Jack Qiu (2016, chapter 4) also identifies free consumer labour as a form of slavery that he calls manufactured iSlavery. The implication of his analysis is that users of advertising-funded online platforms are Facebook slaves, Google slaves, etc., who are coerced by advertising, monopolies, play and the addiction to commodity and media consumption into working without payment for advertising-based media. Qiu writes that the manufactured iSlave shows “voluntary servitude”, in which “[a]ddiction becomes enslavement” (p. 111). The manufactured iSlave is a mind-slave – her or his mind is enclosed by the dominant class’s logic.
Slavery can be used as a more restrictive or more expansive term. Marx did both at once. He on the one hand saw the differences between slave-labour and wagelabour by stressing that slavery is the most unfree and life-threatening form of labour. He however also stressed certain parallels between pure slavery and other class relations. So, for example, he characterised patriarchy as a system in which “the wife and children are the slaves of the husband” (Marx and Engels 1845, 52) and spoke of capitalism’s “two poles of Capital and Wage-slavery” (Marx 1871, 335). Every class relation at least bears traces and has certain features of slavery because it always entails some form of unfreedom and coercion. There are historical dialectics of slavery.
But there are also reasons for not expanding the term slavery to every form of exploitation. There is a tendency for commonality in that slave-labour, reproductive labour, and Facebook labour are highly exploited and are unpaid forms of labour, in which all labour-time tends to be surplus-labour-time. But there is also a difference in respect to the difficulty of refusing labour, that is in respect to the political dimension of political economy that governs human activity, labour-power, and labour-time. Regular wage-workers because of their double freedom can leave their employer’s factory or office at the end of the working day. They have to return in order to earn a wage, but they can also choose to search for another job, which is a relative freedom within unfreedom. In contrast to the wage-worker, the Congolese miner extracting coltan at gunpoint cannot leave the mine without being shot. He is a slave. Some Foxconn workers cannot leave the factory because they are locked into their contracts and into the factory walls all day and night. They too are slaves.
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Themes