Proceedings of the 47th International Academic Conference, Prague

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.” The adaption of the term “known unknown alienation” stems from the discourse in the film, “The Unknown Known” which highlights aspects of known unknown alienation, in the form of so-called national security experts who are mentally divided about what they can and can not know (or talk about) and also the divide between the expert and the taxpayer, who does not qualify to have access to the same information that the expert has. This personal internal contradiction and social alienation is compounded because Americans are proud of US constitutionally protected free speech rights (which according to The Citizens United Act allows corporations to be individuals); these contradictions help drive surveillance capitalism. 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, or in the case of the CIA be “witting” of national security secrets, which alienated them from US constitutional free speech. Their alienation manifest 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.

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

DOI: 10.20472/IAC.2019.047.016

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