IISES International Academic Conference, Copenhagen

ALIENATING MARX (ISTS) FROM THE COLD WAR INTO SURVEILLANCE CAPITALISM

NOEL PACKARD

Abstract:

Marx’s Machine Age theory of capitalism ascribes a unique driving role for alienation and argues new modes of production emerge from past modes of production. Presently so-called surveillance capitalism is superseding Machine Age capitalism and distributing wealth unequally to a 1% global elite. There are debates about what alienation is at work in this changed epoch. Premised on Marx’s idea that modes of production are born in the previous epoch along with the alienation that works with them, a hypothesis about how today’s Internet enables both endless free speech, while inversely and simultaneously, enabling endless spying with impunity is presented here. The hypothesis is a conceptualization of alienation labeled as “known unknown”, which emerged with the rise of anti-communism, neoliberalism and development of a military-industrial-complex. The historical-comparative argument is: “Communist hunting” intelligence agents, scientists, and contractors, backed by neoliberal economists, built a military-industrial-complex that obligated them to both known and not know, national security secrets that alienated them from US constitutional free speech and adjoining social movements. Their alienation was congealed in their interactive inventions - the Internet, pc and cell phone - devices that today dialectically give customers the ability to express free speech endlessly in electronic memory form, while inversely giving spies unlimited access to that speech with impunity. This process works in tandem: enabling appropriation of data for government surveillance and service fee payments for corporations. This hypothesis is juxtaposed with historical facts, to test if present modes of production and adjoining alienation are evidenced in the earlier epochs. Research draws from Cold War history, political economics literature and the Errol Morris film about Donald Rumsfeld, titled, The Unknown Known (2013).

Keywords: alienation, Internet, neoliberal, Cold War, intelligence, surveillance, Communist



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