4AAVC101 - week 10

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These are my notes from November 28 for 4AAVC101 at King's College London for the 2017-2018 school year. The lecturer, Nick Srnicek, is the author of two excellent books at the intersection of technology and leftist politics: Inventing the Future (with Alex Williams), and Platform Capitalism.

The usual disclaimer: all notes are my personal impressions and do not necessarily reflect the view of the lecturer.

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Digital Workers

Readings

(Not) Getting Paid to Do What You Love by Brooke Erin Duffy (chapter 3)

Described as

An illuminating investigation into a class of enterprising women aspiring to “make it” in the social media economy but often finding only unpaid work

in the press materials. Didn’t read.

Labor in the Global Digital Economy by Ursula Huws (chapter 5)

Going to read this at some point for my dissertation.

Cyber-Proletariat by Nick Dyer-Witheford (recommended)

Same as above

Lecture

On the subjects of the digital world. Introducting basic Marxist theories of class & exploitation and applying them to the digital economy, without too much explicit mention of Marx (presumably to avoid the associated semantic baggage).

• there is a dialectical opposition of the working & the capitalist class (collective categories, not individualistic)
• historical examples of class struggle:
  • welfare state (power resources theory)
  • 2-day weekends (won by workers)
  • deregulation of finance (won by capitalist class)
  • the creation of the EU (born out of the former European Coal and Steel Community, but really a victory for the German industrial capitalist class)
• on Bourdieu’s theory of taste (cultural class signifiers, where what is considered “high culture” is at least partly determined by the ruling class)
• one way to think about class is based on income bracket, but there’s a better way: relationship to the means of production
  • the easiest way to distinguish: capitalist class sees more income more capital; proletarian, from wages
• pre-capitalism, workers (by and large) had ownership of tools needed for production; there was no concept of “unemployment”
  • but capitalism brought about the separation of workers from their tools, in a process called primitive accumulation
  • result: workers need to sell their labour-power in order to survive
• exploitation refers to the general process of capitalists selling goods for more than the worker is paid in wages + is needed for raw materials (the extracted value is called surplus value)
• of course, this is a fairly crude analysis
  • to be more sophisticated, we’d need intermediate classes, and we’d also have to allow liminality
  • there are high-tech workers who are getting paid (high) wages but also often have stock or at least options, which can realise high capital gains
  • we also have middle managers, who ofte promote the class interests of capital even though they’re usually compensated like workers
  • plus, within the capitalist class, we have different categories: industrial/financial/platform which may have opposed views on topics like the deregulation of finance
• operaismo, or “workerism” in Italian: emphasises the centrality of the working class
  • implies that we need to look at the composition of the working class as well
  • technical composition, based on: division of labour; management techniques; machinery; reproduction of labour
  • political composition, based on: self-organising structures (unions and political parties); direct action (strikes, vandalism)
  • operaismo accepts that the composition (technical and political) can change along with the economy, in various cycles
• the Fordist cycle, from 1920s-1970s:
  • assembly lines
  • Taylorist management (deskilled workers given as little control over their work as possible; atomised work units)
  • huge factory machinery (high capital investment)
  • high wages (in order to boost consumption) assuming a male breadwinner model (women at home, doing domestic labour)
  • trade unions divided by industry
  • primary tactic: strikes
  • theory: political composition is determined by technical composition
    • due to centralisation of factories, it’s easy to have a strike that can shut down a nerve centre in a particular industry
    • plus, workers tended to be somewhat homogenous (similarly skilled, male, brought together in factories so they build solidarity that way)
  • (there’s a great article in Catalyst called Management-By-Stress which sees the move from Fordism to Toyotism as a way to deprive workers of these “pressure points”)
• do we have a new worker subjectivity now, due to changes in technology?
  • free labour for the advertising-driven UGC platforms (Facebook/Google/etc): not really
    • (thought: in Marxist terms, is there actually value being produced, or is the more targeted advertising just reducing the cost of circulation in the market?)
  • gig economy workers
    • precarious work
    • digitally managed via app (as opposed to an actual living employer)
    • rarely get to meet each other in person, unless they happen to pass each other by on the street or at waiting points
    • otoh, they are starting to organise and using some clever strategies, so there’s hope
  • content moderators for platforms like FB
    • outsourced to low-wage areas like the Philippines
    • checking for pornographic/violent content
    • high turnover -> harder to organise
  • Amazon warehouse workers
    • product sales cycle highly seasonal (higher Q4 revenue due to Christmas shopping)
    • in order to keep up with this seasonal demand, they have hired a mobile workforce which they call a “CamperForce”
    • basically elderly/retired workers who own their own RVs and who may have lost assets in the financial crisis
  • Coltan mining in the DRC (necessary to produce electronics)—Christian Fuchs writes about this a lot
  • software engineers/data scientists who are in high demand (partly as a result of overaccumulation, tbh) and thus can command high salaries
    • this is very cushy cognitive work, in environments that are intellectually challenging
    • they’re getting paid well so they have no reason to question the status quo (at least as a class)
• on class divisions today
  • cognitariat: selling intellectual labour-power (as opposed to the proletariat which sold physical labour-power)
    • highly educated (overeducated) workers with lots of cultural capital who will likely end up in precarious work
    • (Yann Moulier-Boutang makes an illuminating distinction between the intellectual & physical labour power in Cognitive Capitalism: whereas physical labour-power is, in a sense, “destroyed” in the process, intellectual labour-power builds upon itself as the owner of it accumulates greater skill and know-how)
  • the “multitude”: affective/common labour, connected by digital networks, building commons
    • peer production as an example—don’t need capitalists
    • ofc this is a very optimistic account that abstracts away material elements (not everyone benefits)
• the concept of surplus populations (aka reserve army of labour) is useful for understanding the future of labour
  • people who will be excluded from work due to automation (and other factors)
  • unemployed, marginalised in labour market
  • (this is his research focus right now)
• no focus on the platform capitalist class today; instead, focusing on those below

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