Reconsidering value and labour in the digital age (dynamics of virtual work series) by Eran Fisher and Christian Fuchs (eds) (2015), Houndmills/Basingstoke/Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 978‐1‐137‐47856‐6, xiii + 268 pp.

• Date: 01 March 2017
• Author: Rudi Schmiede
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/ntwe.12083
• Published date: 01 March 2017

New Technology, Work and Employment 32:1

ISSN 0268-1072

Book Review

Reconsidering value and labour in the digital age (dynamics of virtual work series)

Eran Fisher and Christian Fuchs (eds) (2015), Houndmills/Basingstoke/Hampshire:

Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 978-1-137-47856-6, xiii + 268 pp.

This is a book of papers originally presented at a workshop entitled ‘Marx’s

Labour Theory of Value in the Digital Age’ which was held in June 2014 at the

Open University of Israel under the auspices of the EU COST network on The

Dynamics of Virtual Work. The question of value production and the valorisation

of capital in the era of digitisation (which is inseparable from financialisation and

globalisation) has attracted special social scientific and political attention recently.

The starting point of this book is the question of how the process of extracting

value from labour has changed with the recent digitisation of work under capi-

talism. In their introductory chapter, Fisher and Fuchs stress the importance of

this Marxian theoretical tradition and devote most of it to an overview of his

writings on labour, value, productive labour and rent.

In the first part of the book entitled ‘Foundations’, Fuchs discusses productive

labour and rent. He argues that ‘the concept of rent is mistaken for understanding

the political economy of Facebook and […] Facebook users are productive trans-

port workers who communicate advertising ideologies that make use- value prom-

ises. Their activities are productive labour (1, 2, 3)’ (p. 38). By 1, 2, 3 he means

Marx’s three central criteria for productive labour: that it produces use- values,

that it produces capital and surplus- value for accumulation, and that it includes

combined or collective labour for these purposes.

In the second article in this section, Sandoval argues for an inclusive approach

to cultural labour. She criticises optimistic theories of the information society and

cultural work which focus almost entirely on immaterial labour, insisting that we

‘consider both the hands and brains of cultural production to avoid mystifying

the materiality of digital culture’ (p. 43). She stresses the importance of the tech-

nological basis of today’s information, communication and knowledge production

and sees the global division of labour in global value chains as ‘the dirty secret

of the digital revolution’. This argument echoes Raymond Williams’s materialist

critique of a merely idealist concept of culture and cultural work, and is supported

by examples of the value chains and the accompanying social inequalities of big

cultural producers like Apple and Google.

The second part of the book deals with ‘Labour and Class’. Lund sets out a

critique of the concept ‘playbour’ by analysing play, game, work and labour to

show that ‘play and labour are […] each other’s opposites: a qualitative non-

instrumentality and a quantitative instrumentality’ (p. 67). Work by Hannah Arendt

and Moishe Postone is deployed in support of this argument, and the author

concludes that peer production with its focus on use- values and free associations

has an emancipatory potential because it transcends the division of labour and

alienation in ‘a generalised workplay or playwork’ (p. 76).

Recent labour statistics reveal more than twelve million Internet workers in

China, and Xia’s chapter places them within an analysis of the Chinese class

structure. They regularly work overtime without proper pay, suffer high work

intensity, mostly low workplace autonomy and precarious insecurity. They are

highly educated, but most of them work in private firms which have poorer pay

© 2017 John Wiley & Sons Ltd Book review 59