The Digital Situation: The Present and Future of Systemic Labor-capital Relations

The digital economy has caused improper entanglement of labor-capital relations, and the safety bottom line of labor-capital relations is being challenged. Therefore, exploring the new variables that break the balance of labor-capital power and their mechanism of action is of great significance to provide new insights into the management and government strategies of labor-capital relations in the digital environment in the future. This paper uses the modeling method of cybernetics, from the systematic and structural point of view, along the traditional economy, platform economy and meta-universe economy in order to find out what has happened and will happen in labor-capital relations. It is found that the labor-capital relations in the platform economy mainly produce four new variables, which may push the potential risks to the crisis state. The new variables include employee's main status, systematic control function of labor-capital relations, labor-capital ecology and employee's psychological contract. The meta-universe and the platform economy will eventually coexist. Whether the meta-universe labor-capital relations can enter the control mode of the digital system smoothly is based on the platform labor-capital relations.