Christian · Fox's Digital Labor and Karl · Marx (translated by Zhou Yanyun, People's Publishing House, 2024.1) has caused a wave of discussion about digital labor. The primary controversy over the concept of digital labor is its definition and connotation, that is, whether the general online activities of the public can be called labor. Most scholars believe that this is a kind of unpaid and free digital labor, so the subsequent problem that needs to be solved is how this labor brings surplus value, just as the core problem of the final labor theory of value is the production of surplus value, and the author believes that this question is the core of whether the concept of digital labor is valid.
Is online activity digital labor?
By browsing the papers on digital labor in recent years, the author found that many scholars have reached a consensus on the entire data flow process: the behavior of the public in the network can generate a large amount of data, which can become useful information under the processing of information companies, and then push it to consumers in need, and the capital of the information industry obtains corresponding profits. Most of the authors believe that the general online activity of the masses is the emerging "labor", and the concept of digital labor has emerged. However, in this process, not all the data generated by network behavior can be used to generate value, but must be processed by the information company to have a certain value and the possibility of value-added. For example, in the beginning, people shared their experiences, chatted, and selflessly helped others in BBS, exchanging information and their own data through posts. At this time, information was obviously useful to people, but it did not have value under capitalism, so it was not labor to rely solely on the software and hardware of the network for information exchange. With the development of the network, the webmaster of the website and the moderator of BBS with the help of information companies such as Google introduce the advertising chain, and the corresponding community information contributors become KOLs and exchange with capital.
In addition, there are more common online activities mentioned in the book, that is, almost all the online behaviors of the public, such as browsing websites, sending ins, Facebook, emails, holding video conferences, chatting with friends, etc., the data generated by these behaviors accounts for the vast majority of Internet data, and many foreign scholars believe that this is a new digital labor. But they still do not involve the production of value like the original online information behavior, just as the agriculture-based farmers' market transactions in feudal society gradually developed into the extensive universal commodity circulation and exchange of capitalism, which required the production of surplus value at the production level in order to support the huge accumulation of commodities in the capitalist world. These general network behaviors are like raw materials, and the capital of the information industry incorporates information and data into the circulation and reproduction of capital in various ways. On the one hand, machines and network systems record network behaviors and collect "raw materials" to generate data; On the other hand, these platforms classify this information and provide an online platform for the processing of this information to communicate. Only when these two processes exist at the same time can information be used and exchanged for value and become a commodity. These activities do not have a direct effect on the production and value-added of information goods, on the contrary, redundant and fragmented data needs corresponding algorithms, or even manual processing, before they can be turned into useful information and then sold in the online world. So, where does the appreciation of capital come from at this time? What kind of labor corresponds to?
The source of the surplus value of information capital
This requires a return to Marx's political economy to dissect the concept of labor. Based on Marx's labor theory of value, the production of surplus value lies in the abstract exchange of wage labor and capital.
Although this is very similar to the process of "dealing" between workers and machines in the factory in Marx's time, the labor of workers and machines together shape the final commodity, but there is no compulsory domination of labor by capital, that is, capital buys labor commodities, but in fact it is the domination of labor force, so this is not wage labor. To define abstract labor in the process of labor-capital exchange in the contemporary digital world by the participatory behavior in the production process of this information commodity is to confuse Marx's critique of the capitalist economy with the historical materialist method he founded in his early years, and to expand the boundaries of the concept of wage labor in the capitalist mode of production, and to believe that any action that produces usefulness is labor under the capitalist mode of production. However, this is only the principle of production history in the historical materialist method, which is the foundation and beginning of history, and is not directly labor in the capitalist mode of production, and the concepts of labor and value in capital production are all unique concepts of the capitalist era, and are the embodiment of the abstract and social exchange relations of various concrete forms of labor. To classify the specific human behavior in general history into the category of wage labor is to regard the basis of general history, production and labor, as wage labor in the capitalist era, and to regard the specific human behavior and activities that produce data in the process of information production as the source of the ultimate value appreciation of information commodities, which ignores Marx's criticism of the specific semantics of capitalism.
For example, information companies such as Google generate business value through GoogleAD by modeling behavioral data and copying user portraits. This industry is not fundamentally different from the traditional advertising industry in terms of capital appreciation. It is difficult to say that in the process of collecting consumption data and producing advertising services in the advertising industry, consumers' consumption behavior is an abstract wage labor, on the contrary, its capital appreciation comes from the labor of employees in the advertising industry. Therefore, if we want to define the current critical concept of digital labor, they must participate in the process of capital appreciation, which is the source of continuous capital appreciation in the information industry. Of course, its essence is also the wage labor that Marx said, but it has a new form in the development of the times, and increases the value of capital in a more subtle way.
True digital labor is the work of designing algorithms by a large number of computer engineers in information companies, or even the research and development of new semiconductors in laboratories. There is no doubt that these jobs are "digital" labor in the employment relationship, and they exchange exchange value through these jobs, which is a typical kind of capital hired labor, but it has the unique "invisible" form of labor hidden behind the machine that is unique to the information industry, and there is nothing mysterious about it. Machines that can automatically record network behavior and generate data are the basis of information capital production, and its corresponding labor is precisely this kind of information labor, just like the advertising industry in the early years of manual data collection and production of information. However, this kind of seemingly "traditional" labor is the main source of surplus value of information capital, and these labor embodies the leading factors hidden in the process of social wealth production in today's capitalism - scientific and technological research and its algorithm design, automaton design, etc., and their corresponding labor, according to Marx's labor theory of value, the value of capital has only one source - wage labor, so the current "consumption" and "fun" proposed by foreign scholars The definition of digital labor does not conform to Marx's labor theory of value, but is the result of the rapid increase of social wealth and the external form of information commodity production. (Produced by the "Thought Workshop" of the social science newspaper, the full text can be found in the social science newspaper and its official website)