Planetary carambolage: The evolutionary political economy of technology, nature and work
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Planetary carambolage: The evolutionary political economy of technology, nature and work Katarzyna Gruszka 1 & Manuel Scholz-Wäckerle 2
& Ernest
Aigner 3
Accepted: 16 November 2020 / Published online: 27 November 2020 # The Author(s) 2020, corrected publication 2020
Abstract The following editorial introduces the special issue (SI) on “Work, Environment and Planetary-scale Computation in Political-Economic Evolution”. Here, however, we go beyond an outline of what each contribution to the SI addresses, and attempt to draw a more pronounced shared embedding of the arguments that have come to the fore. The original idea of this SI was to synthesize a range of contemporary global politicaleconomic challenges, i.e. (1) technology (esp. digital transformation), (2) nature (esp. ecological crisis) and (3) work (esp. precarization via the evolving platform economy). The main argument developed in this editorial reflection focuses on the common ground and origin of those processes found in the complex evolution of capitalist development. We frame the latter by assigning it a new term, i.e. “planetary carambolage”. Keywords Political economy . Complexity . Evolution . Capitalist development .
Ecological crisis . Digital transformation . Platform work JEL codes B51 . B52 . J81 . O33 . P11 . P16 . P18 . Q57
* Manuel Scholz-Wäckerle manuel.scholz–[email protected] Katarzyna Gruszka [email protected] Ernest Aigner [email protected]
1
Institute for Ecological Economics, Department of Socioeconomics, Vienna University of Economics and Business, Wien, Austria
2
Department of Socioeconomics, Vienna University of Economics and Business, Wien, Austria
3
Institute for Economic Geography and GIScience, Department of Socioeconomics, Vienna University of Economics and Business, Wien, Austria
274
Review of Evolutionary Political Economy (2020) 1:273–293
1 Introduction This editorial introduces the special issue (SI) on “Work, Environment and Planetary-scale Computation in Political-Economic Evolution”. In this SI of the Review of Evolutionary Political Economy (REPE), we ask questions about the current state of capitalism and its potential of endogenous transformation to disrupt the phase of what we refer to as planetary carambolage. The call asked for evolutionary political economic approaches synthesizing problems around the automation of production and exchange, the future of work and the implications for the environment. In addition to the summary of the contributions to the SI, this article argues that there is a common ground in the origin of the three crucial contemporary global political economic challenges, more specifically, the challenges of (1) digital transformation, (2) ecological crisis and (3) the precarization of work via the evolving platform economy. This common ground, we argue, is located in the complex evolution of capitalism, its development, the understanding of which can be supported with the concept of planetary carambolage. The SI begins with Hanappi (2020) explaining the role of “re
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