马克思主义总体性视域中的日常生活数字化批判

Critiquing the Digitalization of Daily Life from the Perspective of Totality

数字技术在重塑社会生产方式的同时,也带来了包括基本需求满足、社会交往扩大、意识形态建构等在内的日常生活的数字化。为此,我们需要立足马克思主义辩证法的总体性视域,深入考察日常生活数字化的现状及趋势。作为维系资本积累和流通这一总体秩序的重要环节,日常生活的数字化既反映了数字化时代人类的生存境况,也成为透视当代资本积累内在矛盾和演变趋势的重要窗口。垄断资本的过剩积累难题和风险资本的金融运作,共同推动了数字平台的形成及日常生活的数字化。各类数字平台虽然一定程度上缓解了垄断资本的积累困境,但随之亦付出了沉重的代价,表现为平台经济领域更为深刻的垄断及更为庞大的资本过剩。究其实质,日常生活的数字化意味着人类主体性的丧失,意味着剥削的极端化以及全景式监控生存世界的到来。

The digital economy has reached a commanding height in international strategic competition. The development of the digital economy is not only of great significance for unclogging domestic and international economic cycles and constructing a new development pattern,but it also provides strong support for facilitating the transformation and upgrading of traditional industries and building a modern economic system. The development of the digital economy has profoundly changed modern daily life,bringing about its digitization in the realms of basic needs to be satisfied,social interaction,and ideological construction. To this end,we need to base our understanding of it on the overall vision of Marxist dialectics,thereby to deeply examine the current situation and its related trends,in the expectation of clarifying its generation mechanism as well as its essence.Elucidating the development and evolution of the digital economy from this perspective not only helps us to completely grasp the operating laws of digital capital,but also has important theoretical significance for the innovation and development of the Chinese Marxist political economy. The digitization of daily life refers to the accumulated logic of digital capital that penetrates it. It is the same force that drives the rise of digital capital that has created this new reality in today’s era. The emergence of digital capital is undoubtedly inseparable from the technical support centered on cloud computing,big data,as well as the Internet more generally,but the principal driving force behind its rise lies in the dilemma of excess accumulation of monopoly capital and the resulting need for “demand management”. In this process,financial capital represented by venture capital also plays a role in fueling the flames of digitization. Thus,the digitization of daily life complies with the needs of monopoly capital accumulation,and to a certain extent helps to overcome the difficulties encountered in social production and reproduction under the conditions of monopoly competition,but at the expense of deeper monopoly and excess capital in the platform economy. In essence,the digitization of daily life equates to the loss of human subjectivity,extreme exploitation,and the advent of a kind of panoramic monitoring of the living world. At present,academic research on topics such as the digital economy,digital capital,and digital labor is in its early stages but it has produced comparatively abundant research results. Nevertheless,most of the existing research has focused on the exploitative nature of digital capital,the reorganization of labor by digital platforms,the social consequences of data production,and digital fetishism from the macro level,while it focuses less on the changes in daily life of individuals under the conditions of digital technology. This paper attempts to strengthen the research in this area and regards the changes in individual living conditions in the digital age as an important perspective to recognize the inherent contradictions and evolutionary trends of contemporary capital accumulation. In general,the rise of digital capital and the digitization of daily life have not only failed to resolve the dilemma of contemporary capitalism once and for all,but they have instead made the contradictions of contemporary capitalism more intricate and sophisticated.