Free Labor
Article: Terranova, Tiziana, Free Labor: Producing Culture for the Digital Economy. Social Text - 63 (Volume 18, Number 2), Summer 2000, pp. 33-58
URL = http://muse.jhu.edu/login?uri=/journals/social_text/v018/18.2terranova.html
For more material and discussions, see also: Free Labour
Contextual Quote
Structural use of interactive consumers to externalize costs:
"The shifting of time-consuming tasks from paid employees to unpaid customers when accessing banking services, is one example of enhanced interactivity. Another example would be the 15.000 volunteer maintainers of AOL’s chat-rooms. Or the attempt by the Open Source initiative to co-opt the labour power of free software engineers. These are highpoints in a broader pattern, according to Tiziana Terranova. Free labour has become structural to late capitalist cultural economy. It is therefore totally inadequate to apply the leftist favourite narrative of authentic subcultures that are hijacked by commercialism. Authentic subcultures at this point of time is a delusion, she charges. ‘Independent’ cultural production takes place within a broader capitalist framework which has already anticipated and therefore modified the ‘active consumer’. Interactivity counts to nothing else than intensified exploitation of the audience power of the user/consumer. It is not different to the intensification of exploitation of wage labourers."
- Johan Soderbergh [1]
Abstract
"Working in the digital media industry is not as much fun as it is made out to be. The "NetSlaves" of the eponymous Webzine are becoming increasingly vociferous about the shamelessly exploitative nature of the job, its punishing work rhythms, and its ruthless casualization (www.dis-obey.com/netslaves). They talk about "24-7 electronic sweatshops" and complain about the ninety-hour weeks and the "moronic management of new media companies." In early 1999, seven of the fifteen thousand "volunteers" of America Online (AOL) rocked the info-loveboat by asking the Department of Labor to investigate whether AOL owes them back wages for the years of playing chathosts for free. They used to work long hours and love it; now they are starting to feel the pain of being burned by digital media. These events point to a necessary backlash against the glamorization of digital labor, which highlights its continuities with the modern sweatshop and points to the increasing degradation of knowledge work. Yet the question of labor in a "digital economy" is not so easily dismissed as an innovative development of the familiar logic of capitalist exploitation."
Discussion
Is free digital creative labour really exploitation?
David Hesmondhalgh:
"I now want to consider some of the issues raised by Terranova’s characterisation of free labour as ‘[s]imultaneously voluntarily given and unwanted, enjoyed and exploited’ (2004: 74), in particular how we might understand relations between exploitation and satisfaction, alienation and freedom, in the present digital context.
The question of exploitation has been raised by Arvidsson (2005) in his piece on free labour in relation to brands, discussed earlier. Brands are ‘valorized’, writes Arvidsson, through their ability to extract a premium price and through the way that higher brand values generate higher share prices. All this depends on brand awareness, associations and loyalties, all of which in turn depend on the attention of consumers. Surplus value – the Marxian term for the ability to generate greater amounts of money from capital investment – is based, in Arvidsson’s gloss, on ‘the ethical surplus, or the surplus community that consumers produce’ (2005: 250) and upon which businesses then draw. This is not just a matter of the time spent on such activities, Arvidsson claims.
Brand management is also a matter of managing the quality of the common [sic] produced through communicative interaction. The qualitative dimension of exploitation thus consists in making the productive sociality of consumers evolve on the premises of brands; to make it unfold through branded consumer goods in such ways that makes it produce measurable (and hence valuable) forms of attention. (2005: 251)
But it is not clear that this really corresponds to exploitation in any meaningful analytical sense of the term. Rather, the problem, as Arvidsson expresses it, seems to be here one of controlling or reshaping the ways in which people communicate, pushing them in the direction of brands. That is indeed a problem, as a number of critics have pointed out, notably Naomi Klein (2002). But this is not the same thing as exploitation. It is important that such a loaded word is used with at least a certain amount of precision. Exploitation can be used as a useful term to express our repulsion when someone makes use of someone else for their own purposes, but when used in research we presumably intend it in a more precise analytical sense. And analytical use of the concept of exploitation has been overwhelmingly Marxian: it is about the historical relationship between classes, again in the Marxian sense. Erik Olin Wright (1997) has argued that exploitation in its Marxian sense is based on three principles. First, exploitation occurs when the material welfare of one class is causally dependent upon the material deprivation of another. The capitalist class in modern societies could not exist without the deprivations of the working classes. Second, that causal dependence depends in turn on the exclusion of workers from key productive resources, especially property. Third, the mechanism through which both these features (causal dependence and exclusion) operate is appropriation of the labour of the exploited. The first two alone would just represent oppression; for exploitation (in the Marxian sense) to take place, the third condition must be present. Equally, appropriation is not the same thing as exploitation; the first two features, causal dependence and exclusion, must also be present as well as appropriation.
As well as being a historical concept, exploitation is also an explanatory one. It was intended to explain how capitalism was able to generate such massive surplus values and at the same time such immiseration. This explanation, it should be noted, rests on a complex conception of compulsion. All human life involves being compelled to do things. Implicitly, therefore, the explanatory power of the concept of exploitation rests on an ethical distinction between legitimate and illegitimate forms of compulsion. As Alex Callinicos puts it:
What is distinctive about Marx’s account of capitalist exploitation is that the appearance of free exchange between worker and employer is nullified by the unequal distribution of the productive forces: as a result, workers are compelled to sell their labour-power to the capitalists on terms that lead to their exploitation. This is a violation of their liberty, even if they are not directly coerced into performing surplus-labour for the capitalist, but rather do so as a result of what Marx called “the silent compulsion of economic relations”. Thus exploitation is directly unjust, independently of any injustice in the initial distribution of productive assets, because workers are illegitimately compelled to work for the capitalist. (Callinicos 2000: 68)
So exploitation in its Marxian sense, Wright and Callinicos help to make clear, is a historical, explanatory and ethical concept that revolves around certain (disputed) notions of class, labour and compulsion. This means that when the term is applied to specific empirical examples, some kind of link needs to be made to these necessary abstractions if it is to have analytical purchase. This does not mean that every single invocation of the concept of exploitation by any writer should involve such theorisation. The problem here though is that, as the quotations in the introduction to the concept of free labour in the first section of this article illustrate, the term ‘exploitation’ has been widely but uncertainly used in these debates.
In a recent piece on YouTube, Andrejevic (2009) has returned to the issues of free labour discussed in the earlier pieces quoted above and has offered a more developed consideration of the concept of exploitation. Drawing on the autonomists, Andrejevic sees the term ‘free labour’ as meaning unpaid work, but also freely given work, ‘endowed with a sense of autonomy’ (2009: 416). He interprets this as suggesting a logic whereby the production of community and sociality is ‘both autonomous of capital and captured by it’. For Andrejevic, this question of capture signals the crucial importance of exploitation. Turning to the work of Adam Arvidsson, Andrejevic wonders (as I have, above) whether the capture or appropriation of free, affective and immaterial labour, as outlined by Arvidsson, can really be described as exploitation in any convincing analytical sense. Andrejevic rightly points out that, for Marxian analysis, the generation and appropriation of surplus value depends on a kind of force:
the forcible separation of the worker from the means of production is conserved in workers’ forced choice to relinquish control over their labor power. But the potential located in affective or immaterial labor by Arvidsson, Hardt and others lies in the very fact that it is freely or autonomously given. It is by definition not forced. Nor is it clear that this labor is appropriated under the threat of force, which renders the claim of exploitation in need of further explanation. (2010: 418)
Because of this, Andrejevic seeks an alternative understanding of exploitation in relation to digital labour. To do so, he emphasises how the concept is bound up with the related concept of the alienation of workers from the products of their labour. Web 2.0 style technologies, says Andrejevic, gain their popularity by offering users an escape from alienation (there are potential links here with Stahl’s work, discussed above) by offering ‘modicum of control over the product of their creative activity in return for the work they do in building up online community and sociality upon privately controlled network infrastructures’ (2009: 419) and allowing themselves to be monitored. For Andrejevic, there is an important distinction to be made between ‘user-created content’ and ‘user-generated data’ (2009: 418). It is the latter not the former that is extracted under conditions of private ownership and that is turned into a commodity. All this suggests to Andrejevic a generalisation of the forms of subjection traditionally associated with women. Time spent building social relations in affective labour is both autonomous and subject to exploitation, he writes; so is the kind of immaterial labour involved in social networking sites such as YouTube.
Rather than exploitation, however, Andrejevic’s analysis seems actually to be dependent on questions of freedom and ideology. In his various contributions (such as Andrejevic, 2004: 201), he shows how prevailing ideas about digital interactivity do not so much conceal more general relations of exploitation but rather point to their inevitability, celebrating the savviness of audiences, but offering no means by which this savviness can be converted to forms of action which might meaningfully reduce inequality. This seems to me to be insightful. But his conception of exploitation is rather less successful. Andrejevic here tries to rescue the concept of exploitation in relation to ‘free’ digital labour by linking it to force indirectly, via the concept of alienation. The oppressive system of alienation creates such misery that it compels people to seek out ways of re-exerting their control in ways which then become open to appropriation of surplus value by capitalists. This is a thoughtful and stimulating idea, but the mechanisms of this indirect force – for example the variable ways in which people respond to alienation by seeking out cultural production – are not really spelt out. What’s more, this conceptualisation risks reducing the drive to communicate and to produce culture and knowledge to a reaction to alienation. And there is evidence that capitalism might have moved in the direction of attempting to reduce alienation in the interests of accumulation (see Boltanski and Chiapello, 2005).
The concept of ‘free labour’ is linked to some interesting ideas about power and control in cultural production in the digital era. But the frequent pairing of the term with the concept of exploitation is unconvincing and rather incoherent, at least as so far developed by the most-cited analysts. I hope this does not come across as pedantry. I point all this out in a comradely attempt to encourage greater precision in critical thought. In the same spirit, I now turn to questions concerning what political demands might flow from critiques of free labour."
Is unpaid labour always a problem?
David Hesmondhalgh:
Even if they might want to retreat from the view that free labour involves exploitation in any meaningful Marxian sense, leftists might still want to hold on to the idea that it is wrong in some way. In its broadest sense, labour is simply exertion of the body or mind, and it is usually used to describe activities that have some sort of compulsion attached to them. Obviously we cannot define labour in terms of whether it is paid or unpaid, or whether an employment relation is involved, because it is clear that a great deal of the labour that goes into sustaining and enhancing life in modern societies is unpaid. But under what conditions might we object to such unpaid labour, and on what grounds?
Domestic labour, often performed primarily by women, is the most discussed version of such unpaid labour (and those who write about affective labour from an autonomist perspective sometimes have a tendency to sound as though this insight was an invention of the autonomist Marxists, sidelining the many contributions that have come from other perspectives – see Himmelweit, 1991 for one summary). But the fact that these debates concerned a form of unpaid labour should not make us think that the fact that labour was unpaid was always the principal point under debate. The important point that feminists were making, in drawing attention to the economic and social contribution of unpaid domestic and childrearing labour, concerned the many injustices associated with the gendered division of labour, including the expectation that one particular group of people (women) were, more than any other group, and by virtue only of their biological and cultural differences from men, expected to perform such onerous duties without financial recompense. Closely connected to this was a set of disadvantages in paid labour markets, including exclusion from certain high-prestige sectors. The ethical problems here were ones of inequality and injustice, and the political ones concerned, for example, whether a demand for wages would really serve to address these problems or whether the deeper question was the institutional separation of (for example) childrearing from paid work. Even if we agree with the wages for housework movement, this does not mean that we can or should apply similar demands to other forms of unpaid labour. Clearly, life will always involve a huge amount of labour, often unpleasant, some of it answering more urgent needs than others, and in some cases we might find it acceptable, or a matter of lesser priority, that certain forms of work are unpaid and others paid. Until the work/leisure distinction and the social division of labour are abolished altogether (the extremely distant utopian aspiration embodied in Marx’s famous hunter/fisher/critic passage in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts) we cannot expect to be paid for all the many different tasks that we might have to perform in order to reproduce and maintain life. Even if we achieve more just social relations, future societies will continue to be based on a complex division of labour, and it seems highly likely that some spheres will come within the realms of paid labour and some outside it.
The important question here though is whether socialist-feminists (in the broadest sense of that term, to include anyone who thinks that economic and gender relations are currently unjust and unequal, and need urgently to be made more just and more equal) might object to unpaid work in the cultural industries on anything like the same grounds as the objection to unpaid household labour – i.e. that it contributes significantly to broader patterns of inequality and injustice. If that can be shown, then there might be a strategic case for demanding payment, to redistribute income, and/or in order to highlight the ethical problems concerned. To consider that question, though, we need to be clear about which forms of unpaid labour are being discussed. There has been a tendency to bandy about the phrase ‘free labour’ as if it describes one huge, interconnected aspect of inequality and injustice. Instead, unpaid work may not be a problem in itself, and may in fact be an inevitability, even in a better future society. The fact that work is being performed for free in itself is not a sufficient objection.
In the history of cultural production, only a very few people within any society have taken on the role of cultural producers in return for financial reward. A major development was the patronage relationships of feudalism and early capitalism, which gave way to payment by royalties and wages with the development of cultural capitalism and the copyright system. Most cultural production in history has been unpaid, and that continues to be the case today. Consider the millions of people across the world, especially young people, who will, on the day you are reading this, be practising musical instruments, or, to use an example from an industry that I would call a leisure industry rather than a cultural industry, imagine how many young people are practising football or basketball. Now it could be argued that all this represents labour (defined here as the expenditure of effort, under some kind of compulsion; it will usually seem preferable to undertake some other more restful activity) which is vital to the realisation of surplus value in the music industry or the football industry. For this work helps to create a reservoir of workers, from whom these industries can draw. Regular practice by future musicians and sportspeople ensures that there are greater levels of talent available for businesses to employ. The football example is perhaps even more germane, because while a great deal of music teaching is done on a professional basis, most football coaching is done by amateurs, who give of their time in reward for a range of pleasures and rewards including winning competitions, inculcating the joys of team-based physical activity, and being able to shout very loudly at young people. But even if this is true, what political demands might ensue from this? Wages for music practice? Wages for sports coaches?[6] Of course some on the left believe in the importance of making ‘maximum’ political demands as a way of furthering emancipation, but there also needs to be some sense of prioritisation, and at least some kind of pragmatic reading of what might be possible. An undifferentiated critique of free labour can generate demands that fail these basic tests.
Now the advocates of a critical (autonomist) position towards free labour may validly respond that free labour only becomes an issue in spheres of activity where there has been extensive commodification, and that the vast social reach of certain digital technologies makes it important to highlight the labour that they depend upon. The development of the internet might be an example of this, or more specific sites such as YouTube. Even here, however, there are problems that we might want to consider, and which do not seem to have been raised in the debates about free labour. Terranova’s seminal account usefully pointed to the huge amount of unpaid work necessary to create the internet. But it may be said in response that those who undertook such unpaid digital labour might have gained a set of rewards from such work, such as the satisfaction of contributing to a project which they believed would enhance communication between people and ultimately the common good; or in the form of finding solutions to problems and gaining new skills which they could apply later in other contexts. In some cases, it might be possible to think of their work as involving the building of skills which lead to higher wages being paid in the longer term – a kind of deferred wage. Without denying for a moment the fundamental importance of a living wage, it seems dangerous to think of wages as the only meaningful form of reward, and it would surely be wrong to imply that any work done on the basis of social contribution or deferred reward represents the activities of people duped by capitalism. Actually, it seems to me that this would run the danger of internalising capitalism’s own emphasis on commodification. We have to hold on to the value of work done for its own sake, or as ‘gift’ labour (see Hyde, 1983), and complaints about free labour – unless the normative basis for the complaints are spelt out very carefully – risk undermining that value.[7] It may be that open source software is linked to corporate forms of capitalism, as Terranova (2004) and others have pointed out. But the idea of carrying out software development for free may in many cases lead to the development of products, which are not quite so much under the control of major corporations as others. At the very least, complaints about free labour need to be linked to discussion of which kinds of free labour merit payment and which do not. We might for example want to argue that the expertise that goes into Wikipedia might be subsidised by governments and corporations out of general taxation given that it provides a huge social resource, often drawn upon by businesses and governmental institutions; until recently, this was the justification for funding Higher Education out of taxation in Western Europe, though this idea has been eroded in the era of neo-liberalism. On the other hand, the complaint I referred to earlier, that contacting friends and uploading photographs on to Facebook represents some kind of exploited labour is, to my mind, more along the lines of arguing that we should demand that all amateur football coaches be paid for their donation of free time: not impossible to argue for, but hardly a priority – and accompanied by the danger that it may commodify forms of activity that we would ultimately prefer to leave outside the market. The dangers of commodification might be better countered by arguing against developments, which seek to exert ownership by sites of content generated by users. It could be that it is in the realms of intellectual property that a more convincing critique of contemporary capitalism might be mounted, rather than unpaid labour.
A striking case of unjust, unpaid labour in the media industries is the internship system. It is increasingly difficult to enter the media and media-related industries in advanced industrial countries without having performed, at some point, a significant period of unpaid work. The fact that young people are willing to do this is a product of the desirability of creative labour, and the over-supply of workers. The extraction of billions of hours of unpaid labour by media companies can be seen as a kind of rent (in the technical economic sense). This is offset by the considerable time needed to train and mentor a constant influx of young, inexperienced workers, but this does not come close to matching the financial advantages gained by media companies. The use of such young people performing unpaid labour also depresses wages for workers in the cultural industries. Furthermore, it has a serious impact on which kinds of people are likely to be able to gain entry to the media industries. Young people from wealthy families are much more likely to be able to afford sustained periods without pay. Increasingly, internships are provided as part of media education degrees. Of course many young people want to carry out such internships. But they benefit companies at the expense of time that young people might be spending exploring ideas and broadening their intellectual horizons – benefits that it might be difficult for them to understand, compared with the potential excitement of working in a media company, but which in my view must be seen as likely to provide benefits for societies. Defenders of labour might, then, argue for such internships to be made illegal, or for them to be licensed: media companies might have to pay a fee into a common fund which is then distributed to young people as payment, or is simply redistributed through taxation, earmarked for education."