Reconsidering Value and Labour in the Digital Age

Transcription

1 Reconsidering Value and Labour in the Digital Age

2 Dynamics of Virtual Work Series Series Editors: Ursula Huws, University of Hertfordshire, UK, and Rosalind Gill, City University, UK Titles include: Olivier Frayssé and Mathieu O Neil (editors) DIGITAL LABOUR AND PROSUMER CAPITALISM The US Matrix Eran Fisher and Christian Fuchs (editors) RECONSIDERING VALUE AND LABOUR IN THE DIGITAL AGE Dynamics of Virtual Work Series Series Standing Order ISBN (hardback) (paperback) (outside North America only) You can receive future titles in this series as they are published by placing a standing order. Please contact your bookseller or, in case of difficulty, write to us at the address below with your name and address, the title of the series and the ISBN quoted above. Customer Services Department, Macmillan Distribution Ltd, Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS, England

3 Reconsidering Value and Labour in the Digital Age Edited by Eran Fisher Open University of Israel Christian Fuchs University of Westminster, UK

4 Selection and editorial matter Eran Fisher and Christian Fuchs 2015 Individual chapters Respective authors 2015 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6 10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act First published 2015 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number , of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave and Macmillan are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN ISBN (ebook) DOI / This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Marx s Labour Theory of Value in the Digital Age (Workshop) (2014 : Open University of Israel) Reconsidering value and labour in the digital age / [edited by] Eran Fisher, Christian Fuchs. pages cm. (Dynamics of virtual work) This book documents the results of the workshop Marx s Labour Theory of Value in the Digital Age that took place from June 15 17, 2014, at the Open University of Israel. ISBN (hardback) 1. Labor. 2. Value. 3. Telecommuting. 4. Information technology Economic aspects. 5. Social media Economic aspects. I. Fisher, Eran, editor. II. Fuchs, Christian, 1976 editor. III. Title. HD4904.M dc

5 Contents List of Figures and Tables Series Preface Notes on Contributors vii viii x Part I Foundations 1 Introduction: Value and Labour in the Digital Age 3 Christian Fuchs and Eran Fisher 2 The Digital Labour Theory of Value and Karl Marx in the Age of Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and Weibo 26 Christian Fuchs 3 The Hands and Brains of Digital Culture: Arguments for an Inclusive Approach to Cultural Labour 42 Marisol Sandoval Part II Labour and Class 4 A Contribution to a Critique of the Concept Playbour 63 Arwid Lund 5 Marx in Chinese Online Space: Some Thoughts on the Labour Problem in Chinese Internet Industries 80 Bingqing Xia Part III The Labour of Internet Users 6 The Exploitation of Audience Labour: A Missing Perspective on Communication and Capital in the Digital Era 99 Brice Nixon 7 Audience Labour on Social Media: Learning from Sponsored Stories 115 Eran Fisher v

6 vi Contents 8 Advertising on Social Media: The Reality behind the Ideology of Free Access : The Case of Chinese Social Media Platforms 133 Yuqi Na Part IV Rent and the Commons 9 Mapping Approaches to User Participation and Digital Labour: A Critical Perspective 153 Thomas Allmer, Sebastian Sevignani, and Jernej Amon Prodnik 10 Is the Concept of Rent Relevant to a Discussion of Surplus Value in the Digital World? 172 Olivier Frayssé 11 The Demise of the Marxian Law of Value? A Critique of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri 188 Jakob Rigi Part V Productivity in Reproduction 12 Devaluing Binaries: Marxist Feminism and the Value of Consumer Labour 207 Kylie Jarrett 13 The Concept of Subsumption of Labour to Capital: Towards Life Subsumption in Bio-Cognitive Capitalism 224 Andrea Fumagalli 14 Form-Giving Fire: Creative Industries as Marx s Work of Combustion and the Distinction between Productive and Unproductive Labour 246 Frederick H. Pitts Index 261

7 Figures and Tables Figures 1.1 Articles published about Marx and Marxism in social sciences citation index Relations between the involved concepts Typology of the Chinese middle class A regular Facebook post rendered into an ad Global advertising expenditure, by medium: Reality and ideology Reality, appearances, and ideology in capitalist society Relations of the base and superstructure Mode of production of social media 165 Tables 1.1 Number of articles in the journal Historical Materialism that contain certain title keywords Mapping of the original six-volume plan of Capital and the final three volumes Dimensions for defining behavioural categories Renren annual report, Weibo financial results, Youku annual report, vii

8 Series Preface Technological change has transformed where people work, when, and how. Digitization of information has altered labour processes out of all recognition whilst telecommunications have enabled jobs to be relocated globally. The new kinds of economic activities based on a combination of computing and telecommunications have also enabled the creation of entirely new types of digital or virtual labour, both paid and unpaid, shifting the borderline between play and work and creating new types of unpaid labour connected with the consumption and co-creation of goods and services. This affects private life as well as transforming the nature of work and people experience which impacts differently depending on their gender, their age, where they live, and what work they do. Aspects of these changes have been studied separately by many different academic experts including sociologists, economists, geographers, political scientists, psychologists, organizational theorists, and people working in such diverse fields as gender studies, management, innovation, development studies, and industrial relations. However, up till now no cohesive overarching analytical framework has been developed, and even a common vocabulary is lacking. The term Virtual Work identifies a new and expanding field of study, bringing clarity to a context in which terminological confusion has been created by the coining of a large number of different terms in differing disciplinary contexts, such as immaterial work, crowdsourcing, telework, digital labour, ework, information economy, prosumption, symbolic analysis, sharing economy, and creative economy. Launched in 2012, and funded by the COST Association, which promotes European cooperation in Science and Technology, the Dynamics of Virtual Work Action is a large international research network. It has brought together, for the first time, leading experts from a wide range of disciplines including political economy, labour sociology, economic geography, communications studies, technology, gender studies, social psychology, organization studies, industrial relations, and development studies from 31 European countries, along with distinguished scholars from other parts of the world. Over a four-year period, this Action has organized a series of workshops, conferences, training schools, and other activities with the aim of bringing coherence to this fragmented viii

9 Series Preface ix field and developing a research agenda for the future. These events have provided a space for lively dialogue between researchers from widely different backgrounds and traditions, bringing together theoretical and empirical research, both qualitative and quantitative, and allowing researchers to speak across disciplinary boundaries, national borders, theoretical and political vocabularies, and different languages to understand and make sense of contemporary transformations in work and social life more broadly. This book series is an outcome of this rich conversation.

10 Contributors Thomas Allmer studied media and communication and political science at the University of Salzburg, Austria, and the Victoria University, Melbourne, Australia. He is Lecturer in Social Justice at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, UK, and a member of the Unified Theory of Information Research Group, Austria. His publications include Towards a Critical Theory of Surveillance in Informational Capitalism (2012) and Critical Theory and Social Media: Between Emancipation and Commodification (forthcoming). Eran Fisher is a senior lecturer at the Department of Sociology, Political Science, and Communication, the Open University of Israel. He studies social issues of digital media technology. His work has been published in European Journal of Social Theory, Journal of Labour and Society, Media, Culture, and Society, and Information, Communication, and Society. His books include Media and New Capitalism in the Digital Age: The Spirit of Networks (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010) and Internet and Emotions (co-edited with Tova Benski, 2014). Olivier Frayssé is Professor of American Studies at the University of Paris-Sorbonne. A graduate of the École Normale Supérieure and Institut d Études Politiques de Paris, he is Head of the English Department at Paris-Sorbonne and of the Work, Culture and Society in Anglophone Countries research centre of that university. This centre analyses the specificities of anglophone societies in relation to the issue of work and labour and focuses on work-related issues by taking account of the social and cultural contexts of these societies. His latest publications include Work and Labour as Metonymy and Metaphor (TripleC, vol. 12, no. 3, 2014) and How the US Counterculture Redefined Work for the Age of the Internet, in Olivier Frayssé and Mathieu O Neil (eds.), Digital Labour and Prosumer Capitalism: The US Matrix (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). Christian Fuchs is a professor at and the Director of the University of Westminster s Communication and Media Research Institute (CAMRI), UK. He is editor of the journal triplec: Communication, Capitalism & Critique. His field of research is the critical theory and critique of the x

11 Notes on Contributors xi political economy of media, communications, culture, and the internet. He is author of Reading Marx in the Information Age: A Media and Communication Studies Perspective on Capital, Volume 1 (2016), Culture and Economy in the Age of Social Media (2015), Digital Labour and Karl Marx (2014), Social Media: A Critical Introduction (2014), OccupyMedia! The Occupy Movement and Social Media in Crisis Capitalism (2014), Foundations of Critical Media and Information Studies (2011), and Internet and Society: Social Theory in the Information Age (2008). Andrea Fumagalli is Associate Professor of Economics in the Department of Economics and Management at University of Pavia and a militant researcher. He got the Habilitation for full professor in 2013 in Economic Policy. He teaches history of economic thought, theory of firms, and economics of knowledge. He also teaches at the Department of Informatic Science, the University of Bologna, and is a member of the Effimera Network, a founder member of Bin-Italy (Basic Income Network, Italy), and a member of the Executive Committee of BIEN (Basic Income Earth Network). He is active in the San Precario network. His research interests are the transformation of accumulation and valorization processes in contemporary capitalism (cognitive biocapitalism), labour flexibility and precarization, the theory of money and basic income hypothesis. Kylie Jarrett is Lecturer in Multimedia in the Department of Media Studies at the National University of Ireland Maynooth. Her research focuses on the political economy of the commercial web, including studies of ebay, Facebook, Google, and podcasting. She is soon to publish a book entitled Feminism, Labour and Digital Media: The Digital Housewife, applying Marxist feminist perspectives on domestic work to digital media value creation. Arwid Lund will defend his dissertation Realm of Freedom on Swedish Wikipedians in Library and Information Science in October He is affiliated to the Archival, Library & Information, Museum & Cultural Heritage Studies Department at the University of Uppsala, Sweden. He is the author of three books in Swedish, and has worked as a librarian with digital publishing and digital repositories. Yuqi Na is a PhD student from the Communication and Media Research Institute (CAMRI), University of Westminster. Her main research areas

12 xii Notes on Contributors are political economy of communication, ideology, social media, and the internet. Brice Nixon is a visiting assistant professor in the Communications Department at the University of La Verne, USA. His research is in the areas of the political economy of communication, digital media studies, media history, journalism studies, communication law and policy, and critical theory. His primary interest is in analysing how communication industries from the print era to today have sought to determine the conditions of cultural consumption in order to turn communicative practices into the business of media and culture. Recent work in this area includes an article on the old media business of Google, in Media, Culture & Society. Frederick H. Pitts is a PhD researcher with the Department of Social and Policy Sciences at the University of Bath, UK. His research explores work and work-time in the cultural and creative industries, with a specific focus on the struggle to measure, quantify, and value creative labour. His approach is informed by a critical engagement with Marxian thought and critical theory, including the German Neue Marx-Lektüre and Italian post-operaismo. Jernej Amon Prodnik is a post-doctoral researcher at the Institute of Communication Studies and Journalism, Faculty of Social Sciences, Charles University in Prague (the PolCoRe research group), and a researcher at the Social Communication Research Centre, Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Ljubljana (Slovenia). He holds a PhD in media and communication studies from the University of Ljubljana in In 2014, he published Protislovja komuniciranja: h kritiki poblagovljenja v politicni ekonomiji komuniciranja (Contradictions of Communication: Towards a Critique of Commodification in Political Economy of Communication). Jakob Rigi is an associate professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Central European University. He has taught at SOAS, Cornell University, and the Central European University. He has been a research fellow at Edinburgh University, New York University, London University, and Manchester University. His current research is focused on the political economy of knowledge/data and 3D printing and digital copying, and the development of peer production/commons of knowledge. His distinctive contributions to his field of research consist of his

13 Notes on Contributors xiii theory of peer production, on the one hand, and his theory of knowledge/information rent, on the other. His articles have appeared in the journals Peer Production, Capital and Class, triplec, andthe Information Society. His previous research, resulting in a wide range of publication, explored post-soviet politico-economic change in Kazakhstan and Russia. Marisol Sandoval is a lecturer at the Department of Culture and Creative Industries, City University, London. Her research critically deals with questions of power, responsibility, commodification, exploitation, ideology, and resistance in the global culture industry. She is co-editor of the open-access journal triplec Communication, Capitalism and Critique. Her book From Corporate to Social Media (2014) looks beyond common understandings of the term social media by providing a critical analysis of corporate social (ir)responsibility in the global media and communication industries. Sebastian Sevignani studied media and communication, philosophy, and theology at the University of Salzburg, Austria. He is a member of the Unified Theory of Information Research Group, Austria, and an assistant professor at the Friedrich-Schiller-University Jena s Department of Sociology, Germany. His publications include the book Privacy and Capitalism in the Age of Social Media (2016). Currently, he works on a social theory project about a contemporary critical theory of needs. Bingqing Xia is an assistant professor in the Faculty of Humanities and Arts at Macau University of Science and Technology, Macao. Her research focuses on labour and the quality of working life in the Chinese internet industries, and primarily on Chinese internet industries. Her background is in history and new media studies. She has presented her work at a range of international, annual, and biannual conferences such as the Association of Internet Researchers, the International Association for Media and Communication Research and the Crossroads Cultural Studies conference.