Crowds and Party · 第 17 页

Looked at most broadly, the demographics of recent protests point to heavy involvement by those who are young, well educated, and un- or underemployed. Because of communicative capitalism’s tight labor market, they encounter a decreasing return on their investment in education. In 2014, more than 80 percent of low-wage workers in the US had at least a high school degree; nearly 11 percent had bachelor’s degrees.³⁴ As more people wind up in jobs for which they are overqualified, they end up pushing those without a college education out of the labor market entirely, thereby contributing indirectly to long-term unemployment.³⁵ In this regard, it should be noted that in 2013 the occupations employing the largest numbers of people in the US were all in the service sector: retail sales, cashiers, food service, office workers, nursing, and customer service.³⁶ The annual income of three of the top four occupations in the US (determined by percentage of the workforce)—retail, cashiers, and food service—is below the poverty line.³⁷

Alongside the large-scale movements like 2011’s Occupy, the movement of the squares in Spain and Greece, and the Arab spring, as well as 2013’s protests in Turkey and Brazil, there has been a wide array of strikes and actions by others we might think of as proletarianized communicative laborers. In the US, the protests of civil service workers in Wisconsin in 2011 and the Chicago teachers’ strike of 2012 stand out. Globally, the strikes are virtually innumerable. Consider just one month, March 2014.³⁸ That month there were strikes of public sector and airport workers in Germany, cleaners at the University of London, civil servants, teachers, doctors, and pharmacists in Greece, teachers and education support workers in Western Australia, and non-teaching staff and postal workers in India; there was a telecom strike in Ghana and a sit-in at an airport in Sudan in protest over the contracting-out of security jobs; seven thousand doctors in South Korea went on strike in opposition to plans to introduce telemedicine and for-profit hospital subsidiaries. And this is just a partial list for March. Nonetheless, it points to the active, ongoing, but still disconnected struggles in the workplaces of communicative laborers.

Given changes in the workplace associated with increased use of technology, flexibilization, and precaritization, and linked to the decline of unions, we should not expect class struggle in communicative capitalism to manifest primarily as workplace struggles. Communicative production takes place throughout the social field. That a struggle doesn’t take the form of a classic workplace struggle, then, doesn’t mean that it’s not class struggle. Student, debt, housing, and education protests need to be understood in terms of the class politics of those encountering proletarianization, not as separate and specific issue-based politics. On the flipside, that a primary organizational feature of the recent protests has been the general or mass assembly, often in parks or public squares, should also not misdirect us away from class struggle. Incidentally, this is one of the interesting features of the mainstream emphasis on the fact that Occupiers were always on their phones uploading video and tweeting and all the rest: for some contingent and mobile workers, the park is a workplace. Phones are means of production. When they occupy, communicating activists put these means of production to a use of their own choosing, not capital’s (although capital can still expropriate their content and metadata).

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