Sociologist Weekly Open Chat 2023-W33
Sociologist Weekly Open Chat 2023-W33
Welcome to our second weekly open chat!
Feel free to ask questions, share your thoughts and ideas, or just chat. If you have recommendations on books, papers, blog posts, videos on sociological phenomena, please share them. What interests You definitely interests others :)
Since Marx we have made tremendous strides in technology and have wealth gaps reminiscent of the industrial revolution. It is now easier than ever to imagine a world of corporate states (think Cyberpunk) with totalitarian control over their indentured workforce. With a large indentured workforce at hand, I find it unreasonable to dismiss the idea, that such corporations would not create a command based internal economy, because starving and de-stratifying their own workforce would play into the Marxian prophecy of capitalism's downfall (a workforce too poor to consume their employers products, thus rendering capital worthless).
Do you think, that the Marxian dialectic of class struggle would still hold up in such a scenario, meaning that the upper class controlling these corporations/corporate states would still be overthrown by the lower class due to an inherent trait of their power base?
Or do you think this is more akin to a return to a pre-capitalist mode of production in form of a slave-owning system?
I become increasingly less hopeful that it's the former and it painfully it may really in fact be the latter. The working class being so fully locked out is starting to feel like inevitable feudalism. And I do think that the technological factors have only exacerbated this. How was Marx to account for the massive ownership of say, data, as a controlling resource? I'm less hopeful than I used to be, I'll leave it at that. There's still a chance it could come around and be okay, or more okay, in whatever form.
I'm not sure if I believe in a communist or socialist utopia, just considering the nature of humanity. But I believe that there's some better way to strive for. Seems like we've veered off course.