In a digital capitalist society, transnational digital corporations such as Uber, Deliveroo, Fiverr, or Upwork are the contemporary middlemen that exploit digital pieceworkers.
2.3.6 Facebook Labour
In the book The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, Engels (1892, 131–132) gives a definition of materialism:
According to the materialist conception, the determining factor in history is, in the last resort, the production and reproduction of immediate life. But this itself is again of a twofold character. On the one hand, the production of the means of subsistence, of food, clothing and shelter and the implements required for this; on the other, the production of human beings themselves, the propagation of the species.
Materialism in society is the insight that social production is the key factor of all societies and social realms. What Engels’s passage allows us to understand is that social production as the foundation of society is not limited to the office and the factory, but extends into all realms of society, including the family. Engels’s formulation has been influential on and led to discussions in Marxist and socialist feminism (e.g. Barrett 1980, 48–49, 131–132; Eisenstein 1979; Federici 2012, 1; Fraser and Jaeggi 2018, 32; Gimenez 1987; Haug 2015; Leacock 2008, 13–29; Notz 2020; Rowbotham 1973, 47; Sayers, Evans and Redclift 1987; Vogel 1996).
Although there is besides agreement lots of criticism of Engels’s formulation, its importance lies in the stress that reproductive labour such as housework is a very important aspect of capitalism. It allows a focus on the economic dimension of the household where labour-power is reproduced. Rejecting interpretations that Engels separates gender oppression from class, Martha Gimenez (1987) argues that Engels’s formulation should be interpreted dialectically. “Dialectically, that is the meaning of Engels’s term, ‘twofold’. To speak of the twofold nature of production is to refer, at the metatheoretical level, to its fundamental moments or aspects” (Gimenez 1987, 40). Gimenez argues that Engels stresses that class and gender oppression have different and united dynamics that are interacting, interconnected and entangled through (re) production and labour.
Chapter Two | Friedrich Engels in Digital Capitalism
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The Digital Condition of the Working Class Today