Journal of Guangxi Teachers Education University (Philosophy and Social Sciences Edition) ›› 2025, Vol. 61 ›› Issue (5): 9-17.doi: 10.16088/j.issn.1001-6597.2025.05.002

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A New Exploration of the Issue of Capital Power from the Perspective of Bio-politics—With a Discussion on the New Alienation of Biopolitics in the Digital-Intelligence Era

KONG Ming-an   

  1. School of Marxism, Nankai University, Tianjin 300350, China
  • Received:2025-03-18 Online:2025-09-05 Published:2025-09-18

Abstract: The regulation and management of life by power has always been the core concern of biopolitics, yet to some extent, biopolitics has overlooked capital as a power mechanism and its covert operation within capitalist society. Although Marx did not explicitly propose the term “biopolitics”, his critique of capital's modernity undoubtedly provides substantial theoretical resources for biopolitical studies. In Marx's view, capital embodies a socioeconomic relationship that includes exploitation and being exploited, domination and being dominated. The inequality in capital ownership signifies inequality among living beings, as capital asserts its will and status by extracting the life force of laborers. Contemporary left-wing scholar Slavoj Žižek adheres to Marx's critical stance on capital and employs modern psychoanalytic theory to reveal the hidden mechanisms of biopolitical power operation, that is, capital power, to conceal the structural imbalances of capitalist society, covertly permeates the entire capitalist system, forming its incessant drive mode. With the rapid advancement of the digital-intelligence era, behind technological progress lies the deeper operation of capital power, exacerbating the alienation issues within capitalist biopolitics. Taking capital power as a starting point to examine the dilemma of digital alienation of life in the digital-intelligence era can help deepen contemporary capital critique theory, thus advancing and enriching Marxist research on biopolitics.

Key words: capital power, biopolitics, social relations, drive mode, digital-intelligence era

CLC Number:  B0-0
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