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Such analyses
inspired the Wages for Facebook manifesto that appeared in 2014: 'They
say its friendship; we say its unwaged work. With every like, chat, tag or
poke our subjectivity turns them a profit. They call it sharing. We call
it stealing' (Ptak 2013). The echo of the autonomist feminist 'wages for
housework' campaign against the unpaid contribution of domestic work to
value creation is intentional and apropos. Free online labour for Web 2.0
capital is one of the manifold forms of shadow work through which capital
supplements surplus value extracted through the wage, a process labour
historians such as van der Linden and Roth (2014) see as always having
been constitutive of capitalist proletarianization and that now takes fresh
form at a new level of technological subsumption.
Facebook posting is a form of
exploitation, which, without explicit violence, is nonetheless parasitic. It
does not replace the 'normal' structures of daily class exploitation at work
and home, but is added to and superimposed upon them, to constitute a
regime in which the user is habituated, on pain of exclusion from social
worlds, to surrendering the elements of their personality - identity,
creativity, sociality - to enhance the circulation of capital. This submission
is not the same as the brutal bodily discipline inflicted on the dagongmei,
but it is a form of subjectification that is both infiltrative and extroversive
in the abject submission to the commodity form it elicits.
This
relation is in one way, as 'Third World' Marxists have repeatedly and
correctly pointed out, that of conflicting global class interests (Cope
2012): the relative affluence of the North American Facebook user is based
on the cheap commodities, including computers, produced in China's
factories, so that s/he benefits from the exploitation of the dagongmei. Yet
the relation is also, simultaneously, one of complementary exploitations,
in which the computer made by the dagongmei becomes the means for
the Facebook user's surrender of free labour and subjective subordination
to the commodity form. Each exploitation drives the other; the toil of
the dagongmei creates the material basis of the social media platforms
that generate 'voluntary' labour for digital capital which in turn propels
further low-wage physical exploitation of electronics workers. The result
of both was an increase in the power and wealth of major information
corporations and in the overall buoyancy of capital, whose mid-decade
stock market boom these companies contributed to - and whose sudden
disruption would send reverberations from the Potomac to Pearl River.
1) The end of the global peasantry. The subsistence farming that over
millennia supported the largest part of the world's people in Asia,
Africa and Latin America has for decades been eroding under a variety
of pressures: the 'urban bias' (Lipton 1977) of capitalist and socialist
modernizers; monocultural food export policies; the automated harvesters
and genetically modified seeds of high-technology agribusiness plugged
into the supply chains of the global food industry; land expropriations for
urbanization or extractive industries (Weis 2007). Increasingly unable to
sustain itself by farming alone, and dependent on periodic or permanent
wage labour, the global peasantry is slowly disintegrating, in a process
combining the coercive push of poverty and violent dispossession with the
pull of wages and urban modernity (Wildcat 2008). To become proletarian
is both emancipating and immiserating; the vortex blasts people free from
local famine and parochialism, and into limitless insecurity and new
subordinations; for young women in particular, flight from the land can
be a liberation from traditional patriarchal repression, but in exchange
for factory exploitation. This exodus fuels a new phase of the primitive