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Abstract This essay takes up the work of Bernard Stiegler to evaluate and critique his use of Marx and Engels' notion of proletarianization in the context of new media, television, education and activism. The impact of technology and the notion of the general intellect is measured against Stiegler's worry about a 'short circuit' that threatens humanity and requires a 'new critique'. Talk of an 'attention economy' might be better understood if we deploy a wider Marxist notion of proletarianization in relation to class consciousness and struggh. Rather than a forlorn compfoint about the 'conspiracy of imbeciles' and the 'ruin' of public education, a more careful reading of Marx offers proletarianization as a resource in a struggle that is - abo but not only - a 'battle for intelligence'.
Keywords proletarianization, cretinization, technology, education, general intellect, critique
PROLETARIANISATION
The future of Europe and the world must be thought from the question of the psycho-power characteristic of control societies, and whose effects have become massive and destructive. Psycho-power is the systematic organisation of the capture of attention made possible by the psychotechnologies that have developed with the radio (1920), with television ( 1 950) and with digital technologies ( 1 990), spreading all over the planet.
Bernard Stiegler1
There is a kind of unseemly scramble underway to cope with apparent changes in the technological and social composition of capital today. It is my argument that this scramble is symptomatic of a political failure and a danger that can be analysed with the help, albeit taken critically, of the work of Bernard Stiegler, and of course - as if it were necessary to even say this - with Marx. Stiegler's is an unorthodox Marxism, which is not always a bad thing. He diagnoses an 'indeterminacy rising out of an always-accelerating future' and this opens the space for a 'battle for intelligence'.2 A key concept relevant to this battle is quite an old one - a somewhat expanded notion of proletarianisation, building upon Gilbert Simondon's notion of collective, technical and human 'individuation',3 but derived initially from comments by Marx and Engels in The Communist Manifesto. Stiegler calls 'proletarianisation' Marx's greatest contribution.
In the Manifesto, Marx and Engels refer to the way in which the capitalist mode of production...