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# Digital Capitalism

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If reproductive labour were paid at the average wage, then profits would dwindle and capitalism would not be able to survive. This fact shows on the one hand the importance of reproductive labour in capitalism. On the other hand it also indicates capitalism’s inherent drive and need to create milieus of unpaid labour in order to survive. Another measure is the rate of reproductive labour. It measures the ratio between unpaid reproductive labour-time and wage-labour’s surplus-labour-time. For the analysed data, the rate of reproductive labour is 5.14, which means that reproductive labour-time in the total economy is 5.14 times as large as wage-labour’s surplus-labour-time.

Table 10.1 indicates that, on average, each person in the USA engages in 44.53 hours of reproductive labour per week. Commercial media use accounts for 38.75% of this time, which shows that advertising dominates a very significant portion of our lifetime. In 2015, global advertising revenue was £308 billion (Ofcom 2016, figure 1.21). Television advertising totalled £106 billion (34.4%) and online advertising £102 billion (33.1%) (Ofcom 2016, figure 1.21). So TV and the Internet are the two most profitable realms of advertising. At the level of human activities, this results from the fact that we spend large amounts of our free time watching television and using social media: On average, Americans watch 19.5 hours of television per week and spend 12.4 hours on social media (see table 10.1). A significant share of reproductive labour is television audience labour and social media digital labour.

A very important part of housework is made up by household activities such as food preparation, cleaning, lawn and garden care, and household management. According to statistics, US women in 2015 spent on average 48 minutes more time on such activities than men (men: 1.43 hours per day, women: 2.23 hours per day)<sup>1</sup>. Another important activity is caring for and helping others. Whereas, US men spent 0.47 hours per day on caring for and helping others, the amount for women was 0.91 hours. Shopping took up 0.6 hours per day for men and 0.88 hours for women. Taking the averages of these three types of activities allows us to estimate that US women tend to be responsible for, on average, 60% of reproductive labour and men 40%. Reproductive labour is both gendered and racialised. It is predominantly a realm of women, and in the case of paid reproductive labour, low-paid migrant workers and workers of colour form a proportionally very large share of the workforce. Capitalism is inherently connected to patriarchy and racism. The next section further explores this connection in the context of digital labour.

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1 Source: http://www.bls.gov/news.release/atus.t01.htm (accessed on 29 October 2016).

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10.3 Slavery and Racism in the Age of Digital Labour

Capitalism is not just connected to patriarchy but also to racism. When analysing digital capitalism, it is therefore also important to have a look at what forms racism takes in respect to digital media. This section explores this topic in two steps. The first sub-section of this part re-visits debates on the connection of capitalism and racism. The second sub-section builds on this discussion and discusses aspects of racism in the context of digital labour.

10.3.1 Slavery in the Age of Facebook

One of the most important differences between wage-labour, slave-labour, reproductive labour, and Facebook labour concerns their legal status and what makes the workers conduct labour. Slave-workers’ bodies and minds are a private property that the slave-master owns at all time. Slavery is the most reified form of labour, which means that slaves have no rights so that the slave-master can treat them as he pleases and is legally allowed to kill them. So what makes the slave work is in the final instance the fear of being killed or experiencing physical violence. In slavery, “the worker is distinguishable only as instrumentum vocale [vocal instrument] from an animal, which is instrumentum semi-vocale [semi-vocal instrument], and from a lifeless implement, which is instrumentum mutum [silent instrument]” (Marx 1867, 303, footnote 18).

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Whereas, the slave constantly faces the threat of death, wage-labour only does so in particular cases, for example when workers are being asked to conduct lifethreatening work, such as cleaning up nuclear waste. Other than the slave, the wage-worker owns him-/her-self. In Capital (Volume 1, chapter 6) Marx (1867) formulates the unfreedom of wage-labour as the double freedom of labour. Modern labour is free because it is better off than slaves (although slavery has continued to exist in global capitalism), but it is also unfree because it is compelled to be exploited by capital and to having to enter class relations in order to be able to survive. Proletarians’ minds and bodies are not the private property of the dominant class, as slaves are, they are rather compelled by the “silent compulsion of economic relations” (Marx 1867, 899), the violence of the market that makes ordinary people die if they do not obtain money that allows them to buy commodities, which compels many to become wage-workers.

A specific share of women experience domestic violence and economic dependence that force them to conduct reproductive labour against their will and create their fear to leave their partner. So, direct violence can be a means of coercion in the case of housework. But also commitment, solidarity, and love are important driving forces of reproductive labour. Housework can frequently involve hybrids of love and hatred, pain and pleasure, play and toil, care and violence, feelings of self-fulfilment, and alienation. Facebook labour is normally not coerced by physical and psychological violence but by monopoly power, which is a specific form of structural violence. Facebook’s and Google’s absolute market dominance and their restrictive terms of use and privacy policies force users to use these platforms if they do not want to suffer from social and informational disadvantages.

It would be a mistake to assume that the rise of capitalism and wage-labour has brought an end to slavery. Although slavery is older than wage-labour, it continues to exist in specific forms in capitalism. Jack Qiu (2016) speaks of iSlavery in his book Goodbye iSlave: A Manifesto for Digital Abolition, to indicate that slavery is still a reality in the 21st century, where the iPhone has become one of the dominant tools for the organisation of life. Qiu bases his understanding of slavery on the 1926 UN Slavery Convention that foregrounds the ownership of a person by another as the key feature of slavery. The Bellagio-Harvard Guidelines on the Legal Parameters of Slavery (Qiu 2016, 189–196) specify that the ownership of a person can entail buying, transferring, or selling her; exploiting her labour or sexuality; managing such exploitative use; profiting from the use of a person; transferring the slave to another person (e.g. a heir or successor); or physical or psychological mistreatment. These definitions are in line with Marx’s understanding of slavery that foregrounds the unfree character of a slave so that s/he is not in possession of his/her own body and mind.

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According to estimates, in the year 2016 there were 45.8 million slaves in the world (Walk Free Foundation 2016), including high numbers in India, China, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Uzbekistan, North Korea, Russia, Nigeria, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Indonesia, Egypt, and Myanmar (Walk Free Foundation 2016, 30). The same report provides a concise definition of slavery as “situations of exploitation that a person cannot refuse or leave because of threats, violence, coercion, abuse of power or deception, with treatment akin to a farm animal” (p. 158).

Digital technologies are based on minerals such as cassiterite, coltan, gold, cobalt, or wolframite. Large amounts of it are extracted in conflict-ridden regions in the Congo. As a result, rebels and warlords that enslave villagers control some of the mines. Parts of the minerals used in mobile phones, laptops, etc. are based on slave-labour and child labour. This phenomenon has come to be known as conflict minerals (Fuchs 2014, chapter 6). Cobalt is an important mineral for the production of batteries used in phones and laptops. More than half of the world’s supply comes from the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Amnesty International and Afrewatch conducted research in artisanal mining areas in southern DRC in April and May 2015, visiting five mine sites. […] Chronic exposure to dust containing cobalt can result in a potentially fatal lung disease, called ‘hard metal lung disease’. […] Many of the miners complained that they coughed a lot or had problems with their lungs. […] UNICEF estimated in 2014 that approximately 40,000 boys and girls work in all the mines across southern DRC, many of them involved in cobalt mining. The children interviewed by researchers described the physically demanding nature of the work they did. They said that they worked for up to 12 hours a day in the mines, carrying heavy loads, to earn between one and two dollars a day. (Amnesty International 2016, 5–6)

One can be a slave for a limited time period (Qiu 2016, 41)? Qiu documents how Foxconn workers, who manufacture iPhones, iPads, and other digital gadgets, faced “tremendous difficulty […] to quit” and how “student interns were used as inexpensive and involuntary labor on a massive scale” (p. 47). He shows how forced labour and the lack of freedom to quit employment, two types of slavery, exist within the manufacturing domain of the international division of digital labour (IDDL) (see also Fuchs 2014, 2015, 2016, for a detailed discussion of the IDDL). Qiu also documents Foxconn’s refusal to pay out wages to workers, violent and abusive factory guards, and the control of Foxconn workers’ leisure and sleeping time. The example also shows that wage-labour can be a form of slavery. Qiu concludes that Foxconn’s management system should be seen as “institutions and practices similar to slavery” (p. 82). The forms of control exercised include physical violence and structural, bureaucratic violence (forced internships, wage restraint, contracts that cannot be broken, etc.), so that any control of labour-time (its start and end) is forcefully removed from workers decision-power.

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Jack Qiu (2016, chapter 4) also identifies free consumer labour as a form of slavery that he calls manufactured iSlavery. The implication of his analysis is that users of advertising-funded online platforms are Facebook slaves, Google slaves, etc., who are coerced by advertising, monopolies, play and the addiction to commodity and media consumption into working without payment for advertising-based media. Qiu writes that the manufactured iSlave shows “voluntary servitude”, in which “[a]ddiction becomes enslavement” (p. 111). The manufactured iSlave is a mind-slave – her or his mind is enclosed by the dominant class’s logic.

Slavery can be used as a more restrictive or more expansive term. Marx did both at once. He on the one hand saw the differences between slave-labour and wagelabour by stressing that slavery is the most unfree and life-threatening form of labour. He however also stressed certain parallels between pure slavery and other class relations. So, for example, he characterised patriarchy as a system in which “the wife and children are the slaves of the husband” (Marx and Engels 1845, 52) and spoke of capitalism’s “two poles of Capital and Wage-slavery” (Marx 1871, 335). Every class relation at least bears traces and has certain features of slavery because it always entails some form of unfreedom and coercion. There are historical dialectics of slavery.

But there are also reasons for not expanding the term slavery to every form of exploitation. There is a tendency for commonality in that slave-labour, reproductive labour, and Facebook labour are highly exploited and are unpaid forms of labour, in which all labour-time tends to be surplus-labour-time. But there is also a difference in respect to the difficulty of refusing labour, that is in respect to the political dimension of political economy that governs human activity, labour-power, and labour-time. Regular wage-workers because of their double freedom can leave their employer’s factory or office at the end of the working day. They have to return in order to earn a wage, but they can also choose to search for another job, which is a relative freedom within unfreedom. In contrast to the wage-worker, the Congolese miner extracting coltan at gunpoint cannot leave the mine without being shot. He is a slave. Some Foxconn workers cannot leave the factory because they are locked into their contracts and into the factory walls all day and night. They too are slaves.

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And what about the Facebook user? Is s/he a slave too? S/he may spend lots of time on the platform, but can also choose to log-off, to deliberately turn off the computer and phone in order to sleep, spend some time talking to friends and family, make love, enjoy an uninterrupted walk in nature, etc. The Facebook user’s refusal of labour in the social factory is much easier to achieve than the Congolese miner’s refusal. They are both highly exploited, but only the latter is a slave. Nonetheless, all labour and all class relations have certain dimensions of slavery because they are all coerced into labour in particular ways. The exploitation of the wage-worker, the slave, the houseworker, and the Facebook worker are in certain respects different as well as in certain other respects comparable. Only the collective revolt of slaves and other workers exploited by transnational corporations, their collective refusal to labour and search for alternatives, can put an end to capitalism and slavery.

Slaves can be houseworkers and digital workers, but not all houseworkers and digital workers are slaves in the classical sense of the term. A houseworker is a slave if s/he experiences violence that makes her afraid of leaving an abusive relationship. A digital worker is a digital slave if s/he, for example, is by debt bondage forced to work as a gold farmer for a game company and can therefore not choose to leave the job.

Slaves do not have political and social rights. Wage-workers have specific social rights in respect to wages, social security, and trade union representation. Houseworkers only have limited social rights in respect to, for example, child benefits. Being a Facebook worker does not give you particular social rights and mostly very limited legal rights in respect to privacy and data protection. Whereas, the wage-worker has a contractual and legally enforceable right to be paid a wage for the performed labour, slaves, houseworkers, and Facebook workers do not have such a right, which enables their exploitation as unpaid workers. But not all of digital labour and housework are unpaid. Parts of it are conducted as contractual labour. Paid carers and cleaners are an example. These are typically low-paid types of labour, often conducted by migrants and women. The intersection of reproductive labour and wage-labour tends to have a racialised and patriarchal character.

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10.3.2 Racist Ideology and Digital Labour

Africans and Asians are employed in the most exploitative and precarious jobs in the IDDL. In contrast, high paid software engineers – the digital labour aristocracy – in the Western world tend to be predominantly male and white (Fuchs 2014). A structural form of racism operates in the IDDL.

Racism and challenges to racism also operate in the world of social media. On the one hand, racism makes use of social media. Here are two example tweets that were posted one day after Donald Trump won the 2016 presidential election:

#Trump 卐 The end of #WhiteGenocide in America. #Nazi #SiegHeil

President Trump wants to know if you have any last words Mr Soros? #RevengeWillBeSweet #WhiteGenocide #RapeJIhad #RWDS #Trump #Trump16 [+ image of a Nazi shooting a Jewish person]

On the other hand, anti-racism is also present on social media: In December 2016, the Twitter account of Black Lives Matter (@blklivesmatter) had around 195,000 followers and its Facebook group around 240,000 followers.

Commodity fetishism makes capitalism and wage-labour appear as natural properties of society, which tends to ideologically sustain both capitalism and class. Racism is an ideology that often justifies slavery and discriminatory labour practices. Sexism is an ideology that tries to chain women to the household and to create a gender pay gap. On Facebook and in housework, there is inverse commodity fetishism (Fuchs 2014, chapter 11; Fuchs 2015, chapter 5). The workers’ immediate experience is not the production of commodities but the creation of social relations. Digital workers have, as Jarrett (2016, 104) says, friends online. And houseworkers tend to care for those they love. The commodity form is hidden behind the social form so that commodity fetishism tends to take on an inverted form. For houseworkers and Facebook workers, it is not directly experienceable that they produce a commodity for Facebook.

Racism, nationalism, sexism, and other ideologies can create economic, political, and cultural advantages for specific groups in society, typically white men. How does this approach relates to the realm of digital labour? Eileen Meehan (2002) introduced the notion of the gendered audience commodity. The advertising industry tends to base advertising on sexism and to “discriminate against anyone outside the commodity audience of white, 18 to 34-year-old, heterosexual, English-speaking, upscale men” (Meehan 2002, 220).

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According to the UN Human Development Report (United Nations Development Programme 2015), Norway and the USA are two of the world’s richest and most developed countries, whereas the Central African Republic (CAR), the DRC, and Malawi are three of the poorest. In 2014, the gross national income per capita was US \$ 52,947 in the USA, US\$ 64,992 in Norway, US\$ 581 in the CAR, US\$ 680 in the DRC, and US\$ 747 in Malawi. Based on this variable, CAR, DRC, and Malawi were the world’s three poorest countries. Table 10.3 suggests that Facebook calculates and provides for the maximum cost-per-click bid they should offer when presenting ads to users of a specific gender in a specific country.

The data indicate that Facebook’s algorithm is based on sexist and racist logic by assuming that users in poorer countries and poorer users are less valuable consumers, that is less likely to click on ads and to purchase advertised commodities, than male users and users in rich countries. The Facebook data commodity is both gendered and racialised. The digital housewife is not just exploited, but this exploitation is combined with patriarchal and racist algorithmic discrimination that assumes that the poor and the female digital housewife are inferior to the male, rich digital housewife. Therefore, it assumes that the price for one click by the “inferior audience” should be less than one of the “superior audience”.

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