These examples sufice to show the relevance of Marcuse’s Hegel interpretation for a critical-dialectical understanding of the contemporary Internet. I will discuss dimensions e) the dialectic of essence and appearance and f) the dialectic of essence and existence in more detail in sections 5 (ideology) and 6 (essence).
4.4. Herbert Marcuse and Digital Labour on Social Media
4.4.1. Three Dimensions of Work
Marcuse (1933, 123) argues that the modern economic concept of labour as wage labour has influenced the general understanding of work and has resulted in ‘the narrowing of the concept’. He distinguishes between a general form of labour (work) that is an essential and foundational category that describes productive human activities in all societies and the economic concept of labour typical for modern societies.
Work has for Marcuse three dimensions: Arbeiten (working as a process), das Gearbeitete (the object of work) and das zu-Arbeitende (the goal of work). Marcuse argues that work has three important characteristics: duration, permanence and burden. The essential duration of work means that it is never finished, work is an ‘enduring being-at and being-in-work’ (ibid., 129). Work is permanent because an object as the result of production is ‘worked into the “world”’ (ibid., 130). That work involves a burden does not necessarily mean for Marcuse that it is toil, but the abstinence from individual pleasure: in work ‘man is always taken away from his self-being and toward something else: he is always with an other and for an other’ (ibid.). Marcuse stresses that work is not just producing a world of goods, but also organises the ‘economics as life’ (ibid., 134). The ‘first and final purpose’ of work is to ‘bring about the being of Dasein itself, in order to ‘secure’ its duration and permanence (ibid., 135).
Marcuse points out the duality of human activity in capitalism that is founded on an antagonism of use-value and exchange-value so that human needs can only be satisfied via the mediation through the commodity form and class relations. Human activity is therefore in capitalism simultaneously concrete and abstract – work and labour.
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Critical Theory of Communication