The Platform is the Message

Amelia Davenport and Renato Flores argue that social media cannot be ignored despite its negative effects on modern culture. Instead, the left needs its own approach to social media that takes into account the values encoded into tech platforms.

Technology Frustration and Cyberattack by Nalisda. Sourced from here.

The Social Dilemma is an impressive film on how social media is affecting the way we relate to each other. Combining docudrama and interviews with former social media platform workers, the film is a mashup of the fictionalized story of a social media addict, who becomes radicalized through anti-establishment “fake news” (with no obvious left or right bent), and ends up arrested at a demonstration, and the real stories of Europeans traveling to Syria and Iraq to enlist in ISIS and white Americans joining white supremacist organizations. The film blames the present-day political radicalization on careful design choices in social media platforms which keep us hooked to the apps, and make us vulnerable to this sort of manipulation. However, like many standard left-liberal documentaries (think Michael Moore), the film presents the overview of a significant issue and suggests mild reforms to solve it while ignoring the elephant in the room: capitalism. By focusing on the neuroscience of social media addiction and how apps are designed to maximize engagement, the documentary brushes over the role market imperatives have in structuring and shaping technology to maximize profit¹, and ignores the way economic factors are responsible for destroying the social fabric of communities.

Critiques of ever-increasing alienation due to the trajectory of bourgeois mass society stretch from the beginning of the communist movement through the work of critics like Theodor Adorno, Thorstein Veblen, and Guy Debord. As Marx said in The Communist Manifesto:

The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. […] In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation. The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honoured and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage laborers.

The capitalist process of creative destruction is not a new thing, nor are the feelings of alienation from society. One only has to remember that Mark Fisher’s portrait of a broken society in Capitalist Realism was written in 2009, before smartphones were as extensively used as today.

Richard Seymour critiques The Social Dilemma in a review aptly titled “No, Social Media Isn’t Destroying Civilization.” As Seymour points out, The Social Dilemma repeatedly fails to address capitalism and instead focuses on an epiphenomenon: the role of social media in the increasing amounts of people radicalized through the internet. It ignores the role of US imperialism, much more important than the internet in creating ISIS. The documentary’s failings are even starker with racism—social media did not create white supremacy. Racism is as American as apple pie. Even if white supremacists find each other on social media, the wide-spread economic ruin of the Rust Belt and decline in the living standards of the white petty bourgeoisie after NAFTA has more to do with Trump’s election than Facebook ads and groups.

This does not mean that we should ignore the problems of social media. In his review, Seymour rightly tackles the gaps and the catastrophist outlook of the documentary, but undersells the ways social media is actually affecting our society. Seymour is not in an easy position: he balances on a tightrope between acknowledging the massive power of social media and denying that it is uniquely responsible for the current moment. But ultimately he ends up overcorrecting against the documentary’s pessimistic assessment of social media. Seymour is correct that the neuroscience of the documentary about the way social media has addicted us is too simplistic and neuro-reductionist, but he does not sufficiently acknowledge that Facebook and friends have managed to addict us in a way that is unhealthy, and operate to maximize the profit advertisers can obtain from our interactions. They spend enormous sums on behavioral research for that purpose. We can always imagine better AI algorithms that will work for our benefit and mental wellbeing; under capitalism, this can at best be apps that help our mental health and overall wellbeing² as long as we do not threaten, or even talk about the C-word.

To elucidate this, we can contrast Facebook with programs oriented for the corporate world for which you are paying for the software. These are qualitatively different from those whose business model is maximizing engagement. For example, Microsoft Teams incorporates features to encourage wellbeing and an “adequate” work-life balance by adding meditation to your schedule. It is not hard to imagine how a benign corporate social media that prioritizes wellbeing will end up being nothing other than self-help apps encouraging us to do yoga and to eat healthy while hiding the destructive role of capitalism.³ Indeed, most of these apps are already available in your app store, with a price tag. While capitalism still drives immiseration regardless of our technological platforms, some technologies remain decidedly worse than others in their social effects.

Seymour ends his review with the question: “where is the communist program for the social industry?” Not only is this question hard to answer (and attempts at such, like nationalization of the data centers, have already been proposed⁴), but it is a higher-order question than what is needed right now. We are far from being able to affect those decisions. It is a bit like deciding how you’re going to spend lottery winnings on a ticket you just purchased. What activists must be asking right now is “what is the social industry, or even social media, strategy of our organizing?” because it is clear that social media drastically affects the way we understand organizing, the way we develop trust in our organizing, or even who gets the largest platform in an organizational debate. We must reckon with the fact that whether we want it or not, social media plays a disproportionate role in our organizing. Parties currently relate to this either by ignoring it, or by enforcing strict social media discipline⁵, and these cannot be good answers to the dilemma.

Whereas individuals can choose to unplug, our organizing will never be able to fully escape social media. We can decide to not partake, but that doesn’t stop others. The time to come to terms with this harsh reality is long overdue. We are no longer living in the times of the Bolsheviks: the difficulties of getting the message out is not just censorship, but also our signal being drowned in the noise of the hot take economy. It is easier to generate attention by calling Holocaust victims “Karens” than it is by writing lengthy critiques of the concept of race. And a second difficulty appears: are we on social media for the “social” part or for the “media” part? How much of our ego goes into making sure that it is our take that is liked, retweeted and shared, rather than the other person’s or groups’ takes? Even with the best of intentions, it is difficult to not feel good from social validation and watching our follower count or page likes go up.

The Platform and the Party

Turning back to the immediate implications of social media for communist organizing one question stands out: “should a party impose a social media discipline on their members?” It is easy to agree that some discipline is necessary: racism, sexism and any other form of discrimination should get you expelled. Likewise, an informal intervention may be needed if a comrade is having a Twitter meltdown. But the question of precisely how much intra- and inter-organization debate should be allowed on social media is not an easy one to answer. Sometimes debates happen on Facebook groups or on Twitter because there is no other platform to have them. These are responses to organizational failures and the feeling of a lack of democracy. In this case, this is a symptom of an organizational disease, and should not be seen as a lack of discipline so much as an uncontrolled explosion due to inadequate communication channels. But other times, party members simply are not happy when a party decides against them and then take to social media to protest this, or even to sabotage the decision. For instance, the infamous letter calling for DSA members to phonebank for Biden despite the National Convention and the National Political Committee of DSA deciding against a Biden endorsement. In this case the unaccountability and uncontrollability of social media following comes to the forefront.

Social media appears to flatten power structures, but what it really does is mask them. DSA-adjacent celebrities, such as AOC, have over ten times the amount of Twitter followers than the organization itself. This sets a clear boundary for accountability. Indeed, platform abuse was what caused the introduction of “democratic centralism”⁶ in the German Socialist Party of yesteryear. Democratic centralism entailed that the votes, and even the speeches members of parliament gave, had to be decided on by the party as a whole. This was a means to ensure that the party controls their elected officials, rather than the opposite. The current structure of DSA prevents this accountability through democratic centralism from happening. The only event which can take place is a public repudiation, similar to the Chicago DSA’s disavowal of their elected alderman Andre Vazquez for voting for a right-wing city budget. While a positive development, it is very unclear that this has a medium- or long-term influence that is larger than the revoking of an endorsement for re-election by a similarly-sized NGO. The current individualistic electoral system is not well suited for these kinds of collective discipline. Vazquez cannot be expelled from a parliamentary fraction or removed from his seat.

Aside from politician-celebrities, social media influences our organizing in undesirable ways. Even if a large social media base does not account for a large popular base, there are still real-life ripples every time a social media celebrity decides to make others hear their opinion. Charismatic people, or even just conventionally attractive people end up having large platforms to disseminate their thoughts about what is to be done, often causing wastes of time and resources. An example of someone who has a large Twitter following due to her charisma and past involvement in politics is Briahna Joy Gray, the former advisor to the Sanders campaign. Gray, among other media celebrities launched a #ForceTheVote campaign, which attempted to pressure progressive Democratic legislators to withhold their vote for Pelosi as House Speaker unless she would accept bringing Medicare for All to a floor vote. The campaign went nowhere despite producing vigorous debates online for a few days; it lacked a real popular base beyond social media presence. Online platforms do not often translate to on-the-ground organizing and power.

The Medium is the Message

Founding father of Media Studies Marshall McLuhan argued that to understand communication, rather than focusing on particular content being transmitted, we should focus on the medium through which it occurs. He summarized this succinctly with the catch-phrase “the medium is the message.” For McLuhan, “media” is not simply audio-visual transmissions like newspapers, television or radio and communication goes beyond language. All technologies are media in McLuhan’s account because at their root they serve to extend some capacity of humanity to effect change in the environment and/or receive sensory stimulation:

“Any invention or technology is an extension or self-amputation of our physical bodies, and such extension also demands new ratios or new equilibriums among the other organs and extensions of the body.”⁷

For instance, the transition from rail to highways as modes of transportation had profound impacts on the structure of cities, logistics networks, and broader human activities like recreation independent of what any given train or car was doing on its network. And it’s not just our social structures, but our bodies that adjust to the stimulation of our technologies. The blue light from electronic screens disrupts sleep patterns, while the consumption of convenience food is linked to heart disease and other health risks, and on a more profound level, as the Greek philosopher Plato bemoaned, our transition to written language led to a loss of our ability to remember nearly as much information as oral cultures. Moreover, every message, be it linguistic or economic, is itself a medium. A car and a train themselves are media transmitting passengers to their destinations who themselves, in the exercise of their social roles for business or pleasure, transmit messages to their destinations. Likewise, a historical television program transmits the message of a script that transmits a lesson of history which itself serves to transmit a particular moral or emotional sentiment to the general public. Media are like nested matryoshka dolls.

From Mcluhan’s ‘The Medium is the Massage”

This especially applies to social media platforms. Off the bat, Twitter messages have a maximum of 280 characters, are evaluated by the likes of a public network, and are very rapid to send. This has a profound impact on the way the medium structures social engagement through it. Most debates will be primarily performed through rapid hits, searching the approval of the public rather than making a convincing argument. In that respect, Facebook provides a marginally better platform for debate, with unlimited length messages—and slightly more secluded commentary, but we are still judged by a large public, in real-time, and performing the debate for the audience. Moreover, Facebook comes with its own drawbacks because of the way its system of invite-only or join-request-based groups work, which create isolated bubbles often characterized by not only group-think but bizarre power dynamics and moderator cliques. What Facebook cares about is that you are engaged; being engaged because you are angry, depressed and seeking validation, or fulfilling yourself through meaningful engagement all look exactly the same to their algorithms. The same way treating disease rather than the symptoms can be seen as unprofitable for medical companies, as long as the tools of social media are dominated by the profit motive, they will maximize the profit of the company, and not necessarily the welfare of the users. Because these platforms condition what sort of media content is enacted through them, they will inevitably shape our habits of thought outside their domain. Thinking about intellectual content in the form of “takes” positions all viewpoints in relation to clout seeking and personal validation and it is increasingly common to see this terminology replace the notion of a political “line” outside decrepit sects.

Tinder might be a clearer example. What is Tinder’s service, or Tinder’s product? If Tinder were optimized to find us an adequate life companion, or at least someone to walk with us for a bit, people would use Tinder for one or two weeks, and then log off, depleting the user base. This would hurt the company. It is in Tinder’s interest to keep us logged on, replying to messages and matches, so we keep on paying our account, keep on watching the ads, and keep on giving away our data. So then, from a financial perspective it makes sense for Tinder to produce matches who provide only temporary relief from loneliness, instead of finding someone who would make us leave the app maybe not forever, but at least for a while.

On Tinder, at least one knows what they hope to get. What do we hope to get from social media aside from social-ness? With social isolation especially exacerbated in the age of a pandemic, the social media giants seek to capitalize on this. Facebook naturally tends to show people who think like us, to maximize interactions. This is where Seymour’s critique of The Social Dilemma, which focuses mainly on the power of capital, is incomplete. Social media does produce dopamine and other chemicals which give us a psychological addiction and keep us on the platform. Even avoiding vulgar materialism, it would be foolish to deny the fact that our central nervous system structures how we engage with reality. It’s not just a neutral medium. Psychedelic drugs, workplace stress, physical health, and meditation practices attest to this in their own ways. But through increased technical understanding of the regularities in the material cognitive processes in our brains, and the ability to artificially process and filter information through computers, our central nervous system itself has been extended. As McLuhan says,

The electric media are the telegraph, radio, films, telephone, computer and television, all of which have not only extended a single sense or function as the old mechanical media did—i.e., the wheel as an extension of the foot, clothing as an extension of the skin, the phonetic alphabet as an extension of the eye—but have enhanced and externalized our entire central nervous systems, thus transforming all aspects of our social and psychic existence.⁸

Our smartphones filter spam calls, our thermostats adjust the temperature, and the weather channel tells you to prepare for snow next week. In some ways, this development of an extended, collective, electronic nervous system has cost the broad masses its antiquated faculties of self-reliance and the same concern for privacy that historically dominated the highly literate specialists and the bourgeoisie. But is this such a loss?

McLuhan notes that this new electronic way of living is much more suited to formerly marginalized cultures with strong memories and legacies of tribal existence, not the white bourgeoisie and upper-stratum of workers who financed it. Communities that had to maintain strong ties and forms of resilience in the face of colonial genocide, or forged through the hardship of the proletarian condition, are more aligned with technological logics that emphasize contextual awareness, socialness, and generalized rather than specialized knowledge. Where yesterday’s actuaries and skilled craftsmen are dinosaurs in the face of automation, a day laborer who runs several independent side hustles is more likely to have the flexibility needed to survive in an economy whose rate of change is constantly accelerating. But it isn’t the street-smart entrepreneur who is most resilient, but those who can develop strong community networks of mutual support and solidarity. The hierarchical and individualist culture of the machine age is unsuited to the conditions of life that our technologies have created when it takes Venmo micro-donations from one’s social circle to meet the rent, and a tenant union to keep the rent from rising higher. In the spirit of socialist architect and futurist Buckminster Fuller, McLuhan remarked, “There are no passengers on spaceship earth. We are all crew.”

Singing Sea Shanties on Neurath’s Boat

The present socialization methods are a contrast to those that dominated the past, but a close comparison can help us bridge the gap and develop our program. Recently on Tiktok, hundreds of videos have been uploaded of people joining in the singing of sea shanties. Passionate yet wholesome, the shared activity shines out like a beacon amid the darkness of plague and civil discord. Sparked by a viral video of a postal worker singing the song “Wellerman,” whose name’s meaning has been lost to history, a glimpse of what a healthier culture might look like flashes on our screens. But unlike earlier viral videos, this one involves widespread social participation. With Tiktok’s duet feature, people can join in song across the gaps social distancing demands.

The social context which produced sea shanties could hardly appear farther from our own: an age of heroic and well-sinewed men setting off on daring struggles with the elements and Nature in pursuit of fortune. It is an era characterized by images of widows staring longingly from the shore, great storms, and drink-sodden invalids telling tall tales to any who would listen. A time when men had no choice but to risk their lives so that their children might eat.

But is that time actually so different from our own? For all our attempts to smooth out the difficulties of life through technology, anxieties and uncertainty still beset us. Today, every time you go to work, buy a coffee, or visit with a friend, you take a calculated risk that a chain of events may result in killing you, a grandparent, or a partner. But even absent the plague, we simply tune out the 3,700 auto fatalities a day as we commute to work. “It won’t be me,” we tell ourselves, if we think about it at all. We live our lives in the face of tornadoes, floods, landslides, and other man-accelerated disasters because we must. Are the meatpackers who face a roughly 25% injury rate any less brave than the whalers or herring fishermen of old? Are retail workers who live in fear of assault by customers or mass shootings?

And yet, as much as things have remained the same, what has changed is the increased atomization and alienation of people from one another. The pandemic has only cast existing trends in sharper relief. Where the whalers had camaraderie and brotherhood, today we have parasocial relationships with twitter celebrities and podcasters. The bourgeois culture our schools and institutions force us into is incompatible with the real demands of the new techno-economic reality we face. And this has real implications for social struggle to improve conditions. As Max Dewes put it in a recent article for Organizing.work:

But all of the knowledge in the world can’t change the fact that the single hardest part of any campaign is talking to your coworkers. Almost every shortcut and miscalibration in organizing pivots around the universal truth that most workers would rather personally and publicly challenge Sundar Pichai or the President of the United States than ask Meng from accounting to have an emotional conversation about his issues at work, and pitch him on acting collectively on the job.

Where a crew of sailors might turn mutinous and maroon their tyrant captain on a rocky outcropping, today we are anxious not to hurt the feelings of our employers. Where discipline on a ship was enforced with the lash, and in the factory with the boss’s cane, today we live in enlightened times where a supervisor’s well-timed tantrum does the trick.

There was a time when the class line was more clear. Organized workers could exert discipline of their own. Scabs feared for their lives, and employers knew that driving the workers too hard would have direct consequences. But the police and national guard were always available to crack heads if workers stepped too far out of line. Organized workers had a culture apart from and subordinated to the dominant bourgeois culture of the men of letters and it played out in a low-grade struggle that involved violence in both directions.

Binding workers together and reinforcing a shared collectivity was a culture distinct from bourgeois high society and from the mass culture that united the classes. Songs sung to keep the pace at work, at the bar, and in the union hall created a shared language that reinforced an identity opposed to the boss. The Industrial Workers of the World’s Little Red Songbook acted like a passport to a world of shared meaning for those who were tired of lies told from the pulpits of corrupt preachers and in the pages of the newspapers. Visual art, poetry, novels, and plays written to advance working-class values could be found across the world and across nations. Works like Takiji Kobayashi’s Kanikosen (The Crab Cannery Ship), Robert Tressell’s The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists, Daniel Alomía Robles’ El cóndor pasa (The Condor Passes), and Bertolt Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children expressed the political subjectivity of the oppressed.

But not all working-class culture was political in character. Much dealt with the tragedies and sorrows of the lived reality of the times like many blues and country songs, spoke of imagined better futures, or recorded memories outside the official histories of polite society. This is where sea shanties largely sat. Singing them was a means for workers in maritime communities to enact their identities and participate in something far beyond themselves. The act of shared singing provided shared structure and narrative to the otherwise disconnected and traumatic experiences of lives on the periphery of society. The singing created a reality where sense could be made of the uncertainty of life. Is it any wonder people today have rediscovered the medium?

In his discussion of human knowledge and the nature of scientific knowledge, Austrian philosopher of science, Otto Neurath, used the metaphor of a boat to explain progress:

We are like sailors who on the open sea must reconstruct their ship but are never able to start afresh from the bottom. Where a beam is taken away a new one must at once be put there, and for this the rest of the ship is used as support. In this way, by using the old beams and driftwood the ship can be shaped entirely anew, but only by gradual reconstruction.⁹

Standing on existing scientific knowledge as a platform, researchers could replace parts of the general body of theory as they were shown inadequate or incompatible with current understanding. But the reconstruction necessarily takes as elements ideas and notions from the past, even as it seemingly discards the outdated.

This is also true with culture. There is no absolute foundation upon which a new culture can be constructed; it will necessarily be made from elements of the old. But as the ways of living and narrative structures created by capitalist mass cultural institutions like individualism, blind faith in the salvific power of scientific progress, and the civic institutions of western democracy are increasingly recognized as rotten to the core, they will be organically replaced by whatever is at hand. Even as we have to isolate through the plague, we also have to come together to survive the growing challenges and threats ecological and economic changes pose to all but the most privileged. Collective forms of cultural expression like sea shanties are a spontaneous expression of this. Socialist political art and media are a conscious attempt to address it. Both can play a mutual reinforcing role.

Even as revolutionaries focus on building direct power against the bosses in organizational and strategic terms, time and resources have to be set aside for the culture that creates political subjectivity. Whether it’s something fun like sea shanties, rap music, video game tournaments, fiction reading circles, or shared meals and recipe swapping, we have to do more than just give it space. This does not mean creating a prescriptive or top-down model of culture that excludes any “problematic” elements. Such a project is impossible beyond its undesirability. But we don’t have to be passive or tail organic cultural development either. If there’s something that needs to be said or a social need unfulfilled, revolutionaries can make conscious interventions. Our revolutionary forebears were not austere killjoys. Part and parcel with revolutions were the creation of traditions like the Soviet Haggadah, a set of prayers created by communist Jews in Russia, songs like “The East is Red” sung during the Chinese Cultural Revolution, and many others.

The Social Dilemma‘s tepid reformism is a dead-end for communists, as is pretending these platforms are neutral and play no role in shaping messages. Taking note from McLuhan, we can’t simply take the existing social media and feed in communist politics and working-class culture. But that does not mean we can’t or shouldn’t engage with it. What is important is first recognizing how the technical frameworks shape the message and then adjusting our engagement accordingly. We must note that how our organizations structure their interaction with social media is more important than any particular content they post. Instead of planning and coordinating our organizations through Facebook, Google Apps, and Zoom, we can look to other platforms such as those developed by Common Knowledge. We can develop user-friendly protocols for operational security that minimize electronic records altogether or use burner flip phones and text messages, and we can develop robust policies for the behavior of organizational officers on public social media. The bourgeoisie is not all-powerful, and while their engineers do design their platforms for maximizing profit, the dynamics of social media in the real world are too complex for them to ever fully control. But the same goes for our movement too.

The traditions of dead generations may weigh like a nightmare on the brains of the living, but it’s a dream workers can take control of and remake according to our own purposes. The power to do so is in your hands!

2019.12.072020.11.24

An Accumulation of Affect

Discourse related to the concept of emotional labor can highlight the way capitalism distorts our humanity or merely naturalize capitalism, argues Richard Hunsinger.

I spend most of my days at a front desk, staring at a window with a grate over it. I watch the light change as the hours crawl. The room is an icebox, but since I am the first face anyone sees, I must be warm. My work can be summed up as an extra layer of emails that others must go through for scheduling with my superiors, processing payments, and ordering food and arranging rooms for meetings. I smooth out the tasks that others formerly had to do themselves. This role is designed to maximize the efficiency of the office functions of the organization. I have nearly perfected the process for email responses and calendar surveys, and reliably make payments on time. In down moments, I read the news or talk to people on Twitter. The 9-5 consistency and the chance to have the most pay I have ever been offered was something I knew I wanted, at least to avoid the precarity of other jobs. But between this schedule and living on the other side of town for lower rent, I’ve been kept from time with friends. The internet is often where I feel closest to anyone. I have never uploaded a picture to my work email because I am not there.

Here and there, complications come up that ruffle the smoothness expected from my performance. Sometimes there is not enough food at meetings. People might want hotel rooms booked for a large group with less than a week in advance to a popular location, and to add extra people at the actual last minute. Often I am sent payment information with incorrect routing numbers, delaying the transaction. Important people show up for meetings hidden from my calendars, asking about details not shared with me. When they sense my confusion, their brows furrow. I smile and think of something charming to say, hoping to see the tension in their facial muscles relax. When these moments happen, I do what I can to assuage concern and I keep things going.

The other day, this did not go as planned and food went pretty quickly. Someone important commented on my unsanitary handling of food. Others sat where it had been served, and getting more in the room ended up being difficult, so it was a distraction. My boss called me in for a meeting, asked what I thought went wrong, and gave me more precise directions on how to avoid this in the future. A professional development class is suggested. I am asked if I think this job is still a good fit for me. I think they are trying to see if I would quit on my own. There is a brief and quick flash of what I think is fear, as I immediately think of my rent, cost of food, other job prospects. That I am burdened with knowing these difficulties, while the present moment depends on me not betraying this, brings a lump to my throat, and I feel the pressure behind my eyes. Is this really about to make me cry? I hold it back, I smile, I assure them that I want to be successful. I take the notes down, I listen to suggestions for how I can order food better. I think about going home, and the next 5 hours until my partner gets home and I can see her again.

I realize that I am expected to perform an emotional ideal much of the time at my work. This has been true for all of my working life. This is not a unique experience in the life of the collective worker today and has given rise to a growing discourse on the subject of emotional labor. It spills out into new avenues of discussion of what exactly it comprises, and where the line between our exploitation and our personal lives exactly lies. In this discourse, it is not at all unusual to come across a wide range of positions, experiences, and reactions. Some attribute the discourse on emotional labor to an ideological basis, that this is simply a form of liberalism gone amok. There are those who see this as a symptom of the most recent, cogent reformation of capitalism’s development, neoliberalism and see it as a totality of marketizing emotional relations between social peers. This appears more accurate, yet more often than not glosses over exactly why the exploitation of labor now increasingly relies upon an assurance of the emotional presentation of the worker, and worse tends to display a tenuous grasp on what “neoliberalism” means except as a bogeyman for today’s ills.

What I seek to achieve here is a grounding of emotional labor as such within the context of Marxist political economy. We must see the discourse surrounding this phenomenon as a process in motion interrelated with the development of labor’s exploitation in an economy that has seen a dramatic rise in its consumer service sector. This acts as an arena of exploitation where the laborer’s access to the wage is increasingly under the watchful eye of every consumer and supervisor. From this, we can see what the growth of emotional labor as a discursive regime reveals to us about the state of alienation in the development of capitalism of late.

We have to begin this analysis with the understanding that, as proletarians and wage-workers in a capitalist mode of production, we have nothing to offer in order to reproduce ourselves except our capacity to sell labor-power as a commodity to the capitalist. This labor-power, as a commodity, must possess both a use-value for its buyer and an exchange-value for its seller. The use-value here is the capacity to perform a given amount of labor within a given amount of time. We must do this in order to earn our wage, the exchange-value for labor-power expressed as a price. We do this in order to use said wage to purchase our means of subsistence, sold to us in commodity form. The key here is that, for the proletariat in a society where the capitalist mode of production prevails, a basic survival and a guarantee of some quality of life depends upon the capacity to sell labor-power and to find a buyer. We must search for a master even if there exists no desire for such.

To this end, what is to be understood of the exploitation of emotional labor as pertains to the working life of wage laborers? Emotional labor is a term coined by Arlie Russell Hochschild, to give a name to the experience of the worker in managing, and through this, suppressing, their expressions and behavior in order to fulfill the emotional demands of a job. Hochschild finds three common elements to employment that require the use of emotional labor by the worker: “First, they require face-to-face or voice-to-voice contact with the public. Second, they require the worker to produce an emotional state in another person — gratitude or fear, for example. Third, they allow the employer, through training and supervision, to exercise a degree of control over the emotional activities of employees.”¹

These can be seen every day in almost any job that requires some form of interaction between the worker and a consumer or superior. The use-value of labor-power as a commodity in these jobs is reliant upon the capacity of the worker to both give an emotional performance and induce a specific affect in those they engage throughout. The worker is alienated not only from their labor-power, but also from their genuine emotional expression. We need not look far to find examples in gig economy jobs, work supposedly “autonomized” by a decentralized coordination of services via app, many of which impose a customer ratings system for every transaction made.

This is made even more clear when taking into account the rapid growth of employment in the service sector, encompassing a wide variety of professions and requiring constant interaction with the public as consumers. The growth of employment in service-based industries is far outpacing that of employment in direct manufacturing and production in the United States, and is expected to keep doing so over the course of the next decade.² The stability of the wage in US capitalism of today, and thus the use-value of labor-power, is increasingly reliant on a capacity of the worker to perform an emotional labor in transactions: satisfy the boss and constantly ease the conscience of the customer, thus reifying the commodity in its exchange, transforming it into money, and allowing for capital’s reproduction to proceed accordingly. Though in Hochschild’s original research, published in the early 1980s, she found a prevalence for this type of employment in the clerical office and retail-oriented work of what then constituted the so-called middle classes, she offers a prescient observation for the future of this phenomenon:

“If jobs that call for emotional labor grow and expand with the spread of automation and the decline of unskilled labor — as some analysts believe they will — this general social track may spread much further across other social classes. If this happens, the emotional system itself — emotion work, feeling rules, and social exchange, as they come into play in a ‘personal control system’ — will grow in importance as a way through which people are persuaded and controlled both on the job and off. If, on the other hand, automation and the decline of unskilled labor leads to a decline in emotional labor, as machines replace the personal delivery of services, then this general social track may come to be replaced by another that trains people to be controlled in more impersonal ways.”³

The US economic situation of today is one of a rapidly deindustrializing imperial core. As a site of capital-intensive production that has shed living labor from its processes and automated many jobs out of existence, US development to date has given rise to a growing relative surplus population whose primary objective as a labor force is the circulation and consumption of commodities through sale and purchase. The privileged position of the US as a site to capture extracted surplus value from more labor-intensive production chains in global peripheries no longer supports the buffer from class struggle that the construction of a middle class once provided. As capital accumulation has intensified and reached new limits that pose as barriers to capital’s expanded reproduction, more avenues for circulation must be opened up. Over the past 40 years, during what can be understood as the neoliberal regime of accumulation, even the imperial core has seen the slashing and gutting of social support services from governments. This has led to increased privatization of that which used to sustain a state-supported social reproduction of the workforce and a degree of class mobility in the so-called middle classes. This onset of privatization and the accompanying deregulation of the financial industry that aided it can be seen as a period where capital accumulation outstripped the limits on profitability imposed by state-supported services towards social reproduction, as the organization of capital and labor underwent structural transformations on a global scale.⁴

It is important to contextualize this historically. The very reason that we see growing awareness of the exploitation of emotional labor, the fundamental coercion of this performance, is structured by the wage relation in this specific historical trajectory. This moment brings us upon convergence between, on the one hand, a stagnant, deindustrializing manufacturing sector placing the US proletariat more and more into jobs involving interpersonal social interactions, and, on the other, an era where the social reproduction of the proletariat as a workforce has increasingly failed. The expectation of emotional performance in the work environment, as well as the increased dominance of working life over personal life to accommodate for decades of suppressed wage growth to maintain profitability⁵, has led to an exhaustion of emotional capacity in personal life. The awareness of this has become a defining characteristic to the way that we understand alienation in capitalist society today.

At the base of all processes of capital accumulation is a separation, as in Marx’s “primitive accumulation” and Harvey’s “accumulation by dispossession,” that acts to form the constitutive social relation between classes of production for exchange that is capital. In the instance of the worker’s emotional capacity as use-value of the commodity labor-power, a further separation is occurring. No longer is it simply the alienation of the worker from their labor-power, but now from emotional expression in this capacity as worker. Affect is commodified, and its appropriation as such here is with the intent to subvert the emotional capacity of the worker to the aims of capital. But as stated above, in the context of this period of capitalism’s countertendencies to declining profitability deployed with an intensifying aggression, we are approaching a severe limit to capital’s reproduction process. To this end, the commodity of labor-power, now as a commodified capacity to provide emotional labor in working life, is pushed to a limit in accordance with the demands of capital’s continued reproduction, and only moves to continually reach beyond that limit as capital stands on the verge of another crisis once again. We, as an increasingly debt-encumbered proletariat, sense this crisis every day. Every day at work is another day we must bear a false smile and perform positive emotional well-being if we are to stave off the looming threats of eviction, starvation, and immiseration that losing our job entails. The alienation of ourselves from autonomy over our emotions as the use-value of emotional labor is thus not only for the benefit of any given customer, but for the stability of the whole of capitalist society.

This brings us to Hochschild’s ominous foretelling of a “personal control system” above, as we have seen this degree of social alienation drastically restructure social life today. Susan Willis posits in discussing the political economy of domestic labor, in the example of the use-value of the married mother at home that in this instance does not fold the laundry, “it is only the failure to create use-value that can be made visible.”⁶ For the use-value of emotional labor, it is vital that the veneer of the laborer’s emotional state exists for the smooth realization of commodity value in exchange, and thus accumulation, to proceed uninterrupted. The failure to provide this exposes a dissatisfaction that reveals that the worker’s emotional performance is just that, a performance, and exposes all to the coercive regimes of personal control that we are all subject to under a life structured by the need to work for a wage. To this end, we find ourselves simultaneously existing at the other end of Hochschild’s prediction, where now a growing number of service-related jobs are also being automated out of existence. We need look no further than the growth of cashier-less lines at grocery stores and commodities delivered by Amazon drones. These systems themselves will never be free of human labor, though they certainly train us to internalize the fact that under the domination of the class relation of capital all human life is effectively disposable. The exploitation of living labor is merely a problem of geographic reorganization to areas where another section of the proletariat will bear the burdens of production.

We are now faced with a situation where, on the one hand, we are under the duress of an increasingly alienated and impoverished social life. This is carried out in exploitation of increasing intensity that pits us smiling, unwillingly, in front of any passing stranger that wishes to make a purchase. We are thus less emotionally reliable than any machine that may take our place. On the other hand, capital can not exist without our pliable consent to its processes and must sustain us. But this is now only possible in an environment where we are increasingly deprived of the time for the most emotionally fulfilling, deeply personal moments necessary for our own reproduction. The immobility of this immanent contradiction to capital’s expanded reproduction has driven us to a new discursive terrain for emotional labor, as we are increasingly aware of the contradiction and its effects.

There is the understanding that emotional labor, as contextualized within the working environment, is coercion of sentiment from the worker to induce a specific emotional affect in the consumer. This is fundamentally different from the role emotion plays for us in daily life, untethered to the demands of a job. To a social life amongst people outside of work, the use of our emotions is to be of authentic expression, fundamental to all communication. The labor of emotion in a context free of the wage-relation is not inherently a coerced act but part of our metabolism with ourselves and each other in social life for our own ends, for both pleasure and pain alike. To experience this as alienated labor for the drive of capital is to subvert this to the demands of the economic dictums of a mode of production that sells us back to each other in dead, objectified forms.

There is also the reaction of those who see emotional labor as coercion in life outside of the wage: the application of an awareness of the exploitation of emotional labor as a process to be mediated through an exchange where one previously did not exist. This has resulted in the notorious phrase “venmo me for my emotional labor,” a phrase that today is not always clearly situated in a space of either sincerity or irony. Phrases like “venmo me for my emotional labor” tend to draw severe ire in many online circles, and I can be sure many reading this have witnessed and participated in moments where they’ve seen this phrase used. The phenomenon to which this is a reaction to is certainly real. As seen above, it is also clearly rooted in a material situation of the prevalence of the exploitation of emotional labor. However, the application of the framework of emotional labor to interpersonal communication outside of waged work, if it aims to be a position that seeks to challenge oppression, does so by further naturalizing capitalist social relations, and thus fails.

It is certainly healthy and important to have emotional boundaries and to operate on the basis of consensual interaction in social life, but to do so by formalizing the emotional and making further transactional interpersonal experience amongst each other is to reify the customer-worker dynamic that prevails under wage labor. In the more vulgar iterations of this, we may see demands of monetary compensation for emotional labor. To seek to address emotional labor in this manner is to take up a rigidly economic line of reasoning that abandons the possibility of redeeming the social significance of the emancipatory use of our emotions for ourselves and each other while in the process merely affirming exchange-value as the basis for struggle and the measure of all value. There is no possibility here beyond a grafting of our exploited life onto the social, and falls prey to the same misgivings of those that call for the payment of labor its “full value” in the wage; a far cry from the emancipation of labor and the self-abolition of the proletariat, leading only to momentary placation until the next wage battle.

The quickness to invoke the issue of interpersonal emotional labor is, however, part of our collective rage at present — the era of human feeling being ripped from its bearers so we can buy and sell commodities more efficiently as the ship goes down once again. The displacement of this rage onto each other can appear a sound move, as such action amongst our own class is less prone to incur a retaliation that may have an immediate effect on needs such as food and shelter. It is the condition of having to sell one’s labor for a wage to purchase these means of subsistence that stands as the primary cause of our emotional exhaustion. The hegemony of work-life prevents us from critiquing these conditions deeply; from realizing that the wage is a scam for a rote labor of performative friendliness, politeness, denial of our free-time, emotionally taxing work-relations of sociability, or, at worst, dealing with the verbally abusive treatment common to the service industry. It is all incredibly draining, and it is no wonder that this current discursive trend exists. Insisting on a transaction to mediate emotional support might be the most revealing symptom of the domination of capitalist social relations. But bearing resentment towards friends needing emotional support should be recognized as a symptom of this. It obscures the origin of our dissatisfaction in the domination of our lives by the irrational demands of capital. If you’re looking for a target for the rage, take on the boss, the landlord, the capitalist, and abolish their class, for it is only through this conquest and transcendence of the capital relation that we may see the end of this exploitation of our emotional labor.