In digital capitalism, strikes need to add new digital dimensions of struggles in order to be effective. On the one hand, given that lots of news consumption and everyday communication take place via social media, unions and labour movements should be present on social media and should mobilise and organise via social media and communicate their goals using hashtags, video platforms, social networking sites, messenger apps, blogs, memes, digital images, digital animations, etc. On the other hand, digital corporations such as Google, Facebook, and Amazon accumulate capital online, which is why digital strikes against such companies should make use of userboycotts, which helps to disrupt these corporations profit-making and allows putting pressure on them when making demands. An example of the digital strike is Adbuster’s #OccupySiliconValley, a one-day digital strike against Facebook, Amazon, Apple, and Google that took place in September 2018. It called on users not to use these platforms for one day. Given that online usage of platforms such as Facebook and Google is not just consumption but also labour, a Facebook- and Google-boycott is also a labour strike. The digital workers put their eyeballs to rest or direct them elsewhere, which disrupts digital value creation. The campaign call read:
Big Tech competes for one thing: our attention. They exploit our basic human instincts in the pursuit of unprecedented financial and cultural control. […] You can turn September 17th into DO NOTHING DAY [….] Partake in a oneday embargo against tech altogether. […] On September 17th, each one of us, in our own sweet way, will participate in a global takedown of Big Tech! […] Make the Internet ours again.<sup>3</sup>
With respect to political struggles, Engels was a supporter of the Chartist movement, a political reform movement that struggled for suffrage and was associated with the English working-class movement. Engels writes that the Chartists “wish to put a proletarian law in the place of the legal fabric of the bourgeoisie” (CWCE, 235). Chartism was for Engels a “class movement” that aimed at “Chartist democracy”
Chapter Two | Friedrich Engels in Digital Capitalism
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Working-Class Struggles in Digital Capitalism
3 http://abillionpeople.org/occupy-silicon-valley/, accessed on 11 July 2020.