Re-configuration of the migrant & the return of rent

Zizek observes that the predominant mode of the extraction of surplus value today is no longer capitalist, at least not in any liberal or neoliberal sense. What he means by this is that companies do not predominantly rely on the sale of a product or service and the margins of profit made from such exchanges to expand and reproduce themselves.

The most commonly cited example is social media platforms which can monetise our very linguistic, pictorial and videographic exchanges, using them as raw data, and the space of our profiles as billboards to rent out to advertisers who buy that data so as to place targeted advertisements on customized news feeds, and suggestions boxes.

Another example is Microsoft Windows. Once the market has been hegemonized, it is no longer necessary to make any major changes apart from periodically releasing a new version which would force all computers in the network to either update themselves or face redundancy in their capacities to run programs which may be incompatible.

While this may seem to be a purely technical phenomena, its effects are asymmetrical at levels of company hierarchy. Many organisations for instance have their own LAN servers which are utilised within the organisation. Having some experience in this domain I can assert, that this hardly serves any logistical purpose apart from keeping employees in the offices and preventing them from working from home; a requirement of the hour given the prevalence of the coronavirus pandemic and one which a number of companies have taken up and responded to across the globe.

So why would an organisation want to keep employees in office spaces? For the same reason that Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Youtube would want users to create profiles and share content - so as to enable the exchange of raw data, not between users themselves, which is self directed and voluntary, but by subjecting each of these exchanges to a surveillance and supervision which can be exploited by the organisational hierarchy in a variety of ways.

In listing the most concrete first 1.) A number of organisations have their employees sign legal agreements which prevent them from working other jobs or from offering their services independently while contractually bound to a company. Apart from limiting the earning potential of a worker, this also serves to tie them within the infrastructure of an organisation, making them increasingly dependent, and in many cases indebted to their employers, who can use strategies such as the delay in payment of wages, incentives, and cutbacks to keep the employees 'disciplined'.

2.) Such a form of control, for it is effectively that - is used to reinforce the age old capitalist motif to increase the length of the working day - resisting which ought to be one of the prime goals of any labor movement.

A brief note on why a capitalist may want to do so. Once the infrastructure of a workshop, factory, or any other kind of company for that matter is in place, the prime means to leverage any economy of scale is by increasing the number of hours a workforce is working on the given machines (or fields in an agrarian setting where a laborer does not own the land.)

A study in the ownership structure of the organisations which implement such practices will reveal further disturbing tendencies, particularly in the world of media, whether in print, or broadcast.

It is simple for a news producer in a television channel for instance, once the person has reached a relatively 'senior' position - to delegate the collection and editing of stories to newer personnel and to focus himself on an entirely other venture, such as a web series or Youtube channel for example. If this person is involved in the hiring and drafting of the contracts which bind employees it would be simple for him to ensure that none of the newer employees are in a position to do so.

Furthermore, the new subsidiary platform or channel created can be used to highlight the first - making it into a mini-monopoly which can be isolated under the rubric of a singular person, bypassing brand even. This is why it is important to take note of who may be on the board of directors of seemingly discrete organisations, who may be appointed as editors by them etc.

In my last article, I tried to explain how the increasing ease of communications has been used by companies to create new forms of localizations in relationships, whose impact is felt even in the personal lives of employees. Allow me to expand on this hypothesis here. It is not difficult for instance, for an organisation, once sufficiently established, to instate its own training program - and for selection procedures to be tailored to favor in house graduates. This is hardly surprising, and even traditional universities have been doing this for decades.

The point however, is that apart from whatever training may be imparted by the parent company - the program in question becomes a new product to be sold in the market, and given the selection mechanisms - becomes a de facto prescription, even if disavowed by the company.

Now how do these circumstances reconfigure how we think of the migrant today? The migrant does not require to be new to a place, merely new to a company or organisation, and in some cases even a department. The internal entrenchment of hierarchies, enforced lack of mobility and outreach built into organisational structure can indeed replicate conditions of sub-infeudation which were sadly the norm at least in medieval India.

You may ask why I persist with this metaphor that draws its analogies of exploitation from land ownership structures in the past. Think of a major newspaper or online new portal for instance. In very rare cases will such an organisation, and the reporters they hire be sourcing all of the stories which they publish internally. Having some experience in this field, I can say that this is basically never the case.

The collection and sourcing of stories, or even in the case of a silver screen production house, are often outsourced to specialized agencies. The Press Trust Of India for instance is subscribed to by every major news outlet in the country. Even some Netflix shows hire freelance ghostwriters, and one can imagine the number of less prominent outlets who would be replicating such strategies. It would be entirely possible - for a scriptwriter, to sell the plot of an episode to a production house without even a byline, and having to tailor its constituents to the fancies of editorial and directorial whim, in return for money - this is an illustration of the Marxian definition of wage slavery.

The circumstances within which this is operating however, as is evident from the examples provided above, really no longer have to be the factory, speatshop and other such embedded images of mass production. They are now bleeding into the oft eulogised service sector itself.

Such conditions, are made worse in any situation where the economy doesn't pick up on the products on offer - resulting in a the diminishing of already negligent promotion prospects, the reduction of real wages, and an increasing precarity tying an employee down to the confines of the position in the company they find themselves in.

This is why Zizek states, that one of the reasons why socialists movements around the world need to re-think their strategy is because what they are facing today is no longer capitalism in a sense that the 20th century coronated by the American dream sought to champion - this is indeed worse. And it is here, again that he, following Marx seeks to assert the productive engine that capitalism has been - even being described as the motor of history, in abolishing forms of slavery that have been built into the feudal structure which preceded it.

The question we need to ask are what are the forms of resistance which can be raised against such a diffused, and seemingly omnipresent onslaught - whose very conditions have been seemingly naturalised into our very sense of reality and living?

There are no easy answers here, but I am inclined to think back to a Leninist volunteerism which was once enshrined in those parties of the past - yet the form which would encapsulate this drive can no longer be the party, at least not in any traditional parliamentary sense.

Organisations like Wikileaks for instance, have done more to shake the double handedness of state repression, and often the brutal and deadly use of violence than decades of peace campaigns and awareness programs which everything from NGO's to CSR wings to even the United Nations have poured millions of dollars, resources and manpower into - the place of such interventions does exist, such as in direct transfers of emergency equipments, food, medical supplies, etc. though that is where the scope of their ambit stops.

We require not merely a civil movement to safeguard the interests of individual rights. It is necessary to realize that without the rights of organisations like Wikileaks which make a breach into the banality and violence that the status quo is soaked in and lives out of - there can be no safeguard for individual rights, that we may very well loose, like the diminishing of eyesight and memory with age, our very concept of what liberty, fraternity and equality meant, via the cultivation of a selective blindness that permeates, state, company and educational organisations.

The channels via which such an intent is to be expressed are only partially in place. There are crippling limitations on the scope that a political party for instance, has on long reaching consequences felt by nations in resisting state censorship, not to mention their ability to enforce or even protect company policy which is a private matter. The mechanism of elections indebts such parties to these very forces in any case, dependent as they are for funding, policing etc.

I think clues as to where such a movement can arise from is available in student movements. In Ambedkar University Delhi for instance, one of the chief demands put forth by the University Worker, a newspaper and erstwhile collective that was founded, seeking to represent the interests of students in questions such as the composition of curriculum - was wages for university work.

This was born out of our realization that the classroom as a space, was utilized by the establishment in a way which is strictly analogous to a profile page or wall on a social media website, where our very interactions form the body of the understanding the a lecturer draws from - seeking to present as insight. This is even more so the case in the newer 'liberal' classrooms which do not have strict curriculum and which draw on mediated discussions as the predominant form of pedagogic exchange.

We recognize that this is indeed how knowledge production operates - yet we seek to underline our own role in the process, and like the servers, cleaners, professors, administrative staff, security personnel etc - ask for a wage for what we do in such engagements.

The way in which such a measure may be implemented is an uncertain nexus, yet bear in mind industries as diverse as publishing, transportation, housing and of course education are critically dependent on the movement and demands of students.

This is a new ground yet the terrain, if I may use a vague notion is not one which is unfamiliar. The withdrawal of state support from higher education is a story well chronicled and one which we can do without another chapter of. And let me underline, that the student population, which travels across cities, countries and continents, in search for better educational opportunities - is essentially a migrant population, often seeking part time work to supplement whatever meagre scholarships they may be receiving, if even that.