A Study On Christian Fuchs’ S Theory Of Digital Labor

With the application of digital information technology in the field of economic production,new forms of labor have emerged.The application of digital information technology in the field of production has not only greatly improved the efficiency of production,but also given rise to a new form of labor,digital labor.The emergence of digital labor has received a lot of attention from scholars,including the British scholar Christian Fuchs.By examining digital labor in the capitalist society in the digital information era,Christian Fuchs shows the real situation of digital laborers in the current capitalist society,reveals the important role of digital labor in the process of surplus value production of capital,and forms a systematic and unique theory of digital labor.Christian Fuchs disagrees the idea of digital labor as an immaterial form of labor.Based on Marx’s labor value theory,he systematically studies digital labor.According to Fuchs,although the goods produced by digital laborers are presented in the form of "information",in general,the production of digital labor still presupposes the production of matter,and digital media capitalists obtain a large amount of surplus value by the labor of digital laborers.Therefore,the production of digital labor does not go beyond the scope of materially productive labor in capitalist society as analyzed by Marx,and digital labor is still a kind of materially productive labor in essence.At the same time,digital labor is essentially different from traditional forms of labor,mainly in three aspects: the unpaid nature of digital labor,the ambiguity of digital labor time,and the unity of production and consumption of digital laborers.Based on such an understanding of digital labor,Fuchs provides an in-depth analysis of the exploitative situation in digital labor.Economically,digital workers produce a large amount of data and material goods for media capitalists,but not only are they not paid for their work,but the products of their labor are also appropriated by the capitalists and earn a large amount of surplus value.Ideologically,digital workers are controlled by the media capitalists’ ideology of "participatory" democracy and "entertainment first" and are gradually reduced to the tools of capitalist production.The exploitation of digital workers leads to the alienation of digital labor,deepening the fetishism of capitalism and reinforcing the patriarchal and racist ideology of capitalism.Fuchs argues that digital laborers can only be truly liberated through a radical social revolution,the overthrow of capitalist rule,and the establishment of a public media platform in order to achieve the de-capitalization of the media platform and thus the real sharing of information and freedom of labor.Fuchs’ s research on digital labor highlights the contemporary value of Marx’s theory of labor value,showing that Marx’s theory is not obsolete in the present era and that it still has the validity to explain the realities of today’s society.Fuchs’ s thinking on digital labor broadens the scope of the labor problem Marx studied and further develops Marx’s theory of alienated labor.Of course,Fuchs’ s theory also has certain limitations,such as his neglect of the autonomy of digital laborers and his failure to formulate specific revolutionary strategies in the choice of the ultimate revolutionary path.