The Rethinking of Technology in Class Struggle: Communicative Affirmation and Foreclosure Politics

Abstract

With expansive digital networks supporting circuits of accumulation, facilitating both new forms of value capture and proletarian organization, Marxian scholars have shown renewed interest in questions of technology in class struggle. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's Empire, the most conspicuous autonomist Marxist theorizing on the subject, presents networked technology positively, as part of the revolutionary body, the multitude. Against the affirmative view, critiques of technology and technological rationality, drawn from a thread of Frankfurt School critical theory, have been posed as challenges to Hardt and Negri's conception of technology in class struggle. After identifying a genealogy of what this paper calls foreclosure politics running through the works of Herbert Marcuse, Jodi Dean, and Christian Fuchs, the paper closes by suggesting a conception of technology in class struggle triangulated by critical theory and affirmative conceptions of use.