Technocapitalism: Primitive Accumulation in the 21st Century?

• In Event: Capitalism and Self-Determination: Past, Present and Future

Abstract

Technological companies like to claim that they are forging the economy of the future through accelerating individual productivity, making global trade possible for more entrepreneurs than ever before, and by developing algorithmic intelligence that can calculate markets, prices, supplies and behaviors as previously unimaginable speeds. This paper examines whether tehcnocapitalism is something that accelerates the well-known dynamics of capitalism or fundamentally alters them. My contention is that understanding these technological developments and their implications for political economy requires a historical perspective. Technology clearly makes state regulation of the market more challenging. Despite the liberal claim that state and market are separate entities, economic historians from Polanyi to Picketty have pointed out how capitalism relies upon state regulation and taxation to provide a stable foundation for the competitive market. The intricate balance between society, state and market is coming undone.

An orthodox Marxist could point out that this balance is coming undone through the overaccumulation of capital in the technology industry. There is a lot of evidence to support this claim, including the estimation that half of the cash stored in offshore accounts today belong to one technology firm or another. Thinking about it this way, technocapitalism is just the most recent phase of capitalism that follows essentially the same dynamics. However, thinking about primitive accumulation provides a different perspective on contemporary phenomena. “Primitive accumulation” is a term for shifts outside of the market that enable the growth of the market. There is some disagreement about primitive accumulation; was it the concentration of wealth that made the birth of capitalist production possible, or was it the rearrangement of social relations that forced labor into the means of economic production and competition? If technology is fundamentally shifting the social relations that undergird capitalism, then technocapitalism could have a different character.

Author

• Keally DeAnne McBride, University of San Francisco