Marx and Digital Machines

Marx and Digital Machines PDF Author: Mike Healy
Publisher: University of Westminster Press
ISBN: 1912656809
Category : Reference
Languages : en
Pages : 172

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Book Description
This book explores the fundamental contradiction at the heart of the digital environment: technology offers all manner of promises, yet habitually fails to deliver. This failure often arises from numerous problems: the proficiency of the technology or end-user, policy failure at various levels, or a combination of these. Solutions such as better technology and more effective end-user education are often put into place to solve these failures. Mike Healy argues that such approaches are inherently faulty drawing upon qualitative research informed by Marx’s theory of alienation. Using Marx’s theory, he considers participants in three distinct settings: the workplace of information and communications technology (ICT) professionals; university scholars researching the ethical and societal implications of our digital environment; and a group of pensioners living in South London, UK, undertaking ICT training. By delving beneath the surface of how digital technologies are created, researched and experienced, this study illustrates the contradictory nature of our digital lives, as they directly arise from the needs of capitalism. The book also places Marx’s theory in contrast to the mainstream approaches derived from Seaman and Blauner. In researching and comprehending ICT, this book reaffirms the superior explanatory power of Marx’s theory of alienation.

Marx and Digital Machines

Marx and Digital Machines PDF Author: Mike Healy
Publisher: University of Westminster Press
ISBN: 1912656809
Category : Reference
Languages : en
Pages : 172

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Book Description
This book explores the fundamental contradiction at the heart of the digital environment: technology offers all manner of promises, yet habitually fails to deliver. This failure often arises from numerous problems: the proficiency of the technology or end-user, policy failure at various levels, or a combination of these. Solutions such as better technology and more effective end-user education are often put into place to solve these failures. Mike Healy argues that such approaches are inherently faulty drawing upon qualitative research informed by Marx’s theory of alienation. Using Marx’s theory, he considers participants in three distinct settings: the workplace of information and communications technology (ICT) professionals; university scholars researching the ethical and societal implications of our digital environment; and a group of pensioners living in South London, UK, undertaking ICT training. By delving beneath the surface of how digital technologies are created, researched and experienced, this study illustrates the contradictory nature of our digital lives, as they directly arise from the needs of capitalism. The book also places Marx’s theory in contrast to the mainstream approaches derived from Seaman and Blauner. In researching and comprehending ICT, this book reaffirms the superior explanatory power of Marx’s theory of alienation.

Karl Marx on Technology and Alienation

Karl Marx on Technology and Alienation PDF Author: A. Wendling
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230233996
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 263

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Book Description
The author draws on lesser known archival materials, including Marx's notebooks on women and patriarchy and technology to offer a new interpretation of Marx's concept of alienation as this concept develops in his later works.

Marx, Alienation and Techno-Capitalism

Marx, Alienation and Techno-Capitalism PDF Author: Lelio Demichelis
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3031073851
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 313

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Book Description
In this book, translated into English for the first time, Lelio Demichelis takes on a modern perspective of the concept/process of alienation. This concept—much more profound and widespread today than first described and denounced by Marx—has largely been forgotten and erased. Using the characters of Narcissus, Pygmalion and Prometheus, the author reinterprets and updates Marx, Nietzsche, Anders, Foucault and, in particular, critical theory and the Frankfurt School views on an administered society (where everything is automated and engineered, manifest today in algorithms, AI, machine learning and social networking) showing that, in a world where old and new forms of alienation come together, man is increasingly led to delegate (i.e. alienate) sovereignty, freedom, responsibility and the awareness of being alive.

Seasonal Associate

Seasonal Associate PDF Author: Heike Geissler
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 1635900360
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
How the brutalities of working life are transformed into exhaustion, shame, and self-doubt: a writer's account of her experience working in an Amazon fulfillment center. No longer able to live on the proceeds of her freelance writing and translating income, German novelist Heike Geissler takes a seasonal job at Amazon Order Fulfillment in Leipzig. But the job, intended as a stopgap measure, quickly becomes a descent into humiliation, and Geissler soon begins to internalize the dynamics and nature of the post-capitalist labor market and precarious work. Driven to work at Amazon by financial necessity rather than journalistic ambition, Heike Geissler has nonetheless written the first and only literary account of corporate flex-time employment that offers “freedom” to workers who have become an expendable resource. Shifting between the first and the second person, Seasonal Associate is a nuanced expose of the psychic damage that is an essential working condition with mega-corporations. Geissler has written a twenty-first-century account of how the brutalities of working life are transformed into exhaustion, shame, and self-doubt.

Marx in the Age of Digital Capitalism

Marx in the Age of Digital Capitalism PDF Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004291393
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 561

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Book Description
More than 130 years after Karl Marx’s death and 150 years after the publication of his opus magnum Capital: Critique of Political Economy, capitalism keeps being haunted by period crises. The most recent capitalist crisis has brought back attention to Marx’s works. This volume presents 16 contributions that show how Marx’s analyses of capitalism, the commodity, class, labour, work, exploitation, surplus-value, dialectics, crises, ideology, class struggles, and communism, help us to understand the Internet and social media in 21st century digital capitalism. Marx is back! This book is a key resource on the foundations of Marxist Internet and Digital Media Studies.

Critical Theory: A Very Short Introduction

Critical Theory: A Very Short Introduction PDF Author: Stephen Eric Bronner
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190692693
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 161

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Book Description
Critical theory emerged in the 1920s from the work of the Frankfurt School, the circle of German-Jewish academics who sought to diagnose -- and, if at all possible, cure -- the ills of society, particularly fascism and capitalism. In this book, Stephen Eric Bronner provides sketches of leading representatives of the critical tradition (such as George Lukács and Ernst Bloch, Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin, Herbert Marcuse and Jurgen Habermas) as well as many of its seminal texts and empirical investigations. This Very Short Introduction sheds light on the cluster of concepts and themes that set critical theory apart from its more traditional philosophical competitors. Bronner explains and discusses concepts such as method and agency, alienation and reification, the culture industry and repressive tolerance, non-identity and utopia. He argues for the introduction of new categories and perspectives for illuminating the obstacles to progressive change and focusing upon hidden transformative possibilities. In this newly updated second edition, Bronner targets new academic interests, broadens his argument, and adapts it to a global society amid the resurgence of right-wing politics and neo-fascist movements.

Marx and Alienation

Marx and Alienation PDF Author: Sean Sayers
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230309143
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 210

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Book Description
The concepts of alienation and its overcoming are central to Marx's thought. They underpin his critique of capitalism and his vision of future society. Marx's ideas are explained in rigorous and clear terms. They are situated in the context of the Hegelian ideas that inspired them and put into dialogue with contemporary debates.

The Marx Revival

The Marx Revival PDF Author: Marcello Musto
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107117925
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 431

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Book Description
An international set of eminent scholars examine the contemporary relevance and continuing contribution of Marx's work. This indispensable volume presents Marx's theories in a new light, both for specialists who might think they already know everything about Marx and for a new generation of readers who are approaching his work for the first time.

The Oxford Handbook of Karl Marx

The Oxford Handbook of Karl Marx PDF Author: Matt Vidal
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190695560
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 865

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Book Description
Karl Marx is one of the most influential writers in history. Despite repeated obituaries proclaiming the death of Marxism, in the 21st century Marx's ideas and theories continue to guide vibrant research traditions in sociology, economics, political science, philosophy, history, anthropology, management, economic geography, ecology, literary criticism, and media studies. Due to the exceptionally wide influence and reach of Marxist theory, including over 150 years of historical debates and traditions within Marxism, finding a point of entry can be daunting. The Oxford Handbook of Karl Marx provides an entry point for those new to Marxism. At the same time, its chapters, written by leading Marxist scholars, advance Marxist theory and research. Its coverage is more comprehensive than previous volumes on Marx in terms of both foundational concepts and state-of-the-art empirical research on contemporary social problems. It is also provides equal space to sociologists, economists, and political scientists, with substantial contributions from philosophers, historians, and geographers. The Oxford Handbook of Karl Marx consists of six sections. The first section, Foundations, includes chapters that cover the foundational concepts and theories that constitute the core of Marx's theories of history, society, and political economy. This section demonstrates that the core elements of Marx's political economy of capitalism continue to be defended, elaborated, and applied to empirical social science and covers historical materialism, class, capital, labor, value, crisis, ideology, and alienation. Additional sections include Labor, Class, and Social Divisions; Capitalist States and Spaces; Accumulation, Crisis, and Class Struggle in the Core Countries; Accumulation, Crisis, and Class Struggle in the Peripheral and Semi-Peripheral Countries; and Alternatives to Capitalism.

The Moral Foundations of Politics

The Moral Foundations of Politics PDF Author: Ian Shapiro
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300189753
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 303

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Book Description
When do governments merit our allegiance, and when should they be denied it? Ian Shapiro explores this most enduring of political dilemmas in this innovative and engaging book. Building on his highly popular Yale courses, Professor Shapiro evaluates the main contending accounts of the sources of political legitimacy. Starting with theorists of the Enlightenment, he examines the arguments put forward by utilitarians, Marxists, and theorists of the social contract. Next he turns to the anti-Enlightenment tradition that stretches from Edmund Burke to contemporary post-modernists. In the last part of the book Shapiro examines partisans and critics of democracy from Plato’s time until our own. He concludes with an assessment of democracy’s strengths and limitations as the font of political legitimacy. The book offers a lucid and accessible introduction to urgent ongoing conversations about the sources of political allegiance.