Peasant warriors in an electronic social-formation

Introduction

El Salvador is one of the smallest countries in America. With 6,227,491 inhabitants in barely 13,073 km ² , this Central American country has one of the highest population densities on the continent (296 H/km) and is also among the poorest in the Latin American region. El Salvador’s search for ‘development’ has moved from the rise and fall of the agro-export model (from anil in the 19th century to coffee in the 20th century) to the maquiladora, service, and financial sector, and moreover to a contradictory kind of development based on remittances from Salvadorians living abroad, mainly in the United States. Inside this landscape, a new promise of development and progress is offered by means of the information or knowledge economy. Global institutions and regional organizations strongly promote the so-called network society (Castells, 2006, 2009; Castells et al., 2006; CEPAL, 2003). For the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean, the ‘new economy’ involves the digitization of productive processes, the creation of an information sector, and a new digital mediation of cultural (re)production. Software production and digital services are considered the future of emerging economies in places such as Central America.

Countering the dominant paradigm of the so-called ‘digital divide’ (Castells et al., 2006; Donner, 2005; Donner et al., 2008; Galperin y Mariscal, 2009; Norris, 2001; Serrano y Martínez, 2003) as the new promise of development, I argue that digitization – understood as the incorporation of digital communication and information technologies into everyday life ¹ – is based on a logic of subordination to capitalistic surplus extraction. Using a Marxist approach, I argue that instead of a digital divide, we are witness to the uneven development of a subordinated digitization in which Third World ² countries and popular classes all over the world are being incorporated into a new kind of social synthesis under capitalistic commodity form. In Marx’s analysis (Marx, 1973), the commodity form is a historical fashion by means of which the material reproduction of life acquires a subordinated shape under capitalist profit seeking. Commodity form is more than the simple manufacturing of merchandise, products, and machines through direct human labor extracted in the workshop; commodity form also involves a framing of time–space expressed in particular, contradictory, and historically produced forms of social synthesis (Sohn-Rethel, 1978, 2010). The forms of the social as communication in today’s media–capitalism are the latest expressions of the contradictions inside the commodity form and involves a new form of social synthesis under which the particular experience of time–space erases any connection with the historical and situated material productive processes via which that social synthesis sustains itself. ³

Digitization shapes everyday life in different forms. In El Salvador, cell phone usage is the most striking example of the fallacy of the so-called digital divide. As a point of comparison, there are 90.8 mobile subscriptions per 100 habitants in the United States, 70.9 in Canada, and 122.8 in El Salvador (Dutta and Mia, 2011). The way digitization is addressed by scholars shapes how we understand cell phone incorporation, as well as the new forms of capitalistic accumulation in contemporary societies. In the field of mobile communication studies, a large body of research emphasizes the diverse aspects of cell phone incorporation into people’s lives. Some of these studies focus on mobile media as a form of material culture, suggesting that phones are artifacts and technologies by means of which people come to understand themselves, producing particular symbolic constructions of their world and their interactions with others (de Souza e Silva, 2006; de Souza e Silva and Frith, 2012; Fortunati, 2005; Goggin, 2006; Horst and Miller, 2006). Other bodies of research study the role that cell phones play in the transformation of family relations (Archambault, 2011; Brinkman et al., 2009; Gam Nkwi, 2009; Horst y Miller, 2007; Kriem, 2009; Madianou and Miller, 2012) or the role of mobile communication devices in identity construction, whereby people, particularly youth, configure different forms of self-perception based on cultural, age, gender, and class fraction identifications (Bell, 2005; Hjorth, 2008; Ito et al., 2005; Portus, 2008).

Of particular importance for this article’s focus are those studies that address different uses and patterns of cell phone appropriation as situated social practices intended to deal with economic and political inequalities in economically deprived social settings in Third World countries (see de Souza e Silva et al., 2011; Galperin and Mariscal, 2009; Law and Peng, 2008; Ling and Horst, 2011; Mariscal and Bonina, 2008; Molony, 2008, 2009; Qiu, 2009; Slater and Kwami, 2005). As it will become clear in this article, some of the findings of these investigations resonate with those I document for El Salvador. However, the theoretical framework employed by others and the political significance they draw from these experiences strongly differ from the interpretation I offer here. I argue that the political consequences of the concept of social class inherent to most of that research have important political implications for the ways we understand class constitution and social struggles in contemporary capitalism.

While all of these research offer highly valuable data and important insights into diverse aspects of people’s experience with cell phones around the world, most of these studies treat subjects as agents or actors who face the everyday challenge of material reproduction in a largely individualistic and ahistorical fashion. The unit of analysis is the individual, or at best, the individual within his/her family or household and/or community. This approach often fails to recognize the dynamics of class constitution inside global capitalism and the place of digital media in that process. Even when economic and political inequalities are addressed, individual’s experience of this situation is not related to larger socioeconomic and political transformations that can be linked to the current transformations of surplus extraction and labor exploitation. Such analysis is built on a Weberian concept of class (see Allen, 2004; Weber, 1996) that fails to address the political consequences of a spatial conception of class relations. In a spatial conception of class, social, cultural, political, and economic differences work as scarce resources to be used inside a fixed structure of differential positions of power in which the subject must find his or her place and/or strive to improve it. ⁴

This approach eliminates the contradictory class relationships shaping the incorporation of digital media technologies in a particular historical situation and suggests, instead, a more individualistic use of such technologies. It does not approach class as a feature of historical social production and reproduction inside capitalism, nor does it provide the means to critically analyze the ways in which digital media technologies are constitutive of emergent forms of capitalist accumulation. Rather, the Weberian approach situates individuals inside a fixed map of differential social positions and access to economic and political resources, including mobile media (i.e. Qiu, 2009).

Unlike previous studies of digitization processes, I argue that the fashion in which cell phones are incorporated is shaped by the historical development of the particular social fields where it takes place. Shaping the ways in which people understand, interpret, and construct their experiences and expectations regarding work, education, and consumption, digital media such as the cell phone participates in the constitution of a particular form of class subjectivity. From a Marxist perspective, I will address the ways in which cell phone incorporation among rural communities in northern Morazán contributes to the constitution of contradictory class subjectivity in postwar El Salvador. I ask, how does the particular historical articulation of this social field frame the ways in which these technologies are appropriated and why?

This article is based on extensive ethnographic data gathered during the summers of 2010, 2011, and 2012 (a total of 6½ months in the field) in the region of Morazán in northeast El Salvador, near the Honduran border. During these three visits, I formally interviewed 130 people – youth and adults – most of them former guerrilla combatants, militia, and supporters of the Ejército Revolucionario del Pueblo (People’s Revolutionary Army or ERP), one of the five factions that formed the Frente Farabundo Marti de Liberación Nacional (Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front [FMLN]) during the civil war that swept the country during the 1980s. ⁵ Countless informal conversations, four focus groups with young people, and direct and participant observation among Morazanians’ everyday lives and communities also influence my interpretations. I conducted my fieldwork in the northern Morazanian communities of Segundo Montes City, Perquín, Arambala, San Fernando, Torola, and the community of Masala in Joateca. The recorded interviews were open ended and the length varied from 1.5 to 3 hours, accounting for more than 200 hours of audio that I analyzed using NVivo8 qualitative analysis software. While my research focused on the life transformations and cell phone use among the former FMLN combatants, militia, supporters, and their families, I also interviewed people who had returned to Morazán from Honduran refugee camps and displaced Morazanians who returned after the war, some of them politically opposed to the FMLN. This broad range of perspectives allowed me to develop a more nuanced analysis of the social field in northern Morazán.

In the first section of this article, I explore the importance of migration and remittances in El Salvador’s dollarized economy and its strong relation with cell phone incorporation among rural working-class people. In the next section, I offer an interpretation of the way in which cell phone consumption and its social representations function as an expression of growing capitalistic commodification in Morazanians’ everyday lives. The third part analyzes the ways in which metaphors related to cell phone usage express emergent forms of class subjectivity in rural Salvadoran communities. In the conclusion, I propose that in order to develop a Marxist understanding of the role of digital media in contemporary capitalist accumulation, we replace the digital divide concept with one that I call subordinated digitization. I argue that in order to fully grasp the complexities of Third World countries’ incorporation to the global digitization process, we need to stop thinking in terms of totalizing categories such as the network society, the knowledge society, and so on (Castells, 2006; Hassan, 2008) and employ a Marxist framework that addresses the uneven articulations of diverse and situated digitization processes and their role in class formation in contemporary capitalism.

The transnational flow of material reality: migration, remittances, and mobile media in postwar El Salvador

In Morazán, when people rush someone to do something quickly – for example, when a mother sends her child to buy something at the store – they may say ‘Rapidito como el Colón y ligerito como el dólar’ (‘as fast as the Colón and as light as the Dollar’). On the one hand, this saying refers to the speed with which the Colón disappeared from the country when the Salvadoran economy was dollarized in 2001. On the other hand, the low weight of dollars in this popular saying refers to the ease with which the foreign currency leaves people’s hands due to the high prices of food and other necessary products.

Because of scarce employment and low wages, it is difficult to obtain enough dollars to make ends meet when the needed currency comes from far away; in the case of people in Morazán, most of the money comes through the remittances that relatives send from the United States. The low weight of the dollar also works as a metaphor for the ethereal qualities of the abstract value that comes to El Salvador as money from abroad. In El Salvador, capitalism is a hard-as-stone reality weighing down the Salvadoran popular classes who are trying to cope with harsh everyday conditions, but, at the same time, it is ephemeral, concealing the origin of its rule based on the logic of separation that hides the fact that the power of money comes from the living labor of Salvadorans working in the fields, factories, and workshops or obtaining a share of the global rent working in the service servile (Marazzi, 2003) sectors in the wealthy countries of the North Atlantic.

In the end, this value comes back to El Salvador in the form of remittances that represent almost one-fifth of the national income (see Centro de Estudios Monetarios Latinoamericanos, 2009; Saavedra, 2012). In the national dimension, the rule of capital is based on the exploitation of work in the coffee industry and the maquila sector, getting a global rentier’s share of servile work in the tourist industry, and finally through the financial flows of international loans from the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank necessary to support this abstract economy.

As a corollary of this capitalistic logic, 90% of the value that comes back to El Salvador in the form of remittances are spent on consumer goods (López, 2011), many of which are imported from the United States. Thus, remittances return to their point of origin. Since the beginning of 19th century, El Salvador has been marked by a deep dependency on foreign production. Its contemporary history has been that of the elites’ desire for a sumptuous lifestyle at the expense of the majority of the population. Since the rise of coffee as the main commercial crop and the consolidation of the agrarian export model, El Salvador has experienced a steady commercial imbalance (for an historical account, see Gordon, 1989; Lauria-Santiago, 1999; Lindo Fuentes, 2002; Menjívar, 1980, 1982) that favors the agro-commercial and financial elite. In 2011, this imbalance reached the amount of US$ −1173.8 million. Exports of coffee, sugar, and the maquila sector recorded a negative growth of −24.6, −14.9, and −1.9, respectively (Banco Central de Reserva [Central Reserve Bank of El Salvador]).

In a population of 6.2 million, 10 million cell phone numbers are already in use. In 2011, the General Superintendence of Electricity and Telecommunications added an additional digit in order to create 10 million new cell phone numbers for 2012 (López, 2012; SIGET; Pastrán, 2011). These digital terminals reflect the spectral flow of value in a country that by 2011 faced one of the worst crises in agricultural production in many years. In 2011–2012, the government invested in corn and bean production in an attempt to counter the rising food prices in the global market. In this context, dependence on remittances as one of the main strategies for development is highly problematic, though wide distribution of remittances can deter the conflict between capital and labor.

The market expansion of cell phone companies in El Salvador has reached its material limits. El Salvador’s small size has enabled the total interconnection of every corner of the country through digital cell phone networks. While travelling uphill in the direction of Perquín on the Calle Negra (the Black Street), the paved road that connects the communities of northern Morazán with the country’s main highways, one observes how antennas erected by Claro, Tigo, Movistar, and Digicell fill the landscape, their electric needles pointing skyward. ⁶ Every town in northern Morazán welcomes visitors with huge signs donated by cell phone companies. Following total incorporation into the digital network comes a phase of expansion of digital–virtual space through the intensification of interconnections and communications. Shaping common sense among the population, cell phones produce a sort of quadric-dimensional enlargement for the capitalistic circulation of value – an emergent spatiality in the digital dimension of informational code (see Galloway, 2006) apparently detached from the material–concrete structures where everyday life is reproduced.

Fleeting capitalism: running out of saldo in northern Morazán

In Morazán and throughout the country, cell phone companies strive to obtain the greatest possible number of users, and in order to achieve this goal, they have initiated a variety of marketing strategies to convince people to buy one of their phones. During the research in summer 2011, I observed some of these strategies in action. On one occasion, I was wandering in the center of Perquín when the air was suddenly filled with a loud voice booming from a megaphone on top of a small blue truck. The mobile unit was completely covered with Tigo publicity. As the recording invited people to purchase a Tigo cell phone, a couple of speakers played dance music at a high volume. It was impossible to ignore this noisy event, but the people in Perquín were accustomed to this spectacle, because different companies had been doing the same thing once or twice a week for several months. The small Tigo van parked near the town park, and about a dozen young people exited the rear of the vehicle. Wearing blue pants and Tigo T-shirts, these young people, male and female, traversed every street in Perquín and the adjacent hamlets of Casa Blanca and El Carrizal, knocking at every door and offering cheap Tigo cell phones with the lowest rate per minute and the largest number of mensajitos (cell phone short message service (SMS)) per dollar spent. In El Salvador, as in most Latin American countries, most people use prepago (prepaid) plans. Even though the cell phone service in El Salvador is inexpensive compared to other countries in the region (such as Mexico), the economic insecurity of most of the population makes it hard to take a postpago (contract) cell phone. People cannot afford to pay a fixed, lump sum amount of money every month, and even with the prepago plan, at the end of some months, they end up spending more money than if they had had a postpago one.

Ervin is a young male in his late 30s who lives in the municipality of Jocoaitique. He owns two vans that he rents for tourist or business trips in El Salvador and the neighboring countries of Nicaragua and Honduras. Since November 2010, he has been working for a couple of cell phone companies transporting staff and products around the country. Tigo and Digicell pay him about US$1200 a month to transport the young staff and merchandise to any town and village the company considers as potential markets for their products and services. In El Salvador, telecommunication companies sell not only cell phones but also laptops, mobile internet bandwidth, and wireless home telephone lines. From his monthly salary, Ervin must pay for gasoline and a driver (especially when he is busy driving another van). At the end of the month, he nets around US$600. Ervin told me how, in many hamlets, people gather around the van to buy cell phones, saldo (cell phone credit), and computers. According to him, Tigo sales skyrocketed during December 2010 when many migrants to the United States sent larger than normal amounts of money to their relatives in El Salvador, and those whose legal status allowed them to travel arrived with money for their families. Cell phones are one of the main gifts that people crave particularly in rural communities and especially among the young. Having an expensive cell phone is a status symbol that draws attention in everyday interactions, eliciting envy and gossip about the source of money necessary to purchase that kind of device.

During the war, most of the people who lived in the municipalities of northern Morazán sided with the FMLN (as combatants or collaborators) or waited out the conflict in the harsh conditions of Honduran refugee camps. Many of these people developed strong feelings of solidarity which have been eroded by the language and institutions through which they have experienced the postwar incorporation to a market economy (see Binford, 2010; Grandin, 2007; Silber, 2010). Envy and cell phones have become a volatile combination: extortion is one of the main postwar criminal activities, and the transnational Salvadoran gangs such as La Mara Salvatrucha and La Mara 18 (Bruneau et al., 2011) use cell phones to threaten people, sometimes randomly and sometimes based on a significant amount of knowledge about the victim’s income. Most of the time, such extortion is committed from inside Salvadoran and even Guatemalan prisons (Chávez, 2012; Romero, 2011). During prison raids in El Salvador, police look for three main things: weapons, drugs, and cell phones (La Prensa Gráfica, 22 May 2012; Chávez, 2012; Flores, 2010). The use of cell phones for extortion has led the authorities to make the registration of cell phone numbers obligatory since 2011. ⁷ Yet in 2011, almost 2.5 million cell phone lines had unknown owners (Ramírez, 2011), with many of these lines presumably used in criminal activities.

Many people in Morazán told me that they had been the victims of extortion or attempted extortion on at least one occasion. One of the biggest cases was the extortion suffered by the drivers of pickup trucks, a semi-regulated form of Salvadoran private mass transportation. In 2010, one driver working the route between Gotera and Perquín was murdered and others had to pay US$12 weekly in order to avoid the same fate. In other cases, relatives and members of the community attempt to extort their neighbors. Because of this threat, few people I interviewed in Morazán answered a call unless they recognized the number. Regardless, cell phones have become a necessity there.

In Morazán, most of the population struggle to make ends meet. Lacking permanent employment, former guerrilleros and other sectors of the population have difficulty obtaining enough cash to buy the products they need. Gerson is a male in his 60s and a former ERP combatant who survived 12 years of civil war. Even though he received land from the postwar land transfer program, he now sells newspapers every morning to get some extra income. Romel, a male in his early 40s, is another former ERP guerrillero who now struggles to make a living by repairing electronic goods in a small, home workshop. Miguel, also a former combatant and in his early 40s, does welding out of a workshop in his house, but the work is marked by seasonal ups and downs. The flow of cash among all these people is irregular, just like the presence of saldo in their cell phones. Yet having saldo has become a necessity for each of them.

For Gerson, saldo is important for knowing that the newspapers will be on the first bus that arrives from San Miguel. Selling newspapers earns him an average of US$6 daily, an amount scarcely sufficient to support his household of seven people. The cell phone is also Gerson’s main means of communication with his daughter who lives in the United States. For Miguell, having saldo is vital for maintaining contact with clients and obtaining orders. He spends around US$6 monthly on saldo, just enough to make business-related calls. After wartime, people like Miguel have had to navigate many changes in everyday life. During the conflict, the FMLN created diverse political organizations and social experiments (producers cooperatives, workshops, and logistical services) where democratic participation and communal solidarity played a key role, creating a strong sense of comradeship and collectivity among its members (Silber, 2010; Wood, 2003). In this context, discipline, together with social and political participation, was subordinated to the common good. After the civil war, most of these solidary and communal organizations established during the war disappeared, and Morazanians have been learning the language of individual striving in a market economy: individual effort, self-discipline, and the goal of saving money shared by many ex-combatants (see Binford, 2010). Miguel characterizes these problems around the ubiquity of cell phones and what is, for him, the conundrum of stolen saldo. Mixing what he learned from the military organization of the ERP and what has become the ethos of capital, Miguel said:

The secret of managing a cell phone is control and discipline. If people don’t have that, they will end up being exploited by the cell phone [company]. You can see how people spend a lot of money on the device, especially downloading ringtones and videos. They [the cell phone companies] send you a message offering you a song or something, and if you say yes, sometimes just by pushing send, they will continue stealing your saldo forever. And the problem is that there is no place to go to complain.

However, many people I spoke to in Morazán said that they spend very little money on saldo, and cell phone companies have had to invent new ways to convince people to purchase their services. With most of the population precariously employed and a minimum wage that averages only about US$140 per month, even a small amount of saldo represents a significant expense. In northern Morazán, cell phone companies have altered their marketing strategies to fit the particular economic and social conditions of these communities.

One market strategy that I witnessed occurred during a visit with Roberto. Roberto, a male in his late 20s, works as a professor of technology in the computer lab at Perquín National Institute, which is part of the national high school system, and lives in Masala in the municipality of Joateca. While we were eating the chicken that his mother and wife had prepared, the distinct sound of loud speakers playing dance music and a voice on a megaphone advertising Claro let us know that cell phones were again arriving to Masala. I say ‘again’ because almost everybody in this community already had a cell phone. The important thing, though, explained Roberto, is that all of those phones were Tigo cell phones (Figure 1).

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Figure 1.

Ervin’s Tigo van (photograph by Rafael Alarcón Medina).

Now Claro was angling to prise its way into this precarious market. The voice booming from the megaphone rang throughout Masala, ‘Now Claro offers you a new cell phone for only US$2, with US$5 of free saldo for you to talk with your friends and family here and in the United States. You will also get 250 mensajitos to chat with your friends’. It was impressive to see poor rural workers streaming from their small clay houses to purchase not one but two or three cell phones; some even bought one for each member of the family, children included. While Claro sold phones, Roberto and I watched from the chalet (small store) of Don Ernesto who was observing the scene with disapproval. Suddenly Don Ernesto said:

You know Rafael, each week I buy US$19 worth of bread and US$40 of saldo [for the store]. By the middle of the week, the US$40 of saldo is gone, but Friday comes and I still have bread … these people prefer to have saldo in their cell phones than something to eat! And it’s the same every week, and it’s not only the people who have relatives in the United States or who have a steady job, but also the poorest people in the community come and buy at least a ‘cora’ of saldo.

Bread or saldo … the concrete or the abstract. In the end, it is only one more expression of the contradictory logic of the commodity form in contemporary Morazán. When Don Ernesto speaks of ‘cora’, he is speaking about the dominant and pervasive manifestations of the US dollar in everyday life in El Salvador. A cora is the Hispanicized form of a quarter (a quarter of a dollar) as well as the minimum amount of saldo one can purchase (Figure 2).

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Figure 2.

A chalet (store) in the community of San Luis in Segundo Montes City totally covered with Tigo’s color (photograph by Rafael Alarcón Medina).

For the people in Morazán, saldo also circulates quickly: Rapidito como el Colón y ligerito como el Dólar. Saldo is a word that comes up in many conversations in Morazán and people construct meanings around it in order to understand their everyday struggles for survival. From the ways in which people in these former rebel communities experience the external forces (economic and political) that impinge on their lives to the ways in which they have learned the language of the market economy into which their reincorporation to civil life has forced them, saldo works as a metaphor by which people play symbolically with their options in the harsh living conditions of neoliberal El Salvador.

Vice and exploitation … saldo metaphors in a digitally reconfigured rural landscape

I undertook my first trip to Perquín in May 2010. To get to this distant rural community, I had to go to the Terminal de Oriente in San Salvador (East Bus Station). The bus station sprawls over a dirty, unpaved lot, where a number of buses are parked while they await passengers.

In and around the station, a large number of street vendors hawk candy, pirated CDs and DVDs, pop, bottled water and food, from the traditional Pupusas to fried plantains, enchiladas, casamiento (mixed rice and beans), fried chicken, or grilled meat (yes grilled meat!), but no one sells cell phone cards. However, saldo is easy to get with electronic charges available in every small store and cell phone cards on sale for all the companies in amounts from US$1.50 to US$20.

It is easy to get these cards in big cities like San Salvador, but during my visits in 2011–2012, it was hard, at times, to get a Tigo, Movistar, or Digicell card in northern Morazán. Eulalio is a former guerrilla fighter now in his late 40s. After the war, he returned to work in his family’s fields in remote Torola, a town as poor now as it was before the war. Since 2009, he has been working as a technical staff member in a macadamia nut project. The association that employs Eulalio gave him a Digicell cell phone to help him organize his activities. But it is almost impossible to get saldo for Digicell in the northern communities of Morazán, particularly in Perquín, where he spends most of his time. In order to get saldo, he must go to Gotera, the departmental capital, and purchase a cell phone card or an electronic recharge, and this means a 2-hour trip in a pickup. For Eulalio having a cell phone is not an optional extra. Maintaining contact with the office is a necessity because he has to inform them about how many people are growing macadamia and where. He must also keep track of the producers’ performance, attend to the growers’ problems, and so on.

In northern Morazán and across El Salvador, public transportation is limited, of poor quality, and unsafe. Once you are in the city of Gotera, you have to take a pickup to get to Perquín unless you want to wait for a bus. Pickups can be loaded with 20 or more passengers at the same time, making it a dangerous and adventurous trip. During one of my first trips on a pickup, I observed that these trucks are public spaces where people gather and exchange information (Figure 3).

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Figure 3.

Selling post for saldo: a chalet (store) in the center of Jocoaitique, with signs of all the cell phone companies (photograph by Rafael Alarcón Medina).

On one occasion, two men had been talking when one of them paused and started to say good-bye to the other, asking the ayudante (pickup helper) to stop. As he was getting down from the pickup, he said loudly, ‘ni modo compa, se me acabo el saldo, se acabó la Cora yo hasta aqui llego’ (‘that’s all partner; I ran out of saldo, the Cora is finished. This is as far as I can go’). In this case, saldo works as a metaphor for physical movement. While there is pickup transportation between Gotera and Perquín every 20 min, other municipalities, such as San Fernando and Torola, only have three bus runs to Perquín each day. People from these places often have to walk long distances to Perquín in order to get transportation to Gotera, San Miguel, or San Salvador.

Cell phones have helped to integrate these distant communities, reconfiguring the sense of spatial belonging among these populations. While Eulalio cannot take the bus whenever he needs to visit the macadamia producers who live in the most distant communities, they can reach him anytime they need to by means of their cell phones. As many people used to say to me in San Salvador, ‘En El Salvador hasta los perros andan celular’ (‘In El Salvador even dogs have cell phones’).

For the cell phone companies, this spatial integration represents a source of income and profit. For the people in Morazán, it means an emergent social synthesis by means of which productive activities and everyday tasks are reconfigured through the physical presence of the cellular (cell phone) and the virtually constant and uninterrupted flow of communication and access to the remittances sent by relatives abroad. Many people with whom I talked said that the dollars they spent on saldo every week were principally to maintain contact with family members who live abroad and send remittances (Figure 4).

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Figure 4.

A packed pickup, on the Calle Negra, near the community of Quebrachos, in Jocoaitique, Morazán (photograph by Rafael Alarcón Medina).

While people are increasingly incorporated into this new digitally based social synthesis enabled by the cell phones, there is also another side to the story. Although this abstract network is always present, saldo is an unstable reality. People in Morazán must engage in more than one economic activity to make ends meet. Silvia, a former female ERP combatant in her late 40s, works her land to grow some crops for her own consumption; she also participates in a cooperative in Jocoaitique producing honey. Economic necessity and her own experience working with bees led her to design her own protective suits for beekeepers, which she now sells to many cooperatives and private honey producers in northern Morazán. Having a cell phone makes things easier and cheaper for her because commuting can be difficult and expensive. A single call or text message prevents her from wasting time and money trying to get in touch with potential buyers. However, the cell phone in itself has made necessary a whole set of strategies that, at the same time they provide these people with the media resources they need to cope each day, also express the expansion of digitally based capitalism.

The strategy utilized by some people can be summarized as ‘one cell phone, many subscriber identity module (SIM) cards’. Cell phone users in northern Morazán generally fall into one of the following four categories: (1) those who have just one cell phone; (2) those who have more than one cell phone; (3) those who have one cell phone and more than one SIM card; (4) those who have a cell phone with multiple bands and more than one SIM cards (there are two- and four-band cell phones in El Salvador). The people with whom I spoke in the communities of Perquín, Jocoaitique, and Segundo Montes City have learned how to take advantage of the system or so it seems to the outside observer. In Morazán, the competition between cell phone companies selling saldo has provoked a battle from which cell phone users seem to benefit. Every day of the week, a different cell phone company launches a saldo promotion that can involve free calls to any number in the same network during that day (calling a Movistar from another Movistar number, for instance), a specified or unlimited number of text messages in the same network (unlimited text messages from 9pm to 5am is a Tigo promotion very popular among young), or low rates on calls to the United States or Canada (as in the example of Claro shown in Figure 3, offering 45 min for US$1.50). But the most popular kind of promotion offered by the cell phone companies in Morazán involves the multiplication of the amount of saldo purchased (Figure 5).

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Figure 5.

Promotional short message services from the Claro cell phone company to call to the United States (photograph by Rafael Alarcón Medina).

People navigate the communicative space by switching SIM cards, using the one that offers more saldo each day. In El Salvador, people can buy a cell phone with the SIM card included or they can buy the SIM card separately. In 2011, there were people offering to unlock cell phones for US$8, so the user could switch SIM cards. However, there is also an option of getting a multiple band cell phone so that the user does not need to open the cell phone every time he or she wants to switch SIM cards (Figure 6).

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Figure 6.

Henry, a young Morazanan, shows me his dual band cell phone (photograph by Rafael Alarcón Medina).

This process has two sides, expressing the deep contradictions of contemporary capitalistic social synthesis. On the one hand, cell phones are there but – at the same time – they are not there (when there is no saldo). They have become the necessary link that contributes to the creation of social ties through which the flow of cash income circulates in Morazán. On the other hand, cell phones are an external, estranged, and sometimes violent presence that has also brought new threats to communities, including gender and generational confrontations (expressed in Morazán by parents concerned about what their children are talking about on their cell phones and, moreover, with whom). Cell phones are transforming the forms of communal communication, sociality, and political participation while producing a new form of social synthesis based on digital communications.

One morning in the summer of 2011, I was lying in a hammock at the house of Doña Berta, a woman in her 50s who lives in the Colonia Guadalupe (Guadalupe neighborhood). We were talking about the problems that community organizations faced today in Segundo Montes City. Doña Berta does political and social work with Comunidades Eclesiásticas de Base de El Salvador [CEBES] – El Salvador’s Ecclesiastic Based Communities), a progressive Catholic organization that has worked with the FMLN since wartime. As we spoke about the generational changes occurring in the communities of Morazán, the conversation turned to cell phones. There was only one cell phone in Doña Berta's house, although she told me that, previously, almost everybody in the house had a cell phone (five people live in the house: three adults and two children). She explained to me that they used to have a fixed landline, but that the monthly fees were too high and sometimes it was difficult for them to pay the bill. Many Morazanans live day to day, and the concept of time inherent in meeting the monthly bills does not match the conditions of their everyday lives. ⁸ Now there is only one cell phone in the house, a Digicell that she bought, because the device she had broke. One day, on her way home, a young vendor had approached her and offered a Digicell cell phone for only US$15, including US$5 of saldo and a T-shirt. Doña Berta saw that as a good deal because traveling to Gotera or San Miguel to get a new cell phone would cost US$2 and entailed several hours of traveling. However, while we were talking about cell phone saldo, Doña Berta articulated a concern that many Morazanians expressed to me during my stay in Morazán:

What I say is that a cell phone exploits you, but if one knows how to manage it, then it can be useful for you. It exploits you because you start to value it, because of the frequent calls; so the cell phone we have, we only use it for the most urgent calls.

‘Emergency’ is one of the most pervasive concepts I encountered in my interviews; it came up every time I asked about the importance of cell phones in everyday life. The notion of an emergency expresses a temporal change, and cell phones help with that; with cell phones, people have learned to think about immediacy in diverse ways, from the process of communication and being in touch with employers and sources of income in a precarious labor market, to the necessity of reaching relatives abroad in order to ask for money during a crisis. Emergency and its relation to precariousness also justify the almost complete lack of participation by the state in most social issues, a constant in Salvadoran history that has undergone some changes with the FMLN administration since 2009.

In addition to the idea of cell phone-based exploitation is the general concern about media related consumismo (consumerism). Doña Berta expressed it as follows:

But look Rafael, here, sincerely, there are families in which everybody has a cell phone, yes it’s true! … if there are three members in the family, each one has their own cell phone … what I say to them is that this time is really ‘fregado’ (screwed up) as to this kind of thing … I mean, going back to the ‘consumismo’ right … imagine, I do the math, and you can see how sometimes one doesn’t have enough to even buy beans, doesn’t have enough even to buy sugar, but for the ‘cellular’ … and the thing is that if you don’t buy saldo on a regular basis, they deactivate it!

Marvin is a young male in his late 20s; he is a political leader among the youth of Segundo Montes and an official member of the FMLN. When we were talking about this issue, he puts it in cruder terms:

Look ‘compa’, ⁹ here people are so fucking enmeshed in this cell phone ‘consumismo’ that they prefer to have saldo in the ‘cellular’ than to have something to eat. Cell phone companies have enslaved us with all their promotions of double, triple, even ten times saldo. But people don’t care. As long as they have ‘mensajitos’ to be chatting or saldo to make calls, they are happy … playing with the cell phone, they forget hunger.

Consumismo in the form of saldo becomes a necessity that pushes Morazanans more deeply into digital-based capitalism. At the same time, many people – such as Marvin and Berta, each in their particular way – perceive how saldo and cell phones represent an external force that, through the emergent digital media consumismo of saldo, exploits them by drawing them into this electronic flow of abstract value.

But there are other forms in which people experience this process. As I talked with people in the communities of northern Morazán about their use of cell phones, the meanings and forms of appropriation changed according to gender, age, and class. Even in this postrevolutionary rural landscape, class differences exist and they are widening. Among former combatants and FMLN supporters, the access to resources in terms of money, land, seeds, and training has been differentiated, most of the time expressing the different positions people occupied in the FMLN organization during the war. ERP commanders, political workers, and people close to the high command accessed more resources after the peace accords. Low-ranking soldiers and particularly FMLN supporters and militants found themselves in worse conditions than before the war, without land, physically disabled, grieving lost relatives, psychologically damaged, and many times displaced from their original villages (Binford, 1997, 2010; Silber, 2010).

Another way in which people build symbolically around the cell phone and saldo is through the notion of vicio (vice). For many people, managing saldo has to do with the personal discipline of austerity and productivity. Leigh Binford (2010) has shown how ideas such as individual responsibility, austerity, and saving money aid in the hegemonic constitution of a neoliberal subjectivity in northern Morazán. In the same way, the idea that saldo-consumismo is just an expression of personal lack of self-restraint, or vicio, represents how cell phone incorporation and saldo work as an axis around which metaphors of class identity are built in these communities.

Vilma is a young woman in her late 30s. When we met at Jocoaitique’s Alcaldía (City Hall) in 2011, she was a member of the local FMLN municipal council. Commenting on the importance of cell phones in everyday life, Vilma told me:

Cell phones offer you excellent communication, if one can manage it in a controlled manner just like a vice, it works excellently … ’cause it can be a vice … but we know that our economy must be rationalized. At least I am not sending messages every day, maybe sometimes just to say hello to somebody … if I do it [call or send messages], it is for business necessities. I have only really used the cell phone for business, but cell phones and saldo in particular can really become an addiction.

By the time we met, Vilma held an important position in a honey products processing cooperative and was also a member of the administration in a regional organization that obtains international resources for production projects in northern Morazán; her job in the municipal government provided her with extra cash income. For Vilma, the language of liberal individual responsibility makes sense, for she has profited from international assistance (Binford, 2010).

In this section, I have offered a few observations that represent the role of mobile phone incorporation in the constitution of class subjectivity as I came to understand it through my conversations with people in Morazán. The stories of Silvia, Vilma, and Berta constitute the two faces of the commodity form in digital-based capitalism. Vilma expresses the idea of liberal subjectivity in which economic improvement depends on individual effort and self-restraint. For Silvia and Berta, the precariousness of labor and cash income is tied to the scarcity of saldo and exploitation (through consumption) by the cell phone companies. In the end, both express the unstable nature of capitalism in the region, where migration and the flow of remittances support everyday survival in a dollarized economy (Andrade-Eekhoff, 2003; Andrade-Eekhoff et al., 2005; Bibler Coutin, 2007; Morera and Contreras, 2002; Ramos, 2011; Robinson, 2003). ¹⁰ This particular set of stories shows the ways in which mobile media use in the rural communities of El Salvador ties these populations into wider, global processes of capitalist accumulation.

Conclusion: Digital Divide or subordinated digitization?

Drawing from the stories of people in Morazán, I suggest that even in its most complex current theoretical articulations (see Norris, 2001; Serrano y Martínez, 2003; Qiu, 2009; Wilson III, 2006), the so-called digital divide stands as an ideological veil over a harsh reality of class exploitation. The displacement of class as a fundamental category of analysis along with a Weberian hegemonic conceptualization allows the endless deferral of the divide’s closing, adding apparent complexity to its particular expressions (gender, age, culture, etc.). The stories of Berta, Marvin, and others show that mobile media impinge on their experiences of time and space (as with the idea of emergency), contributing to the symbolic construction of everyday life experiences in which gender, age, and – more importantly – economic material conditions play important roles. In this regard, mobile communication studies in the Third World have much to say regarding particular experiences of digital media incorporation. The research on cell phones carried out in Brazil among Favela populations (De Souza e Silva et al., 2011), in Jamaican communities (Horst and Miller, 2006), the Philippines (Madianou and Miller, 2011), and in diverse African countries such as Cameroon (Gam Nkwi, 2009), Sudan (Brinkman et al., 2009), Tanzania (Molony, 2008, 2009), and Ghana (Sey, 2011) have shown how even in socially and economically deprived settings, the use of cell phones is affecting both gender relations (see Archambault, 2011; Chib and Chen, 2011) and the way people understand their everyday lives (Horst and Miller, 2006), as well as shaping the contours of migratory patterns (through the creation of communication networks) (Madianou and Miller, 2012) and the ways in which people cope with harsh living conditions (Galperin and Mariscal, 2009; De Souza e Silva et al., 2011; for China see Wallis, 2011), and so on. As I have shown, the experience of people in Morazán in many ways reinforce those findings; however, I maintain that the spatial conception of class inherent in many of these studies and its fragmented approach to capitalism helps to reproduce the idea of a permanent digital divide as another incarnation of old promises of development for the Third World (see Cardoso y Faletto, 1977; Gunder-Frank, 1977a, 1977b; Hinkelammert, 1973; Marini, 1994). As I have shown, digitization is already a fact of life in poor countries such as El Salvador. But instead of becoming a path to the so-called ‘development’ (see Cecchini, 2005; Cimolli, 2011; Guerra et al, 2008), digitization is a process subordinated to capitalistic profit-seeking logic and class formation, contributing to the expansion of commodity form (the law of capitalist value) in the third world.

The integration of former peasant warriors (FMLN guerrilla fighters, supporters, their families and communities) into this digitally reconfigured rural landscape expresses the rise of what I call an emergent electronic social-formation in contemporary capitalism. Contrary to concepts such as global network, knowledge society, information society, and so on (see Hassan, 2008), I propose the category of electronic social-formation as a theoretical tool that can enable us to understand an emerging articulation of new modes of material, economic, and cultural production, and the changing forms of capitalistic social and political organization characterized by the central role of digital information and communication technologies in people’s everyday lives. ¹¹ This category allows us to think about the role of digital media in capitalistic surplus extraction while taking into consideration the uneven and complex articulation of this process inside particular social fields in Third World societies. In the case of El Salvador, this emergent electronic social-formation is expressed in the production of a new capitalistic social synthesis based predominantly on the overwhelming presence and use of cell phones in rural communities such as those in northern Morazán and their role in the working-classes’ material reproduction, where migration plays a key role. However, as with my notion of subordinated digitization, the category of electronic social-formation requires further situated research and theoretical clarification in order to prove its value as a critical alternative to the hegemonic digital divide approach. This article represents the first step toward that end.

As I have shown, the incorporation of the third world countries into contemporary digital-based capitalism is a complex, contradictory process in which digital media is one of the cornerstones by which the extraction – and, moreover, the administration – of surplus value occurs (Amin, 2010). In El Salvador, the flow of value and its administration is expressed in the form of remittances and the centrality of mobile communication in this process. In that sense, cell phones express forms of individual mobility (as in migration and digital diasporas) (Brinkerhoff, 2009; Madianou and Miller, 2012); but, more importantly, they also express the mobility of capitalistic value and its extraction.

Just like cell phone saldo, capitalism in Morazán is fleeting, ubiquitous, and unstable – this is the source of its strength and also the weakness of the separation–concealment logic that constitutes the commodity form. As a metaphor for the precariousness of life in these communities, the ghostly appearance and disappearance of saldo in everyday life is the backside of the instability of wage labor and the increasing difficulty of making ends meet day to day. From exploitation to vice, from communal concern to individual improvement, and from gender to generational conflicts, the cell phone plays a complex role embodying the metaphors, meanings, symbols, and images through which people in Morazanian communities find their places, revolve, and cope in the neoliberal landscape of postwar El Salvador.