This paper critiques two dominant perspectives on agency within digital capitalism. Proponents of the cognitive capitalism thesis claim that cognitive labourers develop a novel, autonomous subjectivity that escapes capitalist control, potentially enabling a post-capitalist transformation. In contrast, Steinhoff (2021), drawing on Ramtin (1991), argues that the application of AI and digital machinery erodes intellectual labour and reinforces capital’s dominance, giving rise to capital as a “non-metaphorically autonomous” agent. I argue that both perspectives mirror each other: the alleged autonomy of labour in cognitive capitalism finds its counterpart in the autonomy of capital in Steinhoff’s account. Building on Evald Ilyenkov’s critique of cybernetics and his conception of thinking as socially and bodily constituted, I show that both views rely on a fetishistic and individualistic conception of agency. From Ilyenkov’s standpoint, agency is irreducibly social, emerging from historically specific forms of labour and collective activity—an aspect absent in both accounts.
