The awareness that we live in a system or, better, that our lives and livelihoods are articulated through systemic forces, does not need to lead us to despair. Knowledge of these forces does not make us weaker; on the contrary, it makes us stronger, because the system reveals its Achilles heel by showing what it must do in order to survive: it must promote enclosures and it must pit producers, both waged and unwaged, against each other, thus creating the appearance of abundance, but instead reproducing scarcity.

Any existing structures and all the conditions of doing business are always in a process of change. Every situation is being upset before it has had time to work itself out.

As a matter of fact, capitalist economy is not and cannot be stationary. Nor is it merely expanding in a steady manner. It is incessantly being revolutionized from within by new enterprise, i.e., by the intrusion of new commodities or new methods of production or new commercial opportunities into the industrial structure as it exists at any moment. Any existing structures and all the conditions of doing business are always in a process of change. Every situation is being upset before it has had time to work itself out. Economic progress, in capitalist society, means turmoil.

Whereas von Hippel’s findings could be read as a strong argument for worker control and autonomy, his intention is precisely to maintain the antagonistic relationship in which users are ‘sourced,’ harnessed, or exploited, and user innovation is appropriated as value by capital.

[A]s long, therefore, as activity is not voluntarily, but naturally, divided, man’s own deed becomes an alien power opposed to him, which enslaves him instead of being controlled by him. For as soon as the distribution of labour comes into being, each man has a particular, exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape. He is a hunter, a fisherman, a herdsman, or a critical critic, and must remain so if he does not want to lose his means of livelihood; while in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic. This fixation of social activity, this consolidation of what we ourselves produce into an objective power above us, growing out of our control, thwarting our expectations, bringing to naught our calculations, is one of the chief factors in historical development up till now.

[I]t could be argued that crowdsourcing transcends commodity fetishism –- albeit, only to a certain point. Labour is at the forefront of discussions of crowdsourcing, implied by the very term itself. Whereas the deskilling of Fordism reduces workers to mere cogs, and whereas their work goes unrecognized and is divorced from the final product, discussions of crowdsourcing often make visible once more the labour and labourer(s) responsible for a given product. For instance, if one is inclined to purchase the best-selling Threadless T-shirt, The Communist Party, from the Threadless online store, one sees that its designer is Tom Burns. One sees that he is in his early-thirties, has been a member of Threadless since 2005, and is quite a prolific Threadless user. One can see his photograph, his other designs, and his Flickr photos. One can read his blogs, critiques, and slogans. One can visit his website, or even contact him through AIM. One would be hard-pressed to have such a relation to whomever helped build, say, one’s new Ford.

At the same time, this relation to Tom Burns is primarily to his identity as-designer; one gets to know Tom Burns principally as Threadless-user ‘tomburns.’ It is perhaps a less fetishized relation than one may have with the seemingly nameless Ford employees who manufactured one’s automobile, but nonetheless does not affirm the complexities of Tom Burns as a person. With this in mind, the vocation can hardly be relegated to an allegedly obsolete industrial-era. The vocation, as a limited -– and limiting -– facet of individual identities, thrives within crowdsourcing; we may now know the names and faces of individual producers, but we approach them through their role in the market. Moreover, this partial overcoming of commodity fetishism can be read also as a model offering increased surveillance, the internalization of worker discipline, and overall a form of commodity fetishism which regards the partial humanization of producers as part of a branding strategy –- in all, that the blurring of public and private identities through crowdsourcing resolves itself in a way that intensifies, rather than alleviates, the commodification of the individual.

Now the advocates of a critical (autonomist) position towards free labour may validly respond that free labour only becomes an issue in spheres of activity where there has been extensive commodification, and that the vast social reach of certain digital technologies makes it important to highlight the labour that they depend upon. The development of the internet might be an example of this, or more specific sites such as YouTube. Even here, however, there are problems that we might want to consider, and which do not seem to have been raised in the debates about free labour. Terranova’s seminal account usefully pointed to the huge amount of unpaid work necessary to create the internet. But it may be said in response that those who undertook such unpaid digital labour might have gained a set of rewards from such work, such as the satisfaction of contributing to a project which they believed would enhance communication between people and ultimately the common good; or in the form of finding solutions to problems and gaining new skills which they could apply later in other contexts. In some cases, it might be possible to think of their work as involving the building of skills which lead to higher wages being paid in the longer term – a kind of deferred wage. Without denying for a moment the fundamental importance of a living wage, it seems dangerous to think of wages as the only meaningful form of reward, and it would surely be wrong to imply that any work done on the basis of social contribution or deferred reward represents the activities of people duped by capitalism. Actually, it seems to me that this would run the danger of internalising capitalism’s own emphasis on commodification.

The basis of the moral condemnation of wage labour is not that the wages are too low, but that wage labour by its very nature dehumanizes man. This means, for Marx, that it defeats his natural human urge toward spontaneous productive activity, converts his free creativity into forced labour and drudgery, and frustrates his human need for a variety of occupations.

The more we join with others, the greater our creative power. The problem, as we have seen, is that under capitalism, socialisation exists as abstraction: it is through abstraction that the social coming together of different doings is established. It is not surprising then that the revolt against abstract labour should take the form of a revolt against socialisation: doing our own thing, expressing ourselves, creating small projects. The traditional concept of socialism seems of little relevance here: it poses an image of post-capitalist society as a society characterised by a grater socialisation of production with ever bigger units of production, but reduces the question of self-determination to the entirely abstract idea of the Plan rather than to the actual process of doing.

“The development of our power-to-do must not be understood as a rejection of socialisation. The challenge, rather, is to construct through the cracks a different socialisation, a socialisation more loosely woven than the social synthesis of capitalism and based on the full recognition of the particularities of our individual and collective activities and of their thrust towards self-determination. There are already many initiatives in this direction. The insistence of the so-called anti-globalisation movement that it is not opposed to globalisation but favours a different sort of globalisation and is therefore an alter-globalisation movement makes precisely the point that the struggle is not for a romantic return to isolated units but for a different sort of social interconnection. Horizontality, dignity, alternative economy, commons: all these terms relate to explorations in the construction of a different form of socialisation.

Capital, since the beginning, says to people, ‘your creativity is valid only within the bounds of value production: if you do not produce value, your creativity counts for nothing’.