Digital Capitalism

10.4 Capitalism, Racism, and Patriarchy

Sections 10.2 and 10.3 have shown that class, patriarchy, and racism are important dimensions in the age of Facebook and digital labour. Digital housework is one particular form of audience labour and reproductive labour that constitutes significant everyday life. It is just like housework–unpaid, exploited, and producing a peculiar commodity. Slavery and racism also play an important role in digital capitalism. Digital capitalism and phenomena such as social media, digital labour, mobile communication, and big data that are associated with it are part of the latest developments in advanced capitalism. Meta-racism takes on a specific form in it. Forced labour and child labour form an important dimension of the IDDL. It especially concerns African and Asian miners and assemblage workers. Structural racism and sexism shape the IDDL. Whereas, people of colour in developing countries conduct the most exploited, unfree, and precarious types of labour in the IDDL, the digital labour aristocracy of highly paid software engineers is predominantly white and male. Whereas, highly skilled and highly paid managerial and knowledge work tend to be primarily dominated by white people, low-paid precarious service jobs in the USA tend to be the domain of black people. Algorithms tend to reproduce racist ideologies that discriminate against people of colour based on the assumption that they are poor and therefore less valuable consumers than white users. Contemporary racism is both communicated and challenged on social media.

The question arises as to how we can make sense of the relationship of capitalism, patriarchy, and racism today. In digital capitalism, we can find an intersection of different forms of labour in the IDDL – paid labour, unpaid labour, reproductive labour, and users’ digital labour. The economic dimension of the interrelation of these forms of labour is that capitalism requires and creates milieus of exploitation in order to sustain profitability. It strives to maximise capital accumulation by minimising labour costs. The diversification of labour is a result of the profit imperative. Non-standard forms of labour, such as slavery, precarious labour, freelancing, unpaid user labour, or housework are an expression of this diversification. The result of it is that transnational digital media corporations are achieving high profits. In 2016, Apple made profits of US\$ 53.7 billion and was the world’s ninth largest transnational corporations. AT&T was the 12th largest (profit: US\$ 13.2 billion), Verizon the 15th largest (US\$ 18 billion), Microsoft the 23rd largest (US\$ 10.2 billion), and Google/Alphabet the 27th largest (US\$ 17 billion).²

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Capitalism is based on the capitalist class’s appropriation of surplus-labour and surplus-value. Given that the working day consist of two parts, necessary labour and surplus-labour, that is paid labour and unpaid labour, all labour in capitalism contains unpaid labour. It is in the capitalist class’s interest to maximise unpaid labour-time. Étienne Balibar (2013) argues in this context that “what characterises capitalism is a normalisation of overexploitation. The reverse side of this is a class struggle that tends to impose limits”. The sustenance and creation of forms of labour that are completely unpaid or have a high degree of unpaid labour-time should therefore be understood as being part of this capitalist tendency to normalise over-exploitation. Unpaid digital labour is one of the newest manifestations of this tendency. Balibar concludes that “we should question the axiom” of “the distinction of productive and unproductive labor”. Theories of digital labour, just like theories of reproductive labour, are a contribution to this endeavour.

Sandoval (2013) provides a typology with 14 dimensions that are relevant for a systematic analysis of labour in capitalism. These dimensions can be grouped into the categories of means of production, workforce, relations of production, production process, results of production, and the role of the state. Table 10.4 builds on Sandoval’s typology. It uses a compressed version of her typology and adds to it the dimension of ideology that focuses on how justifications for the exploitation of specific forms of labour appear and are presented in public. The typology used in table 10.4 focuses on economic, political, and cultural/ideological dimensions of labour. It summarises the discussion of this chapter.

The control and coercion of labour works with both political-economic and ideological means. Political-economic means include physical violence, sexual violence, monopoly power, social violence, and the labour market’s structural violence. The discussion has shown that in the IDDL, we can find all of these forms of violence. Ideological repression takes on specific forms in the IDDL.

Classical commodity fetishism does not allow workers and consumers to immediately experience all the forms of exploitation that are underlying the IDDL. In the usage of social media, there is just like in housework an inverse form of commodity fetishism that veils the role of the commodity by foregrounding sociality. Social media use does not feel like labour, but is unpaid labour that creates profits. Users’ digital labour creates a big data commodity that digital media corporations sell to advertisers. The big data commodity is both gendered and racialised. Algorithms are based on the assumption that white, male users in the West are bona fide consumers potentially buying many commodities and spending lots of money, whereas others are considered to be inferior consumers. “The categorisations of targeted ad groups based on gender (and also other stereotypical features of class, race, ethnicity, and age) function as a kind of discrimination by assigning differential value to these different target markets” (Shepherd 2014, 164).

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2 Source: Forbes 2000, 2016 list; http://www.forbes.com/global2000/list/ (accessed 17 December 2016).

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Classical and algorithmic ideologies create a paradoxical situation: in paid digital labour, white men dominate the employment structure and can obtain gendered and racialised wages of whiteness. People of colour (child labour and slaves in the Congo, predominantly female assemblage workers in China, etc.) in contrast have the most highly exploited and most precarious jobs in the international division of labour. At the same time, white men are also the privileged objects of exploitation in online advertising and unpaid digital labour based on racist and sexist ideologies designed into algorithms. New racism justifies the exploitation, exclusion, domination, or annihilation of an out-group. One can draw a “distinction between a racism of extermination or elimination (an ‘exclusive’ racism) and a racism of oppression or exploitation (an ‘inclusive’ racism)” (Balibar and Wallerstein 1991, 39). In the IDDL, one can both find the exclusive and the exploitative type of racism.

10.5 Conclusion

This chapter has studied the connection of capitalism, patriarchy, and racism in the digital age. Capitalism is inherently patriarchal and racist in character and uses ideology and discrimination for deepening exploitation and domination. Unpaid labour is not unproductive, but rather constitutes a super-exploited form of productive labour that generates surplus-value without wage. Racism, nationalism, sexism, and other ideologies can create economic, political, and cultural surplus-”wages” or, better expressed, Bourdieuian forms of economic, political, and cultural capital for dominant groups.

I took up Kylie Jarrett’s notion of the digital houseworker in order to show commonalities and differences between three forms of unpaid labour, namely slave-labour, reproductive labour, and Facebook labour. These three forms of labour were also compared to wage-labour. Combining the notion of the digital houseworker with Eileen Meehan’s concept of the gendered audience commodity allows us to understand that Facebook’s data commodity is both gendered and racialised, which shows that digital capitalism instrumentalises both sexism and patriarchy by building their logic into algorithms that determine the data commodity’s price by assuming that the price for one hour of labour should be based on gender and country.

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Capitalism requires what Rosa Luxemburg (2003 [1913]) termed milieus of primitive accumulation in order to survive. Forms of unpaid labour constitute such territories. Housework has traditionally been such a milieu of exploitation that has sustained capitalism and wage-labour. Housework means “superexploitation of non-wage labourers […] upon which wage labour exploitation then is possible” (Mies 1986, 48) because it involves the “externalization, or ex-territorialization of costs which otherwise would have to be covered by the capitalists” (p. 110). Housewifisation means the extension of super-exploitation and unpaid labour into realms beyond housework so that work or labour is transformed in such ways that it shows some parallels with the conditions of housework (Mies et al. 1988; Mies 1986; Fuchs 2014). Housewifised labour “bears the characteristics of housework” (Mies et al. 1988, 10).

Facebook labour is just like unpaid internships and the precariat’s labour a form of housewifised labour. Unpaid forms of labour are differently exploited than wage-labour in that they form super-exploited milieus of primitive accumulation. How can unpaid labour today best be made visible in order to resist and overcome it? All labour is based on a specific degree of surplus-labour. In unwaged labour, surplus-labour-time is extended to a maximum. A universal basic income guarantee that is funded out of capital taxation is a progressive demand that builds on and extends the demand of wages for housework. That the organic composition of labour is around 5.8 in an advanced country like the USA shows the role that unpaid labour-time plays in capitalism. Socialist universal basic income does not aims at reforming or improving capitalism, but to provide humans with autonomous space and time beyond capitalism, so that foundations for thinking, living, producing, consuming, and usage beyond the logic of capital can be strengthened.

References

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References

Amnesty International. 2016. “This Is What We Die For”: Human Rights Abuses in the Democratic Republic of the Congo Power the Global Trade in Cobalt. London: AI.

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Chapter Eleven Digital Labour and Imperialism

11.1 Introduction

11.2 Imperialism and the Division of Labour

11.3 The International Division of Digital Labour

11.4 Conclusion

References

11.1 Introduction

Lenin’s Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, Bukharin’s Imperialism and World Economy that were both published in 1917 as well as Rosa Luxemburg’s (1913) work The Accumulation of Capital spoke of capitalism as imperialism. It was a time of strikes for pay rises, Henry Ford’s invention of the first assembly line that laid the foundations for Fordism, World War I, trusts and monopolies, antitrust laws, the October Revolution, the Mexican Revolution, the failed German Revolution, etc. It was a time of the extension and deepening of as well as of challenges to capitalism.

This chapter first reviews the notion of the role of the international division of labour in classical concepts of imperialism. It then uses these foundations for discussing the role of the international division of labour in the production of information and information technology today and introduces in this context the notion of the international division of digital labour. The overall task is to illuminate the relationship of digital labour and imperialism.

Lenin defined imperialism as

capitalism at that stage of development at which the domination of monopolies and finance capital is established; in which the export of capital has acquired pronounced importance; in which the division of the world among the international trusts has begun: in which the division of all the territories of the globe among the biggest capitalist powers has been completed. (Lenin 1917, 266–267)

Bukharin and Preobrazhensky (1920 [2007], 119) gave the following definition of imperialism: “The policy of conquest which financial capital pursues in the struggle for markets for the sources of raw material, and for places in which capital can be invested, is known as imperialism”. Bukharin (1917), a contemporary of Lenin and editor of Pravda from 1917–1929, implicitly saw Lenin’s five characteristics as constitutive for imperialism. He characterised imperialism as “a product of finance capitalism” and argued that “finance capital cannot pursue any other policy than an imperialist one” (Bukharin 1917, 140).

DOI: 10.4324/9781003222149-11