Polanyi and the digital transformation of labour: on fictitious commodities and real conflicts

Hans-Jürgen Urban

Chapter 20 in Capitalism in Transformation, 2019, pp 289-306 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: Currently a disembedding of capitalist markets from state regulation is observed in the transition from welfare-state capitalism to global financial-market capitalism. The question asked in this chapter is what role the digitalization of work plays in this process. The thesis is formulated that digitalization is driving a new surge of marketization and rationalization which promotes a double transformation: the transformation of labour in the sense of a restructuring of work processes and organization; and concurrently, the transformation of the institutional setting of social protection rights, on which the previously attained degree of decommodification of labour power in the welfare state depended. The digitalization of industrial added value (“Industrie 4.0†) is used as an example to illustrate that transformation conflicts in the sphere of interest politics are the locus of decision-making about the developmental path of digitalization, and that special significance attaches to the democratization of economic decisions as a prerequisite for labour and social policy successes.

Keywords: Economics and Finance; Politics and Public Policy Social Policy and Sociology (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
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