Dr Marco Guglielmo | The Left and Digital Politics

Join us for this lecture, co-hosted with the Centre for Contemporary Political Theory, in which Marco Guglielmo will be presenting his new book The Left and Digital Politics.

Abstract 

Digital platforms are more than devices, algorithms and websites. They organise societies through the leadership of platform capitalists and their allies in political institutions. We know that this leadership, or hegemony, fosters exploitation and inequalities. We also know that a politics of resistance is emerging among platform workers and communities around the digital commons.

Less known is how the left has been changing to have a say in digital politics. And what do left-wing parties think and do about platform societies? The Left and Digital Politics answers these questions by developing an updated Gramscian critical theory of (counter-)hegemony in platform societies and a comparative analysis of the ideologies and practices of key European left-wing parties.

The book provides a map of left-wing ideas and practices on digital politics, a compass to point out how some left-wing parties perform as barriers or allies of radical change, and an analytical toolkit to open new routes towards platform socialism.

The book is available open access here.

About the speaker 

Dr Marco Guglielmo is currently Maria Skłodowska Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Valencia after serving as a Lecturer in Politics at Royal Holloway University of London. Marco’s research analyses the evolutions of progressive politics and the politics of the digital transition, focusing on how parties are boosting or hampering the transition to alternative models of digitalisation. Marco’s first book is The Left and Digital Politics. Political Parties from Platform Neoliberalism to Platform Socialism (University of Westminster Press, in press). At the University of Valencia, Marco is part of the research group DIGIPOL, digitalization and politics.