Digital Labor and Karl Marx

by Christian Fuchs

Christian Fuchs, who wrote critical works in the categories of human and society, enabled us to examine Marx in terms of today’s conditions with his book Digital Labor and Karl Marx. The book offers a truly in-depth analysis.

Today, there is a tendency to bring Marx back to the agenda. We can say that the main reason for this is the new world crisis that started in 2008. The reasons mentioned in the book can be summarized as follows;

• Increasing interest in the dynamics, contradictions and concept of crisis of capitalism
• Neoliberalism and work-life balance best understood through exploitation and meta-analysis
• New social movements dealing with class issues (anti-institutional movement, global justice movement, occupation movement)
• The ability of new imperialism and fictitious capital categories to analyze today’s economy finance in the best way
• Interest in imperialism in the framework of new global wars
• Contemporary revolutions and rebellions (like the Arab Spring)
• Discussions about global capitalism
• Generation of university students who work insecurely

Let’s take a look at the ideology put forward by Karl Marx.

Human labor interacts with the means of production and, together with these means of production, transforms nature. Labor becomes objectified with the product and this object has a use value because it is created for human needs. The way to increase productivity is to increase the output produced by labor per unit time. This happens with the self-development of labor. Another way is to increase the time that labor works, but this way has a certain limit. For this reason, increasing the output per unit time is a higher priority target. But are our working hours really limited in today’s digital world? Or can our social media activities, which are seen as leisure time, also be considered as work?

For Marx, capitalism means that capital steals a certain amount of labor for which it is not regularly paid. Marx argued that the value of labor-power is the average amount of time required for survival (necessary labor time) and required for the reproduction of labor, paid by workers in capitalism with their wages. Capital pays labor for the outputs produced during this time. Surplus-labour, on the other hand, is labor that is appropriated by capital, that is not paid for and that makes a profit. For example; If a worker works eight hours a day, his wage is actually the equivalent of six hours of work. In this context, surplus value is unpaid labor time. The remaining two hours’ work goes to the capital. All of his time is labor time that exceeds necessary labor-time, remaining unpaid, allocated by free capitalists and turned into profit. Capitalism is based on the constant theft of workers’ unpaid labor by capitalists. That is why he characterizes the capital as a vampire and a werewolf. Capital, which acts with the motive of profit maximization, does not hesitate to try every way to reach its goal and always acquires new goals to reach. According to this ideology, maximizing profit triggers an environment of endless competition.

The contradictions of today’s capitalist world are more meaningful with Marx’s theory. Especially in terms of digital transformation, social media has emerged for the need to create new capital accumulation strategies. The “social media” discourse focuses on new models of capital accumulation for the internet economy. The rise of new media is accompanied by a techno-deterministic and technological-optimistic ideology. The political economy of surplus value production in “social media” and ideology was heavily involved to drive the economic and discursive rise of “social media”.

As mentioned in the book, Horst Holzer and Manfred Knoche outline four functions related to the Marxist critique of the political economy of media and communication;

• Capital accumulation in the media industry;
• Advertising, public relations and sales promotion for other industries;
• Legitimation of domination and ideological manipulation
• Reproduction, renewal and qualifications of labor power.

Accordingly, users’ data — information about their uploaded data, social networks, interests, demographics, browsing and interaction behavior — is sold to advertisers as a commodity. Consumers of information on the Internet also have a tendency to produce information. Social media platforms try to create the impression that their sole purpose is to provide users with an engaging, high-quality service and experience that enables them to produce their own media content and connect with friends. But it remains confidential that they aim to increase their profits by selling space for user information and advertisements.

We can briefly summarize the media exploitation system as follows;

• Coercion: Users are ideologically compelled to use trading platforms. Because not using such platforms puts people in trouble in their social relations.
• Alienation: Platforms and profits are owned by companies, not users.
• Allowance: Users spend time on corporate internet platforms. Time spent on enterprise platforms is the value created by their unpaid digital labor. Their digital efforts create social relationships and thus transaction data such as profile data, user-generated content and browsing behavior are sold to internet companies. In this data sale, it is also possible to act according to the target audience determined by the companies.

Exploitation is created in an environment where users’ online working time is objectified and this data does not belong to them, but rather belongs to corporate Internet platforms with the help of terms of use and privacy policies. Enterprise Internet platforms provide advertisers with Internet data outputs for sale. Value realization, the conversion of value to profit, occurs when the targeted users view (pay-per-view) or click (pay-per-click) the ad. Not all data is always sold and certain groups of data are more popular than others, but exploitation always takes place at the point of production and allocation.
As a result of all our activities on social media and the content we produce, large corporate companies provide high monetary profits, but we are not paid in any way for this profit. We cannot consider the free service we receive from these platforms as a fee, because the fee is the monetary value that a person receives in exchange for his/her work to maintain his/her life. While it is not possible for us to convert these platform services into monetary value, due to the time we spend on social media and the content we produce, platform-owning companies can convert this data into “real money” in astronomical amounts.

Just how much can we see this “platform service” we have acquired as a reward! In this context, we can consider the profits obtained as the “unpaid profit” that Marx mentioned. The problematic of whether the time realized on the social media we mentioned above is working time becomes clear.

The contemporary globalization of capitalism has spread the walls of the wage-labor factory all over the world. Capital cannot exist without wage labor, and society has become a factory as it exploits the commons created by all.

Of course, you can get more detailed and in-depth information from the book. This book, which I highly recommend to read, is a great critical work that synthesizes Marxist theory with contemporary systems and serves to raise our awareness.