Automated Capitalism: Networks, Machines, Materialism

Alan Turing’s fear in 1951 that “once the machine thinking method has started at some stage we will have to expect the machine will take control”, seems like wishful thinking today. Instead of robot rulers we are still stuck with the capitalist class, an ever more exploitive and oligarchical capitalist class that has managed to monopolize and commodify our attention and turn us into serialized producers and consumers of data. In particular, the algorithmic dance on oligopolistic social media and ecommerce platforms has been at the forefront of “hacking democracy” assertions: responsible for fake news and disinformation architectures, symptomatic populism-radicalism-violent extremism, reproducing gender, race, class and other discriminatory bias in employment, health, education; as well as digital labor and gig economy problematics on the future of work and intensification, hence giving birth to new concerns of data justice, tech giant whistle-blowing, digital rights, data inequality and environmental impact of computation, even resistance movements to any Intelligent Machines whatsoever.

In this seminar we will examine the broader sociopolitical and economic impact of AI and how it continues and intensifies the deeper tendency within capitalism for automation and the deskilling of labor. Departing from Marx's seminal insights on automation in the famous 'Fragment on Machines' in The Grundrisse, we will examine how this most recent moment in capitalist automation has impacted the temporal character of bourgeois societies, the emergence of platform capitalism, the attempt to further capital's autonomy from living labor and social constraints, the intensification of alienation, and the decline of social democracy and the rise of the societies of control. Reading will include works by George Caffentzis, James Steinhoff, Bernard Stiegler, and Matteo Pasquinelli.

Core Readings:

Karl Marx:
The Grundrisse

Matteo Pasquinelli: The Eye of the Master

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READING MARX: THE 18TH BRUMAIRE; THE CIVIL WAR IN FRANCE; CRITIQUE OF THE GOTHA PROGRAM◇

THE RIDDLE OF ORGANIZATION: POWER AND INSURGENCY IN TIMES OF WAR

AUTOMATED CAPITALISM: NETWORKS, MACHINES, MATERIALISM←

MARXIST FILM PROGRAM

FACULTY FOR 2025:

Peter Bratsis, City University of New York
Isabelle Darmon, University of Edinburgh
Carlos Frade, University of Salford
Jackqueline Frost, University of London Institute in Paris
Bruno Gulli, City University of New York
Athina Karatzogianni, University of Leicester
Josh Kolbo, Pratt Institute
Kiarina Kordela, Macalester College
Kristin Lawler, University of Mount Saint Vincent
Sandro Mezzadra, University of Bologna
Rodrigo Nunes, University of Essex
Michael Pelias, Long Island University, Brooklyn
Matteo Polleri, University of Paris, Nanterre
Panayotis Sotiris, Hellenic Open University