Review article
https://doi.org/10.20901/an.22.06
Postcapitalist Hypothesis and Three Perspectives of Digital Transformation
Vedran Jerbić
; Libertas University, Zagreb, Croatia
Ivan Lasić
orcid.org/0000-0001-7625-5948
; Faculty of Political Science, University of Zagreb, Zagreb, Croatia
Abstract
This paper analyzes the postcapitalist hypothesis according to which digital technology and processes of informatization destabilize the fundamental categories of capitalism: labour, value and property. A historical overview, from Marx to the Frankfurt School and contemporary authors, demonstrates that the problem of the transformation of capitalism is a permanent theoretical preoccupation. In the recent literature, we distinguish three interpretative perspectives. Traditionalists (Morozov, Srnicek, Vercellone, Best, Dinerstein i Pitts) claim that digital economy stays in the framework of capitalist adaptability, describing it with notions such as techno-capitalism, platform capitalism or cognitive capitalism. Optimists (Hardt and Negri, Mason, Rifkin, Bastani) emphasize that digital networks contain emancipatory potential and enable the development of cooperative, non-market forms of production outside of market-commodity paradigm. Pessimists (Varoufakis, Durand, Dean, Wark) warn of the rise of technofeudalism whose characteristics are digital rent, algorithmic surveillance and privatization of sovereignty. We conclude that the current moment is, in the first place, transitory: digitalization
undermines market-commodity logic, but a postcapitalist society has not
yet been formed.
Keywords
digital technology; capitalism; postcapitalism; refeudalization; technofeudalism
Hrčak ID:
340531
URI
Publication date:
8.12.2025.
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