数字资本积累的流通偏向与价值创造阻滞——兼论平台经济“内卷式”竞争的政治经济学本质

The prevalent “involutionary” competition in the current platform economy indicates that the early extensive expansion model of digital capital is facing growth bottlenecks. Deeply rectifying this alienated phenomenon has become a major proposition for improving the socialist market economic system and promoting high-quality development. Based on Marx’s theory of the circuit of capital, this paper transcends the single perspective of technological critique and ex-post antitrust to construct a political economic analytical framework of “circulation bias-value blockage”. It aims to profoundly reveal the alienated logic of capital accumulation behind “involution” and its structural blockage mechanism on the national economic circulation. The study finds that this competitive form, superficially manifested as a zero-sum game for traffic and price wars, is essentially a structural shift in the center of gravity of digital capital accumulation from productive profitability to circulation-based profitability. Under this alienated model, capital operation presents three major characteristics at the micro level: First, pure costs of circulation have broken away from their elastic marketing attributes, mutating from a simple deduction of value into a capital entry threshold with rigid binding force. Second, platform monopoly capital utilizes its monopoly power over market access and algorithmic traffic distribution to construct a digital rent mechanism, forcefully intercepting and absorbing the surplus profit and even the average profit of real industries. Third, platforms rely on algorithmic systems to impose strict spatio-temporal discipline on the labor process in the circulation sphere, achieving the “real subsumption” of labor and leading to severe digital labor alienation and physical exhaustion. Based on this, the key to governing platform “involution” lies in rectifying the path dependence of the circuit of capital and reshaping the dynamic equilibrium between production and circulation. This paper proposes the following: Break down data segregation and “walled gardens” among platforms by building a unified national market, thereby reducing the friction costs of total social capital operation; guide digital technologies and capital to withdraw from the overcrowded traffic monetization segments and turn towards empowering real production, thereby cultivating and expanding new quality productive forces; restrict the excessive deprivation of real profits by digital rent in primary distribution, while strengthening the protection of labor rights and interests in new forms of employment. This will repair the chain of labor reproduction and consolidate the foundation of macroeconomic demand, ultimately realizing the high-quality development of the digital economy.