They’re wrong about informatization – instead, capitalism is going through a process of digitalization that has infinite potential.

Ever since the initial emergence of the capitalist merchant, the productive “waiting period” discussed by Polanyi has undergone dramatic changes. It is now characterized by ceaseless improvements in manufacturing processes and technologically ever more sophisticated efforts to replace human labor. The activities of the “waiting period” are supported by a multitude of social trends and political measures that effectively reduce the price of human labor. Polanyi never shone an analytical spotlight on the inner pro-cesses that occur during this waiting period. For Marx, however, this is the point at which many very different actions for increasing absolute and relative added value are consum-mated. Herein lies the motor of permanent change in productive forces, which he under-stands to be an interconnected economic and societal arrangement.

Digitalization is without question an increasingly dominant part of current develop-ments in productive forces. What makes it new (also in contrast to the precursor phase of “informatization”) is the promise that purchasing (i.e., the acquisition of raw materials and labor), production (i.e., the “waiting period” when value is generated), and sales7 (i.e., the realization of value) all become possible without interruption and without hav-ing to take local, personal, or material realities into account. It is the promise of maxi-mum flexibility and exact calculability. This uncoupling from the constraints of material reality had begun already in Polanyi’s commercial society, but with the new pos-sibilities of digitalization it is taking a giant leap forward.

Changes in the importance of sales to the production process come with a significant economic impact and impart to all sales activities a newly transformative potential. With constantly increasing productivity globally, pressure grows to guarantee the realization of value immediately after production in a crowded and competitive field of suppliers. For analyzing these dynamics and their implications, I use the concept of distributive forces, by which I mean all technological and organizational strategies and activities designed to effect (and guarantee) the realization of value

In the developed capitalism of our days, the central problem is the realization of created values on markets. Strategies of market expansion and consumption are becoming the more relevant field for competition. In addition to the productive forces directed toward the generation of value, those directed toward the realization of value are gaining dominance. This has economic reasons that lie in the logic of our econ-omic system, and is not a consequence of digitization. In order to be able to shed more light on this shift in meaning analytically and empirically, these special pro-ductive forces are given their own name here: distributive forces. They include, first, all technological and organizational measures and activities associated with the realiz-ation of value, the intention of which is, second, to extend this realization of value guaranteed as possible, to secure it in the long term and to do so with the lowest poss-ible circulation costs. This is precisely where digitization and digital business models prove to be particularly promising.