In digital capitalism, one also finds a form of absolute surplus-value production in software and other companies that employ highly skilled and highly paid engineers, who are incentivised to spend long hours and their life in office complexes such as the Googleplex where the boundaries between labour/play, working time/leisure time, office/home, workers/friends and family blur. The result is that the digital labour aristocracy works very long hours and has high wages but suffers from social poverty, that is, a lack of work/life balance, friendships and social life outside of the workplace. Digital platform workers are what Engels and Marx characterised as piece-wage workers. Engels’s stress on reproductive labour in The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State reminds us that in capitalism there are unremunerated unpaid forms of labour, such as housework and Facebook usage, that create commodities such as labour-power and advertising space. In digital capitalism, we find digital houseworkers who are unpaid and highly exploited (see Jarrett 2016).
The international division of digital labour means transnational digital corporations global outsourcing of labour in order to maximise profits. The question arises what potentials there are for working-class struggles against exploitation in digital capitalism. The next section addresses this issue.
2.4 Working-Class Struggles in Digital Capitalism
CWCE’s chapter 8 “Labour Movements” analyses the role of working-class struggles in capitalism. In this chapter, Engels identifies and analyses different types of workingclass struggles: (a) crime, (b) the destruction of machinery, (c) trade unions, and (d) political movements.
Chapter Two | Friedrich Engels in Digital Capitalism
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Working-Class Struggles in Digital Capitalism