Marx and the Robots

Marxist discourse around automation has recently become waylaid with breathless techno-pessimist dystopias and fanciful imaginations of automated luxury communism. This collection of essays by both established veterans of the field and new voices is a refreshingly sober materialist reflection on recent technological developments within capitalist production. It covers a broad range of digital aspects now proliferating across our work and lives, including chapters on the digitalisation of agriculture, robotics in the factory and the labour process on crowdworking platforms. It looks to how 20th century Marxist predictions of the ‘workerless factory’ are, or are not, coming true, and how ‘Platform Capitalism’ should be understood and critiqued. Through rich empirical, theoretical and historical material, this book is necessary reading for those wanting a clear overview of our digital world.

Florian Butollo is a Research Fellow for Globalisation, Work, and Production at the Weizenbaum Institute for the Networked Society, Berlin.

Sabine Nuss is managing director of the Karl Dietz Verlag. As a political scientist, she has published books on Karl Marx's analysis of capitalism, economic crises in capitalism, digitalisation and automation.