Machinery, computers and overcoming capital: a critical approach to cyber-communism

Abstract

This article provides a critical assessment of the cyber-communist proposal mainly defended today by authors such as Cockshott, Cottrell and Nieto. We will analyze whether computing offers the necessary elements to carry out a revolution in the conditions of production, that may leave behind the mercantile and fetishized forms we seem to require today to satisfy our needs. To that end, we examined it in the light of the developments that Marxist criticism of political economy offers about how the capitalist mode of production overcomes itself. The core of the argument will be limited to discerning to what extent and in what sense cyber-technology manages to deepen the changes that Marx identified with the introduction of machinery as a form of extraction of relative surplus value.