capitalism, many more women are active in the paid labour force than 100 or 200 years ago, but housework is still predominantly women’s concern, which creates multiple responsibilities and less free time for them.
10.2.2 Digital Housework and Reproductive Labour
The crucial difference in the analysis of different forms of labour is the one between wage-labour and unwaged labour. Slave-labour, reproductive labour, and unpaid Facebook labour have in common that they are unwaged, but by being integrated into capitalist society nonetheless they create surplus-value. They are therefore productive labour. Not all online activities are labour. For example, listening to music on Spotify based on a monthly subscription is advertising-free. The consumers do not create but consume a commodity. Not all digital labour is unpaid. For example, gold farmers on World of Warcraft or online freelancers tend to conduct their labour via Internet and to produce digital outputs, but are mostly paid. In this section, we focus on Facebook usage when speaking of digital labour.
Kylie Jarrett (2016) uses the notion of the digital housewife for pointing out parallels between unpaid online labour and houseworkers’ domestic, reproductive labour. She argues that the social worker has not emerged in contemporary capitalism but has, in the form of houseworkers, always been an essential part of surplus-value production in capitalism.
Parallels between housework and Facebook labour include that both are unwaged and produce two use-values, of which only one is a commodity (wage-labour in the case of the houseworker, data in the case of the Facebook worker). Affects and social relations form the second use-value. The “Digital Housewife can have real friends on Facebook” (Jarrett 2016, 4). Jarrett argues that both the houseworker and the Facebook worker produce alienable and inalienable objects (p. 123). The first are “inalienable use-values such as pleasure, social solidarity and the general intellect” (p. 98).
Consumer labour is akin to domestic labour not only because it is unpaid and occurs outside of formal factory walls in what is ostensibly free time. It is also akin to it because it is a site of social reproduction: a site for the making and re-making of the social, affective, ideological and psychological states of being that (may) accord with appropriate capitalist subjectivities. (p. 71)
Chapter Ten | Capitalism, Patriarchy, Slavery
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Housework and Digital Labour