False Consciousness
When Ross uses the term “false consciousness” in the very last sentence on page 37, he is referring to a Marxist concept that has typically categorized those workers who do not subscribe to a Marxist ideology as being duped or brainwashed by the capitalist overlords. Essentially, it’s a way to enforce pressure on individuals to fall in line with Marxist or rather communist platforms, where the definition of the worker self is in agreement with the necessity for a communist or Marxist revolution against the capitalist system.
Ross begins this section by delving into what the commonly agreed upon (from Marx onward to present day) definitions of work or labor are, in a historic sense. To apply an equally outdated (and definitely intended as a pejorative) term to a subsection of the population that works but not in the traditionally (and rigidly) defined way that waged labor is historically classified as, exposes the limitations that Marxist applications for understanding the way labor has shifted in the digital age. By advocating for a more flexible analysis or perspective on the types of labor being performed in the present day (unwaged labor which is indeed more common across the board in many nations and across many derivations of individual identities of workers) Ross frees the subset of the workforce that might be considered superfluous or in denial about the exploitation of their own labor contributions. By flipping the last two sentences at the close of page 37, Ross is basically saying that perhaps these workers (the under-40’s contending with the mutable conditions and rapidly shifting age of neoliberal economic and cultural mores) are not as naïve or brainwashed as a traditional Marxist analysis of waged labor would suggest.
I liked this section because Ross applied an intersectional analysis of labor through raising the issue of the how these terms have hegemonically dominated ideas of what labor and work look like. When I hear the term unwaged labor I immediately think of several different models of workers that have never had access to the protections of a labor analysis, one that is based on the ideas and models developed out of the organizing of union card carrying cismale industrial workers. This group includes sex workers and undocumented workers; these folks are largely charged with having a false consciousness about their situations… as if agreeing to assume positions that are typically outside of the moral and often nationalistic concerns of society are inherently evil, wrong, or due to the misgivings of an individual. That line of thinking fails to put the onus of the conditions that created a space for this kind of labor to exist – the systems and structures of the capital and the state, these hierarchies are what drive people to participate in “illicit” labor, it’s basic survival of the fittest. (I might even include those who work other street economies – but most folks are going to have a hard time understanding the previous two categories I suggested.)
