The concept of the "collective worker" proposed in Marx's Capital reveals the organic integrity of labor cooperation under the conditions of capitalist socialized mass production, and provides a theoretical foundation for us to analyze the evolution of contemporary labor production. The "collective worker" is undergoing a reconstruction in today's digital age. "Digital Taylorism", spawned by digital capitalism, reconstructs traditional workers into "digital collective workers" with algorithmic management, real-time monitoring and space-time compression as its core means. This process deepens the fundamental contradiction between the socialization of production and the private ownership of the means of production, and embodies the real subsumption of labor by capital. Socialism with Chinese characteristics strives for the free time of workers by breaking the monopoly of digital capital, promoting the sharing of data factors, and developing new-quality productive forces, so as to promote the fundamental transformation of the "digital collective worker" into a "digital community", which ultimately points to the all-round free development of human beings. It provides a theoretical and practical framework for understanding and criticizing the new forms of contemporary capitalism.
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Zhaolin Fu (2026) studied this question.
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