讲座信息

主讲人：Christian Fuchs（Professor at the University of Westminster）

评议人：夏冰青（华东师范大学晨晖学者）

主持人：吴桐雨（浙江大学社会学系副教授）

时间：2020年6月26日（周五）16:00——18:30pm

地点：钉钉（线上平台），群号：33006273

The Marxist Political Economy of Digital Labour

讲座简介

The goal of this talk is to show that and how Karl Marx’s critique of the political economy can inform our understanding of digital labour and digital technologies in the 21st century.

In contemporary mainstream economics, the notions of work and labour are largely missing. Karl Marx critically theorised work and labour. In this talk, first a model of Marx’s notion of work is introduced and connected to the notion of communication.

Second, Marx’s notion of class is applied to the realm of the digital. For Marx, class is an antagonism between capital and labour, a relationship of surplus-value production and exploitation. In respect to the digital, applying the concept of class requires us to discuss the relationship of digital capital and digital labour.

Third, the talk will discuss particular examples of digital labour, especially the changes of work in the COVID-19 pandemic crisis and freelance digital labour that is part of the so-called “gig economy” and digital platform capitalism.