Fuchs, Christian. Digital Labour and Karl Marx. New York, NY: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2014.

PART I Theoretical Foundations of Studying Digital Labour

Claim: An understanding of key concepts of Marx' theory of value is essential for analysis of digital labour.

Who deals with: Karl Marx

Method: narrative. Breaks down Marx’s labour theory of value into key points: (2.2) labour and work; (2.3) use-value, value,exchange-value, money, price, value and price of labour-power, surplus value.

Why important: to Marxists researchers, as a background for his theory, which is the most thorough analysis that is available (25)

Relevance to my research: lays ground to understanding Fuch's theory of digital labour

Notes:

Introduction. Starts with Aristotle's definitions of poíesis (the creation of works from nature) and praxis (self-determined action) (24). This is seen as key to Marxia definitions. Looks at how later thinkers responded to this duality in definitions: Paulus, Thomas Aquinas, Martin Luther, John Locke, Adam Smith, Hegel.

Marx breaks down economy into production, distribution and consumption. Humans are seen as having doing work, which is a conscious productive activity, aimed at producing means of subsistence. Their need is described as "production of material life itself" (Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. 1845/1846. The German ideology. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books.) Subjectivity in Marx is the world of work that surrounds the commodity, which is seen as objective. Labour creates use-value.

Marx sees labour as natural condition of human existence. There is an implied "interchange between man and nature", which I would question i two ways: (1) man and nature dualism needs to be further nivetigated; (2) argue the evidence for the interchange - capitalism uses extractive logic, which does not presuppose to give anythinig to nature in return of resources.

Fuchs uses the following distinction between work and labour drawn by Marx in Capital: "Labour which creates use-values and is qualitatively determined is called ‘work’ as opposed to ‘labour’; labour which creates value and is only measured quantitatively is called ‘labour’, as opposed to ‘work" (27 quoting Marx, 1867c: 138). In other words, in labour humans do not own means and results of production, and it is necessary alienated. Work is a process where humans make use of technology to transform nature and society and satisfy human needs. Freedom begins where labour ends.

Labour creates "objective form", the product from the material by the activity that uses the instruments (technology). Labour is seen bby Marx as something that consumes materials and instruments, and thus is also a process of consumption.

Hegelian dialectical concept of subject-object relation prescribes the subject as a "posited unseparatedness of moments in their distinction" and objects are external undetermined totality, and the idea is a subject-object relation, or a process. (28). Marx supports these views and extends them into the realm of economy.

Use-value in Marx is a piece of natural material adapted to human needs through changing its form. Labour is objectified (congealed) in product - and this is true also in the phenomena of internet as the sum of efforts of many people. Latter can also be defined as objectification, - and even the deliverables in agile terminology are called artifacts. In other words, software development is usually seen as material production, despite the fact that it doesn't result in physical objects.

What I find inconsistent with application of Marxian logic to digital labour is that the product is theorised by Marx as something that "was intended from the outset" (29). According to my argument, in software development the product is not, and cannot be, something that is intended from the outset. Is it true that we need to have a vision in order to start working on software product, but the work on software does not have an end, meaning, by extension, that no result could be imagined from the outset.

The "productive forces" is a system consisting of humans and their tools.

To Marx, capital and labour stand in opposition: "real not-capital is labour” (Marx, Karl. 857/1858b. Grundrisse. London: Penguin: 274). He introduces the idea that in capitalism the worker works one part of the day for her subsistence, and the other part of the day for the capitalist - effectively meaning that outside of capitalism workers would only perform the labour necessary for their subsistence, and wouldn't have to work in the other part of day.

Alienation to Marx comes in four aspects: (1) alienation from the product; (2) alienation from the labour process in the form of forced labour (ibid.,
74), (3) alienation from himself/herself and (4) from other humans and society (Marx, 1844: 74). This earlier categorisation of alienations focuses more on humans than later one theorised in Grundrisse. Out of the manifold alienations, exploitation of labour emerges, in the moment when the worker labours for free (surplus value) and capitalist turns the free results of labour to monetary profit (33). Exploitation occurs in the context of class relations. The latter are seen as something that evolves from relation to production, and is the source of "antagonism between the productive forces and the relations of production" (35). Dead labour is the labour objectified into capital (as Marx sees it, labour as space) and it dominates living labour (labour as time) (Marx, 1861–1863)

Fuchs notes that there are two layers in Capital due to the fact that Marx wrote critique of capitalism and economic theory in the same book. Marx thus has two sets of categories both constituents of capitalism. There are essential and historic categories (36):

What it means that one set are milestones for developing his critique, and the other are economic categories.

Abstract labour here is human power in abstract, the one that can be use in economic analysis. Speaking of abstractions, Marx identifies four kinds: (1) from physical properties; (2) from single products (in favor of quantities); (3) from simple labour activites to more complex tasks; (4) from labour conditions

Marx theorises three types of labour in relation to production: productive (for capital), unproductive(for the worker) and reproductive (to regenerate from work experience). Wage labour is productive, the one that creates surplus value. For Marx, wage labour is the area of interest - in the moment of exchange of use value to money this labour confronts capital. Negri goes as far as to claim that for Marx there is no other labour, but wage labour, but extends this by rejecting the difference between labour and work, seeing both as necessarily alienated. Work is something to be abolished. Fuchs, however, argues that non-wage work is also accounted for, in the notion of collective worker, the sum of labour efforts that labour power spends not only to produce, but to reproduce (37, quoting Marx, Capital Vol.1, 1867: 274).

Communism for Marx is "a society without labour because alienation ceases to exist" (38). He predicts further focus in society on science and knowledge work that would reduce the necessary labour time and free uptime for personal development. The classes would then cease to exist, because labour relations are not going to be based on onwership of means of production, but on disposable time - in this context, the idea of general labour emerges.

Marx’s Labour Theory of Value

Fuchs' discusses Marx' theory of value in conversation with today's German debate around it, in which value is seen as the notion that appears only in relation with money, in the moment of exchange.

In his value form analysis, Marx comes from Hegelian notion of attraction and repulsion. To Hegel, Ones confront one another, but are still exists in the certain relationship which he argues could be the relation of attraction as well as repulsion.(43) similarly, Marx claims that commodities repulse each other individually, but are generalized in production as abstract labour and in exchange by money. Here I must add from my side, expanding Hegelian principle to subjects of labour, which are mutually attracted via abstraction of their labour despite their repulsion - for example, in entrepreneur mindset.

Capital's volume 1 chapter 1 uses the dialectical method of argumentation of theory of value: first it talks about the commodity (objective view) then the labour (subjective view), and then the exchange, where subjects exchange the labour objectified in commodities. Abstract human labour is here summed up by Fuchs as the substance of value. While use-value is shaped by the time required to produce a commodity, its value (a second type of value in Marx) is determined socially - via the amount of social labour that goes into it. Marx theorises socially necessary labour as the amount of labour required to produce a commodity generalized over the entire economy. Magnitude of value is the amount of socially necessary labour that goes into commodity. Marxian law of value is connected to productivity: the higher the productivity, the less time is needed to produce an item, the lower its value.

Looking at value from the perspective of class, Marx observes that proletariat sees the use-value of the commodities, to consume them. Capitalists see the exchange-value, e.g. apprehend value quantitatively. However, while being "absolutely poor", labourer also uses quantitative nature of commodities when she sells her time in exchange for renumeration. Capitalist, at the same time, needs use-value (of labour as commodity) in order to produce (Cleaver, 2000: 99 and Marx, 1857/1858b: 295).

A part of the horse market in Lorenzkirch, Zeithain, Saxony, Germany. View from the church steeple in Lorenzkirch to the horse market, to the river Elbe and to the town Strehla. Source: Wikimedia Commons

Exchange-value

This is defined by Marx as “the necessary mode of expression, or form of appearance, of value” (Marx, 1867c: 128). Fuchs supports Marx's idea that objectivity of abstract human labour in commodity is a social (and societal) matter. This is because commodities produced in a society and production process is a social process. Due to the exchange, and the two sides of Marxian theorisation (essential and economic), commodities have concrete and abstract sides, use-values and exchange-values, and value has objective and social form. This dialectical unity of commodities is called the measure (50). In other words, Marxian theory (which it extends from Hegel's quality>quantity>qualitative quantity) accounts for three kinds of value: use-value>value>exchange value.

Price

To Marx, “price is the money-name of the labour objectifi ed in a commodity” (Marx 1867c:195–196). Money is the medium of circulation, but also the mediator of class relation. The latter is evident, for example, in the way that capitalist aims to lower the wages and increase the retail price, while the worker struggles or higher wages and can go on strike. Value and price do not necessarily coincide. Price can be driven down by such factors, as for example, market competition, however Fuchs aligns with the idea that generally price and value and not entirely independent and are in any case linked to amounts of social labour that goes into them.

In his two examples, Fuchs shows how prices depend on politics of class struggle. In the first example, fascist enslavement of workers, computers are produced for 100 and sold for 400 eur, through the low wages paid to the workers. The second example shows that when the legislation is changed to pay a minimum wage of 200 eur, the capitalist increases the price of computers to 700 eur, thus achieving the same profit.

Bidet (2007) points out two mediations, market and organisation, as the two key forces that coordinate capitalism on the social scale. Exchange-value is different for the worker and for the capitalist. For the worker, the money is both the income and the instrument of resistance to capital. For the capitalist, on the other hand, it is a cost which threatens surplus value (55). In his example of trade unions, Fuchs show that trade unions's efforts are directed at not letting the price of labour fall below its value (56).

Value of labour-power is here determined by the labour-time necessary to produce the commodity. Services such as schoolwork and housework, as the unpaid labour, contribute to the increase of surplus value (55). In this context, Mario Tronti introduces the term "social factory" (1962). This addresses the social nature of labour, and defines the new way of labour becoming implicated in society through the development of technical means, in the way that the whole society becomes a collective production, in other words, a factory.

Surplus value

To Marx, this kind of value equals surplus labour, the "increment or excess over the original value" (Marx 1867c: 293, 251). "The theory of surplus value is in consequence immediately the theory of exploitation” (Negri 1991, 74) and, one can add, the theory of class and as a consequence the political demand for a classless society". (55) This phenomena of capital being able to acquire unpaid surplus labour (to Marx, a permanent theft) is why the capital is able to self-valorise.

Conclusion.

Chapter 1 of Fuchs' Digital Labour and Karl Marx gives an overview of Marx's labour theory of value. It starts from establishing the differences in Marx's theorisation of work vs labour by pointing out their subjective and objective qualities and the use-value that is produced in labour. It then proceeds to explain alienation leading to exploitation as the key to self-valorisation of capital. Labour appropriated by capital becomes dead labour, and capital is presented as a vampire that requires constant inflow for living labour. Then the two-sided character of Marxian terminology is descried, which on one side operates in "essential categories", eg work, use-value and concrete labour, and historic (economic) categories, such as labour, exchange-value and abstract labour. The moment of exchange is theorised as the point at which the categories swtch from essential to economic. The antagonism between labour and capital is grounded in wages and the surplus value created by unpaid surplus labour, and is thus a class relation. Use and exchange values of commodities are mediated through money and price, which reveals their dialectical unity. The nature of labour, meaning, concerete labour, is social. Through the improvement of technology the relations of production become closely interlinked with other societal relation thus converting a society into a project - a social factory. In the next chapter Fuchs look at the application of theory of value in the context of digital labour from the perspective of media and communication studies.

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Bibliography

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