11.4 Conclusion
Apple has marketed the iPhone 5 as being made “for the colourful” and the iPhone 6 as being “bigger than big”. Such slogans communicate that the digital technological revolution has brought about a new and better society that benefits all. Similar ideological promises and claims can be found in the context of phenomena such as social media, cloud computing, big data, the sharing and like economy, crowdsouring, crowdfunding, the maker movement, etc. Such assertions are forms of technological fetishism that assume that technology inherently fosters a good society without analysing the social relations into which it is embedded. In technological fetishism, the “definite social relation between men themselves” assume “the fantastic form of a relation between things”, technological things (Marx 1867, 165).
Confronting what some call the digital or information society with Lenin, Luxemburg, and Bukharin’s classical concepts of imperialism helps us to unmask technological fetishism. The example of Apple shows that digital technology and the ideologies that often positively frame it in advertisements, the press, bourgeois politics, and the public are distorted by the fascination of the new that overlooks the continuities of exploitation in an international division of labour.
Apple achieves high profits in the international division of digital labour by outsourcing manufacturing labour to China, where the Western strategy of “exporting capital abroad” achieves high profits because “wages are low” (Lenin 1917, 241) and the rate of exploitation is high. The exploitation of workers at Foxconn, Pegatron, and other companies in the international division of digital labour shows that “‘[s]weating blood and filth with every pore from head to toe’ characterises not only the birth of capital but also its progress in the world at every step” (Luxemburg 1913, 433). Both these analyses by Lenin and Luxemburg are as true in the 21st century as they were 100 years ago.
The international division of digital labour involves diverse forms of the exploitation of labour, including the labour of slave-miners, Fordist hardware assemblers, highly stressed and highly paid aristocratic workers at playworkplaces in Silicon Valley tech companies, low-paid precarious data processors carrying out deskilled digital labour, highly skilled, creative, and precariously self-employed freelancers in the digital and cultural industries, users who become value-generating play-workers for targetedadvertising financed social media companies, etc. (Fuchs 2014, 2015). This division is organised in global space, which shows that also in digital capitalism capital “needs the means of production and the labour power of the whole globe for untrammelled accumulation” (Luxemburg 1913, 345–346).
Chapter Eleven | Digital Labour and Imperialism
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Conclusion