Digital Capitalism

In respect to Tony Benn, the tabloid press spoke of “Dictatorship under Führer Benn” (Daily Express, 1 Februrary 1975), “Benn The Dictator” (Daily Express, 28 May 1981), “Citizen Benn who shouts from the rooftops the debt we owe to a man called Joseph Stalin” (News of the World, 13 September 1981), “the Bennite monster” (Daily Mail, 16 January 1984), or wrote that “some say Tony Benn is raving bonkers” (The Sun, 1 March 1984) (cited in: Hollingsworth 1986). Jeremy Corbyn’s win of the Labour leadership election in September 2015 was accompanied by the return of the loony Left- and anti-socialist ideology.

I conducted an empirical ideology critique of tweets about Jeremy Corbyn during the leadership election. General opinions presented without arguments formed an important discourse topic in the dataset. One general bias that was frequently encountered in this respect was that Corbyn is a “loony” left-winger:

a wet handwringing leftie terrorist supporting anti Semite for Prime Minister?? Corbyn will Drive Brit off a cliff. (#242)

the radical extreme left wing lunacy of Jeremy left wing lunacy left wing loony lefty extreme radical Corbyn. (#438)

Dangerous communist (#1228)

Bloody pinko (#1287)

Corbyn is satan (#4927)

socialist pig (#12741)

When will everyone realise that #Corbyn is a communist bastard? He’s gonna fuck this country up if he gets in power #Labour. (#17405)

Corbyn is a radical left wing idiot (#17528)

Corbyn is a left wing socialist scumbag (#20456)

Single tweets even expressed the wish that Corbyn is killed because he is left-wing:

Jeremy Corbyn…. A communist fraud …. hope he goes the way of Trotsky #Mexico1941 #NeverForget (#15440)

The sensationalist right-wing anti-Corbyn Twitter-discourse was not simply accepted, but contested. There were various strategies that Corbyn supporters used for #Panorama cheap smear campaign against Corbyn tonight trying to link him to terrorist group short memory of this

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challenging anti-socialist ideology online. One was that they associated Corbyn with positive general characteristics: “He seems to be about common sense and decency and so very normal/nice” (#422), “he is sensible, clear, knowledgeable & decent” (#606), “In my view he just preaches common sense” (#22591).

A second strategy was to use the strategy of discursive dialectical reversal: the argument made in this strategy is that not Corbyn, but the Tories are extremist, radical, violent, hard-right, and dangerous. Figure 9.8 shows an example.

A third strategy was to use satire and humour to ridicule anti-socialist ideology. It is based on the insight that ideologies are often irrational and emotional. They are difficult to challenge by rational arguments. The hashtag #suggestacorbynsmear that emerged on Twitter on 31 August 2015, and was used within 24 hours more than 11,000 times⁴ is an example. Examples are: “Jeremy Corbyn shares the letter ‘n’ with Stalin and Satan, and the letters ‘e’ and ‘r’ with Hitler! #suggestacorbynsmear” (#5229); “Jeremy Corbyn was born in 1949. Stalin was alive in 1949. Coincidence? I think not. #suggestacorbynsmear” (#5251).

Ideologies are semiotic structures that justify domination. Twitter limits linguistic expression to 140 characters. User-generated ideology such as online redbaiting therefore has to compress ideology. User-generated ideology is the use of digital media for producing and spreading semiotic structures that justify domination by distorting reality, misrepresenting it, or inventing false representations of reality. By making claims, insults, and personal attacks without underlying arguments and justifications, users compress ideology on Twitter into 140 characters. A feature of many anti-socialist tweets was that they made claims about Corbyn without arguments and proof.

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Social Media Ideology #2: Red Scare 2.03

4 http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/Jeremy\_Corbyn/11836904/Twitters-funniest-smear-attacks-on-Jeremy-Corbyn-as-suggestacorbynsmear-goes-viral.html

Users are not the helpless victims of anti-socialist and other ideologies, but can contest, oppose, and struggle against ideologies. Social media is a communication space where ideologies are expressed and challenged. Studying user-generated ideologies online therefore allows identifying and analysing the structure of antisocialist and anti-Corbyn ideologies and how they can best be challenged.

Left-wing social media users have developed intelligent strategies of how to react to ideological smear campaigns. Studying counter-discourses to anti-socialist ideology can inform political campaigns at a time when redbaiting is again omnipresent in politics.

9.6 Conclusion

Society shapes and is shaped by communications technologies and society. There is a dialectic of media and society. In an antagonistic society, new information and communication technologies will therefore display an antagonistic logic. A critical theory and critique of the political economy of communications and the media tries to understand the contradictions of society and communications.

This chapter has investigated causes of the crisis of capitalism. This crisis is not a crisis of regulation, but a fundamental economic crisis that has emerged from capitalism’s inherent contradictions. The economic crisis has also turned into political and cultural crises, for example a crisis of the European idea and European politics. On the level of communications, crises tend to manifest themselves in various ways. The focus of this chapter was social media in the context of capitalism’s crisis: capitalism’s crisis has favoured the expansion of targeted online advertising. In the realm of politics, social media communication and offline communication are two interacting forms of protest communication. The strengthening of right-wing extremism has resulted in various forms of far-right ideology and nationalism online (see Fuchs 2016a, 2016b, for two detailed studies of ideology 2.0).

Social media is in complex ways embedded into the contradictions of capitalist society, economy, politics, and ideology. As a consequence, social media is incompletely social and is shaped by the logic of instrumental reason that turns such communications into forms of domination and exploitation. Only social struggles can develop potentials of communications and society that communalise both society and the media so that social media and society can become truly social.

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Chapter Ten

Capitalism, Patriarchy, Slavery, and Racism in the Age of Digital Capitalism and Digital Labour

10.1 Introduction

10.2 Housework and Digital Labour

10.3 Slavery and Racism in the Age of Digital Labour

10.4 Capitalism, Racism, and Patriarchy

10.5 Conclusion

References

10.1 Introduction

This chapter asks: how can understanding the relationship of exploitation and oppression inform the study of digital capitalism? To answer this question, the chapter re-visits and updates the discussion of how capitalism, patriarchy, and racism are connected.

One important question that arises in this context is how the economic and the noneconomic are related to each other. This question is not just of theoretical relevance but also matters politically. It focuses on how class politics that struggle for redistribution of resources and identity politics that struggle for the recognition of oppressed identities are related (Fraser and Honneth 2003). Reductionist politics privilege either class or identity politics, whereas dualist politics say that both realms and demands are important without relating them (Fuchs 2011, section 2.3).

In Marxist feminism, patriarchy has not just been seen as a form of sexist oppression but as the exploitation of houseworkers in capitalism. Given that in the world of digital capitalism new unpaid forms of labour (Fuchs 2014; Lambert 2015), such as the use of Facebook or crowdsourced labour, have emerged, the question arises: what can we learn from studies of the relationship of exploitation and oppression that helps us to better understand unpaid digital labour?

The media’s commodity has a peculiar character because information is not used up in consumption and it is difficult to exclude others from its use and copying. The labour involved in producing media therefore also takes on peculiar forms. Targeted advertising is a very important capital accumulation model in the realm of Internet capitalism (Fuchs 2017b). Dallas Smythe (1977) and Sut Jhally (1987) have argued that not media workers but audiences produce the advertising-funded media’s commodity. The access to such media is provided as a gift to the users and the audience’s attention is sold as a commodity to advertisers. Smythe therefore speaks of audience labour and the audience commodity. In the context of targeted-advertising-based capital accumulation on social media platforms such as Facebook, YouTube, and Google, we find user labour that produces a data commodity and attention commodity. Based on constant surveillance and big data analytics, online advertising is personalised and interest based (Fuchs 2014, 2015, 2017b). Such user labour is yet another form of unpaid labour in capitalism. Therefore, the question arises as to what the role of unpaid labour is in the capitalist mode of production, what types there are, and what their commonalities and differences are.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003222149-10

Section 10.2 focuses on the relationship of housework and digital labour. Section 10.3 analyses the relationship of racism, slavery, and digital labour. Section 10.4 generalises the discussion and provides a typology that outlines the commonalities and differences of wage-labour, slave-labour, housework, and users’ digital labour. Section 10.5 draws some conclusions.

10.2 Housework and Digital Labour

The task of this section is to explore commonalities and differences between housework and users’ digital labour. This will be done in two steps: section 10.2.1 revisits the debate on reproductive labour and identifies two basic positions. The first holds that reproductive labour is productive labour, the second that reproductive labour is excluded from productive labour. Especially the first position is relevant in the digital age. Based on this discussion, section 10.2.2 updates debates about reproductive labour by engaging with the notion of digital housework that was introduced by the Marxist-feminist scholar Kylie Jarrett (2016).

10.2.1 The Debate on Housework and Reproductive Labour

Women have historically carried out the dominant part of reproductive labour, such as child-rearing, care, education, cooking, laundry, shopping, cleaning, etc. In contemporary

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capitalism, many more women are active in the paid labour force than 100 or 200 years ago, but housework is still predominantly women’s concern, which creates multiple responsibilities and less free time for them.

10.2.2 Digital Housework and Reproductive Labour

The crucial difference in the analysis of different forms of labour is the one between wage-labour and unwaged labour. Slave-labour, reproductive labour, and unpaid Facebook labour have in common that they are unwaged, but by being integrated into capitalist society nonetheless they create surplus-value. They are therefore productive labour. Not all online activities are labour. For example, listening to music on Spotify based on a monthly subscription is advertising-free. The consumers do not create but consume a commodity. Not all digital labour is unpaid. For example, gold farmers on World of Warcraft or online freelancers tend to conduct their labour via Internet and to produce digital outputs, but are mostly paid. In this section, we focus on Facebook usage when speaking of digital labour.

Kylie Jarrett (2016) uses the notion of the digital housewife for pointing out parallels between unpaid online labour and houseworkers’ domestic, reproductive labour. She argues that the social worker has not emerged in contemporary capitalism but has, in the form of houseworkers, always been an essential part of surplus-value production in capitalism.

Parallels between housework and Facebook labour include that both are unwaged and produce two use-values, of which only one is a commodity (wage-labour in the case of the houseworker, data in the case of the Facebook worker). Affects and social relations form the second use-value. The “Digital Housewife can have real friends on Facebook” (Jarrett 2016, 4). Jarrett argues that both the houseworker and the Facebook worker produce alienable and inalienable objects (p. 123). The first are “inalienable use-values such as pleasure, social solidarity and the general intellect” (p. 98).

Consumer labour is akin to domestic labour not only because it is unpaid and occurs outside of formal factory walls in what is ostensibly free time. It is also akin to it because it is a site of social reproduction: a site for the making and re-making of the social, affective, ideological and psychological states of being that (may) accord with appropriate capitalist subjectivities. (p. 71)

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Digital housewives “express themselves, their opinions and generate social solidarity with others in commercial digital media while, at the same time, adding economic value to those sites” (p. 4).

Nancy Fraser (1989, 116) argues that child-rearing is a dual aspect activity and at the same time an activity of material and symbolic reproductions, economic and cultural. One must caution in this respect that the symbolic and cultural realms are not immaterial because materiality in society means that humans socially produce results. So, it is better to speak of physical reproduction. Fraser (1989, 116) says that all work, including industrial food production and software engineering, reproduces social identities and physical existence. The difference is that both in reproductive labour and Facebook labour humans directly produce two use-values, whereas in software engineering and industrial food production conducted as paid jobs there is one main usevalue, and sustained social relations between colleagues may or may not result as an indirect by-product of the labour process. Humans have a family and use Facebook for sustaining their social relations, whereas they have to have a paid job in order to earn money to be able to survive.

One should stress that the two use-values (created by both reproductive labour and Facebook labour) are not independent. Social relations and affects are key resources for the reproduction of labour-power in the case of housework and the creation of personal relations data in the case of Facebook. Social relations are the means of subsistence for houseworkers and Facebook workers.

Both housework and Facebook labour have a relation to commodity consumption: purchased consumer goods are part of the goods that housework transforms into the means of subsistence that sustain life and labour-power. In consumer capitalism, consumers learn about the existence of particular commodities via advertisements by looking at shelves in a shop. Audience labour and user labour generate attention and data that are used for presenting and targeting ads and selling commodities. Audience labour and commercial digital labour are therefore that part of reproductive labour that generates commodities that help advertisers to make profits so that consumer goods are sold and consumed. Housework transforms consumer goods into the means of subsistence that enable survival and the saleability of labour-power.

Marx argues that capital has aspects of living and dead labour. He therefore introduces the distinction between variable and constant capital. Both are key factors in the capitalist production process, but it is only living labour that creates value. The organic composition of capital is the relationship of constant to variable capital: “As value, it is determined by the proportion in which it is divided into constant capital, or the value of the means of production, and variable capital, or the value of labour-power, the sum total of wages” (Marx 1867, 762). Marx describes a tendency of the organic composition of capital to increase, that is an expression of the automation and technification of capitalism, by which the capitalist class tries to replace labour by technology. To offset increasing costs for constant capital, capital tends to be forced to also increase the exploitation of unpaid labour. Marx (1867, chapter 9) introduced for this purpose the rate of surplus-labour. It is the ratio of profit to wages, typically calculated at the level of monetary prices, not labour-time, and thereby leaving out forms of unremunerated labour such as reproductive labour. It operates in respect to waged labour. The organic composition of labour is a new complementary variable that operates at the level of labour-time. It calculates the relationship of the total of unpaid labour hours to paid labour hours. Unpaid labour-time includes both unwaged labour-time and surplus-labour-time in waged labour.

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Table 10.1 provides approximations for what can be termed the organic composition of labour that can be calculated as the ratio of unpaid labour-time (including both reproductive labour-time and wage-labour’s surplus-labour-time) in an economy over the time period of one year. The data show that in the USA, the organic composition of labour is around 5.8. This means that per waged hour, there are 5.8 hours of unpaid labour. American capital only pays for one in seven labour hours. The rate of reproductive labour measures the share of both components of unpaid labour (table 10.1). It indicates that in the USA, reproductive labour accounts for around 83.7% of all unpaid labour-time and wage-labour’s surplus-labour-time for about 16.3%.

The total production time includes the reproductive labour-time that reproduces the labour-power as a commodity. Reproductive labour is productive because it is surpluslabour-time unremunerated by capital. Capital not just exploits wage-labour, but also the reproductive labour required for the existence and reproduction of labour-power. Based on Marx’s analysis, we can say that the exploitation of labour entails not a dual separation but a dialectic of reproductive labour and wage-labour.

Table 10.2 presents further estimates. It indicates that, on average, for each paid hour of labour, there are 5.8 hours of unpaid labour. I call the ratio of unpaid to paid labourtime the organic composition of labour. Unpaid labour includes both unpaid reproduction labour as well as wage-labour’s surplus-labour-time.

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