Studies On Digital Labor From The Perspective Of Historical Materialism

Historical materialism holds that labor has the dual determinations of material foundation and social relations.Labor not only produces the material subsistence,but also creates social relations.The dialectical development process of labor also means the process of social progress.Nowadays,as a whole new form of labor in the digital era,digital labor reflects the dialectical development of labor from the determinations of material foundation and social relations,and shows the realistic logic of historical materialism on social development and human liberation.Digital labor has both positive and negative effects on social development.At the level of material determination of labor,as a highly collaborative social overall labor,digital labor greatly improves social labor productivity,and becomes a powerful driving force for the continuous progress of productivity.Digital labor deepens the process of humanization of the nature and enhances human subject ability,providing possible conditions for social development and human liberation.As far as the social determination of labor are concerned,digital labor inspires us to pay attention to new social divisions,class antagonisms,and exploitation and oppression under the still-deformed capitalism.Studies on digital labor from the perspective of historical materialism show three basic dimensions: historical review,value criticism and ideal construction.The first is the historical review of the generating field and the essence of digital labor.The emergence of digital labor benefits a lot from the digitization of information,the factorization of data production and the deepening of digital technology.It reflects the historical evolution of labor paradigms under the rapid development of social productivity.The historical generation process of digital labor is also the process of the development of social mode of production.As for its essence,digital labor is still the labor in the scope of Marxism,and is a kind of immaterial labor with inherent materiality that reflects the changes in modern labor patterns.The second is the value criticism of the inner contractions and the dual effects of digital labor.The backside of the general characteristics of digital labor,such as virtuality,liberalization,diversity and publicity,is hiding the inner contractions in the development of digital labor,that is,the symbiosis of labor freedom and labor coercion,the coexistence of pluralistic openness and restrictive discrimination,and the interweaving of social publicity and private possession.These contradictions are related to the logic of capital,and are the concrete manifestations of the inner contradictions of social relations,which means that digital labor has not yet got rid of the unequal production relations,and therefore digital labor can not become the real free labor.Digital labor is the strongest evidence of the development of social productivity,but as far as it is reduced to "digital alienated labor" in the context of capitalist private ownership,it expresses the essential opposition between labor and capital,which will inevitably lead to the gradual reduction of the actual productivity that digital labor can create,and even will hinder the full development of human beings and the society.The third is the ideal construction of the future path of digital labor.The extent to which digital labor can continue to guide the development of social productivity,promote the evolution of social patterns and accelerate the process of human liberation depends on the extent to which digital labor sublates the unequal social relations in itself,which also set the anchor of construction and development of digital labor in the future.Digital labor still has tremendous development potential,and we should strengthen the scientific guidance for digital labor and build a reasonable model for the development of it.Taking the dialectical development of determinations of material foundation and social relations as the goal,the path of constructing reasonable digital labor is mainly manifested in stimulating the basic utility of data resources,respecting the subjectivity of digital laborers,and establishing a reasonable value orientation for the use of digital labor results.