Work in and beyond the Second Machine Age: the politics of production and digital technologies

Abstract

Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, in their widely read and politically impactful book The Second Machine Age, highlight the costs and benefits of digital technologies for the volume and quality of work and identify reforms designed to ensure that digital technologies deliver net advantages to workers and society more generally. This article offers a critique of their thesis. Specifically, it criticizes the authors for their neglect of the nexus between the politics of production and digital technologies. They fail, in short, to grasp the importance of power relations for the form, direction and outcomes of digital technologies. The article argues for an alternative view of the progress of digital technologies that is rooted in an understanding of the political economy of capitalism. In this respect, it draws on and applies ideas and concepts from Marxian political economy.

Keywords

capitalism digital technologies future of work politics of production Second Machine Age

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

Bell

(1973) The Coming of Post-Industrial Society: A Venture in Social Forecasting. New York: Basic Books.

Bergvall-Kåreborn

Howcroft

(2014) Amazon Mechanical Turk and the commodification of labour. New Technology, Work and Employment 29(3): 213–23.

Brynjolfsson

McAfee

(2014) The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.

Brynjolfsson

McAfee

(2015) The jobs that AI can’t replace. BBC, 13 September. Available (consulted 9 February 2016) at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-34175290

Cederström

Spicer

(2015) The Wellness Syndrome. London: Polity Press.

Davies

(2015) The Happiness Industry: How the Government and Big Business Sold Us Well-Being. London: Verso.

Dyer-Witheford

(2015) Cyber-Proletariat: Global Labour in the Digital Vortex. London: Pluto Press.

Elson

(1979) Value: The Representation of Labour in Capitalism. London: CSE Books.

Fine

(2001) The continuing imperative of value theory. Capital and Class 25(3): 41–52.

10.

Foley

(2000) Recent developments in the labor theory of value. Review of Radical Political Economics 32(1): 1–39.

11.

Friedman

(2014) Workers without employers: shadow corporations and the rise of the gig economy. Review of Keynesian Economics 2(2): 171–88.

12.

Fuchs

(2014) Digital Labour and Karl Marx. London: Routledge.

13.

Haldane

(2015) Labour’s share. Speech at the Trades Union Congress, London, 12 November. Available (consulted 9 February 2016) at: http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/publications/Documents/speeches/2015/speech864.pdf

14.

Huws

(2014) Labor in the Global Digital Economy. New York: Monthly Review Press.

15.

Huxley

(1970[1931]) Brave New World. London: Chatto & Windus.

16.

Keynes

(1963[1930]) Economic possibilities for our grandchildren. In: Essays in Persuasion. New York; London: W. W. Norton & Company, 358–73.

17.

Klein

(2016) Humans, Machines and the Digital Economy Spark Davos Debates. MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy. Available (consulted 9 February 2016) at: http://digitalcommunity.mit.edu/community/sec/blog/2016/01/25/mcafee-brynjolfsson-discuss-humans-machines-and-the-digital-economy-at-world-economic-forum

18.

Lapavitsas

(2011) Theorizing financialization. Work, Employment and Society 25(4): 611–26.

19.

Luce

(2015) Time is political. Jacobin Magazine. Available (consulted 1 August 2015) at: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/07/luce-eight-hour-day-obama-overtime/

20.

McAfee

(2015) Defending the free market in Davos. Financial Times, 29 January. Available (consulted 9 February 2016) at: http://blogs.ft.com/andrew-mcafee/2015/01/29/defending-the-free-market-in-davos/

21.

Marx

(1976) Capital, Volume 1. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

22.

Mason

(2015) Postcapitalism: A Guide to Our Future. London: Allen Lane.

23.

Schumpeter (2015) Digital Taylorism. The Economist, 12 September. Available (consulted 18 March 2016) at: http://www.economist.com/news/business/21664190-modern-version-scientific-management-threatens-dehumanise-workplace-digital

24.

Thompson

(2013) Financialization and the workplace: extending and applying the disconnected capitalism thesis. Work, Employment and Society 27(3): 472–88.

25.

Toffler

(1970) Future Shock. London: Bodley Head.

26.

Vonnegut

(1980[1952]) Player Piano. New York: Laurel.

27.

Wacjman

(2006) New connections: social studies of science and technology and studies of work. Work, Employment and Society 20(4): 773–86.

28.

Wacjman

(2010) Feminist theories of technology. Cambridge Journal of Economics 34(1): 143–52.