Criticism Of Capitalist Digital Agriculture And Its Contemporary Enlightenment

Under the realistic background of the proliferation of the world’s population and the lack of natural resources,capitalist digital agriculture deeply integrates digital technology with agricultural production and operation,promotes agricultural modernization to ensure national food security,conforms to the nature of capital profit-seeking,takes large multinational monopoly enterprises as the carrier,rely on strong economic strength and technology accumulate,aims to capture the surplus value of digital agriculture all over the world,and then complete the new physical industry of capital proliferation.Its development process traced back to the 1950 s,has gone through several stages that contain the focusing on the development of agricultural databases,developing agricultural information service networks and the big data agriculture.Nowadays,it has achieved all-round application,which not only promotes the output growth of agricultural primary products effectively,but also the transformation of agricultural production structure into a refined one.Compared with the previous agricultural production methods,a lot of new changes have taken place in capitalist digital agriculture,but its fundamental logic of production--exploitation of surplus value--has never changed,merely the methods becomes more diversified and the means are more subtle.Therefore,the construction of the critical framework of capitalist digital agriculture should be based on Marx’s criticism of capitalist agriculture and its related theories,adhere to the principles of practical,class,scientific and systematic,fully absorb the reserved reasonable content in the form of “ideological data” that was created by predecessors and finally highlight the latest achievements of socialist political economy with Chinese characteristics.Specifically,the critical framework mainly includes four levels: accumulation,labor,distribution and consumption.First of all,the capitalist digital agriculture pays attention to data accumulation.The accumulated object extends from land elements to data elements,and the agricultural data has become a kind of core resource.The accumulation mode has changed from violent plunder to collected using data mining technology,and the connection and cooperation of intelligent sensors and digital agricultural platforms has greatly improved data accumulation efficiency and quality.The accumulation link has expanded from partial links to total production process links and the in-depth use of digital technology enables agricultural industry chain to binary expression.So,from production to circulation to consumption,all of them become the best expansion field of data accumulation.However,with the help of Marx’s capitalist accumulation criticism theory,it can be found that the essence of capitalist digital agriculture focusing on data accumulation is to capture digital surplus value.The extension of accumulation object makes it plunder the value of data commodities value to maximize the surplus value.The non-employed and unpaid digital surplus labor break through the boundary between work and leisure,as well as the age of population,so that data labor products are finally sold for free.The transformation of the accumulation mode promotes data collection invisibility and erects barriers of value extraction.Thus,program authorization steals data invisibly and data capacity and algorithm model exclude farmers from profit sharing.The expansion of accumulation link makes the platform rentiers to install applications to complete the digital ‘enclosure’,They will not occupy the land by building fences but rely on software licenses to obtain digital land rent.Secondly,the transformation of the labor process by capitalist digital agriculture is worthy of attention.Technological laborers and transnational immigrant laborers constitute the main body of labor,providing agriculture with dual guarantees for technological research development and actual production.In addition,new intelligent and automated agricultural machinery equipment becomes means of labor,promoting output growth and maintaining ecological diversity.Digital technology has replaced supervisory fine books and is widely used in labor supervision.Because the labor management software can precisely measure labor time and reduce the economic cost of agricultural production.However,capitalist production is the production of surplus value,and the essence of transforming the labor process of capitalist digital agriculture is still to squeeze the surplus value provided by agricultural workers.The main body of labor has become the modern slave who is deeply exploited.The high salary income of technological workers is at the expense of physical exhaustion,and transnational immigrant workers are engaged in production in extremely harsh environments.Besides,the transformation of labor materials has led to the reduction of employment opportunities.The widespread use of automation equipment displaced low-skilled labor and resulted in the intensification of internal competition that made the situation of digital agricultural workers even more difficult.Furthermore,the strengthening of labor supervision has given birth to digital Taylorism,That is to say the work measurement achieved standardization and quantification and the trend of workers’ deskilling has become increasingly obvious.Thirdly,the reshaping of distribution relations by capitalist digital agriculture is also worthy of attention.The distribution subject is represented by the rise of digital capital and presents a trend of alternation between the old and the new,and platform companies seize most of the income of the remaining distribution subjects in the capital cycle.The principle of distribution is based on distribution based on factors while balancing distribution according to work.Wages and profits are in the same form.Moreover,the distribution share enjoyment standard puts more emphasis on the degree of digital technology application,labor subjects or business entities with high labor productivity can obtain a higher share in the distribution of digital agricultural surplus value.However,from the perspective of Marxist distribution criticism theory of capitalism,the essence of capitalist digital agriculture reshaping the distribution relationship is to plunder wealth and ease the contradiction between labor and capital.Distribution subjects “evolve” and capital accumulation strengthens digital monopoly.Platform capitalists provide time-limited free public technical services to farmers to cultivate user stickiness to continue to expand the “cake”.Acquisitions and mergers of similar competitors in the market try to monopolize the “cake”.The “flexibility” of the distribution principle allows agricultural workers to be exploited willingly.Through the three mechanisms of excessive rush games,salary and promotion rules based on seniority,and internal state construction,the three mechanisms create recognition among workers and skillfully transform labor-capital conflicts.The “digitization” of distribution shares has led to polarization within and outside the class.The gap between large farms and small and medium-sized farms within a class,“elite farmers” who grow major crops,and ordinary farmers who grow other crops in terms of profit is getting wider and wider.Additionally,platform capitalists outside the class also freely demand“tributes” from peasants’ economic activities in the form of “absolute land rent”“differential land rent” and “monopoly land rent”.Finally,capitalist digital agriculture improves consumption efficiency.Digital technology is deeply used to reconstruct the consumption ecology,predicting consumption demand,tracing food safety has become a reality;digital media panoramic presentation induces consumption motivation,TV advertising and social software turn the audience’s attention into a business;digital platforms are globally interconnected to update consumption carriers.However,according to Marx’s critical theory of capitalist consumption,the essence of capitalist digital agriculture to improve consumption efficiency is to resolve overproduction and accomplish capital proliferation.Digital technology for reconstructing the consumer ecosystem has become a legitimate tool for proliferation.Consumer demand can be predicted or cultivated.Food safety can be traced or used as an excuse.The induction of consumption motivation brings visual colonization and physical health overdraft,landscape divides the real connection between people and real life,which committed to cultivating“successors” in the future capitalist tobacco industry;the renewal of the consumer carrier exacerbates the credit risk and global trade imbalance,credit scale expansion exacerbates the risk of financial turmoil.The platform company has become a new type of “middleman” and draws high commissions from every online transaction of agricultural products.Although capitalist digital agriculture promotes evolution of the relationship between productivity and production,it has not got rid of the inherent shackles of capital proliferation after all,and cannot truly achieve the ideal goal of rational agriculture.This also provides a realistic enlightenment for China to take the road of digital agricultural modernisation in the new era,that is accumulation and application of agricultural data must be people-centered,continue to consolidate the dominant position of workers in digital agriculture,create a new distribution pattern to promote farmers to achieve common prosperity,and expedite dual-cycle consumption to promote the healthy development of digital agriculture.