Work and Sensibilities: Commodification and Processes of Expropriation Around Digital Labour (original) (raw)
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Reconsidering digital labour: Bringing tech workers into the debate
New Technology, Work and Employment, 2022
The digital labour debate has produced manifold insights into new forms of work emerging within digital capitalism. So far, though, most research has focused on highly precarious labourers, neglecting the growing ranks of affluent 'tech workers'. I argue that this analytical oversight can be attributed to a narrow con-ceptualisation of digital labour. Thus, this article first proposes a broadening of the digital labour concept to encompass all work entangled with the digital economy. In a second step, I demonstrate the heuristic surplus of this theoretical broadening through a discussion of the empirical literature on tech workers. By bringing tech workers into the debate, I point to the cultural, technological and organisational relations between high and low-paid digital labourers. Pursuing twin-aims, the article combines a theoretical reconsideration of digital labour with an analytical discussion of the literature on tech workers to provide a more relational account of work and class in digital capitalism.
Special issue of tripleC journal entitled "Philosophers of the World Unite! Theorising Digital Labour and Virtual Work - Definitions, Dimensions and Forms", 2014
This special issue of tripleC: Communication, Capitalism & Critique aims to contribute to building a theoretical framework for the critical analysis of digital labour, virtual work, and related concepts that can initiate further debates, inform empirical studies, and inspire social struggles connected to work and labour in and beyond digital capitalism. The papers collected in this special issue (a) provide systematic definitions of digital labour, (b) analyse its specific dimension, and (c) discuss different forms of digital labour.
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The Fourth Industrial Revolution and Labour: A Marxian Theory of Digital Production
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In recent years the birth of ‘digital production’ has spurred a lively theoretical debate in political economy, seeking to understand the implications of ‘immaterial labour’ for the labour theory of value. These discussions have identified a number of theoretical challenges pertaining to the conceptualization of capitalist production in digital space. In particular, scholars have been puzzled by the question of how the notion of ‘abstract labour-time’ applies to immaterial labour, how the ‘free use’ of websites/applications is compatible with ‘commodity production’, what role ‘users’ play in the production process, and whether digital firms can be simply seen as rent-seekers disengaged from value-production altogether. In this paper I present an answer to these questions using Marx’s Circuits of Capital model which allows a clear understanding of ‘commodity production’ and ‘labour-processes’ to be drawn in any microeconomic arrangement. I then complement this theoretical analysis wi...
This paper deals with the questions: What is digital labour? What is digital work? Based on Marx's theory, we distinguish between work and labour as anthropological and historical forms of human activity. The notion of alienated labour is grounded in a general model of the work process that is conceptualized based on a dialectic of subject and object in the economy that we present in the form of a model, the Hegelian-Marxist dialectical triangle of the work process. Various aspects of a Marxist theory of work and labour, such as the notions of abstract and concrete labour, double-free labour, productive labour, the collective worker and general work are presented. Labour is based on a fourfold alienation of the human being. After these concepts are introduced, they are used for discussing the notions of digital labour and digital work. The presentation is on the one hand general and on the other hand uses Facebook as a concrete case for explaining how digital labour functions. Digital work is the organisation of human experiences with the help of the human brain, digital media and speech in such a way that new products are created. Digital labour is the valorisation dimension of digital work. We conclude that we require the transformation of digital labour into digital work, a true social media revolution that makes "social media" truly and fully social. We also argue why in our view work is not the same as labour by discussing the concept of playful work and pointing out limits of concepts such as antiwork, postwork and zerowork.
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