Capitalizing Contradiction, Capitalizing the Commons: Big Tech’s Neoliberal Commonsense and Marx’s “General Intellect”

Abstract

The fundamental premise of this article is that capital thrives on contradiction, that the contradictions of capital are social rather than logical, that they are constitutive of the capital form of value, and that Marx was the first to grasp capital itself as a “moving contradiction” (Grundrisse). The article then explores one of neoliberalism’s prime governance objectives: the further entrenchment of consensual ‘public–private partnerships’ and profit-driven techno-managerial ‘fixes’ to crises of (over-)accumulation. Using Microsoft’s “cybercrime” strategy and PR campaign as a case in point, it argues that the ongoing capitalization of the intellectual commons is best understood as a post-Fordist regime of “accumulation by dispossession” (Harvey 2005) which is itself premised on the global consolidation of capitalist class power in the wake of the “long downturn” (Brenner 2006; Mattick 2011; Chuang 2016). Critiquing the naturalization of capital in the field of information and communication, it explores value and class struggle under neoliberal capitalism in the ‘digital’ conjuncture through the Marxian concept of “general intellect.” Over and against a virulent cyber-optimism propagated by Big Tech and governments alike, it engages Jodi Dean’s concept of “communicative capitalism” (Dean 2010, 2014) in order to explicate the disavowed contradictions at the heart of this formation and the ideological ‘commonsense’ it engenders.