Örsan Şenalp on Sun, 2 Jun 2019 16:44:52 +0200 (CEST)


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<nettime> digital socialism by Evgeny Morozov


This is a relatively long but very intriguing text, 39 pages with footnotes.   

https://newleftreview.org/issues/II116/articles/evgeny-morozov-digital-socialism.pdf?token=9MDVQBbB2wgi

Somehow reminds me Julian Assange calling for system admins of the world to unite.

ps. Maybe from the beginning, it had to be so. and it was a mistake of Marx and Engels that we have to confront today. I mean, they thought of and appointed another -the working- class as the protagonist of the revolution they wanted to see. So why not the collective subject that should have led the radical change and build a classless society was your own: the (leftist) intellectuals? Instead, they were to help the main guy, by bringing him his self-consciousness from outside by 'organizing' him, his mind and soul in collective.

Kautsky and Lenin after him, later on, promoted the intellectuals to the managerial post -sort of system administrators- to run things on behalf of the proletariat. Maybe if Marx and Engels took the responsibility on themselves, on their own class, and called the intellectuals to gain their self-consciousness first (as the organizers of the society who organizes its experience, emotions, ideologies, institutions, and increasingly economies who are becoming rival to the capitalist classes) and pick a side; Kautsky and Lenin could not dare to do what they did. And they had to formulate a program, in which politically alliances with the impoverished and oppressed classes, especially workers. Or they were to join in Bogdanov's project: It was clear that the only way to dismantle all the class privileges, in the economy, politics, and culture, was through opening up and bridging the knowledge, the intellectual capacity, directly to all the oppressed classes.

The theory and practice would have been united then and the intelligentsia could have been accountable on its own right for the side it would choose in class-struggle. Or in case it would take power for its own, as in Leninist-Stalínist USSR, Fascist Italy, and Nazi Germany.    

Morozov's vision sounds like it is an argument for data 'socialism' in the former sense. But can it also be interpreted as an argument for 'managerial' alternative to capitalism?           




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