Digital labour and the theory of value

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

Austin Distel, Unsplash

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

Bidet, Jacques. 2007. A reconstruction project of the Marxian theory: From Exploring Marx’s Capital
(1985) to Altermarxisme (2007), via Théorie Générale (1999) and Explication et reconstruction
du Capital (2004). http://jacques.bidet.pagesperso-orange.fr/londongla.htm.

Cleaver, Harry. 2000. Reading Capital politically. Leeds: Anti/Theses

Marx, Karl. Economic and philosophic manuscripts of 1844 and the Communist Manifesto, 13–168. Amherst, NY: Prometheus.

Marx, Karl. 1857/1858b. Grundrisse. London: Penguin

Marx, Karl. 1861–1863. Economic manuscripts of 1861–1863. http://www.marxists.org/archive/
marx/works/1861/economic/index.htm.)

Marx, Karl. 1867c. Capital, Volume 1. London: Penguin

Negri, Antonio. 1991. Marx beyond Marx. London: Pluto.

Tronti, Mario. 1962. Arbeiter und Kapital, Frankfurt: Verlag Neue Kritik.

Software vs human work rituals

Kenneth S. Rubin - Essential Scrum. A Practical Guide to the Most Popular Agile Process (2012, Addison-Wesley Professional)..

Image: sagarsoft.com

0. Introduction

Claim: Scrum can be a way of making software engineering work more proficient.

Who deals with: rejects traditional, plan-driven, predictive development (waterfall style) approaches and Gannt charts, acknowledges that kanban framework is useful in contexts where scrum is not applicable.

Method: Narrative. Breaks Scrum framework into constituent parts: concepts (sprints, requirements and user stories, backlog, estimation and velocity, tehnical debt) and roles (product owner, scrum master, dev team, managers). Then gives introduction to agile principles and zooms in to planning and sprinting to discuss in more detail.

Why important: Rubin defines three key reasons: (1) deals well with situations where there's more unknown than known; (2) avoids big up-front architecture design; (3) teams are cross-functional.

Relevance to my research: describes the software engineering approach to work, which my research also deals with; explains how software rituals are applied in human behaviour.

Naysayer: scrum is not ideal for all situations; it's not good for chaotic contexts and in interrupt-driven workflow (eg, support tickets).

Image: Rubin, 2012: 7

Technical debt

Avoiding long-term, low-certainty guessing

Example technical debt economic analysis

•Each month of development costs $100K.

•We cannot reasonably meet the target delivery date (at ten months) with all of the requested, must-have features.

•Dropping features is just not an option.

Post-launch development process: Scenario 1

•Team finishes up all the lag in the reasonable amount of time (before next update/release due)

•At point B, the total amount of work gets back to being equal to ongoing work

Post-launch development process: Scenario 2

Team makes sure the debt is not growing and covers the most critical issues, sealing the debt that cannot be addressed

At point B, the total amount of work equals ongoing work plus any servicing of debt that was left behind unaddressed

Post-launch development process: Scenario 3

Team discovers that technical debt is in fact growing quicker than can be addressed without further budgeting considerations

The total amount of work grows, adding up the ongoing work, servicing of debt and addressing the debt.

At point B maintenance costs exceed total cost of building entirely new website from scratch, making keeping of the old one questionable

Notes:

Found chapters on technical debt, sprints and product backlog quite informative. chapter 16 to 18 contain information which mostly reiterates previous claims and adds a bit more in terms of large-scale planning. The section about sprinting contains mainly stuff mentioned before.

Sprinting:

- come to sprint planning with already groomed backlog (336)
- formulate sprint goal
- break backlog items into smaller tasks (344)

Difference between sprint review and retrospective: review is for the work done in the sprint (with stakeholders). Retrospective is to analyse the working methods (for Scrum team).

Retrospective questions (377):

- What worked well this sprint that we want to continue doing?
- What didn’t work well this sprint that we should stop doing?
- What should we start doing or improve?

Tools for retrospective:

- Timeline with emotional seismograph to analyse team feelings about the sprint
- Things to keep doing/things to stop doing/things to try board

Marxist analysis today

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

0. Introduction

Claim: The task of this book is to better understand labour and value generation in the context of digital media.

Who deals with: Karx Marx, Dallas Smythe. Supports Dyer-Witheford and Trevor Scholtz.

Method: Grounded in the works of Karl Marx. Introduces a matrix of two sets of ideas: (1) Labour-Power and the Objects, Tools and Products of Labour and (2) role in the International Division of Digital Labour. Applies it to case studies (Foxconn, mineral extraction, call centres, labour on social media, indian software industry). The aim is to create a set of categories, or more a lexicon of key ideas (listed below).

Why important: Nine reasons for which Marxist analysis fits the best in today's situation are occupying a whole section in Introduction. The reasons are: economic crisis, neoliberalism and precarisation of work, new social movements, financialisation of economy, global wars, revolutions and rebellions, globalisation, mediatisation, precarious work in academia.

Relevance to my research: In order to introduce the debate on digital labour (a candidate to develop a debate with?). Find out what his ideas are on the differences between industrial and software engineering. And the role of abstraction he sees in software.

Dallas Walker Smythe was a political activist and researcher who contributed to a political economy of communications. He believed that research should be used to develop knowledge that could be applied to policies in support of public interest and the disenfranchised in the face of private capital.Wikipedia

Notes:

The task is rather to introduce a multifaceted conceptual digital labour theory toolbox with following categories: absolute and relative surplus-value production, commodity fetishism, formal and real subsumption, housewifization, labour aristocracy, modes of production, play labour, productive forces, prosumers commodifi cation, slavery, the new imperialism, primitive accumulation, etc. (8)

Prejudices against Marx (Eagleton, Terry. 2011. Why Marx was right. London: Yale University Press.) - addressed directly to Eagleton's text, where the reasons for rejection of those prejudices are described. Fuchs supports Eagleton's claims and adds a few of his own in a media and communiations dimension, which he calls "a Marxist theiry of communication" (16).

Subjects of digital labour: towards the roadmap (2)

Abstract

The problem with today’s critical discourse around the future of work lies in the assumption that methods used by worker’s right movements are readily available for use in digital labour. In the same way as we have argued for the workers’ rights in industrial production and service industries, the assumption tells us, we can now adopt the same methods to software engineering and other new types of labour that involve provision of digital services produced and delivered over the internet. Indeed, this is quite obvious that exploitation of workers online is no less and is often higher than in offline and colocated labour. Numerous efforts are made to adopt traditional methods of collective bargaining and self-organisation to digital labour without any further interrogation. Yet any attempt of unionisation are largely met with worker’s scepticism. Struggles to bring down exploitation by arguing full time employment and benefits are met as attempts to undermine the freedom of lifestyle choices. Platform coops remain the esoteric endeavour of the few, not supported by the majority of global remote workforce. Why such efforts are short lived or fail at the very outset? Traditional worker inquiry has no tools to provide the answer. 

My research addresses this gap by claiming that the difference between seemingly similar spheres of industrial and software engineering is much larger than meets the eye, and indeed so vast that new analytical methods need to be devised in order to access digital labour in full detail. What makes the two so different? Firstly, industrial production is using the economic model which makes profit from making identical copies of same products. In software engineering, products are not goods, but processes in the perpetual state of becoming, not only constantly updated, but usually customised for each customer. Secondly, industrial production is dependent on extraction of fossil fuels, while software production uses extraction of time in order to make teams more effective and deliver value early. Lastly, the key players, the manager and the worker, come in completely different forms and have different relationships. In the industrial model, the worker is a distinct individual that is connected to performing a certain service in a certain location often together  with other workers, and manager’s role is focused on administration. In digital labour where the product is both the software and the user experience, the product is largely created not by the worker but by the algorithm, individuals performing the work may not be in touch. The engineer in this context becomes a mixed figure combining the features of administrator with those of the worker. 

Having determined the key role software plays in remote digital labour, the research aims at developing a mode of ideological critique of such software, as the way to theorise the subjects of digital labour as something fluid and constantly changing depending on the work and the rituals used to perform it. Why such study is important? As mentioned previously, such theoretical tool is required to delineate software production from production of physical commodities and will thus position me and other researchers in the field better to understand what kind of possible futures for this labour can be imagined. On the other hand, my research contributes to the broader discourse around the future of work as a whole, which is a theme that is extensively debated in academic circles as well as by wider audience. 

Marvin Meyer, Unsplash

Methodology

In order to observe the changes involved in the paradigm shift from industrial to computational logic of labour, and to construct the proposed ideological critique, I compare the two spheres using the matrix with four categories - entrepreneur ideology, corporate cultures, topology and abstraction. The figure of the subject that emerges through this matrix is applied in the project to software engineering but is potentially applicable across the broad range of other services delivered online. In contrast to sociological methods used in today’s study of platform labour by Oxford Internet Institute and other research organisations in the field of society and internet, my aim is to develop a distinctly critical mode of inquiry that would look at the ideological implications in the sphere densely involved with software. In order to do this, I have to combine methods from three disciplines. Feminist critique of work and constructionist critique of science (Haraway, Beniger) allow to analyse the scientific basis of industrial production model. Topological view helps to draw the parallel of space in physical industry vis a vis virtual space of software, as well as for its argument for political life of forms of knowledge that present themselves a purely technical (Neilson, Cowen). Theorisation of abstraction (Kittler, Gehl) in combination with Simondon’s notion of individuation are required for analysing the notion of the subject with regards to human-computer interaction (HCI). Beside these three methodological sets, traditional worker’s inquiry along with its theorisation of the working class and the meaning of alienation of workers in remote vs colocated employment is re-assessed in light of the radical shift in digital labour discussed above.

This project's key innovation does not lie in its approach to subjects themselves, the models of labour it analyses or the application of comparative analysis, but rather in the argument of the previously ignored differences between the two types labour, which would potentially help us gain a better position for analysing them. 

Chapter overview.

Five theoretical chapters that look at the key themes. Each chapter is broken down in three sections, (1) industrial (colocated) engineering, (2) software (remote) practices and (3) comparing the relationship of key trends in each to the subjects of labour.

Corporate cultures. Comparison of waterfall vs agile workflows. Celebration of teamwork in scrum methodology and traditional work philosophies in history and today (Ford, Taylor, Toyota Way, Amazon). Ways of overlapping of agile into other practices.

Entrepreneur ideology. Broader discussion of ideology and its implication in industrial labour and software (work as ideology vs software as ideology).

Topology.  Comparison of logistics (spatial relation of production) vs software topology (how space is being translated in software). Also similarities here - London tube map vs Google Maps as abstraction of space in and out of software.

Abstraction. Discussion of abstractions in maths, computer science, in Marxian critique. Real abstraction vs interface as abstraction in software.

Subjects. Comparing the figures of industrial worker, software engineers and technical individual. Can we argue that in both spheres technological individual is a broader notion of a worker, which is always already more than human/technological? Working class vs digital working class.

Towards the ideological critique of digital labour. Summary of outcomes and proposition for the new way of analysing digital labour through its subjects.

Empirical study

Ideas to come after the initial engagement with the companies. Still like the idea of having a long-term relationships with individuals over the time of my PhD, but not all of them would be workers (Bryan Stutzman, Workplaceless). Alternatively to the more general internet and society think tanks, it would be more interesting to look at the more hands-on practices connected to software engineering and remote work in general: Workplaceless, Laboratoria - a feminist coding bootcamp based in Latin America. Maybe worth getting in touch with Atlassian, the company that produces the mainstream project management software that is my primary target of critique. Is it worth locating partners among the industrial engineering sector, and which could that be? Eg some kind of robotics used for manufacturing, etc.

Shortlisted institutions in the sphere of more general research in the area: The Centre for Internet & Society in Bangalore, India; Digital Asia Hub in Hong Kong; Sarai, Delhi, India.