Forces and Relations of Control

Jochum, Georg; Schaupp, Simon

doi:10.2307/j.ctv28vb1tp.20

Cited by 5 publications

(6 citation statements)

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“…The recent pandemic has even further increased the role of communication and collaboration technologies such as Zoom and Slack, but also of delivery platforms such as Amazon or Deliveroo (Schaupp, 2021). The current technological trend for critics of capitalism to focus on might thus not be robots replacing human labor, but the emergence of cybernetic technologies of coordination (Jochum and Schaupp, 2019).…”

Section: Part I: the Case For Fully Automated Luxury Space Planningmentioning

confidence: 99%

Failing to Plan Is Planning to Fail: Toward an Expanded Notion of Democratically Planned Postcapitalism

Sorg

2022

Critical Sociology

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With the advent of digitalization, the more techno-optimist among critics of capitalism have articulated new calls for post-work and post-scarcity economics made possible by new advances in information and communication technology. Quite recently, some of this debate shifted for calls for digital-democratic planning to replace market-based allocation. This article will trace the lineages of this shift and present these new calls for digitally enabled and democratic planning. I will then argue that much of the discussion focuses on capitalism’s laws of economic motion, while rendering less visible capitalism’s social, political, and ecological ‘conditions of possibility’. To remedy this shortcoming I will ask how these fit into the recent debate and suggest avenues to extend the discussion of democratic planning in that way. Concretely, I will discuss features of a postcapitalist mode of reproduction that abolishes capital’s subordination of non-waged and waged care work. The following part will focus on both planning’s need to calculate ecological externalities and consequently determine sustainable and egalitarian paths for social and technological development on a world scale. The last section will elaborate on the ‘democratic’ in ‘democratic planning’ in terms of planning’s decision-making, multi-scalar politics, and politics of cultural recognition.

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Section: Part I: the Case For Fully Automated Luxury Space Planningmentioning

confidence: 99%

Failing to Plan Is Planning to Fail: Toward an Expanded Notion of Democratically Planned Postcapitalism

Sorg

2022

Critical Sociology

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“…in the form of remediation). Our paper therewith contributes to recent debates on social standards in GVCs (LeBaron 2020; Lund-Thomsen 2019; Raj-Reichert 2020), on the relevance of digital tools for the governance of GVCs Foster and Graham 2017), and on the contested role of control over feedback infrastructures in the age of big data (Jochum and Schaupp 2022;Morozov 2019;Zuboff 2019).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 84%

“…For instance, flight platform algorithms not only operate based on prices but also through a wide range of consumer preferences such as departure times, number of stopovers, or type of aeroplane. But although feedback infrastructures have become increasingly pivotal for economic action, they remain in private (monopolistic) hands and thus contribute to a centralisation of private power (Jochum and Schaupp 2022;Morozov 2019;Srnicek 2016). However, they are also important in political terms, as data collection is only the first step followed by various process of decision making for interpreting, presenting and sharing that data with ultimate consequences for the translation into practices (Scheper and Zajak 2019).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Digital worker feedback infrastructures: The digitalisation of worker rights monitoring in global value chains

Sorg,

Vestena,

Scheper

et al. 2023

Econ. labour relat. rev.

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In this paper, we present empirical research on what we call ‘digital worker feedback infrastructures’ (DWFI); these are communication systems based on digital technologies that allow for creating so-called ‘feedback data’ via different forms of information input of workers in global value chains (GVC). The paper provides an overview of over 50 current DWFIs in GVCs and asks about the main differences between management-oriented and worker-centred digital feedback infrastructures in their usage of worker data. In the first part, we trace the emergence of DWFIs at the intersection of different trends: the continuous non-improvement of working conditions through auditing, the permanent politicisation, and contestation of this fact through labour and activist networks as well as the development of new digital technologies. In the second section, we elaborate the main features of DWFIs and analyse potential shortcomings in the context of the ‘ethical’ audit and monitoring regime for GVCs. Third, we use our dataset to present an overview of the heterogeneity of DWFIs. We pay particular attention to examples of civil society developed tools as we suggest that they provide a glimpse of the potential of worker feedback technologies from below, which could contribute to better monitoring of worker rights and facilitate a more democratic coordination of workplaces and GVCs.

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“…Most proposals make heavy reference to current logistical systems like those at Walmart (Phillips and Rozworski, 2019), Amazon (Saros, 2014) or service platforms (Muldoon, 2022). These approaches emphasise that algorithmic management would not be used as a system of surveillance but rather as a "feedback infrastructure" (Jochum and Schaupp, 2022;Morozov, 2019;Saros, 2014). Drawing on ideas of cybernetic management, digital feedbacks are supposed to enable decentralized, self-organized planning both on the level of the labour process and on the level of economic coordination.…”

Section: Digital Democratic Planningmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Thus, the democratic deliberation of various economic options would always entail projections of the ecological effects that would go along with any of these options (cf. Jochum and Schaupp, 2022). This also means that the ecological dimension does not appear as scientifically declared "limits" but rather as socially deliberated boundaries (cf.…”

Section: Forces Of Re/productionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Democratising the forces of re/production. AI planning as sensing apparatus for a degrowth economy

Schaupp¹

2023

Preprint

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This article contributes to the discussion on the role of technology for degrowth by exploring the Marxian concept of productive forces. It argues against a techno-deterministic understanding of the concept present in both the opposing camps of eco-modernism and degrowth. Instead, it suggests an interpretation of productive forces as the totality of what human beings are able to do. This definition focusses on positive and negative potentials instead of the current technological state of the art. This emphasis of potentials makes the concept of productive forces more suitable for an ecological politics than the term technology, which is rooted in what currently is. Furthermore, the emphasis on potentials makes it possible to systematically identify the political and not merely technical nature of the productive forces. Such a perspective allows for a more precise critique of environmentally destructive technologies that does not fall into the trap of technological fetishism, i.e. turning technology itself into the subject behind the catastrophe. Building on ecological and feminist Marxism, environmental destruction can instead be attributed to the separation between the spheres of production and reproduction. Technological tools suitable for a socio-ecological transition must therefore be able to transcend this separation, becoming forces of re/production. Such a possibility will be evaluated here with regard to technologies of digital planning. These can, the article argues, become a sensing-apparatus and thereby reconnect production to its social and ecological basis. This addresses an important gap in the degrowth literature. Thus, Durand et al. (2023) note that almost all concepts of degrowth imply some kind of economic planning but do not spell out the concrete ways in which this would be realised. This gap is so important because it is the very notion of a planned transition that distinguishes degrowth from recession (degrowth by design instead of degrowth by disaster). Therefore, the question of feasibility of degrowth is also and maybe even primarily a question of the feasibility of democratic economic planning. This article aims to provide some basic consideration of this feasibility by reviewing approaches of digital democratic planning and participatory integrative planning. Thereby, it also hopes to contribute to easing the tensions between techno-optimistic and techno-pessimistic camps in the debate on the ecological crisis.

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Forces and Relations of Control

Cited by 5 publications

References 0 publications

Failing to Plan Is Planning to Fail: Toward an Expanded Notion of Democratically Planned Postcapitalism

Failing to Plan Is Planning to Fail: Toward an Expanded Notion of Democratically Planned Postcapitalism

Digital worker feedback infrastructures: The digitalisation of worker rights monitoring in global value chains

Democratising the forces of re/production. AI planning as sensing apparatus for a degrowth economy

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