2.3.4 Play Labour at Google
Engels describes a faction of the working class that was relatively privileged. These were workers whose “state of misery and insecurity in which they live now is as low as ever” (CWCE, 321). He terms these workers the labour aristocracy, “an aristocracy among the working-class” (engineers, carpenters, joiners, bricklayers) that has “succeeded in enforcing for themselves a relatively comfortable position” (CWCE, 321). Lenin (1920, 194) uses the notion of the labour aristocracy for “workers-turnedbourgeois”, “who are quite philistine in their mode of life, in the size of their earnings and in their entire outlook”. “They are the real agents of the bourgeoisie in the working-class movement, the labour lieutenants of the capitalist class”.
Software engineers are a digital labour aristocracy. They tend to earn very high wages, which gives them a privileged position. The demand for their labour-power is very high. Although many software engineers are relatively rich money-wise, they are socially poor. They often lack social relations friendships, outside of the office. They spend most of their time in offices such as the Googleplex, where they work long hours. Many software companies want to keep them in the office by providing facilities for sports, entertainment, relaxation, etc. The Googleplex more looks like a playground than an office. In the life of software engineers, labour and play converge. Google workers are playworkers, workers for whom labour feels like play.
Google workers in comparison to ICT manufacturers have much higher wages and privileges, which also means that they are more unlikely to resist, which is, as Engels describes, typical for the labour aristocracy: “they are very nice people indeed nowadays to deal with, for any sensible capitalist in particular and for the whole capitalist class in general” (CWCE, 321).
This passage from Friedrich Engels’s book The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844 describes typical working conditions in the phase of the industrialisation of capitalism: work in factories was mentally and physically highly exhausting, had negative health impacts, and was highly controlled by factory owners and security forces.
Chapter Two | Friedrich Engels in Digital Capitalism
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The Digital Condition of the Working Class Today