Work vs Labour - First reading of Marx and Digital Labour

Whilst Fuchs aims to analyse work in the digital era, it is first important to have an understanding of the general principles which Marx (and Engels) discussed throughout the course of their work. Many interpretations of Marx have developed since the time of writing, Marxist-Leninism and Maoism being a few ideologies that have built on top of this framework, where the working-class plays a fundamental role in the changing of society, but will these interpretations stand up to scrutiny when we take into consideration the abilities that technology will have on the traditional roles of the working class?

Below are just some notes that I have taken whilst reading a bit of the introductory chapter to the book:

There are three levels utilised in Marx’s work to analyse how we can view work and labour, the first being society in general, following onto class relations within a capitalist society and finally with the conditions that would exist under communism.

Work itself, as in a conscious productive activity that transforms and organises nature in a way so that humans “produce their means of sustinence” has been a universal concept that has applied to all societies in one way or another. The theory of “work” has a historical element to it, in which humans have interacted with nature in order to provide for themselves and their communities in ways such as hunting and farming for food, building shelters and homes or the development of tools and weapons. Aside from the physical nature of products, ideas can also fall under this category where humans develop philosophies and laws in which to govern society, to organise its citizens and to punish them when they do wrong.

Common to all societies, work is the process whereby humans utilise tools and technologies to transform nature into a form where it satisfies human needs, with these “tools” as communal to the community for the benefit of the community. Labour on the other hand is a form of work, but one that has developed within class based systems such as capitalism where the labourer does not own the tools that are used to produce goods, he does not own the final object, nor are these things essential for his own or the communities survival.

The labourer creates “use-values”, the result of materials and labour power combining to create a new object, in which the means of production and the outcome are own by a small dominant class yet in a capitalist sense the differing aspects of “work” and “labour” have become one and the same. Production out width the meeting of human needs is defined as “surplus labour” which is then sold on by the capitalist through markets for profit. The labourer must sell his labour power as a commodity to the capitalist in order to achieve for himself the basic things required to survive.

The theory of “alien labour” also comes up, where a worker has no connection to what he or she is producing. The tools are alien, the materials and the outcome the same, they simply sell their ability to create them as means of survival. The dominant class uses violence through repression, laws and threat of unemployment in order to keep the workers subdued, but even though the worker does not own the means of product, without them the wealth that is accumulated by the capitalist cannot be created, in essence the accumulation of capitalist wealth is at the destruction of the wealth of the worker.

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These are notes from reading only the first part of the introductory chapter, but interesting questions arises such as if the computer becomes the sole means of production, in what sense will the capitalist be able to reap the proceeds of digital labour.

The idea of money has not been fully examined as yet either which is a central factor to work in the modern age.