Meaning of algorithmic governance: On Algorithmic Governance and Governance of Algorithms

In recent decades, a new form of governance has emerged—one that operates not only through political institutions but through algorithms. Intelligent systems now analyze, evaluate, classify, and decide—sometimes replacing human judgment. The book Algorithmic Governance and Governance of Algorithms, edited by Martin Ebers and Marta Cantero Gamito, offers a comprehensive exploration of this phenomenon, distinguishing between two intertwined dimensions:

The first is governance by algorithms—the use of algorithms to manage areas such as healthcare, education, security, and welfare; the second is governance of algorithms—the effort to impose regulation, ethics, and legal oversight on these algorithmic systems.

Algorithms as Social Power

Ebers and Cantero Gamito argue that algorithms are not merely technical tools but new social forces. They determine who gets a loan, who is hired, and who is flagged as “high risk” by financial or security systems. Beneath their cold, seemingly objective logic lie values, assumptions, and human biases. For example, an algorithm trained on historical data can easily replicate existing patterns of discrimination against minorities or women—not because it is “evil,” but because it learns from an already biased social reality.

The Democratic Challenge

This raises a fundamental question of legitimacy: how can we preserve accountability, transparency, and fairness in a world where decisions are made by computational “black boxes”? The book argues that democracy rests on the principle of public justification—the idea that every decision can be explained and contested. Yet when algorithms decide, the reasoning behind those decisions often becomes opaque. Hence, governance by algorithms demands governance of algorithms: a framework of oversight, regulation, and the development of principles such as algorithmic transparency, the right to explanation, and social sensitivity.

Between Efficiency and Justice

One of the book’s central tensions lies between technological efficiency and social justice. Algorithms promise speed and cost-effectiveness, but the price is often the loss of human discretion and empathy. The authors cite cases where algorithmic management improved efficiency in welfare or healthcare systems but undermined fairness or accuracy. The question, then, is not whether to use algorithms, but how—to what extent, under what boundaries, and with what ethical and legal safeguards.

Beyond the legal discussion, the book touches on deeper philosophical questions: what does governance mean in an era where decision-making power is increasingly automated? Can moral responsibility be assigned to algorithms? And are we still sovereign subjects when our public and private lives are governed by continuous computation of risk and optimization?

Algorithmic Governance and Governance of Algorithms is a key text for understanding an era in which the algorithm has become the silent legislator of our lives. The book is not anti-technology; rather, it calls for boundaries grounded in responsibility and humanity. It invites us to rethink the meaning of democracy in a world where power is measured not only by who makes the decisions—but by who programs them.

Know more:

Power/Knowledge in the Age of AI: The Algorithmic Structuring of Discourse

Algorithmic Culture and Surveillance Capitalism: what we’re really selling when we scroll

Dead Labor, Dead Bodies, Dead Earth: The Triple Crisis of the Capitalocene

This is not just about carbon. Not just about the polar bears or the ice shelf cracking like a knuckle. Not even about “the planet,” as if it were a single, coherent thing in peril. What we’re living through isn’t a “climate crisis”—it’s a death system. An industrialized, monetized, and increasingly automated arrangement of extinction.

Call it the Capitalocene—not the Anthropocene, which too generously blames “humanity” in the abstract. The Capitalocene, a term sharpened by environmental historian Jason W. Moore, insists on naming the real culprit: a world system organized by capital accumulation, racialized disposability, and fossil-fueled extraction. It’s not a glitch. It’s the logic.

But to understand the full scope of this logic, we need to expand our lexicon. Climate change, yes—but also necropolitics, the management of who gets to live and who is allowed (or forced) to die. Necroeconomy, too: the market logic that turns death itself into a resource. These aren’t metaphors. They are blueprints.

Let’s follow the bodies.

Dead Labor: The Ghost in the Supply Chain

Marx wrote of “dead labor”—the sedimented time of workers embedded in every commodity. The shirt you’re wearing? Ghosted with Bangladeshi sweat. Your phone? A haunted object, blinking with the exhaustion of Congolese child miners and Chinese factory suicides.

Under the Capitalocene, the conversion of living labor into dead value intensifies. Work doesn’t just exploit life—it metabolizes it. Think of Amazon warehouses designed with gamified tracking and “time off task” metrics. Algorithms don’t crack whips, but they do issue kill commands: slower workers fall behind, gig workers burn out, truckers die at the wheel.

Silvia Federici’s work on reproductive labor reminds us that even care work—mothering, cooking, cleaning—gets extracted for profit. But in the Capitalocene, even care is lethal. Nurses collapsed during COVID while hospital CEOs got bonuses. Fast fashion seamstresses passed out at sewing machines while brands flaunted “sustainable” lines. Behind every “cheap” good is a ledger of vanishing life.

Dead Bodies: Necropolitics as Governance

Achille Mbembe coined the term necropolitics to describe how modern power operates not by fostering life (as Foucault’s “biopolitics” suggested), but by curating death. Nation-states, corporations, and infrastructures now determine which populations are exposed to slow or sudden extinction. The “essential worker” was never meant to be eternal.

Necropolitics doesn’t always look like overt killing. Sometimes it’s passive, bureaucratic, even polite. Border policies that let migrants drown. Urban “redevelopment” that poisons water. Medical systems that ration insulin by income. In the Capitalocene, death isn’t just permitted—it’s optimized.

The pandemic crystallized this. “Reopen the economy” meant: let the elderly, the poor, the immunocompromised die. It was a collective shrug in the face of mortality. Not everyone’s mortality, of course—just those deemed inefficient. Disposable. Already priced out of the future.

Dead Earth: Extraction as Extinction

Environmentalism often talks about “saving the planet,” but the Capitalocene frames nature as a mine, a dump, a dead zone waiting to be monetized. Trees become timber. Rivers become hydroelectric data points. Mountains become lithium. The Earth is not dying—it’s being murdered for parts.

And not equally. Capitalism doesn’t extract evenly. It racializes extraction. The Global South is sacrifice-zoned: flooded, fracked, strip-mined. Indigenous land is “developed.” Island nations drown. Disaster capitalism kicks in to rebuild—on investor terms. Naomi Klein had it right: first comes the disaster, then comes the profit model.

Jason Moore reminds us that capitalism doesn’t just depend on nature—it produces it. It invents what counts as “natural” in the first place: cheap labor, cheap food, cheap energy. But that cheapness is subsidized by death. Ecological death. Species death. Cultural death. To keep going, capital must keep killing.

Living in the Necroeconomy

What we’re describing here isn’t just a political order—it’s an economic one. A necroeconomy: a system where value is extracted from death itself. Insurance companies profit when people die earlier than expected. Pharmaceutical firms depend on chronic illness. Private prisons make money off caged time. Carbon offsets let corporations kill a forest here as long as they promise to plant a sapling there.

Even grief is monetized. Funerals, memorial NFTs, AI bots that mimic the dead—mourning is a market. The line between death and data thins. Capital wants everything, even your afterlife.

And Yet—What Now?

It’s easy to feel paralyzed. To scroll past another fire, another war, another species gone and think: nothing can be done. That’s part of the necrospell—convincing us that life has no alternative. That survival is just another form of consumption.

But there are cracks. Mutual aid networks. Indigenous land defense. Strikes, occupations, refusals. Not just resistance—but reclamation. Of life, of land, of labor that isn’t undead.

If the Capitalocene is a death cult, maybe it’s time for a counter-ritual. Not to mourn endlessly—but to live otherwise.

See also: The meaning of Capitalocene / necropolitics / necroeconomy — explained

The meaning of Capitalocene / necropolitics / necroeconomy — explained

Capitalocene: naming the crisis by its engine

The term Anthropocene suggests that “humanity” as a whole is responsible for planetary destruction. Capitalocene, however, shifts the blame from humanity in general to the specific system of capitalism — the global organization of production, consumption, and exploitation that has driven ecological collapse. The political ecologist Jason W. Moore and theorist Donna Haraway use the term to describe how capitalism operates as a “world-ecology”: a system that thrives on extracting “cheap nature” — cheap labor, cheap energy, cheap raw materials — while externalizing the social and environmental costs.

In this view, the crisis is not geological but systemic. Capitalism doesn’t just use nature; it organizes the entire relationship between human and nonhuman life through profit, competition, and endless growth. Some thinkers even date the Capitalocene back to the early modern period — to colonization, plantation agriculture, and the slave trade — where the global metabolism of capital first took shape.

Necropolitics: the power to decide who must die

The Cameroonian philosopher Achille Mbembe coined necropolitics to describe a darker extension of Michel Foucault’s concept of biopower. While biopower governs life — promoting health, reproduction, and productivity — necropolitics governs death. It’s the political capacity to decide who may live and who must die.

Necropolitics highlights how modern power often manifests not through explicit killing but through exposure — leaving certain populations to die slowly, by poverty, environmental destruction, or neglect. These “death-worlds” are spaces where life is reduced to bare survival: refugee camps, occupied territories, prisons, or toxic neighborhoods. In modern democracies, too, Mbembe argues that racial capitalism and militarized borders continue to determine which lives are protected and which are disposable.

Necroeconomy / Necroeconomics: when death becomes profitable

The term necroeconomy has two distinct uses.

1. In economics, Levan Papava used necroeconomics to describe “dead sectors” — unproductive industries sustained by subsidies and inertia in post-Soviet economies. These are parts of the economy that should have died but continue to exist artificially.

2. In critical theory, however, the term takes on a much grimmer meaning. Drawing on Mbembe’s necropolitics, scholars use necroeconomy or necrocapitalism to describe profit systems built upon disposability — industries that depend on suffering, precarity, or slow death. Examples include extractive mining zones that poison local communities, privatized detention centers, or economies of war and surveillance.

The Mexican theorist Sayak Valencia calls this “gore capitalism” — an economy in which extreme violence itself becomes a market logic. In such contexts, death is not an accident of capitalism but one of its operating costs, even a source of value.

How the three ideas connect

• Scale: Capitalocene diagnoses the macro-system — capitalism as the planetary driver of ecological and social breakdown. Necropolitics describes how that system distributes death and vulnerability. Necroeconomy analyzes how these logics become profitable and institutionalized.

• Agency: Together they reveal how power and profit operate not simply through production, but through abandonment — through deciding which lives can be wasted for the system’s continuation.

• Ethics: The trio of ideas forces us to ask moral and political questions beyond individual responsibility: how do we design economies that refuse to treat death as collateral, and how do we create governance structures that make life, not profit, the central measure of value?

See also:

Dead Labor, Dead Bodies, Dead Earth: The Triple Crisis of the Capitalocene

The meaning of Technosphere, Technogenesis and Technicity - explained

Algorithmic Culture and Surveillance Capitalism: what we’re really selling when we scroll

Data‑driven advertising isn’t just a new business model; it’s a cultural and political revolution. In her book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (2019), Shoshana Zuboff argues that tech giants have created a new economic logic built on the extraction and monetisation of human experience. Far from simply providing search engines, social networks or video platforms, these companies systematically gather behavioural data, predict our actions and sell those predictions to the highest bidder. The result is a transformation not only of the market but of subjectivity itself – an evolution of what Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer once criticised as the culture industry: a system that turns art and thought into commodities, shaping consciousness for profit.

What is surveillance capitalism?

Unlike industrial capitalism, which commodified labour, surveillance capitalism commodifies behaviour. Zuboff traces how Google discovered that the “data exhaust” users leave behind when they type queries or navigate maps could be analysed to predict future behaviour. Over time, the company moved from simply improving services to predicting and influencing users, selling targeted advertising based on what it knows we will do next. Facebook, Amazon and hundreds of data brokers followed suit. This process, she argues, is not consensual; users’ data are taken without meaningful permission and used to train algorithms that shape what news we see, who we date and what we buy. The system thus operates through asymmetrical power: companies know everything about us, while we know little about how their predictions are made.

Algorithmic culture and the data economy

Scholar Ted Striphas coined the term algorithmic culture to describe how cultural forms are now curated by code. Streaming platforms decide which songs we hear and which films are recommended; social media feeds rank and filter posts. These processes are not neutral. They are designed to maximise engagement and, consequently, advertising revenue. The algorithms learn our preferences, not just to satisfy them, but to nudge them in profitable directions.

This dynamic mirrors Foucault’s idea of power/knowledge: power is productive, creating new desires and identities rather than simply repressing them. By analysing and organising our activities, algorithms generate knowledge about us that can then be used to influence us. In this sense, we participate in our own governance; we train the systems that will shape our future choices. Zuboff calls the resulting behavioural predictions surveillance assets – raw materials that can be packaged and sold in markets we rarely see.

From the culture industry to digital panopticon

Adorno and Horkheimer warned that mass‑produced culture turns individuals into passive consumers. Zuboff extends this critique: we are not just consuming standardised products; we are producing data that enable corporations to anticipate and mould our behaviour. Michel Foucault’s image of the panopticon – a prison design in which inmates never know when they are watched – is a useful metaphor here. In the digital realm, surveillance is continuous and often invisible. As Foucault observed, power produces subjects who police themselves. Today’s apps encourage us to share our locations, monitor our workouts or track our sleep, embedding surveillance into everyday life.

Why it matters

Surveillance capitalism raises urgent questions about democracy, autonomy and resistance. When a handful of companies control the infrastructure through which we communicate, shop and learn, they exercise unprecedented influence over public discourse. The data economy can exacerbate social inequalities, as predictive policing algorithms target marginalised communities or loan algorithms deny credit based on opaque criteria. As Zuboff notes, the danger is not just privacy loss but a future in which our behaviour is subtly engineered by entities we cannot hold accountable.

Understanding these dynamics is crucial for cultural studies. Theories of power, ideology and subject formation provide tools to analyse how algorithms are reshaping society. By recognising the continuities between the culture industry of the mid‑20th century and today’s digital economy, we can better grasp the stakes of our seemingly trivial acts of liking, scrolling and sharing. Informed critique is the first step toward developing forms of collective resistance and alternative infrastructures that prioritise human autonomy over profit.

See also: 

The Invisible Workforce: Tiziana Terranova and the Politics of Digital Labour

The New Jim Code: Ruha Benjamin on How Technology Reimagines Race and Justice

Managing the Commons: Elinor Ostrom and Collective Responsibility

In a world faced with environmental degradation, climate change and resource depletion, the work of Nobel Prize winning economist Eleanor Ostrom offers a way to deal with problems through collective action. Ostrom explained how communities around the world can manage shared resources sustainably and equitably, challenging the common perception of the inevitable "tragedy of the commons."

The tragedy of the commons, a concept popularized by the work of Garrett Hardin in 1968, states that people who share a common resource but act out of self-interest will inevitably overuse and deplete common resources, such as pastures, forests, and fisheries. The conventional solution proposed to avoid this tragedy was state regulation or privatization. However, Eleanor Ostrom, through her careful empirical research, has demonstrated that there is a third way: the commons can be effectively managed by the people who use them, through collective action and self-governance.

Ostrom's journey into the world of the commons began with her groundbreaking research on irrigation systems in Los Angeles, where she observed that farmers successfully managed water resources through self-organized systems, without the need for outside authorities. This observation led her to research similar community-managed systems around the world, from the highlands of Nepal to the lobster fisheries of Maine.

Through her research, Ostrom has identified several key factors that contribute to the successful management of shared resources. These include clearly defined boundaries, rules adapted to local needs and conditions, collective decision-making processes, effective monitoring and sanctions of rule-breakers, conflict resolution mechanisms, minimal recognition of rights to organize by external authorities, and ventures nested into a larger common pool.

Ostrom's work challenges us to rethink our ways of governing and the potential for communities to sustainably manage shared resources without relying solely on top-down approaches or market mechanisms. She showed that with the right conditions, collective action can lead to outcomes that are not only sustainable but also equitable, preserving resources for future generations while meeting the needs of the present.

Her insights are particularly relevant today as we face global challenges that require joint solutions, from climate change to water scarcity. Ostrom's legacy teaches us that the key to solving these problems lies not only in technological advances or policy reforms, but in empowering communities to take action and manage their resources through shared governance and collaboration.

The Tragedy of the Commons Explained with Examples

The term "tragedy of the commons" was coined by ecologist Garrett Hardin in 1968. It describes a dilemma that occurs with shared resources. When individuals, motivated by personal interest, exploit a jointly-owned asset (like space, water, air, etc.), it can harm the common good, leading to the resource's depletion or destruction. While these actions may seem rational from the individual's perspective, they counter the shared interest of all users, resulting in overuse and depletion of the resource for everyone.

This concept illuminates the conflict between individual interests and the collective good. Each user can benefit from exploiting the shared resource, while the costs of depletion and pollution are shared among all users. This encourages overuse and mismanagement of the resource, leading to severe depletion. It highlights the need for effective governance and management strategies to balance individual needs with the long-term sustainability of public resources.

Environmental issues exemplify the tragedy of the commons. Natural resources like fisheries, forests, water sources, and air quality are classic examples. Overfishing in the oceans is a clear illustration: individual fishermen benefit from catching as many fish as possible, but without regulation, fish populations collapse, damaging the ecosystem and the livelihoods of fishing-dependent communities. Deforestation in the Amazon, driven by private economic gain, leads to biodiversity loss, climate disturbances, and risks to indigenous populations' habitats.

The tragedy of the commons also affects economic and social systems. Public goods such as fresh air, clean water, and public lands can suffer from overuse and underinvestment. Traffic congestion in cities is a social example: roads, a public resource, become clogged due to excessive use by private vehicles, leading to inefficiency and pollution.

Climate change presents a complex, global example of the tragedy of the commons. Emission of greenhouse gases by countries and companies pursuing economic growth results in drastic climate changes and environmental damage that affects everyone.

However, solutions and management strategies can help resolve and mitigate the consequences of the tragedy of the commons. Nobel laureate Eleanor Ostrom's work demonstrated that communities could manage shared resources sustainably without requiring privatization or government intervention. Her research identified success factors such as setting clear boundaries, adapting rules to local conditions, collective decision-making, monitoring and enforcement mechanisms, and conflict resolution processes.

Summary: Anarchy is what states make of it / Alexander Wendt

- Wendt holds in  ‘Anarchy is what states make of it’ that international politics is socially constructed

-states have a say in what anarchy means: does not necessarily mean that states always distrust one another, but states construct the relationship they have with one another

- identity results in what states find important

à constructivism = the idea that everything is a social construction where focus lies on interest, identity, and meaning

However, it does not mean that we can make up random things à it is true that relations and what states want is not a given and is constructed by interaction, BUT: that does not mean that states are not bound by certain cultures that define what they want.

MAIN POINT:

We should not necessarily treat interests and identity as given. Although Wendt agrees with a statist view, he argues that an important field of research should treat state interests and identity as the dependent variable. Wendt concedes that there are those who study how first- and second-image factors affect state identity and interests; he wants us to study how anarchy affects state identities and interests.

Realism's shortcoming is its failure to do this (although Wendt agrees that realist game theory is entirely appropriate in situations where we can assume that identities are constant, at least in the short term). Neoliberalism's failure is that it has sought to explain cooperation by focusing on process, but it has not sufficiently accounted for systemic variables. Constructivism's failure is that it gets too bogged down in epistemological debates without looking enough at how identities are formed in practice.

In short, we need a combination of neoliberalism and constructivism that will study how the system affects state identities and interests.

FROM HANDOUT:

• Wendt argues for a constructivist approach to the concept of self-help. He argues that international institutions (here the institution is self-help) can change state identities and interests.
• He argues that the concept of self-help as defined by realists (and mainly by Waltz) originates from the interaction of the units in the system, and not from anarchy. This conception conflicts with the structural, deterministic arguments that realists advance in which anarchy is the key explanatory variable that drives interactions.
• Wendt says that states interact with each other and, based on the results of that interaction, can become characterized by self-help, but this result does not necessarily need to follow. Whatever is observed, self-help or not, is defined by process, not structure.
• Wendt says that neorealism and neoliberalism cannot account for changes in the system, but norms-based constructivisim can (threats are socially constructed). A major difficulty in this piece is the issue of how states behave in the first period before they have any priors.

SOME VARIABLES:

This article explores "three ways in which identities and interests are transformed under anarchy [Y]: by the institution of sovereignty [X1], by an evolution of cooperation [X2], and by intentional efforts to transform egoistic identities into collective identities [X3]." I gather that Wendt doesn't intend for these three variables to tell us everything that anarchy does to identity. Instead, he is looking at three different things that can happen under anarchy to affect identity. The strong implication is that there is more to it, and we need to theorize about it.

Before getting into that, Wendt argues that the system does not create self-help idendities. An anarchic system is only a permissive cause of such an identity. He suggests one possible sufficient cause of self-help identities. If a predatory state emerged, it would force other states to respond. But even this depends on the prior identity; if the predatory state emerges into a system that already has a strong collective security identity, then it would be defeated without changing the dominant identity. So, think NATO. Realism would predict that, with the Soviet threat gone, the alliance will break up as states become suspicious of one another. But Wendt would seem to suggest that a collective identity can continue.

After making all this argument as background (and using up two-thirds of his pages), he then turns to the three independent variables that can effect a change in state identities and interests under anarchy.

X1: Sovereignty. Sovereignty is a norm, and it has been self-enforcing so far (look what happened to Hitler and Napoleon when they went against it). It has changed our interests, so that we think we need to defend territorial boundaries (even when letting a piece of territory go might be better for our security).

X2: Evolution of cooperation: Europe's long experience with cooperation during the cold war may have fundamentally changed its identity, creating a "European" identity that will persist despite the collapse of the Soviet threat and the renewed vigor of Germany.

X3: Intentional efforts to egoistic identities into collective identities: Gorbachev, recognizing that the USSR was losing the security battle, sought instead to proactively change its identity--and the identity of its adversary--into a cooperative identity. He did this by sending signals that he had changed (e.g. developing weapons that are only useful for defense) and by treating the West as the it, too, had changed.

Back to article summaries in political science 

Marx on the Crises of Capitalism

     Marx saw capitalism as being subject to swings of prosperity followed by recessions or even depressions.   He was one of the first people to try to explain the business cycle, as it is now called.  There were two different explanations given by Marx.

     One of Marx’s explanations involved the uncoordinated nature of the market (Marxists call this the anarchy of the market.)  Company A sees a profitable opportunity.  To take advantage of it, Company A buys some new machinery or builds a new factory in order to be able to increase production.  What it does not realize is that many other companies are doing the same thing.  When they all increase production, there is now too much production!  This causes the period of recession.  Some companies go out of business.  Others decrease their production.  When production falls enough, the recession is over.  The periodic recessions and depressions (Marx called them “crises”) that result under capitalism are one reason that Marxists have so strongly supported government planning. 

     The second of Marx’s explanations involves under-consumption.  To Marx, capitalism acts to keep wages at the socially-determined subsistence level so that profits can expand.  But wage earners usually spend all of their incomes while profit earners can afford to save a portion of their incomes.  By transferring income from spenders to savers, capitalism sets up a process by which companies produce goods but consumers do not have enough income to buy them.  Goods that are produced go unsold; this is the recession (crisis).  Eventually, companies are able to eliminate their surplus inventories and the recession is over. 

     One of Marx’s important predictions was that these crises would become increasingly severe.  This was a result of the increasing concentration of capital.  Early crises may cause the failure of small companies; this would have only minor overall effects.  Later crises would cause the financial ruin of giant companies.  The repercussions of this would be much more severe.  To Marxists, the Great Depression of the 1930s seemed to prove this part of the theory.

     Keep in mind that Marx’s description was contrary to the general view of the day.  In that view, recessions could not occur for long.  If recessions did occur, there were built in forces to eliminate them quickly.  (These were falling prices, falling wages, and falling real interest rates)  Everything that could be produced would be bought!  (This statement is usually stated as “supply creates its own demand” and is called “Say’s Law”.)

     Since World War II, there have indeed been periodic recessions in the United States.  The country went ten years without a recession (March 1991 to March 2001) but then experienced a recession in 2001 and then a most severe recession beginning in 2008.  But these recessions have been much less severe than the Great Depression or than the “crises” described by Marx.  That they have been less severe is partially the result of increased government intervention in the economy, a point that was not predicted by Marx.

For more on Karl Marx and Marxism:

Marx's Dialectical Approach and Materialist Interpretation of History
Marx's Class Struggle
Marx on alienation and freedom
Marx's Value and Surplus Value theory
Marx on The Reserve Army of Labor / Unemployed 
Marx's Law of Increasing Concentration of Capital
Marx on Contradictions of Capitalism
Marx on the state
Marx on Imperialism 
Marx on the Proletarian Revolution 
Marx on the dictatorship of the Proletariat -
Summary of the Communist Manifesto 
Summary of The German Ideology

Workers of the world -know more:

                 

Marx's Law of Increasing Concentration of Capital

    To Marx, capitalism involved a large number of highly competitive companies, each with a desire to expand.  Profits would not be spent on luxury consumption; instead, profits would be ploughed-back into the company as investment (called accumulation). For Marx the drive for accumulation would cause companies to wish to hire more workers.  This would then drive up wages.  Both the existence of profits and the higher wages would lead capitalists to increase the amount of machinery used in production.  This process leads to what economists of today call “economies of scale”.  Since the costs of the machines are fixed, a company that produces a larger quantity of goods has an advantage over a smaller company.  (As an example, the cost of your classroom is fixed --- that is, the cost is the same regardless of the number of students.  If the classroom is full, the cost per student would be less than if the classroom were half-empty.)  Since larger companies can produce at a lower cost than smaller companies, they can charge a lower price and still make a profit.  With the lower price, the smaller companies cannot make a profit and therefore go out of existence. Their owners (the petit bourgeoisie) become part of the proletariat.  Ownership of capital becomes concentrated into fewer and fewer hands. 

     It may seem as though this statement of Marx was fulfilled.  A steel industry that once had hundreds of companies became dominated by six.  An automobile company that once had hundreds of companies became dominated by three.  The department store replaced the small store. The grocery chain replaced the “mom-and-pop” store.  After World War II, this concentration of capital occurred as Marx predicted; the proportion of total assets owned by the 50 largest companies grew significantly.  However, this was reversed beginning in the 1970s.  New technologies allowed smaller companies to be able to compete effectively with the larger ones.  In addition, the opening to foreign trade enhanced competition greatly.  This reversal was not predicted by Marx.  Marxists often refer to capitalism as “monopoly capitalism”.  But since the 1970s, the amount of competition has been increasing, not diminishing.

For more on Karl Marx and Marxism:

Marx's Dialectical Approach and Materialist Interpretation of History
Marx's Class Struggle
Marx on alienation and freedom
Marx's Value and Surplus Value theory
Marx on The Reserve Army of Labor / Unemployed 
Marx on Contradictions of Capitalism
Marx on the Crises of Capitalism 
Marx on the state
Marx on Imperialism 
Marx on the Proletarian Revolution 
Marx on the dictatorship of the Proletariat -
Summary of the Communist Manifesto 
Summary of The German Ideology

Workers of the world -know more:

                 

Nozick’s entitlement theory of Justice - Summary

The philosopher Robert Nozick presents a libertarian statement of the theory of justice that he calls the entitlement theory in the book Anarchy, State and Utopia (1974).  Nozick's principles of justice are historical principles that take into account the process by which a distribution came about rather than the nonhistorical or end-state principles (such as those in utilitarianism and Rawls’s theory) that evaluate a distribution with regard to certain structural features at a given time.  In addition, Nozick's principles of justice are not patterned, inasmuch as patterned principles evaluate a distribution according to the presence or absence of that feature.  Nozick contends that any particular pattern of distribution can be maintained only by continuously interfering in people’s lives and hence violating the right to liberty.  This is the point of the argument about Wilt Chamberlain.

The entitlement theory states that "a distribution is just if everyone is entitled to the holdings they possess."  An expression of the non-patterned entitlement theory in patterned form is, “From each as they choose, to each as they are chosen.”  People are entitled to their holdings if the holdings were obtained by one of the following three principles:

1.  The principle of just transfer.

2.  The principle of just original acquisition.

3.  The principle of rectification.

The original acquisition of a holding is just as long as it does not violate anyone else’s rights.  (Note the discussion in the text of the Lockean Proviso.)  Transfers are just as long as they result from  purely voluntary exchanges, provided that all preceding transfers were just reaching back to a just original acquisition.  However, a principle of rectification is necessary to correct injustices in transfers and original acquisitions.

Justice and free markets according to Nozick

The market system is just because it protects individual rights better than any other economic system.  The point of justice, for Nozick, is to protect rights, not to promote human well-being or to achieve equality, and a largely unregulated free market system, with only the absolute minimum of government intervention, protects rights best.  However, Nozick fails to support his major assumption that liberty, understood as the unhindered exercise of property rights, is a paramount value.  In addition,  not all restrictions of liberty are due to interference by the state; individuals are sometimes restricted by the choices of others.  The conditions for just original acquisitions and just transfers are often absent, and most distributions have been affected at some point in time by forced takings which have never been rectified in accord with the principle of rectification.

Libertarianism, Hayek and the Market System - Summary

Libertarianism is committed to individual liberty conceived as the right to own property and live free from the interference of others.  The free market is justified as the economic system that best supports individual liberty.  Both utilitarianism and libertarianism support a system of free markets, but when the promotion of utility conflicts with the protection of liberty, libertarians favor unregulated markets that protect liberty, while utilitarians prefer regulation in order to increase utility at the expense of liberty.

Hayek and Classical Liberalism. Friedrich von Hayek’s perceptiveness with respect to what is now called classical liberalism and its implications for understanding the market system was significantly underappreciated during the majority of his lifetime.  As a staunch critic of planned economies, particularly those of totalitarian regimes, he advanced a notion of spontaneous order that conceptualizes the free market as far superior to human planning as regards economic and political systems.  It should be noted that Hayek recognized that all human activity requires some order.  However, the two competitors for ordering economic and political system seem to involve greater control and regulation on the one hand and freer rein given to individual liberty on the other.  Within a broad, general set of principles, spontaneous order is the notion that the only goals within a system are those set by individuals rather than those set by either governmental or corporate fiat.  Corporate systems, then, are understood to supervene on aggregates of individual agents exercising free and self-interested choices rather than as basic or foundational to economic and political development.  Hayek called spontaneous order “catallaxy.”  Hayek’s view is consistent with the classical sense of Millian liberalism.  Free exercise of individual liberty will produce greater positive effect within a society than any of the alternatives. 

"Cultural Studies Vs. Political Economy: Is Anybody Else Bored with this Debate?" by Lawrence Grossberg – review and summary

Lawrence Grossberg's  "Cultural Studies  Vs. Political Economy: Is Anybody Else Bored with this Debate?" (1995) is a reply to Nicholas Garnham' attack on cultural studies in his "Political Economy and Cultural Studies: Reconciliation or Divorce?" article which ensued the cultural studies Vs political economy debate over the pages of Critical Studies in Mass Communication. Grossberg believes that one of the key points of disagreement between cultural studies and political economy is the weight the two approaches ascribe the economy as a determining factor of social formations. Grossbergs argues against the political economy reductionist approach which sees capitalism as a universal, unvaried structure with no variations in time and place.

Grossberg starts out by claiming that there is nothing novel about Garnham's criticism of cultural studies, and that this criticism arises from a misunderstanding of the relationship between cultural studies and political economy. Grossberg argues that cultural studies did not reject political economy, just the manner in which some political economists tended to their subject matter. On the other hand Grossberg agrees that cultural studies at times tended to over-celebrate culture while paying less warranted attention to the larger economic contexts.

 Political economy's main problem, in the eyes cultural studies according to Grossberg, is it’s ahistorical and universal perceptions which halt exactly at the point in which cultural studies begin their articulation of specific time and place societies. Grossbeg also claims that Garnham does to cultural studies what political economy does to society, that is reduce it from a complex to a black-and-white nature. Another aspect of Garnham's attack which Grossberg notes is his "critique by absence", that is criticizing a position for what it does not do or say. But this is also misplace for there has been significant work done in cultural studies regarding cultural production, reproduction and institutions, and not just consumption.

Grossberg continues to wonder what is the distinction, if there is any, between popular culture and dominant culture in the context of capitalism. He claims that cultural studies are engaged with people's experience, and the way to comply with and/or resist their subordination, an engagement which is crucial if they are ever to overthrow these power structures that are, admittedly, largely created by what political economy researches but is also sustained and reproduced by what cultural studies are concerned with.

"Political Economy and Cultural Studies: Reconciliation or Divorce?" by Nicholas Garnham –review and summary

 Nicholas Granham opens his "Political Economy and Cultural Studies: Reconciliation or Divorce?" by quoting Stuart Hall's reported break from traditional Marxist thought and the antagonism between Marxist political economy and cultural studies. Garnham's claim is that political economy is essential for cultural studies if its project is to be successful. He also argues that political economy is the source of cultural studies' critical stance. The affirmation of British working class in the works of the founders of cultural studies is situated in the formation of class structure produced by industrial and cultural capitalism. And therefore, Garnham argues, the struggle that cultural studies undertook was stemming from the wider social structure conflict. What Garnham subsequently argues is that for cultural studies to be a meaningful political project it cannot detach itself from its founding problematic, that dealt with by political economy. Cultural studies' developments, the growing interest in symbolic representation and taking on not just capitalism, but also gender and race issues, lead Garnham to ask of its current relation with political economy. Political economy sees all these as determined by material considerations of modes of production, ignored, so Garnham argues, by cultural studies. In other words, by distancing itself from political economy line of thought and subject matter, cultural studies are engaged with the secondary and less important and determining aspects of the social structure, and on the consumers' side instead of the producers'. Politics of identity, Garnham argues, not only secondary to the politics of labor, welfare and other economic issues.

Nicholas Garnham follows Marx in saying that every product produced must have a need which it satisfies, cultural products being no exception. Therefore cultural studies' sense of freedom in interpretation and consumption is justified only to some extent, an extent overly extended by cultural studies research.      

One of the ways in which Nicholas Garnham positions his attack on cultural studies is by understating it as a project assigned to "overthrowing domination" by assessing which cultural practices sustain the social order and which practices subverts it. Garnham further constructs cultural studies' interest in common culture not because it was a site of significant cultural activity, but due to the will to give the working class a "sense of importance" of their experience which Marxistically assumed to be stemming out of subordination. The second reason Garnham notes for cultural studies' interest in popular culture was the Frankfurt School project of explaining the mechanisms which inhibit a cultural overtake of the lower-classes (Stuart Hall, it should be noted, views the cultural studies turn somewhat differently).

These baseline questions necessarily hint, for Granham, at the Marxist notion of false consciousness, which he sees as claiming that only intellectuals, and not the blinded masses, have access to the truth. But cultural studies reject notion of false consciousness, which is for Garnham absurd.

Garnham also talks of cultural studies' view of education as means liberation of the subordinate classes and the role they assigned for themselves in it. However, cultural studies' sanctification of popular culture was in Garnham's eyes in fact harmful in the field of education. The attempt at liberation from power was foiled due to the obscurity regarding what that power was and where it comes from.

The main point of contention between cultural studies and political economy is according to Garnham that of the structure of power and domination. The difference is focus, while political economy reduces everything to issues of class, cultural studies tend to give an equal status to gender and ethnicity which precede the capitalist mode of production, but are, so Garnham argues, for the most part determined by class differences. Racial and patriarchal domination are founded on economic domination. Therefore dealing with representation (such as "black is beautiful") is meaningless without addressing structural economic issues which give rise to disadvantaging representations.  

see: The Cultural Studies-Political Economy Debate

The cultural studies – political economy debate

From its early stages cultural studies were under criticism from within the Marxist oriented agenda. This criticism asserted that cultural studies' preoccupation with representations, identities and so forth came at the expanse of addressing the economic structures of society and culture.

The debate heated up over a series of articles published in 1995 in Critical Studies in Mass Communication between Nicholas Garnham and Graham Murdock from the political economy side and Lawrence Grossberg and James Carey on the side of cultural studies.

The first shot was fired by Garnham in his "Political Economy and Cultural Studies: Reconciliation or Divorce?" where he accused the Birmingham School and their predecessors in favoring discussions of ethnicity and gender in favor of examining the more essential matter of economic factors which determine social stratification. Garnham did not argue that these issues were not important, but that they must be preceded by discussion of the economic aspects of culture. Symbolizing, signifying and representation are meaningless, he argued, if the material conditions stay the same.

Grossberg then commented by arguing that it is wrong to claim that cultural studies has disengaged itself from pursuing the economical power structures which underlie the cultural industry, referring to the work of scholars like Dorothy Hobson, Mike Apple, Cameron McCarthy and even Pierre Bourdieu which examined the relations of cultural production to social reproduction.

James Carey criticized another aspect of the political economy theory. He claimed that economical models aspire to absolutism which does not amount to the time-and-place intimacy of the work of cultural studies which do not simply deduce the nature of specific societies from abstract models.

Graham Murdock, from the side of the political economy, disagreed with Carey claiming that specific research like the one produced by cultural studies avoids discussing the essential political questions.

Garnham signed off the debate by again saying that the economical factor should precede any discursive discussion and that the work of the expert should have prominence over the wisdom of the common man so hailed by cultural studies. 

see also:

"Political Economy and Cultural Studies: Reconciliation or Divorce?" by Nicholas Garnham

"Cultural Studies  Vs. Political Economy: Is Anybody Else Bored with this Debate?" by Lawrence Grossberg 

culture industry - sumamry