Digital Capitalism

Workers told SACOM researchers that they sometimes have to work very long hours till early morning, often 12 to 15 hours a day, and sometimes even up to 17 to 18 hours a day. In other words, the total amount of overtime hours can be up to 170 to 200 hours a month, which, in turn, means that workers have to work more than 360 hours a month. (Students & Scholars Against Corporate Misbehaviour 2014, 2)

Further issues at Pegatron included an unsafe and unhealthy working environment, illegal charges for health checks, insufficient health information, precarious dispatch labour, exclusion from social insurance, difficulties to resign from the job, scolding, fines, repressive management, and lack of trade unions. The report concludes:

Pegatron and its buyer Apple have continuously engaged in poor labour practices and abuses of workers’ rights. Even though the Apple Inc. has established its code of conducts since 2005, the working conditions in Apple’s supply chain are still far from satisfactory. This report, along with the earlier investigative reports released by SACOM throughout the years, have continuously demonstrated that Apple and its suppliers in the Chinese mainland have never treated their workers with dignity. (Students & Scholars Against Corporate Misbehaviour 2014, 21)

A 2014 BBC undercover report unveiled that workers assembling iPhones 6 in Pegatron factories are so overworked that they fall asleep during work and in their breaks.¹⁰

An ideology is a claim that does not correspond to reality. SACOM’s studies show that reality in the factories of Apple’s Chinese suppliers is different than reported in the company’s own reports. Apple tries to distort presentations of labour in its supply chain by ideology in order to forestall critique of capitalism.

The Foxconn example shows that the existence and usage of digital media not just depends on the labour of software engineers and content producers. Digital labour covers a broad range of labour working under different conditions, including slaveminers working in African conflict mines, smelters, hardware assemblers, software engineers, digital media content producers, eWaste workers, or users of commercial digital media (Fuchs 2014, 2015).

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10 Apple “failing to protect Chinese factory workers”. http://www.bbc.com/news/business-30532463 BBC Online, accessed on 18 December 2014.

11.4 Conclusion

Apple has marketed the iPhone 5 as being made “for the colourful” and the iPhone 6 as being “bigger than big”. Such slogans communicate that the digital technological revolution has brought about a new and better society that benefits all. Similar ideological promises and claims can be found in the context of phenomena such as social media, cloud computing, big data, the sharing and like economy, crowdsouring, crowdfunding, the maker movement, etc. Such assertions are forms of technological fetishism that assume that technology inherently fosters a good society without analysing the social relations into which it is embedded. In technological fetishism, the “definite social relation between men themselves” assume “the fantastic form of a relation between things”, technological things (Marx 1867, 165).

Confronting what some call the digital or information society with Lenin, Luxemburg, and Bukharin’s classical concepts of imperialism helps us to unmask technological fetishism. The example of Apple shows that digital technology and the ideologies that often positively frame it in advertisements, the press, bourgeois politics, and the public are distorted by the fascination of the new that overlooks the continuities of exploitation in an international division of labour.

Apple achieves high profits in the international division of digital labour by outsourcing manufacturing labour to China, where the Western strategy of “exporting capital abroad” achieves high profits because “wages are low” (Lenin 1917, 241) and the rate of exploitation is high. The exploitation of workers at Foxconn, Pegatron, and other companies in the international division of digital labour shows that “‘[s]weating blood and filth with every pore from head to toe’ characterises not only the birth of capital but also its progress in the world at every step” (Luxemburg 1913, 433). Both these analyses by Lenin and Luxemburg are as true in the 21st century as they were 100 years ago.

The international division of digital labour involves diverse forms of the exploitation of labour, including the labour of slave-miners, Fordist hardware assemblers, highly stressed and highly paid aristocratic workers at playworkplaces in Silicon Valley tech companies, low-paid precarious data processors carrying out deskilled digital labour, highly skilled, creative, and precariously self-employed freelancers in the digital and cultural industries, users who become value-generating play-workers for targetedadvertising financed social media companies, etc. (Fuchs 2014, 2015). This division is organised in global space, which shows that also in digital capitalism capital “needs the means of production and the labour power of the whole globe for untrammelled accumulation” (Luxemburg 1913, 345–346).

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To my knowledge, no mobile phone or laptop exists that has not been produced as part of the imperialist division of labour that characterises digital capitalism. The political task is to question the capitalist character of media, culture, communications, and the Internet and to find ways to transform them into and defend them as common and public goods. Given the global conditions of exploitation, the contradictions of the international division of digital labour result again and again result in class struggles.

Foster and McChesney argue that “capitalist contradictions with Chinese characteristics” (Foster and McChesney 2012, 157) feature the overinvestment in construction and urban real estate, weak consumption, extreme exploitation, rising inequality, unused infrastructure, discrimination of rural migrant labour, pollution, and environmental degradation. Media reports about China in the West tend to ignore the active political culture of working class and social struggles stemming from these contradictions. A better world can only be the result of social struggles. “The emancipation of the working class must be the work of the working class itself“ (Marx and Engels 1879, 555). According to data by China Labour Bulletin, 1276 strikes took place in China during 2014.¹¹ China is not a monolithic society, but one with very active and vivid working class struggles against exploitation. One example is that in October 2014 1000 workers went after earlier labour unrest in June on strike for wage increases at Foxconn Chongqing.¹²

The short-term perspective for digital working class struggles should be the formation of worker-controlled companies in the digital and cultural industries at all levels of organisation and over the entire globe, no matter if it concerns social media organisations, software engineering, the cultural freelance economy, mineral extraction, or ICT assemblage. In the medium term the perspective should be to overcome the capitalist organisation of these spheres together with capitalist society. The question what role the national and/or the international dimension of social struggles against digital capitalism should have is in this context a matter for strategic political debates. In an address of the International Workingmen’s Association, Marx argued that “in order to oppose their workers, the employers either bring in workers from abroad or else transfer manufacture to countries where there is a cheap labour force” (International Workingmen’s Association 1867, 422). It is true today as it was true at the time of Marx that if “the working class wishes to continue its struggle with some chance of success”, then the adequate response to global capitalist rule that “the national organisations must become international” (International Workingmen’s Association 1867, 422).

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11 China Labour Bulletin Strike Map, http://www.numble.com/PHP/mysql/clbmape.html

12 China Labor Watch: Thousands of Foxconn workers strike again in Chongqing for better wages, benefits. http://www.chinalaborwatch.org/newscast/395, accessed on October 8, 2014.

References

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Chapter Twelve The Information Economy and the Labour Theory of Value

12.1 Introduction

12.2 The Information Industry and Marx’s Labour Theory of Value

12.3 Labour Productivity in the Information Sector

12.4 Conclusion

References

12.1 Introduction

The question if and how Marx’s labour theory of value applies to the information industries has been an important and contested issue in Marxist theory that has gained a new impetus with the rise of so-called “social media” platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Weibo, and YouTube (Arvidsson and Colleoni 2012; Beverungen, Böhm and Land 2015; Bolaño 2015; Carchedi 2014; Comor 2014; Foley 2013; Fuchs 2010, 2012a, 2012b, 2014a, 2015, 2016b, 2017; Huws 2014; McGuigan and Manzerolle 2014; Perelman 2002, 2003; Proffitt, Ekbia and McDowell 2015; Reveley 2013; Rigi 2014; Rigi and Prey 2015; Teixeira and Rotta 2012; Zeller 2008). As part of neo-liberal hypes of the “new economy”, the Internet and the “creative industries”, the actual economic relevance of the Internet and knowledge work has often been overestimated (Garnham 1998, 2005). But at the same time it cannot be dismissed that these phenomena have some relevance and that Marxist political economy therefore needs to consider and analyse them (Fuchs 2013). The theoretical question that has been discussed within Marxist theory in recent time is what Marxian categories, such as value, productive labour, rent, profit, commodification, reproductive labour, etc. can be used for understanding information and the Internet. This is a complex theoretical debate that is not subject of this chapter.

Fisher and Fuchs (2015) as well as Fuchs (2015, chapter 5) provide overview discussions of various aspects of this theory's debate. Approaches used have, for example, included Dallas Smythe’s (1977) theory of the audience commodity and audience labour, rent theory, Autonomist Marxism, and Marxist feminism. A basic question is if labour or specific labour conducted in the information economy is productive or unproductive? This question already goes back to Smythe’s (1977) works. Claims that labour in the information economy is unproductive are not new. They tend to reoccur within the contemporary political-economic debate about value in the Internet and information economy. They are often reformulations of Michael Lebowitz’s (1986) criticism of Dallas Smythe’s concept of audience labour. This chapter only discusses empirical aspects of the labour theory of value in the context of the information industries. The reader further interested in the theoretical foundations is therefore referred to the above-mentioned debate on this question.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003222149-12

Information, media, communication, and culture are connected terms. How do they relate to each other? Culture is the process and system, in which humans produce social meanings in society. This means that it is the system, where social information is produced. The term information has a broader meaning because information also exists in living systems, as the term genetic information indicates. For the purpose of this chapter, information is however understood as social information. Social information is often also termed knowledge. Information in society exists as cognitive thought patterns, communicated information, and information stored in objects. Communication is the process of symbolic interaction between humans. Mediation means a relation between interacting systems. A medium is therefore a system that enables interaction. Wherever humans communicate, there is a medium of communication. Culture therefore is a social information system, in which humans produce, communicate, and use information with the help of media. It is society’s social information system. In this chapter, I will predominantly use the terms information economy and information industries.

The information economy is in this chapter defined as the realm of the production of information and technologies for the consumption and transmission of information.¹ This definition can be challenged on the ground of combining aspects of the production of physical and non-physical production, such an argument is however a form of cultural idealism that neglects the materiality of culture (Williams 1977). Raymond Williams’ argument is that separating the economy and culture is idealist: culture is produced by information workers. The emergence of cultural work and the culture industry show the importance of the interconnection of culture and economy (Fuchs 2015, chapter 2). For Williams, culture is not a superstructure that sits on top of an economic base. Culture and ideas are just like all reality material.

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1 In the International Standard Industrial Classification of All Economic Activities (ISIC Revision 4) these are the following categories: D18 printing and reproduction of recorded media; D26 computer, electronic, and optical products; D58T63 publishing, audiovisuals, broadcasting, telecommunications, IT; D72 research; D73 advertising and marketing research; D85 education; D90T93 arts, entertainment, and recreation.

In discussions about the contemporary information economy, one can find tendencies that categories such as information, the digital, knowledge, cultural/information/digital/virtual labour are separated from physical labour that produces information technology. The most extreme example is the concept of immaterial labour that implies that there are parts of society that are not material, which contradicts a materialist worldview. Raymond Williams’ cultural materialism is an approach that allows us to see the dialectic of categories. So, for example, all work has mental and physical aspects (Fuchs 2015). But a specific concrete work has a specific degree of mental and physical aspects. Culture at the same time belongs to the economy and does not belong to it: humans produce all culture and information is created in concrete economic production processes. The created information however has effects in all parts of society. Information matters, makes a difference, and has meaning – not just in the economy. It has emergent effects when humans interpret the world based on existing information and with the help of information technology (Fuchs 2015).

In defining the information economy, there is a difference between industry and occupation approaches (Machlup 1962). Occupation approaches consider the information economy, the aggregate of the value created by all workers whose occupation is to produce information. Industry approaches in contrast define the information economy as the aggregated value produced by all companies creating information products. The occupation approach is methodological individualist, whereas the industry approach is in line with what Marx (1867, 643) termed the collective worker, “a combination of workers” jointly creating a product. In the contemporary corporation, this includes the value created together by a variety of workers. In an information corporation, this includes both occupations that create tangible and intangible outputs that contribute together to the production of information technologies and information content.

The OECD has in the fourth revision of the International Standard Industrial Classification of All Economic Activities (ISIC) introduced an information sector (sector J) that it defines in the following way:

This section includes the production and distribution of information and cultural products, the provision of the means to transmit or distribute these products, as well as data or communications, information technology activities and the processing of data and other information service activities.²

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2 http://unstats.un.org/unsd/cr/registry/regcs.asp?Cl=27&Lg=1&Co=J

It, however, also defines a separate arts, entertainment, and recreation sector (sector R) and defines scientific research, advertising, market research, consulting, accounting as part of sector M: professional, scientific, and technical activities. Given that science, art, entertainment, research, advertising, consulting, and accounting all produce some form of information, such a definition is confusing and results in a narrow understanding of the information sector.

Goodrige, Hasek and Wallis (2014) have measured the investment in intangible assets ordered by year, industries, and intangible asset types. In their conceptual framework, intangible assets are comprising reseach and development, mineral exploration, financial product innovation, design, training, artistic originals, organisational structure, software, and branding. They calculated that in 2011, intangible asset investment was significantly larger in the UK economy than tangible asset investment. The core distinction in this approach is the one between tangibles and intangibles. The basic question is however if this strict separation can be upheld in the contemporary economy. A computer clearly is a tangible machine. It however is an information technology, that is a data processing machine. So it has to do with a tangible form that processes an intangible asset. It is therefore unclear how the computer as asset should exactly be classified in this approach.

Higgs, Cunningham and Pagan (2007, 20) define the creative economy as “human activities related with the production, distribution, exchange, and consumption of creative goods and services”. They say it is broader than the term cultural industries that focuses on artistic production and stresses the commercial use of “symbolic knowledge and skills” (p. 4). The authors understand the Creative Trident as the total of the creative occupations in the core creative industries as well as in other industries. The definition includes, in contrast to the ISIC’s understanding of the information sector, a broad range of information industries (music, performing arts, film, TV, radio, advertising, marketing, software, online, publishing, architecture, design, and visual arts) in the core creative industries. It furthermore combines the industry and occupation approach.

Bakhshi, Freeman and Higgs (2013) take a comparable approach that suggests measurements of the creative intensity of creative occupations in any industry. They make creative talent the defining feature of a creative occupation. The defining qualities of creative activity are that it is a novel process, mechanisation resistant, non-repetitive, non-uniform, independent of context, and that it involves interpretation not mere transformation (p. 24).

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This confers a unique and important quality on the creative worker within the creative process, namely that it is difficult to mechanise the creative process and hence to substitute machines or devices for the humans, reversing a trend that has dominated much of history. Implementing a creative decision is not really a creative role, we would argue, but making one is. (Bakhshi, Freeman and Higgs 2013, 22)

Based on this approach the authors calculated that in 2010, 8.7% of the UK workforce was part of the creative economy and that the majority of these workers were employed outside the core creative industries.

The two latter approaches have a strong focus on measuring occupations. However, in capitalism, “the commodity-form of the product of labour […] is the economic cellform” (Marx 1867, 90). The commodity is the economic form that objectifies value generated by humans and whose sale results in the realisation of monetary profit. Like Marx, it therefore makes sense to start economic analysis with the commodity form. Speaking about the information sector, this means that one must have a look at the commodity form of information as the economic cell-form of the information sector. The focus on creative occupations makes individual activities that generate novel information and are based on highly skilful and qualified labour the cell‐form of this sector. The notions of creative labour, creative industries, and the creative economy overestimate the role of highly educated and qualified non-replaceable labour. Many information commodities are generated in a division of labour that involves occupations that produce information, services, and physical products, that have varying forms of qualification (low, medium, high skill), etc. The point is that for the production of certain information commodities, the labour-time of a diverse set of workers is needed. All of their labour-time is reflected in the commodity. A labour theory of value applied to information sector must therefore start with the information commodity produced by a collective (but diverse) information worker as the basic focus.

“Editing a film is a creative task – but operating a 6 plate 35 mm Steenbeck editing table under the direction of the editor is not” (Bakhshi, Freeman and Higgs 2013, 22). The point here is that both the editor and the operator’s labour-time is objectified in the film as commodity and that they work in the same division of labour of the movie industry. To argue that the first’s labour is creative and the second is not can easily create the impression that only skilled workers are creating surplus-value and unskilled ones do not. In the production of an information commodity such as a film both of them are however productive workers, that is the exploitation of their labour that is expended in time results in commodities that are sold in order to accumulate capital.

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