Chapter 10’s title is “Capitalism, Patriarchy, Slavery, and Racism in the Age of Digital Capitalism and Digital Labour”. It asks: How can understanding the relationship of exploitation and oppression inform the study of digital labour and digital capitalism? Chapter 10 combines the analysis of capitalism, patriarchy, slavery, and racism in order to analyse digital labour. The essay presents a typology of differences and commonalities between wage labour, slave labour, reproductive labour, and Facebook labour. It shows that the digital data commodity is both gendered and racialised. It analyses how class, patriarchy, slavery, and racism overgrasp into each other in the realm of digital capitalism. The chapter also introduces the notions of the organic composition of labour and the rate of reproductive labour and shows, based on example data, how to calculate these ratios that provide insights into the reality of unpaid labour in capitalism.
Chapter 11 is focused on “Digital Labour and Imperialism”. Lenin’s Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, Bukharin’s Imperialism and World Economy that were both published in 1917 as well as Rosa Luxemburg’s 1913 work The Accumulation of Capital spoke of capitalism as imperialism. It was a time of strikes for pay rises, Henry Ford’s invention of the first assembly line that laid the foundations for Fordism, World War I, trusts and monopolies, antitrust laws, the October Revolution, the Mexican Revolution, the failed German revolution, etc. It was a time of the extension and deepening of as well as of challenges to capitalism. Chapter 11 first reviews the notion of the role of the international division of labour in classical concepts of imperialism. It then uses these foundations for discussing the role of the international division of labour in the production of information and information technology today and introduces in this context the notion of the international division of digital labour. The overall task is to illuminate the relationship of digital labour and imperialism.
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Introduction