Digital Labour and Karl Marx

Abstract

George Caffentzis' (2013) efforts to expand Marx's theory of machines (139-203) and his related critique of cognitive capitalism (66-81, 95126); Nick Dyer-Witheford's (1999) attempt to take autonomist Marxism in a different direction than Hardt and Negri; critical political economy of media and communications (McChesney 2008; Mosco 2009); and, the socialist feminism of Ursula Huws (2014) and studies of the workplace culture of the so-called "creative class" (Ross 2009; Boltanski & Chiapello 2005). [...]a variety of modes of production and organizations of the productive.. [...]he offers measured advice that "one should avoid both overstressing and underestimating the role of media technologies in contemporary social movements" (341).

Christian Fuchs. 2014. Digital Labour and Karl Marx. New York and London: Routledge. 403 pages, ISBN 978-0415716161 Paper ($43.95).

During my seminars in the sociology department at Binghamton University, one of three graduate programs in the United States specializing in world-systems analysis, it was not unusual to hear criticisms of Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri, and the wider idea of "cognitive capitalism." They were dismissed as "Eurocentric" and chastised for ignoring older debates. They were seen as recapitulating the dominant ideology, dismissed as "a marxified version of Tom Friedman." Case closed. Move on to more rigorous scholarship.

Unfortunately, the Marxist scholarship on the high technology sectors of contemporary capitalism makes a relatively short reading list: George Caffentzis' (2013) efforts to expand Marx's theory of machines (139-203) and his related critique of cognitive capitalism (66-81, 95126); Nick Dyer-Witheford's (1999) attempt to take autonomist Marxism in a different direction than Hardt and Negri; critical political economy of media and communications (McChesney 2008; Mosco 2009); and, the socialist feminism of Ursula Huws (2014) and studies of the workplace culture of the so-called "creative class" (Ross 2009; Boltanski & Chiapello 2005). While these works each make important contributions, none of them put forward a systemic theorization of contemporary capitalism that is as broad as that offered by Hardt, Negri, and the larger cognitive capitalism school.

Christian Fuchs steps into this void with Digital Labour and Karl Marx. In this ambitious text, Fuchs seeks to affirm Marxist tradition, demonstrate the continuing relevancy of the labor theory of value, and renew the struggle for communism. Despite some problems, Digital Labour and Karl Marx is compelling reading for anyone interested in contemporary capitalism.

The book is organized in three sections. The first positions the book in existing literature, providing both theoretical background and a critique of theories of information society. Fuchs presents a non-dogmatic Marxism that incorporates elements of Frankfurt School, autonomist Marxism, the feminism of Maria Mies, Claudia Von Werlhof, and Veronika BennholdtThomsen. While he does not dismiss either theories of information society or cultural studies, he provides a trenchant critique of both bodies of literature, exposing their implicit celebration of neoliberalism and their often-superficial engagement with Marx. Instead, Fuchs calls for "an institutional revolution that buries prejudices against Karl Marx...[W]e are living in a world with multidimensional global inequalities. Interpreting and changing this world requires us to think about class, crisis, critique and capitalism" (73).

As part of this effort to demonstrate the utility of Marxism to the study of contemporary media, Fuchs puts forward his signature theoretical contribution, what he calls "internet prosumer commodification." Here, he returns to the idea of the "audience commodity," which Dallas Smythe (1977) first advanced to expand the study of mass media beyond the ideology critique and apprehend the role of media in processes of capital accumulation. Traditional mass media formats, radio and television, produce and sell air time for advertisements. The unpaid labor of media consumption, objectified as the "audience commodity," is their primary product. Fuchs expands the concept to apprehend the nature of contemporary unpaid consumption work on the Internet. He appropriates the notion of the "prosumer," first coined to celebrate the blurring of consumption and production as a form of economic and political self-determination. For Fuchs, prosumpution connotes "the outscoring [of] work to users and consumers, who work without payment...The exchange value of the social media prosumer commodity is the money value that the operators obtain from their clients. Its use value is the multitude of personal data and usage behavior..." (99, 103). The shared use of the accumulation strategy by all Internet firms signals the near-complete real subsumpution of social relations by capital. "Social media and the mobile Internet make the audience commodity ubiquitous and the factory not limited to your living and your workplace-the factory is also in all in-between spaces...the entire planet today is a capitalist factory" (111).

Fuchs details this "planetary factory" in the second section of the book, a series of case studies that trace "the international division of digital labour," detailing the global value chain that makes "internet prosumer commodification" possible. He begins with the mining of the minerals that are essential to the production of information and communications technologies (ICTs). Here, he focuses on the Democratic Republic of Congo and the various forms of unpaid labor-outright slavery, corvée labor, and peonage slavery-that characterize this link in the value chain. He moves next to industrial production of ICTs in China's sprawling factory complexes, discusses Indian software engineers, and then pivots to Silicon Valley, where he details both the hyper-exploitation of largely undocumented workers in the ICT manufacturing industry and "a highly paid and highly stressed labour aristocracy that enjoys relative surplus wages at the expense of transforming its life time into work time for Google" (232).

The final two cases focus more on the circulation of commodities: (1) the call centers which organize the transactions and (2) use of social media. Fuchs defines the former as a "Taylorized and housewifized" form of labor. As Taylorized work, it is deskilled and subject to aggressive surveillance. As housewifized work, it takes on the precarious conditions that characterize housework. It is unprotected, always available, and socially devalued. The final case study reviews and further elaborates the earlier section that theoretically defined "internet prosumer commodification." Here, Fuchs makes the distinction between digital labor and digital work, as the analysis blurs into the discussion in the final section of the book concerning the nature of contemporary working class struggle.

As a whole, the international division of digital labor represents "the history and articulation of forms of exploitation" (296). Fuchs argues against the staged history shared by Orthodox Marxists and liberals. Instead, he describes an articulating network of distinct modes of production: "The emergence of a new mode of production does not necessarily abolish, but rather sublates (aufheben) older modes of production" (164). As a result, "a variety of modes of production and organizations of the productive...are articulated, including slavery in mineral extraction, military forms of Taylorist industrialism in hardware assemblage, an informational organization of the productive forces of capitalism that articulates a highly paid knowledge labour aristocracy, precarious service workers, imperialistically exploited knowledge workers" (295-296). While this framework avoids restricting capitalism to wage labor, it also leads Fuchs to stop short of commenting on the systemic totality of historical capitalism. Fuchs sees slavery in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Google's labor aristocracy as somehow articulating with each other, but, absent any historical attention to processes of uneven development or core-periphery differentiation, he never asks why.

The lack of historical depth becomes problematic in the final section of the book, where Fuchs reviews the various claims made about ICT and social movements in the context of Occupy Wall Street (OWS). In contrast to "societal holism that ignores media and technology, technological reductionism that ignores society and dualism that ignores causality," Fuchs advances a dialectical view of social media. He concludes that "social media in a contradictory society...are likely to have contradictory character: they do not necessarily and automatically support/amplify or dampen/limit rebellions but rather pose contradictory potential that stand in contradiction to influences by the state, ideology and capitalism" (331, 333). In short, he offers measured advice that "one should avoid both overstressing and underestimating the role of media technologies in contemporary social movements" (341).

For such an ambitious book, this conclusion is unsatisfying. After advocating return of Marxism, a renewal of the revolutionary spirit, and detailing "the international division of digital labour," Fuchs' concluding question is limited to the role of social media in OWS. While Fuchs acknowledges the similarities OWS shares with other contemporary movements and justifies his case selection on the basis of his language skills, his concluding case study does not begin to address the rich questions his text raises. For example, his reflection on OWS does not address the main political problem introduced in the opening sections of the text: the way the commodity form obscures the connections between global workers laboring in different moments of the international division of digital labor.

The asymmetry between the soaring ambitious of the first two sections and the inadequate conclusion speaks to a larger problem. Fuchs puts too many ingredients in the pot. Much is left uncooked. While the broad scope of the study is admirable, the overall effect is limited by poor execution. Digital Labour and Karl Marx suffers from inelegant prose and poor editing that suggests hurried writing. Paragraphs run on for pages despite clear shifts in emphasis. Identical blocks reappear throughout the book. Abrupt and unclear transitions limit the overall coherence of the argument. These types of mistakes will limit the appeal of the work and provide an easy out for unsympathetic readers.

More importantly, they impede the flow of the book with unnecessary clutter. Better editing and a tightened argument would have created more space to explore some of the wider ramifications that his study raises. His treatment of ecological issues is particularly wanting. In the concluding section, he acknowledges this shortcoming (295-296). This discussion, however, mentions only e-waste-the disposals of ICTs-and ignores a litany of other issues, such as the limited supply of rare minerals used to make ICTs, pollution caused by their production, and the energy and water used to operate them. Throughout the text, Fuchs asserts that the productivity gains of capitalist development have conquered scarcity and made global communism a material possibility. The world-ecological contradictions of contemporary capitalism-and the dream of digital communism, for that matter-remain unexplored.

Digital Labour and Karl Marx is an important book. It takes on important questions: What is the organization and the class composition of digital labor? Are the current struggles of digital workers revolutionary? Fuchs offers the closest approximation of the axial division of labor as it relates to the high technology sectors of contemporary capitalism. This contribution alone makes the Digital Labour and Karl Marx an important work, despite its flaws.

References

References

Boltanski, L. & E. Chiapello. 2005. The New Spirit of Capitalism. London and New York: Verso.

Caffentzis, G. In Letters of Blood and Fire: Work, Machines, and Value in Crisis of Capitalism. Oakland: PM Press.

Dyer-Witheford, N. 1999. Cyber-Marx: Cycles and Circuits of Struggle in High-Technology Capitalism. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press.

Huws, U. 2014. Labor in the Digital Economy: Cybertariat Comes of Age. New York: Monthly Review Press.

McChesney, R. 2008. The Political Economy of Media: Enduring Issues, Emerging Dilemmas. New York: Monthly Review Press.

Mosco, V. 2009. The Political Economy of Communications. London and Thousand Oaks: Sage.

Ross, A. 2009. It's Nice Work if You Can Get It: Life and Labor in Precarious Times. New York: NYU Press.

Smythe, D. 1997. "Communications: The Blindspot of Western Marxism." Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory 1(3): 1-27