’s exploitation is deepened. On the other hand, the development of the productive forces often advances the socialisation of labour, its co-operative character, as well as the potentials for the social management of companies, the collective ownership of the means of production, and the reduction of necessary labour time to a minimum.

Marx stresses that in capitalism, the antagonism between the productive forces and the relations of production advances the economy’s crisis tendencies: ‘The growing incompatibility between the productive development of society and its hitherto existing relations of production expresses itself in bitter contradictions, crises, spasms’ (Marx 1857/1858, 749). At the same time, new potentials for a socialist economy of the commons emerge. Digital technologies tend to increase labour productivity, which under capitalist conditions results in antagonisms around labour-time. For example, while some work long hours, others are precarious workers or unemployed.

Information is not used up during consumption. It can be simultaneously consumed by many individuals (non-rivalrous consumption). It can be easily and cheaply copied. It is difficult to exclude individuals from access to information (non-exclusion). Digital networks support the cheap and easy global copying and spreading of information. In the digital age, the specific characteristics of digital information undermine the private property character of digital commodities. While digital capital develops new capital accumulation strategies, it always faces the danger of users and consumers copying information without paying for it and turning digital information and digital technologies into common goods that are not commodities and are available to everyone without payment. Digital capitalism’s economy therefore not only contains an antagonism between digital capital and digital labour but related to it also an antagonism between digital commodities and the digital commons. The networked, boundary-transcending, non-rivalrous, non-exclusionary character of the digital advances at the same time digital commodification and potentials for digital commonification. The antagonism between digital commodities and the digital commons is an expression of the antagonism between the digital relations of production (the class relation between digital labour and digital capital) and the networked digital productive forces.

Digital labour is an expression of the mentalisation of the productive forces. In knowledge labour, the brain is a key means of production. Marx anticipated the emergence of knowledge labour as an important productive force when he wrote in the Grundrisse that as part of the development of fixed capital, the ‘general intellect’, by which he means ‘general social knowledge’, becomes ‘a direct force of production’ (Marx 1857/1858, 706). The brain as a means of production is more difficult to subsume under capital and to be controlled by capital than machines, buildings, and other physical resources. The brain is physically attached to the human body and, as Spinoza knew, not detachable from the body. Knowledge labour is in contrast to industrial and agricultural labour brain-driven and strongly brain-based. Knowledge is a product of the human mind. Therefore, the digital means of production can be more easily self-managed in the digital knowledge industry than in traditional industries. Self-managed labour in a way is already present in digital knowledge labour’s ethos of self-fulfilled labour. This quest for creativity and self-fulfilment has to do with the fact that the brain is utilised as a means of production in digital knowledge labour. There is a relatively high level of freelance labour among digital knowledge workers. In 2023, with 320,000 workers, the arts, literature and media sector was by far the largest freelance sector in the UK ² . In 2020, there were 2.152 million one-person companies in Germany. Three hundred and fifty-six thousands of them (16.5%) were located in academic and technological services, 168 thousand in the information and communication industry, and 155 thousand in art, entertainment, and recreation. This means that taken together, there were 679,000 cultural freelancers that accounted for 31.6% of Germany’s one-person companies ⁴ .

Freelance workers manage themselves and exploit themselves. One can interpret their strange class status on the one hand by saying freelancers are particularly prone to share neoliberal management ideology. On the other hand, one can also interpret their class status by saying that freelancers are particularly prone to embrace the notions of the commons and self-managed companies that transcend capitalism. Perhaps both interpretations are true and false at the same time. Digital knowledge workers who are freelancers embrace the idea of self-management, which can take on two forms, namely (a) capitalist self-management in the form of for-profit freelance companies that embrace capital accumulation and private property and (b) socialist self-management in the form of not-for-profit companies that embrace the commons and collective ownership.

The antagonism between the networked digital productive forces and the digital relations of production has resulted in the dominance of a variety of digital capitalist corporations that together control a significant share of global profits. Digital capital’s Power (digital potestas) has again and again been challenged by socialist forms of production such as platform co-operatives, Creative Commons, Wikipedia, Diamond Open Access, not-for-profit Internet platforms, public service Internet platforms, etc. (see Fuchs 2021, 2024) that have the potential to be and become important digital class struggle projects, aspects of digital potentia as politically organised digital labour. Digital socialism is a power movement, a digital potentia that challenges digital capitalism (Fuchs 2020).

In the establishment of alternatives to the capitalist digital giants, creating the software infrastructure needed is neither difficult nor expensive. In the digital media landscape, consumers are producers of information, and it has become relatively easy for everyone to establish new means of production. While traditionally it was difficult and expensive to establish a new radio or television station or newspaper, it is neither complicated nor difficult nor expensive to create your own podcast, YouTube channel, blog, or Internet platform. The digital means of production are more easily accessible and producible than the traditional means of production, etc. There is, however, a shift of power away from the control of the means of communication as a means of production towards the power of attention and visibility. Platforms such as YouTube, Google, TikTok, WhatsApp, Instagram, and Facebook are so widely used and help to accumulate digital capital. The six platforms just mentioned are among the 15 most accessed Internet platforms in the world ³ . They are owned by three of the world’s largest transnational digital corporations (Meta Platforms: WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook; Alphabet: YouTube, Google; ByteDance: TikTok). These three corporations have in common that they primarily derive profit from digital advertising (see Fuchs 2024).

Anyone can today create a new Internet platform, but the difficulty lies in attracting users to it. Digital capital’s Power (digital potestas) – its profits and monopoly character – has to do with the attention and visibility that dominant digital platforms enable. But the Power of digital capital is based on the power of the users to give attention to and make visible digital content on the Internet. This means that users whose attention is an important resource and means of production have the power to boycott digital capital. In the case of advertising-financed platforms, a user boycott is a digital labour strike (Fuchs 2021, 2024). Without users, Google’s and Meta’s capital accumulation collapses. The establishment and struggle for digital capitalism on the one hand faces digital monopolies as a hindrance and problem that keeps alternatives from growing. On the other hand, digital labour struggles have the power to block digital capital. As a consequence, the establishment of alternative, not-for-profit digital commons projects should be integrated with digital labour struggles. For example, digital platform workers who go on strike to demand higher wages and better working conditions are an ideal subject for projects that are based on a switch of digital labour to a not-for-profit, socialised, union-based platform co-operative that competes with digital capital.

Not-for-profit digital projects that take on forms such as Creative Commons, platform co-operatives, public service Internet platforms, digital commons, etc. have the digital potentia to challenge digital capital’s Power. To do so, they need to be and become part of digital class struggles, new forms of (digital) strikes that blur the boundaries between labour protests/consumer protests, the labour movement/the consumer protection movement, socialist advocacy/privacy advocacy, etc.

In Spinoza’s time, societies were agricultural societies, which means that land was the most important means of production. ‘Thus the land and whatever is fixed to it in the way we have described is especially the public property of the commonwealth, that is, of all those who by their united strength can claim it, or of him to whom all have delegated the power to claim it’ (Spinoza 1675–1677/2002, 716). We can only speculate on how Spinoza would have argued about the digital means of production as an economic resource. Extrapolating his idea of the common good to 21st-century digital capitalism implies that a commonwealth requires the commonalisation of digital infrastructures such as Internet platforms so that digital platforms and information are no longer private goods yielding profits for the capitalist class but common goods. In such a system, ‘the production of commodities by means of commodities’ (de Peuter and Dyer-Witheford 2010, 44) is replaced by the ‘circulation of the common’ that connects ‘eco-social, labour, and networked commons to reinforce and enable one another’ (de Peuter and Dyer-Witheford 2010, 45).

For Toni Negri, the emergence of what he terms immaterial labour means ‘that the producer (the worker or proletarian, intellectual or material labour-power) reappropriated the tool of production, which increasingly is called the brain’ (Negri 2003, 144). Negri (2019) argues that what takes place today in the digital media landscape is the workers’ appropriation of fixed digital capital: ‘When we see today’s young people absorbed in the commons, determined by their machinic engagements in cooperation, we must recognise that their very existence is resistance. Whether we are aware of it or not, they produce resistance’ (Negri 2019, 213). Negri is too optimistic. There is no automatic resistance of digital workers against digital capital. The digital means of production and digital labour have power potentials for resistance (digital potentia) that are only realised and activated through and in class struggles and social struggles. Only in so far as digital labour struggles emerge, digital capital is questioned and opposed.

VIII Conclusion

This paper asked: How can Spinoza help us to better understand digital capitalism? Spinoza has not directly theorised class. Attempts to create indirect connections between Spinoza’s philosophy and the analysis of communication in capitalism have, for example, taken Spinoza’s notions of the communication of bodies, imagination, and freedom of speech as a starting point. It was pointed out that such connections are far-fetched. In order to theorise digital capitalism with Spinoza, we need to update Spinoza via Marx and Negri.

I suggested that the analysis of digital captialism should focus on Spinoza’s analysis of power as potestas and potentia that Antonio Negri has foregrounded in some of his works. In the capitalist economy, the dominant power of capital that is exerted from above (Power with ‘P’) in the form of accumulation processes and commodification is produced and reproduced by the power of the working class from below (power with ‘p’). Marx has analysed the dialectic of economic Power and power in capitalism by arguing that labour and the working class are at the same time general poverty and the general possibility of wealth. The consequence is that we must think of capitalism not just in terms of capital structures but also in terms of labour practices that are dialectically mediated. Given the power of the working class in capitalism, there is no automatism of resistance to capital but always the power potential that workers go on strike, oppose and overcome capital.

The dialectic of economic power and economic Power takes on specific forms in digital capitalism. Digital labour produces digital capital. There is no digital capital without digital labour. Digital capital is digital potestas, economic Power in the digital capitalist economy that is imposed on workers, consumers, citizens, and society from above. Digital potestas dominates and exploits digital potentia, that is, digital labour’s potentials. Digital capital is a form of exploitation and domination, a political economy that constitutes and governs the class relation between the owners and organisers of the digital means of production and those who as digital workers produce and put to use these means of production in order to create digital commodities. Analysing digital capitalism in a Spinozist–Marxian–Negrian way means stressing that the Power of digital capital (digital potestas), that is, the accumulation of digital capital, is the product of digital labour (digital potentia).

Digital labour includes a variety of social forms such as extractive digital labour, industrial digital labour, digital knowledge labour, digital service labour, and digital disposal labour. Labour is potentia because it constantly realises economic potentials that as constant work result in use-values and as abstract labour produce commodities. Economic potentials are turned into capitalist actualities in the form of commodities’ use-values, values, and exchange-values. Digital labour as digital potentia produces a variety and different forms of digital commodities and digital capital. This means that digital potentia produces digital potestas.

Given that Spinoza advances a materialist monism and opposes substance dualism, digital knowledge labour is a more suited and more Spinozist term than immaterial (digital) labour. The analysis of the antagonism between digital labour and digital capital as the antagonism between digital potentia and digital potestas is superior to the dualist category of immaterial labour that, other than Spinoza’s materialist monism, separates ideas from physicality. Digital labour is not part of an immaterial working class but of the working class’ faction of knowledge workers.

Although conceptually confusing, Hardt and Negri’s notion of immaterial labour points in an important direction, namely the importance of focussing on how capital in contemporary capitalism manages workers’ emotions and affects. Digital potestas as capitalist management form targets digital labour’s emotions, feelings, minds, and affects. Digital capitalist management is among other things also affectual management. Digital knowledge labour is associated with the brain as general intellect and means of production, the high affectivity of labour, and the transcendence of the boundaries between production/consumption, labour time/leisure time, office/home, alienation/fun, labour/play, pain/pleasure, etc. Digital knowledge labour is a type of labour that has been highly targeted by digital capital’s new management strategies that try to create more surplus value by trying to manipulate workers’ affects and integrate workers’ entire subjectivity, including their affects, emotions, and minds, into the labour process. As a consequence, many digital knowledge workers are highly paid workers and socially poor individuals who work long hours and have poor work-life balance.

Digital capitalism is based on an antagonism between digital labour and digital capital, an antagonism between the digital class relations of production and the networked digital productive forces, and an antagonism between digital commodities and the digital commons. Digital capitalism has not just advanced new forms of exploitation but also new potentials for the development of working-class potentia in the form of digital working-class struggles and digital commons projects that question, oppose, and transcend digital capital and digital capitalism. Digital working class potentia does not emerge automatically. It is a mere potential for resistance to digital capital that needs to be activated in and through class struggles and political organisation.

Not-for-profit digital projects that take on forms such as Creative Commons, platform co-operatives, public service Internet platforms, digital commons, etc. have the digital potentia to challenge digital capital’s Power. To do so, they need to be and become part of digital class struggles, new forms of (digital) strikes that blur the boundaries between labour protests/consumer protests, the labour movement/the consumer protection movement, socialist advocacy/privacy advocacy, etc. The digital means of production and digital labour have power potentials for resistance (digital potentia) that are only realised and activated through and in class struggles and social struggles.

Spinoza’s philosophy is a fruitful inspiration for the critical analysis of digital capitalism. The focus on his notion of power is just one of the promising lines of thinking. Other topics, such as, for example, Spinoza’s notion of ideology and the connections between the philosophies of Hegel and Spinoza are further topics that promise interesting and important foundations for future analyses of digital capitalism.