Florian Butollo is a Research Fellow for Globalisation, Work, and Production at the Weizenbaum Institute for the Networked Society, Berlin.

Sabine Nuss is managing director of the Karl Dietz Verlag. As a political scientist, she has published books on Karl Marx's analysis of capitalism, economic crises in capitalism, digitalisation and automation.

A wide-ranging, myth-busting and balanced materialist account of an overheated discourse

Introduction - Florian Butollo and Sabine Nuss
1. Automation: Is It Really Different This Time? - Judy Wajcman
Part I: Productive Force between Revolution and Continuity
2. 'Voracious Appetite for Surplus Labour' - Elena Louisa Lange
3. Industrial Revolution and Mechnisation in Marx - Dorothea Schmidt
4. A Long History of the 'Factory Without People' - Karsten Uhl
5. The Journey of the 'Automation and Qualification' Project - Frigga Haug
6. 'Forward! And Let's Remember' - Christian Meyer
Part II: Robots in the Factory - Vision and Reality
7. High Tech, Low Growth: Robots and the Future of Work - Kim Moody
8. Productive Power in Concrete Terms - Sabine Pfeiffer
9. Drones, Robots, Synthetic Foods - Franza Drechsel and Kristina Dietz
Part III: Digital Work and Networked Production
10. Networked Technology and Production Networks - Florian Butollo
11. Computerisation: Software and the Democratisation of Work as Productive Power - Nadine Müller
12. Designing Work for Agility and Affect's Measure - Phoebe V. Moore
Park IV: Platform Capitalism under Scrutiny
13. Old Power in Digital Garb? - Christine Gerber
14. The Machine System of the Twenty-first Century? - Felix Gnisa
15. Digital Labour and Prosumption under Capitalism - Sebastian Sevignani
16. Artificial Intelligence as the Latest Machine of Digital Capitalism - For Now - Timo Daum
17. Forces and Relations of Control - Georg Jochum and Simon Schaupp
Notes on Contributors
Notes
Index