A provocative extension of the debates about unpaid labour, reproduction and the social factory, from Johan Söderberg:

"In the past three decades, Marxism has been criticised by feminists for its blind spot towards forms of oppression not directly involving class. Feminist Marxists have tried to bridge the two standpoints by showing that (male) waged labor depends on the reproductive work of women in the household. Harriet Fraad, Stephen Resnick, and Richard Wolff extends on this important work in Bringing it All Back Home: Class, Gender and Power in the Household Today. They say that women produces surplus labour at home which is appropriated by their husbands and in a feudal-like relation. The appropriated surplus labour of the wife is bundled together with the surplus labour of the husband-worker. Eventually most of it ends up in the pockets of the capitalist.

Now, my proposition is that the exploitative situation in which the wife finds herself is analogous to the appropriation of gratis labour from audiences and communities. The Star (the Author, the Artist, etc.) has a role similar to the husband in selling the surplus labour of his audience. The awesome revenues which a handful of superstars can negotiate away from the profit margins of media capital does not derive from their own toil. They are simply relays in the distribution of vast amounts of surplus value appropriated from audiences. It is true that professionals of the Spectacle are labourers too and situated in a subjugated position towards capital.

Indeed, to the vast majority of the immaterial workforce, the promise of celebrity is a mere hallucination which keeps them from revolting against the extreme insecurities of their working conditions. The insecurity of their occupations owes to the fact, that the qualities for which they are hired (appearance, chatting, playing) is entirely generic, in the sense that anyone can do it from just being born a human. The sole negotiation power of a Star springs from her name-recognition among the unnamed masses. The artistic labourer is recognised and ‘named’ as such in her exchange with capital (including, of course, state capital). Concurrently with the naming of the individual Author, the authorship of the masses is denied, which is also the precondition for the appropriation of their audience power.

[…] audiences as involved in a labour activity of sorts. Dallas Smyth daringly made such a proposal. He started with an insight known from the advent of radio and television (the so called Sarnoff Law), that the value of broadcast networks is proportionate to the number of viewers. Smythe recognised that the commodity sold by media networks derives from the audience. Hence the consumer is not the audience but the advertisers, a point which hardly is controversial any more. However, from this reversal of roles must follow, that the producer in question is the audience. He nick-named this input of watching by audiences as ‘audience power’ (mirroring the term ‘labour power’) and made some probes for further inquiries.

I believe the concept of audience power provides us with the missing link in the discussion. It helps us to discern how audiences are put to work in the social factory and are crafting sign values. Work doesn’t stop after the worker has left the factory gate, certainly a fact known to female workers. In their ‘spare time’ workers must prepare themselves for the next day in the factory; by cooking, cleaning, and sleeping; and for the next generation of workers, by sexual intercourse. Before the advance of monopoly capitalism, reproduction of labour power was accomplished inside the household. Bread was baked, clothes sewn, tools tinkered with, and mating of adolescents seen to, inside the family or the extended family and community. Today the purchase of consumer goods fills the same purpose of facilitating reproduction, Dallas Smythe insists.

Audiences work in the spare time to stay informed on what goods are available, which is necessary for them to enable the reproduction of their labour power. His suggestive ideas were picked up and pushed to its logical endpoint by Sut Jhally. He rallies against radical critics who he says have accepted the self-image of the media industry. It believes itself to be the producer of audiences. This is the old myth of ‘the productivity of capital’, he charges. Networks merely sell a commodity, audience time, which has been produced for them by others. Obviously, the television staff has done a part. But the other, crucially part, can only be the contribution of the audience. In his view, valorisation of audiences is analogous to the valorisation of labour. The outlines drawn in the ‘law of value’ can be applied to both."

The rest of Soderberg's article here.  See also Tiziana Terranova on what she calls the ‘free labour’ of the NetSlaves.

All of which raises the debate over the demand for wages for housework, of which the most prominent advocates ‘for’ are Mariarosa Dalla Costa, Silvia Federici.

Is the question of unpaid labour resolved by demanding that it be paid? What are the implications of monetising all activities, or indeed monetising those which—given the segmentary structure of the paid labour market—are likely to reflect those segmentations? Söderberg’s argument is provocative (for a number of reasons, but also) because his argument about unpaid labour is an argument made, in the context of that essay, for the abolition of copyright. In that sense, it seems to open onto more radical reconceptions of unpaid labour and responses to it than does the demand that everything become wage labourised.  Instead, Söderberg argues for eroding the specific means by which labour is gathered, alienated and exploited -- in this case, copyright.