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Aurialie Jublin

11 Things To Know About Abstract Labor - 0 views

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tictravail travail digital labor valeur travail contributif abstract labor

shared by Aurialie Jublin on 18 Aug 14 - No Cached
  • Living labor can be understood as identity-making effort (in the absence of traditional prescriptions); it is the productivity of open-ended potentiality. You can be whatever you want (and you will have to work to become it!) Abstract labor is the quantification of that effort, conforming it to pre-existing measuring tools that allow for its commodification. It’s a matter of having oneself fitted to the yardstick. All the work of being someone can be converted to dollars.
  • A fundamental problem for capitalism: how to maintain a supply of workers who are (a) flexible, creative, and motivated to be social (work cooperatively with others to produce value) at the same time they are (b) manageable, controllable, and predictable. It must be able to extract “living labor” — the work of belonging socially — as “abstract labor” amenable to rationalization, measurement, and control and freely deployable on whatever opportunity will yield the most profit.
  • Aurialie Jublin on 18 Aug 14
     
    "To recap: Social media are ways to contain and recapture the productive and potentially disruptive energy of the cooperation engendered by the capitalist production process, which depends on bringing workers together, dividing labor among them, and generating/capturing the surplus that emerges from their effort to work together. Cooperative efforts - sociality - are captured by social media and made into data: that is, they are made fungible, abstract, countable. This data then sets cooperative workers back into competition with one another, now competing over and in terms of measurable influence, attention, contribution, network links and so on. The struggle comes to seem like the very struggle for personal identity, but it's just the opposite; it's the struggle to render what is personal about oneself into something that is generally exploitable to whatever company wants it."
Aurialie Jublin

​The Future of Robot Labor Is the Future of Capitalism | Motherboard - 0 views

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shared by Aurialie Jublin on 03 Sep 14 - No Cached
  • According to Marx, automation that displaces workers in favour of machines that can produce more goods in less time is part and parcel of how capitalism operates. By developing fixed capital (machines), bosses can do away with much of the variable capital (workers) that saps their bottom line with pesky things like wages and short work days.
  • Capital itself is the moving contradiction, [in] that it presses to reduce labour time to a minimum, while it posits labour time, on the other side, as sole measure and source of wealth.
  • In Marxist theory, capitalists create profit by extracting what’s called surplus value from workers—paying them less than what their time is worth and gaining the difference as profit after the commodity has been sold at market price, arrived at by metrics abstracted from the act of labour itself. So what happens when humans aren’t the ones working anymore? Curiously, Marx finds himself among the contemporary robotic utopianists in this regard. Once robots take over society’s productive forces, people will have more free time than ever before, which will “redound to the benefit of emancipated labour, and is the condition of its emancipation,” Marx wrote. Humans, once freed from the bonds of soul-crushing capitalist labour, will develop new means of social thought and cooperation outside of the wage relation that frames most of our interactions under capitalism. In short, Marx claimed that automation would bring about the end of capitalism
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  • “Not immediately productive” is the key phrase here. Just think of all the forms of work that have popped up since automation began to really take hold during the Industrial Revolution: service sector work, online work, part-time and otherwise low-paid work. You’re not producing anything while working haphazard hours as a cashier at Walmart, but you are creating value by selling what has already been built, often by machines. In the automated world, precarious labour reigns. Jobs that offer no stability, no satisfaction, no acceptable standard of living, and seem to take up all of our time by occupying so many scattered parcels of it are the norm.
  • A radically different form of work is that of providing personal data for profit. This online data work is particularly insidious for two main reasons. First, because it is often not recognized as work at all. You might not think that messaging a pal about your new pair of headphones is work, but labour theorists like Maurizio Lazzarato disagree. Second, because workers are completely cut out of the data profit loop, although that may be changing.
  • Some people are already working toward this. The basic income movement, which calls for a minimum salary to be paid out to every living human regardless of employment status, is a good start, because it implies a significant departure from the purely economic language of austerity in political thought and argues for a basic income for the salient reason that we’re human and we deserve to live. However, if we really want to change the way things are headed, more will be needed.
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