Preparing the 2021 Socialist Register amidst the accelerating Coronavirus pandemic has been a considerable challenge. Our earlier decision that the time was ripe to explore ‘new ways of living’ in the twenty-first century through two successive volumes of the Register – under the rubric of ‘Beyond Market Dystopia’ for the 56th annual volume, and ‘Beyond Digital Capitalism’ for this 57th volume – was taken long before the greatest health crisis by far in over a century exploded, quite literally on a global scale, through the course of the first half of 2020. This crisis fully exposed for all to see the severe consequences of longstanding neoliberal state practices beholden to the blinkered competitive individualism of the proponents of pro-market ideology. And it drove them – however belatedly, confusedly, and temporarily – to undertake the types of massive social expenditures they had derided only months before. (‘There is such a thing as society’, Boris Johnson solemnly admonished the ghost of Margaret Thatcher in 10 Downing Street). But the pandemic also posed a new challenge for socialists, including for us as the editors as well as for all the contributors to this volume who we invited to analyze the nature of digital capitalism and its contradictions. Could we now do this in ways that also captured the significance of the pandemic and what it spoke to in terms of imagining, struggling for, and planning for, new ways of living?
In addressing how far digital technology has become integral to the capitalist market dystopia of the first decades the twenty-first century we were deliberately seeking to counter so much facile futurist ‘cyber-utopian’ thinking that has proliferated through these decades. The proof of capitalism’s continued dynamism, even in the face of severe global economic crisis, lay in the most successful and most celebrated high-tech corporations of the new information sector which really were restructuring and refashioning not only our ways of communicating but of working and consuming, indeed ways of living. Yet precisely because this was taking place within the logics of capitalist accumulation and exploitation, and through the reproduction of capitalist social relations, this produced new contradictions and irrationalities. Perhaps none of these was greater than those revealed by the contrast between the investment, planning, and preparation that went into the interminable competitive race for ‘more speed’ by way of reducing latency in digital communications by so many milliseconds, on the one hand, and on the other the lack of investment, planning, and preparation that underlay the scandalous slowness of the responses to the spreading Covid-19 pandemic around the world
