From "Digital Labor" To" Digital Work"

With the continuous development of ICT(information and communication technology)technology and IDDL(digital international division of labor),the research on digital labor has gradually become a hot issue in domestic and international academic circles.Christian Fuchs,a British scholar who is a follower of Marxism,believes that although the form of labor has changed in the digital context,the essence of digital labor has not changed.Based on Marx’s political economy and Dallas Walker Smythe’s "audience commodity theory," Fuchs analyzes the concept of digital labor and the phenomenon of digital labor alienation,highlighting the vitality of Marxism in the digital age.Fuchs has made a theoretical construction and in-depth critique of digital labor.By analyzing two different expressions of the concept of "labor" in Marx’s works,Fuchs defines the concepts of digital work and digital labor respectively,and advocates the logic that digital labor is alienated digital work and digital work is the general form of digital labor.Fuchs further argues that digital labor will eventually turn into digital work in the communist period,and that the abandonment of digital alienation is the key to the transformation.Through an in-depth analysis of the phenomenon of digital labor exploitation,Fuchs summarizes three major manifestations of digital labor alienation:alienation of digital labor itself,alienation of digital labor materials and alienation of digital labor products,and argues that the phenomenon of digital alienation eventually leads to the emergence of the phenomenon of reverse commodity fetishism.By analyzing the alienation of digital labor,Fuchs argues that the real source of alienation is the privatization of platforms and human experience by digital capital,and proposes to abandon alienation by building a social media commons,i.e.,building a truly workerowned and shared social media platform through non-commercial alternatives to the Internet and digital working class struggles.Fuchs’ theory of "digital labor" responds to some contemporary theorists’ questioning of Marx’s theory of labor and combines Marx’s theory with "audience commodity theory" to provide a new perspective on the nature of capitalist social exploitation in the new context.However,Fuchs’ s "digital labor" theory also has certain defects: it contradicts Marx’s concept of conscious "labor",ignores Marx’s concept of "mental production",and misinterprets Marx’s "total worker",and the contemporary digital industrial production method is not properly considered.In short,a correct understanding of Marxist labor-related concepts and digital industrial production methods is the key to building a comprehensive digital labor theory and enhancing the power of Marxist digital labor interpretation in the information age.