Physical digital labour creates minerals and ICT components that are assembled into digital media technologies. It involves extractive and industrial digital labour. Digital information workers use this technological infrastructure in order to create digital contents and data that are sold as commodities. Physical and informational digital work can take place within various social relations of production, including slavery, freelance labour, wage labour, feminised labour, unpaid labour, etc. In the case that these relations are class relations, we speak of digital labour. In contrast, if we have to do with communist relations of production, in which there are no class relations but common property and common production, we merely speak of digital work. Digital work is a more general term than digital labour. All digital labour is digital work, but not all digital work is digital labour. Table 2.1 shows an overview of relations of production into which digital work can be embedded. It is based on a distinction between diferent forms of ownership (self-control, partly self-control and partly alien control, full alien control).
Lukács’ Ontology is a general theory of society that draws attention to the importance of work, language, and communication in general. However, it is also an ontology of class-based society, in which he analyses the role of labour and ideology.
2.3. Labour and Ideology
2.3.1. Ideological Labour
We have seen in the previous section that for Lukács, cultural workers create culture, which means that also ideologies are created by labour, namely ideological labour. Lukács makes clear that not every cultural work creates ideology, but cultural products can turn into ideology if they serve dominative interests in classbased societies. Critiques of ideology such as Critical Discourse Analysis, often with the help of text and visual analysis, focus on uncovering the structure of ideologies, but neglect the working conditions under which concrete humans and organisations create ideologies, whereas labour studies often focus on the study of working conditions and neglect how ideologies frame labour and capital (see: Fuchs, 2015, chapter 3). Lukács’ approach allows us to understand that labour and ideology are inherently connected: there is ideology-producing and -communicating labour – ideological labour – just like there are ideologies of and about labour.
Georg Lukács as a Communications Scholar
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