Floating (on) platforms? European Left parties and the digital revolution. A Gramscian analysis

Guglielmo, Marco ORCID: 0000-0001-9249-456X (2022). Floating (on) platforms? European Left parties and the digital revolution. A Gramscian analysis. University of Birmingham. Ph.D.

Preview

GuglielmoPhD2022.pdf
Text - Accepted Version
Available under License All rights reserved.
Download (4MB) | Preview

Abstract

This thesis examines how European Left Parties reacted to the digital revolution in the 2010s, a decade that recent literature theorised as one of ‘crisis’ for the Left. Meanwhile, critical theorists claimed that platform societies provide new routes for transformative Left-wing politics. However, there is a lack of research on how Left Parties tapped into these dynamics. This gap set the rationale for developing a Gramscian framework through which I explored the core attributes of the hegemony in platform societies. On this ground, I conducted empirical research on how six left-wing parties in Italy, France and Spain sought to navigate or transform ‘digital’ hegemony. By looking at how parties conceived platform capitalism and platform politics, I theorised the emergence of three left-wing ‘digital’ ideologies: the neoliberal Techno-Third Way, Post-Social Democracy, and Platform Socialism. I analysed parties’ official discourses and original evidence from 37 elites’ interviews to advance understandings of how Left parties ‘fit’ into the confrontations for hegemony in platform societies. The empirical findings develop the thesis’s central argument, namely that the politics of the digital revolution provided Left parties with potential essential resources to exit their ideological crises, but in opposite directions that (re-)polarised the Left. Indeed, while parties embracing Techno-Third Way could elaborate ideas and strategies to organically represent the ruling classes of platform capitalism, Platform Socialists found new ways to empower resistance around the field of the ‘digital commons’. Conversely, the thesis argues that Post-Social Democracy demonstrates the ongoing crisis of the ‘arbitrary’ attempts to revive Social Democracy under impossible structural conditions.

Type of Work:

Thesis (Doctorates > Ph.D.)

Award Type:

Doctorates > Ph.D.

Supervisor(s):