Labour question as an identity question - direct and indirect market mediation

Neto, Jeanne and Maya Gonzalez. 2013. The Logic of Gender. Endnotes (3).

Source: Tina Bosse, Three red front-load clothes dryers, Unsplash

Summary

Claim: Marxist feminism categories are no longer enough to understand why humanity is inscribed into one or the other gender, they need clarifying and transformation, because "reproductive" activities no longer occupy the same structural positions within the capitalist totality.

Keywords: feminism, social reproduction theory, value, labour-power

In conversation with: Marx, Capital, chapters on Labour power and social reproduction. Follow Judith Butler in the criticism of the sex/gender binary coming from pre-1990s feminism. seeing value in Silvia Federici's contribution to marxist feminist debate, however opposing the position influential in the commons that reorganisation of reproductive work is not a question of identity but a question of labour. It is argued, on the contrary, that the labour question is an identity question. Julia Kristeva's theorisation of abject in Essay on Abjection, 1982.

Aim: to debunk the established gendered forms of domination under capitalism - productive/reproductive, paid/unpaid, public/private, sex/gender, offering a new social reproduction theory reading to these categories

Method: Establishes two new shperes for theorising gender, IMM and DMM. Then performs comparative analysis of those four traditional categories (listed in the aim) within those two new spheres.

Why important

To academics: contributes to understanding why and how gender is used in today's society

To general public: explains why traditional feminist categories are no longer sufficient to explaining the processes taking place in today's society.

Relevance to my research:

- the view of the worker as a commodity is important in my analysis of subject and object in both industrial and software production models.

- articulates the difference between IMM and DMM, which is crucial for developing imaginations of same processes that function in and out of capitalist modes of production

Source: Nathan Dumlao, Close-up photo of top hanged on rack, Unsplash

Notes:

1. PRODUCTION/REPRODUCTION

1) On labour-power as a distinctive commodity. There is a sphere dissociated from the value production, where the dead labour of means of subsistence is transformed into the living labour found in the market.

Picks up from the Marx's quote as something to build argument with: "Whatever the form of the process of production in a society, it must be a continuous process, must continue to go periodically through the same phases. A society can no more cease to produce than it can cease to consume. When viewed, therefore, as a connected whole, and as flowing on with incessant renewal, every social process of production is, at the same time, a process of reproduction" (Marx, 1976: 711). They note then the contradictory character of commodity, whereby one the one hand it stands via its use-value, as a particular object different from the next, while on the other it contains an aliquot portion of "total social labour" within society. The latter notion is important, since it umbrellas both productive and reproductive labour.

The labourer confronts the capitalist mode of production as a commodity, at the same time as the subject meeting the object. Further, it is argued that while labour-power is a unique commodity, Marx does not distinguish its production from other commdities, merely claiming that it is valued as the value of production of its means of subsistence. However, to Gonzalez and Neto, means of subsistence on their own do not produce labour-power as a ready made commodity. This is where they see the gap - Marx does not consider labour that transforms raw materials, eg means of subsistence, into labour-power commodity as necessary labour at all. G&N explain the lack of interest in Marx to this labour by the fact that it takes place in "a sphere of the capitalist mode of production which is not directly mediated by the form of value". Using a principle that in order for value to exist, it needs to have an exterior,

2) Separation into two different spheres. In order to understand how labour-power is produced, it is necessary to differentiate not by theorising a "reproductive sphere" but by rather drawing a divide between commodified and non-commodified activities: the directly market-mediated sphere (DMM) and the indirectly market-mediated sphere (IMM).

DMM is characterized by the productivity, efficiency and product uniformity (for software, not necessarily "uniformity" but rather compliance with client/other requirements). The return on investment is paramount to all activities. Outside of DMM, there is no market-determination.

IMM has different temporality, different from capitalist working day (check M. Postone's abstract time).

G&N also define different forms of domination: DMM has impersonal, abstract domination, which organises it via the value-comparison in terms of socially necessary labour time. IMM, on the contrary, is socially determined - including direct domination, violence or hierarchical forms of cooperation.

Source: Filip Mroz, Chores, Unsplash

2. PAID/UNPAID

This is a categorisation used by marxist feminists, which needs to be replaced by a more precise waged/unwaged. Wage here is a price for which the worker sells his labour-power. G&N point out that wagd /unwaged does not map neatly to IMM/DMM scheme - while all of unwaged labour is IMM, some of IMM is in fact waged - those are the activities organised by the state sector. There is also a refrence to social validation that happens through wage, which is seen as social form of value (more on this, Christine Delphy, Close to Home: A Materialist Analysis of Women’s Oppression. Hutchinson, 1984).

What does the wage buy? eg which element of the wage constitutes exchange-value of labour power. It buys commoditiies necessary for the reproduction of labor-power. The non-waged activites located outside of value exchange are necessarily dissociated to make a production of value possible - this sphere for G&N is a gendered sphere. These activites are non-labour and are naturalised. As it says in Grundrisse, "the increase of population is a natural force of labour, for which nothing is paid. From this standpoint, we use the term natural force to refer to the social force. All natural forces of social labour are themselves historical products.)" (Marx, 1973:400).

Labour G&N propose to define broadly in opposition to non-labour as an activity that is socially validated as such, because of its specific function. However seemingly banal, such definition is seen as more productive for understanding the character of unwaged activities rather than exchange between man and nature or expense of energy.

3. PUBLIC/PRIVATE

Public/private as the way of distingusihing between economic and political, civil society and the state (these two categories are also held as opposites in Marx). G&N argue that it is only in the pre-modern relations that private was limited to the household. From the advent of capitalism, "the scope of private spans the entire social landscape".

Public, in Marx, is the abstraction from society in the form of the state. Public in this shape is required for the capitalists to accumulate the capital in an independent way, rather than being controlled by the state - and abstract community of "equal citizens". Thereby, the relation of public/private to DMM/IMM is as follows: in DMM citizens defined by the state manage their labour-power directly, while in IMM through those with formal equality.

How does sex/gender map to these spheres? When in the capitalist mode of production the abstract formulation of the "citizen" and "other" came about, these categories were mapped on "white male"/"non-white non-male" positions.

G&N argue that what constitutes the citizen/other binary though is not slavery, but "free" labour - which to Marx is a technical definition of freedom for the wage labourer. Free labourer is the one who has their labour-power for sale, but is short of anything else in order to realise it (Marx, 1976:272-273).

Please revisit the section on Public/private later, because it is quitedense and some bits, like the idea of freedom and the mapping sex/gender on IMM/DMM is not entirely clear

Women here occupy the position of someone who were free fro the means of production, but were not free from selling their labour-power as their own. Only recently they became the owners of their labour-power (a "double freedom", political and "public"). G&N note here, however that a new form of analysis of proletarian identity is also required. Such an identity as an abstraction based upon the common form of unfreedom, was never going to account for everyone.

Women in their fight for freedom were caught between, using G&N own terms, the freedom as "citizen" and freedom as "other", fighting for human and civil rights on one side and for reproductive rights on the other. But the gender distinction has persisted even when the "differential" freedom of women was abolished. However, if that differential freedom was what anchored women to the IMM sphere, why didn't this abolishion also free them from category of "women"?

DOUBLE-FREEDOM AND THE SEX-BLIND MARKET

G&N see the reason for that in that the mechanism of unfreedom in the "private sphere of the economic", the labour-market was inscribed so deeply that it appeared as a mysterious "natural law". Market, it is argued, have to be "sex-blind" because it functions via the comparison of abstract values.

It doesm, on the other hand, reinforce a concrete attribute, such as gender difference, because women, defined as those who bear children, are seen as coming to the market with a potential disadvantage. This anchors them to the IMM sphere. In other words, the contradiction here is that abstract capital punishes women for their concrete sex attribute, even though this sex difference is necessary for the reproduction of capitalism itself. Female labour-power thus has a higher social cost, and, contradictory, cheaper market price.

In the addendum on women, biology and children, conflation of three definitive factors of child-bearing agent (particular body biology, fact of bearing a child and specific relation to the result of this bearing) obscures two things. On one side, the mechanisms that regulate childbirth - marriage, contraceptives, shame of non-child bearing forms of sex activity. On the other, the changing definition of what a child is.

Source: Capturing the human heart., Group of toddlers on the school with teacher teaching, Unsplash

4. SEX/GENDER

Sex is defined as anchoring a specific group of individuals to specific spheres of activity. As well as the process of anchoring, it is the process of reproduction of two separate genders.

Going back to Butler for the critique of gender/sex binary, G&N observe that "gender" is socially tethered to culture, and sex is driven equally towards nature. Butler's counter proposition to this dynamic that G&N align with is that "sex is the naturalisation of gender’s dual projection upon bodies, aggregating biological differences into discrete naturalised semblances" (not sure I get that fully at this point, need to study Butler's critique of Simone de Beauvoir’s ‘uncritical reproduction of the Cartesian distinction between freedom and the body.’ Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (Routledge 1990), chapter 1: ‘Subjects of Sex/Gender/Desire.’ ) G&N however, arrive to this notion not via the critique of the existentialist ontology of the body, as Butler, but via the alternative route, through value. They draw the analogy between the sex/gender relation (of the social body) and the value/fetishism dualism of the commodity.

Sex is then the use-value that attaches itself to gender as (exchange-) value. Gender is the abstraction that determines the body to which it is attached, in the same way as real abstraction of value transforms the material body of the commodity.

I do see how sex and gender are historically determined, but it is unclear how is it that both are "purely social". Likewise, this is arguable that both use-value can be abolished in the process of communisation together with exchange-value - since, supposedly, people will still need things for something, even after communisation?

Sex and gender are seen as two side of the same coin, and the more the abstraction of gender becomes denaturalised, the more natural and biological sex appears. Female gender in essence signifies a lower price tag. Extending the gender/sex/use value/exhange value allegory, gender relations are constantly renegotiated, reimposed and re-naturalised in a dialectical process.

5. THE HISTORY OF GENDER WITHIN CAPITALISM

The section offers a periodisation in order to break down this dialectical movement, on the example of the family.

1) Primitive accumulation (18th-19thc). The two genders and the IMM/DMM spheres de facto did not map to one another, even though women were responsible for the IMM and wage was the responsibility of men.

2) Nuclear family and Fordism (19thc). Fordism introduced new standards for production and consumption, and the crisis of reproduction of labour force at the beginning of this period has necessitated a more rigid gender coding, strictly confining women to the IMM. House work became doable by one woman alone because of the home appliances.

3) The 70s: real subsumption and commodification of IMM activities. While many IMM activites becoming rationalised, the time spent on childcare could not be reduced (still 24 hours a day), and instead redistributed to poor immigrants and women of colour. Thus, there is an abject - something which either cannot or not worth subsuming.

Source: Danurwendho Adyakusuma, Tea collector, Unsplash

6. CRISIS AND AUSTERITY MEASURES: THE RISE OF THE ABJECT

Why do G&N propose to differentiate abject and the IMM activities conceptually, even though in practice the two can be one and the same? Abject, comgin from Julia Kristeva's theorisation in Essay on Abjection, is defined as activities that were waged but becoming unwaged because they are too costly for the state or capital. IMM is a "purely structural category, independent of any dynamic".

In conclusion, G&N argue that if gender, through the process of denaturalisaion, is becoming an external constraint, it is, if not necessairily less powerful, but does present a possibility to abolish. Can this externality be seen as purely accidental?

On Marx' theory of value

Harvey, David. Marx’s Refusal of the Labour Theory of Value, March 1, 2018

Claim: "Marx’s value form is not a still and stable fulcrum in capital’s churning world but a constantly changing and unstable metric", influenced by markets, changes in technology, social reproduction and other factors.

Marx never aligned with labour theory of value and instead proposed his own "value theory".

Who deals with: Ricardo, labour theory of value.

Method: Picks up the main points of labour theory of value that add little to Ricardo's theory, but then claims that few Marxists notice that Marx went further, and shows where.

Notes:

Marx's theory of value is, in contrast to Ricardo's, who is looking only at production and circulation, argues that value is rather an outcome of negotiaton between competitive market processes, surplus value production and social reproduction. The latter is something that Marx devises after his comparative studies of living conditions and rationing among workers and prisoners.

Human motor in Marx

Rabinbach, Anson. The Eclipse of the Utopias of Labor. First edition. Forms of Living. New York: Fordham University Press, 2018.

Etienne-Jules Marey chronophotograph. Source: graphicine.com

Overview

Claim: there is an eclipse of hopes that a more efficient workplace could provide the basis of a new, more socially satisfactory society.

Who deals with: European science of work, bridges intellectual history, labor history, and the history of the body. Marx’s productivism, Taylorism, Communism, the Nazi Beauty of Labor program, and the discourses of the digital workplace in the later 20thC.

Method: Analysis of labour. Establishes the idea of human motor as a figure of 19thC transcendental materialism. Then uses this definition in the context of dualism of human and machine to cut across history, identify the notion's decline in 20thC and analyse why it happened (the answer is it because of digital technology). Rabinbach's historical analysis is based on division of history into three parts (mimetic, transcendental, and digital). Chapters are mapped to this three stages.

Why important: for historians. General public, because more efficient workplace could provide the basis of a new, more socially satisfactory society.

Relevance to my research: important because also analyses differences between industrial and digital labour.

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Notes:

Explains categorisation into three historical stages:

1. Mimetic (18thC) - aims at imitating the nature.

2. Transcendental (19-20thC) the body as productive in the sense that it is capable of converting energy into work. Energy is a transcendental principle, that is, equally omnipresent in nature and society.

3. Digital (from 20thC onwards). Driven by the ideas that (1) the primacy of bodily functions was now replaced by the manipulation of signs (Walter Benjamin) and (2) that any mathematical operation can be reproduced mechnanically (Alan Turing) (ix).

Étienne- Jules Marey. Cat drop. Source: ucla.edu

Human motor in Marx

Claim: Marx saw labour as a '“metabolic exchange” between history and nature" (7)

Who deals with: discoveries of William Thomson and Helmholtz around steam engines (7). Thermodynamics theory of William Robert Grove (8). Clausius’s second law of thermodynamics (10). Ukrainian physician and socialist Sergei Podolinsky (11). The “Pope” of German socialism, Karl Kautsky (12).

Method: Looks at Marxism from the standpoint of physics, particlarly first and seconds laws of thermodynamics.

Why important: one reason why socialism is a utopia is because it ignores the 2nd law of thermodynamics, thus denying the environmental impact (“heat death of the universe” hypothesis)(10).

Relevance to my research: to compare application of Marxian analysis in Rabinbach with other digital labour theorists. He also points out the shift in Marx's thinking from more anthropological to economic analysis.

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Notes:

Marx considered his discovery of labour-power as one of his most important achievements (7). In his productvist shift, as observed by Rabinbach, Marx redefines the concrete and abstract labour as conversion of labour versus its generation (Moishe Postone) (8, 177). Once discovered, labour-power became quantifiable, which foregrounded emancipation from productive labour for the sake of even greater productivity over Marx's earlier claim of emancipation through labour (8). In Capital, Marx stresses the substance of exchange is nothing more but labour power, now understood as a commodity (Marx, Capital, 1:179).

In its most general sense, productivism is a belief that all growth is good (opposed by the belief of the finite planet and those who argue that it's up to the worker to put values on their free time). Rabinbach defines it as "primacy and ultimate interchangeability of productive activity of the body, technology, or nature" (vii). Getting back to Marx, he observes in this context that Marxian analysis is built on seeing labour as expenditure of human labour power (8).

Rabinbach argues that Marx and Engels failed to fully adopt the theory of "heat death" in their labour theory of value, and thus delineated their thinking from productivism (11).

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

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(1985) to Altermarxisme (2007), via Théorie Générale (1999) and Explication et reconstruction
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