Karen Lewis addresses CTU

Karen Lewis, President of the Chicago Teachers Union, addresses their rally last Saturday. She is so impressive and so inspiring. She gets some great digs in at the billionaires who want to tell teachers how to teach, at the Walton and the Gates Foundations, and at John Legend. A must, must see.

Facebook and the theory of surplus value

source

On the occasion of Facebook's IPO, today, May 18, 2012, I want to share something I came across just last night, from an excellent article on the legacy of Karl Marx. ("Marx at 193," John Lanchester, London Review of Books, April 5, 2012). I particularly like statement this because (1) it's a great, teachable illustration of Marx's theory of surplus value and (2) it uses the theory to expose how labor is "hidden" in and by Facebook.

This idea of labour being hidden in things, and the value of things arising from the labour congealed inside them, is an unexpectedly powerful explanatory tool in the digital world. Take Facebook. Part of its success comes from the fact that people feel that they and their children are safe spending time there, that it is a place you go to interact with other people but is not fundamentally risky or sleazy in the way new technologies are often perceived to be – that VHS, for instance, was when it was launched on the market. But the perception that Facebook is, maybe the best word would be ‘hygienic’, is sustained by tens of thousands of hours of badly paid labour on the part of the people in the developing world who work for companies hired to scan for offensive images and who are, according to the one Moroccan man who went on the record to complain about it, paid a dollar an hour for doing so. That’s a perfect example of surplus value: huge amounts of poorly paid menial work creating the hygienic image of a company which, when it launches on the stock market later this year, hopes to be worth $100 billion.


Be sure to read the entire article.

As for the poorly paid Moroccans working for FB, it appears that The Gawker blew the whistle. And The Daily Telegraph did some reporting on this in March.

Wisconsin/Tahrir (+kufiya)

Lots of evidence that demonstrators in Wisconsin against Gov. Walker's draconian anti-labor bill is inspired, in part, by recent events in Egypt. Check out this photo of a kufiya-clad demonstrator, from a fabulous video of the last three days of protests, with a stirring soundtrack from Arcade Fire.

Wisconsin Budget Repair Bill Protest from Matt Wisniewski on Vimeo.

Check out this headline from an article on Boing Boing: "Midwestern Tahrir: Workers refuse to leave Wisconsin capital over Tea Party labor law."

Protesters also evoked Egypt's democracy struggle, on their first day at the Capitol--I'll add those links when/if I can find them.

Egyptian Textile Workers Confront the New Economic Order: Middle East Report Online

A new MERO. I quote from the announcement:

The Egyptian regime is cracking down on all manner of dissenters -- from
Muslim Brothers in Parliament to the well-known Kifaya movement to bloggers and journalists. But another form of opposition has been scoring victories: a wave of wildcat strikes that, like the Kifaya protests, began in late 2004. The collective action of Egyptian workers is currently the most broad-based kind of resistance to the regime. It represents a possible threat to the "stability" President Husni Mubarak needs to pass his office on to his son, as most Egyptians are convinced he seeks to do.

Joel Beinin and Hossam el-Hamalawy tell the story of the most militant and politically important strike to date in "Egyptian Textile Workers Confront the New Economic Order," now available in Middle East Report Online.

Here's an excerpt I particularly liked:

Then, on December 7, thousands of workers from the morning shift started assembling in Mahalla’s Tal‘at Harb Square, facing the entrance to the mill. The pace of factory work was already slowing, but production ground to a halt when around 3,000 female garment workers left their stations, and marched over to the spinning and weaving sections, where their male colleagues had not yet stopped their machines. The female workers stormed in chanting: “Where are the men? Here are the women!” Ashamed, the men joined the strike.