Labor in the global digital economy the cybertariat comes of age

209 Pages·2014·0.926 MB·English

by  Huws, Ursula

Labor in the Global Digital Economy
This page intentionally left blank
Labor in the Global
Digital Economy
The Cybertariat Comes of Age

by URSULA HUWS
MONTHLY REVIEW PRESS
New York
Copyright © 2014 by Ursula Huws
All Rights Reserved
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available from
the publisher.
—
978-1-58367-463-5 pbk
978-1-58367-464-2 cloth
Typeset in Minion Pro 11/14
Monthly Review Press
146 West 29th Street, Suite 6W
New York, New York 10001
www.monthlyreview.org
5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Introduction / 7
1. What Will We Do? / 27
Th e Destruction of Occupational Identities in
the Knowledge-Based Economy
2. Fixed, Footloose, or Fractured / 47
Work, Identity, and the Spatial Division of Labor in
the Twenty-First-Century City
3. Begging and Bragging / 61
Th e Self and the Commodifi cation of Intellectual Activity
4 . The Globalization of Labor and the Role
of National Governments / 85
Toward a Conceptual Framework
5. Expression and Expropriation / 101
Th e Dialectics of Autonomy and Control in Creative Labor
6. Crisis as Capitalist Opportunity / 127
Th e New Accumulation through Public Service Commodifi cation
7. The Underpinnings of Class in the Digital Age / 149
Living, Labor, and Value
Notes / 183
Index / 203
This page intentionally left blank
Introduction
I
n 2003, Monthly Review Press published a collection of my
essays dating back to the late 1970s under the title Th e Making
of a Cybertariat: Virtual Work in a Real World. Th is collection
continues where that one left off , bringing together essays writ-
ten between 2006 and 2013, a tumultuous period in the history of
capitalism and the organization of labor.
In the earlier collection, one of my central themes was capital-
ism’s extraordinary ability to survive the crises that periodically
threaten to destroy it by generating new commodities. Just at the
point when its logic of expansion seems destined to generate a sat-
uration of markets and a consequent crisis of profi tability, it fi nds
fresh areas of life to bring within its scope, generating new forms
of production of new goods and services for which new markets
can be created. Th ese phases are oft en associated with the diff usion
of new technologies. In the early twentieth century, for instance,
the spread of electricity gave rise to a wave of new commodity
development based on domestic labor (such as vacuum cleaners,
washing machines, and refrigerators) or entertainment (such as
radios, fi lm projectors, or phonographs and the fi lms and records
that provided them with content). In the process novel forms of
8 LABOR IN THE GLOBAL DIGITAL ECONOMY
production were generated, but so too were novel forms of con-
sumption. While new kinds of paid work were created, domestic
labor was increasingly transformed into what I termed “consump-
tion work,” sucking ever more activities out of the private sphere
of direct interpersonal interaction and bringing them into a public
marketplace. Th e more workers become dependent on these new
commodities to survive from one day to the next, the greater their
need for a source of income to pay for them, tightening capital-
ism’s grasp on their lives still further. Yet such innovations are,
on the whole, adopted willingly and enthusiastically. Th ere is an
almost irresistible appeal in their novelty, modernity, and conve-
nience, their increasing cheapness, the promise they hold out of
saving time and labor, and the lure of possessing something that
was previously a luxury only the rich could aff ord. And those
who do resist, positioning themselves thereby as old-fashioned,
technologically inept, conservative, or even Luddite, quickly fi nd
that so many features of social and economic life are designed on
the assumption that everyone now has these new commodities
that survival without them becomes ever more diffi cult. Th e last
volume charted some of the impacts of these developments on
labor, both paid and unpaid, in a context in which capitalism was
not only expanding in terms of the areas of life it embraced, but
also in its geographical scope.
We have now entered a period, I argue here, when new waves
of commodifi cation set in motion in earlier periods are reaching
maturity. Th e new commodities have been generated by drawing
into the market even more aspects of life that were previously out-
side the money economy, or at least that part of it that generates a
profi t for capitalists. Several such fi elds of accumulation have now
emerged, each with a diff erent method of commodity genesis,
forming the basis of new economic sectors and exerting distinc-
tive impacts on daily life, including labor and consumption. Th ey
include biology, art and culture, public services, and sociality.
I use the term “biology” to refer to the way that life itself, in
the form of plants and animals and the DNA that makes them
Introduction 9
up, is exploited to produce commodities such as new drugs and
genetically engineered forms of food. Th is is a vast and expanding
fi eld, with huge implications for many aspects of life. I mention it
only in passing and do not go into detail here, because, although
I believe it to be very important, I have done no research in this
area and have little to add to the interesting debates taking place
elsewhere. I concentrate now on three other fi elds: art and culture,
public services, and sociality.
Th e commodifi cation of art and culture is the continuation of
a process with a long history. Artistic work has been paid labor
for centuries, and cultural commodities also have a long pedigree,
produced under a variety of social and contractual conditions.
What has changed in recent years has been the scale of their
incorporation into capitalist productive relations, the concentra-
tion of capital in these sectors, and the introduction of a global
division of labor into the production of cultural commodities.
Th e concentration of ownership among a few transnational com-
panies has been encouraged by technological developments that
have enabled a convergence between activities that were formerly
dispersed across diff erent industries. Newspaper and book pub-
lishing, television, fi lm, record, and games production, and other
“content-generating” industries have merged seamlessly with each
other and with distribution companies and infrastructure provid-
ers to create corporate behemoths that bestraddle a wide range of
activities, interlinking the eff orts of “creative” workers with many
other technical, clerical, managerial, and service workers across
the globe in ever-changing confi gurations. I analyze creative work
at greater length in chapter 5.
In the late twentieth century, the income and working condi-
tions of writers, fi lm-makers, musicians were largely dictated
by the terms they could negotiate with vertically organized fi lm
companies, record companies, and publishers whose profi ts were
directly linked to the sale or distribution of commodities such
as fi lms, records, CDs, books, and magazines. Now the markets
are increasingly dominated by companies that produce hardware