To my knowledge, no mobile phone or laptop exists that has not been produced as part of the imperialist division of labour that characterises digital capitalism. The political task is to question the capitalist character of media, culture, communications, and the Internet and to find ways to transform them into and defend them as common and public goods. Given the global conditions of exploitation, the contradictions of the international division of digital labour result again and again result in class struggles.
Foster and McChesney argue that “capitalist contradictions with Chinese characteristics” (Foster and McChesney 2012, 157) feature the overinvestment in construction and urban real estate, weak consumption, extreme exploitation, rising inequality, unused infrastructure, discrimination of rural migrant labour, pollution, and environmental degradation. Media reports about China in the West tend to ignore the active political culture of working class and social struggles stemming from these contradictions. A better world can only be the result of social struggles. “The emancipation of the working class must be the work of the working class itself“ (Marx and Engels 1879, 555). According to data by China Labour Bulletin, 1276 strikes took place in China during 2014.<sup>11</sup> China is not a monolithic society, but one with very active and vivid working class struggles against exploitation. One example is that in October 2014 1000 workers went after earlier labour unrest in June on strike for wage increases at Foxconn Chongqing.<sup>12</sup>
The short-term perspective for digital working class struggles should be the formation of worker-controlled companies in the digital and cultural industries at all levels of organisation and over the entire globe, no matter if it concerns social media organisations, software engineering, the cultural freelance economy, mineral extraction, or ICT assemblage. In the medium term the perspective should be to overcome the capitalist organisation of these spheres together with capitalist society. The question what role the national and/or the international dimension of social struggles against digital capitalism should have is in this context a matter for strategic political debates. In an address of the International Workingmen’s Association, Marx argued that “in order to oppose their workers, the employers either bring in workers from abroad or else transfer manufacture to countries where there is a cheap labour force” (International Workingmen’s Association 1867, 422). It is true today as it was true at the time of Marx that if “the working class wishes to continue its struggle with some chance of success”, then the adequate response to global capitalist rule that “the national organisations must become international” (International Workingmen’s Association 1867, 422).
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11 China Labour Bulletin Strike Map, http://www.numble.com/PHP/mysql/clbmape.html
12 China Labor Watch: Thousands of Foxconn workers strike again in Chongqing for better wages, benefits. http://www.chinalaborwatch.org/newscast/395, accessed on October 8, 2014.