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# Digital Capitalism

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Figure 2.1 shows a typical Google job-ad. It advertises a variety of jobs such as software engineer, designer, business strategist, marketing, sales support, policy and privacy manager, etc. in Googleplex, the company headquartered in Mountain View, California. Google in this ad lauds itself for proving worker “[o]nsite benefits like fitness and wellness centers”, “a group cooking class”, “coffee tasting”, riding “a gBike to one of our cafés”. The business philosophy is that “taking care of Googlers is good for us all”. The point is that these benefits that promise fun, relaxation and entertainment are “onsite”: They keep Googlers at the Google premises and turn leisure time into labour time. When workers attend yoga and fitness classes, cooking classes, cafés etc. at the workplace, then the reproduction of their labour-power takes place at the workplace so that there is no clear spatial and temporal demarcation of labour time and relaxation. The three images in the job ad symbolise the blurring of space and time at Google: coding, chatting with colleagues in a café, and relaxation in a garden are presented as integral parts of work at Google. Googlers do not leave the workplace for leisure time but stay at the Google workplace. The blurring boundaries between workspace and playground and between work time and leisure time result in an increase of unpaid labour-time. For Google workers, lifetime becomes Google time and value-creating labour-time. What Google means by saying that “taking care of Googlers is good for us all” is that providing a playful work environment is a method of exploitation by absolute surplusvalue production that is good for Google’s profits.

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2.3.5 Precarious Platform Workers

Digital capitalism has also given rise to platform workers. These are workers who mostly are freelancers and use apps and Internet platforms for finding work. Examples are the Uber and DiDi taxi driver, the Deliveroo biker who delivers food, and the online freelancer who uses platforms such as Fiverr, Upwork, or Freelancer for finding work. All of these platforms have in common that they are large capitalist corporations that own a proprietary software programme that platform workers use in order to find customers. The platform is a key means of production that is privately owned by digital corporations. Without access to this platform, freelancers cannot find customers. They depend on this means of production. Formally speaking they are self-employed, but in reality, they are workers who are exploited by digital platforms that control the key means of production as private property and capital. For each service organised via the platform, the capitalist platform corporation typically charges a share of the service price. It makes a profit by renting out its platform to freelancers who produce a service commodity that is sold to customers that are found via the platform’s algorithms. Platform capitalists typically advertise their platforms as enabling flexible work that allows workers to earn lots of money. Figures 2.2 and 2.3 show two examples.

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The Digital Condition of the Working Class Today

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The common narrative of these self-presentations is that freelancer platforms enable and support workers’ freedom to be their own boss and determine their work times themselves, and in doing so earn lots of money. The reality is that platform workers are very often highly exploited, precarious workers who work long hours to survive (see Fuchs 2021, chapters 11 and 12; Fuchs 2017b, chapter 10).

Platform workers are often piece-workers. They are not paid by the hour, but for each completed service, each piece of work. Karl Marx (1867) dedicates chapter 21 in Capital Volume 1 to piece-wages (see also Fuchs 2016, chapter 21). He characterises piece-work and piece-wages as the most fruitful source of reductions on wages, and of frauds committed by the capitalists” (Marx 1867, 694). Platform labour is a contemporary form of piece-labour and piece-wages in digital capitalism that aims at platform capitalists’ reduction of investment costs for maximising profits. If platforms such as Uber had to pay its drivers per hour, it might make much less profit than it does when charging a percentage share of the piece price. Platform capitalism is a dimension of digital capitalism that advances highly precarious labour.

In CWCE, Engels describes the working conditions of needlewomen, who were paid per piece. They were low-paid and conducted highly tiresome labour.

With the same cruelty, though somewhat more indirectly, the rest of the needle-women of London are exploited. The girls employed in stay-making have a hard, wearing occupation, trying to the eyes. And what wages do they get? I do not know; but this I know, that the middleman who has to give security for the material delivered, and who distributes the work among the needle-women, receives 1½d. per piece. (CWCE, 218)

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In a digital capitalist society, transnational digital corporations such as Uber, Deliveroo, Fiverr, or Upwork are the contemporary middlemen that exploit digital pieceworkers.

2.3.6 Facebook Labour

In the book The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, Engels (1892, 131–132) gives a definition of materialism:

According to the materialist conception, the determining factor in history is, in the last resort, the production and reproduction of immediate life. But this itself is again of a twofold character. On the one hand, the production of the means of subsistence, of food, clothing and shelter and the implements required for this; on the other, the production of human beings themselves, the propagation of the species.

Materialism in society is the insight that social production is the key factor of all societies and social realms. What Engels’s passage allows us to understand is that social production as the foundation of society is not limited to the office and the factory, but extends into all realms of society, including the family. Engels’s formulation has been influential on and led to discussions in Marxist and socialist feminism (e.g. Barrett 1980, 48–49, 131–132; Eisenstein 1979; Federici 2012, 1; Fraser and Jaeggi 2018, 32; Gimenez 1987; Haug 2015; Leacock 2008, 13–29; Notz 2020; Rowbotham 1973, 47; Sayers, Evans and Redclift 1987; Vogel 1996).

Although there is besides agreement lots of criticism of Engels’s formulation, its importance lies in the stress that reproductive labour such as housework is a very important aspect of capitalism. It allows a focus on the economic dimension of the household where labour-power is reproduced. Rejecting interpretations that Engels separates gender oppression from class, Martha Gimenez (1987) argues that Engels’s formulation should be interpreted dialectically. “Dialectically, that is the meaning of Engels’s term, ‘twofold’. To speak of the twofold nature of production is to refer, at the metatheoretical level, to its fundamental moments or aspects” (Gimenez 1987, 40). Gimenez argues that Engels stresses that class and gender oppression have different and united dynamics that are interacting, interconnected and entangled through (re) production and labour.

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A key insight from Engels’s The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State for understanding digital labour is that labour extends beyond the factory and the office. The political economist of communication Dallas W. Smythe (1977) stresses that audience labour is labour that produces attention for advertisements. Consumers are audience workers who create the value of the advertisement (see Fuchs 2012). Targeted-advertising–based Internet platforms such as Google and Facebook make a profit based on the analysis of users’ online behaviour, which results in the collection of big data, which allows them to target ads (see Fuchs 2017a, 2021). Users of Google and Facebook are unpaid digital workers, who produce Google and Facebook’s value. They produce social relations, content, data, and meta-data that is appropriated by Google and Facebook and used for targeting and selling ads. Audience and user labour are like housework unpaid forms of productive, value-generating labour that operate beyond wage-labour. But housework and user labour are also quite different (for a discussion of commonalities and differences of wage-labour, slave-labour, housework, and user labour, see Fuchs 2018a). Housework produces and reproduces labour power. It is reproductive labour. Audience and user labour operate as part of the entertainment as reproductive labour in the household. But the audience and user labour also operate outside the home in a variety of social spaces via the use of mobile phones, laptops, tablets, etc. They facilitate the sale of commodities and the realisation of surplus value, that is the generation of profit by commodity sale. Housework makes labour-power saleable on the labour commodity. User and audience labour contribute to the reproduction of labour-power via advertising-financed entertainment. These two forms of labour help selling goods on commodity markets by creating the value of ads.

Engels’s The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State has laid the foundation for the critical comprehension of the extension of the notion of productive labour beyond wage-labour and of the extension of the factory and the office into the household and onto the Internet.

2.3.7 Section Summary

Digital capitalism is based on an international division of digital labour, where a variety of workers is exploited under a variety of working conditions in different countries and working spaces so that transnational digital corporations accumulate capital. Engels in CWCE outlines concepts and analyses that can inspire digital labour analysis in the 21st century. He shows how capital uses technology as a method of relative surplus-value production. In digital capitalism, digital technologies constitute a technological paradigm that advances new forms of automation and rationalisation of labour that have resulted in significant productivity increases so that more capital can be accumulated in less time. Engels also points out the inhumane consequences of absolute surplus-value production, that is, the lengthening of the working day. In digital capitalism, absolute surplus-value production takes on the form of highly exploitative Taylorist work organisation in Chinese hardware assemblage factories owned by companies such as Foxconn or Pegatron, where workers toil long hours to produce the profits of transnational digital corporations such as Apple, Dell, or HP.

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In digital capitalism, one also finds a form of absolute surplus-value production in software and other companies that employ highly skilled and highly paid engineers, who are incentivised to spend long hours and their life in office complexes such as the Googleplex where the boundaries between labour/play, working time/leisure time, office/home, workers/friends and family blur. The result is that the digital labour aristocracy works very long hours and has high wages but suffers from social poverty, that is, a lack of work/life balance, friendships and social life outside of the workplace. Digital platform workers are what Engels and Marx characterised as piece-wage workers. Engels’s stress on reproductive labour in The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State reminds us that in capitalism there are unremunerated unpaid forms of labour, such as housework and Facebook usage, that create commodities such as labour-power and advertising space. In digital capitalism, we find digital houseworkers who are unpaid and highly exploited (see Jarrett 2016).

The international division of digital labour means transnational digital corporations global outsourcing of labour in order to maximise profits. The question arises what potentials there are for working-class struggles against exploitation in digital capitalism. The next section addresses this issue.

2.4 Working-Class Struggles in Digital Capitalism

CWCE’s chapter 8 “Labour Movements” analyses the role of working-class struggles in capitalism. In this chapter, Engels identifies and analyses different types of workingclass struggles: (a) crime, (b) the destruction of machinery, (c) trade unions, and (d) political movements.

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Engels stresses that there are different ways of how workers react to their exploitation. “To escape despair, there are but two ways open to him [the worker]; either inward and outward revolt against the bourgeoisie or drunkenness and general demoralization. And the English operatives are accustomed to take refuge in both”, which resulted in “hundreds of uprising against machinery and the bourgeoisie” (CWCE, 149). At the time when Engels wrote CWCE, the struggles of the working class were particularly focused on the introduction of the ten hours working day. Engels, again and again, refers to these struggles (CWCE, 179, 182–185, 242, 313). Such struggles resulted in the introduction of the Ten Hours Bill 1847 that limited the working day for women and teenagers to a maximum of ten hours.

Engels sees crime as a purely individual reaction and the destruction of machinery as limited to one single dimension of capital’s rule. He propagates the unity of economicclass struggles and political-class struggles. He argues for the “union of Socialism with Chartism, the reproduction of French Communism in an English manner”. In digital capitalism, there is a large number of different cybercrimes, the crime that is committed using digital technologies such as the Internet (see Wall 2007 for an overview discussion of cybercrime). Many Internet users every day receive spam and online scams via e-mails, which are the most widely spread forms of cybercrime. Such forms of cybercrime are not the reactions of a disenfranchised working class, but highly profitable capitalist businesses.

Machine breaking means the resistance against the introduction of machinery and “revolts against machinery” (CWCE, 222). In industrialising England, machine breaking was known as “Luddism”, a movement named after its founder Ned Ludd. “This form of opposition also was isolated, restricted to certain localities, and directed against one feature only of our present social arrangements” (CWCE, 222). In the book The Making of the English Working Class, the Marxist historian E. P. Thompson (1966) makes a more positive assessment of the Luddite movement than Engels (see also Fuchs 2016, 2000–2004). He writes that Luddism was not a blind attack on machinery as end-in-itself, but a well-organised movement that attacked the machines of capitalists that laid-off workers (Thompson 1966, 564). Luddism was a working-class struggle for “a democratic community, in which industrial growth should be regulated according to ethical priorities and the pursuit of profit be subordinated to human needs” (Thompson 1966, 552).

In digital capitalism, one can, again and again, hear suggestions and see initiatives that call for stopping to use of digital technologies. An example is digital detoxing, the conscious choice to stop using digital technologies for certain periods of time. The problem with such strategies is that they often are technophobic and technodeterministic. They see digital technologies as such as the cause of stress, health problems, depression, loneliness, etc. They abstract from the capitalist, class and power relations that shape contemporary digital technologies. Digital detox retreats have turned into a new form of capital accumulation, where stressed digital workers pay for switching off their phones and laptops for a weekend or a week. For example, the three-day digital detox retreat at The Detox Barn in Suffolk (UK) costs £415 per person “for three nights (Friday – Monday) including all meals, two yoga sessions, smoothie demos, guided country walks and guided meditation”.<sup>2</sup> Deceleration, digital detox and digital Luddism are capital accumulation strategies. They advance the very cause of the stress and problems that digital workers suffer – capitalism.

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Engels “was the first socialist to highlight the importance of trade unions to the struggle for socialism, and this fundamental insight was the concrete corollary of his historical humanism” (Blackledge 2019, 42). Trade unions aim at raising wages and “protecting the single working man against the tyranny and neglect of the bourgeoisie” (CWCE, 223). The strike is the union’s main method of struggle by which they harm capitalists whose capital is “idle as long as the strike lasted, and his machinery would be rusting” (CWCE, 225). The capitalist antagonism between capital and labour is one about the control of the means of production and working time. The capitalist wants to make the workers conduct as much unpaid labour-time as possible, whereas the workers have the interest to control all of their labour-time themselves and not to be controlled by capitalists and managers. A strike disrupts labour time. Workers stop working. Necessary and surplus labour time are both zero. No value is created. No commodities are produced. Capitalists make no profit.

Engels writes about the emergence of a “New Unionism” (CWCE, 324), new trade unions of unskilled workers. These trade unions differed from the old unions of skilled workers focused on wage increases because unskilled workers often faced unemployment and no wages at all. In digital capitalism, we need digital trade unions that support digital workers in uniting in struggles against digital capital.

Digital socialism begins and develops through the class struggles of digital workers. The working class has changed. There are a lot of digital workers in an international digital division of labour. Class struggles in the 21st century must look different than in the 19th and 20th centuries, as the forms and places of work have changed. Many freelancers work in the digital industry. They are not capitalists, but members of the working class. Most of them only own a computer as a means of production, no monetary capital. They do not hire other workers either. They work sporadically and precariously. And they are very difficult to reach and organise in trade unions. Coworking spaces provided free or cheaply by unions create spaces where digital workers come together and can be social spaces and starting points for union organising.

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2 https://queenofretreats.com/retreats/the-detox-barn-suffolk-uk/, accessed on 12 July 2020.

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Traditional trade unions have problems with the representation and organisation of atypical workers such as freelancers. Some unions do not even intend to represent freelancers because they consider them to be capitalists. As the world of work has changed, trade unions and their strategies must change if they want to advance the interests of the working class. It is of particular importance that trade unions as well as left, socialist and communist parties and movements deal with precarious work, domestic work, unemployment, consumer work, public work, Facebook user work, digital work, digital surveillance, etc. and defend and represent these forms of work.

With the convergence of production and consumption, some consumer issues have become labour rights issues. Trade unions and left, socialist and communist parties and movements should therefore consider digital consumer issues as labour rights issues and start to join forces with consumer protection associations.

The unions have lost influence and power, which means that the power of capital has been strengthened in class struggles. If the labour movement and trade unions do not succeed in engaging and organising on issues such as digital work, domestic work, unpaid work, freelance work, crowdsourcing, platform work, consumer work, work of Internet users, privacy, digital surveillance, consumer protection, slave labour, etc., and if they do not see these issues as key to labour struggles, these movements commit suicide. To challenge the power of global capital requires the global networking of the working class and the internationalisation of trade unions, left movements, socialist parties and trade union membership.

Class struggles are of course already taking place in digital capitalism. One example is the strike by Uber-riders. They are digital workers exploited by the Uber corporation, which controls the Uber app as a means of production. In a lawsuit in Britain, it was confirmed that Uber drivers have the legal status of workers.

Worker self-control means that the workers gain control over the app and its source code. For example, if the digital courier workers unionise with software engineers, an alternative app could be created. A strike by digital workers at Uber, Deliveroo, etc. would then consist of, for example, using the union app for one week instead of the capitalist app and damaging the capitalist companies during this period, for example, to push through demands for a minimum wage of 15 Euros per hour for platform workers. Such a strike is a new form of class struggle in and against digital capital.

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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”

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3 http://abillionpeople.org/occupy-silicon-valley/, accessed on 11 July 2020.

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