Digital society and capitalism

The global dimension of recreational and professional uses of information and communication technologies makes them look universal and almost ahistorical. Aiming to reterritorialize globalized issues, this collection interrogates new forms of digital labour as economic facts and as ideological justifications for the social order, both of which emerged in the United States. Digital Labour and Prosumer Capitalism features contributions from some of the leading theorists of value and labour in the digital age, as well as incisive case studies of swiping technologies, collaborative consumption, and convergent media. It explores the two core dynamics at the heart of digital work: tasks, or services, are broken down into components or modularized, and users work for no pay and become 'prosumer'. Placing digital labour and prosumption within the wider political economy, this volume presents a deeply contextualized critical account of the forces which shape contemporary subjects, networks, and work practices. The enrolment of consumers into production attempts to undermine labour rights, benefiting US digital corporations. Yet digital labour may ultimately challenge the capitalist logic, as user disregard for property rights extends from bits to atoms.

2018

The digital sphere can be studied as one of the most mature materialisations of the process of abstraction that accompanies capitalism. It is also a framework where subjectivity internalises the abstract form of commodities even further. In this sense, the Internet is the home of an abstract nature that is linked to a particular reification process that characterises post-Fordist production and consumption. This process can be named “eidetisation”. My basic assumption is that the process of reification is being intensified with the digitalisation of the capitalist system. I will begin discussing the concept of reification as a specific form of alienation, stressing that the reification of society changes and intensifies in as much as capitalist production and consumption evolve. Then I will consider the process of abstraction as one of the main elements of reification. Finally, I will try to identify some distinctive traits within the process of “eidetisation”.

Stream: Culture/Politics/Technology, 8 (1), 4-8.

This working paper was written as a seminar presentation and was intended as a first conceptual framing for an ongoing research project. Explorations into today’s labour context reveal a wide schism between those workers who live under conditions of precarity and contingency and those who seem to be living the dream – and not only in terms of wages. The standardized work day and Taylorized division of labour that characterized most of the industrial era has transitioned, at least in large part, into a regime of flexibility and insecurity that reconstitutes not only working but lifestyle conditions. This paper is intended as an initial con- ceptual investigation of a dual trend in the conditions of labour under digital capitalism: the rise of contractual contingency and insecurity and the introduction of fun and hipness into the office envi- ronment as a means of work intensification.

New Technology Work and Employment, 2017

This is a book of papers originally presented at a workshop entitled 'Marx's Labour Theory of Value in the Digital Age' which was held in June 2014 at the Open University of Israel under the auspices of the EU COST network on The Dynamics of Virtual Work. The question of value production and the valorisation of capital in the era of digitisation (which is inseparable from financialisation and globalisation) has attracted special social scientific and political attention recently. The starting point of this book is the question of how the process of extracting value from labour has changed with the recent digitisation of work under capitalism. In their introductory chapter, Fisher and Fuchs stress the importance of this Marxian theoretical tradition and devote most of it to an overview of his writings on labour, value, productive labour and rent. In the first part of the book entitled 'Foundations', Fuchs discusses productive labour and rent. He argues that 'the concept of rent is mistaken for understanding the political economy of Facebook and […] Facebook users are productive transport workers who communicate advertising ideologies that make use-value promises. Their activities are productive labour (1, 2, 3)' (p. 38). By 1, 2, 3 he means Marx's three central criteria for productive labour: that it produces use-values, that it produces capital and surplus-value for accumulation, and that it includes combined or collective labour for these purposes. In the second article in this section, Sandoval argues for an inclusive approach to cultural labour. She criticises optimistic theories of the information society and cultural work which focus almost entirely on immaterial labour, insisting that we 'consider both the hands and brains of cultural production to avoid mystifying the materiality of digital culture' (p. 43). She stresses the importance of the technological basis of today's information, communication and knowledge production and sees the global division of labour in global value chains as 'the dirty secret of the digital revolution'. This argument echoes Raymond Williams's materialist critique of a merely idealist concept of culture and cultural work, and is supported by examples of the value chains and the accompanying social inequalities of big cultural producers like Apple and Google. The second part of the book deals with 'Labour and Class'. Lund sets out a critique of the concept 'playbour' by analysing play, game, work and labour to show that 'play and labour are […] each other's opposites: a qualitative noninstrumentality and a quantitative instrumentality' (p. 67). Work by Hannah Arendt and Moishe Postone is deployed in support of this argument, and the author concludes that peer production with its focus on use-values and free associations has an emancipatory potential because it transcends the division of labour and alienation in 'a generalised workplay or playwork' (p. 76). Recent labour statistics reveal more than twelve million Internet workers in China, and Xia's chapter places them within an analysis of the Chinese class structure. They regularly work overtime without proper pay, suffer high work intensity, mostly low workplace autonomy and precarious insecurity. They are highly educated, but most of them work in private firms which have poorer pay

TripleC, 2024

This paper deals with the question of how the process of digitalisation on the technical basis of the computer can be described in Marxist categories and what consequences are foreseeable as a result. To this end, the first section shows, based on a historical analysis of the emergence of the computer, that this apparatus was invented as an instrument of a division of human mental labour and thus complementary to the division of physical labour. It is therefore necessary to analyse computers and digitalisation in their relation to human beings and human labour. In the second section, the central ideology of digitalisation is elaborated, which is supposed to make the current form of digitalisation appear meaningful for people and society: The anthropomorphisation of the computer, which was said to be increasingly able to think, speak, and learn like humans, to become more and more intelligent, and to be able to do everything better than humans once the technical singularity had been reached. This claim, which has been propagated again and again, is contradicted on various levels. The computer operates on about two dozen simple mathematical, logical, and technical commands and can do nothing but run one programme at a time, developed and entered by programmers on the basis of behavioural or physical data. This sometimes produces amazing results because the computer can work quickly and systematically as well as reliably. But in contrast to humans, it faces the world as a behaviouristic machine that can neither understand meaning nor reflect its own or human behaviour. The computer also "sees" and "hears" its environment only on a physical basis and it "thinks" at best on a statistical basis if the programme tells it to do so. The apparatus can therefore simulate mechanical machines, but in interaction with humans its actions and reactions are, as any machine, not socially oriented, but dependent on whether humans interpret them as meaningful und useful. The third section elaborates on the complementarity of mental and physical divisions of labour. This would be a central theme of a critical Marxism for an analysis of digitalisation today, which understands the previous capitalism from the division of physical labour. Even though there are some theoreticians who have contributed to this, so far there is no comprehensive theory of it. Therefore, section 4 wants to contribute to such a theory by collecting empirical observations in an interpretive way regarding the related questions. In this way, it becomes clear how the division of people's intellectual labour made possible by the computer is being dealt with today: Capitalism is reorganising more and more areas of human life such as mobility, social relations, education, medicine, etc. through the use of the computer. As a result, first and foremost the business fields of the digital economy are expanding. Moreover, capitalism no longer has to limit itself to controlling the field of production but is increasingly intervening in the whole symbolic world of people. Consequently, according to the thesis, we are heading for an expanded capitalism that will increasingly restrict and reduce both democracy and people's self-realisation. Section 5 emphasises once again that a different digitalisation is also possible, one that serves humanity and not capitalism. Further, some summarising and comments are added there.

Journal of Human and Social Sciences (JOHASS), 2023

The study examines the phenomenon of individualization of labour, which has increased with the concept of digital capitalism. The principal argument of the study is that the individualization of labour has increased with digital capitalism; this phenomenon can be examined with the increase of remote working. First, the importance of digital capitalism to capitalism is questioned. Is digital capitalism the occurrence of capitalism in digital spaces? Is digital capitalism a new era of capitalism? Although the individualization of labour is a concept emphasized by Manuel Castells, it needs to be examined in depth. Is isolation meant by the individualization of labour, or is the emphasis on the processes of non-unionization? With the answers to these questions, the phenomenon of individualization of labour is examined through the example of remote work. Remote work is concentrated in the service area, which can be expressed as the sector where digital capitalism is experiencing. In this sense, remote work is a useful example to understand both digital capitalism and the phenomenon of individualization of labour.

Political Quarterly, 2020

This article introduces the Special Issue on the Politics of Postcapitalism. Considering the theoretical foundations, empirical perspectives and political ramifications of claims made about a coming ‘post-work’ or ‘post-capitalist’ society, it maps existing debates through a discussion of two key recent texts, Paul Mason’s Clear Bright Future and Aaron Bastani’s Fully Automated Luxury Communism. It first surveys how the relationship between labour market trends, technological change and wider political-economic shifts is articulated in the postcapitalist literature. It then explores how concepts from Marx are deployed to depict social relations as a constraint on technological development and its utopian potentialities, leading to political demands for new class actors and electoral blocs centring on the new forms of economic and political activity associated with digital networks. It also considers the role of the state and how this theoretical and political approach envisions historical change, situating utopian visions of an incipient postcapitalist alternative to capitalism within the contemporary political context of authoritarian populism and and challenges to liberal democracy. Finally, it explores the continuing relevance of humanism as a critical counterpoint to the social and philosophical agenda of present-day ‘posthumanism’. It is concluded that, in unfavourable political conditions, it would be strategically unwise to stake too much on an overoptimistic approach to the unfolding future. This outlook, it is suggested, carries considerable risks and consequences for a contemporary left in search of a viable electoral coalition and route back to power.

Theorists of post capitalism have recently argued for a more or less inevitable end to capitalism. They assume that private accumulation is systematically blocked by the inability of capitalist corporations to create revenues by setting prices as they lose control over the reproduction of their commodities and that in this process, capitalist labour will eventually disappear. Drawing on a case study of Amazon and thoughts on the policies of other leading digital corporations, we challenge these assumptions. Key corporate players of digitization are trying to become powerful monopolies and have partly succeeded in doing so, using the network effects and scaling opportunities of digital goods and building socio-technical ecosystems. These strategies have led to the development of in part isomorphic structures, hence creating a situation of oligopolistic market competition. We draw on basic assumptions of monopoly capital theory to argue that in this situation labour process rationalization becomes key to the corporation's competitive strategies. We see the expansion of digital control and the organizational structures applied by key corporate players of the digital economy as evidence for the expansion of capitalist labour, not its reduction.

Triplec Communication Capitalism Critique Open Access Journal For a Global Sustainable Information Society, 2014

On the face of its virtual and immaterial appearance, digital labour often is seen as a phenomenon of abstract work. Contrary to that common understanding, in Marx's theory the abstraction of labour derives from its historical development into a commodity, splitting human work as all commodities into use-value and exchange-value. Thus the process of abstraction is of economical logic, and not to be explained or characterized by the virtual and immaterial quality that is typical for the means and objects of digital labour. In his early work Marx differentiates between living labouring capacity (Arbeitsvermögen) as the use-value of human work and labour power as its objectified form to be exchanged. In the tradition of Marx's Grundrisse Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge in Geschichte und Eigensinn pointed to the dialectical relationship between the use-value and exchange-value of labour, revealing how labour on its use-value side "contains and reproduces capacities and energies that exceed its realisation in/as commodity", extending the model of labour power "to a whole range of physiological, sexual, social, and national relations" (Negt and Kluge 1993a, xxxiii). While these qualitative and material as well as corporeal aspects of human work are still visible in industrial production processes, they seem to be vanished in virtual work environments. But, digital capitalism not only opens up exploitation to higher levels and new forms (e.g. Fuchs 2012; Scholz 2012), the relevance of human work and its use-value for capitalism becomes more concealed to the same degree as it becomes more significant. The article develops an analytical conception relying on Marx's dialectical distinction between the use-value (labouring capacity) and the exchange-value (labour power), and transforming it into an operationalized model that could be and has been successfully used for empirical studies of digital labour. Labouring capacity has three levels of phenomena: subjectifying corporeal working action, material means and objects of work (even in virtual environments), and the socially and physically experienceable face of globalised work organisation. This analytical concept of labouring capacity (Arbeitsvermögen; Pfeiffer 2004) is especially helpful to reveal the dialectics in digital work and its sources of value creation (Pfeiffer 2013). The article unfolds the theoretical foundations of the concept, and elaborates its potential to analyse digital labour.

New Technology, Work and Employment, 2022

The digital labour debate has produced manifold insights into new forms of work emerging within digital capitalism. So far, though, most research has focused on highly precarious labourers, neglecting the growing ranks of affluent 'tech workers'. I argue that this analytical oversight can be attributed to a narrow con-ceptualisation of digital labour. Thus, this article first proposes a broadening of the digital labour concept to encompass all work entangled with the digital economy. In a second step, I demonstrate the heuristic surplus of this theoretical broadening through a discussion of the empirical literature on tech workers. By bringing tech workers into the debate, I point to the cultural, technological and organisational relations between high and low-paid digital labourers. Pursuing twin-aims, the article combines a theoretical reconsideration of digital labour with an analytical discussion of the literature on tech workers to provide a more relational account of work and class in digital capitalism.

Work Organisation, Labour & Globalisation, 2023

Digitalisation is often associated with the domination of technology over humans. This article aims to develop a concept of self-perpetuation that illuminates the relationship between technology and social domination instead of focusing only on technological properties. Drawing on Marx's concept of real subsumption and interviews in industrial companies, we analyse specific forms of self-perpetuation that take place in the digitalised working world. In doing so, we critically examine the diagnosis of digital Taylorism which assumes a comprehensive elimination of the subjectivity of workers. In contrast, we show that digital technology allows for other forms of domination based on the flexibility of living labour.

Ctheory, 2010

On June 17th 2010, a new CTheory Global Online Seminar on Critical Digital Studies was launched with a discussion of the "Future of Digital Capitalism." Seminar discussion was based on a CTheory article by Michael Betancourt, "Immaterial Value and Scarcity in Digital Capitalism." Live commentaries were provided by Arthur Kroker and Simon Glezos. What follows are the two commentaries as well as a formal response by Michael Betancourt.

2017

Digital work platforms are transforming labor markets around the world. Firms that own, manage and deploy these work platforms have reframed employer–worker relations by defining their core business as the provision of the technology that enables certain services to be provided rather than the provision of those services, and offering their workers independent contractor arrangements rather than employee contracts. This has significant consequences in terms of wages, jobs security and other working conditions. Digital work platforms also increase worker welfare by offering unparalleled flexibility in setting work hours and most permit a workday to be segmented, allowing certain parts of the population who otherwise would not be able to work (due to other commitments or constraints) to have some source of income. At the same time, they pose significant challenges in the labor market. Companies replace employees with contract workers to control costs but this may lead to lower pay, be...

2017

In recent years the birth of ‘digital production’ has spurred a lively theoretical debate in political economy, seeking to understand the implications of ‘immaterial labour’ for the labour theory of value. These discussions have identified a number of theoretical challenges pertaining to the conceptualization of capitalist production in digital space. In particular, scholars have been puzzled by the question of how the notion of ‘abstract labour-time’ applies to immaterial labour, how the ‘free use’ of websites/applications is compatible with ‘commodity production’, what role ‘users’ play in the production process, and whether digital firms can be simply seen as rent-seekers disengaged from value-production altogether. In this paper I present an answer to these questions using Marx’s Circuits of Capital model which allows a clear understanding of ‘commodity production’ and ‘labour-processes’ to be drawn in any microeconomic arrangement. I then complement this theoretical analysis wi...