(Studies in Critical Social Sciences) Christian Fuchs, Vincent Mosco (Eds.) - Marx in The Age of Digital Capitalism-Brill (2015) PDF
(Studies in Critical Social Sciences) Christian Fuchs, Vincent Mosco (Eds.) - Marx in The Age of Digital Capitalism-Brill (2015) PDF
Studies in Critical
Social Sciences
Series Editor
Editorial Board
VOLUME 80
Edited by
Christian Fuchs
Vincent Mosco
LEIDEN | BOSTON
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Marx in the age of digital capitalism / edited by Christian Fuchs, Vincent Mosco.
pages cm. -- (Studies in critical social sciences, ISSN 1573-4234 ; 80)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-90-04-29138-6 (hardback : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-90-04-29139-3 (e-book) 1. Marx, Karl, 1818-1883.
2. Communism and mass media. 3. Communism and technology. 4. Digital media--Economic aspects.
5. Marxian economics. I. Fuchs, Christian, 1976- editor. II. Mosco, Vincent, editor.
HX550.M35M375 2015
335.4--dc23
2015029489
This publication has been typeset in the multilingual “Brill” typeface. With over 5,100 characters covering
Latin, ipa, Greek, and Cyrillic, this typeface is especially suitable for use in the humanities.
For more information, please see www.brill.com/brill-typeface.
issn 1573-4234
isbn 978-90-04-29138-6 (hardback)
isbn 978-90-04-29139-3 (e-book)
Index 537
List of Figures and Tables
Figures
1.1 Articles published about Marx and Marxism in the Social Sciences
Citation Index 3
1.2 The processes of media production, circulation, and consumption in the
capitalist economy 11
2.1 The economic relationship of Facebook and its advertising clients 51
6.1 The circuit of capital 157
6.2 n fc terminal 166
8.1 Based on Harvey (2010, 195) 227
11.1 Apple’s Profits from 2000 to 2012 (Apple sec-filings, 10-k forms 2010–2012) 354
11.2 Apple’s Net Sales by Product 2012 (Apple sec-filings, 10-k form 2012, 30) 355
11.3 Dimensions of working conditions 358
11.4 Actual basic wages in comparison to estimated living wages at Foxconn
campuses in April 2011 (sacom 2011a, 6, 9) 373
14.1 Unique characteristics of the mode of produsage influencing research
methods 471
14.2 Framework for Examining ‘A Workers Inquiry 2.0’ 472
15.1 Matrix of internet Resistance 506
15.2 Narrating the Revolution through Twitter by Sandmonkey 508
Tables
1.1 A systematic account of the role of media in the Marxian circuit of capital 9
7.1 Shifts in levels of exploitation and alienation in different media
environments 199
11.1 Dimensions of working conditions 361
11.2 Working conditions at Apple’s contract manufacturers 383
13.1 Ideological privacy and privacy as commodity in capitalism 433
About the Authors
Editors
Christian Fuchs
is Professor at and Director of the University of Westminster’s Communication
and Media research Institute (camri). He is co-editor of the open access
online journal tripleC: Communication, Capitalism & Critique (http://www.
triple-c.at). His research interests lie in the fields of Critical Information
Society Studies, Critical Internet Research, critical social theory, media & soci-
ety and the Critical Political Economy of Media, Communication & Society. He
is author of numerous publications on these topics, including the monographs
“Reading Marx in the Information Age: A Media and Communication Studies
Perspective on Capital Volume 1” (Routledge 2016), “Digital Labour and Karl
Marx” (Routledge 2014), “Social Media: A Critical Introduction” (Sage 2014),
“Culture and Economy in the Age of Social Media” (2015), “OccupyMedia! The
Occupy Movement and Social Media in Crisis Capitalism” (Zer0 Books 2014),
“Foundations of Critical Media and Information Studies” (Routledge 2011),
“Internet and Society: Social Theory in the Information Age” (Routledge 2008).
Vincent Mosco
is Professor Emeritus of Sociology at Queen's University where he was Canada
Research Chair in Communication and Society and head of the Department of
Sociology. His most recent books include To the Cloud: Big Data in a Turbulent
World (2014), The Laboring of Communication (with Catherine McKercher,
2008), The Political Economy of Communication, second edition (2009),
Getting the Message: Communication Workers and Global Value Chains
(edited with Ursula Huws and Catherine McKercher, 2010), and Critical Studies
in Communication and Society (edited with Cao Jin and Leslie Regan Shade,
2014).
Authors
Miriyam Aouragh
is Leverhulme fellow at the University of Westminster’s Communication and
Media Research Institute (camri). Her research concerns the everyday impli-
cations of the internet for activists and qcyber warfare in the Arab-Israeli con-
flict. Her Palestine Online: Transnationalism, the Internet and the Construction
of Identity came out in 2011 (ib Tauris). Miriyam is a socialist activist.
about the authors ix
Brian A. Brown
is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication, Media & Film
at the University of Windsor in Windsor, Ontario, Canada. His research is
focused on the biopolitics of social media, autonomist theory, and visual cul-
ture studies.
Mattias Ekman
is working as a researcher at the Swedish Media Council and as a lecturer at the
Department of Media Studies at Stockholm University. His research deals fore-
most with political mobilization and social media, right-wing extremism and the
Internet, political communication and news media, and most recently, domes-
tic media cultures. His latest publications include contributions in Ethnic and
Racial Studies Journalism Practice, Celebrity Studies and Mediekultur.
Eran Fisher
is a senior Lecturer at the Department of Sociology, Political Science, and
Communication, The Open University, Israel. He studies the intersection of
new media and capitalism. His books include Media and New Capitalism in the
Digital Age (2010, Palgrave), Internet and Emotions (2014, Routledge, co-edited
with Tova Benski), and Reconsidering Value and Labour in the Digital Age (2015,
Palgrave, co-edited with Christian Fuchs).
Katarina L. Gidlund
is associate Professor of Informatics at Mid Sweden University. Her main
research interest is critical studies of digital technology and societal change.
This involves issues such as critical and reflexive design, , the discursive level of
design, and the interplay between rhetoric and practice (hegemonies and their
material practices, power structures, the visualization of dominant stories, and
embedded internationalities). She is co-coordinator of the Swedish eGovern-
ment Research Network, programme committee member of the International
egov conference and the Scandinavian Information Systems Conference, and
appointed member in Användningsforum, the forum for usability and acces-
sibility in the ict domain iniated by the Swedish government.
technology policy, new media and game studies, transnational cultural studies,
and the political economy of media and culture. He is the author of numerous
books, including Digital Platforms, Imperialism and Political Culture (2015),
De-Convergence of Global Media Industries (2013), Hands On/Hands Off: The
Korean State and the Market Liberalization of the Communication Industry
(2011), and Korea’s Online Gaming Empire (2010).
Vincent Manzerolle
is an Assistant Professor in the Communication, Media & Film Department at
the University of Windsor. He earned his PhD in Media Studies from the
University of Western Ontario. His teaching and research focuses generally on
the history, political economy, and theory of media. He has published on a
range of topics including credit technologies, consumer databases, apps, wire-
less connectivity, mobile payment systems, and he is a co-editor of The
Audience Commodity in a Digital Age (Peter Lang, 2014).
Robert Prey
is an Assistant Professor in the Centre for Media and Journalism Studies at the
University of Groningen, in the Netherlands. He earned his PhD from the
School of Communication at Simon Fraser University in Canada. His research
interests include the political economy of new media, popular music, global
communication, and social and media theory. Robert’s work has been pub-
lished in numerous academic journals including TripleC, Global Media Journal,
The Information Society and The Asia-Pacific Journal. Robert was a visiting
researcher in the Department of Sociology at Sungkonghoe University in Seoul,
about the authors xi
South Korea from 2007-2008. Prior to, and in between academic degrees he has
worked in radio in Canada and with multicultural television in South Korea.
Anabel Quan-Haase
is Associate Professor of Sociology and Information and Media Studies at
Western University. Her interests lie in social media, social networks, social
capital, inequality, and serendipity.
Marisol Sandoval
is a Lecturer at the Department of Culture and Creative Industries at City
University London. Her current research interests include alternative media,
critical political economy of media and communication, the global division of
labour in the culture industry, Corporate Social (Ir)Responsibility and worker
co-operatives in the cultural sector. Marisol is co-editor of the open access
journal tripleC – Communication, Capitalism and Critique and author of
“From Corporate to Socail Media. Critical Perspectives on Corporate Social
Responsibility in Media and Communication Industries” (Routledge 2014).
Jens Schröter
Prof. Dr. phil., is chair for media studies at the University of Bonn. He was
director of the graduate school “Locating Media” in Siegen, see: http://www.
uni-siegen.de/locatingmedia/. from 2008-2012 and is member of the DFG-
graduate research center “Locating Media” at the University of Siegen since
2012. He was (together with Prof. Dr. Lorenz Engell, Weimar) director of the
research project “tv Series as Reflection and Projection of Change” from 2010-
2014, see: http://www.mediatisiertewelten.de/en/projects/tv-series-as-reflec-
tion-and-projection-of-change/. Main research topics are: Theory and history
of digital media, theory and �history of photography, theory and history of
xii about the authors
Sebastian Sevignani
studied media and communication, philosophy, and theology at the University
of Salzburg. Currently, he holds a postdoctoral position at the University of
Jena’s Institute of Sociology and works on a re-actualisation of a critical sociol-
ogy of needs. Sebastian is a member of the Unified Theory of Information
Research Group (uti) and member of the editorial board of tripleC:
Communication, Capitalism & Critique. Journal for a Global Sustainable
Information Society. Recent publications: “Privacy and Capitalism in the age of
Social Media” (2016, with Routledge).
Andreas Wittel
is a Senior Lecturer at Nottingham Trent University (uk) and is currently inter-
ested in the interface between digital media and critical theory.
chapter 1
save capitalism, it’s worth studying the system’s greatest critic” (Time
Magazine Europe, February 2nd, 2009).
In the golden, post-war years of Western economic growth, the com-
fortable living standard of the working class and the economy’s overall
stability made the best case for the value of capitalism and the fraudu-
lence of Marx’s critical view of it. But in more recent years many of the
forces that Marx said would lead to capitalism’s demise – the concentra-
tion and globalization of wealth, the permanence of unemployment, the
lowering of wages – have become real, and troubling, once again (New
York Times Online, March 30th, 2014).
These news clippings indicate that with the new global crisis of capitalism, we
seem to have entered new Marxian times. That there is suddenly a surging
interest in Karl Marx’s work is an indication for the persistence of capitalism,
class conflicts, and crisis. At the same time, the bourgeois press tries to limit
Marx and to stifle his theory by interpreting Marx as the new saviour of capital-
ism. One should remember that he was not only a brilliant analyst of capital-
ism, he was also the strongest critic of capitalism in his time: “In short, the
Communists everywhere support every revolutionary movement against the
existing social and political order of things. In all these movements, they bring
to the front, as the leading question in each, the property question, no matter
what its degree of development at the time. Finally, they labour everywhere for
the union and agreement of the democratic parties of all countries. The
Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that
their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social
conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution. The
proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.
Proletarians of all lands unite!” (Marx and Engels 1848/2004, 94).
In 1977, Dallas Smythe published his seminal article Communications:
Blindspot of Western Marxism (Smythe 1977), in which he argued that Western
Marxism had not given enough attention to the complex role of communica-
tions in capitalism. 35 years have passed and the rise of neoliberalism resulted
in a turn away from an interest in social class and capitalism. Instead, it became
fashionable to speak of globalization, postmodernism, and, with the fall of
Communism, even the end of history. In essence, Marxism became the blindspot
of all social science. Marxist academics were marginalized and it was increas-
ingly career threatening for a young academic to take an explicitly Marxist
approach to social analysis.
The declining interest in Marx and Marxism is visualized in Figure 1.1 that
shows the average annual number of articles in the Social Sciences Citation
introduction 3
Index that contain one of the keywords Marx, Marxist or Marxism in the article
topic description and were published in the five time periods 1968–1977,
Â�1978–1987, 1988–1997, 1998–2007, 2008–2013. Choosing these periods allows
observing if there has been a change since the start of the new capitalist crisis
in 2008 and also makes sense because the 1968 revolt marked a break that also
transformed academia.
Figure 1.1 shows that there was a relatively large academic article output
about Marx in the period 1978–1987: 3659. Given that the number of articles
published increases historically, also the interest in the period 1968–1977 seems
to have been high. One can observe a clear contraction of the output of articles
that focus on Marx in the periods 1988–1997 (2393) and 1998–2007 (1563). Given
the historical increase of published articles, this contraction is even more
severe. This period has also been the time of the intensification of neoliberal-
ism, the commodification of everything (including public service communica-
tion in many countries) and a strong turn towards postmodernism and
culturalism in the social sciences. One can see that the average number of
annual articles published about Marxism in the period 2008–2013 (269) has
increased in comparisons to the periods 1988–2007 (156 per year) and 1988–1997
(239 per year). This circumstance is an empirical indicator for a renewed inter-
est in Marx and Marxism in the social sciences as effect of the new capitalist
2008–2013
269
1998–2007
156
1988–1997
239
1978–1987
366
1968–1977
214
0 50
100 150
200
250 300
350
400
Figure 1.1 Articles published about Marx and Marxism in the Social Sciences Citation Index
4 FUCHS AND MOSCO
crisis. The question is if and how this interest can be sustained and materiali-
wed in institutional transformations.
Due to the rising income gap between the rich and the poor, widespread pre-
carious labour, and the new global capitalist crisis, neoliberalism is no longer seen
as common sense. The dark side of capitalism, with its rising levels of class con-
flict, is now recognized worldwide. Eagleton (2011) notes that never has a thinker
been so travestied as Marx and demonstrates that the core of Marx’s work runs
contrary to common prejudices about his work. But since the start of the global
capitalist crisis in 2008, a considerable scholarly interest in the works of Marx has
taken root. Moreover, Žižek (2010) argues that the recent world economic crisis
has resulted in a renewed interest in the Marxian critique of political economy.
Communism is not a condition in a distant future, it is rather present in the
desires for alternatives expressed in struggles against the poverty in resources,
ownership, wealth, literacy, food, housing, social security, self-determination,
equality, participation, expression, healthcare, access, etc. caused by a system
of global stratification that benefits some at the expense of many. It exists
wherever people resist capitalism and create autonomous spaces. Communism
is “not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality
[will] have to adjust itself”, but rather “the real movement which abolishes the
present state of things” (Marx and Engels 1844, 57). It is a revolution of the
propertyless, by those who do not own the economy, politics, culture, nature,
themselves, their bodies, their minds, their knowledge, technology, etc. Commu�
nism needs spaces for materializing itself as a movement. The contemporary
names of these spaces are not Facebook, YouTube or Twitter, but rather Tahrir
Square, Syntagma Square, Puerta del Sol, Plaça Catalunya, and Zuccotti Park.
The context of contemporary struggles is the large-scale colonization of the
world by capitalism. A different world is necessary, but whether it can be created
is uncertain and only determined by the outcome of struggles.
The capitalist crisis and the resulting struggles against the poverty of every-
thing are the context for the two books. We have set ourselves the aim to con-
tribute with this issue to the discussion about the relevance of Marx for
analyzing communication and knowledge in contemporary capitalism. Robert
McChesney (2007, 235f, fn 35) has accurately noted that while Marx has been
studied by communication scholars, “no one has read Marx systematically to
tease out the notion of communication in its varied manifestations”. He also
notes that he can imagine that Marx had things to say on communication that are
of considerable importance. The task of the two books is to contribute to over-
coming this lack of systematic reading of Marx on communication and media.
The chapter in the two books “Marx and the Political Economy of the Media”
and “Marx in the Age of Digital Capitalism” make clear that Baudrillard was
introduction 5
Thomas Piketty’s (2014) book Capital in the Twenty-First Century shows empiri-
cally that the history of capitalism is a history of inequality and capital concen-
tration. It has resulted in many responses and a public discussion of capitalism’s
problems (for an analysis of the reception of the book and its relevance for the
political economy of the Internet see Fuchs 2014). Piketty’s book is certainly not
introduction 7
the 21st century equivalent of Marx’s Capital because it lacks solid theoretical
foundations. Piketty also misinterprets Marx (see Fuchs 2014), which is not a sur-
prise because when being asked about Karl Marx, Piketty said: “I never managed
really to read it”.1 Piketty’s book has however stressed the importance of political
measures that weaken capitalist interests and the capitalist class and especially
the role that global progressive tax on capital and wealth could play in this con-
text. This political debate should be welcomed by Marxists because Marx and
Engels themselves called in the Communist Manifesto for a “heavy progressive or
graduated income tax” (Marx and Engels 1968, 51). Marx and Engels would today
embrace and radicalise the idea of a global progressive tax on capital.
A Marxist theory of communication should “demonstrate how communica-
tion and culture are material practices, how labour and language are mutually
constituted, and how communication and information are dialectical instances
of the same social activity, the social construction of meaning. Situating these
tasks within a larger framework of understanding power and resistance would
place communication directly into the flow of a Marxian tradition that remains
alive and relevant today” (Mosco 2009, 44). A Marxist theory of communica-
tion sees communication in relation to capitalism, “placing in the foreground
the analysis of capitalism, including the development of the forces and rela-
tions of production, commodification and the production of surplus value,
social class divisions and struggles, contradictions and oppositional move-
ments” (Mosco 2009, 94). Marxist Media and Communication Studies are not
only relevant now, but have been so for a long time because communication
has always been embedded into structures of inequality in class societies. With
the rise of neoliberalism, Marxist communication theory has suffered a set-
back because it had become common to marginalise and discriminate against
Marxist scholarship and to replace Marxism with postmodernism. So Marx
was always relevant, but being Marxist and practicing Marxism were always
difficult, in part because Marxist studies lacked a solid institutional base. What
we can see today is a rising interest in Marx’s work. The question is whether it
will be possible to channel this interest into institutional transformations that
challenge the predominant administrative character of media institutions and
strengthen the institutionalization of critical studies of communication.
We can summarise the following areas of production, usage, and effects of
media as they are found in Marx’s works (for a detailed discussion of Marx on
media communication in capitalism and explanation of a theoretical model,
see: Fuchs 2010, 2011).
1 Chotiner, Isaac. 2014. “Marx? I never really managed to read it” – an interview with Thomas
Piketty. New Statesman Online May 6, 2014: http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2014/05/
marx-i-never-really-managed-read-it-interview-thomas-piketty.
8 FUCHS AND MOSCO
In commodity production:
In commodity circulation:
The model in Figure 1.2 summarises the connection of four aspects of the
media, i.e., four roles of the media in the capitalist economy:
Table 1.1 A systematic account of the role of media in the Marxian circuit of capital.
M – C (Mp, L) ..P.. C’ – M’
Media Technology
as Means of
Rationalization:
s/v↑
The process of
capital concentra-
tion and centraliza-
tion in the realm of
the media
Knowledge workers as wage labourers in
media corporations
Media as means of inter-organizational
corporate communication and co-ordi-
nation: v↓, c↓
It focuses on the role of the media in the production, circulation, and con-
sumption processes of the economy, not on the relations to the political sys-
tem (state, civil society, laws, etc.) and cultural institutions (education, family,
10 FUCHS AND MOSCO
religion, etc.). Capital accumulation within the media sphere takes place in
both the media content sphere and the media infrastructure sphere. These two
realms together form the sphere of media capital. The Marxian circuit of capi-
tal is shown for each of the two realms, which indicates that they are oriented
to capital accumulation.
The commodity hypothesis can be visualized as the following processes that
are shown in Figure 1.1: vertical and horizontal integration, media concentra-
tion, media convergence, media globalization, the integration of media capital
and other types of capital, the rationalization of production, the globalization of
production, circulation, and trade, and intra-company communication, adver-
tising and marketing. The production of media content and the production of
media technologies are shown as two different systems. They both belong to the
media industry, but create different products. Processes of vertical integration
make the boundaries between the two systems fuzzy. Concentration processes
and horizontal integration, which are inherent features of capital accumulation,
shape each of the two spheres. Media convergence is a specific feature of media
infrastructure capital. The two realms together are factors that influence the glo-
balization of the culture industry. The realm of the economy that is shown at the
bottom right of Figure 1.2 represents capital accumulation in non-media indus-
tries and services. It is partly integrated with the media sector due to corporate
integration processes. Media technologies advance the rationalization of pro-
duction in this realm as well as in the media content industry. Furthermore, they
advance the globalization of production, circulation, and trade. These globaliza-
tion processes are also factors that, in return, promote the development of new
media technologies. Media technologies are also used for intra-company com-
munication. Rationalization, globalization, and intra-company communication
are processes that aim at maximizing profits by decreasing the investment cost
of capital (both constant and variable) and by advancing relative surplus value
production (more production in less time). The media content industry is
important for advertising and marketing commodities in the circulation process
of commodities, which is at the same time the realization process of capital in
which surplus value is transformed into money profit.
The ideology hypothesis is visualized in Figure 1.2 by media content capital
and its relation to recipients. Media content that creates false consciousness is
considered as ideological content. Media content depends on reception. The
reception hypothesis is visualized in the lower left part of Figure 1.1. Reception
is the realm wherein ideologies are reproduced and potentially challenged.
Alternative media is a sphere that challenges the capitalist media industry.
The alternative media hypothesis is visualized in Figure 1.1 by a separate
domain that stands for alternative ways of organizing and producing media
introduction 11
whose aim is to create critical content that challenges capitalism. Media con-
tent depends on reception. Five forms of reception are distinguished in the left
lower left part of Figure 1.2. Reception is the realm where ideologies are repro-
duced and potentially challenged. In some types and parts of media content
capital, capital is accumulated by selling the audience, at a rate determined by
its demographic characteristics, as a commodity to advertising clients. Dallas
Smythe (1977) spoke in this context of the audience commodity. As advertising
profits are not a general feature of all media capital, there is a dotted line in
Figure 1.2 that signifies the audience commodity. In recent times, recipients
have increasingly become an active audience that produces content and tech-
nologies, which does not imply a democratisation of the media, but mainly a
new form of exploitation of audiences and users.
The use value of media and media technologies lies primarily in their capac-
ity to provide information, enable communication, and advance the creation
of culture. In capitalist society, use value is dominated by the exchange value
of products, which become commodities. When the media take on commodity
form, their use value only becomes available for consumers through exchanges
that accumulate money capital in the hands of capitalists. Media and tech-
nologies as concrete products represent the use value side of information and
Vertical
Globalization and
integration acceleration
Rationalization: c
c c↑ => v↓ M-C . . P . . C’ - M’
of financial
M - M’
M-C . . P . . C’ - M’ v Technology Producers,
markets,
Globalization financiali- Financial capital
v
Produser, prosumers, active audience
co a- v↑
m co production: c↑ => v↓ eg
m m ra
un pa tio
ica ny n
Alternative tio
media Glo n:
c↓
red bali ,v
u
tim cti tio z a ↓
o
eo no no c
fc
o f th f tra M-C . . P . . C’ - M’
Ideology, Critique of ideology, “true” and mm e c de
“false” consciousness
od ircu ,
itie lat
v
s ion
Commodity production
Figure 1.2 The processes of media production, circulation, and consumption in the capitalist
economy.
12 FUCHS AND MOSCO
4) Alternative media:
alternative media production spheres, alternative public spheres, media
and social struggles, etc
There is a pressing need for engaging with Marx and the critique of
class and capitalism in order to interpret and change the contemporary
world and contemporary media. The chapters in the two books show a
deep engagement with and care about Marx’s theory and it is natural that
they do not align themselves with research streams that are critical of or
ignore Marxist studies. They are predominantly grounded in Critical
Political Economy and Critical Theory.
The chapters published in the 2 books Marx and the Political Economy of the
Media and Marx in the Digital Age show the crucial relevance of Marx today for
coming to grips with the world we live in, the struggles that can and should be
fought, and the role of the media in capitalism, in struggles against it, and in
building alternatives. It is encouraging to see that there is a growing number of
scholars, who make use of Marx’s works in Media and Communication Studies
today. Whereas Marx was always relevant, this relevance has especially not
been acknowledged in Media and Communication Studies in recent years. It
was rather common to misinterpret and misunderstand Marx, which partly
came also from a misreading of his works or from outright ignorance of his
works. Terry Eagleton (2011) discusses ten common prejudices against Marx and
Marxism and shows why Marx was right and why these prejudices are wrong.
We have added to the following overview a media and communication dimen-
sion to each prejudice. This communication dimensions point towards com-
mon prejudices against Marx within Media and Communication Studies. The
chapters in the two books show that these prejudices are wrong and that using
Marx and Marxian concepts in Media and Communication Studies is an impor-
tant and pressing task today. As a summary of the results provided by the chap-
ters in the two books, we counter each of the anti-Marxian prejudices with a
counter-claim that is grounded in the analyses presented in the two books show
the importance of Marx for understanding society and the media critically.
as an opportunity for the public to buy “people’s shares”. 3) The role of dispos-
session and violence in the commodification of users and their labour on
social networking sites like Facebook.
Jens Schröter examines the idea that the Internet would bring about fric-
tionless capitalism. He stresses that the Internet became popular during the
time of neoliberalism and was a technology into which hopes and ideologies of
endless economic growth without crisis were projected. He stresses that the
dot.com crisis of the early years of this century shattered this ideology. The
Internet would instead be enmeshed in the contradiction between the forces
and relations of production.
Vincent Manzerolle and Atle Mikkola Kjøsen analyse changes in the cycle
of capital accumulation that arise due to digitalization. The authors argue that
personalization and ubiquitous connection are two important aspects of con-
temporary communicative capitalism that have impacted how the cycle of
capital works. They point out that the critical analysis of capitalism and com-
munication in capitalism should be based on the Marxian cycle of capital
accumulation and that digital communication has resulted in a speed-up of
the capital cycle and a facilitation of credit. They argue that the capital cycle is
a communication process.
Eran Fisher analyses the role of alienation and exploitation in audience
commodification on Facebook. Building on the work of Jhally and Smythe, he
introduces the notion of audience alienation, suggesting that audiences of
commercial media are not only exploited, but also do not control content and
content production. The author sees Facebook asboth means of production
and communication, as both a technology and a medium. Facebook would
result in the exacerbation of exploitation and the mitigation of alienation,
whereas commercial mass media would be based on low exploitation and high
alienation.
Robert Prey analyses the role of the network concept in contemporary capi-
talism’s ideological structures. The author discusses Castells’ analysis of power
in the network society, highlighting the importance Castells gives to exclusion.
Drawing on Boltanski and Chiapello, he stresses the problems of basing social
criticism on the network metaphor, especially the lack of focus on class and
exploitation. The author acknowledges the importance of networks in con-
temporary capitalism and argues for a combination of this approach with
Marx’s theory of exploitation.
Jernej A. Prodnik discusses the role of the commodity in critical media and
communication studies. He gives an overview of how Marx discussed the
notion of the commodity and points out that it is a category that has been rel-
evant in all of Marx’s works. Related concepts, such as commodity fetishism
introduction 19
References
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chapter 2
1 Introduction
The Internet has become an important socio-technical system that shapes and
is shaped by life in contemporary capitalism. Internet Studies has become a
crucial field that is engaged in thinking about the transformations of society,
individuality, politics, economy, culture, and nature (Fuchs 2008).
As some scholars have argued the third world economy crisis that started as
housing and financial crisis, but soon became a world crisis of capitalism, has
resulted in a renewed interest in approaches that label themselves as explicitly
critical and anti-capitalist (for example: Harvey 2010, Žižek 2009, 2010b), it is
an important task to reflect on the state of those approaches within Internet
Studies that label themselves as being explicitly critical. The task of this chap-
ter is therefore to provide a short overview of approaches to Critical Internet
Studies, to point out key concepts of this field, and to reflect on critiques of
Critical Internet Studies. The paper is divided into the discussion of the return
of Marx (Section 2), Critical Cyberculture Studies (Section 3), Critical Political
Economy/Critical Theory of the Internet (Section 4), a comparison of these
two approaches (Section 5), a discussion of Critical Internet Studies concepts
(Section 6), a discussion of digital labour (Section 7), critiques of Critical
Internet Studies (Section 8). Finally, some conclusions are drawn (Section 9).
2 Marx is Back
Eagleton (2011) notes that never a thinker was so travestied as Marx and shows
that the contrary of what the common prejudices claim about Marx is the core
of his works. Žižek (2010b) argues that the recent world economic crisis has
resulted in a renewed interest in the Marxian Critique of the Political Economy.
This is shown by the attention recently paid to Marx in the mainstream media.
Time magazine, for example, had Marx on its cover and asked about the global
financial crisis: What would Marx think? (Time Magazine, February 2, 2009).
Hobsbawm (2011, 12f) argues that for understanding the global dimension of
contemporary capitalism, capitalism’s contradictions and crises and the existence
of socio-economic inequality we “must ask Marx’s questions” (13). “Economic
and slums show that we still need the Marxian notion of class and that there is
a need to renew Marxism and to defend its lost causes in order to “render prob-
lematic the all-too-easy liberal-democratic alternative” (Žižek 2008, 6) that is
posed by the new forms of a soft capitalism that promises and in its rhetoric
makes use of ideals like participation, self-organization, and co-operation
without realizing them. Therborn argues that the “new constellations of power
and new possibilities of resistance” in the 21st century require retaining the
“Marxian idea that human emancipation from exploitation, oppression, dis-
crimination and the inevitable linkage between privilege and misery can come
only from struggle by the exploited and disadvantaged themselves” (Therborn
2008, 61). Jameson argues that global capitalism, “its crises and the catastro-
phes appropriate to this present” and global unemployment show that “Marx
remains as inexhaustible as capital itself” (Jameson 2011, 1) and makes Capital.
Volume 1 (Marx 1867) a most timely book.
The implication for Internet Studies is that it should give specific attention to
the analysis of how capitalism shapes and is shaped by the Internet. This means
that there is a need for rethinking Internet Studies and reorienting it as a Critique
of the Political Economy and Critical Theory of the Internet that takes into
account the specific character of Marxian analyses of media, technology, and
communication, namely to analyze “how capitalist structures shape the media”
(McChesney 2007, 79), the role of communication in the “structure of social rela-
tions and […] social power” with a particular concern for the analysis of that role
in the “system of social power called capitalism” (Garnham 1990, 7), and “the
analysis of the relationship of media and capitalist society” (Knoche 2005, 105).
In 20th century Marxism, the critical analysis of media, communication,
and culture has emerged as a novel quality due to the transformations that
capitalism has been undergoing. Early 20th century approaches that gave
attention to culture and ideology included the ones by Gramsci, Lukács and
Korsch. The latter two thinkers have influenced Frankfurt School Critical Theory
(Kellner 1989). Gramsci has had an important influence on British Cultural
Studies (Turner 2003). Frankfurt School Theory and British Cultural Studies
differ in a lot of respects, but have in common the interest in ideology critique.
In addition, authors like Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse, Benjamin, Williams,
or E.P. Thompson had a profound knowledge of, interest in and made thorough
use of Marx’s works. Cultural Studies has also been influenced by Althusser’s
theory of ideology (Turner 2003). The focus on ideology has been challenged
by Critical Political Economy scholars like Smythe and Garnham, who stress
the economic functions of the media, whereas other political economists like
Schiller, Golding, Murdock, Herman, Chomsky, McChesney acknowledge the
importance of the economic critique of the media, but have continued to also
Towards Marxian Internet Studies 25
stress the role of media as producers of ideology (Mosco, 2009). More recent
developments in Marxist theories of culture and communication have for
example been approaches to integrate diverse approaches (for example:
Kellner 1995), theories of alternative media that have been implicitly or explic-
itly inspired by Enzensberger’s version of Critical Theory (for example:
Downing 2001) and the emergence of the importance of Autonomist Marxism
(for an overview see: Virno and Hardt 1996). Marxist Studies of the Internet can
make use of this rich history of 20th century Marxism.
Critical Studies of the Internet have been influenced by various strands of
Marxist Cultural and Media theory, such as Ideology Critique (see for example
the concept of Net Critique: Lovink and Schultz 1997), Autonomist Marxism
(Dyer-Witheford 1998; Fuchs 2008; Hakken 2003), Critical Political Economy
(Andrejevic 2005, 2007, 2009; Fuchs 2009b, 2010a, 2011, 2014a, 2014b, 2014c, 2015,
2016; Hakken 2003), or Critical Theory (Andrejevic 2009; Fuchs 2008, 2011;
Taylor 2009).
are marginalized within this volume. The volume lives up to what Bell prom-
ises in the introduction – and does therefore not deserve the subtitle “critical
concepts”.
David Silver (2006b) characterizes “Critical Cyberculture Studies” as the third
stage in Cyberculture Studies that followed after Popular Cyberculture Studies
and Cyberculture Studies. He characterizes Critical Cyberculture Studies as:
(1) exploring “the social, cultural and economic interactions that take place
online” (Silver, 2006b, 67),
(2) the analysis of discourses about cyberspace,
(3) the analysis of access to the Internet,
(4) focusing on participatory design (Silver 2006b, 67–73).
Silver advances a shallow notion of the critical. The first quality is extensively
broad, the vast majority of analyses of the Internet focuses on social, cultural,
or economic issues (except political and ecological analyses), so it remains
unclear what shall be specifically critical about “Critical” Cyberculture Studies.
When discussing the study of “online marginality”, Silver stresses the impor-
tance of exploring “issues of race, ethnicity and sexuality” (Silver 2006b, 70).
The category of class is not mentioned.
David Silver and Adrienne Massanari (2006) present in their collection
Critical cyberculture studies 25 readings. In the introduction, Silver (2006a, 6f)
mentions capitalism as one context of “Critical Cyberculture Studies”, but a
much stronger focus is on the “cultural differences” of “race and ethnicity, gen-
der, sexuality, age, and disability” (Silver 2006a, 8). This is also reflected in the
volume’s contributions, where the analysis of class, surplus value, and exploi-
tation on the Internet are marginal issues, whereas topics relating to “cultural
difference” in cyberspace occupy a dominant position.
The second typical approach that can be found in Critical Internet Studies is
based on Critical Political Economy and Critical Theory. The sequence of pre-
sentation of the following approaches does not reflect an assessment of the
importance of approaches, but is based on a chronological order of key works.
Included are approaches that use distinctive terms related to critical theory
and political economy to characterize themselves.
Geert Lovink and Pit Schultz (1997) argue that “Net Critique” analyzes the
organization of power in the immaterial sphere (Lovink and Schultz 1997, 6) as
Towards Marxian Internet Studies 27
well as imperialism and ideology on the Internet (Lovink and Schultz 1997, 11).
The goal of Net Critique is free access to all media and all content (Lovink
1997). Net Critique would not be a theory, but a theory-praxis that stands for
radical criticism within an exploding electronic public (Lovink and Schultz
1997). Since the Call for Net Critique (Lovink and Schultz 1997) has been pub-
lished in 1997, a multitude of publications has emerged from the Net Critique
Approach (for example: Lovink 2002; Lovink and Scholz 2005; Lovink and
Zehle 2005; Jacobs, Janssen and Pasquinelli 2007; Lovink and Rossiter 2007;
Rossiter 2006), which has more recently also included a critique of web 2.0 (for
example: Lovink 2008; Lovink and Niederer 2008; Rossiter 2006). The Net
Critique approach of Lovink and others does not understand itself as a system-
atic critical theory, but as a very practical form of critique that is therefore also
closely related to media activism and media art.
Geert Lovink (2013) stresses in the introduction to the reader Unlike Us:
Social media monopolies and their alternatives (Lovink and Rasch 2013) that in
“contrast with social science scholars around Christian Fuchs discussing the
(Marxist) political economy of social media, Unlike Us is primarily interested
in a broad arts and humanities angle also called web aesthetics (as described
by Vito Campanelli), activist use, and the need to discuss both big and small
alternatives, and does not limit itself to academic research. We see critique and
alternatives as intrinsically related and both guided by an aesthetic agenda”
(Lovink 2013, 14). It is definitely the case that Geert Lovink’s main achievement
is that he has advanced the critical analysis of the Internet and social media
with an aesthetic and arts-based focus. It is also understandable that he does
not consider himself to be a social scientist and is not interested in using social
science methods. But the separation between a social scientific Marxist politi-
cal economy of social media on the one hand and a humanities-based critique
on the other hand is artificial: Marxist political economy uses dialectical, phil-
osophical and theoretical concepts that could be seen as the humanities side
of political economy. The social sciences have in the form of social theory a
humanities side themselves. In critical social sciences, critical social theories
represent this dimension. Critical political economy also has a practical-�political
dimension and uses methods for critical empirical research.
In the formulation of the Unlike Us research agenda, Geert Lovink and
Korinna Patelis (2013, 367) argue that what is “missing from the discourse is a
rigorous discussion of the political economy of […] social media monopolies”.
This means that a political economy agenda that Lovink (2013) positions in the
book introduction as outside the Unlike Us universe has in the first instance
been defined as part of the framework. The political economy framework prop-
agated by the Unlike Us research agenda (Lovink and Patelis 2013) is of course
28 fuchs
(1) the refutation and questioning of ideologies that claim the Internet is
revolutionary,
(2) the analysis of the “process of Internet corporatization and portalization”
(Elmer 2002, x),
(3) the focus on radical possibilities of the critical Internet community espe-
cially the cracks, fissures, and holes in the forms of domination that char-
acterize the Internet.
Towards Marxian Internet Studies 29
David Hakken (2003) argues for a knowledge theory of value that is grounded
in Marxian theory. He sees cyberspace as being shaped by “vast contradictions”
(Hakken 2003, 393). New information- and communication technologies “are
better viewed as terrains of contestation than as ineluctable independent
forces. Technologies do have politics, but like all politics, they manifest multi-
ple, contradictory tendencies” (Hakken 2003, 366).
Fuchs (2008, 2009a, b; 2010a, b; 2011; 2014a, b, c; 2015) speaks of Critical
Internet Theory/Studies and the Critique of the Political Economy of the
Internet. He argues that these approaches are grounded in more general
approaches, especially Frankfurt School Critical Theory and Marx’s Critique of
the Political Economy that are both foundations for Critical Media and
Information Studies (Fuchs 2011). He thereby undertakes an ontological and
epistemological grounding of the critical analysis of the Internet by basing it:
Fuchs defines Critical Internet Theory/Studies and the Critique of the Politi�cal
Economy of the Internet as an approach that engages in “identifying and ana-
lysing antagonisms in the relationship of the Internet and society; it shows
how the Internet is shaped and shapes the colliding forces of competition and
cooperation; it is oriented towards showing how domination and exploitation
are structured and structuring the Internet and on how class formation and
potential class struggles are technologically mediated; it identifies Internet-
supported, not yet realized potentials of societal development and radically
questions structures that restrain human and societal potentials for coopera-
tion, self-determination, participation, happiness and self-Â�management” (Fuchs
2009b, 75). Fuchs (2011) defines this approach as a unity of philosophically
grounded critical theory, empirical research, and praxis-oriented critical ethics.
For Mark Andrejevic (2009), “critical media studies 2.0” challenge the
uncritical celebration of the empowering and democratizing character of
contemporary media by showing how new media are embedded in old
forms of domination. “Thus, when it comes to the revolutionary promise of
participatory media, the challenge faced by the proponents and practitio-
ners of a Critical Media Studies 2.0 is not to assert (in all too familiar rheto-
ric) that, ‘everything has changed,’ but rather to explain why, even in the
face of dramatic technological transformation, social relations remain
30 fuchs
value (Adorno 1962, 560). He said that positivism is only oriented on appear-
ance, whereas critical theory stresses the difference between essence and
appearance (Adorno 1969, 291). He pointed out that Popper’s notion of critique
is subjective and cognitive (Adorno 1969, 304). There is a fundamental differ-
ence between epistemological critique (Popper) and the critique of society
(Adorno). Critical Internet scholars question the empiricist application of
methods to studying the Internet without grounding the analyses in a thor-
ough analysis in society and in a critical theory of society. This includes some
who question all empirical research because they think that the normative
falsehood of domination cannot be empirically tested, but only argued for.
They all share Adorno’s focus on the critique of society.
A second feature that Critical Internet Studies approaches share is the con-
sideration of conventional Internet Studies that dominate the field as forms of
instrumental and technological rationality that help legitimize and reproduce
capitalism and other forms of domination within capitalism. Instrumental
reason means that “ideas have become automatic, instrumentalized” that are
not seen as “thoughts with a meaning of their own. They are considered things,
machines” for the achievement of the reproduction and deepening of domina-
tion (Horkheimer 1974/1947, 15). Technological rationality is another term for
instrumental reason, which stresses “elements of thought which adjust the
rules of thought to the rules of control and domination” (Marcuse 1964b, 138).
Technological rationality denies that reality could be other than it is today. It
neglects alternative potentials for development. It aims at “liquidating the
oppositional and transcending elements” (Marcuse 1964, 56). Technological
rationality causes a one-dimensional thinking, in which “ideas, aspirations,
and objectives that, by their content, transcend the established universe of dis-
course and action are either repelled or reduced to terms of this universe”
(Marcuse 1964, 12). Critical Internet scholars consider conventional Internet
Studies as ideological because they analyze the Internet as it is, without
embedding the analysis into an analysis of structures of domination and with-
out engaging in the struggle for a better world that abolishes domination.
A third commonality concerns the normative and practical levels. Critical
Internet Study approaches criticize phenomena that they describe as exploita-
tion, domination, oppression, or exertion of power and structural violence and
seek to help advance practices that result in the liberation from these phenom-
ena. Maria Bakardjieva (2010, 61) argues that Critical Internet Studies in con-
trast to statistical and interpretative approaches seeks answers to normative
questions relating to the Internet’s role in empowerment, oppression, emanci-
pation, alienation and exploitation. Critical studies relate the analysis of the
Internet to both domination and liberation. To a larger or lesser degree this
32 fuchs
The main difference that can be found in Critical Internet Studies is the one
between Critical Cyberculture Studies and the Critical Political Economy of
the Internet. The first approach focuses more on issues relating to the margin-
alization of identities online, whereas the second has a focus on issues relating
to class, exploitation, and capitalism.
When reading “Critical” Cyberculture Studies books and collections, one
should remember Nicholas Garnham’s insights that “modern forms of racial
domination are founded on economic domination” and that “forms of patriar-
chy have been profoundly marked by the way in which the capitalist mode of
production has divided the domestic economy from production as a site of
wage labor and capital formation” (Garnham 1998, 610). Critical Political
Economy “sees class – the structure of access to the means of production and
the structure of the distribution of the economic surplus – as the key to the
structure of domination, while cultural studies sees gender and race, along with
other potential markers of difference, as alternative structures of domination in
no way determined by class” (Garnham 1998, 609). The same difference can be
found in Critical Internet Studies. The approach of “Critical” Cyberculture
Studies tends to see gender and race in cyberspace as not being necessarily
shaped by class. It tends to not see class as the key to understanding domina-
tion in cyberspace that has crucial influence on gender, race, and other lines of
difference. It tends to ignore topics of class, capitalism, and exploitation.
“Critical” Cyberculture Studies is therefore an approach that in its postmodern
vein is unsuited for explaining the role of the Internet and communications in
the current times of capitalist crisis. The crisis itself evidences the central role
of the capitalist economy in contemporary society and that the critical analy-
sis of capitalism and socio-economic class should therefore be the central
issue for Critical Internet Studies.
Ernesto Laclau has in a trialogue with Judith Butler and Slavoj Žižek admit-
ted that in postmodern approaches it is a common language game to “trans-
form ‘class’ into one more link in an enumerative chain […] “race, gender,
ethnicity, etc. – and class” (Butler, Laclau and Žižek 2000, 297) and to put class
deliberately as last element in the chain in order to stress its unimportance –
Laclau speaks of “deconstructing classes” (Butler, Laclau and Žižek 2000, 296).
Slavoj Žižek has in this context in my opinion correctly said that PostmoderÂ�
nism, Cultural Studies, and post-Marxism have by assuming an “irreducible
plurality of struggles” accepted “capitalism as ‘the only game in town’” and
have renounced “any real attempt to overcome the existing capitalist liberal
regime” (Butler, Laclau and Žižek 2000, 95). Subordinating or equalizing the
category of class to other antagonistic categories (gender, ethnicity, age, capa-
bilities, etc) poses the danger of burying the project and demand to establish
participatory alternatives to the capitalist totality. The Butler-Laclau-Žižek
debate implies for “Critical” Cyberculture Studies that its tendency of neglect-
ing class, exploitation, and capitalism means that it will necessarily have a
reformist political agenda and will not be able to conceptualize alternatives to
a capitalist Internet in a capitalist society (Fuchs 2011).
All non-class antagonisms are articulated with class, whereas not all non-
class antagonisms are articulated with each other. All antagonisms of contem-
porary society have class aspects and are conditioned by class. Class is the
antagonism that binds all other antagonisms together; it prefigures, condi-
tions, enables and constrains, and exerts pressure on possibilities for other
antagonisms (Fuchs 2008). At the same time, non-class antagonisms influence
the class antagonism so that complex dynamic relationships are present. If
class is the super-antagonism of capitalism that does not determine or overde-
termine, but condition other antagonisms, then it is important to give specific
attention to this category.
Towards Marxian Internet Studies 35
Critical Internet Studies to a certain degree already makes use of Marxian cat-
egories and should therefore acknowledge its own Marxian roots. With the
help of examples this circumstance will now be shown especially for eleven
Marxian concepts:
36 fuchs
(1) dialectics
(2) capitalism
(3) commodity/commodification
(4) surplus value, exploitation, alienation, class
(5) globalization
(6) ideology/ideology critique
(7) class struggle
(8) commons
(9) public sphere
(10) communism
(11) aesthetics
Vincent Mosco stresses that Marxian political economy decentres the media
by “placing in the foreground the analysis of capitalism, including the develop-
ment of the forces and relations of production, commodification and the pro-
duction of surplus value, social class divisions and struggles, contradictions
and oppositional movements” (Mosco 2009, 94). To this analysis, six additional
crucial Marxian concepts are added: globalization, ideology, commons, public
sphere, communism, and aesthetics.
The first relevant Marxian concept is dialectics. Marx applied the Hegelian
method of dialectical thinking to the analysis of capitalism. Dialectics is “in its
very essence critical and revolutionary” because “it regards every historically
developed form as being in a fluid state, in motion, and therefore grasps its
transient aspect as well. […] the movement of capitalist society is full of con-
tradictions” (Marx 1867, 103). Fuchs’s approach has an epistemological and
ontological focus on dialectical philosophy in order to conceptualize the rela-
tionship Internet/web 2.0 and society not as one-dimensional and techno-
deterministic, but as complex, dynamic, and contradictory (Fuchs 2009b;
Fuchs 2011, Chapters 2+3). Peter Lunenfeld (1999) and Michael Heim (1999)
have spoken of the digital dialectic. Such approaches are related to the dialec-
tical insight of the critical theory of technology that technology is “an ‘ambiva-
lent’ process of development suspended between different possibilities”
(Feenberg 2002, 15).
Marcuse (1941) wanted to avoid deterministic dialectics and to bring about
a transition from a structural-functionalist dialectic towards a human-centred
dialectic. Therefore he argued that capitalism is dialectical because of its
objective antagonistic structures and that the negation of this negativity can
only be achieved by human praxis. The Internet or specific Internet platforms
have multiple, at least two, potential effects on society and social systems that
can co-exist or stand in contradiction to each other (Fuchs 2008, 2011). Which
Towards Marxian Internet Studies 37
potentials are realized is based on how society, interests, power structures, and
struggles shape the design and usage of technology in multiple ways that are
also potentially contradictory. One should therefore think about the Internet
dialectically just like Marx thought about technology in capitalism as being
shaped by an antagonism between productive forces and relations of produc-
tion. Networked productive forces are in capitalism “antithetical forms”, which
are at the same time ‘mines to explode’ capitalism (Marx 1857/1858, 159) and
governed by class relations that are ‘no longer productive but destructive
forces’ (Marx and Engels 1846, 60). So for example the services created by
Google anticipate a commons-based public Internet from which all benefit
and create new potentials for human co-operation, whereas the freedom (free
service access) that it provides is now enabled by online surveillance and user
commodification that threatens consumer privacy and results in the economic
exploitation of users. The solution is not to call for the abolition or replace-
ment of Google, but to argue for its transformation into a publicly organized
and controlled search engine (that could for example be run as collaborative
project by public universities). The Internet holds at the same time potential
for “capitalist spectacle and commodification” and the construction of “cyber-
situations” that are “aimed at progressive change and alternative cultural and
social forms” (Best and Kellner 2001, 237–238).
The second cluster of Marxian concepts that is reflected in Critical Inter�
net Studies is capitalism/capitalist mode of production/capitalist society. For
Marx, capitalism is a system of capital accumulation, in which the worker
“has permission to work for his own subsistence, that is, to live only insofar as
he works for a certain time gratis for the capitalist (and hence also for the
latter’s co-consumers of surplus value)” so that “the whole capitalist system
of production turns on increasing this gratis labour” (Marx 1875, 310).
Therefore this system “is a system of slavery” (Marx 1875, 310). The notion of
capitalism/�capitalist mode of production is reflected in Critical Internet
Studies within concepts such as communicative capitalism, informational
capitalism, the antagonism of the networked digital productive forces and
the relations of production, digital capitalism, hypercapitalism, or new media
capitalism.
The third important Marxian category is that of commodity/commodifica-
tion. Marx argues that the fundamental element of capitalism is the commod-
ity, a good that is exchanged in a certain quantitative relationship with money:
x amount of commodity A = y units of money. “A given commodity, a quarter
of wheat for example, is exchanged for x boot-polish, y silk or z gold, etc. In
short, it is exchanged for other commodities in the most diverse proportions”
(Marx 1867, 127). The commodity is for Marx the cell form of capitalism: “The
38 fuchs
labour. Discussions about value creation on digital media have become impor-
tant. Andrejecvic speaks of “the interactive capability of new media to exploit
the work of being watched” (Andrejevic 2002, 239). Andrejevic (2009) employs
the term exploitation 2.0 in order to stress that exploitation remains a funda-
mental characteristic of the web 2.0 environment. In another work, Andrejevic
(2007) has connected the notion of the work of being watched to the category
of the digital enclosure. Terranova (2004) has advanced the concept of the
exploitation of free labour on the Internet. Digital labour-conferences like
“Digital labour: Workers, authors, citizens” (University of Western Ontario,
October 2009; see Burston, Dyer-Witheford and Hearn 2010), “The Internet as
Playground and Factory” (New School, November 2009; see the book Scholz
2012) and “Towards Critical Theories of Social Media. The Fourth ict s and
Society-Conference” (Uppsala University, Sweden. May 2nd–4th, 2012, see the
collected volume Fuchs and Sandoval 2014) have achieved extraordinary inter-
est in terms of contributions and attendance. A related question is the one of
how class relations have changed in the context of culture, the Internet, net-
works and information.
The fifth concept is that of globalization. Marx stressed that capitalism has
an inherent tendency to globalize because of “the entanglement of all peoples
in the net of the world-market” and “the international character of the capital-
istic regime” (Marx 1867, 929). The world market, capital export and the global
organization of companies are aspects of this capitalist globalization process.
Kellner (2002) stresses the importance of Marx’s dialectical and critical theory
in contemporary “technocapitalism” for understanding that globalization and
the Internet are contested terrains composed of oppositions. Harvey (1990),
reflecting Marx’s insight that “capital by its nature drives beyond every spatial
barrier” and that “the means of communication and transport” are connected
to “the annihilation of space by time” (Marx 1857/1858, 524), says that the rise
of a flexible regime of accumulation in combination with new communication
technologies has brought about a new phase of time-space compression of
capitalism. The Internet has not caused, but enhanced the globalisation of
capitalist production, distribution and circulation. Communication technolo-
gies like the Internet are the medium and at the same time outcome of the
globalization tendency of capitalism (Fuchs 2008, 110).
The sixth concept is the one of ideology/ideology critique. For Marx, ideology
is inverted consciousness, consciousness that is manipulated so that it sees
reality other than it is. “In all ideology men and their circumstances appear
upside-down as in a camera obscura” (mecw Vol. 5, 14). It is “an inverted con-
sciousness of the world” (mecw Vol. 3, 175). In Capital, Marx (1867) described
ideology as the fetishism of commodities that makes social relations appear as
40 fuchs
partly by the cooperation of men now living, but partly also by building on
earlier work” (Marx 1894, 199). Its common character is due to “communal
labour, [that] however, simply involves the direct cooperation of individuals”
(Marx 1894, 199). The concept of the commons has been applied to the context
of knowledge on the Internet that is collectively produced and shared and
appropriated by capital. Discussions of Internet commons relate especially to
free software, Wikipedia, and filesharing.
The concepts of class struggle and the commons are in contemporary
Marxism and in critical studies of the Internet especially grounded in Autonomist
Marxism, a perspective that Žižek (2008, 354) criticizes (mainly in respect to
Hardt and Negri) as celebrating the informational revolution as “the unique
chance for overcoming capitalism” and as thereby ignoring the rise of a new
frictionless soft capitalism that enabled by it makes use of a rhetoric consist-
ing of ideals like participation, self-organization, and co-operation without
realizing them. Žižek however agrees with Hardt and Negri (2009) that the
exploitation of the commons of society (such as knowledge on the Internet,
education and culture) justifies at the political level as a form of resistance “the
resuscitation of the notion of communism” (Žižek 2008, 429).
The ninth concept is the public sphere. Marx imagined alternatives to the
bourgeois state that serves class interests when he described the Paris
Commune as a specific kind of public sphere: The commune superseded class
rule (Marx 1871, 274), it “was formed of the municipal councillors, chosen by
universal suffrage in the various wards of the town, responsible and revocable
at short terms” (Marx 1871, 274). “Public functions ceased to be the private
property of the tools of the Central Committee. Not only municipal adminis-
tration, but the whole initiative hitherto exercised by the State was laid into
the hands of the Commune” (Marx 1871, 274). The Commune was “the self-
government of the producers” (ibid., 275), who “administer their common
affairs by an assembly of delegates” (ibid., 275), abolished “that class-property
which makes the labour of the many the wealth of the few” (ibid., 277), and
transformed “the means of production, land and capital, now chiefly the
means of enslaving and exploiting labour, into mere instruments of free and
associated labour” (ibid., 277) so that a “united co-operative” society (ibid., 277)
emerges. Marx asks about such a true public sphere: “what else, gentlemen,
would it be but Communism” (ibid., 277)? Habermas’ original concept of the
public sphere is grounded in this Marxian understanding (see: Habermas 1991,
122–129). Marx saw the bourgeois public sphere ironically (Habermas 1991, 123).
“Marx denounced public opinion as false consciousness: it hid before itself its
own true character as a mask of bourgeois class interests” (Habermas 1991, 124).
Marx’s “critique demolished all fictions to which the idea of the public sphere
42 fuchs
of civil society appealed. In the first place, the social preconditions for the
equality of opportunity were obviously lacking, namely: that any person with
skill and ’luck’ could attain the status of property owner and thus the qualifica-
tions of a private person granted access to the public sphere, property and
education. The public sphere with which Marx saw himself confronted contra-
dicted its own principle of universal accessibility” (Habermas 1991, 124).
A number of authors has discussed how to apply the notion of the public
sphere to the Internet and thereby has also taken into account Habermas’
Marxist grounding by describing how the political economy of capitalism can
colonize and thereby limit the potential of the Internet to act as a tool that
advances the transformation towards a public sphere. However, many authors
have ignored Marx’s concept of the public sphere as communism that tran-
scends the private control of the means of production and the acknowledge-
ment of this dimension by Habermas. Taking both Marx’s and young Habermas’s
concepts of the public sphere seriously must mean for Critical Internet Studies
to discuss what a communist Internet is all about (Fuchs 2011). According to
Habermas, the public sphere is not only a normative ideal, but also a concept
that allows criticizing the political reality of the media. He has stressed in this
context that the liberal public sphere limits its own value of freedom of speech
and public opinion because citizens in capitalism do not have same formal
education and material resources for participating in the public sphere
(Habermas 1991, 227) and that it limits its own value of freedom of association
and assembly because big political and economic organizations “enjoy an oli-
gopoly of the publicistically effective and politically relevant formation of
assemblies and associations” (Habermas 1991, 228). Critical Internet Studies
should especially take a look at how freedom of speech and freedom of assem-
bly are limited by unequal conditions of access (money, education, age, etc)
and the domination of visibility and attention by big economic and political
organizations.
The tenth concept considered here is communism. Marx and Engels did not
mean by the term communism a totalitarian society that monitors all human
beings, operates forced labour camps, represses human individuality, installs
conditions of general shortage, limits the freedom of movement, etc. For them,
communism is a society that strengthens common co-operative production,
common ownership of the means of production, and enriches the individual
sphere of activities and thereby individuality. The new crisis of capitalism has
brought about an interest in the idea of communism (see for example: Žižek
and Douzinas 2010). Marx spoke of “an association of free men, working with
the means of production held in common, and expending their many different
forms of labour-power in full self-awareness as one single social labour force”
Towards Marxian Internet Studies 43
(Marx 1867, 171). Communism is “a society in which the full and free develop-
ment of every individual forms the ruling principle” (Marx 1867, 739). In Critical
Internet Studies, scholars have for example spoken about the goal of a com-
munist Internet in a communist society (Fuchs 2011), 21st century communism
(Dyer-Witheford 1999, 4), cybernetic communism (Barbrook 2007), or dot.
communism (Moglen 2003), an alternative Internet (Atton 2004), a public-
service Net (Patelis 2000, 99) or public service and commons-based social
media (Fuchs 2014d). The notion of communism has for Internet Studies spe-
cial relevance for the question to which extent the common sharing (like on
file sharing platforms) and co-operative production of knowledge (like on
Wikipedia or in the Free and Open Source Software movement) constitutes
foundations of a communist mode of production. Marx has stressed the com-
mon character of knowledge with his concept of the “General Intellect”, which
is the “power of knowledge, objectified”, “general social knowledge” that
becomes “a direct force of production” (Marx 1857/1858, 706). He pointed out
that knowledge is “brought about partly by the cooperation of men now living,
but partly also by building on earlier work” (Marx 1894, 199). Its common char-
acter is due to “communal labour, [that] however, simply involves the direct
cooperation of individuals” (Marx 1894, 199). The concept of the commons has
also been applied to the context of knowledge on the Internet that is collec-
tively produced and shared and appropriated by capital (see for example:
Dyer-Witheford 1999, 4, 219ff; Fuchs 2010b, 2011; Hardt and Negri 2009, 282;
Žižek 2010a).
The eleventh concept is aesthetics. Marx pointed out that art should not be
organized as surplus-value generating labour, but in capitalism can be trans-
formed into this kind of work and thereby can become an object of commodi-
fication (Marx 1863, 401). For Marx, communism meant the end of the division
of labour, so that all people could engage in artistic activities. “In a communist
society there are no painters but only people who engage in painting among
other activities” (Marx and Engels 1846, 418). Adorno pointed out based on
Marx the relationship of art, capitalism, and communism by arguing that
authentic art is non-identical with the logic of capitalism, it neglects instru-
mental reason: “the function of art in the totally functional world is its func-
tionlessness” (Adorno 1997, 320). In recent years, discussion abouts Marxist
aesthetics have been applied to the realm of the Internet, online play, and com-
puter games (see for example: Kline, Dyer-Witheford and De Peuter 2003,
Andrejevic 2006, Dyer-Witheford and De Peuter 2009).
The eleven concepts discussed are some of the most frequently invoked
Marxian notions in Internet Studies. Others could be added and the discussion
extended, but the limited space of this article does not allow discussing these
44 fuchs
issues at length. The examples given are, however, suggestive of the impor-
tance of Marxian theory for critical analysis of the Internet. Certainly such
concepts are not only welcomed, but are also opposed. This phenomenon is
discussed in the next section.
7 Digital Labour
The rise of “social media” that are based on targeted advertising combined
with the rising interest in Marx’s works in the course of the new world eco-
nomic crisis has resulted in discussions about the political economy of the
Internet and how Marx’s works can be used in this context. In this context,
especially the concept of digital labour has gained importance. New debates
have emerged around the question if and how to use Marx for understanding
digital media.
Authors have for example discussed the usefulness of Karl Marx’s labour
theory of value (Fuchs 2010b, Arvidsson and Colleoni 2012, Fuchs 2012), how
the notion of alienation shall be used in the context of digital labour (Andrejevic
2012, Fisher 2012), or if and how Dallas Smythe’s notion of audience labour can
be used for understanding digital labour (for an overview discussion see my
contribution in the companying volume “Marx and the Political Economy of
Communication” to this book). My books Social Media: A Critical Introduction
(Fuchs 2014b), Digital Labour and Karl Marx (Fuchs 2014a) and Culture and
Economy in the Age of Social Media (Fuchs 2015) provide an introduction to as
well as more advanced discussions of many of the involved issues. The general
task has been how to best understand and conceptualise that users under real-
time far-reaching conditions of commercial surveillance create a data com-
modity that is sold to advertising clients and who exactly creates the value that
manifests itself in social media corporations’ profits.
The digital labour debate has been accompanied by the question how fea-
sible Karl Marx’s labour theory of value is for understanding digital labour.
This theory argues that the value of a commodity measured as the average
number of hours it takes to produce it is a crucial economic category for the
critical analysis of capitalism. It is connected to questions of productive and
unproductive labour, surplus-value, exploitation and class. I have held and
continue to hold the position that a digital labour theory of value is feasible
and necessary. Some commentators have remarked that Marx’s theory is out of
date in the 21st century and that today value is determined by affects and repu-
tation. They advocate a turn from Marx’s objective concept of value to a
�subjective concept of value, much comparable to the neoclassical concept of
Towards Marxian Internet Studies 45
value that postulates that “value depends entirely upon utility” and oppose the
view that makes “labour rather than utility the origin of value; and there are
even those who distinctly assert that labour is the cause of value” (Jevons 1871, 1).
The claim that the labour theory of value is no longer valid implies that time
plays no role in the contemporary capitalist economy. Attention and reputa-
tion can be accumulated and getting attention for social media does not hap-
pen simply by putting the information there – it requires the work of creating
attention. The groups on Facebook and Twitter with the largest number of fol-
lowers and likes are the ones of entertainers and companies who employ peo-
ple such as social media strategists to take care of their social media presence.
It is no accident that new job profiles such as social media editor, social media
strategist, social media manager, social media consultant, social media com-
munity executive and social media analyst have recently emerged. Companies
are willing to pay employees in order to invest time for creating and maintain-
ing social media profiles. So we need to conceptualize value with a theory of
time and need theories of time in society, capitalism and the media economy
and the media.
For Marx, the creators of commodity values are productive workers exploited
by capital. An important question that has arisen in the digital labour debate is
who creates the value that materializes itself in the profits made by Facebook,
Google and comparable companies. The crucial question is if the users of com-
mercial social media are generating value and are exploited. One argument in
the debate is that only wageworkers can create value and that Facebook users
therefore are not exploited. Facebook would rather consume the value gener-
ated by the paid workers who are employed by those companies advertising on
Facebook. Facebook would therefore not contribute to the exploitation of
users, but the exploitation of wageworkers of companies that purchase social
media ads. Some scholars make the related argument that Facebook rents out
advertising space and that its profits therefore are a form of rent derived from
ad clients’ profits. Depending on the version of the digital rent argument,
Facebook users are then considered as not being exploited or as being exposed
to a secondary form of exploitation that is subsumed under the exploitation of
wageworkers.
Most of these claims result in the assumption that wage-work is the crucial
or only form of productive labour. The consequence of this argument is how-
ever not only that Facebook users are seen as unproductive and unexploited,
but that also other forms of unpaid work constitutive for capitalism and pre-
capitalist modes of production, especially housework and slave work, are
unexploited and unproductive. They reproduce an argument against which
Marxist feminism has struggled since decades, namely that only wageworkers
46 fuchs
are exploited by capital. Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Selma James (1972, 30)
challenged the orthodox Marxist assumption that reproductive work is “out-
side social productivity”. In contrast a socialist feminist position argues that
“domestic work produces not merely use values, but is essential to the produc-
tion of surplus value” and that the “productivity of wage slavery” is “based on
unwaged slavery” in the form of productive “social services which capitalist
organization transforms into privatized activity, putting them on the backs of
housewives” (Dalla Costa and James 1972, 31). Zillah Eisenstein (1979, 31) argues
that the gender division of labour guarantees “a free labour pool” and “a cheap
labour pool”. Maria Mies (1986, 37) says that women are exploited in a triple
sense: “they are exploited […] by men and they are exploited as housewives by
capital. If they are wage-workers they are also exploited as wage-workers”. The
question who is a productive worker is not just a theory question, but a crucial
political question because it is about the question who is an important politi-
cal subject in the struggle against capitalism. Focusing only on wageworkers
has patriarchal and racist implications.
An important question that has arisen within the digital labour debate is if
it suffices to focus on the social media world and to limit the notion of digital
labour to paid or unpaid work in the online realm (or even narrower to limit
the term to users’ unpaid labour on social media). We access social media on
laptops and mobile phones that tend to be assembled in China. Hon Hai
Precision (also known as Foxconn) is a Taiwanese company that was the 139th
largest company in the world in 2014 (Forbes 2000, 2014 list2). In 2011, Foxconn
had enlarged its Chinese workforce to a million, with a majority being young
migrant workers who come from the countryside (sacom 2011). Foxconn
assembles e.g. the iPad, iMac, iPhone, Kindle, various consoles (by Sony,
Nintendo, Microsoft). When 17 Foxconn workers attempted to commit suicide
between January and August 2010 (most of them “successfully”), the topic of
bad working conditions in the ict assemblage industry became widely known.
This circumstance was followed up with a number of academic works that
show that workers’ everyday reality at Foxconn includes low wages, working
long hours, frequent work shift changes, regular working time of over 10 hours
per day, a lack of breaks, monotonous work, physical harm caused by chemi-
cals such as benzene or solder paste, lack of protective gear and equipment,
forced use of students from vocational schools as interns (in agreement with
the school boards) that conduct regular assembly work that does not help their
studies, prison-like accommodations with 6–22 workers per room, yellow
unions that are managed by company officials and whom the workers do not
• “Digital work is a specific form of work that makes use of the body, mind or
machines or a combination of all or some of these elements as an instru-
ment of work in order to organize nature, resources extracted from nature,
or culture and human experiences, in such a way that digital media are pro-
duced and used. The products of digital work are depending on the type of
work: minerals, components, digital media tools or digitally mediated sym-
bolic representations, social relations, artefacts, social systems and commu-
nities. Digital work includes all activities that create use-values that are
objectified in digital media technologies, contents and products generated
by applying digital media” (Fuchs 2014a, 352).
• “Digital labour is alienated digital work: it is alienated from itself, from the
instruments and objects of labour and from the products of labour. Alienation
is alienation of the subject from itself (labour-power is put to use for and is
controlled by capital), alienation from the object (the objects of labour and
the instruments of labour) and the subject-object (the products of labour).
Digital work and digital labour are broad categories that involve all activities
in the production of digital media technologies and contents. This means
that in the capitalist media industry, different forms of alienation and
exploitation can be encountered. Examples are slave workers in mineral
48 fuchs
The digital labour debate has been accompanied a resurgent interest in Dallas
Smythe’s concept of audience labour and audience commodification for
explaining the role of targeted advertising on social media. In this context
notions such as prosumers labour have been used.
Prosumer labour on social media differs in a number of respects from audi-
ence labour in broadcasting:
The digital labour debate has been accompanied by the question how feasible
Karl Marx’s labour theory of value is for understanding digital labour. And
often-overlooked aspect is that this theory is a theory of time in capitalism
and that digital labour needs therefore to be situated in the temporalities of
capitalism. One criticism brought forward against those who argue that users
Towards Marxian Internet Studies 49
of �corporate social media platforms that use targeted advertising are exploited
has been that advertising as part of the sphere of circulation that only realises,
but does not create value, and that users’ activities are one or several of the fol-
lowing (see for example: Bolaño and Vieira 2014, Comor 2014, Huws 2014, Reveley
2013, Rigi and Prey 2014): unproductive, no labour at all, less productive, a con-
sumption of value generated by paid employees in sectors and companies that
advertise on social media, the realisation of value generated by paid employees
of social media corporations, or an expression of a system where what appears
as profits are rents derived from the profits of advertisers. These opinions are
not new, but just a reformulation of Lebowitz’s (1986) criticism of Smythe.
The crucial category used in such discussions is Marx’s notion of productive
labour. There are passages, where Marx argues that only wageworkers who pro-
duce surplus-value and capital that is accumulated is productive labour. For
example: “Every productive worker is a wage-labourer, but not every wage-
labourer is a productive worker. Whenever labour is purchased to be consumed
as a use-value, as a service and not to replace the value of variable capital with
its own vitality and be incorporated into the capitalist process of production
– whenever that happens, labour is not productive and the wage-labourer is no
productive worker” (Marx 1867, 1041). Or: “Productive labour, therefore, can be
so described when it is directly exchanged for money as capital, or, which is
only a more concise way of putting it, is exchanged directly for capital, that is,
for money which in its essence is capital, which is destined to function as capi-
tal, or confronts labour-power as capital. The phrase: labour which is directly
exchanged for capital, implies that labour is exchanged for money as capital
and actually transforms it into capital” (Marx 1863, 396–367).
Marx’s thoughts on this topic are however inconsistent, so there cannot be
one “true” interpretation of what productive and unproductive labour is. The
interpretation of productive labour that I follow is one that stresses the notion
of the Gesamtarbeiter (collective worker).
Marx stresses that work is not an individual process. The more co-operative
and networked work becomes, which is the consequence of the technification
of capitalism and the rise of knowledge in production, the more relevant
becomes Marx’s third understanding of productive labour: productive labour
as labour of the collective worker. The notion of the collective worker becomes
ever more important with the development of fixed constant capital and pro-
ductivity (Marx 1857/58, 707). Marx has set out this concept both in Capital,
Volume 1, and the Results of the Immediate Production Process:
of productive labour, and of the concept of the bearer of that labour, the
productive worker. In order to work productively, it is no longer necessary
for the individual himself to put his hand to the object; it is sufficient for
him to be an organ of the collective labourer, and to perform any one of its
subordinate functions. The definition of productive labour given above,
the original definition, is derived from the nature of material production
itself, and it remains correct for the collective labourer, considered as a
whole. But it no longer holds good for each member taken individually”
(Marx 1867, 643–644).
• “First, with the development of the real subsumption of labour under capi-
tal, or the specifically capitalist mode of production, the real lever of the
overall labour process is increasingly not the individual worker. Instead,
labour-power socially combined and the various competing labour-powers
which together form the entire production machine participate in very dif-
ferent ways in the immediate process of making commodities, or, more
accurately in this context, creating the product. Some work better with their
hands, others with their heads, one as a manager, engineer, technologist,
etc., the other as overseer, the third as manual labourer or even drudge. An
ever increasing number of types of labour are included in the immediate
concept of productive labour, and those who perform it are classed as pro-
ductive workers, workers directly exploited by capital and subordinated to
its process of production and expansion. If we consider the aggregate
worker, i.e. if we take all the members comprising the workshop together,
then we see that their combined activity results materially in an aggregate
product which is at the same time a quantity of goods. And here it is quite
immaterial whether the job of a particular worker, who is merely a limb of
this aggregate worker, is at a greater or smaller distance from the actual
manual labour. But then: the activity of this aggregate labour-power is its
immediate productive consumption by capital, i.e. it is the self-valorization
process of capital, and hence, as we shall demonstrate, the immediate pro-
duction of surplus-value, the immediate conversion of this latter into capi-
tal” (Marx 1867, 1039–1040).
c (technologies,
infrastructure)
M-C . . P1 . . P2 C’ - M’
v1 (paid) v2 (unpaid work;
platform use)
Saying that the cultural labour of branding, public relations and creating
commodity advertisements creates symbolic value is not detached from the
notion of economic value. Rather value here precisely means that for the cre-
ation of this symbolic dimension of the commodity labour time is invested. It
is therefore no wonder that almost all larger companies have their own public
relations departments or outsource public relations and advertising to other
companies. Paying the circulation workers employed in such departments or
companies needs to be planned and calculated into the price of commodities.
Consumers give specific meanings to the commodities they buy and con-
sume. They thereby construct consumption meaning and in doing so can react
to use-value promises in different ways:
(1) They can share these ideologies and buy the commodities because they
hope the promise is an actual use value;
(2) they can deconstruct the use-value promise as ideology and refuse buy-
ing the commodity;
(3) they can deconstruct the use-value, but nonetheless buy the commodity
for other reasons.
But are Facebook users productive workers? They are certainly not less
important for Facebook’s capital accumulation than its paid employees
because without users Facebook would immediately stop making profits and
producing commodities. Facebook’s commodity is not its platform that can be
used without charges. It rather sells advertising space in combination with
access to users. An algorithm selects users and allows individually targeting
ads based on keywords and search criteria that Facebook’s clients identify.
Facebook’s commodity is a portion/space of a user’s screen/profile that is filled
with ad clients’ commodity ideologies. The commodity is presented to users
and sold to ad clients either when the ad is presented (pay-per-view) or when
the ad is clicked (pay-per-click). The user gives attention to his/her profile, wall
and other users’ profiles and walls. For specific time periods parts of his/her
screen are filled with advertising ideologies that are with the help of algorithms
targeted to his/her interests. The prosumer commodity is an ad space that is
highly targeted to user activities and interests. The users’ constant online activ-
ity is necessary for running the targeting algorithms and for generating viewing
possibilities and attention for ads. The ad space can therefore only exist based
on user activities that are the labour that create the social media prosumer
commodity.
Facebook clients run ads based on specific targeting criteria, e.g. 25–35 year
old men in the usa who are interested in literature and reading. What exactly
is the commodity in this example? It is the ad space that is created on a specific
25–35 year old man’s screen interested in e.g. Shakespeare while he browses
Facebook book pages or other pages. The ad is potentially presented to all
Facebook users who fall into this category, which were 27 172 420 on June 3rd,
2013. What is the value of the single ad presented to a user? It is the average
labour=usage time needed for the production of the ad presentation. Let’s
assume these 27 172 420 million users are on average 60 minutes per day on
Facebook and in these 60 minutes 60 ads are presented to them on average. All
time they spend online is used for generating targeted ads. It is labour time
that generates targeted ad presentations. We can therefore say that the value of
a single ad presented to a user is in the presented example 1 minute of labour/
usage/prosumption time.
So Facebook usage is labour. But is it productive labour? Marx sees transpor-
tation labour that moves a commodity in space-time from location A to loca-
tion B, which takes a certain labour time x, as productive labour: What “the
transport industry sells is the actual change of place itself” (Marx 1885, 135).
“The productive capital invested in this industry thus adds value to the products
transported, partly through the value carried over from the means of transport,
partly through the value added by the work of transport” (Marx 1885, 226–227).
54 fuchs
lack of material resources does not allows them to fully develop their capaci-
ties. In communism, there is “the development of individuals into complete
individuals” (Marx and Engels 1846, 97). “The approporiation of a totality of
instruments of production is, for this very reason, the development of a totality
of capacities in the individuals themselves” (Marx and Engels 1846, 96).
For Marx, a communist society or socialist mode of production is based on
the principle: “From each according to his abilities, to each according to his
needs!” (Marx 1875, 306). This means that in a communist society all goods and
services are for free and human activities are self-chosen. The precondition is
that “the productive forces have also increased with the all-round develop-
ment of the individual” and that “all the springs of common wealth flow more
abundantly” (Marx 1875, 306). Computer technology plays an important role in
achieving a communist society: it allows increasing productivity so that overall
wealth can be increased. If class relations are substituted by co-operative rela-
tions, these material conditions allow post-scarcity and wealth for all as a basis
for free labour (in the self of self-determined, not unpaid!) and free goods and
services (in the sense of gratis for all). A communist Internet is only possible in
such a communist society. In a communist society, digital goods and services
will be created in voluntary co-operative labour and will be available to all for
free. Digital commodities and commodities in general cease to exist. Self-
determined activities online and offline will create a well-rounded individual-
ity that is not a form of digital Maoism, but a true form of freedom realized in
a dynamic and self-enhancing dialectic of individuality and collectivism.
The second strategy (ideological subsumption) is represented by Kevin Kelly,
who preached the neoliberal credos of liberalization, privatization, and com-
mercialization in relation to it in the 1990s (see for example: Kelly 1998), argues
that the “new web”, where people “work toward a common goal and share their
products in common, […] contribute labour without wages and enjoy the fruits
free of charge” (Kelly 2009, 118) constitutes a “new socialism” – “digital social-
ism”. The new socialism is for Kelly a socialism, in which workers do not control
and manage organizations and the material output they generate. Therefore
this notion of socialism should be questioned. For Kelly, socialism lies in collec-
tive production, not in democratic economic ownership. If “socialism seeks to
replace capitalism by a system in which the public interest takes precedence
over the interest of private profit”, “is incompatible with the concentration of
economic power in the hands of a few”, and “requires effective democratic con-
trol of the economy” (Frankfurt Declaration of the Socialist International;
Socialist International 1951), then Kelly’s notion of socialism that is perfectly
compatible with the existence of Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, and other web cor-
porations (as indicated by the fact that he lists Google, Amazon, Facebook, and
Towards Marxian Internet Studies 57
YouTube in his history of socialism), is not at all a notion of socialism, but one
of capitalism disguised as socialism. For Rosa Luxemburg, socialism was “a soci-
ety that is not governed by the profit motive but aims at saving human labour”
(Luxemburg 1913/2003, 301). She argued that the “aim of socialism is not accu-
mulation but the satisfaction of toiling humanity’s wants by developing the
productive forces of the entire globe” (Luxemburg 1913/2003, 447).
Kelly’s notion of socialism is incompatible with theoretical concepts of
socialism, it is theoretically ungrounded and can be considered as the ideologi-
cal attempt to redefine capitalism and capitalist exploitation as socialism.
9 Conclusion
The analysis of approaches in this chapter showed that there are methodologi-
cal, ontological, and epistemological differences within Critical Internet
Studies. Critical Cyberculture Studies is influenced by Cultural Studies, it rather
ignores aspects of class and exploitation, and should therefore better be termed
“Cyberculture Studies”. Critical Theory and Critical Political Economy of the
Inter�net are based on the insight that class is crucial for understanding the
structures of exploitation and domination that express themselves on the Inter�
net and in other media and that in capitalism, all forms of domination are
related to and conditioned by forms of exploitation. Either implicitly or explic-
itly, a lot of Marxian concepts have been reflected in Critical Internet Studies:
dialectics, capitalism, commodification, surplus value/exploitation/alienation/
class, globalization, ideology, class struggle, commons, public sphere, commu-
nism, aesthetics. Anti-Marxism and subsumption are two strategies that attempt
to neutralize the critical role of Marxian concepts in Internet Studies.
The outlined eleven Marxian concepts allow formulating an incomplete
research agenda for Critical Internet Studies that includes the following questions:
(1) How can the creation, development and the contradictions of the
Internet be understood by a dialectical and historical critical theory?
(2) What exactly is the role of the Internet in capitalism? How can this role
be theorized and empirically measured? Which Internet-based capital
accumulation models are there?
(3) Which forms of commodification do we find on the Internet and how do
they work?
(4) Which different forms of surplus value creation are there on the Internet,
how do they work? What do users think about them?
(5) How does the Internet interact with globalization processes?
58 fuchs
(6) Which myths and ideologies are there about the Internet? How can they
be uncovered, analyzed, and criticized?
(7) What is the role of the Internet in class struggles? What are the poten-
tials, realities and limits of struggles for an alternative Internet?
(8) What are Internet commons? How does the commodification of the
Internet commons work? Which models for strengthening the Internet
commons are there?
(9) What are the potentials and limits of the Internet for bringing about a
public sphere?
(10) What is a commons-based Internet? Which forms and models of a com-
mons-based Internet are there? How can the establishment of a com-
mons-based Internet be strengthened?
(11) How does the Internet change art and aesthetics? Are there potentials
of online art and online aesthetics for challenging the logic of capitalism
and to help advancing a different logic?
This chapter has attempted to show the importance of Marx for Critical
Internet Studies. The results confirm the views of a number of critical media/
technology studies and information science scholars, who stress the impor-
tance of Marx for studying communication (see especially: Fuchs 2010a).
Dallas Smythe called for a “Marxist theory of communication” (Smythe 1994,
258). Murdock and Golding (2005, 61) say that “Critical Political Economy of
Communications” is “broadly marxisant”. Andrew Feenberg has stressed that
the critical theory of technology “originates with Marx” (Feenberg 2002, vii)
and that Marx provided the first critical theory of technology (Feenberg 2002,
47). Robert McChesney has argued that Marx is of fundamental importance for
communication science because he provided intellectual tools that allow:
Edward Herman (1998) has stressed that the following elements of Marx’s
analysis are important for an inquiry of contemporary capitalism and
communication:
Gerald Sussmann (1999, 86) has emphasized in a special issue of the Journal of
Media Economics on the topic of “Political Economy of Communication” that
critical communication science is based on Marxian thinking: “Marx, one of
the first to recognize modern communications and transportation as pillars of
the corporate industrial infrastructure”. Bernd Carsten Stahl (2008, 10, 32) has
argued that Marx is the root of the critical intention of critical information
systems research and critical studies in general.
If Internet Studies is a distinct highly interdisciplinary field (Ess 2011), then
Critical Internet Studies can be characterized as a subfield of Internet Studies,
which focuses on the analysis of dominative structures and practices on the
Internet, Internet-based struggles against domination, and seeks to find ways
of using the Internet for liberating humans from oppression, inequality, and
exploitation. I have argued in this chapter that in the contemporary situation
of capitalist crisis it is specifically important that Critical Internet Studies
focuses on the analysis of the role of the Internet in capitalism and draws upon
the Marxian roots of all critical studies. Some scholars in Critical Internet
Studies acknowledge explicitly the importance of Marxian analysis for study-
ing the Internet critically, whereas others refer implicitly to Marx. Authors in
Critical Cyberculture Studies tend to bracket issues relating to class and capi-
talism. It is time to actively remember that Karl Marx is the founding figure of
Critical Media and Information Studies and Critical Internet Studies (Fuchs,
2010a, 2011) and that Marxian analyses are crucial for understanding the con-
temporary role of the Internet and the media in society (see also: Fuchs and
Winseck 2011).
Steve Macek (2006) has distinguished between two forms of digital media
studies: (1) analyses “typically informed by Marxism, materialist feminism,
radical political economy, critical sociology, and social movement theory”,
(2) “postmodernist and poststructuralist media scholarship” (Macek 2006,
1031–1032). The first approach is certainly “vastly superior to the other”
(Macek 2006, 1038; see also the analyses in Artz, Macek and Cloud 2006). In
addition, it needs to be stressed that the second approach is completely out
of joint with the capitalist crisis times we have entered. Marx is back, capital-
ism is in crisis – therefore we require Marxist Internet Studies if we want to
understand the role of the Internet in domination and exploitation and its
potential for liberation.
60 fuchs
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chapter 3
Andreas Wittel
1 Introduction
This is the claim: In the age of mass media the political economy of media has
engaged with Marxist concepts in a rather limited way. In the age of digital
media Marxist theory could and should be applied in a much broader sense to
this field of research. For Marxist theorists this development is to be applauded,
as it allows a broader inclusion and appropriation of his concepts. The article
will provide a rationale for this claim with a two step approach.
The first step is to produce evidence for the claim that political economy of
mass media engaged with Marxist theory in a rather limited way. It is also to
explain the logic behind this limited engagement and to explain why digital
media – or better: digital things – open up new and promising possibilities to
incorporate a broader range of central Marxist concepts for an analysis of both,
digital media (specifically) and (more generally) capitalism in the information age.
The second step – which really is the core objective of this article – is an
exploration of key concepts of Marx’s political economy – such as labour,
value, property and struggle – and a brief outline of their relevance for a critical
analysis of digital media or digital things. These key concepts are particularly
relevant for a deeper understanding of phenomena such as non-market pro-
duction, peer production, and the digital commons, and for interventions in
debates on free culture, intellectual property, and free labour.
Part of this article is a critical inspection of the free labour concept, which
was highly productive for an illumination of new developments in the social
web but which suffers from a lack of analytical rigour and conflates a number
of rather different practices. One of the key challenges in digital capitalism is
the need to rethink labour for those human activities that blossom outside
wage-based relations and other forms of commodified labour. In order to take
the debate on free labour forward, I want to argue that we need to discuss
labour. In order to think about labour we need to think about property, value
and the value theory of labour.
Many of the conclusions I draw on in this article can only be achieved
through struggle. A very brief remark on struggle points towards the relationship
between digital media and social movements. In the digital age the political
economy of media can occupy new territory with an inspection of direct action
and its various forms of mediation.
Raymond Williams who is usually not portrayed as someone who is part of the
inner circle of political economy of media was in fact among the first to develop
such an approach. In an essay on the growth of the newspaper industry in
England he starts with the observation that “there is still a quite widespread
1 For an analysis of the tensions between cultural studies and political economy see Kellner
1995 and Wittel 2004, for an analysis of the disagreements between political economy of
media and active audience studies see Schiller 1989, 135–157.
Digital Marx 71
failure to co-ordinate the history of the press with the economic and social
history within which it must necessarily be interpreted” (Williams 1961, 194).
He sets out to develop such a perspective, studying empirically a period of 170
years. His findings are highly sceptical:
If we juxtapose this passage with the key claims in McQuail’s summary box it
becomes clear that Williams anticipated many of the themes and results that
will be debated within this field over the next five decades. The quoted sum-
mary in his study is like a microcosm of the field.
The theoretical roots of political economy of media – at least their critical tra-
dition (which is all I am concerned with) – are usually located in Marxism.
After all and as the name already indicates, this field within media studies
explores communication from a political economy perspective. So how much
engagement with Marx do we get in this academic field? The short answer:
there is some engagement but it is fairly limited. In order to support this claim
with some evidence I will check a number of texts that are generally consid-
ered to be important contributions.2
The first and rather surprising insight is that a considerable number of
books (Herman and Chomsky 1988; Schiller 1989; Curran 1990; Herman and
2 To keep this analysis simple, I will ignore here German Marxist media theory (Brecht,
Krakauer, Benjamin, Adorno, Enzensberger) at the beginning of the mass media age, a line of
thought which – perhaps wrongly – is usually not included in the field of political economy
of media. The texts I have chosen to consider are certainly not extensive, they are also not
representative in any way, but they do provide a solid indication on the relation between this
field and Marxist theory.
72 wittel
McChesney 1997; Curran and Seaton 1997; Grossberg et al 1998; Curran 2000;
Nichols and McChesney 2006) have either no reference at all or less than a
handful of references to Marx or Marxism. In the latter case these references
function usually as signposts (such as to distinguish Marxists from liberal tra-
ditions of political economy). They do not engage with Marxist theory in a
more profound manner.
Nevertheless they are all rooted in Marxist theory, or to be more precise, in
one particular part of Marxist theory. They are all directly linked to the base and
superstructure model. According to Marx human society consists of two parts, a
base and a superstructure. The material base consists of the forces and relations
of production, the superstructure refers to the non-material realm, to culture,
religion, ideas, values and norms. The relationship between base and superstruc-
ture is reciprocal, however in the last instance the base determines the super-
structure. This model has been developed in various writings of Marx and Engels,
perhaps most famously in the preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political
Economy (Marx 1977) and in the German Ideology (Marx and Engels 1974).
The texts mentioned above directly or indirectly apply the base and super-
structure model to the media industry, which like no other industrial sector
Digital Marx 73
4 Digital Technologies
What is the logic behind this rather restricted appropriation of Marxist theory?
One might point out – referring again to the base and superstructure argument –
that Marx was obviously more interested in the former and has thus neglected
an analysis of the latter; that Marx did not have a lot to say about media and
3 Perhaps the first thorough appropriation of Marx’s concepts for distributed media has been
produced by Nick Dyer-Witheford (1999). He analyses how the information age, “far from
transcending the historic conflict between capital and its laboring subjects constitutes the
latest battleground in their encounter” (Dyer-Witheford 1999, 2). Since then other books have
emerged with an explicit Marxist approach to theorise the Internet, e.g. Wayne 2003; Huws
and Leys 2003; Stallabrass 2003; Wark 2004; Terranova 2004; Artz, Macek and Cloud 2006;
Jhally 2006; Fuchs 2008; Mosco, McKercher, and Huws 2010; Kleiner 2010; Fuchs 2011, Fuchs et
al. 2012).
Digital Marx 75
as text, sound, image and moving images as digital code; (2) they can integrate
communication and information, or communication media (the letter, the
telephone) with mass media (radio, television, newspaper); (3) digital objects
can endlessly be reproduced at minimum costs; (4) they don’t carry any weight,
thus they can be distributed at the speed of light.
These phenomenological qualities of digital technologies, which rely largely
on a distinction between bits and atoms, I want to argue, have profound impli-
cations for the social. Firstly the number of media producers increases dra-
matically in the digital age. Now everybody with access to a mobile phone or a
laptop and access to a network is a potential producer of media content.
Secondly digital technologies enable new social forms of media production
and media distribution, for example large scale ‘sharing’ of media content4
and large scale forms of collaboration and peer production such as open source
code. Thirdly, as the number of media producers increases media themselves
are becoming ubiquitous in that all aspects of the social world and our lives
become mediated, from the global and public to the most intimate aspects of
our existence (Livingstone 2009). Fourthly and perhaps most importantly digi-
tal technologies are not just media technologies. They are built into all produc-
tive processes (Castells 1996). The digital economy now is not just the itc
economy any more, it is simply the economy full stop. As a consequence of this
process the digital does not just refer to the realm of media, but to new forms
of production based on ict s, and possibly (depending on the success of future
struggles) to a new mode of production, to a ‘commons-based peer production’
(Benkler 2006). For this reason a political economy of digital media really is a
political economy of digital things. It is this opening up of media from few
professionals to many amateurs and from the state and markets to non-�
markets, and the blurring of boundaries between media industries and other
industrial sectors, that suggest the possibility of a broader engagement with
Marxist theory. In the digital age indeed all aspects of Marx’s political economy
become relevant for critical media theory.
A quick comment on technological determinism. This phenomenological
analysis of digital things and their implications is not, in my view, an example
of technological determinism. I do not want to suggest that all explanatory power
lies with technologies and people are mere bystanders reacting to them.
However I am also not very sympathetic to arguments on the opposite end that
position all aspects of agency with people. Social determinism is as dangerous
as technological determinism. My argument, which is broadly in line with Marx’s
thinking, is that technologies open up new possibilities for social production
4 For a critical analysis of sharing in the digital age see Wittel 2011.
Digital Marx 77
and social organisation. They do not determine in any way the future of capi-
talism, which of course will solely be shaped by the struggles of the oppressed.
It is perhaps due to a rather strong aversion against technological determin-
ism within the field of political economy of mass media that commentators
have been a bit slow to acknowledge the profound difference between mass
media and distributed media. Different responses and strategies have been
employed to demonstrate that the new – meaning the so-called digital
Â�revolution – is highly overvalued. The first type of response (e.g. Murdock
2004) rejects any re-evaluation and argues that the digital age is not signifi-
cantly different from the age of mass media and that historical continuities are
more important than differences. Rather than falling for ‘digital possibilities’
political economists should study ‘market realities’. The information society
does not really exist, it is only ‘presumed’. (Murdock and Golding 2001). The
second type of response, the sitting-on-the fence approach (e.g. Curran and
Seaton 2003, 235–293), is more cautious. It consists of a hesitation to take posi-
tion and to make claims about changes with respect to digital technologies. A
third type of response ( e.g. Mosco 2004) consists of the deconstruction of this
discourse, in particular of claims made by Internet-philiacs.
Indeed it would be naïve to ignore continuities. Equally dangerous however
is a position that argues for business as usual. Let us explain this with an exam-
ple. The issue of ownership of means of production, which largely dominated
the discourse of political economy of mass media, will not lose any relevance
in the age of distributed media. On the contrary, it will become an even more
important topic as new concerns are emerging. However this issue needs to be
re-conceptualised in two significant ways. Firstly: In the age of mass media the
issue of ownership of means of production was only relevant with respect to
media content. In the age of distributed media the issue of ownership of means
of production is relevant with respect to media content, but also with respect
to connectivity. This is not just about ideology and the manipulation of mes-
sages any more (base and superstructure), but also about the ownership of
infrastructures, of networks and platforms that allow users to socialise, com-
municate, and collaborate. This is not just about meaning and representation,
it is about the control of people’s online interactions, it is ultimately about
privileging certain forms of sociality and subjectivity. The second reason for a
re-conceptualisation lies in the notion of ‘means of production’. In the age of
distributed media the means of production have become more democratic.
Users with access to a computer and access to the Internet (which is more than
one billion people) and some basic computer skills have the means necessary
to produce media content. What they do not have however are the means of
distribution and the means of online storage of media content. The means of
78 wittel
distribution and the means of storage lie in the hands of few media conglomer-
ates. They control the flows of information. They belong to what Wark describes
as the vectoral class. “The vectoral class is driving the world to the brink of
disaster, but it also opens up the world to the resources for overcoming its own
destructive tendencies.” (Wark 2004, 025) The analysis of this class struggle
between capital and labouring subjects about the future framing of the Internet
is also one of the key objectives of Dyer-Witheford (1999). To summarise this
paragraph: With respect to means of production we can see important histori-
cal continuities but also some remarkable shifts.
Dmytri Kleiner starts his book with a bang: “What is possible in the informa-
tion age is in direct conflict with what is permissible […] The non-hierarchical
relations made possible by a peer network such as the Internet are contradic-
tory with capitalism’s need for enclosure and control. It is a battle to the death;
either the Internet as we know it must go, or capitalism as we know it must go.”
(Kleiner 2010, 7).
Of course this is a mildly exaggerated view. There is not just war going on,
we can also see the development of new forms of co-operation and new mod-
els and arrangements between both sides. Still, I like this quote a lot as it is a
pointed and condensed outline of the responsibility of political economy in
the age of digital media and distributed networks. There is a technology that
opens up new productive forces; there is a political-economic system with
established relations of production. There is struggle between those who want
to conserve existing relations of production and those who attempt to over-
come them. And there is an indication of how to create a better world. Could
the Internet in its more uncontrolled form teach us how to think about society
at large?
We are already in the middle of Marx’s political economy. In the following
parts I want to discuss how some core concepts of his political economy
become relevant for an analysis of media in the digital age. I will focus on four
central terms, on labour, value, property, and struggle. Among these four con-
cepts the notion of labour will be explored in more detail.
5 Labour
Throughout the last century labour has been analysed in the western hemi-
sphere as wage labour only. Apart from the writings of very few Marxist theo-
rists such as André Gorz (1999), alternatives to wage labour have hardly entered
public discourse. It was a common perception that there was just no alterna-
tive to wage labour. Obviously this theoretical orientation was a reflection of
Digital Marx 79
Labour is, in the first place, a process in which both man and Nature par-
ticipate, and in which man of his own accord starts, regulates, and con-
trols the material re-actions between himself and Nature. He opposes
himself to Nature as one of her own forces, setting in motion arms and
legs, head and hands, the natural forces of his body, in order to appropriate
Digital Marx 81
First, the labourer works under the control of the capitalist to whom his
labour belongs; the capitalist taking good care that the work is done in a
proper manner, and that the means of production are used with intelli-
gence, so that there is no unnecessary waste of raw material, and no wear
and tear of the implements beyond what is necessarily caused by the
work. Secondly, the product is the property of the capitalist and not that
of the labourer, its immediate producer. Suppose that a capitalist pays for
a day’s labour-power at its value; then the right to use that power for a day
belongs to him, just as much as the right to use any other commodity,
such as a horse that he has hired for the day […] The labour-process is a
process between things that the capitalist has purchased, things that
have become his property.
Capital Vol. 1, 184 f.
Here Marx has identified two forms of alienation that did not exist in feudal-
ism or in any other mode of production before capitalism. The first form of
alienation refers to the product of the worker’s own work and the inability to
use the product of this own work for his or her living. The second form of alien-
ation refers to the inability to organise the process of work, which lies exclu-
sively in the hands of the capitalist who owns the means of production. Let us
82 wittel
apply again the concept of free labour to Marx distinction between labour and
labour-process. Free labour then is always labour in the general sense of Marx
concept. However the term does not refer to a specific historical labour-�
process. In a strictly Marxist framework the concept of free labour would only
make sense if it would become the dominant mode of production and super-
sede wage labour the same way that wage labour has superseded the labour of
feudal serfs and pre-feudal slaves. We will revisit this issue in more detail.
The free labour debate is mostly initiated by autonomist Marxists close to
the Italian operaismo school. It is connected to the writings of Maurizio
Lazzarato and Michael Hart and Antonio Negri on immaterial labour, which is
situated with the turn towards a Postfordist mode of production and its related
processes such as the transformations in the organisation of work (the organ-
isation of the labour process), the production of subjectivity and social rela-
tions in work environments, and bio-political capitalism where capital
ultimately captures life. This means that immaterial labour, which is both
intellectual labour and affective labour, involves a number of activities that
would not be considered work in Fordist work environments.
It is not simply that intellectual labor has become subjected to the norms
of capitalist production. What has happened is that a new ‘mass intel-
lectuality’ has come into being, created out of a combination of the
demands of capitalist production and the forms of ‘self-valorization’ that
the struggle against work has produced.
lazzarato 1998
(T)he creation of wealth comes to depend less on labour time and on the
amount of labour employed […] but depends rather on the general state
of science and on the progress of technology […] Labour no longer
appears so much to be included within the production process; rather
the human being comes to relate more as watchman and regulator to the
production process itself […] He steps to the side of the production pro-
cess instead of being its chief actor. In this transformation, it is neither
the direct human labour he himself performs, nor the time during which
he works, but rather the appropriation of his own general productive
power, his understanding of nature and his mastery over it by virtue of
his presence as a social body – it is, in a word, the development of the
Digital Marx 83
As Gorz has pointed out, Marx’s language is a bit unstable and fluctuates
between a number of terms. What comes to replace labour is variably ‘the gen-
eral intellect’, ‘the general state of science and technology’, ‘general social
knowledge’, ‘the social individual’, and the ‘general powers of the human head’
(Gorz 2010, 2). The core claim made by Marx is very clear however: At some
stage in the development of capitalism knowledge, technology, and the gen-
eral intellect firstly become somehow decoupled from labour and secondly
replace labour as the source for the creation of value. It is not hard to see why
these pages in the Grundrisse become so crucial for the concept of immaterial
labour. However these observations in the Grundrisse sit uneasy with the Marx
of Capital Vol. 1, who develops the labour theory of value and categorically
insists that labour is the only source for the creation of exchange value.
Tiziana Terranova (2004) is perhaps the first theorist who thoroughly
engaged with the concept of free labour. In an essay, which was first published
in 2000, before the arrival of the social web, before Wikipedia and social media
platforms, she conceptualises free labour as the “excessive activity that makes
the Internet a thriving and hyperactive medium” (Terranova 2004, 73). This
includes “the activity of building web sites, modifying software packages, read-
ing and participating in mailing lists and building virtual spaces” (Terranova
2004, 74). Consistent with the operaismo discourse on immaterial labour, she
situates the emergence of free labour with Postfordism. “Free labour is the
moment where this knowledgeable consumption of culture is translated into
excess productive activities that are pleasurably embraced and at the same
time often shamefully exploited” (Terranova 2004, 78).
With this definition we have three features of free labour that are character-
istic for most commentators in this debate. Free labour is firstly unpaid labour.
It is free in the sense of free beer; it is voluntarily given. Secondly it is free in the
sense of freedom. It is more autonomous and less alienating than wage labour.
It is not a factory but a playground. Thus it can be enjoyed. Thirdly it is exploited
by capital.
This dialectic between autonomy and exploitation is reflected in most
accounts of free labour, however with different interpretation of this tension.
Terranova is careful to avoid strong judgements and speaks of a ‘complex rela-
tion to labour’ (Terranova 2004, 73). Mark Andrejevic has explored the notion
of free labour in a number of studies on reality tv (Andrejevic 2008), YouTube
(Andrejevic 2009) and Facebook (Andrejevic 2011). These are all commodified
84 wittel
spaces and the core argument in each of these cases is a critique of accounts
within media studies that celebrate participation and user generated content
as an indication of a process of democratisation and an empowerment of
users. He argues instead that the free labour invested in these commodified
spaces is being exploited by capital. In his studies, the liberating, empowering
and emancipatory potentials are clearly overshadowed by the negative dimen-
sions of monetised communities. Matteo Pasquinelli (2008) goes one step fur-
ther and critically engages with free labour and the commons. Obviously the
commons is not captured or enclosed by capital, otherwise it would cease to be
a commons. The various digital commons are not commodified spaces. Still
Pasquinelli does not see any positive aspects about the digital commons. They
are bad and dark spaces, as they are exploited by capital. This is a deeply asym-
metrical relationship. Using Michel Serres’ conceptual figure of the parasite
and George Bataille’s thoughts on excess, he writes about the ‘bestiary of the
commons’, where capital behaves like vampires and sucks all the blood of the
surplus energies of free labourers who seem to be too naïve to understand
what is going on.
I have noted earlier that Dallas Smythe, one of the founding fathers of
Canadian political economy of media, is one of the very few theorists in this
field who does not merely engage with the base and superstructure concept
but with other aspects of Marx’s work. In fact he employs Marx’s concept of
labour-power. Smythe argues that media audiences are a commodity. They are
made a commodity by media producers. The activity of watching television
connects media audiences to advertisers. Thus media audiences perform
labour. Even though Smythe did not use the term free labour he could be
described as the founding father of the free labour debate. Like Andrejevic,
Smythe studies media audiences in commodified environments. For Smythe
this is a tragedy with three players: the two bad guys are media producers and
advertisers; the victims are audiences. Media producers construct audiences.
They also sell time to advertisers. Therefore they deliver audiences for advertis-
ers. His argument why audiences perform labour is developed as follows: In
modern capitalism there is no time left that it not work time. Capitalism makes
“a mockery of free time and leisure” (Smythe 1977, 47). He explains how this
observation relates to Marx’s theory of labour power (labour power refers to
the capacity to work).
this point. At the job you are not paid for all the labor time you do sell
(otherwise interest, profits, and management salaries could not be paid).
And away from the job your labor time is sold (through the audience
commodity), although you do not sell it. What is produced at the job
where you are paid are commodities…What is produced by you away
from the job is your labor power for tomorrow and for the next genera-
tion: ability to work and to live.
smythe 1977, 48
This is certainly an innovative argument and Smythe deserves much credit for
what was in the 1970s a rather unusual approach to media audiences. For two
reasons however his argument is rather problematic. Firstly it is totalising as all
time in the life of humans is work for a capitalist system, sometimes paid (‘at
the job’) and sometimes unpaid (‘away from the job’). This means that all
reproductive time is time spent for work (‘24 hours a day’). This is a much big-
ger claim than the claim of audience labour. For Smythe every single activity in
our life becomes work for the capitalist system. This is maximum alienation
and there is no way out. The second problem with this perspective is that it is
based on a misinterpretation of Marx’s concept of labour. Marx’s distinction
between concrete and abstract labour, between labour in productive use and
labour power (the capacity to work) refers only to wage-based labour. It does
not make much sense to use the concept of labour power for reproductive
activities. The concept of labour power makes only sense in a context where
labour power can be sold by the worker. This is precisely what distinguishes
capitalism from other economic systems such as slavery or feudalism. Smythe’s
attempt to circumvent this problem by declaring that “away from the job your
labour time is sold…although you do not sell it” is in my view an ‘interpreta-
tion’ of Marxist analysis that really goes against the fundamental ideas of
Marx’s theory of labour power.
David Hesmondhalgh has recently developed a critique of the free labour
concept. He points out two things. Firstly he critically interrogates “the frequent
pairing of the term with the concept of exploitation” which he sees as both,
“unconvincing and rather incoherent” (Hesmondhalgh 2010, 276). Sometimes
exploitation would refer to alienation, sometimes to ideology and manipula-
tion, and in other cases to the fact that free labour is being captured and used
by capital. However none of these things would really be about exploitation. I
fully agree with this critique and would only add that according to the Marx of
Capital vol. 1 the exploitation of free labour is impossible. Exploitation refers to
the surplus value that capitalists make from wage labour. Surplus value is the
value created by workers in excess of their own labour-cost. It is the basis for
86 wittel
profit and capital accumulation. For Marx of Capital vol. 1 the idea that surplus
value can be created outside the wage-relationship is nonsensical.
Secondly, Hesmondhalgh asks what political demands might flow from cri-
tiques of free labour. He points out that unpaid labour has always existed,
using examples such as domestic labour and voluntary community labour
(coaching football), and insists on the importance of prioritisation. Under
what conditions, he asks, might we object to such unpaid labour, and on what
grounds? Which forms of labour are particularly unjust? He also argues that
throughout history most cultural production has been unpaid. Finally he
points to the fact that those who undertake unpaid digital labour might gain
other rewards, such as job satisfaction and recognition by peers.
It is indeed very important to question the claim that the emergence of free
labour is somehow linked to Postfordism and to point out that unpaid labour
has existed throughout the history of capitalism. It has existed as subsistence
work (or domestic labour) and in the form of non-monetised activities, for
example voluntary community work or mutual babysitting in the neighbour-
hood. However Hesmondhalgh is conflating the labour of an unpaid community
football coach with the labour of users of profit-driven social media platforms.
The former unpaid labour is labour in a non-commercial and thus non-profit
environment. The latter is labour in a commercial environment that sells virtual
or immaterial spaces to advertisers. This is an important distinction. Interestingly
this is a distinction which remains rather nebulous within the free labour debate.
Let us go back to the three authors I discussed earlier. For Terranova free labour
refers to “the activity of building web sites, modifying software packages, reading
and participating in mailing lists and building virtual spaces”; she does not make
a distinction between the commercial and the non-commercial, between capi-
tal and commons (Terranova 2004, 74). Andrejevic writes only about free labour
with respect to advertising spaces and profit-making. Pasquinelli writes only
about free-labour and the exploitation of free labour with respect to the com-
mons, with respect to digital sites that are non-profit sites.
All this is rather confusing. It is as confusing as Smythe’s contradictory posi-
tion: On the one hand he claims that exploitation happens 24 hours a day, that
there is no time in our life that is not being exploited by capital, on the other
hand he refers merely to those moments and spaces outside work that are
advertised spaces and moments. All this is not just confusing, it is highly unsat-
isfactory with respect to exploitation, profit, and surplus-value, in short: with
respect to the question of value. Clearly value can come from both, unpaid and
paid labour. What is not clear at all however is the origin of exchange value and
thus surplus value. Even Marx is sending different messages. In Capital vol. 1
surplus value can only derive from wage labour, in Grundrisse Marx suggests
Digital Marx 87
that technology and the general intellect can also be exploited by capital. I find
it difficult too to come up with a clear position how surplus value is being gen-
erated. In the next sub-chapter on value I will argue that what is valuable and
why certain things are valuable is always a subjective category. Therefore it is
impossible to decide where objectified value (exchange value, surplus value)
really comes from.
Hesmondhalgh also addresses the question of political demands that could
emerge in an age where wage labour co-exists with free labour. Again this is a
very important point. However I would formulate this task in a different way.
Let us go back to Marx’s distinction between capitalist wage-based labour and
his general take on labour (meaning: independent of particular historic eco-
nomic modes of production) as a “process in which both man and Nature par-
ticipate,” as something that transforms both the environment and human beings,
as an activity that is not just an economic but a human activity. Labour in this
sense can broadly be equated with practice or activity. It seems that this is a very
contemporary definition of labour. Marx’s general definition of labour corre-
sponds very much with the points made by Lazzarato, Hardt and Negri, and other
scholars associated with the operaismo school. All we need to do is to exchange
the term practice for life. In bio-political capitalism work is life, work is our
thoughts, our affects, our relationships, our subjectivities. It is becoming increas-
ingly futile to distinguish work from leisure, communication, creativity, and play.
What does this mean politically? In the digital age free labour and wage-
based labour co-exist. This could be seen either as a broadly acceptable situa-
tion or it could be perceived, as I do, as utterly unjust and ultimately intolerable.
This opens up two paths for critique. The first path is a critique of free labour
and the political demand, as Hesmondhalgh indicates, would result in calls to
integrate free labour in the wage-based system. However this is a dangerous
road, as it would lead to an even more commodified world where every single
human activity becomes measured in terms of exchange value. It should not
become a political project to make the wage-based system and its insane mea-
surements of value even stronger. The second path of critique would turn in
the opposite direction. This would be a critique of the wage-labour economy
itself. The search for alternatives to wage-labour has recently gained momen-
tum. Demands for a minimum wage for every citizen are probably the most
prominent model being discussed which could replace wage labour. The work
of André Gorz is perhaps the most developed contribution to an outline of
work “beyond the wage-based society” (Gorz 1999). Needless to say this is a
radical approach, even utopian, with not much hope for realisation. On the
other hand these are times that might need some radical rethinking of how we
work, relate, create and live.
88 wittel
The open-source commons and the knowledge commons are spearheading the
digital commons for a good reason, as those who invest in building it often do get
an income for their work. Other areas, for example the education commons5 and
the arts commons stand in rather stark contrast to open-source and the knowledge
commons. They remain largely underdeveloped as labour invested here is not paid
for by other parties. These commons grow indeed with unpaid labour only, they rely
on the passion, the love, and the enthusiasm by those who contribute and invest in it
without any financial compensation.
Postscript: A critique of free labour is important. A critique of the critique of
free labour is equally important. However let us not get anal about this. If
labour is life and labour is practice it will be difficult to develop a concept of
free labour that is less nebulous than the concept of labour itself. This would
turn out to be a futile enterprise, directing energies towards a project that is
bound to fail. The true value of the free labour debate lies in the articulation
not of a conceptual but a social problem. This social problem will only cease to
exist when both, wage-based labour and free labour become just labour again,
which will only be decided by the outcome of class struggle.
6 Value
5 I have written elsewhere (Wittel 2012) about contemporary attempts to create, as a result of
the neo-liberal destruction of public universities and as a response to this, autonomous uni-
versities and autonomous cells of higher education. For this analysis I have made a concep-
tual distinction between a knowledge commons (e.g. sites such as Wikipedia) and an
education commons. This distinction is much about labour and free labour. The knowledge
commons grows with the growth of knowledge. It grows naturally; it just has to be uploaded
to the Internet. In stark contrast, an education commons requires extra labour (real volun-
tary labour) that is not financially supported.
90 wittel
6 It is not a coincidence that literature which incorporates concepts of labour and value is
usually concerned with advertising. It is advertising which has inspired Smythe (1977) to
develop the concept of the audience commodity. Most notably we find debates on value in
the so called ‘blindspot’ debate (Murdock 1978; Smythe 1978; Livant 1979), which was trig-
gered by Smythe’s (1977) claim that tv audiences provide free labour for advertisers and for
media producers. Value is also central to the work of Sut Jhally (1990), who makes a very simi-
lar argument about the advertising industry and about the labour of media audiences as
Smythe (1977).
Digital Marx 91
desirable values of media and communication. This would have been a debate
about the utopian aspects of media and communication, how media should be
organised, how they should work, what they should be. However an argument
could be made that the political economy of mass media has something to say
about value in the linguistic sense of de Saussure’s structuralism, about the
meaningful difference between comparable forms of media production and
media organisation, notably about the difference between publicly and pri-
vately owned media organisation. Without referring to the notion of value
explicitly, the British tradition of political economy of mass media does com-
pare public media organisations with commercial media organisations and
the result of this comparison is a positive assessment of state owned media
organisations such as the bbc.
What is the relevance of these streams of thought for the age of distributed
media? So far there are no signs that value in the economic sense is becoming an
issue for intense debate. Indeed the measurement of value in calculable and
quantifiable units would always have been a rather questionable objective for
political economists of media in the first place. With the growing importance
of immaterial labour this would turn into more than just a questionable objec-
tive – it would be a mad and utterly futile project. It has become increasingly
obvious that the value of intellectual and affective things is beyond measure.
“What has irreversibly changed however, from the times of the predominance
of the classical theory of value, involves the possibility of developing the the-
ory of value in terms of economic order, or rather, the possibility of consider-
ing value as a measure of concrete labor.” (Negri 1999, 77 f.) Negri suggests
instead to transform the theory of value from above to a theory of value “from
below, from the basis of life” (Negri 1999, 78). Drawing on the work of Spinoza,
Negri sees value as the power to act. We could add this to Graeber’s typology as
a fourth way to think about value: value is what empowers people to act.
In the age of distributed media, I would argue, debates on value in the socio-
logical sense are blossoming. These are debates about the digital commons,
about free labour and free culture, about openness, contribution, and sharing,
about attention, about scarcity and abundance, about the gift economy, about
property and access, about co-operation and collaboration as opposed to com-
petition, about anonymous speech and anonymous action, about surveillance,
privacy and transparency, about the value of experts and amateurs, about the
Internet and democracy, about people and technology, about media and politi-
cal action, about capitalism and exit strategies. These are attempts to make
judgements about what is good and desirable.
I hope my argument comes across: In the age of mass media the value of
media to safeguard democracy was under threat. In the age of distributed
92 wittel
media this value is still under threat. But this is not the end of the story. Now
questions on power, ideology, and manipulation (which of course will remain
highly relevant) are being supplemented by new questions on agency, empow-
erment, potency, and possibilities. In the age of mass media there was not
much discussion that connected media and inquiries on what is important
about life. In the age of distributed media these debates are in full swing.
Can Marx’s concept of value contribute to these debates? Let us rehearse
quickly: In the labour theory of value (as outlined in Capital vol. 1) Marx rejects
claims by liberal political economists that the value of commodities should be
defined by markets, by people exchanging money and commodities. This liberal
perspective oscillates between a position where value is either somehow intrin-
sic to commodities or it is defined by the desire of those who want to purchase
a commodity. Marx argues that value emerges from the amount of labour (and
the amount of time) that has been invested in the production of a commodity.
The exchange of money and commodities hides the fact that it is the produc-
tion of the commodity that gives it its value. From this dictum that value is the
socially necessary labour-time embodied in a commodity Marx develops his
concept of surplus value. Surplus value then refers to the difference between
the cost of the labour power (the wages) and the value of labour that is con-
gealed in commodities. Surplus value or profit is the difference between what
the worker creates and what he or she receives in return. If value is created
through labour, surplus value is created through the exploitation of labour.
Even within Marxist theory his labour theory of value has been subject to
much controversy. For Slavoj Žižek it is “usually considered the weakest link in
the chain of Marx’s theory” (Žižek 2011, 205). Drawing on the work of Moishe
Postone, Žižek argues that Marx’s labour theory of value is not a trans-historical
theory, but a theory of value in a capitalist society only. This poses an impor-
tant question. How relevant is Marx’s theory for our contemporary media eco-
system that is partly capitalist, partly publicly funded, and partly a digital
commons? Does it make sense to apply his theory to what is sometimes called
a ‘gift economy’ (Barbrook 1999) and sometimes an ‘economy of contributions’
(Siefkes 2007). And if so, how would this be possible? Let us consider for exam-
ple a gift economy. Does it really help in a gift economy to locate the source of
value specific objects in the production of these objects at the expense of the
relationship between those who exchange objects as gifts? Such an approach
would not make much sense. There is a need to broaden the horizon for theo-
ries of value that are exclusively developed for an understanding of capitalist
economies only. The obvious place to find inspiration is the anthropological
literature on value.
Graeber has produced an excellent review of the anthropological literature
on value. He is searching for a concept that could overcome the dichotomy of
Digital Marx 93
gifts and commodities that could bridge a Maussean approach and a Marxist
approach to value. He is especially impressed with the concept of value devel-
oped by Nancy Munn who has done extensive fieldwork in Melanesia. For
Munn, value emerges in action. It is the process by which a person’s capacity to
act is transformed into concrete activity. Value is ultimately about the power to
create social relationships.
Rather than having to choose between the desirability of objects and the
importance of human relations one can now see both as refractions of
the same thing. Commodities have to be produced (and yes, they have to
be moved around, exchanged, consumed…), social relations have to be
created and maintained; all of this requires an investment of human time
and energy, intelligence, concern […] Framing things this way of course
evokes the specter of Marx […] We are clearly dealing with something
along the lines of a labor theory of value. But only if we define ‘labor’
much more broadly.
graeber 2001, 45
One might add that such a concept of labour is pretty much identical with
Marx general definition of labour as practice. And it is identical with what
Negri and Spinoza describe as the power to act.
All this is theory and it might be hard to come up with a rationale as to why
political economy of media needs to engage with value theory in the first place.
In fact this is not the point I want to make. I do think however, that Marx’s
labour theory of value (understanding labour in this broad meaning of the
term) would open up new paths for empirical research. If it makes sense to see
value as the power to act and to see it as the power to create social relations, if
value is about how people give meaning to their own actions, then a political
economy of communication, a political economy of distributed media would
be in a perfect position to redefine what political economy means and to estab-
lish what Negri (1999) calls a political economy from below. This would be
research on value that is focused not on structures but on subjectivities and
their desires to create, to connect, to communicate, to share, to work together
and to give meaning to all these things.
7 Property
In the age of mass media property has always been significant with respect to
the ownership of the means of production. However an interest on property in
terms of media content was rather limited. Ronald Bettig (1996) is perhaps
94 wittel
overly careful to say that the area of intellectual property and copyright in par-
ticular has been “relatively unexplored.” He is one of very few political econo-
mists who examined the property of media content. Interestingly this is a
study just at the beginning of the digital turn.
Bettig is interested in the difference between the normative principles of
intellectual property and the actually existing system. The central normative
justification for intellectual property is built on the assumption that the cre-
ators of intellectual and artistic work need an incentive to be creative. The
copyright is meant to give the creator exclusive rights to exploit their work,
which in turn will provide an income for the creator and motivate her to pro-
duce new work. However the actual copyright system does not operate accord-
ing to this ideal. Most artistic and intellectual work relies on a process of
production, reproduction, and distribution that involves many people and
expensive technology. According to Bettig “ownership of copyright increas-
ingly rests with the capitalists who have the machinery and capital to manu-
facture and distribute” (Bettig 1996, 8) the works.
This is a very correct analysis for the age of mass media that does not leave
much room for hope. Still he states with astonishing foresight that “the enclo-
sure of the intellectual and artistic commons is not inevitable or necessary,
even though the emphasis on the logic of capital makes it seem as if it is.”
(Bettig 1996, 5). Bettig must have felt that times they are changing. In the mid
1990s when his book was published sharing cultures and the digital commons
were largely restricted to the open source movement. There was no file-sharing
software such as Napster, no legal experiments with copyright such as the
Creative Commons, there was no social web. In the age of mass media the
expansionary logic of capital has not left much room for an intellectual and
artistic commons. An overwhelming part of media content was not common
property but captured by capital. In this respect Bettig’s statement has some
prophetic qualities. By now it has become very clear that the enclosure of the
intellectual and artistic commons is not inevitable at all. In fact this is the
“battle to the death” which Kleiner refers to, the battle between artistic and
intellectual labour and those who want to rescue the digital commons on one
Digital Marx 95
side of the battlefield and capital and those who aim for enclosure on the
other side.
Bettig has developed a convincing argument with much empirical backup
as to why the copyright arrangements – as legitimate as they are in an ideal
normative sense – have not really supported the creators of intellectual and
artistic work, but those who control the communication flows. With the digital
turn this rather problematic arrangement is becoming even worse. As all digi-
tal objects can be reproduced endlessly and distributed with minimum addi-
tional costs they count as non-rival goods. In fact most intellectual property is
non-rival, meaning they can be used by one person without preventing other
people from using the same goods. Digital objects however are not only non-
rival; they are also abundant by nature. Therefore all attempts to rescue the
idea of copyright via digital rights are absurd in the sense that they create arti-
ficial scarcity. They turn objects that are abundant into legally scarce goods. To
put it ironically: In the digital age only the creation of artificial scarcity can
feed capitalist accumulation. It is exactly because digital things are not just
non-rival but also abundant that the issue of intellectual property has moved
from a sideshow to centre stage.
It is impossible to summarise the free culture debate in a few lines. I still
want to make a few remarks, only to situate the key positions with respect to
Marx. The first thing to note is that there is a relatively straightforward line
between critical political economists and liberal political economists such as
Yochai Benkler (2006) and Lawrence Lessig (2004). The latter celebrate free
culture without giving up on the legitimacy of intellectual property. They
merely suggest modifications to copyright law. They also applaud the digital
commons as a progressive development without being overly concerned about
the free labour that goes into the building of the digital commons. For Benkler
(2006, 3) commons-based peer production enhances individual freedom and
autonomy. This is where critical political economists take a different position.
For them free labour is a problem that needs to be addressed.
The debates within the camp of critical political economists of digital media
are not so clear-cut. While both positions exist, a passionate defence of free
culture (e.g. Cory Doctorow 2008 or Kevin Carson 2011) and a passionate con-
cern about free labour and the exploitation of this free labour by capital
(Pasquinelli 2008; Kleiner 2010), in most accounts we find a general acknowl-
edgement of this dilemma, a dilemma that is hard to crack, with many com-
mentators sitting on the fence. One way out of the free culture dilemma
resulted in the search for new models to guarantee the creators of artistic or
intellectual work some income (e.g. Peter Sunde’s ‘Flattr’ or Dmytri Kleiner’s
‘copyfarleft’ and ‘venture communism’ suggestions).
96 wittel
Apart from some rare exceptions (notably Wark 2004 and Kleiner 2010),
these debates circumvent however a discussion on property itself. Even those
who passionately defend free culture support their position with rather prag-
matic arguments, for example with the claim that free culture ultimately stim-
ulates creative production and innovation, whereas copyright brings about a
reduction of creative and innovative work. While these are important argu-
ments I do find it astonishing that a fundamental critique of intellectual prop-
erty itself has so far not been put on the table. Badiou asks a good rhetorical
question: Why do we “keep tight controls on all forms of property in order to
ensure the survival of the powerful?” (Badiou 2010, 5).
This is where Marx could come in rather handy. The first thing we can learn
from Marx is that property is not a natural right. It is a historic product. Property
relations are subject to specific historic conditions.
Why does this quote resonate so well in a time when capitalism is facing its
first global crisis?The third and for our purposes more important observation
is Marx’s distinction between private and personal property. In capitalism, pri-
vate property is bad, it is not only the result of alienated labour (wage-labour)
but worse, is it also the means that makes alienated labour possible in the first
place and the means to maintain this unjust relation between capital and
labour. Private property is productive property. It is property that is crucial for
capitalist production. It is property that can be used for the creation of surplus
value. It might be a bit simplistic but in general Marx equates private property
with privately owned means of production. This is very different from personal
property or property for consumption (for reproduction, for subsistence),
which should not be socialised as there is no need for doing so. Unproductive
property or property based on needs is rather harmless after all.
Marx was perhaps a bit overly optimistic about this struggle. Then again, this
optimism and the hope that goes with it are very much needed.
8 Struggle
There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making
war, and we’re winning.
warren buffett 2011
structures. Finally it refers to social movements. 2011 was the year of the first
global uprising. While the specific relationship between social media and
social movements does need to be studied in more detail, we can safely claim
that social media can empower social movements and political activists. In the
digital age the connection between media and struggle is complex but strong.
Political economists of distributed media are expanding their research beyond
a focus on media organisations or media industries; they are also studying
what is happening in cyberspace; and they are studying what is happening in
the real streets and squares.
Marx is back indeed and this time it’s personal.
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chapter 4
1 Introduction
The current global crisis of capitalism has inspired numerous social theorists
to both revitalize and reinvent many of the key arguments and trails within
Marx’s magnum opus Capital. Without any other comparison to the increasing
body of literature that draws on Capital, this chapter will be yet one more
attempt to connect to the seminal work that has been counted out so many
times before by the apologetics of capitalism.
The purpose of this chapter is to discuss Marx’s (1867/1990) theory of original/
primitive accumulation (“ursprüngliche Akkumulation”), described in the first
volume of Capital, and its relevance for analysing the role of (mass) media,
online communication and communication systems, in the process of capital
accumulation. In order to revitalize Marx’s argument in Capital, the theory of
original/primitive accumulation is updated in relation to Harvey’s (2003; 2006;
2010a) theory of “accumulation by dispossession.” Harvey draws on Marx’s dis-
cussion of primitive accumulation in order to unfold the neo-liberal shift
within the development of global capitalism.
Following a basic theoretical understanding of primitive accumulation and
accumulation by dispossession the chapter addresses two key aspects of news
media content and media structures in relation to the processes of accumula-
tion by dispossession. It examines the media representation of social struggle
against capital accumulation, and how both news media content and news
media systems facilitate capital accumulation in the finance sector. Furthermore
the chapter taps into how surplus value is produced in the realm of Internet
use, particularly Web 2.0. Here, some thoughts on how everyday Internet use
could be understood as surplus labour and how users are transformed into
commodities will be addressed. In relation to the discussion on everyday
online activities, Marx’s theory of original/primitive accumulation provides
an understanding of new forms of exploitation by the appropriation of intel-
lectual assets and creativity in the field of cultural production, distribution
and communication in the Web 2.0. Here the chapter discusses how the
�
commodification of free time, the self and social relations, plays a key part in
the political economy of social media and the Internet. Included is also a short
section that discusses if Internet surveillance, and the commercial gathering,
owning and processing of personal information, could be understood as an
underlying threat to citizens, and a part of what Žižek (2008) defines as the
objective violence of capitalist exploitation.
The chapter combines the results of empirical research on news media with
examples of how the everyday use of social media and intellectual assets and
creativity in the field of cultural production/distribution could be explained
through a Marxist theory of capital accumulation in a time of systemic crisis.
Harvey’s updated version of Marx’s notion of original/primitive accumulation
provides a strong argument for understanding the recent development of late
capitalism.
M — C (Lp/Mp)…P (v/c)…C’ — M’
1 Marx (1867/1990, 711ff) distinguishes between “simple reproduction” and “expanded repro-
duction” (Marx 1867/1990; 1885/1992). Simple reproduction is basically the reproduction of
capital-labour relations without any accumulation of capital.
2 The definition of what characterizes over-accumulation crises is highly simplified here, since
systemic crises tend to inherit several dimensions (see Harvey 2003; 2006; 2010b, for a more
in-depth analysis of systemic crises, & see Fuchs 2011, for an overview of different contempo-
rary crises-explanations).
108 ekman
In Marx’s depiction of how the old feudal system was transformed into capital-
ism, the liberal version of capitalism mounting like a natural evolution of capi-
tal is confronted by a much blunter version of reality. The transformation of
the feudalist system was a process marked by a brutal and often violent expro-
priation of capital. The enclosure of the commons, the colonial system, impe-
rialism, the use of slave labour, the expulsion of peasant populations forced
into industrial wage labour, etc., were often violent. So in Marx’s version of the
“ursprüngliche” or primitive accumulation, violence plays a central part. As
Marx (1867/1990, 875) argues in a famous statement in Capital; “…the history of
this, their expropriation, is written in the annals of mankind in letters of blood
and fire.” Undoubtedly Marx’s depiction of the historical process of capital is
only partly true; there were also peaceful or at least less violent transforma-
tions (Harvey 2010a, 304f). Nevertheless, Marx exposed the liberal myth, paint-
ing a picture of a smooth transformation originated from the shoulders of
hardworking men with specialized labour skills that became employers – that
story was anything but true.
For the labourer, the process of primitive accumulation was double sided,
workers were set free from the feudal oppression system, slavery, etc. just to
become entrapped in a new relation of exploitation, the system of wage labour
– indirect forced labour. Or as Marx argues in Grundrisse, in a comment on the
indignation of a former slave master on the fact that slaves were freed from bond-
age, but did not become wage labourers in the plantations owned by the latter:
They have ceased to be slaves, but not in order to become wage laborers,
but, instead, self-sustaining peasants working for their own consump-
tion. As far as they are concerned, capital does not exist as capital,
because autonomous wealth as such can exist only either on the basis of
direct forced labour, slavery, or indirect forced labour, wage labour.
Marx 1857/1993, 326
2.1.1 Privatization
Accumulation by dispossession is manifested by the privatization of public
assets – the appropriation of the commons. These privatizations include
everything from natural resources (water, land, air), infrastructure (public
transport, telecommunications, energy supplies), social systems of redistribu-
tion, social services, healthcare, education, public institutions, public housing,
warfare, and so on, basically anything that is not already included in the circu-
lation of capital. There is also a privatization of immaterial assets such as
knowledge, genetic material, and reproduction processes. All these areas,
which previously were outside capital accumulation because they were
regarded as commons, public services, of national interest, etc., are appropri-
ated to different degrees in the neo-liberal model of capitalism. By adding
them to the circulation of capital they are incorporated into capitalist property
relations, thus they also transform the social relations of subjects in society.
Students, patients, water drinkers, citizens, etc., are transformed into clients,
customers and buyers of goods and services as commodities. The process of
accumulation by dispossession is therefore ultimately a process of social
exploitation. The contemporary process of privatization has been defined by
Indian writer and activist Arundhati Roy (2001 in Harvey 2006, 44–45) as a
“barbaric dispossession on a scale that has no parallel in history.”
Processes of privatization can be swift and clean without any particularly
struggle or use of force, this is predominantly the case in the global north
where the state has been the main propagator of privatizations. But the pro-
cesses of dispossession in the global south are often followed by harsh or vio-
lent expulsions of rural populations and appropriations of everyday natural
resources (Harvey 2006, 45). Sometimes the outcome of dispossessions is open
social struggle and sometimes capital even loses. This was the case during the
water wars in Cochabamba, Bolivia, in the late 1990s. During a wave of privati-
zations orchestrated by the imf, the city’s public drinking water was sold to
the us-owned company Bechtel, which resulted in increasing water prices and
a limitation of supplies. The dispossession of water resulted in a hard struggle
for the right to water as basic human asset, which ultimately forced the city to
re-buy the water rights (Olivera and Lewis 2004). So processes of privatization
can also sharpen class struggle and class-consciousness in various ways.
Privatization also includes warfare. War is in fact an increasingly commodi-
fied endeavour, where private companies make huge profits in security and
torture. Warfare is simply a process in which huge transfer of government
funding to private owned capital takes place. Luxemburg’s (1913/2003, 434) dis-
cussion of “militarism as a province of accumulation” of the early 20th-century
112 ekman
2.1.2 Financialization
The second characteristic of accumulation by dispossession is financializa-
tion. The enormous increase in financial capital is intertwined with deregula-
tions of markets, a rapid development of information and communication
technology and the processes of privatization. Speculation in the capitalist
financial system has contributed to an apparent economical growth through
major capital redistributions. The financial system holds a particularly impor-
tant position in the “thievery” of public assets such as pensions (Harvey 2006,
45). The on-going build-up of fictitious capital, through hedge funds, ponzi
schemes and asset stripping, together with an overall emphasis on stock value,
generates an apparent economical growth. These processes were depicted as
one main factor when the global economic crisis set in 2008. Financialization,
and the increasing importance of the financial sector, also marks the stagna-
tion phase in the so-called Kondratiev cycles that distinguish growth and stag-
nation within the capitalist world system over historical periods (Arrighi 2010).
Marx (1867/1990, 920) stressed the importance of the credit system in order to
understand the growing power of capital over states and the rapid (spatial)
centralization of capital. As an example the imf and the World Bank are doing
the job by setting “up micro-credit and micro-finance institutions to capture
what is called ‘the wealth at the bottom of the pyramid’ and then suck out all
that wealth to support ailing international financial institutions…and use that
wealth to pay the asset and merger games…” (Harvey 2010a, 272). Media
researcher Almiron (2010) highlights the growing relationship between finan-
cial capital and news media organizations. News media are increasingly
dependent on financial actors, such as banks, and therefore financialization
has profound consequences on news practices and content (Almiron 2010).
single countries enabled quick changes to the imf’s structural adjustment pro-
grams, and thereby transformed the national economies according to the neo-
liberal model propagated by transnational institutions such as imf and the
World Bank. These provoked crises resulted in a massive relocation of capital
and created an apparent accumulation of capital. The crises produced a large
population of unemployed labour force that created “a pool of low wage sur-
plus labour convenient for further accumulation” (Harvey 2006, 47). These
crises also expose the use of violence that is applied in order to secure the
interest of capital. The violence emanating in the intersection of capital and
states is manifested through brutal suppression of protests, labour organizing
and social movements all over the global south.
against people who are forced from their homes due to property speculation
that surfaced in the aftermath of the large privatization of public housing (as
in London), or the expulsion of large populations caused by the private expro-
priation of natural resources (everywhere in the global South). The formation
of such indirect violence is a key attribute in several processes in late capital-
ism. We will now tap into what distinguishes the violence of original/primitive
accumulation in relation to our contemporary era of new imperialism through
accumulation by dispossession.
There is a bundle of theoretical and empirical work that draws on Marx’s the-
ory of capital in order to understand the role of media and communication in
the accumulation of capital (cf. Mosco 2009). Fuchs (2011, 141ff) distinguishes
between several aspects, both internal to media and communication (as indus-
tries) and external to media and communication (as general accounts) that
might illuminate its specific role in the processes of capital accumulation.
I will only touch upon a couple of aspects that could be useful in order to
understand media and communication in relation to primitive accumulation
or accumulation by dispossession. The first aspect deals with the ideological
dimension of media content and the structural relations between news sys-
tems and the financial sector. The ideological element is crucial to the repro-
duction of capitalism in various ways, economically, politically, juridical and so
forth. For example, the media have a powerful position in reifying social rela-
tions by normalizing and facilitating the privatization of everyday life. For
example, media content produces the audiences as consumers of goods and
services. The aim here is not to evoke too much of the historical discussion of
ideology critique, but to distinguishes some core ideological elements in rela-
tion to accumulation by dispossession. Second, the discussion on how the free
time of individuals is appropriated and transformed into surplus labour,
touches upon the notion of how social media work as an infrastructure for
advertisement that advances capital accumulation (cf. Fuchs 2011, 149). Social
media and modern information technology are crucial in the compression of
time and space in the everyday circulation of commodities. We are, when using
smart-phones, going online, and so on, constantly targeted as consumers. In
fact, most parts of the Internet have been commercialized, and processes of
commodification constantly subjugate users. There is not much that separates
commercial from non-commercial content on the Internet (Hesmondhalgh
2007, 259).
with the media representation of the global justice movement, global protests
and the World Social Forum in Swedish mass media (Ekman 2011).
newspapers and in the public space) and after a political campaign (the whole
privatization was endorsed on a personal level by the minister of finance)
aided by news media. In the process of privatizing part of the company, the
stock was promoted as a “people’s-share”3 in the news. This ideological noun
was used in order to smoothen out the fact that the public now could buy
something that was already in their possession, and with the opportunity to
make a profit.4 For example, a couple of weeks prior to the privatization, the
second largest tabloid, Expressen, published several articles endorsing the
readers to purchase shares. One article used the luring headline: “Eight reasons
in favor of Telia…This is why the share might become a winner” (Bolander
2000a). Articles, both in tabloids and dailies, used financial actors to boost the
privatization and the opportunity to make a quick profit: “Stock market experts
believe in a killing on the market” (headline in Bolander 2000b), “Telia is pre-
dicted a good start. Experts advise to purchase the new people’s-share” (head-
line in Magnusson 2000). Some articles were just plain buyers guides: “How to
purchase Telia – the new people’s-share” (headline in Norlin 2000), “How you
can purchase the people’s-share” (headline in Wendel 2000). The list of articles
aiding the privatization could be extended. The whole construction of a “peo-
ple’s-share” is very much a media phenomenon interlinked to the increasing
focus on the financial sector. When searching the largest Swedish press archive
Mediearkivet, it reveals that the term “people’s-share” appeared in a total of 186
articles prior to the privatization of Telia. But from the year 1999, when the
privatization process started, and onwards, it has appeared 1113 times, peaking
at 400 articles in the year 2000. The seven biggest Swedish newspapers pub-
lished 220 articles containing the word “people’s-share” in the year 2000 alone.
The privatization of public infrastructures such as telecommunication ser-
vices corresponds to similar processes of marketization within news produc-
tion (Almiron 2010). The mounting commercialization of news and the
increasing symbiosis between financial news and the financial sector, paral-
leled by limited economic recourses and increasing time limits within journal-
istic production, results in a very uncritical journalism (of course with notable
exceptions). The harsher conditions of news journalism as a result of increas-
ing demands of higher profit margins (obtained from what Marx defines as
3 The noun “people’s-share”, corresponds to the concept of the “people’s-home”, a term used
to explain the Swedish welfare model that prevailed in Swedish society during the post ww
ii-period. The concept of a people’s-home, was first used in 1928 in a speech by Swedish
Prime Minister Per Albin Hansson (Meidner 1993, 212).
4 However, this was not the case. The share became a huge disappointment, and by 2010 the
value was reduced to half the launching price in 2000 (Dalarnas Tidningar 2010).
The Relevance of Marx’s Theory of Primitive Accumulation 119
this, the relationship between actors within news media organisations and in
the financial sector became even more blurred, both in case of ownership and
personal interests among journalists. For example, high-prolific journalists
became advisers on financial blogs and the blogosphere “helped to constitute
the informational environments of financial print media and business televi-
sion channels” (Hope 2010, 660).
The mutual interest between news and the financial sector was a great fac-
tor in the (almost) total failure of journalism in the build up to the economic
crisis in 2008 (Almiron 2010). The general oblivious attitude among journalists
and news producers towards the preceding financial break down in 2008 have
rendered some internal criticism (see for example Schechter 2009; Fraser
2009), but the overall discussion of the political economy of financial news is
still marginal outside critical media research.
So considering the role of financial news outlets and economical journal-
ists, news media have without a doubt contributed to the increasing specula-
tion in the financial system, by aiding the processes of financialization. The
‘superfluousness’ of financial information, instantly transferred through com-
munication systems, has together with an increasing dependency on, and
ownership by, financial actors, contributed to uncritical news flows on eco-
nomic issues. You could even argue that a major part of the financial news is
mere an informational infrastructure of finance capital interests. In relation to
what Marx (1867/1990, 920) identified as the emerging credit system (what is
basically today’s finance system), the role of banks, credit institutions and
other financial actors could not be understated in relation to the compression
of time and space through communications systems. Undeniably, the function
of ict’s and financial news flows in facilitating the rapid centralization of capi-
tal in the hands of financial institutions, establishes them as key actors much
as the banks and the credit system in the historic processes of primitive accu-
mulation (Marx 1867/1990).
conclusion, the global justice movement could be seen as a social and political
reaction to the processes that constitute capital accumulation by disposses-
sion (Harvey 2010a, 313).
The mobilizations against a series of global summits towards the end of the
last millennium became visible to a transnational public during the wto-
meeting in Seattle in late November 1999. Following an explosion of protests
around the world at similar events, the Global Justice Movement made head-
line news all over the world (Klein 2001). Through the creation of the World
Social Forum (wsf) in 2001, the diverse political resistance generated by the
dispossession of labour, resources and land, constituted a common ground.
The World Social Forum facilitates a unique space for discussions, meetings,
seminars, and social contacts that generates diverse political collaborations,
platforms, campaigns, and decisions (Sen and Waterman 2009). In short – the
wsf and the global justice movement represent the first step in organizing
global resistance against capital in an age that has been characterized as post-
political (Mouffe 2008).
So, how did the social mobilizations of the global justice movement come to
the fore in (Swedish) mainstream news? On the one hand, the more moderate
political issues connected to the features of accumulation by dispossession
such as debt relief, financial speculation and the consequences of deregula-
tions, did make it into the news flow. The demand for debt relief, taxes on finan-
cial speculation and the right to certain basic goods (particularly water), were
addressed in the mainstream, and sometimes even endorsed by political com-
mentators and actors outside the global justice movement. On the other hand,
at the end, it also became clear that most of the representation focused on the
social and political impossibilities of achieving any larger changes within the
global economic system. When political action was represented in the news
media, such as in the mobilization for a total debt relief, the framing neglected
the long-going struggle among social movements against the structural adjust-
ment programs of the imf and the World Bank. Instead representatives of
Western governments were given credit for putting the issue on the agenda of
global summits (Ekman 2011). A similar conclusion could be drawn from
research made on us news media. As Lance Bennett and colleagues conclude
from their study on us news media: “Perhaps the greatest irony in the journal-
istic construction of the globalization debate is that wef elites were given dis-
proportionate credit for issues that activists had long before defined and
attempted to get into the news on their own terms” (Bennett et al. 2004, 450).
The struggles of large social movements against accumulation by dispossession
were mostly ignored and when they did come to the fore in the news, their
struggles were often depicted as obsolete. In the dominating liberal discourse
122 ekman
Quick response-codes (qr) etc., the activities in physical public space (whether
in the subway on your way to work, or at the billboard posted on the wall in
your neighbourhood) are integrated with your activities in your virtual space.
Moreover. the “apps” that seems to facilitate individual communication pat-
terns, also colonize private subjects and alter patterns of social behaviour in
everyday life by transferring them into the production-consumption relation of
capital accumulation. The “apps” have a double-commodified character, they
are goods that users are purchasing, and they also engage users in more con-
sumer-based activities. Furthermore, since users increasingly rely on smart-
phone apps, they also expose themselves to intricate technological systems of
surveillance. Smartphone apps’ transmit sensitive personal data, such as user-
names and passwords, the physical location of the phone/user, information on
sex, age, personal contacts, and sent and received text messages, to the com-
pany that owns the app, and also to third parties (Wall Street Journal 2010).
Needless to say, the development of mobile phones and the massive disloca-
tion of space when performing online communication also open up for a more
positive and creative non-commercial communicative behaviour. It can enable
political and social mobilization and resistance to capital and the political
structures that uphold the exploitation of labour (Fuchs 2011). The problem is
of course not rapid development of communication technology, but the colo-
nization of communicative social relations by capital.
In relation to the features of accumulation by dispossession, the surveillance
and invasion of privacy by corporate Internet owners such as Facebook, Google,
Yahoo, and so on, could be understood as means to expand the reification of
social relations and the self. But I will also like to stress the possibilities of one
other factor immanent in the processes of primitive accumulation – violence.
If we accept Žižek’s (2008) idea of systemic violence as inherited by a subjec-
tive (physical) and an objective (structural or symbolic) dimension, we could
argue that corporate surveillance of private subjects through technologies that
monitor the information we upload, and the activities we participate in our
online activities, constitute a potential objective violence. The ownership of
such a great amount of information on the private being of individuals and
groups, without any transparency of how this huge bundle of information is
stored or used, could be comprehended as a potential threat to subjects. Besides
the fact that advertised based networks and platforms already censor and for-
bid certain content and activities in order to satisfy advertisers (Fuchs 2011), the
information of private subjects could potentially be sold to anyone. This implies
that information regarding political issues or other socially sensitive oriented
matters (how private the user may think they are in respect to privacy settings
and person-to-person communication) could be gathered and used for purposes
128 ekman
other than commercial advertising. So, in this respect, the surveillance of the
corporate Internet could be comprehended as a potential threat simply because
there is no guarantee what the information will be used for, who is buying it
and to what extent private/personal information is circulated. Sensitive infor-
mation, owned, gathered and processed by companies like Facebook, could be
sold as commodities to actors within the military-industrial complex, or to
political actors. Since surveilled subjects, and the constant flow of information
emanating from users, are commodities in the market place, objective violence
appears as an underlying threat to those whose personal/private information
contests the current interests of the ruling political and economic powers.
4 Conclusion
In order to identify the role and function of news media and communication
systems in the ongoing accumulation of capital, I have argued that Marx’s
(1867/1990) concept of primitive accumulation and Harvey’s (2003; 2006; 2010)
theory of accumulation by dispossession could contribute to critical media
and communication research. The concept of primitive accumulation as a con-
tinuing set of characteristics within the expanded reproduction of capital is
useful in order to understand some distinctive elements in contemporary news
media content, news flows and news media systems, and within the develop-
ment of online communication platforms. The processes that distinguish capi-
tal accumulation in the time of neo-liberal global expansion coincide with
many of Marx’s descriptions of how pre-capitalist modes of production were
transformed into capitalism. The ongoing global crisis reveals that expanded
reproduction of capital is facing many constrains, and thus the search for new
ways to secure the accumulation of capital indicate that more and more aspects
of our societies are, and will continue to be, relocated into capital property
relations. In these transformation processes, new areas of commodification are
located and new ways of appropriating unpaid (free time) labour are devel-
oped. In these processes news media systems and online communication play
a considerable dynamic part. This chapter has targeted two areas in which
primitive accumulation/accumulation by dispossession could contribute to
the research field of the political economy of media and communication.
First, I have addressed the specific ideological dimension of news and the
function of financial news flows and systems in relation to capital accumula-
tion. Second, I have discussed various aspects of how surplus value is produced
in relation to everyday Internet use and in relation to the rapid advancement
of communication technology.
The Relevance of Marx’s Theory of Primitive Accumulation 129
The first aspect that can be summarized here is how news media facilitate the
privatization of the commons, endorse the transfer of public assets into private
property relations and depoliticize and delegitimize social mobilization against
capital. Furthermore the chapter shows how news flows and news media systems
coincide and interlink with financial flows and actors, thus constituting a close
relationship between financial news and the finance sector. This relationship is
also attached to the rapid changes within information and communication tech-
nology and the compression of time and space in capital accumulation.
The second aspect dissects the political economy of Web. 2.0 with a specific
focus on how produsers are commodified and sold to advertisers and how the
work performed by users in social network platforms such as Facebook is
appropriated by capital. The commodification of social media and Internet use
has potentially far-reaching possibilities. The colonization of free time, the
total commercialization of recreation, personal social relations and even the
self, by capital, is made possible by the corporate control over the user dimen-
sion in social networks and other social media platforms. Internet surveillance,
in which commercial gathering, owning and processing of private informa-
tion, is one of the major assets in the circulation of capital and could be viewed
as a potentially threat to users, and even a part of the objective violence consti-
tuted in capitalist exploitation.
Undeniably this chapter has focused on the negative aspects of how main-
stream news media facilitates and reproduces the exploitation of capital, how the
use of new information/communication technology become colonized by capi-
tal, and how commodification processes tend to dominate the flow of informa-
tion in global media and communication systems. However, there are also several
aspects of media production and communication technology that point in an
opposite direction and open up for counter-hegemonic formations in a global
context. The dynamic production and circulation of alternative and radical media
and the ongoing struggle for a commons-based Internet are important aspects to
highlight within critical media and communication research. The realm of news
media production and communication technologies is never monolithic, thus it
also needs to be theorized and analysed from the perspective of emerging alter-
natives (cf. Fuchs 2011). After all, the groundbreaking theory of Marx on capital-
ism also points out alternatives to the total exploitation of capital.
References
Almiron, Núria. 2010. Journalism in Crisis. Corporate Media and Financialization. New
Jersey: Hampton Press.
130 ekman
1 Introduction
Following 1989/90, hardly any “new media” gained as much importance as the
Internet did – on two parallel levels simultaneously: firstly, the Internet became
and remains the central vehicle of transnational economy, and secondly, the
new technology became the focus of mythical tales: “Hardly had the social uto-
pia been banished than the bourgeois media began to revel in unsocial techni-
cal utopias” (Haug 2003, 68; cf. Mosco 2004; Schröter 2004a; Flichy 2007). After
the Cold War between Eastern Stalinism and Western capitalism, it seemed the
next stage of history would be the solution to all problems, a capitalism ren-
dered “frictionless” (Bill Gates) by the Internet. Gates’ formulation by the way
implied that capitalism up to that point was still full of friction, despite all
official assertions to the contrary.
As early as 1981, Lyotard had observed that “[e]ven capitalism, the liberal
or neo-liberal discourse […] ha[s] little credibility in the contemporary situa-
tion”, for “it no longer knows how to legitimate itself”. However, capitalism can
exploit “information technologies” in order to achieve “the computerization of
all of society […]. That is today’s capitalist horizon; and it is clear this will be
what brings capitalism out of the crisis” (Lyotard 1986, 210). Lyotard takes
�completely for granted that information technologies will be able to solve the
diagnosed crisis – rather than exacerbating it.
However, at this time “the Internet” as such did not yet exist, only some of its
predecessor networks which were hardly used by corporations. The Arpanet,
one of the more important predecessors of the Internet (cf. Campbell-Kelly/
Swartz-Garcia 2013), resulted from the overlapping of military (communica-
tion that would still function in case of a thermonuclear war) and academic
(sharing computer resources, which were scant at this time) discursive prac-
tices. For a long time, it was seen emphatically as a non-commercial, non-�
economic medium (cf. Abbate 1999; Schröter 2004a, 20–148). Only in the 1990s
did the net become more widely used, particularly following the 1991 lifting
of the ban on commercial activity and opening of the www in 1994. And today,
in 2011, it literally seems to have become the “net of the world market” (Marx
1991, 929).
Nietzsche’s original German) of new media, but there is no guarantee that they
will develop as originally anticipated.
The following section will outline some parts of the discourse on the Internet
that developed during the 1990s. We are concerned in particular with those
arguments that, hardly had the “user-friendly” World Wide Web platform become
popular, sought to transform the Internet into a medium of the global neolib-
eral economy.
2 Frictionless Capitalism
The Internet was only cleared for commercial activity in 1991, and soon after-
wards began to expand rapidly due to the spread of the www and browsers
after 1994. Politics reacted quickly. As early as 1994, the u.s. Vice-President Al
Gore gave his speech Building the Information Superhighway, in which he
coined the metaphor of the information superhighway. Gore invokes the uto-
pian model of the “universal archive” that developed alongside the earliest
forms of the Internet: “We now have a huge quantity of information available
with respect to any conceivable problem that is presented” (1994). And as the
Vice-President makes abundantly clear, this information should be placed pri-
marily at the disposal of “business people” so that they can succeed in their
tasks. However, the problem is how to find one’s way around this vast mass of
information: “As we confront this huge quantity of information, we see the
appearance of these new devices that can sort through it quickly, organize it,
and apply it”. These “new devices” are of course none other than the personal
computers (with installed browsers allowing access to search engines etc.) that
spread rapidly from the beginning of the 90s. They are able to provide valuable
services in economic problem-solving, as they do in politics: “Probably 90 per-
cent of the work I do when I’m in my office in the West Wing of the White
House is on a computer terminal”. But in order for all of this information to be
available, the machines need to be connected. Gore stresses that the develop-
ment of the National Information Infrastructure is mainly the task of private
enterprise – despite the fact that the development of data networks was pri-
marily supported by the military and universities, and thus at least partly by
public funds.
Naturally, Europe did not want to lag behind the usa. The “Bangemann
Report” titled Europe and the Global Information Society hurriedly composed
by the eu Commission only refers back to Gore’s transport metaphor in pass-
ing, but sounds even more optimistic: “The information society has the poten-
tial to improve the quality of life of Europe’s citizens, the efficiency of our
136 SCHRÖTER
2 Discussing the question of whether and how hegemonic discursive practices are inscribed in
technologies and thus try to operationalise them is particularly relevant in the case of com-
puters, as this technology is by definition open and programmable, waiting like a sponge to
soak up discursive practices in the form of programmes; cf. Schröter (2004a, 7–17, 279–292;
2005). This pro-gramming process has nothing in common with the simple, unsustainable
instrumentalism advocated by Kellner (2004) in regard to the “information superhighway.”
The Internet And “frictionless Capitalism” 137
3 The portal still exists (www.napster.com), but the free sharing of music files is no longer
possible.
4 Or with massive threats and intimidation – as evident in the respective poster, cinema and
television campaigns. These function like instruction manuals, driving home a conservative
usage of data networks, that is to say a usage compatible with capitalism.
5 As, for example, in pseudo-futurological works of propaganda such as Tapscott (1996).
138 SCHRÖTER
[I]f every buyer knew every seller’s price and every seller knew what
every buyer was willing to pay, then everyone in the ‘market’ would be
able to make fully informed decisions and society’s resources would be
distributed evenly. To date we haven’t achieved Smith’s7 ideal because
would-be buyers and would-be sellers hardly ever have complete infor-
mation […] The Internet will extend the electronic marketplace and
become the ultimate go-between, the universal middleman […] It will be
a shopper’s heaven.
ibid., 180–181
That is to say that the universal communication between buyers and sellers
made possible by the Internet and the universal access that home pcs give
to all ranges of goods will prevent that participants in the market have only
6 With the exception that “the wealth of our marketplaces” in cyberspace is referred to, which
appears to assume an understanding of the Internet as a market.
7 Gates is here referring to Adam Smith, one of the masterminds of market economy.
The Internet And “frictionless Capitalism” 139
At a growing number of [Levi Strauss & Co.] outlets, customers pay about
$10 extra to have jeans made to their exact specification – any of 8,448
different combinations of hip, waist, inseam, and rise measurements and
styles.
ibid., 189
8 It might even be possible to trace the emergence of “Big Data” back to the trial to implement
the “perfect market” in reality, because “perfect markets” are possible only – according to
neoclassical ideology – when having perfect transparency. This idea will be developed in
another essay soon.
140 SCHRÖTER
This totalitarian order – including driving home “how you compare” with oth-
ers, i.e. what counts as standard – enables a huge rise in consumption effi-
ciency; the pc serves as an efficiency machine not just in terms of Al Gore’s
work, but also in terms of buying – indeed, it seems possible to suggest prod-
ucts to consumers that they themselves do not (yet) know they want.
This “techno-eschatology” combines “free-market visions of endless expan-
sion, and an abiding faith in technology” (Dery 1996, 8, 10). It is possible to
enumerate countless further similar web manifestos: thus Dertouzos (1997, 9)
also writes: “It seemed natural and inevitable to me that the future world of
computers and networks would be just like the Athens flea market – only
instead of physical goods, the commodities would be information goods”.
In all of the texts discussed here, barriers are broken, global expansion (of
markets) is predicted, and limitless, universal competition and concurrent
unlimited access to the Internet is not only demanded, but more or less com-
manded – often in the name of an anonymous “we” or “us”. This seems to blend
in perfectly with the structure of the www: “Internet protocol enables almost
unlimited expansion and thus accommodates the pressure of capital to accu-
mulate and expand” (Altvater 1998, 60; cf. Schiller 1999).
And thus, around 1999, a new magic word dreamed up around the mid-1990s
began to circulate: New Economy. The constant conjuration of the Internet as
the medium of a new capitalism seemed to have reached its goal. As if from
nowhere, the shares of dot.com start-ups shot sky high, and the Internet
seemed to have become a veritable money-making machine. However, as it is
well known, this bubble soon burst with a loud bang.
The discussions dating from the 1990s reveal the programme for programmable
machines: They are to serve the complete and utter expansion of �capitalism to
The Internet And “frictionless Capitalism” 141
every corner of the world, including individual subjects’ inner selves. With the
advent of eBay, every flat becomes part of the global market, and every private
homepage creates a shop window for marketing one’s own self. Paul Treanor
remarked quite early on that the neoliberal discourse on the Internet prolifer-
ating during the 1990s had totalitarian characteristics:
This logic says in effect: ‘no one is free to stay outside the free market’. […]
Net-ism does not want a choice: it wants the Net, one Net, one global Net,
one Net everywhere, one universal cyberspace, and nothing less. It seems
that, as with the ideology of the free market (and as with liberalism in
general), no co-existence is possible with the Net.
treanor 1996
But as has already been suggested several times, there are reasons to doubt –
following Marx – whether this rededication and readjustment of the Internet
is in fact really frictionless. The burst of the New Economy bubble already indi-
cates this.
It appears as if the spread of digital media, the “third industrial revolution”,
is actually conflicting with capitalism – as suggested by the legal and police
disputes over file sharing sites such as Napster and other phenomena such as
cd burning, illegal sharing of films etc.9 Intimations of this sort are already to
be found in one of the sources of today’s digital media culture. In his 1948 book
on cybernetics, Norbert Wiener wrote of the coming potential of the “ultra-
rapid computing machine[s]”:
The automatic factory and the assembly line without human agents are
only so far ahead of us as is limited by our willingness to put such a degree
of effort into their engineering as was spent, for example, in the develop-
ment of the technique of radar in the Second World War. […] It may very
well be a good thing for humanity to have the machine remove from it the
need of menial and disagreeable tasks, or it may not. […] It cannot be
good for these new potentialities to be assessed in the terms of the open
market […] There is no rate of pay at which a United States pick-and-
shovel laborer can live which is low enough to compete with the work of
9 Cf. Hartmut Winkler, who states: “One is almost reminded of the Marxist contradiction
between productive forces and the conditions of production: the technical potential of tech-
nical reproduction and its societal constitution – copyright – are directly opposed to one
another” (Winkler 2004, 29). See also Kurz (2007) for a polemic, but detailed discussion if
digital products disrupt the commodity form.
142 SCHRÖTER
In the same way that production work was thinned out or completely
abolished by industrial robots, office work and services are now being
10 Marx already knew that science and technology have caused “general social knowledge
[to] become a direct force of production” (Marx 2005, 706) – however, this debate is in
precisely that section of the Grundrisse concerned with the “contradiction between the
foundation of bourgeois production (value as measure) and its development. Machines
etc.” (ibid., 704).
The Internet And “frictionless Capitalism” 143
thinned out or abolished by the Internet. The first wave or stage of the
microelectronic revolution had already made far more of the workforce
redundant than the capitalist exploitation process could reabsorb by
lowering the cost of products and the market expansion thus made pos-
sible. If the compensatory mechanism in the capitalist development of
productive forces of earlier [industrial] revolutions was no longer effec-
tive during the first stage of the microelectronic revolution, it is even less
so during its second, Internet-determined stage. The result can only be
further, significant growth in structural mass unemployment: in the
Federal Republic of Germany, there will simply then be eight or ten mil-
lion unemployed instead of four million.
kurz 2000
And when the rfid chips currently hailed as the newest great achievement
network products in supermarkets, warehouses and so on, then most ware-
house and supermarket workers will end up on the street (and this, rather than
data protection, is the new chip’s real problem).11 Around 2005, the world’s
largest 200 businesses encompassed more than 25% of global economic activ-
ity, but were only able to employ 0.75% of humanity (cf. Kurz 2005, 81). Even
though simulation, automatisation and networking cause productive forces’
potential to soar, more and more people seem to be excluded from the cycle of
work12 – earning money – consumption, which in the end plunges the entire
11 Cf. the online rfid journal as the richest source of information: http://www.rfidjournal
.com, retrieved November 9, 2011. The best introduction to this technology and the possi-
bilities it offers is an article under the following link: http://www.rfidjournal.com/article/
articleview/1339/1/129/, retrieved November 9, 2011. Here it states explicitly: “Some auto-
id technologies, such as bar code systems, often require a person to manually scan a label
or tag to capture the data. rfid is designed to enable readers to capture data on tags and
transmit it to a computer system – without needing a person to be involved.” Another
job lost!
12 This argument has been criticized. There has been a discussion around the so-called ‚pro-
ductivity paradox’ (f.E. Brynjolfsson 1992): It seemed as if the increasing use of computers
didn’t increase productivity and so didn’t erase work (for critiques of this position see
some of the contributions in Wilcocks and Lester 1999 and Trenkle 2011). But even some
of the most passionate advocates of this argument, f.E. Erik Brynjolfsson, have to admit in
a recent publication with the telling title ‘Race against the Machine’ (Brynjolfsson and
McAfee 2011) that digital technology is erasing work and therefore leads to serious prob-
lems for economic reproduction. Of course affirmative writers like Brynjolfsson come not
even close to the insight that capitalism and digital technology might not be compatible
– and it’s absurd that he and his co-author praise their insight that digital technology
might erase work as a new discovery (see the quote in Brokaw 2011: “But there has been
144 SCHRÖTER
structure of the market economy into crisis. For those who do not work do not
consume and do not pay taxes,13 meaning that neither can the products gener-
ated be sold (leading to a crisis of the domestic market), nor can the state
responsible for the legal, education-political etc. framework of the market con-
tinue to function – the ever deeper debt of a lots of European states are com-
mon knowledge. Consumers, who lose their jobs or have to do mini-jobs, take
credits to maintain their standard of living. At the same time businesses are
forced to go into debt in order to keep up with increasingly rapid leaps in
�productivity. The consumers, the state and the businesses need credits. The
simultaneity between the spread of digital technology, increasing structural
mass unemployment and the inflation of the (credit-based) financial markets
since the 1970s is surely no coincidence – rather, it is a sign of the conflict
between capitalist conditions of production and digital or networked forces of
production.
The obvious counterargument that new technologies create new industries
and new jobs (if only for the people delivering the products ordered on eBay)
unfortunately does not hold water. At present, far fewer new jobs are being
created (and if so, they are often only in the precarious low-pay sector) than
are being cut.
relatively little talk about role of acceleration of technology”), as if there hadn’t been the
whole Marxian discussion or at the least the work of Jeremy Rifkin (1995). See also the
recent book by Constanze Kurz and Frank Rieger (2013) and especially the study of Frey
and Osborne (2013), who argue that 47% percent of all jobs in the us are threatened by
computerisation in the next years. For a historical account of the discussion on ‘techno-
logical unemployment’ in the us see Bix (2000). See also the differentiated discussion in
Cortada (2004, 30–40).
13 Not to mention the transnational molecularised businesses granted tax cuts due to frantic
location competition (cf. Kurz 2005, 135–144). When speaking about global economy one
point has to be made: One reviewer of this text asked: “How does uneven development fit
the conclusions drawn from the work of Wiener and Marx?” If I understand correctly the
question was directed at the Chinese growth, without which the global crisis would be
even deeper. This implies that China proves that capitalism is still working well, at least in
some parts of the world. Doesn’t the growth rate of Chine prove this? This question is
interesting, but to answer it in detail there is not enough space here (especially because
this is not the central topic of this chapter). But to give a short answer: Chinas seeming
“successes” are in no way a counterargument to the diagnosis of (perhaps terminal) capi-
talist crisis (see Kurz 2005, 180–186; see the short comments on China in Kurz 2010). On
the contrary: Chinas growth is completely dependent on the fictive capital generated
by credits (mostly) in the us. The Chinese economy is completely oriented on export
(mostly) in the us. When the credit-chains in the us collapse the Chinese growth will end
– not to mention the disruptive social and ecological problems.
The Internet And “frictionless Capitalism” 145
This is the real meaning of the catchphrase “digital revolution”, one that usu-
ally remains unconscious. The leading thinker on cybernetics Norbert Wiener
14 Even though it occasionally sounds like this in Marx’s writing, for example when he
writes: “Social relations are closely bound up with productive forces. In gaining new pro-
ductive forces, human beings change their methods of production, and by changing their
methods of production, the way they earn their living, they change all of their social con-
ditions. The hand-mill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam-mill society with
the industrial capitalist” (Marx 2009, pp. 48–49).
15 In Castoriadis’ brilliant discussion of Marx, this particular aspect of Marxian analysis
appears to have been misinterpreted. Castoriadis states that Marx accuses the capitalist
conditions of production of “a slow-down in the development of the productive forces,”
while this has actually “instead accelerated in proportions that were unimaginable in
an earlier time” (Castoriadis 1998, 15). While the ideological whips of the overdue moderni-
sation in the former Eastern Bloc did in fact assert that their so-called “socialism” liberated
the development of the productive forces, Marx’s point – particularly in the Grundrisse – is
that capitalism develops the forces of production to an inconceivable extent and that pre-
cisely that limits it – for this development does away with the work that accumulation of
value is based upon. The Communist Manifesto states: “Modern bourgeois society with its
relations of production, of exchange and of property, a society that has conjured up such
gigantic means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to
control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells” (Marx and
Engels 2009, 10). This does not sound like a slowing down of productive forces by the condi-
tions of production, rather the latter have been forced into a tight spot by the former.
146 SCHRÖTER
seems already to have anticipated this: “The answer, of course, is to have a soci-
ety based on human values other than buying and selling” (Wiener 1961, 28).
It is surprising that the conflict Wiener anticipates between the potential of
computer technology and the capitalist social form of reproduction makes no
appearance at all in the current debate on cybernetics in media studies
(cf. Bergermann 2004) – despite the fact that this conflict is the crucial effect of
the programmable technologies connected to the science of cybernetics. It
seems as if the analysis of media and communication would benefit a lot from
re-reading Marx (see Mosco 2009). For example, Claus Pias writes:
The possibility that cybernetic arrangements, their knowledge and the digital
media connected to them could actually have a destabilising effect on the
market-based form of Pias’s underdetermined notion of ‘society’ is not taken
into consideration, similarly to Lyotard’s grand récit of 1981.16 In contradiction
to Wiener, the “redundancy of utopia” (Pias, 2004, p. 325) can only be diag-
nosed if one is not yet affected by this destabilisation. Since 2008, we seem to
have been experiencing it more clearly than ever.
4 Conclusion
It is interesting that after the year 2000 we witnessed a little bit of history
repeating. At the end of the 1990s Gates’ optimistic notion of ‘frictionless capi-
talism’ was ridiculed by the subsequent collapse of the dot-com-crash. Before
16 Pias does admit, however, that cybermetics might be “definitely problematic.” Pircher
only mentions that “in Western market economies automatisation was perceived as a
threat” (2004, 93) – even though it was not just “perceived” as such, but actually was and
is a threat to many jobs.
The Internet And “frictionless Capitalism” 147
the crisis beginning of 2008 there was a similar optimistic discourse, this time
on the ‘Web 2.0’ (see Leister and Röhle 2011 for critical analyses of the optimis-
tic discourses around Facebook). Again it seemed that the new Internet appli-
cations, the ‘social media’, could be the source of new kinds of work, value and
wealth. But this didn’t work – despite all the usages of social media as new
technologies of control, discipline and the commercialization of the uncon-
scious (see Fuchs 2010a; 2010b; 2011). Perhaps this shows again that digital
media are not compatible with capitalism and that there is no way to make
them compatible. Perhaps they are simply – with Marx – the productive forces
that clash with the relations of production. This does of course not lead by
itself to a new post-capitalist form of society, but it seems to heighten the
awareness that something has to be done.
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chapter 6
Since the publication of our original article (Manzerolle and Kjøsen 2012) there
have been a number of developments in the field of telecommunications, pay-
ment technologies and banking that support our original argument, but also
require that we address them and update accordingly. When we wrote our
original piece the widespread adoption of near-field communication (nfc) as
a mobile payment standard was still uncertain. At that time it served more as a
useful probe with which to introduce and discuss the relationship between
capital’s logic of acceleration and digital media. While the certainty of nfc as
an industry standard is yet to be determined, it has benefited most recently
from the support of Apple and its Apple Pay service. Apple, now one of the
largest companies in the world with respect to market capitalization, has pro-
vided a crucial endorsement of nfc by incorporating the standard into its
iPhone 6 and Apple Watch devices. The incorporation of nfc as a mobile pay-
ment standard is itself only one, albeit important, component of the Apple Pay
ecosystem which involves strategic partnerships with retailers, but most cru-
cially, credit card companies and banks. nfc, and mobile payment generally, is
now benefitting from Apple’s considerable marketing and advertising prow-
ess.1 As the promotional literature for Apple Pay proclaims:
Paying in stores or within apps has never been easier. Gone are the wasted
moments finding the right card. Now payments happen with a single touch.
Apple Pay will change how you pay with breakthrough contactless �payment
* Thanks to Nick Dyer-Witheford, Edward Comor, and Bernd Frohmann for their various con-
tributions to the intellectual development of this chapter. Thanks are also due to Veronica
Manzerolle for offering her time and editorial skills, and to Lee McGuigan for reading and
commenting on a draft of the paper. Finally, thanks to Jordan Coop for his help in designing
the figure of the circuit of capital.
1 Apple’s marketing and advertising efforts are an important intervention in socializing con-
sumers to accept and adopt mobile payment technologies and services. As a 2013 Accenture
report notes, “Some 41 percent of North American smartphone users are highly aware that
their phones can be used as payment devices at retail counters, yet only 16 percent have done
this” (Accenture 2013, 4).
technology and unique security features built right into the devices you
have with you every day. So you can use your iPhone, Apple Watch, or
iPad to pay in a simple, secure, and private way.2
Apple Pay combines nfc payment technology with its own thumbprint scan-
ner built into each new device to create a level of security and simplicity for
the transaction process, and allows both online and offline purchases to be
integrated into one platform. Although still a mostly unproven service, Apple
Pay is a further harbinger of the convergence of ubiquitous digital media plat-
forms with the flows of financial data. However, Apple’s alignment with credit
card companies, and the closing off of access to valuable transactional data by
retailers (Freed-Finnegan and Wall, 2014), has spawned some resistance from
banks and retailers and has led to a competing mobile payment system, for
example the CurrentC payment platform developed by the mcx consortium,
led by Walmart.3 Beyond Apple, nfc continues to be adopted as a standard
supported by major corporations across the mobile ecosystem: from software
developers (Google, Microsoft), to handset designers (Samsung, Research In
Motion), semiconductors (Qualcomm, Broadcom, and nxp), to credit card
companies (Visa and Mastercard). For example, the Softcard4 payment
network, which is now rolling out in the United States, has similarly
brought together major telecommunications companies (Verizon, AT&T, and
T-Mobile) and credit card companies (Visa, Mastercard, and American Express)
around the nfc standard. Perhaps what is most notable for media researchers
is the broad convergence between telecommunications and finance insti-
tutions and infrastructures.5 That very convergence is evidenced by
Canada’s Rogers Communications’ successful application to become a bank
and creditor.6 Indeed, its Suretap mobile payment technology uses nfc as a
central mechanism.7
nfc not only demonstrates a new political economic configuration for
media and finance industries, but at a more micro level, nfc points to two of
the most defining characteristics of contemporary digital media: personaliza-
tion and ubiquitous connectivity.8 These qualities are not simply autonomous
expressions of technological change, but as we will argue, they reflect a teleol-
ogy of digital media itself – one largely shaped by the barriers existing in capi-
tal’s sphere of circulation. We hope to situate these new phenomena within
Marx’s theorization of circulation, but to also suggest new theoretical modes
of analysis.
We argue that nfc is just one small example of a more general evolu-
tion of digital media in line with capital’s logic of acceleration. It repre-
sents this logic in two key ways. First, it accelerates the actual moment of
exchange by reducing latency and minimizing “wasted moments”; second,
it produces transactional data that can be used as a logistical resource to
accelerate the circulation of commodities (Manzerolle and Kjøsen, 2014).
It is precisely this logic we will address by examining and situating the
place of media within the overall circuit of capital. Media enable capital
to move as an iterative process and are therefore key in circulating capital;
they are the means by which capital communicates itself in and through
society.
This chapter argues that questions of circulation are central to the study of con-
temporary and future media under capitalism. Moreover, it argues that such ques-
tions – questions that evidence strong parallels with those of media theorists and
historians largely outside of the Marxist tradition
Â� – have been central to Marx’s
6 “The [Rogers] bank would likely primarily deal in credit and mobile payment services, as
opposed to bricks and mortar bank branches that take traditional savings and loan accounts”
(Evans 2011). See www.rogersbank.com.
7 http://www.rogers.com/web/content/suretap.
8 There have been a number of alternative mobile payment systems proposed, reflecting a
diversity of interests; for example, PayPal is seen as a potential competitor of nfc (Barr
2012). Startup company Square has also offered a mobile payment service using a card
reading adaptor that plugs into a mobile device (https://squareup.com/). Hedging its
bets, Visa has invested heavily in Square (Barth, 2011). Moreover, even social media net-
works are moving quickly to incorporate peer-to-peer payment and transactional func-
tions into their platforms, most notably Facebook Messenger, Twitter and Snapchat. It is
uncertain to what extent nfc will play in these services, but they are representative of a
broad pursuit by new digital media companies to embed payment-like features in their
platforms.
154 MANZEROLLE AND KJøSEN
and future digital media. Our goal is to situate the ongoing evolution of con-
temporary media within an existing logic identified by Marx. We add to his
analysis a focus on the formal and material qualities of specifically digital
media. We ground the logic of acceleration within the materiality of contem-
porary digital media, and in so doing uncover prospectively new tensions and
contradictions.10 The newness of our contemporary moment lies in the matu-
ration (in complexity, sophistication, profitability) of digital media and the
development and convergence of the finance, telecommunications, and media
industries. Out of this convergence, the digital form allows the moment of
exchange to become ubiquitous and immediate. Indeed our opening example
of Apple’s nfc-enabled service encapsulates this convergence.
Digital media not only offer an acceleration of circulation in time and space,
but through personalization, provide new vectors for capital; finding the short-
est route between the point of production and exchange, and producer and
consumer. Thus in addition to its acceleration, circulation becomes diagram-
matic through personalization (Elmer 2004, 41–48).11 What we identify as new
is how the drive to accelerate is taken to its logical end in the conditions of
ubiquity and immediacy engendered through digital media.
Garnham (1990) and Fuchs (2009) argue that media and communication
should be systematically located within the circuit of capital. We take their
10 It is beyond the scope of this chapter to consider resistance and class struggle in relation
to circulation. Revealing how capital can be short circuited, however, is the ultimate goal
of our exploration of the increasing importance of circulation. Research (for example,
Bonachich and Wilson 2008, 239–243) suggests that labour has been generally weakened
by the recent logistics revolution. However, the streamlining and rationalization of the
supply chain have given workers that are strategically positioned in the distribution net-
work more potential class or bargaining power (Silver 2003, 100–103; Bonachich and
Wilson 2008: 244–249). Similarly, unionized and non-unionized workers in the telecom-
munications industry have repeatedly demonstrated that capital’s circulatory infrastruc-
ture can become a site for class struggle (see Mosco and McKercher 2008).
11 D.N. Rodowick describes diagrammatics as “the cartography of strategies of power,” and
thus the figure of the diagram helps depict “a historical image of how strategies of power
attempt to replicate themselves in forms of surveillances, documentation, and expression
on the one hand, and in the spacial organization of collective life on the other” (quoted in
Elmer 2004, 41–42). Greg Elmer writes, “In the realm of contemporary infomatics, the dia-
gram therefore allows us to trace the everyday data economy in which habits, routines,
rhythms, and flows are digitized, coded, and diagnosed for the purposes of control” ( 2004, 47).
156 MANZEROLLE AND KJøSEN
argument one step further and argue that what capital communicates is value,
that the circuit of capital (M – C…P…C’ – M) can be understood as a schematic
for this communication of value and that consequently the circulation of capi-
tal can be understood as a theory of communication.12 After all, capital is
“value-in-process” (Marx 1973:536).
The circulation of capital incorporates the circulation of commodities on the
market (C-M-C) as a moment of its own process. It is important to bear in mind,
however, that the circulation of commodities is wider than an individual circuit
of capital; C-M-C can also refer to general circulation, in which all individual
circuits of capital interact. “The circulation of capital…contains a relation to
general circulation, of which its own circulation forms a moment, while the
latter likewise appears as posited by capital” (1973, 619–620). The sphere of cir-
culation refers to more than simply market exchange. Nicholas Garnham argues
that within the sphere of circulation “we need to look at what Marx called the
locational and temporal moments, referring to the problems both of the actual
spatial extensions of the market (the physical transport of goods) and the time
expended in commercial transactions (this time refers not to any labour time
used in commercial transactions, but to the actual lapsed time expended in
transforming a commodity into money and vice-versa…)” (1990, 46).
As Marx explains in Volume 2, capital is a circuit because it enables a quan-
tity of value to pass through a sequence of three mutually connected meta-
morphoses. As it passes through these stages, value both maintains itself and
increases its magnitude. Once it has moved through each of these stages, capi-
tal has completed one turnover and can repeat the process anew. The circuit
has three stages: the sphere of production (stage 2) and circulation (stages 1
and 3); and the three particular forms of capital (money [M], commodity [C]
and productive-capital [P]). When the social function of a particular form is
fulfilled, capital completes a stage and assumes the next form. Stage 1 is
12 Importantly, because capital is a circuit or a closed feedback loop, capital can be understood as
both the subject and purpose of the communication of value. In Grundrisse, Marx argues that
when the circulation of commodities is incorporated into the life process of capital, it gives the
process the content of value (1973, 626). Marx writes that capital is the “predominant” subject of
the metamorphoses of value (1973, 620; see also 1976, 255). We argue that capital is an non-
human subject that seeks to transmit value-content through the circuit, which can only occur
by forcing the content to assume and discard the three forms of capital. In this communication
process, other actors, such as workers and capitalists, are reduced to mere relays (transmitters
and receivers) or a data source in the case of living labour. Kjøsen (2013) takes this argument to
its logical extreme, comparing the circuit of capital to a general communications system as
defined by Claude Shannon, argues that economic behaviour is a form of programming by
economic forms, and that therefore so-called human actors are reduced to mere relays for value.
Digital Media And Capital’s Logic Of Acceleration 157
cÂ� ompleted by the capitalist using money’s function as means of payment and/
or purchase to acquire labour-power and means of production. When these
commodities are set in motion as productive capital (P), and are productively
consumed, the second stage is completed. The result of the production stage is
a mass of commodities (C’) with a higher quantity of value than originally
advanced. The third stage is completed when the commodity’s function of
being bought and sold is fulfilled, thereby realizing the surplus value created in
production, and making capital accumulation possible in the first stage (Marx
1978, 132–133).
The circuit is Marx’s concept of capital (see Figure 6.1). It is the universal
form within which the particular forms of capital are internally related. The
identity of capital can thus be found in its unity and in the difference to itself
as unity. This negative unity is found when capital exists in either of its stages
or forms (Arthur 1998, 102–116). Capital is found in two aspects: “first as the
unity of the process, then as a particular one of its phases, itself in distinction
to itself as unity” (Marx 1973, 622). Capital is unified in the movement from its
universal to particular forms. Although the forms of money-, productive- and
commodity-capital are necessary for the existence of capital, the particular
forms are not in and for themselves capital. Outside the circuit they simply
function as money, commodities and a production process. Only in the circuit
do they also have the social form of capital (Arthur 1998, 107). The three forms
are only capital insofar as they are internally related to each other in the total-
ity of the circuit as the functional forms of circulating capital (Arthur 1998, 102;
Marx 1978, 133). In other words, they are forms of capital because each form is
the possibility of assuming the next form and completing and moving to the
next stage of the circuit (Marx 1978, 112). When capital is in negative unity, it is
Sphere of Circulation
M
STAGE 3 STAGE 1
Mp
C’ C
Lp
STAGE 2
Figure 6.1
The circuit of capital
P Creative Commons Attribution 2.0
Sphere of Production Jordan Coop and Atle Kjøsen.
158 MANZEROLLE AND KJøSEN
only potentially capital and perpetually becoming – it is capital if, and only if,
it can discard its current form and metamorphose into the next form, which
occurs only when the associated function is fulfilled. Money-capital is latently
productive capital, which is the possibility of commodity capital that in turn is
the becoming of money-capital.
For accumulation to take place, capital must constantly move between the two
spheres of production and circulation; although surplus value is created in the
sphere of production, it must be realized and accumulated in the sphere of circula-
tion. This realization is a necessary condition and moment of the entire motion of
capital: capital is the unity-in-process of production and circulation (Marx 1973,
405–6, 535, 620; 1978, 205). Effectively, capital must always be in motion in order to
be capital; when capital is not in movement, it is stuck in a particular form and
stage and is therefore negated as capital and devalued as value (Marx 1973, 621). To
reduce these periods of negation and devaluation, capital must increase its velocity
thus decreasing the time spent in circulation. To accelerate, however, capital must
develop or adopt media that allows it to bind space and time, and thereby progres-
sively overcome the barriers capital posits to its functioning (see below). It is never
a guarantee, however, that an individual capitalist will complete a turnover:
The three processes of which capital forms the unity are external; they
are separate in time and space. As such, the transition from one into the
other, i.e. their unity as regards the individual capitalists, is accidental.
Despite their inner unity, they exist independently alongside one another,
each as the presupposition of the other. Regarded broadly and as a whole,
this inner unity must necessarily maintain itself to the extent that the
whole of production rests on capital, and it must therefore realize all the
necessary moments of its self-formation, and must contain the determi-
nants necessary to make these moments real.
marx 1973, 403
In other words, the formal circulation of capital (inner unity) contradicts its
real circulation process (external unity), in which capital assumes a material
form alongside its particular economic forms. Capital “risks getting tied up for
certain intervals,” because it must invest itself in matter that exists in geo-
physical space; it is therefore never guaranteed that it will metamorphose
into its next form (Arthur 1998, 117, 133). Consequently, circulation must be
considered from both its formal and real moments. Real circulation refers to
the actual circulation of matter, i.e. the movement at a given speed, of com-
modities and money through space and time. Real circulation thus includes
transportation, infrastructure, vehicles, packaging, warehouses, banking, and
Digital Media And Capital’s Logic Of Acceleration 159
below, it also acts to increase the speed and vector of capital’s circulation.
What is peculiar about mobile devices is that they open up for dealing with
these barriers simultaneously as we discuss in the following section.
The circulation of capital proceeds in space and time. As capital extends
itself in space and strives to make the earth into a market, capital tries to “anni-
hilate this space with time, i.e. to reduce to a minimum time spent in motion
from one place to another” (Marx 1973, 539). That space is annihilated with
time means that spatial distance is reduced to temporal distance; spatial exten-
sion folds into circulation time. Thus the annihilation of space becomes identi-
cal to abbreviating the circulation time of capital. Circulation time is a barrier
to capital because the time spent in circulation is time that could be used for
the valorization of value. The barriers around use-value and equivalents are
also significant, but will be addressed later in the paper.
Circulation time is a deduction from production time, specifically a deduc-
tion of surplus labour time (Marx 1973, 538–539). The maximum number of
repetitions is reached when the velocity of circulation becomes absolute, i.e.
when circulation time is zero. If this occurs there would be no interruption in
production resulting from circulation and overall turnover time would be
equal to production time (Marx 1973, 544–45, 627). It is the “necessary ten-
dency of capital to strive to equate circulation time to 0; i.e. to suspend itself,
since it is capital itself alone which posits circulation time as a determinant
moment of production time” (Marx 1973, 629).13 The closer circulation time
comes to zero, however, “the more capital functions, and the greater is its pro-
ductivity and self-valorization” (Marx 1978, 203). It is in this tendency that capi-
tal seeks new methods of communicating value at ever-greater velocities.
Capital’s increasing attention to logistics or supply chain management – as
evidenced in the rapid development of telecommunications and transporta-
tion infrastructure – is determined by its need for speed.
As an example of the apotheosis of this drive consider recent invest-
ments in fiber-optic trans-Atlantic cables purporting to shave off six
milliseconds of transmission time. Scheduled to be completed in
September 2015, cable company Hibernia Atlantic is currently building the
all commodities” and “it is therefore directly exchangeable with all other com-
modities” (Marx 1976, 159). In other words, in the form of money, “value exists
in its ever convertible form” and is in “constant readiness for action” (Marx
1978, 204). Formally, the movement M – C, the sale, therefore has low latency.
Thus apart from the problem associated with “sourcing” the correct quantity of
the means of production and labour-power from the market, the purchase, for
analytical reasons, can be treated as if it occurs automatically. In commodity-
form, however, value is not in the direct form of exchangeability and this fact
alone is what makes the sale more difficult and its duration longer relative to
the purchase. The commodity must pass the “test of use-value” before its price
can be realized in money (Marx 1976, 179). That is, someone must have a need
for the commodity’s use-value, but there is never any guarantee that in a given
market there is in fact a need for its particular use-value or, if there is need, that
this need is backed up with “hard” cash; need and equivalents are thus barriers
to capital (see below). Marx therefore refers to the sale, “the leap taken by value
from the body of the commodity into the body of the [money],” as the com-
modity’s “salto mortale” (Marx 1976, 200).
There is a further distinction to be made between the movements C’ – M’ and
M – C, which “has nothing to do with the difference in form between commodi-
ties and money, but derives from the capitalist character of production” (Marx
1978, 205). While both movements represent a change in the form of value, “C’
– M’ is at the same time the realization of the surplus-value contained in C’”
(Marx 1978, 205). This is not the case with M – C. Marx therefore argues that “the
sale is more important than the purchase” (Marx 1978, 205). Thus while it is
important to reduce both selling- and purchasing-time there is an added pres-
sure to sell as fast as possible because the commodity is impregnated with sur-
plus-value. While buying and selling formally represents movements of
commodities and money as a change of form, from a material point of view they
are also supported by the real movements of commodities and money as physi-
cal objects, and also by the human gestures involved in buying and selling.
Marx refers to exchange, the twinned acts of buying and selling, as a “chang-
ing of hands.” The physical movement of exchange is thus a transfer of com-
modities from the seller into the hands of the buyer, money going in the
opposite direction. It is in reference to this material changing of hands that we
should understand how payment technologies, for example those backed by
nfc, can increase the velocity of capital, i.e. reduce its overall circulation-time
by specifically reducing selling-time.
A sale is at the same time a purchase because for someone to sell another
person has to buy (Marx 1976, 205). This intimate connection means that accel-
erating either the sale or the purchase will reduce the time it takes to exchange
Digital Media And Capital’s Logic Of Acceleration 165
representative, receive (if any) the correct change back, and then place this
change back into your wallet and/or pocket whereby you can walk out with
your purchases and bring them into the sphere of consumption. With credit/
debit cards and their associated payment terminal and ecosystem, you first
have to take your wallet and/or card out of your pocket, find the right card, wait
for the moment the payment terminal is ready to accept your swipe or the
insertion of your card, choose between various options such as paying from
checking or savings, cash back, and in the end entering your pin number to
authorize a transfer of money.
In the introduction we cited promotional literature on Apple Pay. What is inter-
esting about this quote is that it specifically addresses the latency of exchange, but
addressed to the money-owning buyer: “Gone are the wasted moments and find-
ing the right card.” The moments Apple refers to include the time it takes to com-
plete some of the payment gestures just described (see Figure 6.2, which shows a
nfc-enabled device). With nfc-enabled devices or credit/debit card most of these
wasted moments are eliminated; all you have to do is to tap a phone (or other
device) on a payment terminal, and in the case of Apple Pay, authorize the trans-
action with a fingerprint scan (or other nominal authenticating action).
This basic ease of use is an essential component of the nfc standard itself
which is essentially a set of technical specifications for short-distance trans-
mission of data, similar to tap-to-pay features of some credit and debit cards.
nfc allows for the secure transmission of personal data, with limited read-
write abilities integrated into an nfc chipset. This technology builds on exist-
ing contactless standards with the goal of creating global interoperability
across systems and devices; it “enables devices to share information at a dis-
tance of less than 4 centimeters with a maximum communication speed of 424
kbps.”14 According to the nfc Forum (www.nfc-forum.org), a lobbying and
standardization group,
14 “Users can share business cards, make transactions, access information from smart post-
ers or provide credentials for access control systems with a simple touch” http://www
.nfcforum.org/aboutnfc/nfc_and_contactless/).
168 MANZEROLLE AND KJøSEN
As more free time is created, so too are the productive capacities of the social
individual. Importantly, free time gives way to the more full development of
the social individual, and of culture generally, a process of enculturation that
creates an ever-greater diversity of needs. As culture grows in complexity and
sophistication, so does the individual.
Digital Media And Capital’s Logic Of Acceleration 169
[T]he cultivation of all the qualities of the social human being, produc-
tion of the same in a form as rich as possible in needs, because rich in
qualities and relations – production of this being as the most total and
universal possible social product, for, in order to take gratification in a
many-sided way, he must be capable of many pleasures, hence cultured
to a high degree – is likewise a condition of production founded on
capital.
marx 1973, 409
Because surplus value relies on the production of free time to increase the ratio
between necessary and surplus labour, capital also creates free time generally,
allowing for the expansion of cultural activities. As a result capital can circu-
late more freely as the realization of surplus value is potentially linked to the
expanding set of needs variously produced by the converging media, telecom,
and culture industries.
Consequently, the consumption associated with this expanding bundle of
needs comes to reproduce “the individual himself in a specific mode of being,
not only in his immediate quality of being alive, and in specific social rela-
tions” (Marx 1973, 717). The social being of the individual and the circulation of
capital are tied to the perpetual modulation of consumption. It is for precisely
this reason that free time can be mobilized to serve the circulatory needs of
capital, particularly through the advancement of information and communi-
cation technologies (ict s) (Webster and Robins 1999; Manzerolle 2011). Both
the cultural sphere of consumption (use values) and the political economic
development of ict s reproduce a social being whose capacities develop in line
with the requirements of circulation.
The development of free time is important for another reason: It creates
new moments within daily life that can be subsumed into, and is an expansion
of, circulation itself. On this note, Dallas Smythe identified the productive
capacity of attentional forms and the mobilization of audiences towards an
expanding array of new use values (Smythe 1981, 40; McGuigan 2012). The colo-
nization of everyday life by digital and networked devices has opened up new
pores, cracks, and crevices of daily life into possible moments of communica-
tive utility in service of capital’s logic of acceleration (Manzerolle and Kjøsen
2014). As Leopoldina Fortunati has suggested, mobile ubiquitous media help
fill the pauses and downtime of everyday life with potentially new moments of
“communicative use” (2002, 517). The intensifying technological mediation of
human capacities by digital media give way to the “exploitation” of free (often
enthusiastic) labour of users (Zwick et al. 2009).
170 MANZEROLLE AND KJøSEN
The rise of web 2.0 (and its various corollaries) evidences the growing,
increasingly necessary, input of free labour to capital’s circulation. The unpaid
work in free, or unwaged, time is constantly a point at which capital seeks to
harness capital’s spiralling algorithm of accumulation. Capitalism here
requires a cultural exteriority as a source for future commodification. As Marx
tacitly suggests, capital creates greater free time in order to subsume that time
for the purposes of circulation (Marx 1973, 401). Using an analogy Marx deploys
to understand the necessary work of circulation, this creative and communica-
tive labour “behaves somewhat like the ‘work of combustion’ involved in set-
ting light to a material that is used to produce heat” (Marx 1978, 208). In free
time, produced and/or enabled by ict s, human capacities (creative, cognitive,
attentional and affective) act as fuel speeding up the circulation of capital (see
Stiegler 2010; Manzerolle and Kjøsen, 2014). Of specific importance is the cre-
ation, whether explicitly or implicitly, of a mass of personal data (Manzerolle
and Smeltzer 2011).
Thus in trying to overcome the various barriers to circulation, capital’s spe-
cific organization and management of space and time is crucial, but only inso-
far as this management coincides with the production of an expanding bundle
of needs and the related ability to purchase commodities. This is where the
capitalist development and application of ict s – including a wide variety of
ubiquitous, personalized, mobile digital media – becomes so crucial to the
overall circulation of capital, but specifically the transformation of commodity-
capital into money (C’ – M’). Similarly, the ubiquity and instantaneity of
�personalized digital media offers the possibility of precisely coordinating pro-
duction and consumption, replacing the traditionally accidental and ideally
anonymous moments of exchange with over-determination that comes from
the ability to identify and pin-point consumers in space and time. It is by this
very process that capital enhances the vector of its circulation and makes the
circuit diagrammatic (Manzerolle and Kjøsen 2014).
The twinkling of an eye becomes a metaphor for the electronic pulses that
encompass all cultural and economic information. We take as emblematic of
this process the current evolution of mobile payment systems, but perhaps
more generally, the convergence of communication media and crediting or
transactional mechanisms. Consumption capacity is increasingly articulated
in and through digital media, and we can situate the development of mobile
payment technologies like nfc within the process to generally heighten con-
sumption capacity while offloading costs onto consumers for their means of
consumption – in this case the convergence of telecommunications and
finance opens up new areas of commodification through digital data, in addi-
tion to the general expansion of consumption capacity.
Digital Media And Capital’s Logic Of Acceleration 171
As we argue, this process is the most advanced in its articulation by the apps
ecosystem, through which “capital has gained a targeting system. This target-
ing system has the function of predicting who will buy what, where, and when.
The system thus calibrates its predictive targeting by aggregating and process-
ing [data] extracted from the devices of individual consumers” (Manzerolle
and Kjøsen, 154).
Thus in the same way that industrial machinery absorbed the physical and
intellective capacities of the worker in the sphere of production, so too, our
networked environment absorbs the digital streams produced by the very
nature of personalization and connectivity in the sphere of circulation. For
this reason, it is not surprising that such processes are baked into the design,
technical composition and functionality of smartphones – particularly in
light of the rapid global adoption of these devices in both so-called devel-
oped and developing markets (itu 2011). Indeed, such surveillance oper-
ates on at least three levels – operating systems, carriers, and third-party
applications – creating a torrent of personal data flowing to and from these
connected devices. This invisible dataveillance is an embedded component of
our social lives and relationships as they are increasingly mediated by digital
networked technologies. Social networks like Facebook leverage the social
work of users to subsume them, turning them into a means of piggybacking
172 MANZEROLLE AND KJøSEN
Indeed with the rise of ubiquitous media, the body itself becomes inseparable
from a steady stream of digital data. The combination of personalization and
ubiquity makes the intensifying extraction of information a resource in the
diagrammatic expansion and intensification of capital’s vector of circulation.
As we have described in the preceding section, digital media are premised
on a homogenization of all information into digital code and given form
as electronic pulse. This is the same for all information regardless of actual
�content; the formative existence is the same. In the rise of financial capitalism
– or the financialization of the economy, particularly its application of ict s
Digital Media And Capital’s Logic Of Acceleration 173
�
networked globally – the irresistible impulse is towards employing the means
of communication for a total abbreviation of the transformations within the
circulation process that gives rise to the abbreviated formulation M – M’ – the
circuit of finance capital. It takes less time to complete a turnover when capital
does not need to pass into the material forms of productive-capital and com-
modity-capital. But the pressure to shorten circulation time is nevertheless
there for the same reason as a normal circuit, as the example of the new trans-
atlantic cable demonstrates.
The problem of credit, a topic, which prior to Volume 3, Marx regularly
brings up only to defer his analysis (Marx 1973, 519, 535, 542, 549; 1978, 192, 330,
420–421, 433), reflects a similar problem with digital data; its nominal exis-
tence is interchangeable with all other types of information. As credit over-
comes a recurring lack of equivalents available for purchase while capital
expands its production of surplus value, it multiplies the use of abstractions in
circulation. “Where does the extra money come from to realize the extra sur-
plus-value that now exists in the commodity form?” (Marx 1978, 419). “The stor-
ing up of money on the one side can proceed even without cash, simply
through the piling up of credit notes” (Marx 1978, 422). Throughout Marx’s
explication of the sphere of circulation, particularly in Grundrisse, there is a
constant reference to the deus-ex-machina of the entire system, namely, credit.
At various points, he raises the spectre of credit to suggest how it overcomes
barriers, or artificially bypasses circulation, precipitating crises of circulation
in the creation of fictitious or virtual money capital. “The entire credit system,
and the over-trading, over-speculation etc. connected with it, rests on the
necessity of expanding and leaping over the barrier to circulation and the
sphere of exchange” (Marx 1973, 416). All information becomes homogeneous
and interchangeable. For capitalism’s accumulative algorithm this is problem-
atic precisely because its logic is based on a process of transforming value and
is validated step by step through its metamorphoses.
Although his analysis is not developed in Volume 2, Marx explains that the
credit economy is merely an extension of the money economy, but that each
represents “different stages of development of capitalist production” in con-
trast to the natural economy “what is emphasized in the categories money
economy and credit economy, and stressed as the distinctive feature, is actu-
ally not the economy proper, i.e. the production process itself, but rather the
mode of commerce between the various agents of production or producers
that corresponds to the economy” (Marx 1978, 195–196). It is precisely the per-
sonalization of our media represented in the credit economy that qualitatively
changes the mode of commerce between agents of production. Through per-
sonalization, crediting mechanisms generally become intertwined with media
174 MANZEROLLE AND KJøSEN
and, in fact, it is precisely this integration that Apple Pay seeks to exploit and
profit from.
Credit is not only a medium by which to accelerate the circulation of capital
and its turnover time (Marx 1981, 567), but is also a system of abstractions
for personalizing, and prospectively commodifying the various moments of
exchange which can be accomplished through the collection and processing
of transactional data. Credit overcomes temporal boundaries by allowing the
identity and character of the creditor to act as leverage against future pay-
ment (for example, see credit reporting and rating agencies; Manzerolle and
Smeltzer 2011). By credit, we include not only the lending of money but also the
technical mechanisms that allow credit to be granted so as to reduce circula-
tion time. Digitization has enabled the expansion of credit, sometimes for
pernicious or predatory purposes (Manzerolle 2010). As such, digital media
systems increasingly produce greater and greater abstractions, and these become
real abstractions through the consumption of materials and labour time
(Cheney-Lippold, 2011).
This speed-up via abstractions and crediting mechanisms cannot occur on
its own, but requires infrastructure to actually transmit and expand the range
of financial and personal data and thus fuel the creation of ever-more sophis-
ticated abstractions. Although the creation and provision of credit is impor-
tant, it is equally important to provide crediting mechanisms that leverage
personalized data to speed up transactions (whether of credit or real money).
nfc technologies are only one small example of the broader credit apparatus.
Our digital media are increasingly functioning as means of either facilitating
credit or making credit more efficient (credit ratings, credit cards, virtual
goods, mobile payments). Increasingly, these flows of data are being treated as
a kind of pseudo currency, or at least ascribe some nominal value for their
marketing importance. Indeed, consumers are willing to hand over personal
information in exchange for coupons, discounts, and other rewards (Accenture
2013, 5). The production of abstractions, like those emerging from the credit
system for example, function as mediators of value approaching zero circula-
tion time. This mirrors similar considerations that have suggested that per-
sonal data itself be transformed into currency (Brustein 2012a; Zax 2011).
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chapter 7
Eran Fisher
* Thanks to Uri Ram for his invaluable help formulating the argument. I would also like to
thank Christian Fuchs and Vincent Mosco for their constructive remarks.
1 I use the distinction between cultural studies and political economy as ideal types, referring
to categories of analysis, rather than to actual coherent schools, or individual researchers,
which always tend to be more nuanced. Thus, for example, I do not argue that the Frankfurt
School has dealt merely with ideology, but rather that the ideal type of cultural studies and
its focus on ideology is well epitomized in the thrust of the School’s work.
capacity to decode, or “read” ideological messages in the media and resist them
(Hall 1980, Mathijs 2002), leading to a theorization of audiences as participants
in the construction of multiple meanings of media texts (Ang 1985, Morley
1992). Generally, then, whether assuming that ideological content is propa-
gated top-down to audiences, or whether audiences are seen as actively par-
ticipating in the process of meaning-making, this strand of Marxist research
contributes to the analysis of the media as an ideological site.
A second dominant contribution of Marxist theory to communication stud-
ies is a materialist analysis, focusing on the “base”. Such analysis of political
economy uncovers the relations of production entailed in media institutions.
Here, too, one can discern two dominant approaches. Predominantly, the
political economy of the media focuses on media ownership. This approach
analyzes media as a means of production, investigating issues of media
monopoly, media corporation’s mergers and consolidations, links between
government and the media, and employment arrangements of media workers
(Mosco 2009; Mosco and McKercher 2009; Schiller H. 1991; Schiller D. 2010;
McChesney 2008; Herman and Chomsky 1988). In the 1970–80s, the political
economy of the media was greatly revised by analyzing media as a site of pro-
duction in and of itself, thus highlighting the productivist role of audience in
the creation of media value, both as a commodity and as labour power. This
approach was pioneered by Dallas Smythe’s groundbreaking work on the audi-
ence commodity (Smythe 1981). Smythe suggested that what goes on in mass
communication is not primarily audience consumption of media content –
produced by media corporations – but, in fact, the selling of audience atten-
tion to advertisers. This formulation rendered the audience as active participant
in the political economy of mass communication. Smythe’s notion of the
work of the audience revolves particularly on cognitive and emotional work:
learning to desire and buy particular brands and commodities. His was a cri-
tique of what he considered to be a “blindspot” in the aforementioned Marxist
culturalist analysis, which tended to focus exclusively on the content of media
products.
Rather than viewing the media merely as an ideological, superstructural
apparatus, that supports relations of production in the economic base – pre-
sumably located elsewhere (for example, in the factory) – Smythe positioned
the media as a vital component in the chain of capital accumulation. Smythe
suggested that the media sells the audience commodity to advertisers. In
return for the bait of programing, audience remains glued to the television
screen, thus watching advertisements, which become an ever-important driv-
ing motor for consumption. For the first time, then, Smythe assigned the mass
media and the audience central roles in advanced capitalism, arguing that the
182 FISHER
While Marxist political economy of the media has been concerned since the
1970s with the question of exploitation in the media, little attention has been
given to the notion of alienation within this framework; an oddity, considering
that Marx conceived an inextricable link between the two. Marx’s conception
of alienation is complex and multi-layered, pertaining to a process as a well as
a result. Alienation pertains to the separation of the worker from vital life pro-
cesses and objects, as well as to the resulting state of estrangement from these
objects. It is the estrangement of workers from the labour process, from other
workers, from the finished product, and ultimately from their selves, their
species-being (Marx 1978). Rather than work being an activity that workers
control and navigate, rather than the real essence of a person be objectified in
what he does, rather than work be a means of self-realization and authentic
expression, rather than work help a person connect, communicate, and col-
laborate with other human beings, work under capitalism results instead in
alienation.
184 FISHER
�
capacity of choice. As opposed to the work process, of which workers had no
control, watching television supposedly puts the control in the hands of the
viewer (literally so, with the advent of the remote control). Watching the mass
media, then, is constructed in liberal discourse as a consumerist, irrational,
fun, and fulfilling practice.
While Marxist political economy of the media ignored the question of alien-
ation, the culturalist-ideological analysis did pay attention to some core aspects
of alienation, even if not attending to the concept per se. If watching – in the
capitalist media environment – is a form of working, then the process and con-
tent of that labour are also alienated from the audience. In fact, both advertise-
ments and programs (which support the content of the advertisements) feed
into and thrive on audience alienation, suggesting that self-fulfilment and
objectification should and will arrive from consumption and leisure activities,
rather than from work. Such themes are most extensively explored in the work
of the Frankfurt School on the culture industry (Adorno 2001, Ch.6). But such
analysis does not explicitly link audience exploitation to audience alienation.
According to Marx, alienation and exploitation are inextricably linked and
are a corollary of the very foundations of capitalism – private property and the
commodification of labour. One problem cannot be resolved without resolv-
ing the other.
Recently, there has been a renewed interest in the notion of audience work in
light of a changing media environment, particularly the emergence of web 2.0
and social network sites (sns). Some features of this new media environment
makes a revisiting of the concept of audience labour particularly important. As
opposed to mass media, sns is characterized by high levels of participation, by
user-generated content, and by the ability to create varied channels of com-
munication: one-to-one, one-to-many, and many-to-many.
Marxist-inspired research on this new media environment has focused
almost exclusively on audience exploitation. Simultaneously, mainstream (lib-
eral) research has tended to reaffirm the common-sense and ideological con-
struction of sns as facilitating de-alienation by offering users opportunities
for self-expression, authenticity, communication, collaboration with others,
and deep engagement with, and control over cultural, social, and economic
ventures.
My argument is that both these trends – seemingly contradictory – are in
fact dialectically linked. Exploitation and de-alienation are not simply two
186 FISHER
What is the work that sns users do? What is it precisely that they produce?
And how are they exploited? To accommodate a dialectical analysis of
Facebook we should be looking at it as both a means of communication and a
means of production. That is, not only as a new form of media which allows for
new modes of communication (Napoli 2010), but also as a technology that
facilitates a new mode of production. This should help up overcome the short-
coming of previous Marxist analysis, which offers two divergent analyses of
the media as either a means of communication or a means of production.
While such dialectical approach is appropriate to any form of mass media it
becomes particularly important in the new media environment, which can be
defined precisely as tying communication and production more closely
together. Indeed, the unique character of web 2.0 has encouraged researchers
to look more carefully at the dialectics of these two coordinates (Scholz 2010,
Lee 2011).
Facebook, the world’s most popular sns, was launched in February 2004
and had 845 million monthly active users at the end of December 2011
(Facebook 2012b). Facebook offers a platform where users can create personal
profiles to present themselves and communicate in varying degrees of detail
and complexity about their whereabouts, thoughts, feelings, and actions. Users
may add other Facebook users as friends, exchange messages with them, and
follow after their public messages and their whereabouts. Users may also cre-
ate communities, or sub-networks, based on shared interests. The profile
allows users to characterize themselves along various personal categories, such
as gender and education history, as well as through lifestyle choices, such as
favorite artists and hobbies.
Users communicate with friends through various private and public tools
such as “Status”, which allows users to inform their friends of their where-
abouts and actions; “Wall”, which is the a space on every user’s profile page that
allows friends to post messages for the user to see; and “Chat”, which allows
How Less Alienation Creates More Exploitation? 187
private, synchronic communication with friends. Users may also create and
join interest groups and “Like” pages, initiated and operated primarily by gov-
ernmental, commercial, and non-governmental organization as means of
advertisement, sale, and mobilization. The plethora of networks and commu-
nities of which Facebook users are part can generate social action – political,
economic, communal, or societal – by mean of communication and organiza-
tion. Facebook is reported to have an increasingly central role in facilitating
and organizing social movements and political upheavals from the Anti-
Globalization movement to the Arab Spring.
Facebook is inherently “biased” to communication so that even some per-
sonal activities on one’s own profile automatically translate into communica-
tion. Such is the case of photo “tagging” in the Photos application, one of the
most popular applications on Facebook, where users can upload albums and
photos. If an uploaded photo features a user’s friend, he may tag the photo.
This sends an automatic notification to the tagged friend, containing a link to
the photo. Thus, posting a photo may roll into a communication event.
Such banal description highlights the communication facet of Facebook,
and the opportunities it facilitates for users’ de-alienation, especially, as
opposed to the limited opportunities facilitated by mass media. The age of
mass- media was dominated by broadcast television and radio, print newspa-
pers, and film. It was centralist, allowing only a uni-directional flow of informa-
tion from few to many, and from top down. Mass-media created a hierarchical
dichotomy between active producers and passive consumers, content was
�prepackaged and thus limited in variety, at once assuming and constructing a
relatively homogenous audience. Social media, in contrast, facilitates varied
communication forms: few to few, few to many, many to many. It is interactive,
allowing users more engagement, and rendering the passive, homogeneous
audience of mass-media into an active and engaged audience. Communication
on the Internet allows individuals to narrate their lives (e.g. blogs), make their
views public (talkbacks), and express their creativity (YouTube). It also allows
Internet users to collabourate among themselves in an increasingly participa-
tory culture (Jenkins 2009, Burgess and Green 2009). Indeed, most research
looks at the communication facet of Facebook, and at its ability to empower
individuals by contributing to their objectification.
Thus, Internet research tends to construct communication – multiple, dem-
ocratic, trespassing boundaries of space and time – as an ideal, most fully
materialized by means of the Internet. It tends to focus on user’s experience
with Facebook, emphasizing individual agents’ purposeful use of Facebook for
communication. Such “methodological individualism” (Popper 1971: Ch. 14),
where individual users are the point of departure for the analysis, leads much
188 FISHER
signifies a turn from the culture of anonymity, promulgated during the early
years of online sociability in forums, chat rooms, and muds (Turkle 1997).
This brings us to a second, ‘thicker’ layer of information, which pertains to
the identity and authenticity of users. The ethics of sns call for publicness, for
defining and identifying oneself to oneself and to others. Users are encouraged
to reveal and present their true self and define who they are through profiling.
Such a demand puts users in a position of forced reflexivity, an obligation to
think about, define, and present themselves. Such reflexivity is built into the
website’s design, which encourages users to self-disclose abundantly and sys-
temically. As Illouz (2007, Ch. 3) has shown, profile-based websites (such as
dating sites) encourage users to think about themselves in particular terms
and identify themselves according to preconceived and pre-packaged catego-
ries, thus rationalizing self-disclosure. For example, when constructing a per-
sonal profile on Facebook users are asked to define their “philosophy” with the
following categories: “religion”, “political views”, “people who inspire you”, and
“favourite quotes”. Even though this kind of personal information presumably
precedes engagement with Facebook, it cannot really be thought of as pre-
existing information that Facebook merely harvests, but as information which
gets articulated within the specific context of social networks, i.e., that of com-
munication and sociality.
The third layer of information is further dependent on the engagement of
users with Facebook: information based on the communication content of
users, on their conversations with each other. In economic terms, this is argu-
ably the most valuable information produced by users. Indeed, the attention of
companies, professionals, and applications engages in the endeavour of mon-
etizing sns is primarily focused on communication content. Such endeavour
employs quantitative and qualitative methods to analyze the content of inter-
personal and social communication in order to decipher what people are talk-
ing about and in what way. The analyzed trends, keywords, themes, and
narratives can then be associated with demographic information (such as gen-
der, geographical location, or age) or with behavioural information (such as
consumption behaviour), and yield valuable commercial information. Such
information is also highly individualized, allowing it to make a definite con-
nection between a specific content and a specific person.
Commercial interests not only listen in to the conversation of users, but also
use the sns to initiate, engage with, and shape the conversation. They can par-
ticipate in the conversation by propagating messages, creating a buzz, and
designing fashions and fads. An exemplar of that is the viral message (or the
meme), often originating and promulgated by public relations professionals
How Less Alienation Creates More Exploitation? 191
(see: Downes 1999, Green 2010: Ch. 11). In such cases, users become the media
through which messages are propagated.
While communication content on Facebook covers virtually every aspect of
human communication, it is worthy to note two particular types of information
that sns is especially conducive in allowing their articulation and organization,
and that are of increasing value in contemporary capitalism: mundane informa-
tion, and emotional queues. Mundane information pertains to everyday expres-
sions of lived experience, such as photos taken on a trip, or reports about one’s
whereabouts (Beer and Burrows 2010). These scraps of information about every-
day life experiences were hitherto perceived as too fragmented, insignificant,
and personal to be noticed or reported on in public. sns is especially fit to host
this kind of information, which in turn opens up a capillary gaze at the way peo-
ple live. Emotional queues pertain to subjective emotional expressions, and to
emotional characterizations which accompany the communication. Emotional
queues are usually tied to some activity done by users, such as reading a news
story, or waiting in line at the supermarket. The ever-presence and immediacy of
social media through mobile devices means that sentiments are registered and
expressed almost as they occur, rather than reported upon in retrospect. sns –
because they are personal, interpersonal, and social; because they are associated
with leisure activities and sociability; because they encourage people to be
expressive, frank, and above all communicative – are particularly apt for the pro-
duction and extraction of such types of information.
The forth layer of information is performativite, pertaining to quantitative
and qualitative characteristics of users’ activities on sns, such as the number
of friends they have, the dynamics of the sub-networks of which they are part,
their level of engagement with Facebook, time spent on Facebook, type of
activities (number of posts, number of photos posted, number and nature of
“likes” clicked) and so forth.
The fifth and last layer of information, closely related to the previous one, is
associational. This refers to the very formation of sub-networks within the sns:
a user’s link to other profiles, to commercial and political pages, to news sto-
ries, brands, and so forth. By forming networks of associations, users are pro-
ducing webs of meaning, symbolic universes, and semantic fields. Association
information is valuable in further identifying and characterizing individuals.
In a postmodern culture, where identity is constructed through signs, the web
of “Likes” that users form serves as an indicator of their identity. Associational
information may therefore be valuable in uncovering correlations between
indicators. Moreover, the sub-networks that are formed are highly valuable
since they are likely to have an identifiable character; in public relations terms,
192 FISHER
Marxist theory, then, introduced two coordinates to the analysis of the media:
a culturalist, ideology approach, and a materialist, political economy approach.
In more abstract terms, these two coordinates refer to two distinctive facets
of media as either a means of communication or a means of production.
Notwithstanding Marx’s insistence on a dialectical analysis of society, Marxist
studies of the media commonly employ either of these two coordinates
(Fenton 2007). This is not to say that such studies are flatly undialectical, but
rather, that dialectics is not internalized into the analysis of media. Thus, for
example, culturalist analysis shows how media products such as television
programs work ideologically to support relations of production in general, not
in the media particularly.
Scholarship on the political economy of new media, and on audience labour
in particular, also tended to be relatively one-sided, highlighting sns as a site
of exploitation of “free labour” (Terranova 2004, Ch. 3). Such approach has
been criticized as over-deterministic, structuralist, and functionalist (Caraway
2011). Rather than underscoring media as a site of struggle between labour and
capital, such approach gives a one-sided analysis, that of capital. The crux of
Smythe’s argument is that with mass communication all time becomes pro-
ductive time, an argument later to be much developed with the notions of the
social factory, and immaterial labour. Caraway argues that such framework is
unable to distinguish leisure time from work time, coerced labour from free
labour, and capacity to work from willingness to work. This lack of distinctions,
How Less Alienation Creates More Exploitation? 193
2 For example, the 2011 revenues of Nielsen, the largest global media rating company, were over
$5.5 billion (Nielsen 2012).
194 FISHER
are hard to locate, localize, and collect, since they are “produced” during lei-
sure time, within private spaces, and within the communicative space between
individuals, as part of their everyday lives. The analysis presented here suggests
we should think about sns as a technology for the reterritorialization of the
kind of labour that produces such knowledges – immaterial labour – and the
kind of knowledges that are produced – general intellect (Peterson 2008).
Hence, the extension and intensification of exploitation in social media
compared with mass media relies on the unprecedented ability to harness new
forces of production to the accumulation process, particularly the production
of information through communication and sociability. The audience of sns
creates value simply by audiencing, by using the media platform to express
itself, communicate, and socialize. Such exploitation, then, is conditioned by a
promise for de-alienation. sns offer a media environment where audience
work can potentially lead to objectification: users have much more control
over the work process and the product (although not owning it legally); work
entails communication that helps users connect with others and objectify
more facets of their species being. sns is a space for self-expression, for making
friends, constructing communities, and organizing a political, cultural, social,
or economic action.
The two processes that sns facilitates – the exacerbation of exploitation
and the mitigation of alienation – are not simply co-present but are Â�dialectically
linked. sns establishes new relations of production that are based on a dialec-
tical link between exploitation and alienation: in order to be de-alienated,
users must communicate and socialize: they must establish social networks,
share information, talk to their friends and read their posts, follow and be fol-
lowed. By thus doing they also exacerbate their exploitation. And vice-versa, in
order for Facebook to exploit the work of its users, it must contribute to the
de-alienation of their users, propagating the ideology that de-alienation can in
fact (and solely) be achieved by communicating and socializing on sns, an
ideology of communication, networking, and self-expression (Dean 2010),
which sees network technology and social media in particular as the golden
route to de-alienation. In such ideology, alienation is linked with a lack of com-
munication and with social isolation, a malady promised to be cured through
communication and through sns. And so, the more users communicate and
socialize, the more they post photos and follow their friends, the more they
“Like” – in short, the more they engage in authentic self-expression and inter-
personal communication – the more they objectify and de-alienate. Put differ-
ently, the more they work, the more they create surplus-value, and the more
they are exploited.
196 FISHER
Conclusion
Table 7.1 summarizes the argument. In the mass media the exploitation of
audience work is fairly limited. The nature of the exchange between media cor-
porations and their working audience is programming (which acts as “wages”)
for watching advertisements (“labour”). Surplus-value arises from extra-watch-
ing (Jhally and Livant 1986), from producing value that exceeds that value
needed to produce the programming. In comparison, the level of exploitation
in social media is more intensive and extensive. Here, the media itself, i.e., the
platform (“wages”) is exchanged for the audience work of communicating and
socializing (“labour”). Surplus-value arises from extra-communicating, from
producing thicker, more textured information than is possible for individual
users to use.
Alienation of the working audience in the mass media is relatively high.
Television audience remains unidentifiable and anonymous to media corpora-
tions. Such audience is principally passive, merely choosing the programs it
watches. The mass media also constructs a clear hierarchy between the pro-
ducers of content and its consumers. Alienation of the working audience in
social media is lower. The audience is actively engaged in the production of
Exploitation Alienation
media content. Audiencing entails deep engagement with the media, opening
up the opportunity for authentic self-expression, and for communication and
collaboration with others. Lastly, a high level of exploitation of audience work
enabled by social media is dialectically linked with a low level of alienation.
Higher levels of exploitation are dependent on high intensity of communica-
tion and sociability, which, in turn, are dependent on the affordances that sns
allow for de-alienation.
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chapter 8
Robert Prey
1 Introduction
From the terrorist networks that brought down the twin towers to the financial
networks that brought about the credit crunch, today, as Hardt and Negri
(2004, 142) put it, “we see networks everywhere we look.” As the key isomor-
phism and central metaphor of our times, the idea of the network has become
the new “organizing framework” (Cavanagh 2007, 24) for how we understand
social interaction in contemporary society.
This of course raises some important questions for social critique. The met-
aphors, narratives, and frames we draw on for meaning perform into being
both forms of power and our ability to imagine critiques of power. Thus, this
chapter begins by asking what should be an obvious question: how does the
network metaphor shape our understanding of power?
In what follows, I argue that the network metaphor provokes a one-dimen-
sional understanding of power, one that fixates on an inclusion/exclusion
binary and is largely blind to relations of exploitation. The reasons for the
homology between network thinking and the critique of exclusion will be dis-
cussed, as will the inadequacy of thinking about power solely in such terms. I
then turn to an examination of how Marx can provide us with richer critique
of power in a world that – while increasingly connected – remains resolutely
wedded to the exploitation of surplus value. However, instead of carpet-bomb-
ing the network metaphor from the heights of ideological critique, this chapter
takes a reconstructive approach by first acknowledging a common ontological
basis – what I call a “process-relational ontology” – that is shared by both net-
work theorists and Marx. By starting from this common position it becomes
possible to reconstruct the distinctive path Marx takes by materializing ‘pro-
cess’ and internalizing ‘relations’. These critical differences, I argue, explain the
importance of exploitation in Marx’s work and its neglect in the work of most
network theorists.
Before network thinkers and Marx can be brought together in conversation
however, let us first turn our attention to the network metaphor, its ubiquity,
and the mode of critique it engenders.
1 In discussing network theory in this chapter I will primarily focus on Manuel Castells’ notion
of networks and his thesis of the ‘network society’. I do this because his is arguably the most
prominent and familiar version of network theory within Communication and Media
Studies. While Castells presents an original theory of networks, much of my analysis and
critique can be understood to apply to network theory in general.
2 In part this has to do with how broad the definition of networks is. As Watts observes: “In a
way, nothing could be simpler than a network. Stripped to its bare bones a network is noth-
ing more than a collection of objects connected to each other in some fashion. On the other
hand, the sheer generality of the term network makes it slippery to pin down precisely”
(Watts 2004, 27). The myriad ways of understanding the ‘network metaphor’ as it is used in
social theory has resulted in a situation whereby “even within a discipline it would be seren-
dipity rather than design if two theorists were talking about the same concept at the same
time” (Cavanagh 2007, 9).
3 The attempt to understand society through the study of networks is not new either (see
Quandt 2008). In Communication and Media Studies, Mattelart and Mattelart (1998) describe
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history. However, Castells and other contemporary scholars believe that “con-
temporary social circumstances provide, for the first time, a unique basis for
[the] pervasive expansion [of networks] throughout the whole social struc-
ture” (Hepp, Krotz, Moores, and Winter 2008, 4). This basic argument – that a
unique combination of technological, political and cultural factors have
coalesced so that networks have emerged from under the shadow of previously
dominant hierarchical forms of organization – accounts for “the rise of the
network metaphor” (Cavanagh 2007).
Yet, if we accept the idea that metaphors do not just describe but also pre-
scribe – that metaphors actively constitute the world we attempt to under-
stand – then we must be willing to accept that there are direct political
implications for the metaphors we choose. This is not an argument against the
use of metaphors. Indeed as John Urry writes: “social scientific work depends
upon metaphors and much theoretical debate consists of contestation between
different metaphors” (Urry 2003, 42). However, we must think carefully about
the type of metaphors we employ and their effects on shaping our perceptions
of social reality.4
Precisely how the network metaphor shifts our understanding of social and
political critique will be examined in the following section. I will argue that the
network metaphor orientates critique towards a binary focus on inclusion and
exclusion. In doing so it simultaneously orients critique away from the prob-
lem of exploitation.
how pioneering communications scholar Everett Rogers drew from the work of Gregory
Bateson, Georg Simmel and Jacob L. Moreno to update his theories of innovation by fore-
grounding communication network analysis. However, while network analysis has never
been more than a marginal endeavor Castells and other contemporary proponents of the
‘network society’ thesis believe that it is more applicable than ever.
4 Castells is certainly aware of this issue; indeed it is a central part of his theory of “communi-
cation power.” In his most recent book he draws on neuroscience and cognitive linguistics to
argue that we are made up of neural networks connected to an outside world of networks
through the metaphors, narratives, and frames we draw on to make meaning. As Castells
(2009, 145) puts it “[p]ower is generated in the wind mills of the mind” and thus “the funda-
mental form of power lies in the ability to shape the human mind” (ibid., 3).
The Network’s Blindspot 207
elites (Lash 2002, 4). Similarly, in his latest book Communication Power, Castells
argues:
We can see from this quote that not only does Castells see exclusion as “a fun-
damental form of exercising power,” but ‘exclusion’ and ‘power’ actually appear
to morph into one concept. According to Castells and other social theorists, if
networks and connectivity are the dominant logic or morphology of life, then
oppression is defined by disconnection from these networks. As the British
geographer and theorist Nigel Thrift puts it matter-of-factly, “new forms of con-
nection produce new forms of disconnection” (Thrift 2002, 41).
For Castells, the emergence of the new spatial logic that characterizes
the network society is expressed through the fragmentation of physical
space in a variable geography of hyperconnection and structurally induced
“black holes” – what he refers to as “the Fourth World.” This “new geogra-
phy of social exclusion” includes much of Sub-Saharan Africa, American
inner-city ghettos, French banlieues and Asian mega-cities’ shanty towns
(Castells 2000c, 168). Exclusion thus becomes the predominant side effect
of contemporary ‘informational capitalism’. For Castells, according to one
commentator,
[…] large sections of the world population are not so much repressed –
rather they are abandoned, declared worthless, and bypassed […] by the
global flows of wealth and power […] The intense, if repressive, attention
totalitarian regimes paid to their citizens has been replaced by the exten-
sive neglect of informational capitalism, which also declared entire pop-
ulations to be “redundant,” to be ignored or treated as undesirable
migrants if they show up at the gated communities of the rich.
stalder 2006, 131
programs” (Castells 2011, 774). “If a node in the network ceases to perform a
useful function it is phased out from the network, and the network rearranges
itself – as cells do in biological processes” (Castells 2000b, 15). Enrolling all that
is useful and required for the continued survival of the network and expunging
all that is considered useless or detrimental, the network “works on a binary
logic: inclusion/exclusion” (ibid.).
What is most important to take away from such a conceptualization of
power is that power is not enacted through personalized decisions but rather
through the protocols that a network sets. A protocol is a mechanism that
binds seemingly autonomous agents together so that they are able to interact
and form a network.5 “Without a shared protocol, there is no network”
(Galloway 2004, 75).6 Protocol allows power to become disassociated from the
acts of individual agents and instead embeds power in the rules and regula-
tions that make up the system.
Exclusion is perfectly situated to assume pole position as the dominant
political critique in a society that seemingly coheres around networks; where
being connected in constantly shifting links of affinity becomes the ultimate
aim and where power is never manifested in a fixed ‘class’, individual, or insti-
tution.7 As Daniel Béland explains:
5 In the world of digital computing, the term ‘protocol’ refers to the standards governing the
implementation of, and the communication between, specific technologies. However proto-
col is not a new word. A protocol may be technical, legal, financial, or cultural in nature. As
Alexander Galloway notes, “[p]rior to its usage in computing, protocol referred to any type of
correct or proper behaviour within a specific system of conventions. It is an important con-
cept in the area of social etiquette as well as in the fields of diplomacy and international
relations” (Galloway 2004, 7).
6 For example, the highway system, like any system held together by protocols, allows “interde-
pendence on the basis of independence” (Stalder 2006, 134). To be denied entry, or to be
excluded from the system – to be refused a driver’s license for example – represents the grav-
est threat. Thus, unlike traditional command-and-control hierarchies, which monitor the
content of interaction, power operates in a network through the protocols that set the ‘rules
of engagement’. As Felix Stalder notes, “[t]his is precisely the point where we can locate the
transformation of power operating through repression to power operating through exclu-
sion” (Stalder 2006, 135).
7 The post-Marxist critique of the idea that power emanates from an identifiable centre has
almost become a new academic orthodoxy. When Castells describes power as operating in a
‘space of flows’ he is building on and adding to a diverse tradition that includes Foucault,
Laclau and Mouffe and other influential post-Marxist theorists. In a different way, the recent
work of Hardt and Negri (2000, 2004, 2009), which I will be discussing in more detail later on,
also builds on this tradition. The contribution of Castells, and Hardt and Negri, is in provid-
ing the perfect metaphor for the diffuse, de-centred world of post-Marxists, because “[b]y
definition, a network has no centre” (Castells 2000b, 15).
The Network’s Blindspot 209
In our view, the very rapid diffusion of a definition of the social world in
terms of networks that accompanied the establishment of the connex-
ionist world makes it possible to understand how the dynamic of exclu-
sion and inclusion – initially associated with the fate of marginal groups –
was able to take the place previously assigned to social classes in the rep-
resentation of social misery and the means of remedying it.
boltanski and chiapello 2005, 349
8 Likewise, in this chapter I am not attempting to deny the existence of exclusion. I am arguing
that it has become too hegemonic. We thus find ourselves in a very different intellectual
moment compared to what Raymond Murphy (1985) was describing when he tried to over-
come the limitations of the then-dominant voice of critique – Marxist theories of exploita-
tion – with an appeal to Weber’s social closure theory of exclusion.
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9 In an essay entitled “The Social Exclusion Discourse” Daniel Béland documents the
French origins of the concept. He writes “[a]s early as 1965, social commentator Jean
Klanfer published a book entitled L’Exclusion sociale: Étude de la marginalité dans les
sociétés occidentales [Social exclusion: The study of marginality in western societies]. In
this moralistic book emphasising personal responsibility, the term ‘social exclusion’ refers
to people who cannot enjoy the positive consequences of economic progress due to irre-
sponsible behavior” (Béland 2007, 126).
10 Béland writes “the dominant political discourse about social exclusion has done little
more than legitimise modest social programmes that seldom challenge the liberal logic
seeking to limit social spending while encouraging citizens to become increasingly
dependent on market outcomes (ie. ‘recommodification’)” (Béland 2007, 134).
The Network’s Blindspot 211
response taken by Marxian scholars has been that of ‘ideologiekritik’: all talk of
networks is deemed ideological and a return to the analysis of class and exploi-
tation is called for (Garnham 2004; Callinicos 2006). Alternatively, following
Boltanski and Chiapello’s (2005) lead, we can largely accept the network dis-
course and attempt to generate a new theory of exploitation more suitable for
our “connexionist” world.
In what follows, I attempt to offer a third approach; one that leaves behind
metaphors and narratives of networks and instead examines the common
ontological framework that I argue guides the thinking of both network theo-
rists and Marx. Clearly Marx was not a ‘network’ theorist as conventionally
understood. Nevertheless, his discussion of capital as a relation and as value-
in-motion shares deep affinities with network thinking.11 This is no mere coin-
cidence. In this chapter, I argue that this affinity stems from a shared process-
relational ontology. By locating a common position from which to begin, it
becomes possible to reconstruct the distinctive path Marx took in conceptual-
izing ‘process’ and ‘relations’, and in turn, understand how this path leads us
not into the inclusion/exclusion cul-de-sac but rather to a critique of exploita-
tion writ large.12
11 Scott Kirsch and Don Mitchell develop in detail the affinities between Marx and network
theory – in particular actor-network theory: “Marx, of course, did not write in the lan-
guage of networks. But he did write in the language of circuits, showing in great detail
how capital – as value in motion – travels a set of circuits, from, for example, the hands of
the capitalist, into the machines and buildings of the work place, and on into the pro-
duced commodity. He shows how capital precisely because it is a relation, becomes “fro-
zen” for greater or lesser duration as the means of production or the produced commodity,
only to be returned to the capitalist when the commodity is exchanged on the market.
Commodities “stabilize” social relations in technologies and “things as such,” and com-
modity circulation in this sense is a network” (Kirsch and Mitchell 2004, 696).
12 Although my focus in this chapter is on exploitation and exclusion in the economic field,
it is important to point out that Marx’s theory of exploitation need not be limited to this
field. Buchanan (1979, 122) argues that Marx’s work includes “three distinct but related
conceptions of exploitation: (a) a conception of exploitation in the labor process in capi-
talism, (b) a transhistorical conception of exploitation which applies not only to the labor
process in capitalism but to the labor processes of all class-divided societies, and (c) a
general conception of exploitation which is not limited to phenomena within the labor
process itself.” Marx’s most general conception of exploitation appears in one of his earli-
est works, The German Ideology, where he describes the bourgeois view of interpersonal
relations which sees all human relations in general as exploitable:
[…] all […]activity of individuals in their mutual intercourse, eg., speech, love, etc., is
depicted (by the bourgeois) as a relation of utility and utilization. In this case the util-
ity relation has a quite different meaning, namely that I derive benefit for myself by
The Network’s Blindspot 213
2 Network Ontology
Let us now leave behind the network metaphor and work our way down to the
level of ontology. Once we do so we will quickly realize that this metaphor is no
more than a contemporary version of a much older philosophical position
which can be traced back to the pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Heraclitus.
This “process-relational ontology,” as I will call it, has found new life in network
analysis. I will begin by explicating what is meant by ‘process’.
2.1 Process
Network thinkers emphasize processes. Social reality is composed not of static
things, but of activity, of change, of flows. The idea that process precedes sub-
stance has been the primary argument of process philosophers from Heraclitus
to Alfred North Whitehead.
How does this relate to networks? Networks are dynamic patterns of pro-
cesses. The physicist Fritjof Capra, a former colleague of Castells at Berkeley,
has been a tireless popularizer of the new science of complexity and autopoei-
sis, which places networks at the center of all life processes. Capra, drawing on
the seminal work of the Chilean biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco
Varela, argues that what makes life a dynamic process and not a static system
is the characteristic of renewal and recreation. “[L]iving networks continually
create, or recreate, themselves by transforming or replacing their components.
In this way, they undergo continual structural changes, while preserving their
web-like patterns of organization” (Capra 2004, 10). Thus, networks are not
determined by one individual component (contra the genetic blueprint argu-
ment for example), nor are they characterized by the static and stable organi-
zation of relations. Instead, it is the entire process of interactions and the
continuous bringing into being of emergent properties through interactions
with the surrounding environment, which prevents a network from entering a
state of decay.
Networks are also not characterized by one-off interactions but rather by
enduring, recurrent, re-creative patterns of interaction over time. Thus, a focus
doing harm to someone else (exploitation de l’home par l’home) […] All this actually is
the case with the bourgeois. For him only one relation is valid on its own account – the
relation of exploitation; all other relations have validity for him only insofar as he can
include them under this one relation, and even where he encounters relations which
cannot be directly subordinated to the relation of exploitation, he does at least subor-
dinate them to it in his imagination. The material expression of this use is money, the
representation of the value of all things, people and social relations. (Marx 1974, 110).
214 PREY
2.2 Relations
Relations, writes the Dutch network theorist Jan van Dijk, are “the prime focus
of attention in a network perspective”14 (van Dijk 2006, 25). Relations can be
understood as the most basic form inherent to any network and a network can
be said to exist whenever two or more linked relations are present.
Rather than attempting to understand actors by looking at the institutions
and structures under which they live, or through the individual traits and char-
acteristics they posses, network thinkers believe that we can learn far more
about someone or something through the relations they are embedded within.
This argument is based on an ontology which sees the world as constituted by
forms instead of substances. Relational ontology posits that relations between
entities are ontologically more important than the entities in and of them-
selves (Wildman, 2010). In any network, Felix Stalder points out, “it makes no
sense to argue that nodes come first and then they begin to create connections.
Rather it is through the connections that nodes create and define one another.
13 We can only express change by adding a verb to a thing. Emirbayer quotes Norbert Elias
for an example of this: “We say “The wind is blowing,” as if the wind were actually a thing
at rest which, at a given point in time, begins to move and blow” (Elias 1978, 111f. cited in
Emirbayer 1997, 283).
14 While Castells is well known for not providing clear definitions of the concepts he uses –
preferring instead to let definitions emerge organically through their usage – Jan van Dijk
provides a very useful definition of networks in his book The Network Society. “A network
can be defined as a collection of links between elements of a unit. The elements are called
nodes. Units are often called systems. The smallest number of elements is three and the
smallest number of links is two. A single link of two elements is called a relation(ship)”
(van Dijk 2006, 24).
The Network’s Blindspot 215
Nodes are created by connections, and without nodes there can be no connec-
tions” (Stalder 2006, 177).
Network thinkers can be situated along a spectrum in terms of how they
conceptualize the relative importance of relations to nodes. Jan van Dijk
adopts what he calls a “moderate network approach” by focusing not solely on
relations, but “also on the characteristics of the units (nodes) that are related
in networks (people, groups, organizations, societies)” (van Dijk 2006). Other
network theorists take relational ontology to its logical extreme, arguing that
there are no essences (units or nodes) at all. Actor-Network theorists Bruno
Latour and John Law call their approach “radical relationality.” This is the prin-
ciple that “[n]othing that enters into relations has fixed significance or attri-
butes in and of itself. Instead, the attributes of any particular element in the
system, any particular node in the network, are entirely defined in relation to
other elements in the system, to other nodes in the network” (Law, 2003, 4).15 It
is not necessary to go to this extreme though in order to accept the central
argument agreed upon by all network theorists; that “[a]ll entities […] achieve
their significance by being in relation to other entities” (ibid.).
Finally, process and relation must be understood as co-dependent because
“a universe driven by the movement of process is necessarily a relational uni-
verse. In fact, the processive movement itself is the self-generation of relation-
ality” (Pomeroy 2004, 143). As I will demonstrate in the following sections, a
process-relational perspective is also the key to understanding Marx’s philoso-
phy, and in particular his theory of exploitation.
15 Just as in the idea, first proposed by de Saussure, that all words only achieve meaning
when they are juxtaposed with other words – ie. father and son, day and night etc. – radi-
cal relationality extends this insight beyond language to all things and beings.
216 PREY
With stability used to qualify change rather than the reverse, Marx –
unlike most modern social scientists – did not and could not study why
things change (with the implication that change is external to what they
are, something that happens to them). Given that change is always a part
of what things are, his research problem could only be how, when, and into
what they change and why they sometimes appear not to (ideology).
ollman 2003, 66
However, while Marx shares this predilection with network theorists, process
nevertheless takes on a whole new meaning in his writings. This is because, as
the philosopher Anne Fairchild Pomeroy argues, Marx materializes process
through his foundational category of ‘production’.16 Pomeroy compares Marx
to the process-relational philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, illustrating how
the category of ‘production’ in Marx is the “functional equivalent” of the cate-
gory of ‘process’ in Whitehead’s metaphysics (Pomeroy 2004, 44).17 A brief
overview of what Marx means by ‘production’ may be helpful to demonstrate
how it informs his process-relational ontology.
‘Production’ is for Marx a highly complex term that serves as a necessary
abstraction. Just as ‘process’ for Whitehead performs multiple levels of analy-
sis, Marx’s concept of ‘production’ functions on numerous levels from the most
16 Since process is a temporal concept it may be helpful to give a brief overview of Marx’s
theory of time. Against Kant Marx argues that time is not an a priori form of perception, nor
is it an objective sequence that is located purely outside collective subjectivity (à la Newton).
Instead, Marx argued, human time-consciousness emerges out of the very labouring activ-
ity, which objectifies our world. This is because it is only through labouring activity (produc-
tion) that real novelty comes into being. While Heidegger posits the activity of ‘Being’ as the
source of temporality, Marx regards this activity (labour) as introducing time into things
(objects, institutions etc). In turn the ‘objectified’ form of labour introduces objective time
(see Gould, 1978, 56–68, for a much more detailed explanation).
17 It is possible to sum up Pomeroy’s argument for the equivalence of ‘production’ and ‘pro-
cess’ as follows. Firstly, “[b]oth Marx and Whitehead use their respective terms to refer
both to the general abstract character of all productive processive activity and to any
specific concrete instance or moment of that activity.” Second of all, “[p]roduction and
process both refer to and serve to explicate the movement of becoming that is the tempo-
ral or historical world…” and finally “[b]oth process and production are affected by
socially related individuals…” (Pomeroy 2004, 60).
The Network’s Blindspot 217
abstract and general to the most concrete and specific. In Marx’s writings ‘pro-
duction’ operates:
(1) on the level of the general conditions found in all production as the
interchange between, indeed identity between, human life and nature;
(2) on the many levels of historical forms of production: communal, feu-
dal, capitalist, (3) within each of these, on the levels of different branches
of production, and (4) on the levels of the activity of the social subjects
who are ‘active in a greater or sparser totality of branches of production’.
marx 1973, 86; cited in Pomeroy 2004, 46
[…] must not be considered simply as being the production of the physi-
cal existence of the individuals. Rather it is […] a definite mode of life on
their part. As individuals express their life, so they are. What they are,
therefore, coincides with their production, both with what they produce
and with how they produce.
marx and engels 1974, 42
Thus, for Marx, each human being is what he or she does, and what he or she
does, constantly, is produce. We are continuously re-producing ourselves as we
produce something new.
Earlier I described how network thinkers regard the processes of renewal
and recreation as crucial to how networks are able to sustain themselves.
Marx’s conception of ‘production’ performs much the same function, but for
“individuals-in-relations” and the objective world produced into being. In
Castells’ theory of “the network society,” the locus of production is transformed
from individuals-in-relations to knowledge-in-networks. This is because for
Castells the key source of productivity in the network society is not the knowl-
edge worker, but knowledge itself. The tendency by network theorists to natu-
ralize knowledge represents the continuation of a long trend in economic
thought of bestowing innate qualities of value on factors of production. Marx
criticized this fallacy vehemently in his day and would no doubt concur that
knowledge or information “is not inherently valuable but that a profound
social reorganization is required to turn it into something valuable” (Schiller
1988, 32, cited in Jessop 2003, 2).
A network approach does not necessarily preclude a material view of pro-
cess. Like Castells, Hardt and Negri (2000, 2004, 2009) posit the network as the
dominant form power takes in contemporary society. Unlike Castells and most
other network theorists though, Hardt and Negri understand power as operat-
ing through processes of inclusion. The logic of capital, what they call “Empire,”
is best understood as a “universal republic, a network of powers and counter-
powers structured in a boundless and inclusive architecture” (Hardt and Negri
The Network’s Blindspot 219
2000, 166). Hardt and Negri understand this logic to be one that necessitates
constant movement and expansion outwards. Echoing Marx, Hardt and Negri
write, “the capitalist market is one machine that has always run counter to any
division between inside and outside. It is thwarted by barriers and exclusions;
it thrives instead by including always more within its sphere” (Hardt and Negri
2000, 190). By focusing on inclusion, Hardt and Negri are able to better con-
ceive of power as productive.
Who is the source of this production that ‘Empire’ seeks to include? In
Hardt and Negri’s Spinoza-influenced language, it is the ‘multitude’. The mul-
titude is a conception of class that extends beyond the wage-labourer to
include all those who labour to produce “the common.” It follows from this
that Hardt and Negri re-evalute exploitation to be about the expropriation of
the common. We could think of this as ‘network exploitation’ whereby the
common which is produced through the networked activity of the multitude
is simultaneously exploited by Empire. Capital is therefore dependent on
the multitude’s production.
Hardt and Negri thus follow Marx in understanding human agency to be
generative of a surplus: life as a process of production. This represents an
advance over network theories that can only conceive of power as working
through exclusion. As discussed earlier in this chapter, the theme of exclusion
tends to focus attention on deficiencies or handicaps, broadly construed. The
excluded are those who lack proper educational qualifications for example.
Exclusion thus emerges as a problem of lack. Exploitation on the other hand is
a problem of excess. ‘Exploitation’ defines the exploited as those who have
something, for why else would they be exploited? As Hardt and Negri (2004,
333) write in Multitude, “ ‘[t]he oppressed’ (or excluded) may name a marginal
and powerless mass, but ‘the exploited’ is necessarily a central, productive, and
powerful subject.”
By shifting the focus of critique from exclusion to inclusion, Hardt and
Negri are better able to address more complex modes of power, including
contemporary processes of exploitation. At the same time their adherence to
the network metaphor generates some problems that I will be addressing in
more detail later. First, let us move on to a discussion of how Marx’s process-Â�
relational ontology can be distinguished by its understanding of relations as
internal.
commodity fetishism, his keen insights in the internal relations among pro-
duction, distribution, exchange, and consumption, and, indeed his under-
standing of the capital/wage-labour relation itself.” It has also been said that
“[p]erhaps no word appears more frequently in Marx’s writings than Verhältnis
(relation)” (Ollman 2003, 73).18
But to simply state that Marx was a relational thinker does not tell us very
much. The question should instead be what kind of a relational thinker was
Marx?
Marx’s relationality is generated from a philosophy of internal relations –
what Ollman considers to be “the much-neglected foundation of his entire
dialectical method” (Ollman 2003, 116). While Marx draws inspiration from
Hegel, the philosophy of internal relations traces its origins to the Greek phi-
losopher Parmenides, reappearing in the modern period as a central tenet of
Spinoza’s thought.
To say that all relations are internal is to imply that everything has some
relation, however distant, to everything else and that these relations are neces-
sary. To say that relations are necessary is to argue that they are essential to the
characteristics of the relata. “Internal relations are those in which the individu-
als are changed by their relations to each other, that is, where these relations
between individuals are such that both are reciprocally affected by the rela-
tion” (Gould 1978, 37). Contrarily, external relations serve to link up relata but
“each relatum is understood to be a separate self-subsistent entity, which exists
apart from the relation and appears to be totally without change in their nature
or constitution” (Gould 1978, 38).
The importance of distinguishing between a relationality composed of
internal relations and one made up of external relations becomes clear
when we look at Castells’ thesis of the network society. What allows Castells
to posit the emergence of a novel social formation – a “network society” – is
the distinction he makes between “modes of production” and “modes of
development.”19 The current mode of production is still capitalist, according to
Castells, but with a new mode of development that fuels its productivity:
18 Ollman (2003, 73) also acknowledges though that “the crucial role played by Verhaltnis in
Marx’s thinking is somewhat lost to non-German-language readers of his works as a result
of translations that “...often substitute ‘condition’, ‘system’, and ‘structure’ for ‘relation’.”
19 According to Castells, modes of production are characterized by “[t]he structural princi-
ple under which surplus is appropriated and controlled” (Castells, 2000a, 16). The “net-
work society” is still founded on the capitalist mode of production, however the causal
force which gives the network society its defining characteristics is its specific “mode of
development.” Modes of development are distinguished by the main source or “element”
that generates their productivity.
The Network’s Blindspot 221
20 While the industrial mode of development was based on new forms and uses of energy,
the current “informational mode of development” locates its source of productivity in
“the technology of knowledge generation, information processing, and symbol communi-
cation” (ibid., 17). Castells acknowledges that knowledge and information is key to all
modes of development throughout history, his argument is instead that specific to the
informational mode of development “is the action of knowledge upon knowledge itself as
the main source of productivity” (ibid.).
21 This is even more evident in Jan van Dijk’s work when he proposes that in the network
society “basic units are held to be individuals, households, groups and organizations
increasingly linked by social and media networks” (van Dijk, 2006, 28).
222 PREY
To make such an argument is certainly not to say that that network tech-
nologies and new network forms of organization have no impact on social
development. Of course they do. But these technologies and forms of organiza-
tion do not appear from outer space. They emerge from within, reifying and
abstracting from internal social relations. Consider money, the most powerful
and pervasive network ‘technology’. At first glance it may appear to be an exter-
nal relation that influences and distorts almost all realms of life. However Marx
regards money as an abstraction of internal relations. This is most forcefully
(and humorously) demonstrated in the final chapter of Capital: Volume 1, “The
Modern Theory of Colonization.” Marx tells the story of the British politician
E.G. Wakefield who discovered in the colonies the truth about capitalist
Â�relations – that money has no meaning if there is no wage-labourer to buy:
A Mr. Peel, he (Wakefield) complains, took with him from England to the
Swan River district of Western Australia means of subsistence and of pro-
duction to the amount of £50,000. This Mr. Peel even had the foresight to
bring besides, 3,000 persons of the working class, men, women, and chil-
dren. Once he arrived at his destination, ‘Mr. Peel was left without a ser-
vant to make his bed or fetch him water from the river’. Unhappy Mr. Peel,
who provided for everything except the export of English relations of
production to Swan River!
marx 1990, 932f.
3.3 Contradiction
Contradiction offers the ability to understand how and why change occurs.
Contradiction, of course, describes the existence of two structural principles
within a system which simultaneously depend upon and negate each other. It
is commonly acknowledged that capitalism is defined by contradictions and
its relative success or failure in managing them.22 Contradiction is also the
principle that unites Marx’s understanding of process and internal relations, as
process is instigated through internal contradictory relations.
The importance of contradiction to Marx’s process-relational ontology and
his theory of exploitation is perhaps best revealed by contrasting it with
Castells’ approach. Castells offers up a model of power that minimizes contra-
diction. As Mike Wayne recognizes, at times Castells’ mode of development
even “sounds suspiciously like a new mode of production which has tran-
scended the antagonistic contradictions of capitalism” (Wayne 2004, 142). By
introducing a mode of development/mode of production duality Castells
downplays the origin of all knowledge within specific class relations. In turn
this flattens the dialectical contradictions which exist within Marx’s mode of
production argument – between the forces and relations of production.
Remember that power, for Castells, circulates through the ‘space of flows’
which by definition contains no centre. Instead it works through inclusion and
exclusion; enrolling what is of value and rejecting all else. Castells does not shy
away from critiquing the injustices that emerge from such an account of power,
22 Bob Jessop (2001, 4) describes some of the main contradictions within capitalism:
For example, the commodity is both an exchange-value and a use-value; the worker is
both an abstract unit of labour power substitutable by other such units (or, indeed,
other factors of production) and a concrete individual with specific skills, knowledge,
and creativity; the wage is both a cost of production and a source of demand; money
functions both as an international currency and as national money; productive capital
is both abstract value in motion (notably in the form of realised profits available for
re-investment) and a concrete stock of time – and place – specific assets in the course
of being valorised; and so forth.
The Network’s Blindspot 225
such as the aforementioned ‘black holes’. However, such a critique offers only
description, not explanation. Massimo De Angelis captures this problem well:
No matter how highly sophisticated and detailed Castells’ theory of the transi-
tion to a society constructed around networks is, at its core it is still based on a
traditional cause-and-effect chain of description. Such an account of social
change is what Hegel referred to as “bad infinity”: an endless series of causes
generated from effects caused by previous effects that never arrives at an
explanation of the how or the why (Rees 1998, 7).
As discussed earlier, this is due to the tendency to understand ‘cause’ as
something external rather than internal to the system. As Ollman (2003, 18)
writes:
Modes of
Technology Production
Reproduction of
Social Relations
Daily life
Mental Conceptions
of the World
This chapter has attempted to accomplish two main tasks. The first task was to
demonstrate that the overwhelming popularity of the network metaphor, like
all metaphors, is useful as a heuristic device but not innocent of power effects.
How we choose to describe the world we inhabit has direct political implica-
tions. I argue that while the network metaphor may illuminate new organiza-
tional forms throughout contemporary society it also serves to focus social
critique on the problem of exclusion to the neglect of processes of exploita-
tion.24 While exclusion is an important and obvious injustice, it is not, as Castells
(2009, 33) and others (ie. Lash 2002, 4) argue, the preeminent mode of injustice
in ‘the network society’, nor is exploitation a derivative form of exclusion
(Murphy 1985). At the same time, while the purpose of this chapter has been to
highlight exploitation – the network’s ‘blindspot’ – this should not be taken to
mean that ‘exclusion’ is a mirage. Instead, what we need is a better understand-
ing of the internal relations between processes of exclusion and exploitation.
‘Exclusion’ though, as I argued, leaves much to be desired as the central
theme of social critique. ‘Exploitation’ in fact seems to do a better job of
reminding us of the shared and dynamic basis of social reality. However,
instead of following Boltanski and Chiapello’s lead and generating a new the-
ory of exploitation more suitable for a ‘connexionist’ world, this chapter argues
that we already have a theory of exploitation for such a world – Marx’s theory
of exploitation.
The second task of this chapter was to demonstrate why Marx’s theory of
exploitation is still relevant for critiquing power within contemporary ‘infor-
mational capitalism’. I first reveal how network theories are rooted in a process-
relational ontology that shares much with Marx’s ontology. Marx’s particular
understanding of process and relation, and his recognition of contradiction, is
contrasted with that of contemporary network theorists, particularly Manuel
Castells but also Hardt and Negri. It is this common process-relational perspec-
tive that allows us to understand Marx’s contemporary relevance. At the same
time, it is the key distinctions which promise to reinvigorate critique.
24 While I critique the network metaphor for its ‘blindspot’, I am mostly in agreement with
Felix Stalder’s assessment that the network society thesis signals “the return of sociologi-
cal macrotheory after years of postmodern pessimism about the possibility, or even desir-
ability, of such a project” (Stalder 2006, 1). This is generally something to be welcomed but
I attribute it largely to the process-relational ontology that guides this thesis, which brings
our attention back to structural forms and the relational processes that enact these forms.
The Network’s Blindspot 229
Peter Marcuse critiques Castells for presenting “the excluded without the
excluders” (cited in Stalder, 2006 140). However, my argument is that this is not
a criticism that can be limited to Castells. Rather, it appears to be inherent to
all social critique built around the network metaphor. This is because network
theorists conceive of power as a de-centered ‘flow’, operating through the pro-
tocols that set the network’s “rules of engagement.” This Foucaultian concep-
tion of power – whereby power permeates society in constantly morphing
formations of interlinked networks – is often contrasted with the supposed
Marxist idea of power as a ‘resource’, emanating from a fixed external location.
I hope though that this chapter’s explication of Marx’s process-relational
ontology and his concomitant theory of exploitation makes it clear that such
an interpretation is wrong-headed.
In conclusion, Bertell Ollman neatly summarizes the purpose behind Marx’s
process-relational ontology:
Marx’s quest […] is never for why something starts to change (as if it were
not already changing) but for the various forms this change assumes and
why it may appear to have stopped. Likewise, it is never for how a relation
gets established (as if there were no relation there before), but again for
the different forms it takes and why aspects of an already existing rela-
tion may appear to be independent.
ollman 2003, 14
As we look out of our windows, at a world that appears to be both ever more in
flux and ever more interconnected, it is all too easy to be captured by appear-
ances. We really can see networks everywhere we look. The question we need to
ask though is why does the world reveal itself to us through certain forms and
not others? Are these forms really new, and if so, where did they come from?
Asking these questions gives us the chance to realize that Marx’s theory of
exploitation, contrary to popular perception, is no relic of a hierarchical world
of industrial capitalism but rather a theory of social relations that is highly
suited to critiquing power within contemporary informational capitalism.
References
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232 PREY
1 Introduction
1 Sohn-Rethel takes a close look at the term “form,” which he defines as being time-bound: “It
originates, dies and changes with time” (1978, 17). This supposedly distinguishes Marx and his
dialectical thought from all other schools of thinking. For Jameson (2011, 35) the word “form”
prevents “thingification” or reification of money, exchange-value etc., that are first and fore-
most social relations.
they have been slowly transformed into commodities produced for market
exchange since the fifteenth century. Secondly, by defining fundamental politi-
cal and economic processes occurring in recent decades that help with an
explanation of the rise in the influence of communication and information in
the current historical epoch. In Section 3 of the chapter, commodification of
communication and information is therefore analysed in a deeply historical
manner by looking at how these resources have been subjugated to capitalist
market relations since the capitalist economic system first emerged several
centuries ago. It is pointed out their commodification was part-and-parcel of
the developing capitalism, accompanied by recurring conflicts, contradictions
and antagonistic struggles. It was especially political incentives and interven-
tions (policymaking, funding of research and development, etc.), however,
that led to the increasing social, economic and political significance of the
information and communication systems and resources we have been wit-
nessing in the last few decades.
Furthermore, I am interested in how commodification was approached at in
the (critique of) political economy of communication (Section 4). The latter
will – first and foremost – be done through a reappraisal of the “blind spot
debate” (and the concurring “audience commodity” thesis), which also played
a crucial role in the development of political economy of communication as
such.2 Section 5 helps me to clarify how commodification, with the help of
digitalisation, is able to penetrate into communication processes and thus
construct new commodities. These findings are connected to some of the
recent neo-Marxist approaches, especially to the authors coming from the
autonomist/post-operaist movement (Section 5). I demonstrate how insights
into this intellectual strand can provide an understanding of the ongoing com-
modification processes through concepts such as communicative, bio-linguistic
capitalism, and social factory, and how it therefore offers several convergence
points with political economy of communication. In this section, I also note
we are witnessing new enclosures via recurrent processes of primary accumu-
lation, which make possible incorporation of different spheres under capital.
This brought about a possibility for a further expansion and intensification of
commodification throughout society. In the last part of the chapter (Section 5.2),
I build on the preceding sections and conceptualize a seeping commodification
as a historically novel type of commodification, which trickles throughout
society. This concept indicates we are witnessing a qualitative transformation
2 Dallas W. Smythe initiated this debate in 1977 with his article Communications: Blindspot of
Western Marxism, which was followed by several replies and corrections, most notably by
Murdock (1978) a year later and Smythe’s (1978) rejoinder to Murdock in the same year.
236 PRODNIK
According to Lukács (1971), it was not a coincidence that Marx began his major
works with an analysis of the commodity when he decided to lay out the total-
ity of capitalist society. The problem of commodities should, according to
Lukács, in fact be regarded “as the central, structural problem of capitalist soci-
ety in all its aspects” (Lukács 1971, 83). It should therefore not be seen either in
isolation or even as a central problem of only economics, which consequently
means it is difficult to ignore this issue when providing a critique of the really
existing social relations. For Marx (1990/1976, 90), the commodity-form, in which
abstract human labour materialises itself (both being historical categories
bound to capitalist societies), is one of the economic cell-forms of the current
historical epoch. These categories enabled Marx to analyse capitalism in its
most abstract form, but also at its most fundamental level. It is worth mentioning
3c: Commodifying Communication In Capitalism 237
that he saw abstraction as a chief (and perhaps only possible) means of a sci-
entific analysis of society, which, together with dialectics, enables the enquirer
to go beyond mere appearances of things.3
This crucial role of the commodity can be seen from Marx’s earliest writings
on political economy to his later conceptualisations, and many authors
believed this to be the pre-eminent starting point for any analysis of society
under capitalism (e.g. Lukács 1971; Sohn-Rethel 1978; Postone 2003/1993). In
Marx’s early writings, for example in The Poverty of Philosophy, published in
French in 1847 (Marx and Engels 1976, 105–212), he dealt with the use and espe-
cially exchange-value of commodities, the latter being an inexorable part of
commodity production in the societies of producers who exchange their com-
modities. It is around this time that he defined the law of value of commodities
as being determined by the labour time inherent in them (he still wrote of
labour and not labour power, which is a more precise conceptualisation also
present in his later writings). Labour time is therefore the measure of value,
and labour, as Marx pointed out (Marx and Engels 1976, 130), was itself a com-
modity: labour-commodity, bought and sold in the market. If there is an
exchange of two products (commodities), there is an exchange of equal quan-
tities of labour, or more precisely, exchange of labour time (Marx and Engels
1976, 126). As he famously put it: “Time is everything, man is nothing; he is, at
the most, time’s carcase. Quality no longer matters. Quantity alone decides
everything; hour for hour, day for day” (Marx and Engels 1976, 127). This, of
3 Experiments in natural sciences are replaced by the power of abstraction in social sciences.
Theory is, for example, always an abstraction from empirical reality, even if it must inevitably
build on this same reality. Marx furthermore pointed out that “all science would be superflu-
ous if the form of appearance of things directly coincided with their essence” (Marx 1991/1981,
956). It is precisely here, according to him, that “vulgar economics feels completely at home,
these relationships appearing all the more self-evident to it, the more their inner connec-
tions remain hidden.” (ibid.) According to Eagleton (1996, 6), there is always a hiatus between
how things actually are and how they seem; there is, so to say, a difference between essence
and appearance, because the latter needs to be penetrated or bypassed to understand reality
(see Barbalet 1983, 23f.; Postone 2003/1993). It could therefore be claimed that one of the
central goals of both dialectics and abstraction is to take analysis beyond sole appearances of
things, which is impossible with a mere analysis of concrete reality (where several mecha-
nisms operate at the same time). In most cases, things are not simply opaque or what they
seem on the surface. Barbalet (1983, 24) points out it is exactly the role commodity fetishism
(which is dealt with later in this text) plays in society that demonstrates this point in its
entirety. For a more detailed analysis of contradictions between appearances and reality
(and questions concerning transphenomenality and counter-phenomenality) see also
Collier’s (1994, 6f.) interpretation of the meta-theoretical position of critical realism.
238 PRODNIK
4 Seeing commodities as being the blood cells in capitalist accumulation cycle is not only an
analogy or a metaphor. In his analysis of the primitive accumulation, Marx in fact points out
that “a great deal of capital, which appears today in the United States without any birth-Â�
certificate, was yesterday, in England, the capitalized blood of children” (Marx 1990/1976,
920). This, at least implicitly, touches on another important part of his analysis of the com-
modity-form, namely commodity fetishism. I deal with this issue later in the text (especially
in the Section 2.4).
3c: Commodifying Communication In Capitalism 239
5 The fact that this particular type of labour is specific only for capitalism and at the same time
also fundamental for its functioning, led both Marcuse (1955, 287–295) and Postone
(2003/1993) to call for abolition of labour (as known in capitalist societies).
240 PRODNIK
the failure to perceive that money, though a physical object with distinct
properties, represents a social relation of production.
MARX and ENGELS 1987, 275f.
There are several important consequences arising from these findings, perhaps
most notably the following: While Marx’s approach presupposes a need for
abstraction to understand how capitalism works (as already pointed out),
there is also a real abstraction going on all the time in the existing historical
epoch dominated by commodity exchange. “An abstraction is made every day
in the social process of production,” Marx stresses (Marx and Engels 1987, 272).
It is a prerequisite for the constitution of equivalents between factually
unequal things. For example, a reduction of different kinds of useful labour
into homogeneous abstract labour is unavoidable, because it makes possible
monetary exchange between different use-values, which are inherent in com-
modities. Secondly, these findings have enormous consequences for how social
life is constituted in existing societies. Most notably, what is the wider social
role of the commodity-form in the concept of commodity fetishism, but also
what role does exchange of commodities play in the individualisation of
human beings and what types of instrumental rationalisation are developed?
These issues will be more thoroughly analysed in the following subsections.
things. […] In other words, the labour of the private individual manifests
itself as an element of the total labour of society only through the rela-
tions which the act of exchange establishes between products, and,
through mediation, between the producers. To the producers, therefore,
the social relations between their private labours appear as what they
are, i.e. they do not appear as direct social relations between persons in
their work, but rather as material [dinglich] relations between persons
and social relations between things.
MARX 1990/1867, 165f.
It is thus social relations between things that mediate between people, conse-
quently producing the key mystification of contemporary social life. Social rela-
tions between people are displaced by (and to) something else, in this case, into
relations between commodities, simultaneously creating a material veil (which
will lead us directly to the questions of individualisation later in the text). The
general idea behind both this displacement and commodity fetishism as a
whole is relatively simple, but at the same time, it is notoriously difficult (Balibar
2007, 57). This is especially so because this concept produces such immensely
far-reaching consequences on how we live our lives in (post) modern societies.
The key abstract historical arguments made by Marx, which are of crucial
importance for the analysis of these consequences for society, have been suc-
cinctly presented by Hobsbawm (2011, 130–132). He points out that Marx’s the-
ory of social and economic evolution is based on his analysis of (wo)man as a
social animal.6 This can be seen as Marx’s fundamental ontological position
regarding human nature. Marx’s quite abstract account of particular phases of
social-economic formations, as depicted in Grundrisse, starts with human
beings that labour in nature, changing it and taking from it. This is the basis and
natural condition for creation and reproduction of their existence. Taking and
changing a part of nature can be seen as perhaps the first kind of appropriation.
This type of appropriation, however, is merely an aspect of human labour, a
material interchange between nature and human beings, which is necessary for
their survival. Appropriation is also expressed in the concept of property, but
one that is very much different from historically specific private property, which
is distinctive of capitalist societies (see Hobsbawm 2011, 130; May 2010). As
social animals, human beings develop both co-operation and social division of
labour, the latter being nothing else than specialisation of functions, enabling
people to produce a surplus over what is needed to maintain and reproduce the
individual and the community. Furthermore, “the existence of both the surplus
and the social division of labour makes possible exchange. But initially, both
production and exchange have as their object merely use” (Hobsbawm 2011,
131). As human beings emancipate themselves from nature and start to “con-
trol” it (simultaneously also changing the relations of production), significant
changes happen to the social relations into which they enter. A more detailed
account of these changes will be looked at later and was partially already
pointed out. In a historical sense, however, these changes are a result of both
the aforementioned specialisation of labour, and furthermore, of the invention
of the money form, and, with it, of the commodity production and market
exchange. This provides “a basis for procedures unimaginable before, including
capital accumulation” (Hobsbawm 2011, 131). In the latest phase, which occurred
under capitalism, the worker was consequently reduced to nothing more than
labour power. In the production process a total separation is made between
use-value, exchange-value, and accumulation, which can be seen as a very dis-
tinct feature of this epoch. Reproduction is in fact separated from – or even
opposes – production (of commodities), where unity used to exist in the pre-
capitalist social formations (Fortunati 1989, 8). The economic aims of capitalism,
as one can see, are radically different from those of preceding modes of produc-
tion that focused on the production of use-values in relation to the reproduction
of human lives. For Fortunati, this means that commodity production can be
posited as “the fundamental point of capitalist production, and the laws that gov-
ern it as the laws that characterise capitalism itself” (Fortunati 1989, 8). The main
goal becomes an endless accumulation of still more capital, an accumulation for
accumulation’s sake – this rational intent to maximise accumulation is a “law”
that governs all economic activity in capitalism (Wallerstein 1983).
It can be claimed that there is a whole complex of different categories,
which need to be developed (producing a qualitative social change) to make
capitalist society what it is: from abstract labour, commodity-form and com-
modification, which presuppose production with the sole intent of exchange
(and consequently dominance of exchange-value) (see Marx 1990/1867, 733),
to the expropriation of surplus-value in the production process, the social (and
finally worldwide) division of labour, accumulation for accumulation’s sake
and also a historically novel possibility of an endless accumulation. And for
the latter to be possible, accumulation of a capitalist presupposes valorisation,
constant increasing of the value of the commodities bought, which is done
through the production process (see Marx 1990/1867, 711). This complex also
needs a specific capital relation and its reproduction, namely the capitalist on
the one hand and the wage-labourer on the other (Marx 1990/1867, 724).
I will focus on these changes in more detail in the next subsections. For a
more detailed analysis of the historically specific capitalist epoch, as �delineated
3c: Commodifying Communication In Capitalism 243
by Marx, we are first bound to turn to the first volume of Capital (Marx
1990/1867). Looking at capitalism on its surface, one is quickly able to see there
is an apparent rupture between the capitalist class and the proletariat, the lat-
ter being defined as those who do not own the means of production or are
prevented direct access to (and thus divorced from) them. This crucial separa-
tion is constituted especially through the so-called primitive (or primary)
accumulation, which can be seen as being an inherently extra-economic pro-
cess and thereby has little to do with how the economy is supposed to repro-
duce itself “normally.”7 It is exactly primitive accumulation that historically
and momentarily enables enclosures of the common lands, expropriation of
the commoners, expulsion of peasants from their lands, incorporation of dif-
ferent activities and spheres into exchange relations, and finally, also incorpo-
rating these spheres into capitalist social relations (in the words of Sohn-Rethel,
society of private appropriation in contrast to the previous societies of produc-
tion). Amongst others – and one which is of indispensable importance for the
existence of capitalist production – this process crucially contributes to the
production of labour power as a commodity. It effectively prevents people
from accessing the means of production and therefore also the means of their
own subsistence, consequently pushing them into waged-labour (at the same
time producing a very much changed constitution of society). Murdock (2011,
18–20) was one of the authors from the field of political economy of communi-
cation that constantly stressed the historical role of enclosures and processes
of accumulation as dispossession for the march of commodification, which
also forced people to start selling their labour power for a wage.
This factual inability to access the means of production is the key character-
istic of the proletariat and its development in time contributes to ever larger
proletarianisation of the labour force in capitalism as a historical system (see
Wallerstein 1983, ch. 1). As people are (often quite forcefully) rejected access to
7 Primitive accumulation has (in most cases) been also an extremely violent process. There has
been an increased interest into the problems of primary (or primitive) accumulation in recent
years, demonstrating this is still a very much contested topic in the critique of political econ-
omy. It also demonstrates that this topic is gaining relevance in the existing historical epoch.
One of the key arguments made in the reinterpretations of this concept has been that primitive
accumulation is not a historically limited process, which would be significant only as a starting
point of the capitalist accumulation. It is in fact constantly reproduced and therefore a perma-
nent part of capitalism, helping both to constitute and expand capitalist social relations. On
these issues see writings of Perelman (2000), Bonefeld (2001), De Angelis (2007, ch. 10), Prodnik
(2011), or Mezzadra (2011). Harvey (2003, 144–152) coined the term accumulation by disposses-
sion to clearly denote permanence of this process in capitalist societies. On the privatization of
the commons, which is connected to these same issues, see Bollier (2002) and Boyle (2008).
244 PRODNIK
the means of production, they need to sell their labour-power on the labour
market to survive, which is a historical novelty of capitalist societies (and took
a long time to actually develop, initially pushing many people into extreme
pauperism) (see Polanyi 2001/1944). People sell their labour-power on the mar-
ket in a free and apparently fair exchange between the buyers (capitalists) and
sellers (labourers) of this commodity. In most cases, this is in fact the only
commodity proletarians own: their own body and capacities inherent in it,
which can (or rather must) now be exchanged as a commodity on the market.
The capitalist, as the buyer of the labour-power commodity, is only able to
“hire” the labourer, or to be more precise, his capacity to labour, for a particular
period of time.8 The latter can be seen as one of the key tenets of both the lib-
eral political economy and liberal take on human freedom in society. It enables
both apparently free exchange between two consenting parties, which is car-
ried out in the market, and development of the labour market itself. But as
Marcuse pointed out, the fact that an individual is free to sell his labour-power
is actually the prerequisite for labour-power to even become a commodity. The
labour contract thus “epitomizes this freedom, equality and justice” (Marcuse
1955, 308) (and of course also necessity to be exploited) in the context of liberal
capitalism. As Marx himself puts it, “labour-power can appear on the market as
a commodity only if, and in so far as, its possessor, the individual whose labour-
power it is, offers it for sale or sells it as a commodity. In order that its possessor
may sell it as a commodity, he must have it at his disposal, he must be the free
proprietor of his own labour-capacity, hence of his person.” (Marx 1990/1867,
271) As the capitalist temporarily buys the labourer’s labour-power, he (or
she) is able to employ him (or her) in the production process, where he
(or she) can directly control him (or her), making sure the work he (or she)
was hired for is done. Finally, in the production process, the labourer produces
both (exchange-) value and surplus-value, the latter being the source of capi-
talist exploitation.9
8 It has not been stressed often enough, but individuals as such have no (exchange) value
whatsoever in capitalist society and cannot have it. It is a commodity that is contained
within the individual that potentially holds value: their capacity for production – labour-
power. Capitalist therefore does not appropriate labourer as such, but his labour, and in
concrete reality this exchange cannot happen in any other way but between the individual-
as-capacity-for-production and capital (see Fortunati 1989).
9 This can be seen as one of the key findings that Marx successfully proved in the first volume
of Capital on an abstract level (Marx 1990/1867, 293–306): exchange between buyers and sell-
ers of the labour-power commodity is, in fact, not fair. But not on the market, which is the
surface of capitalist social order. This inequality develops in the production process, where
labourer as a rule produces more value with his labour-power than he gets paid for: “The
3c: Commodifying Communication In Capitalism 245
value of labour-power, and the value which that labour-power valorizes [verwertet] in the
labour-process, are two entirely different magnitudes; and this difference was what the capi-
talist had in mind when he was purchasing the labour-power” (Ibid., 300). This is called sur-
plus-value and, in the first instance, it should be seen as a technical and not a moral term (as
it is often both interpreted and used). Labour-power is also the only commodity from which
more value can be extracted than it has been paid for in the market. According to Negri
(1991/1984, 79), behind the appearance of exchange, a theft is thereby taking place.
Furthermore, because labourer temporarily sold his labour-power to the capitalist before he
entered the production process, the products he produced are alienated from him by the
capitalist at the end of the working day (alienation is another concept that had vast influence
in Marxism, but its conceptualization went through drastic changes even in Marx’s own writ-
ings when his thought was developing). Final products of the labour process are therefore a
property of the capitalist and not of its immediate producer, the labourer. Labourer waived
away his right to the products when he temporarily sold his labour-power to the capitalist.
Instead of retaining these products, he gets paid wages for his labour, which are of lower
value than what he actually produced (hence, exploitation). The exchange between the
worker and capital is therefore only formally an exchange of equivalents between equals. As
Fortunati (1989, 9) points out, it is in fact an exchange of non-equivalents between unequals.
The abstract argument made by Marx also presupposes that wage that labourer receives is no
higher than living wages. He already came to this finding in 1847, saying that “labour, being
itself a commodity, is measured as such by the labour time needed to produce the labour-
commodity. And what is needed to produce this labour-commodity? Just enough labour time
to produce the objects indispensable to the constant maintenance of labour, that is, to keep
the worker alive and in a condition to propagate his race” (Marx and Engels 1976, 125). Several
authors claimed this was a nice example of how Marx was historically completely wrong. But
they (perhaps intentionally) forgot this was an abstract argument, building on a rational ten-
dency of how a capitalist will operate. There are, of course, several other tendencies and
mechanisms at work in a concrete and complex social reality, amongst others political inter-
ventions made by the state (regulation of working hours, minimal wage), which are often a
result of class antagonisms and power relations in a specific society.
246 PRODNIK
would simply be on the use-value of the products for their actual producer.10
But the whole importance for the capitalist selling these products in fact lies in
the production of exchange-value, which is, in most cases, expressed in the
form of price on the market (i.e. through the money form, which is the univer-
sal equivalent and the measure of exchange-value). The ability to exchange
these articles for the universal equivalent, which also makes extraction of sur-
plus value fairly simple, is the sole reason the capitalist is employing labourers
who produce these commodities. If something might be very useful for the
society, but would at the same time (directly or indirectly) lack exchange-
value, it, as a rule, could not be of any particular importance for the capital-
ists.11 In the best-case scenario, it will be different support systems in the
capitalist society (e.g. welfare state) that will take care of this – or not.
Furthermore, because it is the capitalist class that sells products (commodi-
ties) on the market, it is incidentally (also) the labourer that needs to buy these
products as the means of his subsistence. Doing so, he inadvertently assists
with the reproduction of the capitalist accumulation cycle and capitalist sys-
tem as a whole; the labourer consequently inadvertently perpetuates his own
exploitation (see Marcuse 1955, 309; Hobsbawm 2011). The labourer thus unin-
tentionally helps with the preservation of the existing class relations, because
he is reaffirming labour’s separation from the means of production. The work-
ing class (i.e. proletariat) is therefore integral to capitalism, its unavoidable
part (Postone 2003/1993, cf. Marx 1990/1867, 716, 724), which is based on the
property relation of private ownership of the means of production. What is of
crucial importance here is that even though the history of modern society and
capital is of course socially constituted, it nevertheless “possesses a quasi-
autonomous developmental logic” (Postone 2003/1993, 31). How the capitalist
10 Again, it is exactly this social character that is the main characteristic of the commodity.
The commodity must be exchanged on the market. It is paradoxical that a specific com-
modity would in fact not be a commodity, if it were a mere use-value for its owner. “For its
owner it is on the contrary a non-use-value,” Marx (Marx and Engels 1987, 283) writes in
the Critique. Commodity is “merely the physical depository of exchange-value, or simply
a means of exchange. […] The commodity is a use-value for its owner only so far as it is an
exchange-value. The commodity therefore has still to become a use-value, in the first place
a use-value for others.” (ibid.).
11 This is not because capitalist is somehow morally corrupt (even though he might be), but
because in competitive market system he is pressured by the coercive laws of competition.
If every individual capitalist did not follow his own self-interest he would quickly go
bankrupt. Capitalists therefore cannot set boundaries to their own activities in a competi-
tive system. This is, for example, a very significant notion when ecological issues are
debated.
3c: Commodifying Communication In Capitalism 247
12 It is sensible to quote Marx here at length, because this is an important and often misun-
derstood presupposition: “The labour time expressed in and exchange-value is the labour
time of an individual, but of an individual in no way differing […] from all other individu-
als in so far as the perform equal labour; the labour time, therefore, which one person
requires for the production of a given commodity is the necessary labour time which any
other person would require to produce the same commodity. It is the labour time of an
individual, his labour time, but only as labour time common to all; consequently it is
quite immaterial whose individual labour time this is. This universal labour time finds its
expression in a universal product, a universal equivalent […] Only as such a universal
magnitude does it represent a social magnitude. […] The labour time of the individual is
thus, in fact, the labour time required by society to produce a particular use-value, that is
to satisfy a particular want” (Marx and Engels 1987, 272).
248 PRODNIK
13 “But though it is correct to say that private exchange presupposes division of labour, it is
wrong to maintain that division of labour presupposes private exchange” (Marx and
Engels 1987, 299).
3c: Commodifying Communication In Capitalism 249
It is quite clear that an abstraction is not only a thought process for social
analysis, but is also a real, factual abstraction, “abstraction not by thought but by
action and operating in time and space” (Sohn-Rethel 1972, 51). It is an abstrac-
tion developing through several fundamental categories: exchange abstraction,
commodity abstraction, labour abstraction, time abstraction etc. (see Sohn-
Rethel 1972; 1978). As Marx points out, “equality in the full sense between differ-
ent kinds of labour can be arrived at only if we abstract from their real inequality,
if we reduce them to the characteristics they have in common, that of being the
expenditure of human labour-power, of human labour in the abstract” (Marx
1990/1867, 166). This argument can of course be extended further on to other
categories, beyond only abstract labour. According to Marcuse:
14 Balibar (2007, 63) points out how Marx realized that the money (as the general equivalent
or universal commodity that can be exchanged for any other commodity) fetish is in fact
nothing else than commodity fetish. This was only possible with a careful analysis of the
commodity-form and the role of exchange-value in it, which was not present in Marx’s
earlier works. In these earlier works this particular social role, which he later ascribes to
commodity, is in fact often attributed directly to money: “The complete domination of
the estranged thing over man has become evident in money, which is completely indiffer-
ent both to the nature of the material, i.e., to the specific nature of the private property,
and to the personality o the property owner. What was the domination of person over
person is not the general domination of thing over the person, of the product over the
producer. Just as the concept of the equivalent, the value, already implied the alienation
of private property, so money is the sensuous, even objective existence of this alienation”
(Marx and Engels 1975, 221).
252 PRODNIK
The process of production has been eliminated, as has all reference to its
genesis; the actors, the objects, the circumstances of the process never
3c: Commodifying Communication In Capitalism 253
existed. What, in fact, has been erased is the paternity of the object, and
the possibility to link it to the process of production. […] Objects are
cleansed of guilt. It is a world of pure surplus without the slightest suspi-
cion of a worker demanding the slightest reward. The proletariat, born
out of the contradictions of the bourgeois regime, sell their labour ‘freely’
to the highest bidder, who transforms the labor into wealth for his own
social class. In the Disney world, the proletariat are expelled from the
society they created, thus ending all antagonisms, conflicts, class struggle
and indeed, the very concept of class.
DORFMAN and MATTELART 1975, 64–65
15 This was most forcefully pointed out by Williams (1973) in his critique of mechanistic
interpretations of the (often contradictory) relation between base and superstructure.
3c: Commodifying Communication In Capitalism 255
social, political and intellectual life,” and furthermore, “it is not the conscious-
ness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that
determines their consciousness” (Marx and Engels 1987, 263).
Significantly, Sohn-Rethel’s goal is precisely to research this relationship
between base and superstructure and to build a staircase between “productive
forces and production relations which together form the material basis for
consciousness as superstructure […] The staircase must be given a firm anchor-
age in the basement, and this, for commodity-producing societies, can only be
found in the formal analysis of commodity itself” (Sohn-Rethel 1978, xi). For
the former approach, it is the material veil that is crucial to understand mysti-
fication in society and this material veil in fact exists (it cannot not exist in
capitalist societies, not least because social relations can never be direct,
unmediated (see Postone 2003/1993, 167)). It is obvious that people might
become conscious of class antagonisms at the level of ideology and fight out
this conflict by overtaking apparatuses in the superstructure, but this might
not change much if some of the basic categories at the material level stay the
same (for example dominance of the commodity-form and private ownership
of the means of production). This is also significant in the context of the really
existing socialisms.
16 Marx (1973/1993, 84) in fact speaks of a political animal (zoon politikon, πολιτικόν ζῷον).
Hannah Arendt (1998/1958) was correct when she pointed out that Marx in fact conflated
social with political realm, reducing Aristotles’s notion of zoon politikon simply to social
animal (for Arendt, there was a complete victory of society over political realm and public
action in modern societies). Even though differences between these two conceptualiza-
tions are important, they are not central for this text.
256 PRODNIK
17 In his Comments on James Mill Marx (1975, 220) for example claims that “the greater and
the more developed the social power appears to be within the private property relation-
ship, the more egoistic, asocial and estranged from his own nature does man become. Just
as the mutual exchange of the products of human activity appears as barter, as trade, so
the mutual completion and exchange of the activity itself appears as division of labour,
which turns man as far as possible into an abstract being, a machine tool, etc., and trans-
forms him into a spiritual and physical monster.”
3c: Commodifying Communication In Capitalism 257
The history of capitalism has, amongst other things, also been a history of a
never-ending (global) commodification. As noted by Marx (1993/1858, 408),
“the tendency to create the world market is directly given in the concept of
capital itself. Every limit appears as a barrier to be overcome.” Nowadays, issues
connected to the sustained processes of commodification are not limited to the
supposedly radical margins of social sciences as they were in the past. Awareness
of these on-going transformations became important both in the more popular
media discourse and in mainstream academic research. According to Wittel:
him to ask the question, “What money can’t buy?” Leaving capitalism to its
own expansionary logic, any strict limits to its penetrating abilities seem illu-
sory, and it seems Sandel agrees with this notion. Economics “is becoming an
imperial domain,” because it “increasingly governs the whole of life” (Ibid, 6),
he laments. This is because “almost everything can be bought and sold,” and
markets “have come to govern our lives as never before.” (Ibid., 5).
What seems equally important to the findings is the fact that both Martin
and Sandel say these new “marketized” relations were not arrived at by any
conscious or autonomous decision of the people that succumbed to it. These
conditions in fact slowly but surely became a part of individuals’ lives and
encroached upon their everyday activities without any visible coercion. What
would never be considered self-evident a couple of decades ago, today seems
almost beyond dispute, an unquestionable imperative of human agency fully
subjected to market forces. Because of an overwhelming intensification of
social commodification, rationalistic calculation and measurement have
become part and parcel of human activities and relations, while exchange-
value equivalence and factual abstraction have simultaneously become the
norm for many individuals in their everyday operations.18
Critical communication and social studies have, in fact, long been aware of
this social transformation. Herbert Schiller (1984, xiv) observed three decades
ago that “the penetration of corporate power and corporate thinking is now so
extensive that the calculus of business performance has become the almost
automatic measurement of individual purpose and achievement.” In Marxist
and other radical political-economic approaches – including those in the field
of critical communication studies (e.g. Murdock 2006a; Mosco 1989; 2009, ch. 7;
D. Schiller 2007; Fuchs 2014, 52–53) – these processes have fallen under the
umbrella of theories that analyse the role of the commodity-form and com-
modification in capitalist societies.19
18 Livant’s (1979, 105) lucid observation speaks volumes in this case. He points out that “the
main impetus to the rise of measurement is the rise of commodity production. Where
something begins to be measured it is an almost sure sign it is being traded.”
19 Both Bettig (1996, 34) and Gandy (1992) write about radical political economy of commu-
nication, which is a similar differentiation to the one that is made by Winseck in his own
typology (see: Winseck 2011, 21–25). While it is mostly Marxist approaches that fall under
the umbrella of radical and critical political-economic approaches, some authors are not
using an explicitly Marxian theoretical framework, but can nevertheless be considered as
critical scholars, because they reflect on the social inequalities and provide a critique of the
capitalism, adopt a deeply historical perspective, use dialectics to discern key structural
developments in the society, while at the normative level they argue for a better and more
equitable world that could fulfil human potentials. Such authors were either �influenced
3c: Commodifying Communication In Capitalism 259
aÂ� pologists claim, it is in fact a patently absurd one: “One accumulates capital in
order to accumulate more capital. Capitalists are like white mice on a treadmill,
running ever faster in order to run still faster” (Wallerstein 1983, 40). As he
stresses (Wallerstein 1983, 15), the whole circuit of capital was only seldom com-
pleted before modern times; several links were missing, meaning several pro-
cesses were not yet transacted through the market, which means they were not
yet commodified. For Wallerstein (1983, ch. 1), historical capitalism thus, first
and foremost, presents itself as a process of a widespread commodification of
different social processes, with it forming complex commodity chains (that in
time become global). It is not merely a question of exchange processes, but also
of commodification of production, distribution, and investment processes.21
As Jameson (2011) lately pointed out, commodity is not only a prerequisite
to capitalist processes of accumulation, it actually constitutes “pre-history” of
capital and is therefore strictly speaking “not yet about capital.” Even though
Jameson’s contribution is an important one, this statement seems at least par-
tially problematic. The commodity-form is not only an enduring prerequisite
of capitalist accumulation, but also its ever-present and constitutive part (sim-
ilarly to primitive accumulation), which on the most fundamental level enables
extraction of surplus value. Looking at the process of capitalist accumulation
from a dialectical point of view, which Jameson himself strongly supports, it is
impossible to separate the commodity from exchange and surplus value (his-
torically speaking, they ought to develop simultaneously). The commodity-
form is a crucial cell-form in every sphere of the cycle of capital accumulation
(for a good overview of the expanded reproduction of capital and cycle of capi-
talist accumulation see Fuchs’s overview (2011, 137–141)) and even though the
production process, for example, might seem primary, capitalism cannot exist
without reproducing itself via commodification, which enables its further
expansion, and without commodity-form as one of its integral parts.
Whether one agrees with him on the mentioned issue or not, Jameson also
acknowledges that in a social period, which is dominated by commodification,
this process plays a crucial political role for an enduring critique of existing
society. While Murdock (2006a) wrote about the commodification of almost
everything, both Wallerstein and Jameson went further, stating it is in fact
everything that can be commodified. According to Jameson (2011, 16, 26), in a
capitalist society, commodification becomes tendentially universal and one can
speak of the tendential dominion of the commodity-form. Similarly, Wallerstein
points out that “the process of global accumulation is developing via the com-
modification of everything” (Wallerstein 2001/1991, 24f.).
Murdock explains how “only in a fully developed capitalist system is the
production and marketing of commodities the central driving force of growth
and profit” (Murdock 2011, 18). The world market is thereby a crucial develop-
ment in capitalism (Hobsbawm 2011, 145) and we can claim that in the last
decades it finally developed in its entirety, constructing a universalised totality
where everything can become subsumed under the rule of capital (Hardt and
Negri 2001). Processes of commodification are crucial for this expansion of
capitalism together with primitive accumulation (or accumulation as dispos-
session). This constant expansion is also one of its unavoidable necessities,
because without constant expansion, a capitalist system is in crisis. It is thus
fair to say that commodification is reshaping the world in its own image, which
led Huws to state that this process can be seen as central in understanding
social changes. With commodification, she has in mind “the tendency of capi-
talist economies to generate new and increasingly standardised products for
sale in the market whose sale will generate profits that increase in proportion
to the scale of production” (Huws 2003, 17).
As stressed by Polanyi (2001/1944, ch. 6), there is, however, also a constant
need for commodity fiction to legitimise the selling of different types of com-
modities on the market, which can serve as a constant reminder of the extreme
artificiality of the capitalist market economy. This is especially obvious when
market relations in certain spheres are still in the process of being established
and have not been subordinated to commodity exchange beforehand. The great
transformation from a feudalist to a capitalist society, as Polanyi called it,
required new fictitious commodities for the successful functioning of new eco-
nomic relations, most evidently labour force, money, and land. In an ongoing
transformation to postmodernity, one can, on the other hand, establish that we
are experiencing a historical epoch that is increasingly void of non-commodified
262 PRODNIK
products, processes, or activities, which can all be willy-nilly subsumed and sub-
dued under economistic rationalisation.22 In their chapter on culture industry,
Horkheimer and Adorno (2002/1947, ch. 4) anticipated such a development of
capitalist societies, pointing at the commodifying processes taking place. But
even their analysis could hardly be ascribed with the prediction that capital will
be able to colonise almost all spheres of society, meaning that nearly all aspects
of human life can be comprehended as a possible investment or a market oppor-
tunity. Capitalism has therefore not incorporated only cultural production, pub-
lic places and creativity, or, more widely speaking, social symbols, into its
accumulation cycle. At first, it really made an industry out of culture and human
artistic creativity (Adorno 2001/1991; Horkheimer and Adorno 2002/1947, ch. 4).
But in time, it was not only symbols, public expression and ideas that were (as
today) constantly being commodified, but also knowledge and information as
such, while both categories are becoming an integral part of capitalism in post-
modern societies (see Schiller 1989, Parker 1994, Fleissner 2009, May 2010). And
as Marazzi (2008) points out, information and communication are not only raw
materials, but also a labour instrument (cf. Williams 2005/1980, ch. 2). Information
and knowledge became commodities as any other, bought and sold, producing
aggregation of resources in the cultural and information sphere. Herbert Schiller
called this the consciousness industry, while indicating “the entrance of the profit
motive into fields, which for different reasons, historically had escaped this now
pervasive force” (Schiller 1989, 91). Entirely new private industries have been
developed and, in most cases, these same industries are exerting vast influence
on how we think and act in our everyday lives (see also Jhally 1987, Hardt 2004).
These privatisation and commodification processes on the other hand also con-
stitute new monopolies of knowledge that have historically been typical of all
human societies (see Innis, 2008/1951).
Debord’s (1970, ch. 2) account of the role played by commodity-form in post-
modern societies, fully submerged in the spectacle, remains one of the most
powerful accounts of the world, in which we live, ever written. He touches on
the domination of the commodity over the totality of human living and pres-
ents spectacle as a permanent opium war, which feeds itself in, and through,
the world of commodities. Everything is incorporated into the world market
22 What Polanyi failed to notice was that it was not only land, labour, and money that were
fictitious commodities. All commodities are fictitious. There is no such thing as a “natu-
ral” commodity. The simple difference is that some commodities quite obviously need
some sort of an ideological underpinning (or an underlying fiction) to socially legitimize
them as commodities that are bought and sold, while commodity-status of others is
rarely questioned, especially when they are already successfully legitimized as commodi-
ties in a specific society.
3c: Commodifying Communication In Capitalism 263
and changed in the way it satisfies the rules made by the capitalist type of
economy and its instrumental rationalisation. Because commodity is indepen-
dent of anything, it can autonomously rule over both the entire economy and
society; social life thereby becomes completely colonised. The spectacle is, for
Debord in fact “the moment when the commodity has attained the total occu-
pation of social life. The relation to the commodity is not only visible, but one
no longer sees anything but it: the world one sees is its world.” (Debord’s 1970,
ch. 2, par. 42) Everything is submerged in the spectacle and the complete rule
of the world of commodities fulfils itself through the spectacle. Debord’s focus
was at least indirectly pointed towards the mass media and a society flushed
with images – and it is only after decades that most theoreticians admit that
we live in fully mediatised societies. To put it in Debord’s words, yet again, we
have to recognise in these symptoms “our old enemy: the commodity.”
(Debord’s 1970, ch. 2, par. 35).
It is quite possible that Debord’s critique of contemporary life was (perhaps
even rightly so) seen as an exaggeration when it was written almost five
decades ago. But most of Debord’s observations look increasingly obvious in
the fully developed postmodern society where human sociability, affects and
communication as such are transformed into commodities and exchanged.
Expansion of commodification has now extended work and exploitation well
beyond the factory floors and into the other spheres of everyday human lives
(Smythe 1977; Terranova 2004; Marazzi 2008; Fuchs 2012a; Crary 2013; Fuchs
and Sevignani 2013).23 This expansion of commodification to communication
in its widest sense therefore also means that these issues must become central
topics of the political economy of communication, which simultaneously also
needs to widen its scope of inquiry as much as possible and provide a critique
of these invasive processes.
The mark of some successful dialectic is shock, surprise, and the under-
mining of preconceived notions.
FREDRIC JAMESON (2007, 196)
23 Several authors have extensively written on this topic (see Section 5). In Marazzi’s (2008,
50) opinion “today the capitalist organization of work aims to overcome this separation,
to fuse work and worker, to put to work the entire lives of workers.” Crary (2013) has simi-
larly pointed out there is a 24/7 logic in contemporary capitalism: non-stop consumption,
exploitation, and commodification, an idea of constant work without any pauses or lim-
its, spreading throughout society.
264 PRODNIK
24 For a critical account see for example Mosco (1989), May (2002), D. Schiller (2007, ch. 1),
Fuchs (2012b).
3c: Commodifying Communication In Capitalism 265
25 See Dyer-Witheford (1999), May (2002, ch. 2), Mosco (1989; 2009, 75, 120), McChesney,
Wood and Bellamy Foster (1998), D. Schiller (2000; 2007), Fisher (2010), Fuchs (2008; 2011;
2012b) and other authors writing in the broad field of political economy of
communication.
26 Fuchs (2012b, 2–6) provides a detailed critical assessment of the discontinuity and conti-
nuity theories of information society. As he points out: “In its extreme form, the continu-
ity hypothesis is the claim that contemporary society does not differ in any significant
way from nineteenth-century capitalism.” (Ibid., 6) Both discontinuity and continuity
approaches are intellectually close to techno-deterministic theories that disregard the
ever-present power relations in specific social context.
266 PRODNIK
Human societies have always been based on both communication and infor-
mation. Language-capacity and communication can, in fact, be seen as defin-
ing characteristics of human societies. Hardt (1979, 19) points out that
communication is “a basic social process involving individuals. In fact, commu-
nication becomes the sine qua non of human existence and the growth of soci-
ety.” Similarly for Mosco (2009, 67), “communication is a social process of
exchange, whose product is the mark or embodiment of a social relationship.
Broadly speaking, communication and society are mutually constituted.” As noted
by Melody (1993, 75), “detailed investigation certainly would show that societ-
ies have always been information based,” which consequently means that “the
changes of recent years have been primarily in the market characteristics of
information.”
Because both communication and information have always been funda-
mental parts of human societies, Headrick (2000, ch. 1) wrote it is consequently
also impossible to define when the information society in fact started. We are,
however, able to define different historical epochs in which the wider impor-
tance of information in a certain social context has been intensified, both in
3c: Commodifying Communication In Capitalism 269
the sense of the amount of information to which people have access, and in
the sense of the changes in the information systems that are crucial for the
management, organization, transformation, and storing of information. At
most it is therefore possible to define several information revolutions accord-
ing to Headrick (2000), not only one that supposedly started in the middle of
the twentieth century. These revolutions have always been put in motion by
cultural, political, and economic upheavals of the times and were closely con-
nected to existing social needs; undoubtedly they were responses to the demands
for information (and their overall organization), echoing the wider power rela-
tions in societies.
The so-called information revolution we have been witnessing in recent
decades should, therefore, only be seen as a long revolution, as Williams
(2011/1961) named the long-term processes of transformation. The changes he
analysed were happening in different spheres of culture, politics and economy,
and in his view could not be considered as being separate from each other, as
they dialectically intertwined. For Williams (2011/1961, 10) long revolution
should be considered as “a genuine revolution, transforming men and institu-
tions,” yet it is at the same time “a difficult revolution to define, and its uneven
action is taking place over so long a period that it is almost impossible not to
get lost in its exceptionally complicated process.” (Ibid.) The changes that
accompanied the not-so-recent rise in the importance of communication, cul-
ture and information resources, points at a similar long-term change, one that
developed as a part of an ever-changing capitalist economic system, while
simultaneously overlapping with contradictory and deep structural transfor-
mation in the wider social order.
The latest information revolution can, according to Headrick (2000, ch. 7),
quite possibly be traced back several centuries into the past, or at least to the
second part of the nineteenth century, if we follow Winseck’s and Pike’s (2007)
analysis. They point out how this was the historical period when global com-
munications infrastructure was developed and first utilized, mostly owing to
the emergence of deep globalization: that is, the expansion of the world mar-
kets, the rise of multinational companies and financial institutions, and the
intensification of capital flows and global commodity exchange (Ibid.). At the
time, global communication infrastructure was closely connected to these
globalizing tendencies, including the development of new technologies.
International commodity exchange and the increasingly global division of
labour propelled the need for fast international communication, as success-
fully overcoming time-space constraints was often of fundamental importance
(because it could also mean an important competitive advantage in the mar-
ket). These tendencies had already been noted by Marx (see Melody 1993,
270 PRODNIK
68–70; Dyer-Witheford 1999, 38–42; Fuchs 2011, 141–160) and were especially
closely observed by another German political economist, Karl Knies, who
wrote detailed analyses of communications and transportation systems,
including two monographs, addressing, respectively, railroads and the tele-
graph, which were both published in the 1850s (see Hardt 2001, ch. 4).
The close connection between communications infrastructure, information
and communication flows, media and culture, and the underlying economic
transformation was closely observed by several other authors long before the
formal emergence of communication studies in the twentieth century. In his
historical analysis of journalism, Bücher (1893/1901, 241), one of the founding
fathers of the German Zeitungswissenschaft, for example, pointed out that
“The sole aim of this cursory survey of the modern development of journalism”
was “to show how the gathering of the news has been conditioned at each
epoch by general conditions of trade.” His materialist and historical approach
to the analysis of newspaper even today provides us with several important
insights.27 Bücher (Ibid, 225–226) was, in fact, one of the first authors to dem-
onstrate that news-agencies and journalism first developed as businesses in
Venice and Rome in the fifteenth century. This would mark the starting point
of the historical period when transmission of the news via commercial corre-
spondence became a source of profit. As historians in the field of media and
communication studies have indicated, Venice was in fact the first city in
Europe in which printing and publishing became an important type of busi-
ness, and this development also included laws regulating the printing and pub-
lishing trade, which can be considered as precursors to the copyright system
(Bettig 1996, 15–16). Even more importantly, it is crucial to note that the emer-
gence of a news-for-profit rationale historically and spatially overlapped with
Arrighi’s (1994) and Braudel’s (1977) account of the historical rise of capital.
According to their analyses, the “first great phase” of capitalism as a social sys-
tem started in the northern Italian city-states around the fifteenth century, and
this included Venice as one of the key financial centres of the time.
As pointed out by Dan Schiller (2007, 35), “Cultural and informational com-
modification commenced not after, but within, the acute social struggles
marking the transition to capitalism.” These processes were, therefore, a part
and parcel of structural changes and social struggles that accompanied the
social transformation into capitalism (Smythe 1954, 31–34; H. Schiller 1996, 35;
27 Bücher was not a Marxist and his approach cannot be defined as historically materialist
in the Marxian use of this term. His analysis however was both deeply historical and also
materialist in the sense of a long-standing philosophical split between idealist and mate-
rialist approaches to the social ontology (see for example Hay 2002, ch. 6).
3c: Commodifying Communication In Capitalism 271
Hardt 2001, ch.1; D. Schiller 2007, 34–35). But these developments were neither
self-evident nor indispensable; in many cases, they were accompanied by
social conflicts and opposition, and were actively countered by more or less
unsuccessful uprisings against the capitalist enclosure. Williams (2011/1961,
191), for example, noted that there were already several publishing houses in
England in the sixteenth century, however commodity exchange of books was
still considered vulgar at that time and there was consequently significant
resistance against the publishing market.
The emergence of modern iprs was, at least from today’s point of view, one
of the more important changes, with vast (and unplanned) consequences that
we are still in the process of fully comprehending. In their historical analyses
of the gradual transformation of information and culture into a special type of
commodity, both Dan Schiller (2007) and Bettig (1996, 22–23) have pinpointed
the eighteenth century as a crucial historical moment, when legal regulation of
iprs first appeared in England (cf. Hesmondhalgh 2009, ch. 5). Because these
rights spread to human creativity, they also enabled its commodification. But,
even before that, at the end of the seventeenth century, there was a consider-
able growth in the size of the reading public, which dialectically contributed to
an expansion of the production and circulation of newspapers, books, maga-
zines, and, consequently, also constituted a considerable expansion in the com-
modification of information and media (Williams 2011/1961, 192–193; Headrick
2000, ch. 1). The newspaper is, for example, often considered to be a product of
the commercial middle class in the eighteenth century, since it provided them
with crucial business information essential for their activities (Williams 2011/1961,
208, 222; Mosco 1989, 50). Because these early newspapers were still limited to a
relatively narrow circle of people, a real reading revolution in England, which
was followed by a vast market expansion of the press, only happened in the nine-
teenth century, especially between 1830 and 1850, when the first market specula-
tors emerged. Writing became an important part of commodity exchange in
England at that time and also led to a transformation of the media and press into
typical capitalist industries; a process that was fully consolidated only at the start
of the twentieth century (see Williams 2011/1961, 200; 1962).
A very similar historical development of the press to that which occurred in
England could be observed in most developed capitalist countries, for exam-
ple, in the us, where business imperatives in the media prevailed in the nine-
teenth century; this meant that both news and, later, advertising space, became
important commodities (Schudson 1978). At around the same time, the first
modern press agencies were founded around the world (Thussu 2006, 9–10)
and there were also vast changes in postal services and telecommunica-
tions throughout the nineteenth century, which provided infrastructure for
272 PRODNIK
Against those accounts that see the information society in terms of tech-
nological revolution, it is also important to emphasise that the appropria-
tion of information and information resources has always been a
constitutive aspect of capitalist societies quite outside of any technologi-
cal context. […] The gathering, recording, aggregation, and exploitation
of information can be – and has been – achieved on the basis of minimal
technological support.
ROBINS and WEBSTER 2004, 63
28 At the time three major European news agencies—German Wolff, British Reuters, and
French Havas—were also the only agencies that were international in their scope. They
made a cartel pact (treaty of alliance) in 1870s, through which they divided the world into
territories of influence. This cartel lasted for over fifty years. (Mattelart 2000, 23–34).
3c: Commodifying Communication In Capitalism 273
Instead of directing our focus on the rise of the new icts as the main incentive
that supposedly produced changes in society, we are therefore bound to point
to the diverging and changing types of access to the management and control
of information (Ibid,), which nowadays are mainly dependent on financial
considerations and are going through new encosures. These continuing
changes have established new economic – and with them social – inequalities;
for example an unequal access to formerly public information and culture,
information poverty, and an intensification of global dependencies because of
the concentration of communication capacity and information is in the hands
of the biggest capitalist conglomerates and corporations.29 In any case, com-
munication, culture, and information were being produced as commodities
centuries ago, but their role in the overall capitalist production and wider
accumulation process only slowly became as influential as it is today.
29 See for example Mosco (1989; 1993, 117–120), H. Schiller (1989; 1996), Bettig (1996),
Perelman (2002), McChesney (2013). According to Perelman (2003b, 32; cf. 2002) “stronger
intellectual property rights contribute to the unequal distribution of income and prop-
erty, have destructive consequences for science and technology and the university sys-
tem, inundate society with legal disputes, and reduce personal freedoms through intrusive
measures to protect intellectual property.”
274 PRODNIK
Likewise, one should not overlook the expansion of the basic democratic free-
doms that were an important process accompanying the struggle for democra-
tization, connected to the rise of liberalism, liberal democracy and urbanization
(cf. Williams 2011/1961, 211; Hardt 2001, ch. 1; Jhally 2006, 50). Urban industrial-
ization – which was, in fact, closely linked to the primary (primitive) accumula-
tion and enclosure of the commons (Marx 1990/1867, part 8; Perelman 2000) – for
example, significantly eroded the older (rural) cultural forms, which opened up
the space for mass culture, which could now be produced as a commodity (Jhally
2006, 50). As Smythe (1954, 34) noted over half a century ago, “The mass media
now supply entertainment which more than fills the quantitative void left by the
displacement of the older rituals for entertainment.” There was also an explosion
of advertising, which radically changed the economic organization of the press
at the start of the twentieth century and greatly contributed to its expansion (see
Park 1922, 360–365; Williams 1962, ch. 2; Baker 1994; Curran 2002, ch. 3).
Even if we take all of these different social processes into consideration it
remains impossible to explain what exactly contributed to such a considerable
qualitative change that communication, culture, and information (as com-
modities) have been turned into crucial resources in the existing capitalist
mode of production (even to the extent that, in some cases, they are now defin-
ing other political economic processes in the current historical epoch). North
American political economists of communication are in full agreement that
the key transformation was in fact led by political incentives and state inter-
ventions in this field. Herbert Schiller (1969; 1984; 1998; 2000, 49–54), Dan
Schiller (2000; 2007), Michael Perelman (2002), Vincent Mosco (1982; 1989;
1993), Nick Dyer-Witheford (1999) and Christopher May (2002, ch. 5; cf. 2010)
are amongst the authors pointing out that the political interventions were the
ones that led to what is often labelled as the information society and informa-
tion revolution.
The increasing social, economic and political significance of information
and communication systems and resources (both the infrastructure and the
content) was ascertained in the us in the 1950s and, especially, in the 1960s.
Key political administrators and decision-makers have, together with the big-
gest corporations and conglomerates, and in co-operation with the military-
industrial complex, realized that controlling communication and information
resources and infrastructure is of prime importance if the us wants to expand
its economic interests beyond their own borders in the areas that were beyond
their immediate political control, defining the terms of global hegemony. The
goal was not an old-fashioned imperial control through military might and
interventions (even though the possibility of this could not be excluded), but
was aimed at providing opportunities to the biggest conglomerates and
3c: Commodifying Communication In Capitalism 275
30 These issues remained amongst his major research interests until his death (see H. Schiller
2000).
276 PRODNIK
31 As Herbert Schiller stressed at the end of the 1990s (see H. Schiller 2000, 76–87), this doc-
trine remains crucial in governmental documents of the United States together with an
imperative of private property (e.g. over information via patents and intellectual property
rights) right to this day. Its fundamental principles are enforced through international
agreements and different bilateral arrangements between nation states.
32 As it is comprehended in the liberal theories. To put it in the words of Marx (1990/1867,
280), commodity exchange in the sphere of circulation “is in fact a very Eden of the innate
rights of man. It is the exclusive realm of Freedom, Equality, Property and Bentham.
Freedom, because both buyer and seller of a commodity, let us say of labour-power, are
determined only by their own free will. They contract as free persons, who are equal
before the law. Their contract is the final result in which their joint will finds a common
legal expression. Equality, because each enters into relation with the other, as with a
simple owner of commodities, and they exchange equivalent for equivalent. Property,
because each disposes only of what is his own. And Bentham, because each looks only to
his own advantage. The only force bringing them together, and putting them into relation
with each other, is the selfishness, the gain and the private interest of each. Each pays
heed to himself only, and no one worries about the others. And precisely for that reason,
either in accordance with the pre-established harmony of thing, or under the auspices of
an omniscient providence, they all work together to their mutual advantage, for the com-
mon weal, and in the common interest.”
33 Nordenstreng and Varis (1974, 54) noted in the conclusion of their influential report for
unesco, which focused on the international flows of television programme and was enti-
tled Television traffic – a one way street?, that Western exporters (unlike other exporters
3c: Commodifying Communication In Capitalism 277
around the world) were able to reach across the globe with their programmes.
“Consequently, exports of tv programmes to other countries seem to be associated with
the wealth and size of a country,” (Ibid.) they pointed out. This also meant that “the free
flow of tv material between nations means in actual fact that only those countries with
considerable economic resources have taken advantage of the freedom to produce, while
those with scarce resources have the ‘freedom’ to choose whether or not to take advantage
of the material made available to them.” (Ibid.) Empirical results of the analysis done by
Nordenstreng and Varis led to a conclusion that television traffic indeed was a one way
street at the time. As a consequence, there was no need for question marks anymore: “there
is no need – in fact, no justification – for a question mark after the title of this publication.
Globally speaking, television traffic does flow between nations according to the ‘one way
street’ principle: the streams of heavy traffic flow one way only.” (Nordenstreng and Varis
1974, 52) Mowlana (1985, 27) came to similar conclusions in his report in the 1980s, which
synthesized previous analyses done for unesco in the field of media, culture, and commu-
nications. He pointed out there is an obvious vertical flow of international news from the
most developed countries to the rest of the world. While horizontal flows existed, they rep-
resented only a fraction of the entire flow of information. This pattern was repeated in all
other forms of information: “With virtually all types of information flow, whether it is news
or data, educational, scientific or human flow, the pattern is the same. The cycles are quite
similar to cycles in other trade areas: industrially less developed countries export raw mate-
rials to highly industrialized countries for processing and then purchase back the more
costly finished products. Notably lacking is the exchange of data, news, information, cultural
programmes and products, and persons among developing countries.” (Mowlana 1985, 64).
278 PRODNIK
According to Dan Schiller (2007, 39–48), the key role played by political inter-
ventions in the rise of the information and communication commodities and
systems can be recognized in several different areas, including: (1) Funding
research and development in telecommunications; (2) “Liberalization” of the
communication market; (3) Changing global trade and investment regulations
to favour services; (4) Privatization of formerly public and freely accessible
information; and (5) Strengthening legal rights to private property in informa-
tion. Most of the funding went directly to the military establishment. As indi-
cated by Mosco (1982, 49–51), the us budget for telecommunications in 1982
that went directly to the Pentagon was us$14.5bn, which was about the same
as the revenue from all the radio and tv stations in the us that year. Mosco saw
the Pentagon as “a major force for capital accumulation” that “exerts a substan-
tial influence on the shape of the electronics industry.” (Ibid, 49, 50) Herbert
Schiller (2000, 53) was certain that the rapid development of computers and
other new technologies, information industries and the underlying infrastruc-
ture of the information age would never have happened without vast amounts
of government money. His estimate of the subsidies and outlays for state-
funded research and development in this field since the Second World War was
over us$1trln (Ibid).
The last two areas of political interventionism that Dan Schiller mentions
are closely connected to the proliferation of iprs, which since the 1980s, and
especially from the 1990s onward, played a very important part in the new
capitalist enclosures and the rise of the so-called digital/informational capi-
talism (Thussu 2005, 52–54; Thussu, 2006, ch.3; D. Schiller 2000). iprs were
embedded in supranational free-trade agreements, such as the General
Agreement on Trade in Services (gats), which made possible a global har-
monization of private ownership of information and imposed this onto
national legislatures (cf. Marshall and Frith 2004). The long-time present
American interests became a part of the World Trade Organization (wto),
which saw the free flow of information doctrine as essential for capitalist
expansion (see H. Schiller 2000, 41–44; Thussu 2005, 53). “With its growing
commodification, information acquired the status of a ‘key strategic resource’
in the international economy,” Thussu (2005, 54; cf. Berry 2008) pointed out.
Consequently “its distribution, regulation, marketing and management
became increasingly important.” (Ibid.)
As pointed out above, the rise of new icts and commodification of the
wider field of communication should not, therefore, be seen as an inevitable
consequence of the continuing expansion of global capitalism, neither were
they an outcome of the infamous (supposedly neutral and somehow benign)
transformation towards the post-industrial/information society. They can only
be seen as a long-term development, which was excessively accelerated
3c: Commodifying Communication In Capitalism 279
34 For a detailed account of nwico see Herbert Schiller (1976; 1978; 1984, ch. 4), Maxwell
(2003, 39–40), Nordenstreng (1993; 2013), Osolnik (2005), Thussu (2005; 2006, 24–37),
Mosco (2009, 72–75), and Mattelart (2011). nwico was a part of a wider initiative for a
New International Economic Order (nieo) promoted by countries that formed nam (see
H. Schiller 1978, 36–38; Nordenstreng 1993, 268). It promoted the right to communicate in
opposition to the free flow of information doctrine. It intellectually culminated in the
MacBride report entitled Many Voices, One World, which was released under the patron-
age of unesco in 1980 (see also the special issue of journal Javnost – the Public, vol. 12, no.
3; e.g. Osolnik 2005; Thussu 2005).
280 PRODNIK
35 Perhaps most striking is the fact that “representative” literature neglects critique of politi-
cal economy when it comes to audiences. A four-volume collection on audiences released
by Sage in 2009, entitled Media Audiences, offers no valuable insights from the political-
economic point of view, even though it contains many texts on this topic, encompassing
1320 pages (see: www.uk.sagepub.com/books/Book233064). The same, for example, holds
282 PRODNIK
the fact that the so-called “blind spot debate” was one of the most heated
debates in the historical development of the political economy of communi-
cation and provided several useful insights that seem crucial in understand-
ing how audiences are instrumentalised by capital. This long-lasting debate,
which at least indirectly continues in a much different technological and
social context of today’s society (see Bermejo 2009; Napoli 2010; Fuchs 2010;
Caraway 2011; Biltereyst and Meers 2011; Kang and McAllister 2011), is an
invaluable source for practices and ideas connected to Marxian-inspired
critical communication studies. Perhaps even more importantly, it also pro-
vides several insights into how commodification spreads throughout the
social fabric and how we are able to analyse these processes in postmodern
society, which is completely permeated with communication. Insights pro-
vided by (the critique of) political economy in communication studies can
thus offer a wide reflection on the current historical epoch by going beyond
narrow affirmative approaches.
With the “blind spot debate,” the issue of commodification in the media and
communication has been extended beyond content and media labour to audi-
ences. Audiences became the key media “goods” towards which scholarly
true for the journal Participations: International Journal of Audience Research, now
renamed into Participations: Journal of Audience & Reception Studies, that “welcomes con-
tributions from different fields,” like “sociology, psychology, anthropology, linguistics,
folkloristics, cultural and media studies” (see: www.participations.org). As it can be seen,
the journal states basically every possible approach, perspective, and discipline, one of
the rare exceptions being political economy. The same thing can be observed in respect
to the recently published Handbook of Media Audiences, edited by Virginia Nightingale
(2011), which almost completely avoids political economy (with perhaps an exception of
Napoli’s contribution) and only by a mere coincidence (if at all) touches at questions such
as power relations, private ownership, exploitation, or class relations. Political economy,
and especially its critique, is often neglected and concealed when it comes to audiences;
they are often seen as proactive and empowered “consumer-citizens.” Little to none
reflection is given to the vast discrepancies between the owners of the means of production
and the “consumers.” This means questions concerning wider structural issues and social
totality are quite possibly completely overlooked and taken for granted. To state it differ-
ently: in these approaches, capitalism is something that stays in the background as an irrel-
evant or presupposed factor, its influence not being worthy of any deeper analysis. When
Marx and critique of political economy are used, they are often seen as outdated and reduc-
tionist or even deliberately misinterpreted (I thank the reviewer of this chapter for his com-
ments on this issue, see also the critique provided by Biltereyst and Meers 2011). This is for
example quite obvious in Fiske’s influential book Introduction to communication studies
(1990), which describes Marx’s theory as “economistic.” It also reduces it to the issues con-
cerning ideology and gives very simplistic accounts of complex Marxist arguments.
3c: Commodifying Communication In Capitalism 283
attention could and should be aimed. Before this debate, media content has
commonly been viewed as the vital commodity sold by the media to its reader-
ship. The recognition that “the mass media are first and foremost industrial
and commercial organisations which produce and distribute commodities”
(Murdoch and Golding 1973, 205f.), has already been widely accepted amongst
critically engaged theorists. This important rethinking of the role of critical
communication studies was initiated by Smythe (1977). Both Mosco (2009, 12)
and Meehan (1993) have pointed out that Smythe’s article, in which the audi-
ence commodity thesis was first proposed, has produced a fundamental shift
in critical communication research. It could now include in its scope all com-
munication companies that advertise, not only the media themselves. This can
in fact be interpreted as an early and radical widening of the possible areas for
analysis that can be carried out by the political economy of communication
and this scope was, furthermore, extended by Smythe’s belief that political
economy can, in its widest meaning, be defined as “the study of control and
survival in social life” (Mosco 2009, 3). According to this interpretation, politi-
cal economy can be seen as the most holistic, and all-encompassing approach,
while in many ways resembling the critical role it should in fact provide in its
analysis of society.
In many ways Smythe’s findings almost prophetically predicted some of the
topics that would later become important in the framework of changes con-
cerning immaterial work and post-Fordist production, which are well demon-
strated by Gorz (2010) (in this text they are dealt with in Section 5). It is thus of
the utmost importance to assess some of Smythe’s key provocative statements
and their continuing (in)validity in light of the rise of new media technologies,
especially the Internet.
36 One of the initial claims by Smythe (1977) was that critical theory, for example Western
Marxism, had more or less ignored communication (hence “the blindspot”). One could
claim so forty years ago, but it is hardly the case today. And it was a problematic thesis
even then (both in the case of Austro-Marxism and some of the authors working in sfr
Yugoslavia), which Murdock (1978) sufficiently pointed out in his reply to Smythe.
Nowadays we have a developed field of study in political economy of communication,
284 PRODNIK
while some of the radical neo-Marxist positions, for example autonomism, presuppose it
is basically communication that is the main category in post-Fordist capitalism.
37 It is the contradictory (almost antagonistic) three-folded relationship between audiences
(living beings that are again being reduced to commodities), content in the media, and
advertisers (representing capital), that is crucial here.
3c: Commodifying Communication In Capitalism 285
out a decade later how the means of communication must be seen as a means
of production, and this is especially so in modern societies, where communica-
tion significantly develops and becomes an important (both direct and indi-
rect) productive force.
Secondly, an even more important and radical thesis was derived by Smythe
on the basis of these initial findings. As if he simply continued Adorno’s and
Williams’ line of thought, he claimed that today, “work time for most people is
twenty-four hours a day” (Smythe 1981a, 121). Consequences of these findings
are radical and wide-ranging and even more importantly, Smythe’s observa-
tions are proven day-by-day. Even if one disagrees with Smythe’s observation of
how labour should be defined, which is indeed a complex issue, his thesis in its
fundamental demonstrates the radical expansion of commodification through-
out new spheres of society.
Both of Smythe’s theses suggest that what can be considered as labour time
has been radically extended into non-work time, when labour power is usually
reproduced. Jhally and Livant (in Jhally 1987, 83–90) extended this notion fur-
ther, while firmly basing their view in the critique of political economy as out-
lined by Marx. They pointed out that watching (as a form of labour) is in fact
just an extension of factory labour and this should not be seen as a metaphor.
It is a specific form of labour that is vital in the whole media economics pro-
cess; similarly to how labourers sell their labour power to capitalists, so audi-
ences sell their watching power to media owners. Leisure thereby becomes an
increasingly important component in the workings of contemporary capital-
ism; it is subsumed under capital, monetised, and valorised, while audiences
are viewed instrumentally, with the sole goal of (surplus) value extraction.
Activities of audiences (listening, watching, browsing, “clicking”) produce value,
which is appropriated by the capitalist, which in exchange offer an apparently
free lunch (various types of content).
Smythe’s theses, as already pointed out, also indicate that all aspects of
social and individual human life can be fully commodified and be drawn into
the capitalist accumulation cycle, whether one wants and knows this or (pref-
erably) not. There are basically no human activities left, from which a certain
magnitude of exchange value could not be extracted and appropriated. This is
possible also because of the rise of digital technologies that started to play a
crucial role in these very processes, providing unprecedented detail and fur-
ther rationalisation of measuring, quantification, and control (see Napoli 2010;
2011). Napoli (2011, 10) even goes as far as to claim that a broad array of options
for data gathering, which the media corporations are able to use today, make
the Internet almost too measurable. These techniques make it possible to record
an unprecedented level of detail of its users (or in the discourse of marketers:
286 PRODNIK
individual consumers). In this sense, Castells’s notion that the Internet is the
fabric of our lives, could hardly be taken more seriously, when it comes to the
encroachment upon people’s privacy.
The key changes brought by new digital technologies that offer new ways of
controlling and measuring the audiences are: (a) fragmentation; (b) formally
increased autonomy, participation and engagement of audiences; (c) unprec-
edented control over consumption; and (d) unprecedented detail of measur-
ing users and audiences (Napoli 2011). Fragmentation of the media environment
and consequently audiences brings an increasing prominence of the “long tail”
scenarios, which break audiences into smaller and smaller pieces. There is a
historical development from broadcasting, distinctive of the early mass media,
to “narrowcasting,” which was enabled by satellite tv and infrastructure priva-
tisation and deregulation, and finally to “pointcasting,” which is made possible
by digitalisation and the Internet. The latter enables a radical “rationalisation
of measuring” and full quantification of every activity that potentially becomes
monetisable through several different techniques and methods (e.g. via data
mining, see Gandy 2012, Andrejevic 2012, Fuchs et al. 2011, Prodnik 2012a). It is
true that Internet users (also called “cybernauts”) can be more engaged and
have more influence over how they use the new media than before, but from
the perspective of the political economy of the Internet, this enables the owner
of the platform they are using an even more detailed measurement of their
activities and preferences, possibly also their social status and other personal
information. It is an idealist notion to speculate blindly on the revolutionary
possibilities that have supposedly been opened up by the Internet. A more
materialist approach should take into account the wider social context and
recognise that the asymmetries have been growing in the last couple of decades
and the Internet unfortunately did little to mitigate this. On the contrary, it could
even be claimed that digitalisation to some extent helped to widen these gaps
and intensify concentration and discrepancies between those in power and the
disempowered many (see Hindman 2009, Bellamy Foster and McChesney 2011).
An exemplary case of the mentioned characteristics is, without any doubt,
Google (see Kang and McAllister 2011). This corporation derives most of
its profit from advertising (especially its main advertising product Google
AdWords), by extensively commodifying its users, fragmenting them into
niche audiences and then selling them to prospective advertisers that offer
specific types of commodity that relate to these audiences. One of the theses,
regarding the post-Fordist economy, proposed by Marazzi (2008), points pre-
cisely at such key duties of corporations: differentiation of products becomes
one of the ways of getting the attention of the consumers. Production, in this
3c: Commodifying Communication In Capitalism 287
light, steps into the background, at least to a certain extent, while the �previously
less noteworthy attention economy increases in importance. In fact, Google’s
yearly profit is levelled with annual budgets of some smaller nation-states (e.g.
Slovenia, with a population of 2 million people), while (formally!) employ-
ing 30 000 people. This is only possible by severe infringement into the
privacy of the users, a process in most cases denoted as economic surveillance
(see Fuchs et al. 2011; Prodnik 2012a). Several authors, amongst them Pasquinelli
(2009) and Fuchs (2012c), point out that one of the most important sources in
the process of capital accumulation by Google is the unpaid labour of the
people using its platform, with the World Wide Web content-producers being
the other. Both can consequently be exploited, because Google Corporation is
able to extract surplus value from their activity. This brings us directly to the
definitions of the social factory and general intellect provided by the autono-
mia (post-operaist) movement, which are discussed in Section 5.
advertiser (or quite simply, he sells their attention if these audiences are less
differentiated) and most notably the content produced by audiences in digital
environments. There is nothing unusual here that would not correspond to
the Marxian analysis, neither is it completely true that “there is no formal con-
tract, negotiation or discussion of terms between audience and advertiser”
(Ibid.), which Caraway seems to feel is the crucial aspect of labour to appear as
commodity (which is not the case; the sole precondition is the ability of the
labourer to choose freely his exploiter when he puts his labour power in the
labour-market). Everything Caraway mentions in fact does happen, mostly
informally, true, but on the Internet often also formally; for example via terms
of use and privacy statements (see Sandoval 2012), while the negotiations are hap-
pening with mouse clicks or on the remote control. The consumer of the media
content is able to change his “employer,” and on the Internet, a person can easily
self-employ himself by building his own website that will in real-life circum-
stances of course have immense difficulties of surviving against dominant actors
such as Google or Facebook (just like it happens in the real-world economy).
Caraway’s major problem throughout the text is that he fails to distinguish
between two very different levels of argumentation: the abstract level and the
concrete level. Both levels are of course of immense importance and the
abstract argumentation, with its focus on tendencies, is built with the sole pur-
pose of explaining the movement of concrete reality. The abstract argumenta-
tion however, which abstracts away particular cases and several mechanisms
that operate in actually existing everyday life, can never fully explain concrete
reality and particular cases, because its insight is limited (intentionally so).
Causes for Marx’s use of abstraction have been laid out earlier in this text, but
one perhaps most obvious reason is that there is no way of analysing every-
thing, dropping to the level of concrete reality, because this leaves the analyst
with the sole focus on particular cases (such an analysis can bring a lot of new
knowledge, but then again, also very little). As Collier (1994, 255–259) points
out, apprehending the concrete whole is impossible and failing to realise this
often makes us overlook crucial mechanisms and determinations (or we, at
best, construct generalisations with little explanatory power).39
Caraway’s inability to comprehend that political economy necessitates
abstraction (together with focus on tendencies) is seen through his statement
that “advertisers are not buying audience power but a fabricated image of an
audience – and it is this fabrication which needs to be challenged by critical
39 While it is true that the further away theory gets from the concrete toward the abstract,
more prone to error it is, it should be noted that “in order to explain the concrete conjunc-
ture we have to unravel by analysis (in thought) the multiple mechanisms and tendencies
which make it what it is” (Collier 1994, 255).
3c: Commodifying Communication In Capitalism 291
scholarship.” Does he really believe advertisers do not know that? They are
buying an approximation, an abstraction, a statistical construct of an audience
and not “real” audiences: there is a relevant tendency (because of all the data
they have) that the fabricated construct of an audience they bought will in
large part behave in a way they planned that they will. In the abstract argu-
ment, they have to behave like that, otherwise the advertiser goes bankrupt; in
the abstract reasoning this approximation must be close enough to reality in
the long run to make it a reasonable purchase (it is not critical scholarship that
factually risks its money by buying these fabrications; if this was not an eco-
nomic practice that enhanced capitalists profitability, they would quite simply
abandon it). It is very similar to a capitalist that is never able to know in advance
whether he will be able to extract enough surplus value from the labour power
he bought, so he is able to succeed on the market with the commodities which
he plans to produce (the capitalist needs to speculate that he will be wily
enough to control the labourer and extract enough surplus value). Similarly,
looking at concrete examples, a capitalist in the production process never has
complete control over the labourers he hired; in the worst case scenario (for
him), labourers will go on strike. Or in the worst case scenario for the media
owner, audiences will stop watching the content he is producing (which means
he will either: put something else on-air, reduce costs so they correspond to the
money brought in by the advertising, or go out of business). The abstract
approach, of course, de-subjectivises, but this is what capitalism in fact does:
rationalising, objectifying, abstracting (see Section 2.3).
It is worth asking ourselves whether anyone, besides now mostly deceased
Stalinist dialectical materialists, genuinely believes that Marx’s quite apparent
lack of interest in subjectivities and working-class power in some of his later
writings, point at his disinterest in progressive changes in the world by these
subjects? This would contradict much of his actual conduct throughout his
whole life. It is, on the contrary, exactly because of his lack of attention toward
subjectivities that he was able to analyse abstractly how the capitalist system
in fact works (again, only at the abstract, not necessarily concrete level, where
several other tendencies come into play, most importantly human agency that
can resist this subjugation). He had to abstract from other aspects of concrete
reality that are of prime importance to fight capitalism, to demonstrate how
the capitalist exploits the worker in the production process if one accepts the
ideal typology of the capitalist market constructed by classical political econo-
mists.40 Abstraction offers both Marx and Smythe a specific perspective on
40 Let us take an obvious example, that of Adam Smith and his construction of social reality
in The Wealth of Nations. The sheer fact his arguments are mostly abstractions tells us they
cannot be refuted with practical examples (e.g. of the reputed failings of his theory when
292 PRODNIK
how capitalism operates in an abstract form and it is obvious that this perspec-
tive is not complete; it leaves out vast parts of social life. It is an abstraction, a
very important one, but still it is limited in its scope, which is a characteristic
of any abstraction. Still, as Fuchs, for example, points out, Smythe in fact does
not neglect agency, even if he finds no automatic resistance.41 As Smythe points
out in Dependency Road:
they are applied to concrete reality); even though we are yet to see such a perfectly com-
petitive market, which is at the fundaments of his theory (arguably, there has never been
such an example, especially not in the last century or so). (see also Harvey 2010).
41 This thesis was raised in his plenary talk entitled Critique of the Political Economy of Social
Media, which was given on 3rd of May 2012 at the Critique, Democracy and Philosophy in
21st Century Information Society conference in Uppsala (Sweden). As he also pointed out
in a private debate, Smythe’s focus is, amongst others, on labour – and labour is an activity,
it is inherently a place where active human subject comes in.
42 This Smythe quote about agency was presented Fuchs in this talk at the Uppsala confer-
ence and taken from his presentation, see: http://www.scribd.com/doc/92818866/
Christian-Fuchs-Critique-of-the-Political-Economy-of-Social-Media-and-Informational-
Capitalism. See also Fuchs (2012a).
3c: Commodifying Communication In Capitalism 293
43 Barbalet (1983, 29–30) stresses that for Marx, abolition of social forms (such as commod-
ity fetishism) requires social and political action, not scientific enquiry. Critical science is
however an integral part of a wider revolutionary framework.
294 PRODNIK
correct one. On the contrary, I feel in many cases it has in fact been highly
detrimental, providing only an “objectivistic” account by focusing on tenden-
cies and mechanisms. Its basic premises should, however, be accepted as being
valuable and credit should be given where credit is due: political readings of
the central concepts in political economy would for example be impossible if
Marx would not first provide us with a stringently technical, abstract, non-
subjectivist and non-political reading.
The key difference between the presented strands of the political economy of
communication and post-operaist/autonomist neo-Marxism is that the latter
expands its scope beyond media and communication (even if in some cases it
takes examples from the Internet as case studies). It also puts a much larger
focus on the subjective agency; it is individual subjects that produce value and
because value production has spread into wider society (e.g. the “social fac-
tory”), this offers a radical expansion for the political possibilities and human
resistance against these processes.
Several findings and ideas on audience as commodity can be directly
�connected to this line of thought. Authors basing their approach in this neo-�
Marxist “school” claim that communication, or even language-capacity as
such, gained hegemonic primacy in contemporary society, therefore providing
only one of the several possible links to political economy of communication.
The concept of “social factory,” which discloses how work has expanded
beyond places commonly intended to host the production process (i.e., fac-
tory, manufacture …) into wider society (see Negri 1984/1991; Negri 1992;
Terranova 2004 etc.), also indirectly points at a full-fledged commodification of
society, a thesis quite similar to those of Smythe and authors participating in
the audience commodity debate.
Several authors such as Agamben (2000, 109–120), Virno (2004), Terranova
(2004), Marazzi (2008), Negri (1991/1984; 1992; 1999) Negri and Hardt (2001;
2004; 2009), Dean (2008), Pasquinelli (2009), Gorz (2010), Fumagalli and
Mezzadra (2010), Moulier Boutang (2011) and others have recently been writ-
ing on variations of communicative, cognitive or even semio and bio-linguistic
capitalism, where communication and language capacity are gaining in impor-
tance. They can even be seen as a deeper, ontological proposition on the
species-being of human beings (see Dyer-Witheford 2004). Similar findings
were applied before that by Lazzarato (1996), who wrote of immaterial labour.
3c: Commodifying Communication In Capitalism 295
Later-on this type of labour was most carefully analysed by Gorz (2010). Gorz
demonstrated how immaterial work has become the hegemonic form of work
and the source for value creation in contemporary societies. Because of this
transformation, people are totally subsumed under capital, where they must
become the enterprises that they are, self-entrepreneurs, and must hold as
much human capital as possible. “With self-entrepreneurship, whole persons
and entire lives can, at last, be put to work and exploited. Life becomes ‘the
most precious capital’. The boundary between work and non-work fades, not
because work and non-work activities mobilise the same skills, but because
time for living falls, in its entirety, into the clutches of value” (Gorz 2010, 22; for
an overview see Brophy and de Peuter 2007).
This is quite peculiar. It is important to note such an intertwinement
between the time of labouring and non-labouring is very far from being com-
mon to capitalist societies. Quite on the contrary, with the rise of capitalism
there was a radical separation between what was deemed productive (by capi-
tal), and what was unproductive, merely adequate for reproduction of human
life. As Thompson (1967, 59f.; 1991, ch. 6) demonstrates, task-orientated work
and a hardly noticeable demarcation between “work” and “life” is distinctive of
pre-capitalist communities, “where social intercourse and labour are inter-
mingled – the working-day lengthens or contracts according to the task – and
there is no great sense of conflict between labour and ‘passing the time of day’”
(ibid., 60). Labour in capitalist societies, on the other hand, has historically
always been stringently measured and timed by the clock (with far-reaching
consequences). Thompson not only demonstrated that apprehension of time
is socially constructed, but that linear measurement of time is crucial for capi-
talism. One of the pre-requisites of Marxian labour theory of value, which is
constitutive for capitalist and exploitation of labour, is therefore being able to
measure the labourers work. This is what abstract time is all about – even
though capitalists have developed several new techniques of measuring, lead-
ing some authors to write about neo-Taylorism or digital Taylorism (e.g. Brown
et al. 2011, ch. 5). Nevertheless, this has important consequences, especially if
we acknowledge there is an increasing number of jobs, where labour cannot be
easily measured (see Gorz 1989). This often means neo-Taylorist practices are
close to a mere façade, because they fail to measure anything of particular rel-
evance. They are, however, effective means of surveillance and control over the
workforce, as they were in the past. This difficulty is of course furthermore
accentuated with the increasing blurring between time of labour and free-
time. As noted by Postone (2003/1993, 26f.), “in the course of development of
capitalist industrial production, value becomes less and less adequate as a
measure of the ‘real wealth’ produced. […] Value becomes anachronistic in
296 PRODNIK
terms of the potential of the system of production to which it gives rise; the
realisation of that potential would entail the abolition of value.” This means
that “the abolition of value would signify that labour time no longer would
serve as the measure of wealth and that the production of wealth no longer
would be effected primarily by direct human labour in the process of produc-
tion.” For Postone it is therefore clear that “overcoming capitalism, according
to Marx, entails a fundamental transformation of the material form of produc-
tion, of the way people work.”
It is not a historical novelty that much labour is done outside the production
process or the places traditionally denoted as places for production (e.g. fac-
tory, manufacture). Such labour is however considered unproductive by capi-
tal and was often denoted as such also by “progressive” socialist movements,
which excluded all but the “real proletariat,” which was constituted by white
men (see Huws 2003). These places were however at the same time crucial for
reproduction of the lives of the labourers. This was especially the case with the
unproductive labour done by women in the household, where this division
was based on gender (for the role of this labour in the wider accumulation
process see Wallerstein 1983, 22–28; Fortunati 1989; Huws 2003). According to
Fortunati (1989, 9) the capitalist mode of production has a dual character,
divided between production and reproduction. While the latter is deemed as a
non-value (it is also non-waged and carried out in the home), the former sup-
posedly produces value in the production process. Fortunati however twists
this logic and demonstrates that reproduction is an integral part of the produc-
tion process; in fact, “it clearly contributes to the creation of value as a crucial,
integral part of the capitalist cycle” (Fortunati 1989, 8). It is an indirectly waged
labour that is engaged in the reproduction of labour power, which is crucial for
the production as such and simultaneously enables that two workers are
exploited with one wage. This notion is today extended even further. Huws
(2003, 27; 45f.; 68f.) for example uses terms “unpaid consumption labour” and
“consumption workers” to denote many unprofitable tasks that are forced back
on the consumer, adding to the unpaid labour common people must do to
reproduce their labour power (and consequently their lives). This type of work
has usually been done by women, who are disproportionately affected by these
demands, reproducing the gender relations. The key novelty is that capital has
been able to include this type of (what is known as) “economic externalities”
into its accumulation cycle.
What is of particular interest to me here is not so much through what
changes the conceptualisation of labour has gone and what the category of
labour even means today. These can be indeed seen as crucial difficulties that
3c: Commodifying Communication In Capitalism 297
political economy must face today. Neither do we want to focus on the �structural
transformations of capitalism in perhaps an entirely new phase of capitalism.
What we want to consider here seems to be an equally important question,
namely, “how far” commodification has been able to spread into lives of human
beings, where and what it is able to colonise and under what conditions. We are
able to see striking convergence points between early findings of Smythe and
observations made by several strands of neo-Marxist critique of political econ-
omy when analysing not only the role of commodification in present historical
moment, but also where capital is able to extract surplus value. There is no limit
to the commodification process according to these two strands of thought and
it is not a coincidence many critical communication scholars have integrated
Autonomist perspective in their theoretical apparatus. It seems both strands
fully demonstrate the real value of George Gerbner’s statement from 1983 that
“if Marx were alive today, his principal work would be entitled Communications
rather than Capital” (cited in: Nordenstreng 2004, 13).
What is presently novel in contemporary societies is, as claimed by
Autonomist authors, that capital is attempting to include in the capitalist
accumulation circuit the sole human capabilities to produce knowledge, com-
municate, quickly adapt to changed conditions (flexibility), participate, or
cooperate. These are capabilities that are specific to human beings, who, as
open animals, are capable of constructing political and social institutions.
These characteristics are being directly “employed” by contemporary capital
through different techniques and apparatuses, which serve to extract value
from living labour. This claim could even be seen as a naturally tendential
development of capitalism, which cannot set itself any limits when colonising
different spheres from which value can be extracted.
This is directly applicable to Virno’s (1996; 2004) reinterpretation of the con-
cept of general intellect, derived from the “Fragment on the machines” in
Marx’s Grundrisse. Virno argues that post-Fordist capitalism mobilises all the
faculties that characterise our species (i.e. language, abstract thinking, plastic-
ity), a thesis that is derived from his social ontology. For Virno, for example,
these capabilities can be seen as generically human: “post-Fordism mobilises
all the faculties that characterise our species: language, abstract thinking, dis-
position toward learning, plasticity, the habit of not having solid habits” (Virno
2005, 29f.). It is these characteristics that are probably used in all professions
and occupations (in the sense of the given definition communication is a nec-
essary social manifestation of human language-capacity). Pasquinelli (2009)
instead uses the term “common intellect,” which demonstrates how capital is
in fact exploiting human capabilities common to all people, while at the same
298 PRODNIK
time appropriating our common social production without paying for it (see
also Hardt and Negri 2009).
As pointed out by Chicchi (2010), Marazzi (2010), or Vercellone (2010) finan-
cial capitalism has been able spread over the entirety of the economic accu-
mulation cycle. In its fundamentals this means that finance is now present in
all of the phases of economic cycle, from its start (production), to its end (con-
sumption). This is the main reason why finance capitalism is able to extract
value beyond areas that were traditionally meant for producing value (i.e. pro-
duction of exchange value behind the borders of a factory). This simultane-
ously means commodification has been able to spread into all areas of life.
5.1 The Second Enclosure Movement: “…and all that is Solid Melts into a
Commodity”?
In capitalism, that is to say, all that is solid melts into pr, and late capital-
ism is defined at least as much by this ubiquitous tendency towards pr-
production as it is by the imposition of market mechanisms.
mark fisher (2009, 44)
extra-economic incentives. The key difference is that these enclosures are now
also aimed against information and cultural resources (cf. Bollier 2002; Hes�
mond�halgh 2008; Berry 2008; May 2010). The width of the enclosures is exempli-
fied by Perelman (2002, 5), who is certain that iprs “have contributed to one of
the most massive redistributions of wealth that has ever occurred.” Several
authors wrote about new imperial and colonial practices (see Bettig 1996; Bollier
2002; Perelman 2002; Berry 2008, 49, 92), while Harvey (2003, 144–152; 2009,
67–70, 73–74) conceptualized these processes of privatization under the term
accumulation by dispossession, which he used to demonstrate that primary
(primitive) accumulation is a recurrent process of an often violent incorporation
of different spheres into a capitalist accumulation cycle. Primary accumulation
is, for Harvey, a process that does not take place only with the emergence of capi-
talism, but also when the system is already in place (cf. Perelman 2000). It
denotes “predatory accumulation practices” that are typical of neoliberal order
and commodification of divergent types of commons. This also includes,
amongst others, people’s histories, culture and cultural heritage, personal and
intellectual creativity, genetic materials and so on (especially via patents and
iprs) (see Harvey 2003, 147–148; 2009, 68–69). In Berry’s (2008, 53) view “the
rapid enclosure of ideas and expressions that has intensified in the past decade”
could even be labelled as “new feudalism,” because it can lead to the emergence
of a rentier class.
Hesmondhalgh (2008; cf. D. Schiller 2007, 43) was one of the authors that
systematically applied Harvey’s concept to the iprs system, which made pos-
sible to own creativity and knowledge, bringing about a new type of imperial-
ism. According to him “capital has shown an unprecedented interest in culture”
(Ibid., 101) in the last decades, and strong iprs were a key dimension of neolib-
eralism that made commodification of this sphere possible. As McChesney
(2013, 80, emphasis by author) recently pointed out, copyright “protects corpo-
rate monopoly rights over culture and provides much of the profits to media
conglomerates. They could not exist without it. Copyright has become a major
policy encouraging the wholesale privatization of our common culture.”
These new enclosures in the field of information, communication, culture,
and creativity should not be taken lightly. These are the spheres of social life
that are crucial for how we, as human beings, think, comprehend, normalize,
reflect, rationalize, institutionalize, research, create, consolidate, question,
preserve, and critically deal with our society, with its political and economic
order, and, consequently, with our lives. Their commodification, therefore, has
a direct influence on the quality of democracy, democratic participation and
the public sphere in our society.
As noted above, anything can be commodified in a capitalist social context
and be subjected to the particular interests of accumulation and profitability.
300 PRODNIK
This is the only possible underlying goal of capital in the production and
exchange of commodities. Exchange value predominates in this relationship
and universal equivalence and instrumental rationality are preliminary condi-
tions of the commodity-form. Even declaratively, the central goal of these ten-
dencies can hardly be the benefit of human beings and the promotion of
democracy. Just to take an example, even the commodification of information
today creates new social and economic inequalities and deepens existing ones,
often influencing whole societies and communities, not “only” individuals (see
H. Schiller 1996; Bettig 1996). And because iprs can cover almost anything
(Perelman 2002), especially with the help of new ict s, everything can be com-
modified, a fact that has important repercussions for wider society. This was
already noticed by Jameson (1991, 37), when he observed that ict s “are them-
selves but a distorted figuration of something even deeper, namely, the whole
world system of a present-day multinational capitalism.” He saw the commu-
nication network as closely connected to capital and the global capitalist sys-
tem. In this way, the commodification of communication and the seeming
openness of the Internet are a perfect reflection of neo-liberal values, in which
everything must operate as a business and the market should have the final
word about everything (cf. Fisher 2010).
These early observations by Jameson are very close to those by Dan Schiller
(2000), who closely connected computer networks to the rise of neo-liberal
capitalism and the continuing global expansion of the capitalist marketplace.
He used the notion of digital capitalism to denote the fact that the Internet is
now one of the focal communications points of the supranational market sys-
tem. It is its underlying and unavoidable infrastructure, which makes possi-
ble information sharing within and among transnational corporations. These
findings should not come as a surprise, in Mattelart’s (2000, 77) opinion
communication must be omnipresent and offer completely free interaction if
transnational corporations want to function properly. Otherwise the spatially
separated and mutually dependent parts of the “network-firm” (its strategy is
necessarily both global and local at the same time) cannot serve the whole.
“Any shortcoming in the interoperability between the parts, any lack of free
interaction, is a threat to the system,” he points out (Ibid.).
It is exactly demands of the corporate business that were crucial for the
development of the Internet, which made possible digital commerce. Dan
Schiller’s (Ibid., xvi) statement that “cyberspace not only exemplifies but today
actually shapes the greater political economy of which it has become a critical
part,” in many ways underlines Jameson’s earlier observations and supports
them with a clear materialist historical account. Eran Fisher (2010) provided a
similar account when he pointed out that digital discourse follows the same
3c: Commodifying Communication In Capitalism 301
44 In fact, language has become central in the production and exchange of things in the
current phase of capitalist accumulation; communication is now both a raw material and
an instrument of work according to Marazzi (2008, 49). We could thus write about semio-
capital, because of “the semioticization of the social relations of production. The private
has become public, and the public has become economic.” (Marazzi 2008, 44).
302 PRODNIK
The key characteristic of a seeping commodification is the fact that, in the cur-
rent historical epoch, commodity-form is able to trickle down to all the niches
and activities of society and human lives. A seeping commodification is able to
more or less successfully mimic the activities that are distinctive of communi-
cation, which has (in the recent decades) been completely absorbed into the
capitalist accumulation circuit.
Because of these characteristics, commodification is nowadays able literally
to seep into the spheres that seemed completely impenetrable (even unimagi-
nable) to the market exchange in the past. For example, one only needs to
think of the importance of the (commodified) genome in the rise of biotech-
nology (Rifkin 2000) or the statistical collections of personal data, which pre-
suppose novel and intrusive forms of (amongst other types especially
economic) surveillance with the new icts (see Allmer 2012; Fuchs et al. 2012;
Sandoval 2012). Or let us consider the increasing intrusiveness of the corporate
branding, which now also covers branding of nations (see Kania-Lundholm
2012, ch. 3), whole communities (Prodnik 2012b), or even faculty departments
at universities. One of the most absurd cases of the latter is provided by the
iedc-Bled School of Management (Slovenia), which today includes The Coca-
Cola Chair of Sustainable Development.45 No less absurd are Amazon’s patent on
the single-click buying method (see Berry 2008, 34), u.s. Olympic Committee’s
trademark over the word “Olympic” (see Boyle 2008, xi–xii), Microsoft’s double-
clicking patent,46 or copyright claim over football match fixtures in the English
Premier League, which lasted for a few years and has later been removed by the
European Court of Justice.
One of the consequences of the process of a seeping commodification is
that many boundaries are starting to disintegrate before our eyes, leaving the
door open for further expansion of capital. It is not only that communication
and information do not pay regard to any solid boundaries; they also became a
constituent part of almost every institution, process, and thing in society,
including a crucial part of the (post-Fordist) production process (Marazzi
2008). It is significant that an important characteristic of postmodernity is,
precisely, fluidity. Bauman (2000), for example, used a very suitable metaphor
of “the liquid modernity” to demonstrate that society on the one hand has
remained the same (modern capitalism) and, on the other hand, that there are
constant changes occurring throughout society (liquidity): this is the persisting
continuity and change, which is occurring simultaneously, and has been men-
tioned earlier in the text. The liquidity of communication is accompanied by a
47 Herbert Schiller (1996, 113, 114) pointed out it was already satellite technology that “has
largely made national borders irrelevant.” In his view “global corporations and media-
cultural conglomerates […] are indifferent to formal communication boundaries.”
3c: Commodifying Communication In Capitalism 305
via digital surveillance, which makes possible new types of quantification and
amassment of data (the so-called “big data”) that via economic surveillance
lead to commodification of personal characteristics of the Internet users and
their everyday life activities (see Allmer 2012; Fuchs et al. 2011; Sandoval 2012).
The same disintegrative process, as already mentioned above, is happening
between the formerly very distinct spheres of production and reproduction, or
between leisure time and work time (Gorz 2010). While none of these boundar-
ies were ever impenetrable and their slow disintegration is evident for several
decades now, they are becoming increasingly porous and vague as somehow
clear demarcation lines.
Herbert Schiller (1989) already noticed these changes decades ago, when he
pointed out how different spheres and parts of society have started to blur.
Amongst the key reasons for this transformation was an offensive of the corpo-
rate capital, which started to permeate all social spaces. Furthermore, “deregu-
lation, privatization, and the expansion of market relationships have affected
all corners of the economy” (H. Schiller 1996, 46).
What seems of prime importance is not only that commodification has
encompassed new spheres of social life, but that even the spheres that are not
(or, at least not yet) subjugated to these tendencies, are being remodelled in the
ways to reflect the rules of the capitalist market. Even the projects and activi-
ties not driven directly by market considerations are now compelled to justify
their existence through neoliberal categories such as efficiency, the real “use-
value” of some public project (which is in fact the exchange-value on and for
the market), economistic rationale and so on. As pointed out by Crouch (2004,
40) governments around the world are increasingly incapable of drawing the
line between public-service and commercial entities. They heedlessly try to
imitate the modus operandi of private firms and require from its own depart-
ments to act as if they were firms. In Crouch’s view, this contributes to the
arrival of what he calls post-democracy, which is devoid of egalitarianism and
fundamentally flawed because of the increasing power of corporate elites.
The instrumentalized quantifying logic is distinctive of neoliberal capitalism,
where the legitimation for doing something must be either directly – or at the
very least indirectly – connected to the underlying logic distinctive of the
capitalist market.
With a general commodification of communication, there is an emergence
of several new dilemmas, contradictions, conflicts, and antagonistic relations
– from the rise in rent capitalism to the new forms of labour and the ways in
which value is created. These contradictions perhaps indicate a fundamental
structural crisis of capitalism, which could be transforming into a new phase
of its development. There seems to be no doubt, as Wallerstein (2001/1991, 167)
306 PRODNIK
warns, that “The bourgeoisie of today are already in the process of trying to
survive their structural crisis by transforming themselves into ‘x’ reigning over
a new mode of production.” This takeover, however, is neither inevitable nor
completely unstoppable. The multifacetedness and contradictory nature of
these intrusive social processes lies primarily in the fact that singularities and
political subjectivities – such as alternative social movements – are struggling
to create common spaces of living and acting that oppose total capitalist colo-
nization (e.g. Hardt and Negri 2009).
The lessons of the past teach us that the bulldozing power of capital should
not be naively underestimated, as the seemingly unstoppable expansion of
capitalism marches forward, rarely being systematically opposed. But, even
though there is a tendency to commodify everything, capital can never subju-
gate all social spheres. It cannot colonize human language-capacity, which
makes possible creativity and virtuosity, even if it can commodify everything
that originates in, and results from, communication. With its expansion into
all spheres and areas commodification also “moves inexorably toward an
asymptote of 100 percent. Once we are in the upper ranges of this curve, each
further step begins to put a squeeze on global profit and hence renders very
acute the internal competition among the accumulators of capital.” (Wallerstein
2001/1991, 24–25) This leads to the limits of growth, to economic crisis, and
consequently to new political turmoils, when alternatives to the present social
order seem more pressing and feasible.
Even though there has been a more or less successful capitalist colonisation
of many areas that have so far not been subordinated to the reign of the com-
modity-form, it should be noted that a seeping commodification is not an
unequivocal process; it is, rather, a very ambivalent and contradictory one, in
large part owing exactly to its mutability and lack of boundaries. Conflicts and
contradictions can emerge at all levels of social reality and what seems like an
opportunity for capital, can quite often be subverted against it. Holloway (2010)
metaphorically wrote about “crack capitalism” as a way of radically transform-
ing the world. In Holloway’s new grammar of revolution, cracks are spaces that
defy logic of capitalism and produce oppositional social relations. They are
often simple and small acts of rebellion that produce small ruptures to the
dominant dynamic of social totality, which attempt to turn these processes in
the opposite way.
Communication can be both commodified and, at the same time, be a tool
against oppression; its liquidity and lack of boundaries may be both a liability
and an opportunity. Similarly, digital sphere is extremely commodified, but
also offers rejection of capitalist social relations and offers new spaces of oppo-
sitional practices. Political movements are establishing active forms of rebellion,
3c: Commodifying Communication In Capitalism 307
and there are both theoretic alternatives and practical applications that go
beyond capitalist organization of communication, culture, and information.
Together with these alternatives, new forms and possibilities for organization
emerge. Williams (1980/2005, 33–35) forcefully argued that contradictions are
not present only at the level of super-structure, where there are ideological
conflicts are being played out. They are also present at the level of political-
economic base, where capitalist relations of production are currently domi-
nant, but are also opposed with alternative organization of production. Base
in a concrete historical context should therefore not be seen as uniform
or static; on the contrary, it is dynamic and contradictory. This means
that alternative relations of production can both emerge or already be present
within the wider capitalist context. Such antagonist struggles are best exempli-
fied by movements that fight for (the/a) common(s). They present one possible
alternative vision of the future that counters commodification, goes against
capitalism and beyond public/private dichotomy (see Mosco 1989, 24; Bollier
2002; Dyer-Witheford 2007; Berry 2008; Hardt and Negri 2009; Murdock 2011;
Wittel 2013). To put it in the words of Dyer-Witheford (2007, 28): “If the cell
form of capitalism is the commodity, the cellular form of a society beyond
capital is the common.”
6 Conclusion
Several unresolved dilemmas have been posed throughout the text and more
questions have been raised than answered. One of these is certainly in the cat-
egory of labour: what does it encompass in the current historical context? It
might be difficult for many to contemplate the idea that what is commonly
considered as ‘leisure time’ can today be defined as a specific type of labour.
My goal here was not to seek transhistorical, anthropological or essentialist
definitions of a necessarily historical phenomenon – namely, labour in the
context of a capitalist society. What should interest us is what capital deems as
labour, no matter how implausible that particular type of labour or its prod-
ucts might seem to us personally. Both political economy and its critique need,
first and foremost, technical rather than moral definitions, which can enable a
radical political resistance against capitalist subjugation. Can one go so far as
to claim that any activity producing additional exchange-value for the owner
of the commodity could be considered as some sort of labour (no matter what
the magnitude of this added value might be)? This is not far from Marcuse’s
definition, which he derives from Marx’s writings. He is defining the term
labour “to mean what capitalism actually understands by it in the last analysis,
308 PRODNIK
that activity which creates surplus value in commodity production, or, which
‘produces capital’” (Marcuse 1955, 293). Productivity in this sense is always
something that is defined by the capital alone.
More detailed answers will have to wait for now, but what is important
here is to acknowledge that big shifts, both at the social and at the eco-
nomic level, have happened in the last decades and we lack acceptable
answers and thorough analyses for many of them. Some indicators of these
transformations have been given, through the problems and dilemmas
raised in this text. We might therefore be able to provide a working thesis
with regard to the all-encompassing, seeping commodification, which runs
throughout different spheres and parts of society, permeating all levels of
human and social life. This thesis needs to be further substantiated, but can
offer a solid ground for a continuation of several ideas already raised regard-
ing this issue:
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1 Introduction
In the early 21st century, notions of imperialism have gained significance with
the rapid growth of platform technologies. Platforms, such as social network
sites (sns s, e.g., Facebook), search engines (e.g., Google), smartphones
(e.g., iPhone), and operating systems (e.g., Android) are known as digital inter-
mediaries, which have greatly influenced people’s daily lives. The digital plat-
form has emerged “as an increasingly familiar term in the description of the
online services of content intermediaries, both in their self-characterizations
and in the broader public discourse of users, the press and commentaries”
(Gillespie 2010, 349). Due to the importance of platforms – not only as hard-
ware architecture but also as software frameworks that allow software to run
– for the digital economy and culture, several countries have developed their
own sns s and smartphones; however, only a handful of Western countries,
primarily the u.s., have dominated the global platform market and society.
The hegemonic power of American-based platforms is crucial because
Google, Facebook, iPhone, and Android have functioned as major digital
media intermediaries thanks to their advanced roles in aggregating several ser-
vices. The u.s, which had previously controlled non-Western countries with its
military power, capital, and later cultural products, now seems to dominate the
world with platforms, benefitting from these platforms, mainly in terms of
capital accumulation. This new trend raises the question whether the u.s.,
which has always utilized its imperial power, not only with capital and tech-
nology, but also with culture, to control the majority of the world, actualizes
the same dominance with platforms.
The primary goal of the chapter is to historicize a notion of imperialism in
the 21st century by analyzing the evolutionary nature of imperialism, from 1)
Lenin’s imperialism, through 2) cultural imperialism, 3) information imperial-
ism, and finally 4) platform imperialism. It then addresses whether or not we
* This research was supported by the Social Sciences Humanities Research Council, Canada.
the epoch of the latest stage of capitalism shows us that certain relations
between capitalist associations grow up, based on the economic division
of the world; while parallel to and in connection with it, certain relations
grow up between political alliances, between states, on the basis of the
territorial division of the world, of the struggle for colonies, of the strug-
gle for spheres of influence.
lenin 1917, 239
Indeed, Lenin himself implicitly discussed the role of the nation-state; and his
notion of state was part of strong power, which included also transnational
capitals, and his argument for a strong state was a Commune worker state. The
Commune was an armed and organized revolutionary section of the Parisian
working class, but it was not a state (Lenin 1964; Rothenberg 1995). What Lenin
described was that both economic rivalry and military conflicts are indicative
as conflicts for hegemony between great powers that constitute essential fea-
tures for imperialism. In his statement, great powers are not necessarily nation-
states, because great powers are powerful actors, meaning that they can also be
corporations as well as nation-states (Fuchs 2011a, 198). Though, in Lenin’s con-
ceptualization imperialism is essentially associated with a system of relations
and contradictions between nation states (Liodakis 2003, 4).
Several new-Marxists (Galtung 1971; Doyle 1986) have also emphasized
nation-states as major actors in imperialism theory. For them, imperialism
involves the extension of power or authority over others in the interests of
domination and results in the political, military, or economic dominance of
one country over another (Wasko 2003). In other words, imperialism would be
conceived of as a dominant relationship between collectivities, particularly
between nations, which is a sophisticated type of dominant relationship
(Galtung 1971, 81). Imperialism or empire can be therefore defined as “effective
control, whether formal or informal, of a subordinated society by an imperial
society” (Doyle 1986, 30). Therefore, while admitting that Lenin’s definition has
greatly influenced our understanding of global capitalism, we should update
theoretical arguments in order to re-engage with Lenin’s theory of imperialism
today (Fuchs 2010b). One way to do so is to take Lenin as a theoretical impetus
for the contemporary theorization of platform imperialism.
Beginning in the early 20th century, media scholars have developed imperi-
alism theory in the contexts of several different areas, including culture and
326 Jin
Guback (1984, 155–156) also argued, “the powerful u.s. communication indus-
try, including film and television as well as news, exerts influence, sometime
quite considerable, over the cultural life of other nations.” These scholars
defined cultural imperialism as the conscious and organized effort taken by
the Western, especially u.s. media corporations to maintain commercial,
political, and military superiority. Those Western multinational corporations
exerted power through a vast extension of cultural control and domination,
and thus saturated the cultural space of most countries in the world, which
was claimed to have eliminated and destroyed local cultures by installing a
new dominant culture in their place (Jin 2007).
What is also important in the cultural imperialism thesis is the major role
taken by the u.s. government. As discussed, media scholars have developed
cultural imperialism primarily based on Lenin’s fourth characteristic of impe-
rialism, which emphasized the primary role of big corporations, in this case,
major u.s. media and cultural companies; however, the push by the large cul-
tural, media and information industries corporations into markets and societ-
ies around the world was also propelled by strong support from the u.s.
government. The u.s. government’s initiative and support for its culture indus-
try has a long history, and this strategy has emphasized the importance of
information-based products, making the u.s. State Department a powerful
government agent on behalf of the cultural sector (Miller et al. 2001). Given
that much of the enormous revenues generated by the u.s. cultural industry
have come from foreign markets, “the liberalization of the global cultural mar-
ket is very significant for the u.s. government” (Magder 2004, 385).
The u.s. government has extensively supported Hollywood by driving other
countries to open their cultural markets, which means the us government has
been deeply involved in the cultural trade issue by demanding that other gov-
ernments should take a hands-off approach in the cultural area. Several non-
Western economics have been targeted by the u.s. due in larger part to the
increasing role of emerging markets, such as China, Russia, Korea, Brazil, and
India. For example, Avatar’s – a Hollywood movie released in 2010 – overseas
income of $915 million significantly outpaced comparable domestic action,
more than doubling its $430.7 million domestic take in the u.s. and Canada
(Hollywood Reporter 2011).
The restructuring of the global film sector was conducted through the use of
larger power relations and patterns after World War ii, with initial moves
beginning prior to wwii. Since World War ii, u.s. policy has generally supported
328 Jin
the liberalization of international trade – that is, the elimination of artificial bar-
riers to trade and other distortions, such as tariffs, quotas, and subsidies that
countries use to protect their domestic industries from foreign competition
(Congressional Budget Office 2003). The u.s. government sought and eventually
secured the liberalization of the audiovisual sector in the first General Agreement
on Tariffs and Trade (gatt) negotiations in 1947. As Western countries began to
settle on the arrangements that would govern the post-war world, cinema was
high on the list of outstanding issues, and Hollywood wanted to restore its over-
seas markets (Magder 2004). The u.s. government alongside major film/
tv corporations has intensified its dominance in the global cultural market, and
cultural imperialism has been one of the primary practices of Lenin’s imperial-
ism in different contexts in the 20th century, of course, until recent years.
The new media sector is not much different. Facebook has rapidly increased
its revenue from advertising in foreign countries, including several emerging
markets, due to the soaring number of users in those markets (more than 1.3
billion in the world as of March 2014), as will be detailed later. Western-based
game corporations have also enjoyed profits from the global markets. Nnew
media corporations alongside cultural industries corporations have benefited
from global capitalism paved by the nexus of the u.s. government and mega
media tncs.
Since the early 1990s, two historical developments – the rapid growth of new
technologies and the development of globalization – have greatly influenced
the concept of imperialism. To begin with, as globalization theory has evolved
over the last decade or so, contemporary theories of imperialism and global
capitalism can be categorized on a continuum that describes the degree of
novelty of imperialism (Fuchs 2010a). At the end of the continuum there are
theoreticians who argue that imperialism, including cultural imperialism no
longer exists today and that a post-imperialistic empire has emerged. Several
media scholars have indeed made a case against the cultural imperialism the-
sis. Straubhaar (1991) emphasizes that national cultures can defend their ways
of life and, in some respects, even share their images with the rest of the world.
Sparks (2007, 119) points out, “in the place of a single, u.s.-based production
center dominating the whole of the world trade in television programs, it was
increasingly argued that technical and economic changes were rendering the
world a more complex place, in which there were multiple centers of produc-
tion and exchanges flowing through many different channels.”
The Construction Of Platform Imperialism 329
Robinson (2007, 7–8) also argues, “capitalism has fundamentally changed since
the days of Lenin due to the appearance of a new transnational capitalist class, a
class group grounded in new global markets and circuits of accumulation, rather
than national markets and circuits.” Robinson claims, “the imperialist era of
world capitalism has ended” (2007, 24). He believes that tnc s are much different
from national corporations because tnc s have been free from nation-states.
More importantly, in the midst of the globalization process, some theoreti-
cians claim that the core-periphery dichotomy by Lenin and new Marxists
does not work anymore because it is too simplistic. Hardt and Negri (2000, xii)
especially argue that “theories of imperialism were founded on nation states,
whereas in their opinion today a global empire has emerged, and imperialism
no longer exists with the demise of nation-states,” although they do not explain
in detail as to why they think that Lenin limited his concept of imperialism to
the extension of national sovereignty over foreign territory (Fuchs 2010b). In
fact, “the nation state-centeredness of their own narrow definition of imperial-
ism as the expansive process of the power of the nation state through policies
of export of capital, export of labour power and constitution-occupation of
areas of influence” (Negri 2008, 34) bears little resemblance to Lenin’s defini-
tion (Fuchs 2010b, 841), because Lenin’s emphasis is on finance capital, which
is capital controlled by banks and employed by industrialists. Again, Lenin
discussed the significant role of nation-states as colonizers and rentier states.
However, economic interdependence and de-colonization do not mean the
demise of nation-states, nor automatic de-territorialization.
330 Jin
the new imperialism that would eventually emerge from the wreckage of
the old would no longer be a relationship between imperial masters and
colonial subjects but a complex interaction between more or less sover-
eign states. While the u.s. took command of a new imperialism governed
by economic imperative, however, this economic empire would be sus-
tained by political and military hegemony.
The stress is, therefore, on continuity rather than fundamental change (Harvey
2003, 2007; Wood 2003). Unlike the emphasis on the coercive power of nation-
states that Hardt and Negri focus on, “the harmonization of capitalist space
relies on the soft power of consent and the emulation of models of develop-
ment” (Winseck and Pike 2007, 8). Although contemporary aspects of imperi-
alism cannot be considered in the same way as set out in Lenin’s understanding
of imperialism, contemporary critical scholars believe that “the notion of
imperialism still functions as a meaningful theoretical framework to interpret
the world which was globalized neo-liberally” (Fuchs 2010a, 34).
Many theoreticians have especially argued that the differential power rela-
tions associated with globalization are a continuation of past forms of Western
imperialism that created the persistent differentiation between the First and
Third Worlds (Miller 2010; Amin 1999). Harshe (1997) describes globalization and
imperialism as intertwined and characterized by unequal cultural and intellec-
tual exchanges. Grewal (2008, 7) also points out, “the assertion that globalization
is imperial has lately become the subject of mainstream discussion in the u.s.
and elsewhere; it is no longer a charge made by anti-globalization activists alone.”
Alongside globalization, the rapid growth of icts has influenced the change
and continuity of the notion of imperialism. The connection of imperialism
and the information sector is not peculiar for a new form of imperialism. Boyd-
Barrett (1980, 23) has shown that “already in the 19th and early 20th century the
big news agencies Havas, Reuters and Wolff were based in imperial capitals,
and their expansion was intimately associated with the territorial colonialism
of the late nineteenth century.” At the time of Lenin, they served as govern-
ment propaganda arms in the First World War. Later, Winseck and Pike (2007)
discuss with the example of the global expansion of cable and wireless com-
panies (e.g. Western Union, Eastern Telegraph Company, Commercial Cable
The Construction Of Platform Imperialism 331
It is clear that the notion of imperialism has gained a new perspective in the
midst of the rapid growth of new technologies. While the importance of the
global flow in capital and culture has arguably changed, several recent theore-
ticians have emphasized the importance of the dominance of icts. Dan
Schiller (1999) has specifically developed a theory of digital capitalism that
emphasizes the changing role of networks for capital accumulation:
Castells (2001) also cautions against the socially and functionally selective dif-
fusion of technology. He identifies one of the major sources of social inequality
as the differential timing in access to the power of technology for people, and
thus acknowledges, in contrast to the laudatory rhetoric about the globaliza-
tion of technological systems, that its outcome is instead large areas of the
world, and considerable segments of population, switched off from the new
technological system. Boyd-Barrett emphasizes (2006, 21–22), “the emergence
of microprocessor-based computer network technology and the u.s. domi-
nance of ict are crucial for u.s. economy and imperialism.” Meanwhile, Fuchs
(2010a, 56) points out, “media and information play a pivotal role in the new
concept of imperialism, which the u.s. has dominated based on its advanced
digital technologies, although they are subsumed under finance capital in the
21st century.”
332 Jin
However, with the swift transfer of power to platforms, the situation has
recently changed, although of course, not without periodic setbacks for tradi-
tional ict companies. Previously powerful ict corporations have increasingly
been subordinated to platforms due to the latters’ ascendant role and power
in digital media economies. For example, in August 2011, Google acquired
Motorola Mobility for $12.5 billion in order to give the platform giant a pres-
ence in smartphone hardware while also bringing it thousands of new patents
(Efrati and Ante, 2011). Almost at the same time, Hewlett-Packard Co., the
world’s largest personal-computer maker, is simultaneously exploring a spinoff
of its pc business as profits slide, but buying u.k. software firm Autonomy
Corp., for about $10.25 billion (Worthen et al., 2011). It is presumptuous to say
that the hardware era is gone; however, these two recent events and the
increasing role of u.s.-based platforms in capital accumulation and culture
(Facebook and Google) are arguably clear examples of the rise of platform
imperialism.
All three of these areas are relevant to why platforms have emerged in refer-
ence to online and mobile content-hosting intermediaries. Drawing these
meanings together allows us to see that platforms emerge not simply as indi-
cating a functional computational shape, but with cultural values embedded
in them.
Since platforms are crucial for people’s everyday information flows and
capitalism, not only on a national level, but also on a global level, it is impor-
tant to measure whether platforms suggest a progressive and egalitarian
arrangement, promising to support those who stand upon them in the con-
temporary global society (Gillespie 2010). Arguably, global flows of culture and
technology have been asymmetrical, as theories of cultural and media imperi-
alism have long asserted, and thus the focal point here is whether asymmetri-
cal relationships between a few developed and many developing countries
exist in the case of platforms. Accepting platforms as digital media intermedi-
aries, the idea of platform imperialism refers to an asymmetrical relationship
of interdependence between the West, primarily the u.s., and many develop-
ing powers – of course, including transnational corporations as Lenin and
H. Schiller analyzed. Characterized in part by unequal technological exchanges
and therefore capital flows, the current state of platform development implies
a technological domination of u.s.-based companies that have greatly influ-
enced the majority of people and countries. Unlike other fields, including cul-
ture and hardware, in which a method for maintaining unequal power relations
among countries is primarily the exportation of these goods and related ser-
vices, in the case of platform imperialism, the methods are different because
commercial values are embedded in platforms and in ways that are more sig-
nificant for capital accumulation and the expansion of power.
the three-month period between September and November of 2012, among the
top 100 global sites on the Web based on page views and visits, 48 websites
were owned by u.s. corporations and 52 websites were non-u.s. Internet firms.
Other than the u.s., 16 countries had their own websites on the list, and among
them, China had the largest number of websites (18), followed by Japan (6),
Russia (5), India (4) and the uk (4). A few non-Western countries, including
Indonesia, Turkey, Brazil, and Mexico also had one website each. This data
seemingly explains that the u.s. is not a dominant force in the Internet market.
However, when we consider the origins of the websites, the story is not the
same, because the websites that belong to these non-Western countries are of
u.s.-origin, including Google, Yahoo, and Amazon. Other than a handful of
countries, including China and Russia, developing countries have no websites
that they originally created and operated themselves. Based on the origin of
the websites, u.s. companies comprised 72% of the list, which means that only
one country controls three-fourths of the top Internet market.
More importantly, 88 of these websites, such as Google, Yahoo, and YouTube,
accumulate capital primarily by (targeted) advertising, and they prove that
u.s.-origin platforms are symbols of global capitalism. In fact, among the top
100 list, only two websites (Wikipedia and bbc Online) are operated with a
non-profit model. Ten websites make revenues through other business models,
including pay-per-view and subscription, although a few websites (Amazon
and eBay) developed several business models, such as product and service
sales and marketing. Among these, Craigslist.com makes money through a
handful of revenue streams. The website charges some fees to post a job listing
in several u.s. cities, while charging fees to list an apartment rental in New
York, usa. The revenues cover only the operating expenses; the company has
not made a profit since its inception (Patrick 2012). Meanwhile, WordPress.
com is run by Automatic which currently makes money from the aforemen-
tioned upgrades, blog services, Akismet anti-spam technology, and hosting
partnerships. What is most significant about the contemporary Internet is the
swift growth of capitalist platforms, such as Facebook, Google, and Twitter. As
Baran and Sweezy (1968) argued, in a capitalism dominated by large corpora-
tions operating in oligopolistic markets, advertising especially becomes a nec-
essary, competitive weapon. No matter whether Western or non-Western,
these websites and platforms are major engines appropriating advertising for
global capitalism.
Specifically speaking, while there are many u.s-based platforms that have
increased their global influence, three major American-based platforms –
Google, Facebook, and YouTube (also owned by Google) – made up the top
three websites in November 2012 (Alexa.com, 2012). Except for two Chinese-based
The Construction Of Platform Imperialism 335
platforms (Baidu.com and qq.com), the other eight platforms in the top 10
were all American-based platforms. Among these, Google is the world’s most
accessed web platform: 46% of worldwide Internet users accessed Google in a
three-month period in 2010 (Fuchs 2011b). Among search engines only, Google’s
dominant position is furthermore phenomenal. As of November 2012, Google
accounted for as much as 88.8% of the global search engine market, followed
by Bing (4.2%), Baidu (3.5%), Yahoo (2.4), and others (1.1%) (Kamasnack 2012).
Google even launched google.cn in 2006, agreeing to some censorship of search
results to enter the country, to meet the requirements of the Chinese govern-
ment. In China, Google’s market share stood at 16.7% as of December 2011,
down from 27% in June 2010, while local web search engine Baidu’s market
share increased from 70% as of June 2010 to 78.3% in December 2011 (La Monica
2012; Lee 2010; Lau 2010). Due to the fact that Baidu is limited mainly to Chinese
language users, though, it can’t surmount Google’s global market share.
snss have also gained tremendous attention as popular online spaces for
both youth and adults in recent years. American-based snss have rapidly pen-
etrated the world and enjoyed an ample amount of capital gains. Several local-
based snss, such as Mixi (Japan), Cyworld (Korea), and qq (China), as well as
vk (Originally VKontakte) – a European social network site that Russian-
speaking users use around the world (vk was established in 2006 by Pavel
Durov, a Russian entrepreneur, who is still the co-owner alongside the Mail.ru
Group–the Russian Internet giant that owns a 39.9% stake in Vkontakte; East–
west Digital News, 2012) – are competing with American-based snss. For exam-
ple, Russian Cyberspace, including the Commonwealth of Independent States
(cis), such as Azerbaijan, Armenia, and Georgia, known as runet, is a self-
contained linguistic and cultural environment with well-developed and highly
popular search engines, web portals, social network sites, and free e-mail ser-
vices. Within runet, Russian search engines dominate with Yandex (often
called the Google of Russia), beating out Google (Deibert et al. 2010, 17–19). The
market share of Yandex was 60.3% in November 2012, while Google’s share was
26.6% in November 2012, according to LiveInternet (2012). However, outside
these few countries, the majority of countries in the world have increased their
usage of Facebook and Twitter. These Western-based platforms have managed
to overtake some local incumbent snss and search engines in the past few
years (Jin forthcoming). The u.s. has continued an asymmetrical relationship
of interdependence between a few developed countries and the majority of
developing countries up to the present time.
Among these, Facebook, which was founded in the usa in 2004, is organized
around linked personal platforms based on geographic, educational, or corpo-
rate networks. Given that the general concept of platform means any base of
336 Jin
which is very significant because these are some of the largest it markets,
Facebook has managed to overtake local incumbent snss, and has rapidly pen-
etrated the majority of countries in the world. Facebook has positioned itself
as the leader of interactive, participant-based online media, or Web 2.0, the
descriptor for websites based on user-generated content that create value from
the sharing of information between participants (Hoegg et al. 2006, 1; O’Reilly
2005).
The dominant positions of several social media, including Facebook and
Google have been considered as clear examples of platform imperialism. While
these sites can offer participants entertainment and a way to socialize, the
social relations present on a site like Facebook can obscure economic relations
that reflect larger patterns of capitalist development in the digital age. The
connection of snss to capitalism is especially significant. sns users provide
their daily activities as free labour to network owners, and thereafter, to adver-
tisers, and their activities are primarily being watched and counted and even-
tually appropriated by large corporations and advertising agencies (Jin
forthcoming). As the number of sns users has soared, advertisers, including
corporations and advertising agencies, have focused more on snss as alterna-
tive advertising media. According to Facebook’s S-1 filing with the u.s.
Securities and Exchange Commission (sec), Facebook’s ad revenue in 2013 was
$6.98 billion, up from $1.9 billion in 2010. Approximately 56% of Facebook’s
2011 ad revenue of $3.1 billion came from the u.s. alone, according to the com-
pany’s regulatory filings (Facebook 2014). However, the proportion of the u.s.
significantly decreased from 70.5% in 2010 to 56% in 2011 (eMarketer 2010),
meaning Facebook has rapidly increased its profits from foreign countries.
As Grewal (2008, 4) emphasizes, “the prominent elements of globalization
can be understood as the rise of network power.” The notion of network power
consists of the joining of two ideas: first, that coordinating standards are more
valuable when greater numbers of people use them, and second, that this
dynamic as a form of power backed by Facebook, which is one of the largest
tncs, can lead to the progressive elimination of the alternatives, as Lenin
(1917) and H. Schiller (1991) emphasized. Facebook as the market leader in the
sns world has eliminated competitors as the number of users exponentially
soars. “In the digital era, one of the main sources of social inequality is the
access to technology” (Castells 1996, 32–33). Even when the issue is no longer
that of lack of material access to technology, a power distribution and hege-
monic negotiation of technologically mediated space is always at play (Gajjala
and Birzescu 2011). The powers that can be marshaled through platforms are
not exclusively centered in the u.s. However, as Lenin argued, the conflicts for
hegemony between great powers, in this case, u.s-based snss and local-based
338 Jin
snss have been evident, and Facebook and Twitter have become dominant
powers. In other words, a few u.s.-based platforms dominate the global order,
which has resulted in the concentration of capital in a few hands within major
tncs and start-ups. This is far from a globalization model in which power is
infinitely dispersed. Capital and power are not the form of monopoly; however,
a handful of u.s.-owned platforms have rapidly expanded their dominance in
the global market, which has caused the asymmetrical gap between a few
Western countries and the majority of non-Western countries.
on their own, new technologies do not take sides in the struggle for free-
dom and progress, but the u.s. does. We stand for a single Internet where
The Construction Of Platform Imperialism 339
all of humanity has equal access to knowledge and ideas. And we recog-
nize that the world’s information infrastructure will become what we and
others make of it. This challenge may be new, but our responsibility to
help ensure the free exchange of ideas goes back to the birth of our
republic.
u.s. Secretary of State 2010
Ma added that China regulated the Web according to law and in keeping with
its national conditions and cultural traditions.
It is evident that the Chinese government understands the vast size of the
Chinese Internet market, and it has taken measures to cultivate the growth of
local information technology, including Google’s competitor, Baidu.cn. The
Chinese government has maneuvered to protect its own technology-driven
corporations due to their significance for the national economy. China’s
English-language Global Times therefore characterizes Clinton’s speech as a
disguised attempt to impose [u.s.] values on other cultures in the name of
democracy. The newspaper then dragged out another snarling phrase to
denounce Clinton’s overtures on freedom of speech: information imperialism
(Global Times 2010).
The second round of debate between the u.s. and China occurred in February
2011. Hillary Clinton again warned repressive governments, such as China,
Cuba and Syria, not to restrict Internet freedom, saying such efforts will ulti-
mately fail. Calling the Internet the public space of the future, Clinton enumer-
ated all the reasons that freedom of expression must be the overriding ethos of
340 Jin
ip rights related global politics, the last several decades’ record is of govern-
ment initiative, support, and promotion of information and communication
policies. The principle – vital to the worldwide export of American cultural
product and American way of life – of the free flow of information has argu-
ably become a universal virtue to both the information industries and the u.s.
government (H. Schiller 1999), and this fundamental political agenda contin-
ues in the Obama government. The u.s. government has become a primary
actor in tandem with tncs, which also applies to platform imperialism. The
u.s. is not the only country to actualize neoliberal policies. The Chinese gov-
ernment also capitalizes on neoliberal globalization, meaning the role of
China in global capitalism has rapidly increased. One needs to be very careful,
though, because “China is not capitalist despite the rise of a capitalist class and
capitalist enterprises” (Arrighi 2007, 331).
The Chinese state in Arrighi’s view still retains a high degree of autonomy from
the capitalist class and is therefore able to act in the national rather than in a
class interest (Robinson 2010).
Since the late 1970s, the Chinese state has undergone a radical transforma-
tion in order to pursue substantive linkages with transnational capitalism.
Neoliberal ideas have been influential in China as the post-Mao leadership
embraced the market system as a means to develop the country (Zhao, 2008).
In A Brief History of Neoliberalism, David Harvey (2005, 120) clearly points out
that “the outcome in China has been the construction of a particular kind of
market economy that increasingly incorporates neoliberal elements interdigi-
tated with authoritarian centralized control.” As The Top 100 Sites on the Web
show, Chinese platforms, including Baidu, qq, and Taobao, utilize the targeted
advertising capital business model, which is not different from us Internet
capitalism. Of course, this does not imply that China has entirely adopted neo-
liberal capitalist reform. Although China’s transition from a planned economy
to a socialist market economy is substantial, China also poses an alternative to
the Washington Consensus, which emphasizes the continuing role of the gov-
ernment in the market. As Zhao (2008, 37) aptly puts it, the Chinese govern-
ment has developed both “neoliberalism as exception” and “exceptions to
342 Jin
neoliberalism” for the national economy and culture. The Chinese government
has developed a market-friendly economy; however, at the same time, it con-
tinues to play a primary role in the market.
In sum, when society looks to regulate an emerging form of information
distribution, be it the telegraph or radio or the Internet, it is in many ways mak-
ing decisions about what that technology is, what it is for, what sociotechnical
arrangements are best suited to help it achieve that and what it must not be
allowed to become (Benkler 2003). This is not just in the words of the policy-
makers themselves. Interested third parties, particularly the companies that
provide these services, are deeply invested in fostering a regulatory paradigm
that gives them the most leeway to conduct their businesses, imposes the few-
est restrictions on their service provision, protects them from liability for
things they hope not to be liable for and paints them in the best light in terms
of the public interest (Gillespie 2010, 356). In fact, Google, in its newly adopted
role of aggressive lobbyist, has become increasingly vocal on a number of pol-
icy issues, including net neutrality, spectrum allocation, freedom of speech
and political transparency (Phillips 2006, Gillespie 2010). Platform imperialism
has been developed and influenced by sometimes cooperative and at other
times conflicting relationships among the government, domestic capital and
tncs. tncs are valuable players to platform technologies; the nation-states
are also primary actors in international negotiations. As Marx stated (1867), the
capitalist expansion of tncs inevitably takes the political form of imperialism,
and it is further evident in the case with the development of platform
imperialism.
7 Conclusion
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The Construction Of Platform Imperialism 349
Heinrichs and Kreye 1981; Smith 2012, 40; Harvey 2005, Munck 2002, 45). Part of
the restructuring of capitalism was the gradual relocation of large parts of pro-
duction activities from the industrialized core of the world economy to the
former periphery. In this context Fröbel, Heinrichs and Kreye coined the con-
cept of the “new international division of labour” (nidl). They argue that:
“The development of the world economy has increasingly created conditions
(forcing the development of the new international division of labour) in which
the survival of more and more companies can only be assured through the
relocation of production to new industrial sites, where labour-power is cheap
to buy, abundant and well-disciplined; in short, through the transnational
reorganization of production” (Fröbel, Heinrichs and Kreye 1981, 15). As a con-
sequence, commodity production became “increasingly subdivided into frag-
ments which can be assigned to whichever part of the world can provide the
most profitable combination of capital and labour” (Fröbel, Heinrichs and
Kreye 1981, 15). The result was the emergence of global value chains and pro-
duction networks in various industries including the electronics sector.
This development had a substantial impact on labour relations and working
conditions around the world. As the global labour force expanded (Munck
2002, 109) the protection of labour rights was weakened. McGuigan argues that
neoliberal restructurings and the rise of post-Fordism led to “an attack on orga-
nized labour in older industrialised capitalist states and devolution of much
manufacturing to much cheaper labour markets and poor working conditions
of newly industrialising countries” (McGuigan 2005, 230).
The rise of China as the “workshop of the world” needs to be seen in the context
of these developments. Hung stresses that “China’s labour-intensive takeoff coin-
cided with the onset of an unprecedented expansion of global free trade since the
1980s” (Hung 2009, 10). The integration of China into global capitalist production
networks was made possible by a number of policy reforms pursued by the Chinese
state. David Harvey highlights that the Chinese economic reform programme
initiated in the late 1970s coincided with the rise of neoliberalism in the us and the
uk (Harvey 2006, 34). This reform program included the encouragement of com-
petition between state owned companies, the introduction of market pricing as
well as a gradual turn towards foreign direct investment (Harvey 2006, 39). The first
Special Economic Zones (sez) in China were established in 1980 (Yeung et al. 2009,
223). The first four sez were located in the coastal areas of south-east China:
Shantou, Shenzhen and Zhuhai in Guangdong province and Xiamen in Fujian
Province (Yeung et al. 2009, 224). By 2002, David Harvey argues, foreign direct
investment accounted for more than 40 percent of China’s gdp (Harvey 2006, 39).
Hong highlights that China was particularly interested in entering the mar-
ket for ict production. In order to boost exports, tax refunds for the export of
Foxconned Labour as the Dark Side of the Information Age 353
ict commodities were set in place In the 1990s (Hong 2011, 37). In 2005 import
tariffs for semiconductor, computer and telecommunication products were
removed (Hong 2011, 37). These policies proved effective: Hong argues that “In
the global market China has emerged as leading ict manufacturing power-
house: In 2006, China became the world’s second largest ict manufacturer,
and ict products manufactured in China accounted for over 15 percent of the
international trade of ict products” (Hong 2011, 2).
The fact that attracting foreign direct investment was made possible by
granting tax exemptions means that foreign companies could make use of
Chinese land area and exploit Chinese labour, while paying only little back to
the Chinese public through taxes. Hong shows that by 2005 40.4 percent of ict
companies in China were foreign enterprises, which controlled 71.1 percent of
all profits from the industry, but due to tax benefits these foreign invested ict
enterprises only made up 42.3 percent of the total tax contribution of the sec-
tor (Hong 2011, 38).
An effect of the shift towards pro-market policies and the privatization of
state enterprises was the massive commodification of labour (Su 2011, 346).
The newly established market for labour power replaced the previous system
in which workers were guaranteed employment as well as social welfare
including medical care, education opportunities, pensions and housing
(Friedman and Lee 2010, 509). Zhao and Duffy point out that the adoption of a
policy towards foreign direct investment in the ict sector and the privatiza-
tion of industries also meant a weakening of the power of the Chinese working
class. Older industrial workers were replaced by young, often female migrant
workers (Zhao and Duffy 2008, 230).
Low wages and cheap production costs made China attractive for compa-
nies in search for outsourcing opportunities. Hung argues that the prolonged
stagnation of wages resulted from Chinese government policies that neglected
and exploited the rural agricultural sector in order to spur urban industrial
growth (Hung 2009 13f). This situation forced young people to leave the coun-
tryside in order to find work in the city, creating a “limitless supply of labour”
(Hung 2009, 14) while reinforcing “a rural social crisis” (Hung 2009, 14). Among
the companies that are taking advantage of the cheap labour supply in China
is the computer giant Apple.
Steve Wozniak, Steve Jobs and Ronald Wayne founded Apple in 1976 (Linzmayer
2004, 6). However, it was not until the mid 2000s that Apple joined the elite of
354 Sandoval
45.00
41.70
40.00
35.00
30.00
25.92
25.00
Million USD
20.00
15.00
14.01
10.00
4.83
5.00 1.99
0.79 5.70
0.07 0.28 3.50
0.00
–0.03 0.07 1.34
–5.00
2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012
Years
Figure 11.1 Apple’s Profits from 2000 to 2012 (Apple sec-filings, 10-k forms 2010–2012)
the most profitable companies in the world. In 2005 Apple’s profits for the first
time exceeded 1 billion usd and during the following years continued to
increase rapidly until they reached 41.7 billion usd in 2012 (Apple SEC-Filings.
10-k form 20122), which made Apple the second most profitable company in
the world.1 Between 2000 and 2012 Apple’s profits on average grew 39.2% each
year2 (Apple SEC-Filings, 10-k form) (see Figure 11.1).
In 2012 Apple’s total net sales amounted to 156.51 billion usd. The largest
share of it was derived from hardware, whereby the iPhone was Apple’s most
successful product (see Figure 11.2).
In addition to its economic success Apple is also successful in building its
reputation. Fortune Magazine, for six years in a row (2008–2013), has ranked
Apple the most admired company in the world.3 According to a survey among
47,000 people from 15 countries that was conducted by the consultancy firm
Reputation Institute, Apple is the company with the 5th best Corporate Social
Responsibility (csr) reputation worldwide (Reputation Institute 2012, 19).
1 Forbes Magazine. The World’s Biggest Public Companies. Retrieved from http://www.forbes
.com/global2000/#page:1_sort:4_direction:desc_search:_filter:All%20industries_filter
:All%20countries_filter:All%20states on April 24, 2013.
2 Compound Annual Growth Rate cagr.
3 Fortune. 2013. World’s Most Admired Companies. Retrieved from http://money.cnn.com/
magazines/fortune/most-admired/ on April 24, 2013.
Foxconned Labour as the Dark Side of the Information Age 355
Apple’s Net Sales by Product 2012
iPad 32.42
iPhone 80.48
iPod 5.62
0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90
Billion usd
Figure 11.2 Apple’s Net Sales by Product 2012 (Apple sec-filings, 10-k form 2012, 30).
This image does not correspond to the company’s actual business practices.
The production of Apple’s hardware products, on which its economic success
is built (see Figure 11.1), is largely outsourced to contract manufacturers in
China. In May and June 2010 many major Western media reported about a
series of suicides at factory campuses in China. The factories, at which 17 young
workers jumped to death between 2007 and May 20104 belong to the Taiwan-
based company Hon Hai Precision Industry Co. Ltd, better known as Foxconn,
which is a major supplier for computer giants such as Apple, Hewlett-Packard
and Nokia (Finnwatch, sacom and somo 2011, 8).
Hon Hai Precision is a profitable company itself. According to Forbes
Magazine it is the 113th biggest company in the world. In 2012 its profits
amounted to 10.7 billion usd.5 Nevertheless the company strongly depends
on orders from consumer brands such as Apple. Finnwatch, sacom and somo
describe this situation as follows: “These companies often drive down the
4 Wired Magazine. 2011. 1 Million Workers. 90 Million iPhones. 17 Suicides. Who’s to blame? By
Joel Johnson on Februar 28, 2011. Retrieved from http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/02/
ff_joelinchina/all/1 on October 23, 2011.
5 Forbes Magazine. The World’s Biggest Public Companies. Retrieved from http://www.forbes.
com/global2000/list/#page:1_sort:0_direction:asc_search:_filter:Electronics_filter:All%20
countries_filter:All%20states on May 1, 2013.
356 Sandoval
price they pay their suppliers, which then makes the suppliers less or no lon-
ger profitable. To get back in the game, suppliers reduce costs, often at the
cost of workers, violating labour laws in the process” (Finnwatch, sacom and
somo 2009, 44). Competition between contract manufacturers such as
Foxconn is also high, which is why profit rates can often only be achieved by
keeping cost low (somo 2005a, 41). Although some Foxconn factories are
exclusively producing for Apple, such as for example three plants in
Zhengzhou, Henan (sacom 2012, 3), Foxconn is not the only company that is
manufacturing Apple products. Other Apple suppliers include Pegatron
Corporation, Primax Electronics, Quanta Computers, Wintek or Foxlink.6
Working conditions are similar throughout these factories (sacom 2010, 2012,
2013). sacom argues that “illegal long working hours, low wages and poor
occupational health and safety are rooted in the unethical purchasing prac-
tices of Apple” (sacom 2012, 1).
The losers in this corporate race for profit are the workers. When young
Foxconn workers decided to end their lives by jumping from their employer’s
factory buildings, Western media for some weeks were looking behind the sur-
face of bright and shiny computer products. For example, The New York Times
published a story about the String of Suicides Continues at Electronics Supplier
in China;7 the bbc reported on Foxconn Suicides: ‘Workers Feel Quite Lonely’,8
Time Magazine published an article entitled Chinese Factory Under Scrutiny As
Suicides Mount;9 The Guardian headlined Latest Foxconn Suicide Raises
Concern Over Factory Life in China,10 and cnn reported Inside China Factory
Hit By Suicides.11
However, these suicides are only the tip of the iceberg. For several years
ngos have stressed that computers, mp3 players, game consoles, etc are often
produced under miserable working conditions (ico, Finnwatch and eca 2005;
somo 2005b, somo 2007a). Far away from shopping centres and department
stores, workers in factories in Asia or Latin America produce consumer elec-
tronics devices during 10 to 12 hour shifts, a minimum of 6 days a week for at
best a minimum wage. Apple’s suppliers are no exception. In the next sections
I develop a systematic account of working conditions (Section 3), which I will
subsequently apply to the situation in the workshops of Apple’s contract man-
ufactures in China (Section 4).
Health Activity
* Resources * Work Experiences - Control
Mechanisms
MoP L
M C .... P .... C‘ M‘
RELATIONS OF PRODUCTION
* Labour Contract
* Wages and Benefits
* Labour Struggles
The model pictured in Figure 11.3 identifies five areas that shape working con-
ditions throughout the capital accumulation process: means of production,
labour, relations of production, the production process and the outcome of
production. Furthermore this model includes the state’s impact on working
conditions through labour legislation:
• The state: Finally the state has an impact on working conditions through
enacting labour laws that regulate minimum wages, maximum working
hours, social security, safety standards etc.
& Company 2012, 64). One reason for this is that the fragmentation of the pro-
duction process allows to separate “labour-intensive and more capital- and
knowledge-intensive parts” so that “there is a considerable amount of low-
value and thus low-skill and low-wage activity, which is often combined with
advanced production technologies in this ‘high-tech’ sector” (Plank and Staritz
2013, 9). Electronics manufacturing is thus characterized by both high-tech
equipment and high demand for labour.
Electronics manufacturing is among those industries that account for the
most robot purchases. According to McKinsey and Company “in 2010, automo-
tive and electronics manufacturing each accounted for more than 30,000 robot
units sold globally, while industries such as food and beverage, rubber and
plastics, and metal products each bought only 4,000 to 6,000 new robots”
(McKinsey & Company 2012, 88).
A technology that Apple’s contract manufacturers employ for the auto-
mated part of assembly is Surface Mount Technology (smt) (wtec 1997, 16;
Lüthje 2012). smt uses programming to automatically solder electronics com-
ponents such as chips or connectors onto circuit boards.15 Boy Lüthje argues
that as labour costs in China are low not the entire potential of automation is
realized, thus “the degree of automation in most factories in China and Asia is
lower than it would be in Europe or the United States” (Lüthje 2012). This
means that labour is sometimes cheaper than high-tech equipment. It also
means that making use of the full range of available automation technology
could eliminate parts of the repetitive and standardized work activities that
are now part of electronics production.
4.1.2 Resources
Among the resources needed for the production of consumer electronics
such as Apple’s Mac’s, iPads, iPhones and iPods are minerals such as tin, beryl-
lium, gallium, platinum tantalum, indium, neodymium, tungsten, palladium,
yttrium, gold, and cobalt (somo 2007b, 10–12, Friends of the Earth 2012, 7; ).
Often these minerals are sourced in conflict areas (somo 2007b, 13). The min-
ing activities usually take place under extremely poor health and safety con-
ditions, are extremely low paid, require the resettlement of local villages,
threaten the environment and the livelihood of local communities (somo
2007b; 2011; Swedwatch 2007; Finnwatch 2007).
work and to be more obedient and less likely to engage in protests (Swedwatch,
sacom and somo 2008, 11).
Workers often have no other choice than to find employment in a factory in
order to be able to earn enough money to support themselves and their fami-
lies. This dependency increases the power of companies over workers. The lack
of alternatives makes it likely that workers feel forced to accept bad working
conditions.
consists of eight factory buildings, was built in only 76 days in order to meet
growing demand from Apple. Furthermore workers were insufficiently trained
and not aware of the dangers connected to aluminium dust (Friends of Nature,
ipe, Green Beagle 2011, 37f).
A similar incident occurred at the iPhone polishing department at a
Pegatron factory in Shanghai in December 2011. 61 workers were injured (sacom
2013, 8). sacom furthermore reports that weak ventilations system at Pegatron’s
polishing department creates high levels of dust that cover worker’s faces and
penetrate their masks entering their noses and mouths (sacom 2013, 8).
Working conditions at electronics manufacturing factories are not only
threatening workers’ physical health but also creating psychological problems.
Social life at Foxconn is deprived. Workers do not have time for any free time
activities. Their life consists of working, eating and sleeping. Often they do not
even find enough time to sleep. When asked what they would like to do on
holiday most interviewees said that they would like to sleep (sacom 2011a, 12).
Workers lack social contacts. sacom’s research shows that workers were not
allowed to talk during work. They live in rooms with workers from different
shifts, which they therefore hardly ever meet (sacom 2011a, 12f, FinnWatch,
sacom and somo 2011, 30).
Work and life at factory campuses have severe impacts on the bodies and
minds of workers. The example of Apple’s supplier factories in China illustrates
that for many workers selling their labour power also means selling their men-
tal and physical health.
The daily production target is 6,400 pieces. I am worn out every day. I fall
asleep immediately after returning to the dormitory. The demand from
Apple determines our lives. On one hand, I hope I can have a higher wage.
On the other hand, I cannot keep working everyday without a day-off.
Foxconn worker quoted in sacom 2012, 5f
368 Sandoval
Furthermore workers describe the way they are controlled and managed as
humiliating and exhausting:
We have to queue up all the time. Queuing up for bus, toilet, card-punch-
ing, food, etc. During recess, we don’t have a place to sit. We can only sit
on the floor. We get up in early morning and can only return to the dorm
in late evening. I am really worn out.
Worker quoted in sacom 2011a, 15
Workers are aware of the alienating character of their work situation, which
expressed by the fact that they are not able to own the products that they are
themselves producing every day: One worker told sacom:
Though we produce for iPhone, I haven’ t got a chance to use iPhone. I believe
it is fascinating and has lots of function. However, I don’t think I can own
one by myself.
Worker quoted in sacom 2011a, 19
make long-term life planning difficult. Short notice periods leave workers
hardly any time to rearrange their lives after a dismissal. Furthermore different
types of contracts create divides between workers with fixed contracts, short-
term contracts, agency contracts or internship contracts. The fact that differ-
ent types of contracts confront workers with different kinds of problems makes
it more difficult to formulate collective demands.
16 The Asia Floor Wage Campaign (2009) suggested a method for calculating the living wage.
According to this calculation a living wage needs to cover the costs for food, equivalent of
3000 calories per adult family member multiplied by two, in order to cover also other
basic need such as clothing, housing, education, healthcare, and savings. The living wage
should provide for a family of two adults and two children. It thus should cover the cost
for food worth 3000 calories for three consumption units (two adults and two children)
multiplied by two. It is thus calculated as follows: price for food worth 3000 calories x 3 x
2 (Asia Floor Wage Campaign 2009, 50). A worker should be able to earn a living wage
within a working week of a maximum of 48 hours. This calculation of a living wage was
developed with specific regard to the garment sector, but is also applicable for other sec-
tors such as electronics manufacturing.
17 Reuters 2010. Foxconn to Raise Wages Again at China Plant. Retrieved from http://www
.reuters.com/article/2010/10/01/us-foxconn-idUSTRE6902GD20101001 on April 28, 2013.
372 Sandoval
18 Reuters 2010. Foxconn to Raise Wages Again at China Plant. Retrieved from http://www
.reuters.com/article/2010/10/01/us-foxconn-idUSTRE6902GD20101001 on April 28, 2013.
Foxconned Labour as the Dark Side of the Information Age 373
3,000
2,728
2,600
2,500
2,192
2,000
Chinese Yuan
1,590
1,500 1,350
1,300
1,000
500
0
Shenzen Chengdu Chongqing
Foxconn Campuses
estimated living wage actual basic wage
19 m.i.c. Gadget. 2010. More Problems With Foxconn; Workers Protest Against Their Wages.
Retrieved from http://micgadget.com/9620/more-problems-with-foxconn-workers-protest
-against-their-wages/ on October 27, 2011.
20 sacom. 2013. Strike Erupted Over Dire Working Conditions at Foxconn. Retrieved from
http://sacom.hk/archives/971 on May 14, 2013.
374 Sandoval
Such protests are not without risks for factory workers. In 2011 during
an investigation at Foxconn’s Zhengzhou factory some interviewees told
sacom about workers being dismissed after attempting to strike (sacom
2011b, 10). In January 2011 the police arrested around 20 workers at another
Foxconn facility while protesting against miscalculations of wages (sacom
2011a, 8).
Labour unions only play a limited role in these protests. The only official
trade union in China is the All China Federation of Trade Unions (acftu),
which is subordinate to the Chinese Communist Party (Friedman and Lee 2010,
521). Friedman and Lee argue that the acftu acts like a government agency
that represents workers in a top-down process, promotes the introduction of
labour laws, provides legal consultation to workers but is opposed to wide-
spread worker mobilization (Friedman and Lee 2010, 521f).
Often workers either do not know what a union can do for them or do not
even know that a union exists at their factory (Finnwatch, sacom, somo 2009
& 2011). Similarly fla in 2012 found that worker had very little knowledge
about the function and activities of worker representatives. Furthermore the
fla found that unions at Foxconn often consist of supervisors or mangers (fla
2012, 11).
In response to the findings of the fla Foxconn in February 2013 announced
that it will hold democratic union elections.21 However a study conducted by
a corporate watchdog shows that in March and April 2013, 90.2% of 685 ques-
tioned Foxconn workers had not heard about any election plans (The New
Generation Migrant Workers Concern Programme 2013, 6). The results show
that more than 50% of the respondents did not know that union members can
democratically elect their representatives and that they can themselves come
forward as a candidate. 82.5% of the workers did not know who the leader of
their union group was. 16.9% of the respondents reported that they are union
members. Further 24.6% said that they think that they are members of a union.
These numbers show that actual union enrolment is much lower than 86.3%,
the number given by Foxconn officials (The New Generation Migrant Workers
Concern Programme 2013, 4f).
Despite these low levels of awareness regarding the existing union the sur-
vey results show that workers nevertheless think that unions could potentially
help to improve their situation. 45.8% of the interviewed Foxconn workers
think that a union can play a “very important” role in achieving wage increases,
21 Financial Times. February 3, 2013. Foxconn plans Chinese Union Vote. Retrieved from
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/48091254-6c3e-11e2-b774-00144feab49a.html#axzz2TFz9DeNG
on May 14, 2013.
Foxconned Labour as the Dark Side of the Information Age 375
while only 3.4% think that unions are “not important” in this context (The New
Generation Migrant Workers Concern Programme 2013, 7). Fostering aware-
ness among workers regarding their rights and strengthening their right to
choose union representatives thus seems crucial to support the struggle of
workers over their working conditions.
There is the potential that Chinese workers become important agents of
labour struggle in the 21st century. In this context Zhao and Duffy highlight:
“The fact that tens of thousand of Chinese workers are engaging in daily strug-
gles over hand-to-mouth issues must qualify any sweeping post-Marxist for-
mulations by Western-centric scholars about the disappearance of the working
class as historical agents of struggle in the information age” (Zhao and Duffy
2008, 244). In this context Time Magazine in March 2013 reported that
“Resentment is reaching a boiling point in China’s factory towns. […] Facing
long hours, rising costs, indifferent managers and often late pay, workers are
beginning to sound like true proletariat”.22 Rather than regarding Chinese
workers at Apple’s suppliers and elsewhere as mere victims of capitalist exploi-
tation it is important to recognize that collectively organized they can cause
severe disruptions to the global value chain.
On several occasions activists around the world have supported the struggle
of Chinese workers. ngos and labour rights activists have been protesting
against Apple tolerating unbearable working conditions in its supplier facto-
ries. For example on May 7, 2011 an international day of action against unac-
ceptable treatment of workers was held. MakeITfair, a project of a group of
European corporate watchdog organizations, under the slogan “Time to bite
into a fair Apple; Call for sustainable it!” organized protest events throughout
Europe,23,24 sacom organized a protest street theatre in Hong Kong.25 Such
international solidarity from activists can support worker struggles by raising
awareness within Western civil society regarding the work and life reality of
Chinese factory workers.
that Foxconn’s Chengdu campus was built in on 76 days, which created a num-
ber of security risks (Friends of Nature, ipe, Green Beagle 2011, 37f).
Labour spaces at Apple’s supplier factories are unpleasant and dangerous.
The fact that work takes place in centralized factory spaces makes it possible to
exert strict control over working hours and behaviour of workers even in their
“free” time.
Chengdu, where the gap between actual and living wage was highest (see
Figure 11.1), also worked most overtime, between 80 and 100 hours per month
(sacom 2011a, 10). In 2012 the fla found that at the three monitored Foxconn
plants in Shenzhen and Chengdu workers during peek season worked more
than 60 hours per week. Despite these very long working hours 48% of the
interviewed workers stated that their working hours were reasonable, 33.8%
said that they would like to work more in order to earn more money and 17.7%
reported that their working hours were too long (fla 2012, 8). In September
2012 sacom investigated three Foxconn plants in Zhengzhou, Henan Province
that are only producing iPhones. The results show that working hours vary
strongly depending on Apple’s demand. During low season overtime work was
as low as 10 hours per month, while during peak season 80–100 hours monthly
overtime were common (sacom 2012, 3). During low season workers thus
struggle to earn enough to cover their living expenses, while during high sea-
son they are exhausted due to a lack of free time.
Even if overtime work is officially labelled voluntary, low wages often
force workers into working excessive overtime. While companies comply
with legal minimum wage standards, compliance with regulations for maxi-
mum working hours is often insufficient. The fact that minimum wage levels
are too low makes compliance relatively easy for companies, while it creates
the need for workers to work overtime to earn extra money. The relation
between low wages and high overtime rates is a basic structural characteris-
tic of contemporary electronics manufacturing. It allows companies to keep
their payroll low at the expense of workers, and at the same time meet high
production targets.
The work activities workers perform in Apple’s supplier factories are monoto-
nous, repetitive and dictated by machines. Their activity can therefore be
described as an alienated labour process, as “an activity which is turned
against” the worker (Marx 1844/2007, 73). Marx argued that in capitalism the
production process turns against the worker because “it is not the worker who
employs the conditions of his work, but rather the reverse, the conditions of
work employ the worker” (Marx 1867/1990, 548).
Work in Apple’s supplier factories is characterized by a separation between
mental and manual labour as it is associated with Taylorist production methods.
Each step of the labour process is defined and controlled by management, while
executed by the worker: “The physical processes of production are now carried
out more or less blindly […] The production units operate like a hand, watched,
corrected and controlled by a distant brain” (Braverman 1974/1998, 86).
The computer industry furthermore illustrates the division between manual
and mental labour on a global scale. While highly skilled engineers that design
computer software and hardware tend to be located in the global North, the
physical production and assembly of computer products largely takes place in
the global South.
had to collectively reply “Fine! Very fine! Very, very fine!” when asked how they
felt (Finnwatch, sacom and somo 2011, 31). At a Foxconn plant in Chengdu
new workers for example had to participate in a one to two day long military
training which only consisted of lining up and standing (sacom 2011a, 16).
Workers furthermore had to stand up to 14 hours per day. During breaks they
were sitting on the floor often without talking to each other because they were
too exhausted (sacom 2011a, 16). If workers made mistakes they had to write
confession letters to their supervisors and sometimes even read them loud in
front of other workers (sacom 2011a, 17). Supervisors were under pressure too.
If one of the workers they were supervising made a mistake they had to face
punishment themselves (sacom 2011a, 17). The strict supervision and control
mechanisms are a means for factory management to demonstrate its power
over workers. It attempts to reduce human behaviour such as talking, eating or
using the toilet and to force machine-like qualities onto the workers.
26 Forced Labour Convention (CO29) and the Abolition of Forced Labour Conven�tion
(CO105). Source: ilo. 2013. Retrieved from http://www.ilo.org/dyn/normlex/en/f?p
=1000:11210:0::NO:11210:P11210_COUNTRY_ID:103404 on May 14, 2013.
Foxconned Labour as the Dark Side of the Information Age 381
27 Freedom of Organisation and Protection of the Right to Organise Convention (CO87) and
the Right to Organise and Collective Bargaining Convention (CO98). Source: ilo. 2013.
Retrieved from http://www.ilo.org/dyn/normlex/en/f?p=1000:11210:0::NO:11210:P11210
_COUNTRY_ID:103404 on May 14, 2013.
28 Apple. 2011. Retrieved from http://www.apple.com/ipad/ on October 25, 2011.
29 Apple. 2011. Retrieved from http://www.apple.com/ipad/features/ on October 25, 2011.
30 Apple. 2011. Retrieved from http://www.apple.com/why-mac/better-hardware/ on
October 25, 2011.
382 Sandoval
MacBook Air, for example. Its unibody enclosure is machined from a solid
block of aluminium. The result is a notebook that is thin and light, looks pol-
ished and refined, and feels strong and durable”.31 This marketing strategy pic-
tures Apple’s products as trendy, clean, sophisticated, elegant and of high
quality – a technology that is so advanced that it will expand the capacities of
its users and fit their needs so neatly, that they will “forget it’s even there.”
Apple’s marketing slogans present its products as technological marvels
without history. They divert attention away from the fact that underpaid
Chinese workers are producing these products during 10 to 12 hour shifts at
least 6 days a week, in exhausting and repetitive working procedures, while
jeopardizing their health. Once displayed on posters, magazines and tv-spots,
iPad, MacBook and Co have lost any trace of the conditions under which they
were produced.
4.7 Summary
Table 11.2 summarizes working conditions at Apple’s contract manufacturers
in China.
The results of the analysis provided here show that labour rights are system-
atically undermined in the factories of Apple’s contract manufactures. The
next section discusses Apple’s response to the bad working conditions in the
factories of its Chinese contract manufacturers.
Apple’s response to labour right violations in its supply chain is very reac-
tive. The company published its first Supplier Responsibility document as
a reaction to ongoing criticism of its supply chain management. It starts
with the following sentence: “In the summer of 2006, we were concerned
by reports in the press alleging poor working and living conditions at one
of our iPod final assembly suppliers in China” (Apple 2006, 1). Since then
Apple published one Supplier Responsibility Report per year. These reports
promise that Apple “is committed to the highest standard of social respon-
sibility in everything we do. We are dedicated to ensuring that working
conditions are safe, the environment is protected, and employees are
treated with respect and dignity wherever Apple products are made”
(Apple 2006, 4).
Based on Teun A. van Dijk’s (2011) concept of the ideological square I in the
following analyse the arguments Apple puts forward in its Supplier
Responsibility Reports in order to demonstrate its efforts to improve working
conditions. The ideological square identifies four possible ideological strate-
gies that describe different ways of how the relation between in-groups and
out-groups, between “us” and “them” is represented in talk or text (Van Dijk
2011, 397). These strategies are: “Emphasize Our good things,” “Emphasize Their
bad things,” “De-emphasize Our bad things,” “De-emphasize Their good things”
(Van Dijk 2011, 396). Three of these strategies are present in Apple’s response to
watchdog criticism: Apple is de-emphasizing its own wrongdoings by down-
playing the extent of the problem of labour rights violations (see Section 5.1),
while at the same time emphasizing its achievements by using a rhetoric of
continuous improvement (see Section 5.2). The company furthermore empha-
sizes the wrongdoings of others by blaming Chinese managers and workers for
the persistence of bad working conditions (see Section 5.3).
full extent of labour rights violations behind statistics and numbers and
describe the problem as the result of minor shortcomings while ignoring struc-
tural causes:
• Fetishism of statistics: Throughout Apple’s Supplier Responsibility reports
hardly any descriptions about how working conditions in its supplier facto-
ries actually look like can be found. Apple only provides statistical data that
actually tells little about the daily work and life experiences of workers.
According to Apple’s own audits, the non-compliance rate in regard to pay-
ment of at least minimum wages and transparent wage calculations was
46% in 2007, 41% in 2008, 35% in 2009, 30% in 2010, 31% in 2011 and 28% in
2012 (Apple 2007–2012). Although these figures show an improvement, it
still means that a large number of workers in Apple’s supplier factories are
paid below the legal minimum. Considering that the even the legal mini-
mum is often below a living wage, these numbers are even more troubling.
Apple’s figures on working hours give a similar picture. Non-compliance with
a maximum 60 hours per week was 82% in 2007, 59% in 2008, 54% in 2009,
68% in 2010, 62% in 2011 before it suddenly dropped to 8% in 2012 (Apple
2007–2012). As an explanation for this sudden decrease of non-compliance
in regard to weekly working hours Apple sates: “In 2012, we changed our mea-
surement on working hours to one that is more meaningful and effective”
(Apple 2012, 29). This explanation suggests that the sudden decrease in work-
ing hours stems from changes in measurement rather than actual changes in
working conditions. Furthermore it is problematic that Apple considers a
60-hour working week as desirable. In fact, a 60-hour working week violates
Chinese labour law. In China a regular working week must not exceed 44
hours. In addition maximum overtime according to the law is 9 hours per
week. This means that including overtime, Chinese labour law limits working
hours to 53 hours per week.32 By calculating compliance with maximum
working hours based on a 60-hour working week, which exceeds the legal
maximum, Apple’s audits misrepresent the extent to which workers are
working excessive overtime. Without any descriptions of the work realities
of workers the statistics Apple presents furthermore remain abstract and
therefore hide how severe low wages, long working hours or the lack of health
protection can be for the lives of individual workers and their families.
• Ignoring root causes: Apple has a strong business interests in keeping pro-
duction costs low. In a 2012 financial statement Apple highlights that it has to
deal with strong prize competition: “The markets for the Company’s products
32 China.org. Labour Law of the People’s Republic of China. Retrieved from http://www
.china.org.cn/living_in_china/abc/2009-07/15/content_18140508.htm on May 15, 2013.
386 Sandoval
and services are highly competitive and the Company is confronted by aggres-
sive competition in all areas of its business. […] The Company’s competitors
who sell mobile devices and personal computers based on other operating
systems have aggressively cut prices and lowered their product margins to
gain or maintain market share” (Apple SEC-Filings, 10-k form 2012, 6).
This structural contradiction between Apple’s need to reduce labour costs
in order to stay competitive, and low wages, low safety standards and long
working hours is not addressed in Apple’s Supplier Responsibility reports.
FurtherÂ�more Apple’s response to the suicide tragedies ignores connections
between bad working and living conditions and the suicide tragedies. In its
2010 report Apple highlighted that it is “disturbed and deeply saddened to
learn that factory workers were taking their own lives at the Shenzhen facil-
ity of Foxconn” (Apple 2010, 18). Apple stressed that as a reaction to the sui-
cides it launched “an international search for the most knowledgeable
suicide prevention specialists – particularly those with experience in
China – and asked them to advise Apple and Foxconn” (Apple 2010, 18). A
team of suicide prevention experts was formed which conducted a question-
naire survey among 1,000 Foxconn workers, face to face interviews with
workers and mangers, investigated each suicide individually and evaluated
Foxconn’s response to the suicides (Apple 2010, 18). The result of this evalu-
ation was that Foxonn’s reaction to the suicides was ideal: “Most important,
the investigation found that Foxconn’s response had definitely saved lives”
(Apple 2010, 19). Suggestions for further improvement were only made
regarding the training of hotline and care centre stuff (Apple 2010, 19).
Both the measures taken by Apple and the improvement suggestions
made by the “most knowledgeable suicide prevention specialists” seem
rather limited. They do not include any improvement of working condi-
tions, which according to different labour rights groups had been bad
for many years (somo 2005b; FinnWatch, sacom and somo 2009;
FinnWatch, sacom and somo 2011; sacom 2011a,b, 2012, 2013). The anti-
suicide team’s findings suggest that the suicides had nothing to do with
working conditions at Foxconn. A study conducted by China Labour
Watch (2010) tells a different story. On May 17, 2010 China Labour Watch
asked 25 Foxconn workers about what they believed were the reason for
the suicides of Foxconn workers. 17 said that high pressure at work was
the main reason. Five workers argued that a lacking sense of commu-
nity at Foxconn has led to the suicides, as even workers that were living
in the same room would not know each other. Three workers doubted
that the reasons for the deaths actually were suicides (China Labour
Watch 2010).
Foxconned Labour as the Dark Side of the Information Age 387
This rhetoric suggests that the existence of bad working conditions is solely
due to a lack of management skills of suppliers, and has nothing to do with
Apple. Apple presents itself as a benevolent saviour that is bringing knowledge
to developing countries. According to its Supplier Responsibility reports Apple
seems to believe that its only responsibility consist in telling suppliers what
they have to do. In the 2009 report Apple for example highlighted: “Apple’s
approach to supplier responsibility extends beyond monitoring compliance
with our Code. We help our suppliers meet Apple’s expectations by supporting
their efforts to provide training in workers’ rights and occupational health and
safety” (Apple 2009, 3). At no point Apple mentions how much money it is
paying for the production of its products in these supplier factories and
whether this amount is enough for ensuring adequate working conditions. By
blaming its suppliers Apple detracts attention away from the fact that these
workers are in fact working for Apple and Apple therefore is responsible for
ensuring that at least their working environment is save, that they receive a
wage which allows them to pay their living expenses and that their working
hours do not extend beyond certain limits. Blaming contract manufacturers
detracts from the fact that Apple keeps almost 60% of the sales prize of an
iPhone as a profit while spending less than 2% for labour cost of final assembly
in China (Kraemer, Linden and Dedrick 2011, 5).
Apple’s response to labour rights allegations follows certain ideological pat-
terns: It downplays the severity of the problem of low wages and long working
hours, avoids descriptions of actual work and life realities of workers by only
referring to statistics and numbers, and ignores structural causes of the labour
rights problem (de-emphasizing Apple’s wrongdoings). The company stresses
that the situation is continuously improving although independent research
shows that problems persist (emphasizing Apple’s achievements); and describes
suppliers, rather than Apple itself, as the ones actually responsible for labour
rights violations (emphasizing the wrongdoing of others).
Apple’s rhetoric tends to downplay the scope of labour rights violations, mys-
tifies their relation to Apple’s business interest in cheap labour and attempts to
deny the company’s responsibility for bad working conditions in its supply chain.
It defends Apple’s business practices by detracting attention away from struc-
tural contradictions and social irresponsibilities that are connected to them.
6 Conclusion
they are produced. While working conditions resemble the early days of indus-
trial capitalism, the produced-high tech computer products build the founda-
tion for 21st century knowledge work. Apple thus represents progress and
regression at the same time. Karl Marx described this contradictory quality of
capitalism when he stressed:
It is true that labour produces for the rich wonderful things-but for the
worker it produces privation. It produces palaces – but for the worker
hovels. It produces beauty – but for the worker, deformity. It replaces
labour by machines – but some of the workers it throws back to a barba-
rous type of labour, and the other workers it turns into machines. It pro-
duces intelligence – but for the worker idiocy, cretinism.
marx 1844/2007, 71
The labour performed in Chinese workshops produces profits for Apple and
marvellous computer products for those who can afford them, while for work-
ers it produces monotony and despair.
However, icts at the same time do not only mean misery for workers, but
can also be a means of empowerment: Jack Qiu (2009) points out that the
Internet and wireless communication is increasingly available to members of
the Chinese working class. He stresses that rather than describing Chinese
low-income groups as “information have-nots,” they should be regarded as
“information have-less” as they increasingly have access to the Internet and to
inexpensive “working-class icts” that are produced for the Chinese market
(Qiu 2009, 3f). These “working class icts” such as mobile phones or computers
can be used “in order for the concerns of the have-less to reach across social
divisions and have a general impact on society” (Qiu 2009, 243). Information
about labour rights violations or protest can sometimes reach the mass media
via online forums or self-made videos (Qiu 2009, 243). Qiu highlights that in
the context of the spread of working-class icts there are “important instances
of working-class cultural expression and political empowerment using tools as
blogs, poetry, and mobile phones, which serve as the substance of new class
dynamics in the twenty-first century” (Qiu 2009, 232). icts can thus be used as
tools to support struggles for worker rights.
Although this chapter focuses on Apple it is important to be aware that
similar working conditions as described here can be found throughout the
electronics industry as well as other manufacturing sectors such as garment or
toy production. Apple thus is more than a “bad apple.” It is an example of struc-
tures of inequality and exploitation that characterize global capitalism. In
order to confront these structural problems it is not enough to rely on corporate
Foxconned Labour as the Dark Side of the Information Age 391
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chapter 12
1 Introduction
The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas: i.e. the
class, which is the ruling material force in society, is at the same time its
ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material pro-
duction at its disposal, consequently also controls the means of mental
production, so that the ideas of those who lack the means of mental pro-
duction are on the whole subject to it. The ruling ideas are nothing more
than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships, the
dominant relationships grasped as ideas.
marx and engels 1976, 59
Marx and Engels’s interest was primarily the material relationships that consti-
tute ruling ideas. This line of reasoning implicitly creates an ontological expla-
nation for the causal relationship between the ruling material forces, the ruling
class, and the ruling ideas. Foucault, on the other hand, goes to lengths to avoid
raising ontological questions, and instead focuses on epistemological ques-
tions, which here mean analysing how technology is intertwined with political
prescriptions, power, and knowledge, and is embedded in socio-cultural prac-
tices. Socio-cultural practices are understood as the institutional and organiza-
tional circumstances in which the making of technology is situated. Since
information society, like all kinds of societal transformations in history, is
multidimensional, involving technological, economic, social, cultural, and
political changes, it is necessary to analyse the strong image of information
technology in relation to its twofold nature.
The implications of the differences in Marx’s and Foucault’s focus are here
presented as a challenging way to move our understanding forward. We argue
that this unconventional way of situating both thinkers in a theorization of
digital culture provides an important avenue to re-evaluating the contribution
they might make. Using pastoral power as a lens, our discussion begins with an
outline of the new modalities of power in digital culture, before moving on to
a more analysis of alienation and reification in digital culture by revisiting
Marx’s early writings. We conclude with a discussion of objectification and
subjectification. We argue that alienation and objectification are definitely still
valid in digital culture, but have to be enriched by an understanding of the
modalities of power in digital culture working in the processes of reification
that produce objectified, subjectified, and subjectifying subjects.
398 Nygren and Gidlund
qualities, and as such could be adhered to in almost all possible future sce-
narios. The symbolic logic is translated into a form that is characteristic of
the digital artefact, and it is both the acceptance of the symbolic logic and
the performed practices themselves that become the object of analysis (see
for example: Löwgren and Stolterman 2004). Technology is nothing but a
mirroring of hegemonic social concepts (such as rationalization or individu-
alization), but we need to create, update, and recreate tools to analyse its
interaction with the distribution of power. Thus the opaqueness of digital
technologies in twenty-first-century information society calls for a deeper
understanding of alienation and capitalism, analysing and criticizing the
uniqueness of things digital.
Here, Marxist theories and concepts are exceptionally well placed, espe-
cially where the ambition is to unveil cultural production in relation to mar-
ketization. However, we think that such an analysis is not enough. The
opaqueness of digital technologies calls for a more complex conceptualization
that allows a deeper, more structural analysis of the ways in which power is
displayed. It is necessary to analyse an understanding of power that goes
beyond power as a relation between oppressors and oppressed, between
worker and owner, or as an effect of the State, and it is to this end we advance
a theoretical framework that draws on both Marx and Foucault. We argue that
a Foucauldian analysis of power is needed if Marx’s concepts of alienation and
dialectical analysis are to have full rein in a critical analysis of the distribution
of power in digital culture.
Foucault’s concept of pastoral power was coined in his genealogical dis-
cussion of the historical development of the Christian Church and its gradual
assimilation into modern State apparatuses. Its primary focus is the tech-
nologies and modalities of power as first developed in a Christian context
(Foucault 1982, 2007). He shows that during the eighteenth century, pastoral
power found a new way of distributing this kind of individualizing power.
The modern State developed as a sophisticated structure into which indi-
viduals could be integrated, given one condition: that their individuality
would be shaped in a new form and submitted to a set of very specific pat-
terns. The State, according to Foucault, should be seen as modern matrix of
individualization – a new form of pastoral power. Foucault argues that pasto-
ral power is reproduced by human beings themselves; the human being turns
himself into a subject. At first the subjects were “the body of the religious
soul,” then “citizens,” then “workers,” and now they are “cultural beings” (see
Touraine 2007). In the transformation from Christian to State modalities of
pastoral power, Foucault characterized pastoral power as follows (Foucault
1982, 784):
400 Nygren and Gidlund
important to turn to the techniques and apparatuses of the regime. The pasto-
ral power of digital technology adds to this by convincing individuals that the
choices they make in the staging of their selves is their own, and that they are
making these choices as expressions of their individuality. We are becoming
willing and efficient self-governing subjects. By addressing things digital as a
means of persuasion, exposure, amplification, and transmission, and as sub-
jectification processes and performances, these circumstances are made more
visible. The opaqueness of digital technology is exposed and made an object of
study,and the masked two-fold performance by individuals as both consumer
and producer of invidualization is possible to analyse. The specific historical
conditions of digital technology allow the process of individualization to colo-
nize the lifeworld in a very effective manner:
Digital technology allows the subject to individualize, to stage the self, and, as
such, the technological (digital) potential seduces the subject with the idea
that with digital technology we can construct and display individuality. In the
same way as automated technologies are embedded with rationalization (the
social concept of a rationality that co-constructs society), digital technologies
are embedded with individualization (individualization as an equally social
concept co-constructing society). Pastoral modalities of power involve the
entire history of processes of human individualization; saying that one does
not want to express individuality with the help of digital technology sounds as
awkward in our digital society as refusing to act in a rational way sounded in
industrial society. Because this individualization is left unquestioned, it
appears all members of society find it of interest – universal, neutral, natural,
and inevitable. Yet where Foucault talks about “the mad and the sane, the sick
and the healthy” (Foucault 1982, 778), our argument turns on pre-censorship
versus the censured, what is staged versus what is behind the scenes, the per-
formed versus the unscripted, and the displayed versus “the dislocated” and
“the localized.”
3 Marx Revisited
(i) In the process of work, and especially work under the conditions of capi-
talism, man is estranged from his own creative powers, and,
The Pastoral Power of Technology 405
(ii) The objects of his own work become alien beings, and eventually rule
over him; they become powers independent of the producer (Marx 1963).
This form of alienation means, for Marx, that individuals do not experience
themselves as the acting agents, but that the world (Nature, others, and he
himself) remains alien to them. They become reified and appear as objects,
even though they may be objects of their own creation. In a capitalist society,
workers can never become autonomous, self-realized human beings in any sig-
nificant sense, except in the way the ruling class wants the workers to be real-
ized. They can only express this fundamentally social aspect of individuality
through a production system that is not publicly social, but privately owned; a
system for which each individual functions as an instrument, not as a social
being (Marx 1963).
When differentiating industrial from digital technology, it becomes appar-
ent that Marx’s theory of alienation is very much based upon his observation
of emerging industrial production (for a similar discussion, see Feenberg
2010). Marx developed his theories during the era of modern industry, when
workers were assembled in large factories or offices to work under the close
supervision of a hierarchy of managers who were the self-appointed brains of
the production process. Workers could be seen as extensions of machines
rather than machines being the extensions of workers. This type of analysis of
alienation is still valid in the twenty-first-century information society. Digital
technologies also enhance many of the industrial phenomena of productivity,
division of labour, and surplus value (Aiello and Kolb 1995; Carayon 1993),
which shows that information society is not only, if at all, a post-industrial
society. But, if we return to the question of digital technology and its opaque-
ness, we take our lead from Marx in suggesting that it is necessary to talk of a
new form of alienation that has emerged with the Internet and information
society – “digital alienation,” which with its dislocated virtual life constructs a
dualistic relation between for example dislocated and located forms of being
(online/offline identities). The life situation (whether digital or virtual) is still
located; the image of liberation, disengagement, and loss of stability is (to
paraphrase Marx) part of this epoch’s “ruling ideas,” meaning the ideas of the
ruling class. It is a widespread contemporary belief that increased economic
globalization, together with online communication, will reduce the impor-
tance of geographical sites as a base for people’s identity (see, for example,
theorists such as Giddens 1990; Virilio 1993; Negroponte 1995). The construc-
tion of “placelessness” and a possible dissolution of space and time give rise to
a new form of alienation – digital alienation – that reproduces and hides class
conflicts in contemporary global societies. Another example of digital alien-
406 Nygren and Gidlund
ation is customization and digital design where individuals design their own
product (being it sneakers or t-shirts) under the pretens of expressing their
individuality and interpreting others’ copying ones design as strengthening
ones identity creation (short-term celebrity status) without allocate their
action as a part of the creation of exchange value for capitalists (Humphreys
and Grayson, 2008). Bloggers are performing their lives contributing to
product placement, experiencing identity creation (Tynan, McKechnie, and
Chhuon. 2010).
According to Marx, the alienation of labour occurs when the worker is
alienated from the product of his work and therefore becomes alienated
from work itself. His argument is that it is essential to human beings to
express ourselves creatively, but that we lose contact with ourselves if this
is not the case in our own working conditions. In industrialized society,
working conditions deny us control of our work and the world we live in.
The line of argument for digital alienation is similar, but based on the pro-
cess of individualization. We position digital alienation alongside the
alienation of labour, in much the same way as religious and political alien-
ation are positioned alongside the alienation of labour: as an objectifying
and dualistic practice. Human totality is alienated from self-consciousness,
and the digital “self” becomes a commodity. The subject might resist, but is
constantly undermined by the relation to the “screen.” We are “seduced” by
the world of consumption into performing our self on the digital stage.
Here the individual is merely a screen onto which the desires, needs, and
imaginary worlds manufactured by the new communications industries
are projected. Those who no longer find the guarantee of their identity
within themselves are ruled, indistinctly, by what escapes their consciousness
(see Touraine 2007, 101).
Individuals perform themselves on the stage of digital culture, and their
control of the performance is lost because of the conditions of the digital per-
formance (Facebook, Twitter, blogs, etc.). We are no longer in control of the
“self” we perform. We censor our thoughts and our images in relation to the
expected (the life-styling logic) and the product/the self becomes alienated.
We lose control of our digital selves and the world we live in, and it is hard to
feel committed to the self since the analogue or localized life is separated from
the digital. Neo-liberal subjects become dependent on the labour market, and
ultimately on education, consumption, welfare state regulations and support,
consumer supplies, and on possibilities and fashions in medical, psychologi-
cal, and pedagogical counselling and care. This all points to the institution-
dependent control structure of capitalist hegemony. With the advent of digital
technology and neo-liberalism, the norms and hierarchies governing the
The Pastoral Power of Technology 407
put to use in various economic, political, and social contexts (see Andrejevic
2009). This chapter has shown how the relationship between the distribution
of power in digital practices in terms of objectification as a prolonged moder-
nity, where everything is objectified and shaped according to commercial,
rational and instrumental thinking, and subjectification as the expression of
ultra-modernity, where instrumentality is supported by the illusory and ideo-
logical image of individual self-choice, could simultaneously be analysed as
processes of reification within the digital pastoral modalities of power.
Reification then refers to two contemporary regulatory digital practices:
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chapter 13
Sebastian Sevignani
In 2010, four young New York university students were listening to a speech by
law professor and free software foundation advocate, Eben Moglen, entitled:
“Freedom in the Cloud: Software Freedom, Privacy, and Security for Web 2.0
and Cloud Computing” (2010). Moglen, also known as the author of the dot-
Communist Manifesto (Moglen 2003), a document where he, inspired by Marx,
propagates a contradiction between free information and multi-national capi-
talism in the age of the Internet, describes in his speech the surveillance-based
heteronomy that users face within an Internet controlled by large corporate
monopolists. Corporations, such as Facebook and Google, are able to dictate
“take-it-or-leave-it” terms and provide users with a dubious but working pri-
vacy-threatening deal: “I will give you free web hosting and some php [per-
sonal home page tools] doodads and you get spying for free all the time”
(Moglen 2010). Moglen challenges the status quo by stressing that the situation
need not be the way it currently is. Technological means that are currently
available, he points out, provide us with a potential alternative to an Internet
controlled by powerful centres. He calls upon his audience: “We’re technolo-
gists, we should fix it […]. You know every day that goes by there’s more data
we’ll never get back. Every day that goes by there’s more data inferences we
can’t undo. Every day that goes by we pile up more stuff in the hands of the
people who got too much” (Moglen 2010).
The four students were inspired by Moglen’s call to start developing an alter-
native social networking site (sns), Diaspora*, that was soon and – as we know
in retro-perspective – too soon celebrated as the potential Facebook-Killer.
The euphoria comes, on the one hand, from Diaspora*’s quick success in fund-
raising. Via an Internet platform, they were able to raise 200,000 usd to get
their project running. On the other hand, Facebook, the world’s biggest sns
and one of the globally most frequented websites, has faced several privacy
problems as well as growing user discontent.
1 The research presented in this chapter was conducted in the project “Social Networking Sites
in the Surveillance Society” (http://www.sns3.uti.at), funded by the Austrian Science Fund
(FWF): project number P 22445-G17. Project co-ordination: Prof. Christian Fuchs.
community. On the other hand and particularly, in the fact that the site is fun-
damentally different in its infrastructure and mode of production. This differ-
ence holds important alternative consequences for its users. In describing this
alternative sns, it is useful to distinguish between two levels. One is the code
level; here, we are interested in how Diaspora*’s software is produced, what the
means to produce sns looks like, and in which social relations they are embed-
ded. The other level is the user level; here, we are interested in the use value of
Diaspora*, such as its ability to satisfy users’ need for privacy. We will see that
on Diaspora* the user level interacts with the code level in an important
manner.
Diaspora* is a distributed sns, which means that uploaded user data are not
stored and managed centrally. Unlike Facebook and Google+, which process
user data in huge server parks, Diaspora* consists of a potentially unlimited
number of interoperating servers that are locally distributed and not con-
trolled by a single organisation. Theoretically, it is possible for everyone to
operate such a “pod.” Therefore, the Diaspora* project should be seen in the
context of initiatives that seek to empower users to run personal, self-
controlled servers easily. For instance, the Freedom Box initiative describes
itself as “a project that combines the computing power of a smart phone with
your wireless router to create a network of personal servers to protect privacy
during daily life […]. The basic hardware and software components already
exist. Our job is to assemble the right collection of social communication tools,
distributed services, and intelligent routing in a package anyone can use to get
the freedoms we all need right out of the box” (Freedom Box Foundation n.d.).
Practically, however, there are a limited number of servers,2 hence the social
network is not yet distributed widely. Nevertheless, the principle behind
Diaspora* is aimed at this direction: “Get started on a community pod and
then move all of your social data to a pod you control. Diaspora*’s distributed
design means that you will never have to sacrifice control of your data”
(Diaspora* n.d.a). The effect of this structure is that “as soon as it becomes
public that a company is exploiting the data of the users of its pod, they move
away and the company is dead (in that sector). So the product shifts from you
being the product to the software being the product” (Diaspora* 2012).
Chopra and Dexter (2006) describe the traditional capital strategy to make
profit in the informational economy: capital is closing the source code and this
means excluding others from this code on behalf of private property rights. “In
this model then, the ‘means of production’ remain with the corporate owner of
the software, because the worker is unable to modify the code” (Chopra and
Dexter 2006, 8). Due to the specific quality of the means of production, how-
ever, the production of informational goods, such as software code, comes
potentially in conflict with capital interest for the following reasons:
Marx argues that the “social relations between the producers, and the condi-
tions under which they exchange their activities and share in the total act of
production, will naturally vary according to the character of the means of pro-
duction” (Marx 1849/2006, 28). The Diaspora* software is produced and devel-
oped according to a mode of production that can be called “peer-production”
(Benkler 2006, Bauwens 2006), which is a way of producing goods and services
that relies on self-organizing communities of individuals who come together
to produce a shared and desired outcome. Instead of being exchanged, out-
comes and inputs of the working process are shared. Goods and services in
peer-production are therefore not commodities, because “only the products of
mutually independent acts of labour, performed in isolation” can become
commodities (Marx 1867/1976, 57).
In terms of forces and modes of production, Marx argues further that “at a
certain stage of their development, the material forces of production in society
come in conflict with the existing relations of production, or – what is but a
legal expression for the same thing – with the property relations within which
they had been at work before” (Marx 1859/1909, 12). The Diaspora* software, to
which access is needed for users to set up their own pods, is (mainly) licensed
under the gnu’s Affero General Public License (agpl). This license, provided
by the Free Software Foundation, follows a principle called “copyleft.” Copyleft
says that code must be free software and works like this: “I make my code avail-
able for use in free software, and not for use in proprietary software, in order to
encourage other people who write software to make it free as well. I figure that
since proprietary software developers use copyright to stop us from sharing,
we cooperators can use copyright to give other cooperators an advantage of
their own: they can use our code” (Stallman 2010, 129). Copyleft uses existing
property regimes to subvert them and uses the power of the right to property
to avoid exclusive appropriation of software code (de Laat 2005; Wolf, Miller,
and Grodzinsky 2009). It can be understood as a self-protecting measure for a
specific mode of production and as an expression of the conflict that Marx has
The problem of privacy and alternative social media 417
The starting point of the modern privacy debate was an article by Samuel
D. Warren and Louis D. Brandeis published in 1890. The motive for writing this
article was an infringement during the wedding of Warren’s daughter by the
press. In this article, privacy is defined as the “right to be left alone” (Warren
and Brandeis 1890/1984, 76). “The right to be left alone” is identical with the
liberal core value of negative freedom (Rössler 2001, 20f.), and as such it deter-
mines most of the subsequent theoretical work on privacy and situates it
within the liberal tradition. The plethora of values that are associated with
privacy, such as the value of freedom, autonomy, personal well-being and so
forth, mostly stem from this very kind of thinking. Serving these values, infor-
mational privacy is today most often defined either as control over the flow of
information or over the access to information. For Alan F. Westin, “privacy is
the claim of individuals, groups, or institutions to determine for themselves
when, how, and to what extent information about them is communicated to
others” (Westin 1967, 7). Westin focuses on the control of information, which
makes him a prototypical proponent of “control-theories” of privacy (Tavani
2008, 142f.). On the other hand, there are “access-theories” of privacy (Tavani
The problem of privacy and alternative social media 419
2008, 141f.). Gavinson, for instance, relates privacy “to our concern over our
accessibility to others: the extent to which we are known to others, the extent
to which others have physical access to us, and the extent to which we are the
subject of others’ attention” (Gavinson 1980/1984, 347). If we combine these
two major strands of privacy approaches, one can speak of privacy as individ-
ual control over access to personal information (Moor 1997; Tavani 2008). Some
authors challenge the non-determination of “privacy as control” definitions
(e.g., Wacks 2010, 40f.; Solove 2008, 25); they argue that these theories fail to
define the content of privacy. In fact, control theories deal with the “freedom
to choose privacy” (Wacks 2010, 41), rather than a determination of the content
to be deemed private. Here, privacy is what is subjectively seen as private; such
theories, therefore, foster individuals’ exclusive control over their data, and do
not want to and cannot lay claim to privacy within a good society and a happy
fulfilled life (Jaggar 1983, 174). Access theories differ on this point; these theo-
ries can denote a realm of privacy that is not at the disposal of the individual’s
choice by any means (Fuchs 2011b, 223). For instance, such determinations of
privacy could include the agreement that individuals’ bodies, homes or finan-
cial issues such as bank secrecy, are inherently private. In access theories, pri-
vacy is what is objectively private and, therefore, theories as these can conjure
up constraints to individuals’ control over their data in terms of certain values.
It is crucial to understand that access theories may allow thinking about what
privacy should be in a good society, but not as a matter of necessity. In fact,
access theories of privacy are also most often situated within the liberal tradi-
tion and have a limited notion of societal issues as the stress is on the individ-
ual control aspect.
A resemblance between privacy and property is often noted in the literature
(Lyon 1994, 186; Laudon 1996, 93; Brenkert 1979, 126; Habermas 1991, 74; Goldring
1984, 308f.; Lessig 2002, 250; Hettinger 1989, 45; Geuss 2001, 103; Sofsky 2008,
95f.; Solove 2008, 26–28; Moore 2008, 420; Kang 1998; Litman 2000; Westin 1967,
324–325; Varian 1997; Samuelson 2000), but has rarely been analysed critically
(exception: Fuchs 2011b).
A broad notion that expresses its fundamental character for human life and
fits in with various kinds of property, understands property as a social relation
with regard to (tangible and/or intangible) things (Pedersen 2010b).
Macpherson speaks about three possible forms: private property, state prop-
erty, and common property. He points out that private property and state prop-
erty are of similar structure, since in both the social relation with regard to
things is exclusionary (Macpherson 1978, 5). Macpherson further remarks
upon three shifts in the property notion, which took place when capitalism and
market society appeared (Macpherson 1978, 9f.). These shifts include relevant
420 Sevignani
instance, people who live in castles are well protected from any unappreciated
intrusions, be they from other people, noise, or anything else. These people
may be able to circumvent reporting their financial status to state authori-
ties, using the law effectively on their behalf by means of tax and investment
consultants. As much as private property, privacy is also good for different
things depending on one’s class status. In capitalism, all people rely on hav-
ing private property in order to satisfy their material and cultural needs. For
the rich and powerful, private property ensures that they have the right to
own the means of production and use them for their own purpose. For the
poor, private property is essential because only via private property can they
reproduce their labour power and ensure that they will make ends meet. In
capitalism, all humans also rely on having privacy in order to be competitive
within a society that forces them to compete, and at the same time to allow
for spaces of escape from that competition (Geuss 2001, 88). Rich and power-
ful people’s call for privacy is not only about individuation, but moreover
about ensuring the sanctity of their wealth while hiding its origin (one thinks
of bank secrecy, for instance). The poorer people also call for privacy in order
to protect their lives against overexploitation and other forms of powerful
abuse by the rich (Demirović 2004).
Not surprisingly, we know of theories that draw consequences from the
outlined close connection between the individualistic control theory of pri-
vacy and private property by conceptualising the right to privacy as a right to
property (Laudon 1996, 93; Lessig 2002; Kang 1998; Varian 1997). Property,
according to the previously outlined identifying processes, is for these authors
always to be understood as private property. Privacy as property would
strengthen the individual control of personal data (Laudon 1996, 93; 97) and
would prevent privacy invasions that occur when personal data is accessed
non-consensually (Laudon 1996, 99). The “privacy as property”-approach
demands that “everyone possesses information about themselves that would
be valuable under some circumstances to others for commercial purposes.
Everyone possesses his or her own reputation and data image. In this sense,
basing privacy on the value of one’s name is egalitarian. Even the poor possess
their identity. In the current regime of privacy protection, not even the wealthy
can protect their personal information” (Laudon 1996, 102). Admittedly, with
other political implications in mind, Lessig says, in the context of privacy as
property, that “property talk […] would strengthen the rhetorical force behind
privacy” (Lessig 2002, 247). If privacy is property, then it becomes possible to
speak about theft regarding the non-consensual usage of personal data (Lessig
2002, 255).
422 Sevignani
In this section, I will use Marxian theory to analyse dominant notions of pri-
vacy. Thereby I refer to Marx’s concepts of ideology critique, commodity fetish,
and his differentiation between a societal sphere of production and a societal
sphere of circulation. Marx’s concept of ideology critique is used as an umbrella
theory that includes his analysis of fetishisms as well as the differentiation
between a sphere of production and a sphere of circulation.
First, I must clarify what I mean by ideology. In general, ideology has differ-
ent meanings. The term can be used neutrally to denote a worldview or a sys-
tem of ideas. It can be used positively as a class struggle concept in order to
mark positions within a struggle of beliefs. It can also be used denunciatively
to dismiss ideas as negative or dogmatic, and the term can be used in the sense
of the Enlightenment to point to an objectivity that is not yet present or known.
this demands changing practices and cannot be achieved solely through alter-
native “true” thinking. Marx interlinks epistemological questions of truth to
sociological questions of human association and practice. In The German
Ideology, Marx and Engels investigate forms of ideology along the modern divi-
sion of labour between brain and hand. They introduce the societal role of the
ideologist. Ideologists are removed from material production and can there-
fore imagine a “false” thinking which is detached from these processes (Marx
and Engels 1845–46/1998, 67f.). Regarding The German Ideology, Terry Eagleton
points towards a curious fusion of that epistemological aspect of ideology and
a political definition (1991, 79f.), because Marx and Engels situate the labour
division also in the context of class society and political domination. They
argue that:
The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas: i.e., the
class which is the ruling material force of society is at the same time its
ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material pro-
duction at its disposal, consequently also controls the means of mental
production, so that the ideas of those who lack the means of mental pro-
duction are on the whole subject to it. The ruling ideas are nothing more
than the ideal expression of the dominant material relations, the domi-
nant material relations grasped as ideas; hence of the relations which
make the one class the ruling one, therefore, the ideas of its dominance.
The individuals composing the ruling class possess among other things
consciousness, and therefore think. Insofar, therefore, as they rule as a
class and determine the extent and compass of an historical epoch, it is
self-evident that they do this in its whole range, hence among other
things rule also as thinkers, as producers of ideas, and regulate the pro-
duction and distribution of the ideas of their age: thus their ideas are the
ruling ideas of the epoch
marx and engels 1845–46/1998, 67
Marx’s talk of social relations here again points to the sociological aspect of
ideology, and so we can reasonably claim that Marx’s concept of ideology
stems from a form of human association that evokes false consciousness and a
structure of political domination.
forms of thought look like is explained and how they can be related to privacy
and property.
The societal dimension of value creation is thus effectively “hidden” for mar-
keters, but asserts itself behind people’s backs (Marx 1867/1976, 135), because
exchange value must be in the marketers’ interest. They have exchange value
and selling in mind when they start to produce and enter markets. Therefore,
they adjust their activities according to the expected exchange value (Marx
1867/1976, 167).
The commodity fetish, which means that value is objectified in things,
breaks the ground for a more highly developed fetishism, the money fetish.
When value appears as a property of things, it is possible to imagine a specific
commodity that objectifies value: money. Within money, exchange value and
use value fall into each other; the use value of money is the exchange. The
transition to independence of the law of value then becomes very concrete,
and at the same time, the social quality of value becomes more “hidden.” The
fetish is thus perfected, and in fact, it is increasingly perfected in the further
establishment of the capital relation. Ultimately, it appears that invested
money itself begs money (capital fetish). I will come back to the capital rela-
tion in the following discussion.
their production give rise to exchange and to their social equation in exchange;
these natural differences are therefore the precondition of their social equality
in the act of exchange, and of this relation in general, in which they relate to
one another as productive” (Marx 1857–58/1983, 168).
From the mutual recognition as private property owners, only formal equal-
ity between people can be deduced; the social status is not affected here. Also,
freedom appears as very formal here. In Privacy: A Manifesto, Wolfgang Sofsky
puts it this way:
Exchange among private individuals is the basis for equality and free-
dom. Trading partners recognize each other as equals. Each accepts the
other as a subject with his own will. The sales contract that they agree to
does not establish equality of status or property but rather a voluntary
relationship between peers. We should not expect more from a society
that shields people from the pressure of the community and is supposed
to put a protective distance between them.
sofsky 2008, 85f
In addition to freedom and equality, a third aspect is set within the commodity
exchange, namely self-interest: “Individual A serves the need of individual B by
means of the commodity a only in so far as and because individual B serves the
need of individual A by means of the commodity B, and vice versa. Each serves
the other in order to serve himself; each makes use of the other, reciprocally, as
his means […] That is, the common interest which appears as the motive of the
act as a whole is recognized as a fact by both sides; but, as such, it is not the
motive, but rather proceeds, as it were, behind the back of these self-reflected
particular interests, behind the back of one individual’s interest in opposition
to that of the other” (Marx 1857–58/1983, 169f.).
In summary, Marx’s differentiation between two societal spheres that are
necessarily interwoven (Marx 1885/1992, 131f., 139, 190) may be helpful also for
the theory of ideology. One sphere is about producing things and the labour
that has to be spent on it. The other sphere is where the produced things circu-
late among people, i.e. the market. Equality, freedom, and self-interest appear
in the latter.
“It is the exclusive realm of Freedom, Equality, Property and Bentham.
Freedom, because both buyer and seller of a commodity, let us say of labour
power, are determined only by their own free will. They contract as free per-
sons, who are equal before the law. Their contract is the final result in which
their joint will finds a common legal expression. Equality, because each enters
into relation with the other, as with a simple Owner of commodities, and they
The problem of privacy and alternative social media 429
and thus makes privacy one-sided and individualistic. But what about the
political dimension of ideology? I am stuck for an answer that addresses why
ideology and therefore ideological notions of privacy are tied to implicit class
domination and are therefore problematic. Marx gives an answer to this ques-
tion within his capital theory. It is important to stress that there is a logical
unity between the value theory and capital theory in Marx. The unity exists
because commodity exchange and exploitation take place in capitalist reality
at the same time. This means that commodity exchange and its objective forms
of thought are necessarily interwoven with capitalism, i.e. we cannot separate
them. And it also means that the dominant notion of privacy is related to the
maintenance of political domination.
Marx describes capital as self-processing value (Marx 1867/1976, 257); in
short, ‘M-C-M’: in the sphere of circulation, money (M) is invested for a specific
commodity production (C) and results then, if the sale was successful, in more
money (M’). Why are investments profitable? Marx gives the following answer.
Self-processing value is possible due to the commodification of the workforce.
The workforce is a certain commodity as it is able to produce more value than
it costs to reproduce. For instance, food and opportunities for regeneration,
such as free time, sleeping, etc. that have to be produced, are reproduction
costs of the workforce. The difference between these costs and the surplus pro-
duced by workers is appropriated by the buyers of the workforce. In this man-
ner, capitalists are steadily able to appropriate the societally-produced surplus
by workers. They become therefore richer and more powerful than workers.
Consequently, a structural class division in society becomes inevitable.
Why is such appropriation legitimate? It is legitimate because the principle
of equivalence, “do ut des,” “I give that you may give,” no one cheats anyone,
remains intact and therefore the mutual recognition as private property own-
ers is not affected. On the contrary, fair commodity exchange – and therefore
the ideological notion of privacy – is presupposed for a capitalist class society.
Not surprisingly, class society affects the privacy issue, as argued in Section 2.
Marx argues that besides commodity exchange, i.e. labour performed pri-
vately and in isolation, capitalism needs to work out “a complete separation
between the workers and the ownership of the conditions for the realization of
their labour” (Marx 1867/1976, 874). In the prehistory of capitalism, this separa-
tion took place through a violent process of expropriation of great segments of
the population, to which Marx refers as “primitive accumulation of capital”
(Marx 1867/1976, part eight). Thereby, workers were set free, but this “libera-
tion” was of ambiguous character. It resulted in a dual sense of freedom (Marx
1867/1976, 270–272), namely, workers are free of personal dependences, for
instance, from their overlords in feudalism, but also free from the ownership of
The problem of privacy and alternative social media 431
the condition for the realisation of their labour. Workers are on the one hand
free to engage in contracts. This freedom is precisely the freedom of commod-
ity exchange. On the other hand, workers are forced to engage in contracts and
to sell their labour power on the markets to make ends meet. This freedom is
also set in commodity exchange as it is a freedom to choose regardless of one’s
social status. Hence, workers are forced to maintain their status as a subaltern
class because the capitalist can steadily appropriate the societal surplus that is
produced by the workers (Marx 1867/1976, 729f.). This fair exploitation process
is, according to Marx, a structural reason for domination in society.
The capitalist quality of society as class society is expressed by the right to
have others work for you and the right to private property in labour’s terms of
realisation. These rights are identified with the right to private property in gen-
eral in an ideological manner (Macpherson 1978). Today’s unitary legal frame-
works for different sorts of private property are only possible because
commodity exchange and appropriation of societally produced surplus are not
divisible (Römer 1978, 140). The universal right to private property, to use,
abuse, alienate or exchange something, and the right to receive the fruits that
the usage of something generates, does not matter if only the things owned are
needed for life, or the conditions within which labour can be realised (means
of production) are private property, or if private property is extended to the
labour force (Munzer 2005, 858).
In terms of privacy, Niels van Dijk (2010, 64) points to an interesting differ-
ence in legislation between Europe and the u.s. While in the u.s. tradition,
personal data is predominantly seen as a commodity and therefore exchange-
able (privacy as property), in Europe there is “little room for propertization of
personal data” (van Dijk 2010, 64), because privacy is conceptualized as a per-
sona right and important for the individual’s dignity (McGeveran 2009;
Shepherd 2012). But human dignity is generally seen as inalienable. In the dis-
cussion on the question whether privacy should or should not be alienable,
exchangeable, and tradable on the markets, it is crucial to understand that in
capitalism any commodification process presupposes rights that cannot be
alienated or exchanged. The labourer must not become a slave, cannot alienate
his or her whole person because this would reverse the double freedom of the
labourer (Pateman 2002, 33). This is a feature of capitalist progress in compari-
son to previous forms of society. According to Marx, this means that domina-
tion, which still exists, is mediated through basic freedoms of the individual.
Macpherson (1962, 264; see also Pateman 2002) argues that alienability of the
labour force presupposes itself a universal, inalienable right of self-ownership
that originates from the practice of commodity exchange and contains, as
already outlined, the circulation sphere-based rights of freedom, equality,
432 Sevignani
and copyleft software. The producer of umbrellas does not have to pay for that
kind of software although it contributes as means of production to his or her
capital accumulation. In this case, an intensive exploitation of the labour that
was once spent on the copyleft product takes place. The producer of umbrellas
saves the money that he or she would otherwise have to pay for the machine’s
operating software. On the other hand, copyleft products are attractive for
users as they cheap, widely cheaply accessible and have a high quality since a
huge pool of co-operative labour builds them. Copyleft products are also often
more flexibly adaptable to specific purposes. This appeal can be used for capi-
tal accumulation indirectly. Commercial firms may offer services that are
related to copyleft products. For instance, a producer of umbrellas pays
another firm that collects and aggregates suitable copyleft components for
running umbrella-producing machines. In this case, it is not the labour spent
on producing the copyleft product that contributes directly to capital accumu-
lation, but rather the labour spent on collection and service. I argue that
copyleft production is indeed opposed to capital accumulation. However, at
the same time, it allows for newer forms of exploitation that can be much
more intensive – the producer of umbrellas pays nothing for the use of copyleft
products, but these products enable him to realise surplus through selling the
umbrellas.
A major problem in this context is that copyleft is not the dominant princi-
ple of production; rather, it can be understood as an expression of a transform-
ing economic foundation in a partial realm and therefore capital accumulation
can behave parasitical to copyleft production. Diaspora*’s mode of produc-
tion is bound to the immaterial or informational realm. In terms of political
economic theories of this realm, it can be differentiated in terms of three
approaches, as Fuchs (2009, 79) argues. A neoliberal position wants to take
back peer-production by enforcing intellectual private property rights and
the principle of exclusion. A social democratic position sees advantages in ini-
tiatives such as Free Software and Diaspora*, but seeks to establish a kind of
dual economy. Pedersen calls this position “information exceptionalism.”
Informational exceptionalists reject property rights in the intangible realm,
but do not challenge them in the tangible realm: “The market is good for
humanity, as long as it behaves nicely in cyberspace” (Pedersen 2010a, 105).
A way to explain the difference between the two positions is to understand
informational exceptionalists as representing a distinct group of capital inter-
ests. While there are corporations making profit by enforcing intellectual pri-
vate property rights, there are other corporations, such as Google, which gain
profits without enforcing intellectual property rights but are ultimately depen-
dent of private property rights in the tangible realm (Söderberg 2002).
438 Sevignani
The preceding evaluation of Diaspora* has shown that the project and its
alternative mode of production are open to be exploited by capitalist modes
of production and capital strategies in the informational age (Chopra and
Dexter 2006).
Diaspora* performs practically an alternative concept of privacy that pro-
tects users from commodification, but at the same time does not aim at an
alternative to a possessive-individualistic privacy notion. As such, this is not
contradictory and may rest with Diaspora*’s multi-faceted – wilfully or not –
embeddedness within capitalist structures that are dominant in society and
remain dominant in people’s minds. However, in order to strengthen the alter-
native quality of Diaspora* and other non-commercial snss, the privacy issue
and its possessive individualistic capitalist coinage should be rethought and
not simply be permitted to enter the discourse about social media.
5 Conclusion
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Samuelson, Pamela. 2000. Privacy as Intellectual Property? Stanford Law Review 52 (5):
1125–1173.
Sevignani, Sebastian. 2013. The Commodification of Privacy on the Internet. Science
and Public Policy 40 (6): 733–739.
Sevignani, Sebastian. 2016. Privacy and Capitalism in the Age of Social Media. New York:
Routledge.
446 Sevignani
User-generated content (ugc) and Web 2.0 sites and services have unleashed
a torrent of creativity, ingenuity, and generosity on the part of their partici-
pants, who daily post, comment, and update content on sites such as Facebook,
Twitter, and Flickr. On Web 2.0 environments a shift has occurred in how indi-
viduals communicate with one another through the sharing of thoughts, ideas,
likes, and dislikes. The rising popularity of Web 2.0 sites and services is at the
centre of this shift and also shows no signs of abating. Data from 2010 indicates
that email is being substituted – at least in Canada – for Web 2.0 services
(Moretti 2010). In the 13–17 and 18–24 age groups, a total of 77% and 82%,
respectively, are now using Facebook more than email. In these digital envi-
ronments, ‘users’ become active participants, producing massive amounts of
content free of the wage relation. What makes the study of unwaged immate-
rial labour, or what Bruns (2008) refers to as produsage, interesting is that
‘users’, a complete misnomer, are willing to produce content at no cost to the
owners of these domains at the same time as these sites generate massive
profits.
Bruns (2008) coined produsage in an attempt to differentiate between the
industrial mode of production and the mode of ‘production’ responsible for
the creation of digital content in Web 2.0 environments. According to Bruns
(2008), the mode of produsage is “built on iterative, evolutionary development
models in which often very large communities of participants make a number
of usually very small, incremental changes to the established knowledge base,
* The present study has benefitted from support given to Anabel Quan-Haase by the Academic
Development Fund and Social Science Alumni Research Award, Western University and to
Brian A. Brown by the Provincial Government of Ontario through two Ontario Graduate
Scholarships 2009–2010 and 2010–2011. We thank Ahmad Kamal and two anonymous review-
ers for their comments and suggestions.
In 1880, Karl Marx published a list of one hundred and one questions in La
Revue Socialiste. La Revue Socialiste was a publication that served the industrial
proletariat of France in the late nineteenth century. Known as “A Workers’
Inquiry,” (1938/1880) the questions were divided into four untitled subsections
that dealt with different facets of the labouring context in that era. The ques-
tions Marx asked to the workers were designed to assess the level of exploita-
tion within the industrial factories of France and to make workers conscious of
their own exploitation. In this way, ‘A Workers’ Inquiry’ was an attempt to
obtain a holistic picture of the social, technical, and political dynamics occur-
ring in the workplace (Wright 2002), so as to
450 Brown and Quan-Haase
By making the worker aware of his predicament, Marx’s questions were inher-
ently political, drafted to rouse the anger of labourers, help the workers to real-
ize the extent of their exploitation, and, as this realization grew, ultimately
motivate them to take action.
The editors of The New International, which republished Marx’s ‘A Workers’
Inquiry’, argue that “[w]ith the changes in industrial production during the
past half-century, certain of these questions in their given form have become
archaic. But no one would find difficulty in modifying them in such a manner
as to bring them up to date” (Burnham, Shachtman, and Spector 1938, 1). What
the editors of The New International were signalling is not that the key tenets of
the methodology were archaic, out-dated, or flawed, but rather that as the
struggles between capital and labour change the form and content of our
modes of production, our methods of study must change along with them.
Hence, if our methodologies are to keep pace with the evident changes in the
labour process, then they too must be adapted and updated so as to take into
account these changed circumstances. In the mid-1950s, Italian autonomists
did just that and it is to the modifications they made to Marx’s ‘A Workers’
Inquiry’ that we now shift our focus.
Beginning in the 1950s, Italian autonomist Marxists1 had similar desires to that
of Marx’s, but found themselves in distinctively different historical circum-
stances. While the mode and relations of production had changed significantly
(see: Bologna 1980; Wright 2002; Negri 1989), the need to speak with and consult
1 Autonomist Marxism is a branch of Marxist philosophy that emphasizes the priority, creativ-
ity, and initiative of labour in its relation to capital. While capital relies on labour as the
source of profit, labour has the skill and knowledge to organize its productive activities free
of the capitalist relation. It is, then, potentially autonomous. Nowhere is the potential auton-
omy of labour more evident than on the self-organized, self-managed, and self-directed net-
works of Web 2.0 sites and services.
“A Workers’ Inquiry 2.0” 451
2 For overviews of co-research, its contemporary uses, and the attempts to organize struggles
against exploitation from a variety of perspectives see: Malo de Molina 2004a, 2004b;
Situaciones Colectivo 2003, 2005; Precarias a la Derive 2004; Brophy 2006.
452 Brown and Quan-Haase
tion of the productive cycle and identifying each worker’s function within
that cycle; but at the same time it also involves assessing the levels of
exploitation which each of them undergoes. It also involves assessing the
workers’ capacity for reaction – in other words, their awareness of their
exploitation in the system of machinery and in relation to the structure
of command. Thus, as the research moves forward, co-research builds
possibilities for struggle in the factory.
negri 2008,162–163
One of the central parallels between Marx’s “A Workers’ Inquiry” and co-
research is the concentration on the factory as the central site of study. Both
methods focus on conducting research with individuals who work within the
physical infrastructure of a factory in the hopes of making the conditions of
their exploitation overt and, ultimately, leading toward changing these condi-
tions. Marx contacted the workers via a publication distributed to the factories.
By contrast, co-researchers went directly to the sites of production and infil-
trated the factory in order to obtain information regarding the level of exploi-
tation and the preparedness of the workers to struggle against it. Because large
numbers of workers were concentrated in geographically specific locations –
working en masse at regular and predictable hours, and on jobs that could be
observed or described first hand – the factory was the obvious place to start
any inquiry into labour relations.
Co-research as practiced by autonomists closely resembles what has come
to be known as participatory action research (par) or action research. Both
methodologies emphasize the active role of the researcher and the individu-
als, groups, and communities that participate in the co-creation of actionable
knowledge. One of the central differences, however, between the two is that
co-research maintains its focus on the factory, while action research expands
the scope of research locales into communities, schools, and clinics (Fals-
Borda and Rahman 1991; Barnsley and Ellis 1992). Similar to co-research, in
action research, individuals in the community or institution under investiga-
tion are actively involved in establishing the goals and directions of the
research, but are also involved throughout the entire research process – including
the presentation of the findings and the implications of these for the com-
munity or group. Action research is often contrasted with other research
approaches, where research participants are not engaged in all phases of the
study and members of organizations and communities are viewed as passive
(Whyte et al. 1990). Another similarity between co-research and action
research is that they both try to develop programs-based research findings
acquired through direct interactions and conversations with individuals,
“A Workers’ Inquiry 2.0” 453
groups, and institutions (Barnsley and Ellis 1992). Similar to co-research, the
objectives of action research “go beyond the creation of knowledge. The litera-
ture emphasizes that par includes an educative function which raises the
consciousness of its participants and a plan for action to improve the quality
of their lives” (Cassano and Dunlop 2005). Both co-research and action
research are methods that recognize the importance of applying unique
approaches to unique contexts so as to gain new insight and formulate rele-
vant conclusions and actionable strategies (Whyte 1990). It is the problems
presented by the contemporary labouring context that force us to once again
change our strategies. “A Workers’ Inquiry 2.0” draws inspiration from the
above methodological lineages, but is focused on a unique productive locale.
We discuss next how changes to the nature of labour itself and the locales
where labour takes place impact where and how an inquiry into the social and
political dynamics of a relatively new labouring context might occur. These
changes are conceptualized under the heading of immaterial labour and the
mode of produsage.
Similar to, yet fundamentally different from, the owners of industrial factories,
the owners of Web 2.0 sites and services also depend on legions of workers to
produce the outputs that get turned into profit for them and their sharehold-
ers. There exist, however, significant differences between these two exploit-
ative relationships. The differences are best explained by recourse to a better
understanding of the concept of immaterial labour (Lazzarato 1996) and what
Bruns (2008) calls the mode of produsage. In what follows, then, we discuss
the concept of immaterial labour, its critiques, and its relation to the mode
of produsage. This theoretical lineage informs the proposed methodology of
“A Workers’ Inquiry 2.0” by placing an emphasis on the nature of the artefacts
produced/prodused, the close and personal interrelationship between workers
and these artefacts, and the conspicuous absence of the wage relation within
the mode of produsage.
3 The extent of the work needed to create the informational content of an immaterial com-
modity is exemplified by Facebook’s privacy rules, which have been critiqued because of
their length being comparable to that of the United States Constitution. Navigating the com-
plexity of these rules and regulations is not made easier by Facebook’s “Help Center,” which
is meant to assist members, in that it has more than 45,000 ‘explanatory’ words (Privacy
Commissioner of Canada 2009).
“A Workers’ Inquiry 2.0” 455
This does not mean that there is no more industrial working class whose
calloused hands toil with machines or that there are no more agricultural
workers who till the soil. It does not even mean that the numbers of such
workers has decreased globally. What it means, rather, is that the quali-
ties and characteristics of immaterial production are tending to trans-
form the other forms of labour and indeed society as a whole.
hardt and negri 2004, 65
While these debates rage on, there is no doubt that Lazzarato and Hardt
and Negri have identified a number of core characteristics representative
of a relatively new labouring context that is having an increasing impact
on the working lives of many individuals.4 While admittedly problematic,
the concept of immaterial labour does go a long way in explicating some of the
more consequential changes to have taken place in the nature and form of
labour for large numbers of workers around the world. These changes
should not be considered in isolation, but need to be thought of in their
relationship to the industrial mode of production (Castells and Hall 1994).
This necessitates that we further explore and continue to question the
meaning of the concept and examine more carefully how it is related not
only to industrialized labour, but also to its unwaged variant known suc-
cinctly as produsage.
4.2 The Mode of Produsage, The Produser and The Wage Relation
Drawing inspiration from the work of Toffler (1981) and his concept of the pro-
sumer, Bruns grasps the unique position of the misnomic ‘user’ and the work
that s/he does on Web 2.0 sites and services via his hybrid concepts of the Prod-
User and Prod-Usage. According to Bruns (2008),
(Brook 2005). Six years later and in response to a rapid decrease in member-
ship, News Corp sold MySpace at a considerable loss for $35 million (Stelter
2011) – a telling indicator of the value generated by the Web 2.0 audience com-
modity. In the spring of 2011, LinkedIn, a professional social networking site,
went public and netted its owners and investors a combined $8.8 billion (Levy
and Spears 2011). Twitter, a micro-blogging service, is estimated to be worth
roughly $7.7 billion by secondary markets (Reuters 2011). And finally, Facebook’s
rumoured initial public offering (ipo) in the spring of 2012 is reportedly valued
at nearly $100 billion (Bilton and Rusli 2012; Cellan-Jones 2012). Clearly, the
Web 2.0 ‘audience commodity’ is in high demand. The above valuations are
based on the vast stores of information prodused by produsers regarding their
tastes, likes, predilections, habits, hobbies, and interests stored within these
sites and services. All of this personal information results in a highly refined
audience commodity. In turn, these sites sell this commodity to advertisers
seeking a better return on their investment by micro-marketing their products
or services to niches of eyes, ears, and minds that have shown previous interest
in the products or services on offer. The pivotal role of the produser in this
relationship is emphasized by Fuchs (2011) when he asks us to consider “what
would happen if [produsers] would stop using platforms like YouTube,
MySpace, and Facebook: the number of [prod-]users would drop, advertisers
would stop investments because no objects for their advertising messages and
therefore no potential customers for their products could be found, the profits
of the new media corporations would drop, and they would go bankrupt”
(Fuchs 2011, 298). Additionally, expanding the scope of this analysis to the
World Wide Web (www) by focusing on Google and the commodities pro-
dused by Google ‘users’, Fuchs (2012) argues “Google exploits Google users and
www content producers because their work that serves Google’s capital accu-
mulation is fully unpaid” (Fuchs 2012, 44). Thus, when produsers begin gener-
ating content and, by doing so, generating value for the site, “in terms of
Marxian class theory, this means that they also produce surplus value and are
exploited by capital as for Marx productive labour is labour generating sur-
plus” (Fuchs 2009, 30; see also: Cohen 2008; Kleiner and Wyrick 2007). Based
on the work of Smythe and according to political economists of Web 2.0 and
social media, the relationship between Web 2.0 owner and produser is, there-
fore, hyper-exploitative because it does not even offer the “user” a wage in
exchange for their pivotally important work.
There is nascent evidence that this hyper-exploitative relationship is
causing produsers to organize struggles against it. The frequent uproars
occurring on social networking sites regarding the violation of one’s privacy
have time and again resulted in controversy, but these controversies are
“A Workers’ Inquiry 2.0” 459
more often than not understood as having to do with the violation of one’s
privacy on social networks that are essentially public. The near-exclusive
focus on the violation of one’s privacy as the cause of these uproars is a mis-
characterization and a mistake. A better understanding of these instances of
produser uproar is provided by Brown (2013) when he argues that privacy
and social networks are conceptually oxymoronic in that adherence to the
principles of the former would render pointless the primary purposes of
the latter. Therefore, the frequent occurrences of produser uproar regarding
the violation of one’s privacy on networks that are eminently social are
better understood as instances of struggle against the exploitation of the
highly personal artefacts prodused by and through the mode of produsage.
Undergirding this characterization of these uproars are a long lineage of
struggles fought by other unwaged, yet highly productive, groups of individu-
als such as female domestic labourers (Dalla Costa and James 1973; Huws
2003) and students (Wright 2002; Touraine 1971).
As Bruns (2008) notes above, the social and political dynamics of the mode
of produsage are fundamentally different than the industrial factories that
Marx and the autonomists concerned themselves with. Moreover, they are also
different from the social and political dynamics of domestic labour as well as
that of student labour. While exploitation remains an important and salient
feature of the mode of production/produsage, the relationships between
owner and worker and between workers themselves are fundamentally differ-
ent in the Web 2.0 era than they were in the industrial era. These differences
require that we once again modify our methodologies so as to better under-
stand the unique social and political dynamics of the mode of produsage.
While Marx’s and the autonomists’ goal of creating awareness and also rousing
the ire of workers so as to enable them to put a stop to the exploitative circum-
stances they found themselves in remains a goal of “A Workers’ Inquiry 2.0,” the
context within which this research takes place as well as the context from
which the researcher conducts his/her research have changed substantially.
The idiosyncrasies of the mode of produsage characteristic of sites like Flickr
force us to approach the procedural elements of “A Workers’ Inquiry 2.0” with
caution and care. These idiosyncrasies must be considered when attempting to
undertake a research project inspired by Marx’s and the autonomists’ method-
ological lineage. What follows, then, is our attempt to rethink these methods in
light of the unique nature of Web 2.0.
In order to do so, three distinctive characteristics specific to the mode of
produsage and its relationship to contemporary academic research need to be
taken into consideration. The first characteristic of produsage that needs to be
addressed in its relation to “A Workers’ Inquiry” and co-research is the lack of a
460 Brown and Quan-Haase
We discuss in this section the key tenets of ‘A Workers’ Inquiry 2.0’ and show
its applicability to the study of the mode of produsage taking place in social
media contexts. We examine the unique challenges of Web 2.0 inquiry and
employ a case study and a critical examination of the mode of produsage as it
occurs on Flickr to illustrate how the proposed method functions in the field.
5.2 Codes of Research Ethics and Social Norms of Web 2.0 Sites
The second central characteristic has to do with modifying one’s methodology
so that it remains congruent with the idiosyncrasies of the environment from
which research participants are recruited. We suggest the following four steps
as a good strategy for recruitment: 1) engage the community in discussion
about the topic of interest; 2) approach a select group of participants for more
in-depth data collection; 3) obtain informed consent for the interviews, and 4)
determine the time and media over which the interview will take place. The
goal of this recruitment process is to be inclusive so as to recruit as many
respondents as possible, all the while leveraging the communicative advan-
tages of Web 2.0 sites to its benefit. It should be noted that the method
described below was developed for Flickr in particular but can be easily
adapted to other Web 2.0 domains where produsage occurs as well.
One of the foremost challenges encountered when conducting research on
human subjects online is the successful recruitment and retention of research
subjects. This is an especially tricky process when Web 2.0 environments are
the spaces upon and within which the research is conducted. Web 2.0 sites and
services each have their own unique patterns of normalized behaviour that
have developed over time and which characterize the quotidian behaviours of
their membership. To obtain a better understanding of Flickr’s unwritten
norms and standards was, in fact, the primary purpose of the research project
to which this method applies.5
Similar to Marx’s method, “A Workers’ Inquiry 2.0” asks produsers a list of
questions in the hope of gaining insight into their thoughts, feelings, and
�consciousness regarding their place in the mode of produsage. At the same
time and once again similar to Marx’s method, this methodology aims to
increase the awareness of produsers regarding their own exploitation. As well,
much like the process of co-research where researchers would enter the indus-
trial factory, sometimes get a job there, and conduct their research alongside
5 The research project for which the ‘A Workers’ Inquiry 2.0’ was originally developed was
designed to answer the following question: If, as Hardt and Negri claim (2004, 66), waged
immaterial labour is biopolitcal, then what are the biopolitics of unwaged immaterial labour
or produsage? Following the example set by Marx and the autonomists, the best way to evalu-
ate the biopolitics of this environment is to try and understand the relationships of power
that influence the ways in which individuals act and react within it.
“A Workers’ Inquiry 2.0” 463
6 In this particular instance, the lead author of this chapter had been a member of Flickr for
five years before initiation of the research project.
464 Brown and Quan-Haase
groups.7 The group that did not respond very well to the initial message is tell-
ing of the importance of crafting this initial message so that it adheres to the
norms of the group. This is one of the weaknesses of the present methodology
and will be addressed more substantively in Section 7 of this article.
The other two groups were better suited to the contemplative nature of the
original question and responded to it well. Flickr Central and Utata are both
public groups within Flickr that address a plethora of topics, ideas, issues, and
elements regarding digital photography and photo-sharing. Their members
responded quickly, enthusiastically, and comprehensively to the research
question. As with all discussion threads, however, there is a point in time when
the conversation runs its course and members move on to different threads so
as to think through different ideas and issues. This is the moment when the
second step of recruiting research participants should take place. From our
experience within these virtual and ever-shifting environments, it is important
not to delay sending follow-up requests for interviews because doing so
adversely impacts the readiness of potential research subjects to participate
further in the project.
Like many social networks, Flickr has an internal email/messaging system
called FlickrMail that allows members to contact each other via a more pri-
vate form of communication than the group chat forums.8 Very soon after the
threaded discussion ran its course, a private message was sent via FlickrMail to
all those persons that responded to the thread. In this private email, they were
asked if they were willing to have a more in-depth conversation regarding
whether or not the time they spent on Flickr can or should be considered a
form of labour and if they ever felt it to be exploitative.
The third step consists of obtaining informed consent, which can be cum-
bersome in the context of Web 2.0. Importantly, and somewhat frustratingly,
FlickrMail does not allow one to attach files or documents to messages sent to
other members making the procedural requirements of ethical research more
involved and complicated than they would have been otherwise. The delivery
and return of a Letter of Informed Consent that details the purposes of the
research, the obligations of the researcher, and the rights of the research sub-
ject is an important element to any ethical research. It is also, however, an
7 In the FlickrCentral group there was a total of forty-four unique respondents and one-
hundred-and-one messages. In Flickr api there was a total of three respondents and three
total messages and in Utata there were thirty-five individual respondents and forty-four total
messages.
8 When one signs up for a Flickr account, one is automatically given a FlickrMail account as
well.
“A Workers’ Inquiry 2.0” 465
obstacle that disrupts the casual, informal, and natural flow of communication
on Web 2.0 sites and services in such a way that threatens the continuing
participation of research participants. This is especially the case when the
delivery and receipt of such a document is pushed beyond the immediate site
of research. The inherently informal, casual, and relaxed norms and mores of
Web 2.0 discussion forums – where punctuation, grammar, and sentence struc-
ture are often ignored – stand in opposition to the formal and often temporally
taxing nature of ethical protocols. There exists a tension between these formal
documents and the casual and informal communicative norms associated
with Flickr and other Web 2.0 sites and services. It is this tension that threatens
the success of conducting research of the sort proposed by “A Workers’
Inquiry 2.0.”
After a Flickr member agreed to participate in the research project, a second
message was sent via FlickrMail asking them for an email address where a
Letter of Informed Consent might be delivered. When, and if, this email
address was received the Letter of Informed Consent was attached to a mes-
sage and sent to the given address. This step is particularly sensitive because
participants are asked to provide contact information outside of Flickr.
Considering that participants may use pseudonyms, aliases, or other nick-
names to protect their identity (Raynes-Goldie 2010), it is important to con-
sider that participants may drop out of the study at this point. Upon its return,
a third message was drafted and a convenient time and medium over which to
conduct semi-structured, open-ended interviews was scheduled.9
Conducting the interviews, then, is the fourth and final step in the first
prong of “A Workers’ Inquiry 2.0.” Following the suggestion of the editors of The
New International which republished Marx’s “A Workers’ Inquiry” in 1938, these
open-ended, semi-structured interviews were inspired by Marx’s technique,
questions, and goals, yet were adjusted and modified so as to reflect the idio-
syncrasies of the mode of produsage characteristic of Flickr and Web 2.0.
Interviews varied in length, lasting on average less than an hour and addressed
a host of issues all involving the ways in which the Flickr member thought and
felt about the time, effort, and energy they expended on the site, their con-
sciousness regarding the exploitation of their labour time and power, and,
similar to Marx and the autonomists, their preparedness to do something
about that exploitation.10 As the above steps have detailed, the first prong of
‘A Workers’ Inquiry 2.0’ emulates the methods used by Marx and the autono-
mists but modifies and adapts their procedures so as to bring them into the
contemporary era. Focusing exclusively on the experiences, impressions, and
affects of produsers, however, fails to acknowledge one of the most important
pieces of information that reflects the members’ subjectivity and conscious-
ness. It is to this, or, rather, these artefacts that we now turn our attentions.
Similar to other Web 2.0 sites and services that leverage the unwaged labour of
members, nearly all of the labour required to produse Flickr is self-managed,
self-organized, self-motivated, and, because of this, fundamentally different
from the mode of industrial production that Marx and the autonomists were
researching. From the perspective of business consultants, Tapscott and
Williams appreciate the monumental changes that the mode of produsage
responsible for Flickr evinces. They comment,
Flickr provides the basic technology platform and free hosting for pho-
tos…. Users do everything else. For example, users add all of the content
(the photos and captions). They create their own self-organizing classifi-
cation system for the site…. They even build most of the applications that
members use to access, upload, manipulate, and share their content.
tapscott and williams 2006, 38; emphasis added
the thing that really makes Flickr Flickr is that the users invent what Flickr
is. …[L]ike us, outside developers could build new features and give Flickr
new capabilities. In fact, we used the same api as the outside developers,
meaning that they had all the same capabilities we had. We hoped that
people would build things that we didn’t have the time or resources to
10 The results of this research project are too involved to adequately address in the available
space and are oblique to the central purposes of this chapter. They are, however, dealt
with briefly in what follows and in much more detail separately and elsewhere (Brown
2012).
“A Workers’ Inquiry 2.0” 467
And finally, from the perspective of a Yahoo! executive involved in the pur-
chase of Flickr in 2005 for an estimated US$30 million (Schonfeld, 2005),
Bradley Horowitz gushes, “With less than 10 people on the payroll, they had
millions of users generating content, millions of users organizing that content
for them, tens of thousands of users distributing that across the Internet, and
thousands of people not on the payroll actually building this thing,…. That’s a
neat trick” (Levy 2006). A neat trick indeed, but one predicated on the exploi-
tation of an unwaged workforce that spans the globe. According to Fuchs, “this
situation is one of infinite over-exploitation…[or] an extreme form of exploita-
tion” (Fuchs 2011, 298). It is for this very reason that Flickr’s produsers were
consulted via the methodological foundations provided by Marx and the
autonomists. The pivotal place occupied by the produser in the mode of
produsage, however, also forces us to reconsider an element that Marx and
the autonomists had no reason to contemplate with their investigations of the
industrial mode of production.
By “Harnessing the Collective Intelligence” of its membership and by
“Treating Users as Co-Developers” (O’Reilly 2005), the owners and administra-
tors of Flickr were more than willing to relinquish their control over the process
of developing their photo-sharing utility and let their members do the majority
of the heavy lifting required to test, debug, develop new applications, code soft-
ware, and, of course, upload photographs. As the quotes above suggest, the
labour of produsers was (and continues to be) instrumental in the construction
and creation of the website. Rather than trying to predict what their members
wanted out of the website and devoting scarce temporal and financial resources
to untested ends, the owners of Flickr released the source code to the developer
community and by doing so enlisted them to hack and code Flickr into exis-
tence. They also granted their members a great deal of autonomy and latitude
to build and grow the site in whatever way they saw fit. Additionally, the owners
of Flickr actively encouraged their produsers to communicate with them via
discussion forums and, in paying close attention to what their members were
saying, many of the suggestions made by produsers were incorporated into the
design and functionality of Flickr by its paid staff. According to one of Flickr’s
paid software developers, Eric Costello divulges that “User feedback…drove a
lot of the decisions about features. We had user forums very early on and people
468 Brown and Quan-Haase
told us what they wanted. … We do look at numbers, but really we just keep our
ears open. We listen to what people say to us on our forums” (Garrett and
Costello 2005, 11–24). Hence, Flickr developed in the way it did not because of a
corporate hierarchy dictating to wage labourers what was going to be built and
scientifically managing the exact manner in which they were going to build it.
Rather, by reversing the direction of this command and control structure, the
owners and administrators of the site took a very hands-off approach and
allowed produsers to build Flickr in their own image.
In short, then, Flickr is a reflection of the subjective wants, needs, desires,
and labour of its membership more than it is that of its owners and adminis-
trators. While Marx and the autonomists considered the end products pro-
duced by industrial labourers as important ingredients in the overall mode of
production, they never thought of them as a source of insight or knowledge
regarding the social and political dynamics of the workplace or as a reflection
of the subjective consciousnesses of those that produced them. For Marx or
the autonomists, the end products, whether coal, cars, or typewriters, held no
interpretive or hermeneutic value regarding the subjectivities of workers. As
Flickr’s developmental history indicates, however, the irreplaceable position,
contribution, and place of the produsers’ subjectivity in the design, functional-
ity, and content stored on the website, indicates that continuing inattention to
the artefacts of produsage is a mistake. Ignoring these artefacts omits from
consideration valuable information regarding the social and political dynam-
ics of the mode of produsage and the subjective dispositions of those produs-
ers responsible for building Flickr.
We must, therefore, consider these ever-developing artefacts as important
indices of the social and political dynamics of the workplace and of the work-
ers’ subjectivity, predispositions, inclinations, and consciousness. Marx and
the autonomists rightfully ignored this dimension of the end products of
industrial labour in their studies. Because the scientific management of an
industrial workforce alienates and divorces the workers’ head from the prod-
ucts of his/her hands, the links between the subjectivity of the worker and the
end product were non-existent. Under these conditions, there was no justifi-
able reason for Marx or the autonomists to examine these end products with
any hope of gaining further insight into the subjectivities of those persons fol-
lowing orders and doing the work of assembling them. The labour of generat-
ing the raw content for Flickr – of capturing, uploading, indexing, and
annotating the billions of images found therein, of coding new applications
and software, and of providing a constant stream of input, feedback, and
direction – grants Flickr’s membership much more agency in the overall struc-
ture and feeling of the website.
“A Workers’ Inquiry 2.0” 469
In sum, the history of the development of Flickr, much like many Web 2.0
sites and services, was not driven, directed, or scientifically managed in an
hierarchical, top-down fashion by the owners or managers of the website.
Rather, as the one-time owner of Flickr acknowledged above, the members
and produsers of Flickr – their whimsical wants, idiosyncratic desires, playful
hacks and remixes, their enthusiasm, but most of all their self-managed, self-
organized, and autonomous labour – made Flickr what Flickr is. This photo-
sharing social network is and would be nothing without the direction, guidance,
and unwaged labour of its membership. Unlike the tedious, monotonous, and
highly repetitive industrial production process where workers have no control
over what gets built, when it gets built, how it is built, what these products are
meant to do, and whose needs they satisfy, the mode of produsage responsible
for produsing Flickr is diametrically different. It is this difference that confers
upon the prodused artefacts a particularly important hermeneutic value.
One way of approaching this new object of study would be to examine the
structure, dynamics, and motivational instruments used by particular groups
within Flickr that have been successful in eliciting enthusiastic participation.
Utata, for instance, one of the groups on Flickr used as a source of research
participants for this project, is an excellent example. With a few simple guide-
lines and a request that members be polite, the self-organized and self-
motivated unwaged administrators of the group have managed to produse a
vibrant and committed community built around the sharing of photographs,
thoughts, and ideas. Utata has over twenty thousand members and more than
three hundred and seventy-five thousand images uploaded to its group photo-
stream. They organize weekly “photo-projects” built around thematically
inspired topics combined with particular photographic techniques. Every
Thursday, members go on a virtual “photo-walk” with each other. They capture
images of the places, faces, and spaces they happen to be, see, or visit that day
and upload their favourites to that week’s dedicated photostream. There is a
group discussion forum where ideas, problems, thoughts, and photographs are
discussed politely and in detail. If the conversation gets heated, as it some-
times does, there are offerings of virtual cake to one’s interlocutor(s) as a ges-
ture of good will and support. In short, Utata is a fascinating group that has
managed to harness the creative activities of its membership to inspired ends.
Another artefactual corner of the Flickr-verse that merits attention in this
regard is an area called The Commons. The Commons began as a joint endeavour
between the u.s. Library of Congress (loc) and Flickr in 2008. The loc
approached Flickr and asked if there was a way to share their archival photo-
graphic collection with Flickr’s membership and by doing so ‘harness their col-
lective intelligence’ by asking them to add information to the photographs on
470 Brown and Quan-Haase
display. The aim of this project was to augment and increase the profile of the
loc’s collection at the same time as increasing the available information regard-
ing this same collection. They did so by bringing their photographic archive to
one of the largest groups of individuals interested in photography on the Internet
and by simply asking for their assistance. According to the loc, this project
“resulted in many positive yet unplanned outcomes” (Springer et al. 2008, 2).
One of the benefits of using Flickr is that it has an inbuilt tagging system
that allows produsers to add descriptive tags to the photographs shared by oth-
ers. It is “important to note that for the purposes of this pilot, [the loc] took a
very ‘hands off’ approach to the tags, other than to check for blatantly inap-
propriate content. (…) There were exceptionally few tags that fell below a level
of civil discourse appropriate to such an online forum – a true credit to the
Flickr community” (Springer et al. 2008, 18).
The loc’s participation in The Commons was a massive success for both
Flickr and the library. They conclude their internal report on the Flickr project
by stating that “the overwhelmingly positive response to the digitized histori-
cal photographs in the Library’s Flickr account suggests that participation in
The Commons should continue” (Springer et al. 2008, 33). The success of this
project as well as other aspects of Factory Flickr shed much needed light into
the social and political dynamics of the space. Once again, unlike the automo-
biles rolling off the assembly line in the industrial era, the artefacts of produs-
age allow for a better-informed appreciation of the kinds of subjectivities
being prodused and re-prodused via the mode of produsage.
The full results of the research project for which this method was designed
are too involved to be dealt with in the available space. Briefly, however, the
social and political dynamics of the Flickr-verse are such that, for the most
part, those individuals responsible for Flickr’s creation and evolution do not
consider the time, effort, and energy they expend on the website as a form of
labour, nor do they feel exploited by the owners of Flickr. As this article sug-
gests, however, the relationship between the owners and members of Flickr is
eminently exploitative. Via mechanisms and systems that tap into Flickr’s
“altruistic substratum” (Springer et al. 2008, 15), the owners of these sites and
services enlist a legion of produsers to do the work of expanding the boundar-
ies of the Flickr-verse by creating the social connections and relationships
required to continue its growth. This paradox is one of the primary reasons
that research focused on raising the consciousness of produsers regarding
their own exploitation is important to undertake and accomplish on Web 2.0
sites and services.
We need to know much more about the virtual gears and cogs of the mode
of produsage responsible for these kinds of produser generated artefacts, their
“A Workers’ Inquiry 2.0” 471
Artefact is personal and
directly linked to community.
Added value created by
community and produser.
- Posting
Artefact - Commenting
- Liking/Linking
- Reproducing
- Forwarding
Virtual Shop Floor
Community
Produser
Community
provides
incentives, sense
Produser creates added
of belonging &
value to community and
social capital.
owners.
the nature of the artefact and its link to the community and the produser are a
central source of data.
Triangulation: Similar to qualitative research, triangulation becomes an
integral part of the analysis. Triangulation in qualitative analysis refers to the
study of data from sources in relation to one another. That is, data from one
source is compared and contrasted with data from other sources to obtain a
more rich and holistic picture of the individuals involved and their social rela-
tions. Triangulation also becomes important in light of the nature of online
communities, where trolling and identity play are an inherent part of these
communities.
Artefacts as Data: What really sets “A Workers’ Inquiry 2.0” apart from other
data collection techniques is a focus on the artefacts prodused by produsers
within Web 2.0 environments. These artefacts represent a rich source of data in
“A Workers’ Inquiry 2.0” as they directly speak to the complex relations that
exist between produsers, the rest of the community, and the norms and mores
that characterize the site.
Worker Awareness: This is the primary goal of “A Workers’ Inquiry 2.0” as it
attempts to start a discussion around the uniquely exploitative relation that
exists between produsers and those who own Web 2.0 sites and services. The
juxtaposition here is between the benefits and costs associated with participa-
tion in these social media environments. On the one hand, there is no doubt
that social media creates gains for those involved, including the pleasure of
adding ugc, as well as being uniquely positioned to engage and contribute to
a community (see Figures 14.1 and 14.2). In a study of uses and gratifications of
Facebook, survey respondents indicated that their key gratifications were to
pass time on the site (for example for entertainment, for relaxation, and to
escape) (Papacharissi and Mendelson 2011; Quan-Haase and Young 2010), for
social surveillance and social searching (for example to learn about friends and
family without their knowledge) (Joinson 2008; Zhang et al. 2011), and for
maintaining social ties (i.e., connecting with friends and family) (Dunne,
Lawlor and Rowley 2010; Raacke and Bonds-Raacke 2008). On the other hand,
produsers are not compensated for their time, effort, and overall added-value
to the site. Indeed, produsers in many cases have no control over how the site
manages content, as the example of Facebook and its constantly changing
Terms of Service has clearly demonstrated. Similar to Marx and the autono-
mists, by making produsers aware that their labour is the source of the accu-
mulated wealth of these websites, the present method seeks to raise the
consciousnesses of these produsers regarding their own exploitation and their
abilities to do something about it. As Figure 14.2 shows a detailed analysis of
474 Brown and Quan-Haase
cooperatively, and autonomously, free of the wage relation. The original goal
of Marx’s and the autonomists’ method was to provide workers with the intel-
lectual and emotional tools required to struggle against their own exploitation.
While produsage remains highly exploitative, Flickr produsers do not experi-
ence it as such. Making clear this exploitative relation, then, is vital. How�
ever, the self-organized, self-managed, and autonomous nature of the mode
of �produsage points to ways of living and working together beyond capital. It is
by no means a perfect blueprint. It does, however, provide valuable informa-
tion regarding some of the constituent elements of a mode of production/
produsage that may play an important role in moving beyond the exploitative
capitalist relation.
The central weakness of this iteration of “A Workers’ Inquiry 2.0” is the rela-
tively limited number of produsers consulted as research participants in pro-
portion to the overall Flickr membership. With over fifty-one million members
intermittently populating Factory Flickr, it is all but impossible to get in con-
tact with each of them. This leaves particular areas of the Flickr-verse under-
explored or completely unexplored. As the sparse reaction of the Flickr api
group to the research question indicated, the voluntary nature of produsage
and the specific focus of particular groups within Flickr, creates new chal-
lenges for researchers undertaking this kind of research. These challenges are
directly related to accessing and recruiting Flickr members to participate in a
research project oblique to their primary purpose of being on the site. Our
experience with attempting to recruit participants from the Flickr api group is
indicative of these new challenges.
The Flickr api Group is a place for unwaged hackers and programmers
working with Flickr’s code to share their experiences. While the api group is
designated as ‘public’ and open to anyone, the focus of the group and the vast
majority of the discussion threads found therein are overwhelmingly directed
towards technical programming issues and their solutions. The question posed
to them by this research project, then, has nothing to do directly with these
core activities and was simply ignored by the majority of the group’s member-
ship. This is evidence of the potential problem alluded to above. Even if a
researcher approaches his/her potential research participants on Web 2.0 sites
and services with an informed understanding of the particular norms that cir-
culate throughout the domain, the members of particular groups may not
respond to the message, ignore the call for participation, and as a result the
research project will stall before it is allowed to begin.
The amount of time, effort, energy, and work devoted to hacking the api is
substantial. For this reason, a larger number of members from this group
would have been interesting produsers to speak with regarding whether or not
476 Brown and Quan-Haase
they considered their activities a form of labour and if they ever felt exploited
by this process. Obtaining this perspective would have been of particular rele-
vance as these produsers are engaged in creating highly specialized knowledge
for Flickr, are responsible in part for how Flickr operates, and have one of the
largest stakes in how Flickr makes use of their artefacts. While two research
participants were in fact recruited from this group, the response to the original
question was meagre compared to the response from Flickr Central and Utata.
We believe this is due to the fact that the Flickr api discussion group is primar-
ily a space for hackers/coders to discuss the intricacies, challenges, and oppor-
tunities of hacking the api. It is however not clear why this group, who is most
involved with the development of the Flickr backbone, would be the most
hesitant to engage in reflective practices about their labour. This remains a
concern that needs to be addressed by subsequent iterations of the proposed
methodology.
The difficulty of accessing produsers working within important corners of
Factory Flickr is another reason why the artefacts of produsage are particularly
important elements to consider when assessing the overall social and political
dynamics of the mode of produsage. They do not replace the input provided by
produsers, but they do assist in shedding some much-needed light into the
obscure corners of Factory Flickr that might otherwise escape detailed scru-
tiny. While the weakness identified above merits recognition, it should not
overshadow the information and data gleaned by the other members who did
participate in the project.
8 Conclusions
The goal of Marx’s and the autonomists’ methods was to seek out workers,
speak with them, evaluate the social and political dynamics of the workplace,
gauge the workers level of exploitation, their cognizance of this exploitation,
and, by doing so, provide them with the intellectual and emotional tools to do
something about it. This remains the goal of “A Workers’ Inquiry 2.0.” In prong
one of the research design detailed above, we describe one procedure for
adapting Marx’s and the autonomists’ methods to the Web 2.0 era and the
mode of produsage. In addition to the elemental step of seeking out produsers
and speaking with them, we must, however, also examine the artefacts pro-
dused by them in an attempt to better understand the intricacies and nuances
of the social and political dynamics that animate the mode of produsage. This
vital function was described in prong two of “A Workers’ Inquiry 2.0” by arguing
that the artefacts of produsage are valuable pieces of data because of their
“A Workers’ Inquiry 2.0” 477
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chapter 15
There is no doubt that the internet is an important medium for the simple fact
that it offers alternative channels to disseminate counter-hegemonic content
and instant mobilization. By hook or by crook, activists must experiment with
the internet if they want to be effective. Since political engagement in the
Middle East and North Africa (mena) often operates in the context of media
censorship, police oppression, war or colonial-occupation this claim requires a
critical analysis though. Especially in times of (counter-) revolution many
forms of online politics are rendered meaningless – unless organically related
to offline street politics. The events shaking the region especially since 2011
have starkly demonstrated this. I wish to revisit these developments from a
media, communication and (non-western) anthropological angle.
The Arab uprisings motivated a broad range of responses. But by simultane-
ously providing a publicity niche this focus has also resulted in facile analyses of
the “Arab Spring” and a sense of “intellectual frustration” (Sabry 2012, 80). Sabry
identifies four categories: Muteness (intellectual impotence); Stam�mering;
Tele-Techno- (the ‘experts’); Subaltern (the activists themselves) (81). In fact, a
quick overview of the work published in communication and media disci-
plines responding to the ‘Arab Spring’ shows two remarkable features: the
sheer volume of material produced (dozens of academic publications in sev-
eral special issues dedicated to the topic)1 and its lack of engagement with
Marxist theory. The fact that recent years have seen a popular re-emergence of
interest in Marxist critiques while Marxist theories are hardly engaged with in
mainstream academia shows a widespread gap between established and new
scholarship and probably an inherited prejudice regarding ‘systemic’ analyses,
also for anthropology (Graeber 2001). Part of the reason is disagreement or
* I would like to thank Jamie Pitman and Jonny Jones for comradely advice concerning the
1 Marxist theory of value helpful references with regards to immaterial labour; the anonymous
reviewers for their valuable comments; and Rob Jackson for proof-reading.
1 Special issues related to internet activism and/or the Arab Spring between 2001 and 2013 are
for instance: International Journal of Communication [“The Arab Spring and the role of icts,”
Volume 5]; Communication Review [Volume 14]; Arab Media & Society [Issue 14]; Middle East
Journal of Culture and Communication [Volume 5]; Globalizations [Volume 9]; Cyber Orient
[“The Net Worth of the Arab Spring,” Autumn 2012]; Journal of Communication [“Social Media
and the Arab Spring,” Volume 62].
confusion at the very core of Marxist academia mostly centred on the depen-
dency of superstructure.2 This chapter intends to contribute to a critical con-
ceptualisation of the Arab uprisings through the prism of the internet. The
theoretical and political proposition regarding the potentials of social media,
which underlies this chapter, rests on a radical critique of the liberal-capitalist
internet-ecology. But revolutions cannot be simply studied through the prism
of the internet: internet activism is here viewed through the prism of the revo-
lutions, combining theory with ethnographic insights based on meetings and
long discussions with activists in the summer of 2011 and their online testimo-
nies over a longer period. This will help to push back the narrow presumptions
about the universality of digital experiences and, by relying on a grounded
empiricism, contribute to existing critical explorations. From this positionality
follows a rejection of technological reductionism which distract from neces-
sary material-political explanations, and an inclusion of the disempowering
materiality of technology. Social movement theories popularised with the
surge of anti-capitalist movements in the early 2000s and have become forma-
tive to internet studies, but to some extent became part of the problem.
Marxist theories of literature and art provided inspiring vantage points
for a radical approach to social media and political change. Marxist studies
about the dialectics of art and literature provide fruitful frameworks for the
study of the social-political implications of online media productions, as I
will argue. Such a Marxist-dialectic lexicon refers to non-material (non-economic)
consequences whereby producers of culture (in whatever form or expres-
sion) are influenced by that material reality yet also relatively free.3 How
this relation is structured, the interdependence formed, is called mediation.
Raymond Williams (1977) (following Adorno’s Theses on the Sociology of
Art) stressed that mediation is in the object itself. As this chapter shows,
23
2 This is probably related to a general anti-Marxist reflex but is quite common in the international
academic field at large. As discussed by Graeber, many anthropologists (at Western universities)
avoided Marxist theories in their work simply because Marxists were often persecuted. Even
after ww2 and height of the Cold war, when there was more intellectual space, Marxist anthro-
pology was absent or dominated by an orthodox Marxist (evolutionary) scheme. There was a
break in the 1960s when most anthropologists’ understanding of their discipline underwent a
transformation, engaging more with a type of scrutiny exposing the workings of a system of
inequality and injustice. A Marxist anthropologists’ critique of non-Western social orders was
not because it was different (the kind of relativism that was for long dominant in anthropology)
from his or hers, but also to the degree that it was similar (2001, 24).
3 As Harman clarifies, ideology and consciousness is “a subjective link between objective pro-
cesses”; ideas develop on the basis of material reality and feed back into that reality. Thus
while they cannot be reduced to that reality, they can neither be divorced from it.
484 Aouragh
1 Deconstructing Mediation
The reluctance to engage with Marxist concepts is partly due to the fact that
‘base and superstructure’ represents a combination of forces and relations of
production, but one of these two dynamics will always seem more ‘basic’. The
confusion about ‘superstructure’ mostly arises from the definition of the ‘base’
as an over arching typology. An important correction given by Harman (1986),
namely that Marx doesn’t make a single distinction between ‘base’ and ‘super-
structure’ because there are two distinctions; between the ‘forces of produc-
tion’ and the relations of production; and between the relations of production
and the remaining social relations. The forces of production can come into
conflict with the (more static) relations of production. The relations of produc-
tion correspond to the forces of production – hence, the forces of production
(that have the agency and motivation) rebel against the relations of produc-
tion – not the other way round. So the forces and organisation of labour are the
economic structures (base) of capitalist society and from this emerge a certain
Social Media, Mediation and the Arab Revolutions 485
polity and politics (superstructure), and these in turn merge in different ways,
depending on the historical situation in which it occurs. If as Marx and Engels
argued, the class which is the ruling material force of society is at the same
time its ruling intellectual force, how does this dynamic occur in the realm of
ideology – literature, art, media?
Literary work and art are a good example for they are (and aren’t) embedded
in state ideology. They are forms of perception related to the dominant (state)
ideology (Eagleton 1976, 7). Which is why the mediation between these forms
requires analyses, Mediation suggests the presence of normative representa-
tions of social relations, but it also depends on what form of mediation (books,
newspapers, films, websites) is at stake. For Eagleton, literature is shaped by the
means of production and is distribution. Therefore, to be able to understand its
implications requires an awareness of the historical conditions (iv) as well as the
social composition of the authors (1976, 2). This evokes the broader dialectic I am
interested in exploring regarding social media. The (revolutionary) intercon-
nected role of literature was originally outlined by Trotsky (1991) who stressed
that literary forms should have, and in fact do have, a high degree of autonomy.
This means that literature and art do not merely bend to ideology but evolve
partly in accordance with it (Eagleton 1976, 26). Books are not just (structured)
expressions of meaning but also commodities produced by publishers for profit.
Literature as a part of ‘superstructure’ is in fact a highly mediated social product
and part of the economic base (60). The superstructure functions as an ideologi-
cal organiser of the social class that owns the means of economic production.
Again, this double metaphor has suffered from distortion because the concept of
the base (political-economy) is easily confused to mean ‘essence’ with super-
structure (ideology/media) an extraction thereof. In reality, each technological
transformation is both a continuation and a unique transformation, mani-
fested in ways depending on a particular development. Every new technologi-
cal force will also have implications for the balance of forces and the tools
required.
This is where the Marxist roots of mediation are still relevant to current
political (e.g. the superstructures of ideologies that prefer non-violent horizon-
tal networks) – economic (a medium deeply embedded in neoliberal ict cor-
porations) ict bases. As Engels himself anticipated “If therefore somebody
twists this into the statement that the economic element is the only determin-
ing one, he transforms it into a meaningless abstract and absurd phrase” (in
Eagleton 1976, 9).
Thus than its literal or aesthetic meaning, this chapter engages with media-
tion beyond dissemination and signifies the capitalist rules of engagement
between base and superstructure. Mediation reveals these inner relationships
486 Aouragh
and lays down the patterns that obscure relations of exploitation; hence it rep-
resents both hegemonic and counter-hegemonic processes. The transforma-
tions regarding the availability and usage of communication and information
has always had political implications. Replacing the time-consuming tech-
nique of parchment with papyrus had important consequences for European
Protestantism and (via the upcoming bourgeoisie) for most other social classes
(Deibert 1997). Presenting social phenomena with the adjective ‘new’ tere-
foe does not acknowledge how everyday technologies have morphed with
each new stage of development (Briggs and Burke 2005). Armbrust (2007)
remind us of the need to historicise (new) media developments and sug-
gest looking at the longer existing and still prevalent media culture (e.g.
oral mediation or tape-recordings) distributions. But historicising is more
than tracing technical forces in themselves, it also allow us to recognise a
common tension between historical continuity and change. In these
Marxist epistemologies is the place they occupy within a whole mode of
production matters in particular (Eagleton 1976, 74). Obviously, such trans-
formations don’t occur immediately. According to Peters (2009, 18), mass
media of any sort passes through five stages: the tech�nical invention (which
is a combination of the old and new); cultural inven�tion (thus how they are
linked to new social uses); legal regulation; economic distribution; and
finally, social mainstream.4 The question remains how to apply this Marxist
exercise in the context of media technologies.
Wayne (2003, 128) identifies seven levels of mediation with regards to the
media: text; production process; production context; industrial context; the
state; modes of development; and mode of production. All these levels are related
but the most important levels in the context of social media are the production
process and production of context. The relationship between producer and
consumer is itself contained in the practices of communication.5 So how can
we reconcile the apparent contradiction inhibited in mediation? The orga-
nized fashion of exploitation - through the concentration of workers into
workplaces, paradoxically - created deeper class consciousness and stronger
class-based ties and identities. This was something new and in addition to exist-
ing identity formations based on shared expectations, endurances, lifestyles,
and proximity. It is the reason behind the adagio that capitalism is a system
45
4 To the fifth phase can be added the register of ways new technologic inventions are coun-
tered, as is sometimes the case with dystopian deliberation about the internet, including by
leftist progressives.
5 Williams engages here with Adorno’s Theses on the Sociology of Art.
Social Media, Mediation and the Arab Revolutions 487
that creates its own gravediggers. Meanwhile, the absence of (free, accessible)
communication technology (through the free-market privatisation of these
means) weakens the social ties of the exploited classes. So what happens to the
process of mediation when this gap is overcome in terms of ‘authorship’, when
the user-generated content or products as well as the users’ intentions are
about artistic development, about social change, subversive acts? What hap-
pens to this process when the producer and consumer are the same, indeed:
the most celebrated feature of Web 2.0?
The (power of the) author as producer is not a new idea only invented with
social networking in he present decade. Discussed by Marxist cultural theorist
Walter Benjamin in 1934 and later coined prosumer by Toffler (1980). Unlike the
recent focus on participation by consumers within the capitalist system such as
by Bruns (2010) with produsage,6 Benjamin meant a revolutionary intervention
to counter dominant bourgeois media and ideology. This is a far cry from the
idea of consumers/users extraction empowerment by participating in corpora-
tions with the effect of further reducing investment costs (Fuchs 2009, 95),
which doesn’t signify democratization but commodification of human creativ-
ity which is actually a risky trade-off.
A related point is that ideological mediation is played out partly through the
commodification of media sources and tools. Corporate operators and provid-
ers basically intensify users’ exposure to the commodity propaganda of adver-
tisements while online (Fuchs 2012,146). In this paradoxical arena the mediated
base and superstructure approach was demonstrated clearly in the case of the
Arab uprisings: the availability of ict is a direct output of corporate structure
and yet their ideology (consensual symbols) have helped frame the narrative
about social media and the Arab revolutions. Of course we have to rethink if
we really can draw conclusions about very different media environments –
whether between Web 0 (pre-internet) and Web 2.0 or between, social media
empowerment in California and mass uprisings. But the relatively similar underly-
ing understanding here concern the ramifications of neoliberalism in an increas-
ingly transformed capitalism sometimes described as an information-economy.
It is important to engage with these shifts if only because it has been misun-
derstood. This will help uncover some flawed interpretations about the role of
internet in the Arab uprisings.
6 For a helpful overview of the so-called ‘democratic turn’ and its introduction in the
Knowledge Economy debate see Daniel Araya’s review: <http://www.danielaraya.com/docs/
ProsumerInnovation.pdf>.
488 Aouragh
Since the Communist Manifesto or Das Kapital the dominant corporate media
has obviously restructured itself, morphed into different mode of production
and capital. Technological innovations are often in par with new stages in capi-
talist societies. When focussing on distinctiveness of internet-economies in the
new contexts (via post-war liberal welfare to a neo-liberal state), communication
emerges as the force of change. According to Castells (2009) communication is
the central (counter-)power in our times. This alludes to a transformative power
by a technological development rather than a mode of production, in this sce-
nario base can be understood as informationalism. This adaptation is similar to
what became known as immaterial labour, characterising a type of capitalism.
Hardt and Negri consider the ‘immaterial’ production of ideas by virtue of what
it produces rather than the labour process (confusing the term ‘labour’ with
‘work’) with the internet as a qualitatively different commodity. In Empire Hardt
and Negri understand immaterial labour as industrial production that has been
‘informationalised’ and therefore transformed “the production process itself,”
which is especially clear manufacturing is replaced by ‘services’, the new driv-
ing forces behind “the postmodernisation of the global economy” (2000, 293).
According to Camfield (2007), these proposed alterations can’t actually play the
role assigned to it because they don’t address how surplus value is extracted, this
strangely enough underestimate the complex and deep exploitation that under-
lies it. The separation between consumption and production mysteriously dis-
solves with new technologies suggests that the internet can function outside
the structures of capitalism, turning class into a different category altogether.7
Meanwhile the global economy is somehow one entity, beyond inter-state com-
petition, thus beside class (multitude) there is also a different role reserved for
states (one dominant empire rather than competing capitalisms).
Ironically, while Hardt and Negri challenge his theory of value in reference
to technology, Marx gives serious consideration to the social implications of
technological development. He ascribes to technology the potential to unlock
7 Voluntarism in the blogger, open-source and hacker communities often comes to mind.
A telling example is the recent case by former contributors against the much hailed Huffington
Post. These bloggers had produced and helped disseminate Huffington content for free. It
was the kind of immaterial labour praised indeed. But when the owner made a multi-million
deal with aol the philanthropy ended: they sued her and demanded a share in the proceeds.
See: <http://www.politico.com/blogs/onmedia/0411/Unpaid:bloggers_sue_Huffington_Post_
and_AOL.html>.
Social Media, Mediation and the Arab Revolutions 489
the free development of individualities and the reduction of labour time to a mini-
mum in the service of artistic and scientific development (i.e. rather than only
creating surplus labour).8 The (old) term ‘labour’ challenges the question of
(new) ‘knowledge production’, but for Marx labour represents action that both
presupposes and propagates new knowledge. Far from ignoring the impact of
the ‘superstructure’ on the ‘base’. Marx builds his whole account of human his-
tory around it because knowledge and physical labour have always been con-
tinuous with one another, but the idea of the informationalisation of industrial
production is problematic.
Perspectives about a new capitalism are associated with a restructuring of
the labour market. Political and ideological struggles arise as a result of compe-
tition and exploitation, are decisive for whether a new rising class (based on
new forces of production) displaces an old ruling class (Harman 1986). And yet
the link between technology and postmodern or post-capitalist shifts keep
resuming. For Hardt and Negri (2004, 140) history moves on and social reality
changes, thus old theories are no longer adequate: new realities demand new
theories. Globalization fuse transnational market systems with new technolo-
gies, the supposed ‘dematerialisation’ of the economy (Haug 2009). ‘Old’ forms
of employment are replaced by new internet-formed discourses that aligned it
mostly with knowledge (‘cognitive’) processes. It is now “biopolitical produc-
tion” in which the economic, the political, and the cultural increasingly over-
lap (Sayers 2007, 444). Such, (re)definitions do not have a clear analysis of the
exploitative mechanisms at work and have provoked fair critique, some describ-
ing these far-fetching propositions “the presence of left wing harmonies in the
neoliberal chorus” (Doogan 2010, 29). Again, some are motivated by the idea
that Marx didn’t allow the absorption of knowledge and new technologies in
the production process. Thus by substituting the ‘classical’ Marxist tradition
with ‘immaterial labour’ the analysis is flipped. But the real challenge is to have
a clear understanding of the social relations underpinning capitalist produc-
tion “rather than fetishize its effects” (Fine & Saad-Filho 2010, 23). Marx obvi-
ously did not delve into a communication and information medium at the
time, but he didn’t overlook its role either. Whilst discussing technology as an
alienating force of modern industry Marx observes that technology disclosing
the process of production and thereby also “lays bare the mode of formation of
his social relations, and of the mental conceptions that flow from them.”9
89
8 These views can be found particularly in Chapter 14 of the Grundrisse (Marx 1857/1858).
9 From Capital Vol. 1, the rest of the paragraph in: <http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/
works/1914/granat/ch02.htm>.
490 Aouragh
10 In such anti-class definitions ‘marginal’ comes to mean ‘the other’ in the Third World, but the
same conditions or accounts can be found in the ‘First World’. To follow Eagleton: “The true
scandal of the present is that almost everyone in it is banished to the margins” (2004, 19).
Social Media, Mediation and the Arab Revolutions 493
11 Often mentioned are the four versions of power according to Manuel Castells: Networking
power; Network power, Networked power, and Network-making power. Castells is impor-
tant to mention as he has had a great impact. He is the 5th most cited author and is suscep-
tible for unintended re-conceptualised frameworks that continue to be associated to him.
12 For a collection of analyses see: <http://www.marxists.org/archive/gramsci/index.htm>,
and see also International Socialism Journal (114, Special Issue on Gramsci): http://www
.isj.org.uk/index.php4?s=contents&issue=114.
494 Aouragh
The overwhelming prominence of the narrative that Facebook and Twitter are
crucial agents for change (besides being conceptually wrong) white-washes
corporate capitalism (Mejias 2009).
For much longer debates about the internet coincided with the ‘globali-
sation discourse’ because neo-liberal globalisation had strongly shaped
conventional modes of communication (Featherstone and Lash 1995). They
were accompanied by extravagant suggestions about the internet creating
gender equality, increasing economic development and other anticipations,
but also doom-scenarios often articulated with postmodern theory about
virtual reality. Take for instance this view by Baudrillard (from Impossible
Exchange):
Some new technologies were indeed revolutionary in the realm of everyday life
(to refuse this new reality is basically to refuse progress). But it is precisely
therefore that they involve new modes of fetishism and disseminate capitalist
norms (Kellner 2002, 299). Insofar as social and economic relations are not
egalitarian within society today, we need to expect the same for the economy
of new media (Mansell 2004, 97). The political realities after 9/11 and the collapse
of the housing market and subsequently the banking system itself in 2008 forc-
ibly ‘corrected’ some of the premature propositions about the political impact
of the internet downgrading the significance of nation-states in (temporarily)
global networks. This is for instance tackled by Jones’ (2011, 89–90) suggestion
that the importance of class presents itself in the class nature of the internet
(as a sector) which conditions our communication styles (open source floss
entrepreneurialism notwithstanding) and class in terms of the organisational
consequences of the proponents of internet media (as opposed to indepen-
dent left-wing publications sold face-to-face on streets and protests) which has
real implications for political organising. The latter is important because, as
Mejias (2009) argues, network theories rely heavily on being wired by techno-
logically connected nodes, but the overwhelming majority are not, they are
‘para-node’. Through this important critique Mejias shows the politics of
Social Media, Mediation and the Arab Revolutions 495
13 The Marxist theory of value considers that the value of commodities is derived from the
human labour that went into producing them. This fact tends to be obscured when the
object is bought and sold on the market so it seems that its value arises naturally, from
the qualities of the object itself. In a way, is obfuscation can also be considered the trap in
the reinterpretation of internet commodities.
496 Aouragh
[T]he economic sphere, the sphere of all exchange, taken overall, cannot
be exchanged for anything. There is no meta-economic equivalent of the
economy anywhere, nothing to exchange it for as such, nothing with
which to redeem it in another world. It is, in a sense, insolvent, and in any
event insoluble to a global intelligence. […] Politics is laden with signs
and meanings, but seen from the outside it has none. It has nothing to
justify it at a universal level (all attempts to ground politics at a meta-
physical or philosophical level have failed). It absorbs everything which
comes into its ambit and converts it into its own substance, but it is not
able to convert itself into – or be reflected in – a higher reality which
would give it meaning.
baudrillard 2001, 3–4
This mix of edgy yet abstract discourse explains the appeal of mass consump-
tion not uncommon for upper-middle class academics. But Baurillard also
reminds us that these awkward preoccupations did not occur in a vacuum but
respond to the dissolution of the vast social movements in the ‘60s; the rise
of neoliberal ideologies; itself partly made possible by the failure of the left
to come up with plausible alternatives. The most influential impact on anthro-
pologists’ understanding of value came from Appadurai’s “Commodities and
the Politics of Value” (1986). Anthropologists would do better, he suggests, to
forget Marx’s approach (which has an emphasis on production and thus value
arises from human labour; a annoying focus on class in other words) and look
instead to value that is not rooted in human labour or a social system but aris-
ing from exchange, from individual desire. Unlike Marx’s, his model can easily
be applied even where formal markets don’t exist; there is always some form of
exchange after all. This approach has its advantages: it allows the analyst to
skip past the problem of social totalities (structures of meaning) and focus on
individual actors and their motivations as Graeber argues (2001, 30–31). It
leaves us with a doomed and static image of a self-interested, calculative uni-
versal human urge (33). It is not very surprising how this comes to fit with the
emphasis on consumption as a topic in cultural and communication studies.
But there is also a critical ‘realist’ philosophy of a different kind, Bhaskar
managed to merge a Marxist theory adhered to the description of ideology in
mediation and base/superstructure analyses yet opening it up for contempo-
rary debates and critical emancipatory inquiries in defence of against post-
modernist analyses. One that sees reality operating at different levels, what is
Social Media, Mediation and the Arab Revolutions 497
happening at the surface does not tell us all. In a contribution written with
political philosopher Callinicos, bot describe how, underneath that surface,
one may find the very structures that could destabilise existing social relations.
This approach suggests is that human agency is made possible by social struc-
tures, though themselves very conditioned, offer the potentiality to undermine
it. Moreover, while doing so we are capable to (consciously) reflect upon the
(changing) the actions that produce them (Bhaskar and Callinicos 2003). In
other words, to bring them to the surface, deconstruct the systems in order to
better dismantle it. These are not new discoveries but they do bring back some of
the powerful radical philosophies that it has taken its cue from, for instance in
the words of Karl Marx “All science would be superfluous if the outward appear-
ance was the essence of things” (Volume iii of Capital) and of course Gramsci’s
“philosophy of practice” (see also Harman 2007). This method inspired me to
regard both the liberating and imprisoning implications of icts at once as well as
to separate the internet as an entity between social media as space and tool.
This dual assessment echoes the agency-structure twin-approach where
internet space refers to both the structural aspects of the internet and society,
while internet tool represents the tactical aspects and political agency, I derive
this distinction from the correlation between practice and theory (Figure. 15.1).
Having made this deconstruction, it still requires a critical inclusion of the
materiality of the internet as it actually exists, such as in terms of internet
access. Actual penetration rates and other statistical evidence are important
arguments against the celebratory and technophile claims cheerleading neo-
liberalism, but I argue that online and offline politics are actually unequal. A
misunderstanding regarding the negative interpretations of the internet (also
by progressive critics) stems from the fact that the total penetration rates are
not equal for political penetration. We cannot assess the political impact of the
internet in terms of ‘the population’ and should, instead, appreciate this (espe-
cially the ‘tool’ function) in terms of its meaning for ‘the activists’. This allows
me to get deeper into the matter and give affirmative assumptions where they
are the case as I show in the final section.
To start with, we need more than the increase of communication and dis-
semination. I take from internet theorist Fenton (2006) that first and foremost
political solidarity is the socio-political glue, and that social movements gain
public legitimacy and political force through the embodiment of solidarity
offline. Without an organised body with a centre, resistance is more likely to
dissipate. The misconception of revolutionary organising comes down to
centralism + hierarchy = authoritarianism. A Leninist understanding of demo-
cratic centralism therefore has two conditions: it has to be democratic because
only through democracy can the best lessons be incorporated and the most
498 Aouragh
4 ict Imperialism
understood to bring economic prosperity and even peace, the imperialism that
obstructs much of the potential justice-based prosperity in the mena is hardly
mentioned in ict policy.
Ya’u (2004) referred to the merging of political-economy and ict as the ‘new
imperialism’ because economic participation depends on ict, i.e. and if we zoom
out, enforced institutionalised policies like the Free Trade Agreement (fta)
increased rather than prevented digital divides on national scales. The most
important feature of this imperialism is control and ownership, very prevalent
through what is called ‘global governance’ directed by powerful institutes that
strongly privilege industrial-free market states. The infrastructures of the inter-
net expose how powerful and centralised bodies like the internet Corporation for
Assigned Names and Numbers (icann) are, demonstrated by their allocating of
url names and addresses. The argument could be that the sheer volume of infor-
mation will transform policies (e.g. Shirazi 2008). But such analyses mostly
depend on western-centred analysis where the internet facilitates the expression
of liberal values such as individualism (e.g. Brinkerhoff 2005).
Ya’u makes an important contribution by reintroducing neo-colonialism
and imperialism into our terminology. A weak ict in mena is related to the
combined problem of ‘late development’ post-independence impediments
itself stemming from colonial structures. In essence, these inherited structures
hardly changed and continued in a neo-colonial fashion, and where the inter-
net manages to grow it is bounded by neoliberal rules of engagement, this
clearly disadvantaged Middle East countries (Saleh 2011). While the agenda for
the 2003 wsis conference in Tunisia was set by the private sector ( the internet
Telecom Union, itu) and serves powerful conglomerates, its public goal was
promoting ict and bridge digital divides for the benefit of common people. As
Costanza-Chock (2003, 4–5) argues, civil society and ngo actors were invited
to such summits to mask the neoliberal agenda and also refer to this corporate
behaviour as ‘imperialist’. Furthermore, the Middle East is predominantly
depicted as suffering from political social conflicts. So, of course there is also
another definition of imperialism which is not sufficiently clear and cannot be
solely explained through parasitical ict firms.
While these conflicts are mostly portrayed as an essential characteristic of a
volatile region always in conflict or at war, they are rarely identified as a result of
external factors (settler-colonialism or major and violent invasions under the
banner ‘war on terror’, or the arming and funding dictatorships). This is a far cry
from space-less and border-less myths and the very point of struggle over self-
determination and territorial autonomy. I agree with Terranova (2004) who
argued against the notion of disconnection from particular places (virtual reality)
but to see that internet power is (state) grounded. The overwhelming material-
500 Aouragh
ity of power over technology in capitalist nation states was practiced during
internet shut-downs at the start of the revolutions in Egypt and Syria. Showing
the world just how ‘free’ the free market is, Vodafone complied with Mubarak’s
orders to disconnect its clients. The internet provider Noor was the last one to
operate but that was mainly because it hosted the stock exchange. The graphs
offered by Renesys (listing all the isps) starkly visualise the day of the shutdown
when all of a sudden there is a flat line. For Dan Mcquillan the sequenced-pattern
(with short intervals) suggesting that the companies were probably being
phoned one at a time and being told to take their connection off the air.14 With
this, we are also reminded that it is real people- managers and ceo’s – with
choices and decision-making power and not some abstract infrastructures that
run the show. This implicates them as collaborators. Looking back, it seems
quite extraordinary that internet connection was restored at the moment the
fiercest and state-orchestrated crackdown (the battle of the camels) took place,
suggesting there were also internal divisions at the heart of the regime. That can
be explained by the fact the security apparatus was taken by surprise by people’s
well-organised and steadfast resistance, and that not being able to monitor
their online communications hampered intelligence forces.
Imperialism is not just a label for Middle East politics, it lies at the centre of
the nexus oppression-resistance precisely because this is a region where the
most important natural resources for capitalism (oil, gas, phosphate) are found
and its geography practically streamline most of the trade routes (including
access to those very resources). On top of this: the region is an important
source for the (state-sponsored) arms industry. In light of these realities the
copy&pasted revolution discourses become more about wishful projections of
liberal uprisings than they are about indigenous experiences. The unprece-
dented uprisings are driven by popular protest and cannot be understood
without placing them in the years of preparations.
Whereas they are widely debated and often treated with either awe or con-
tempt, revolutions are “first of all a history of the forcible entrance of the masses
into the realm of rulership over their own destiny” (Trotsky 1930). For long,
collective self-emancipation through such revolutionary processes were
deemed a part of the past. Hence, the Arab uprisings refute many of the social
14
14 The ‘flat-line’ graphs by Renesys are found in this online post: <http://www.renesys.com/
blog/2011/01/egypt-leaves-the-internet.shtml>.
Social Media, Mediation and the Arab Revolutions 501
theories that considered revolution a outdated (Callinicos 2011, 5). The uprisings
showed world-wide resonances through protest movements that centred
around city squares such as the Spanish Indignado Movement and the Occupy
Movement which started in New York but spread to 900 cities. Two of the most
important factors of the uprisings are the changing political public landscape
(flocked by an amalgam of new leftist, political, student groups and the re-sur-
facing of class struggle. The latter signified in Egypt through some of the largest
workers strikes and the formation of independent unions the minute Mubarak
was ousted. Class struggles and relations are a crucial element of the political
struggle in Egypt (Al-Mahdi and Marfleet 2009), this is not unique, its rather
more related to the objective condition that political uprisings crystallize in a
‘periodic fertilisation’. It is through the spreading of the political struggle the
economic struggle extends as theorised by Rosa Luxemburg (1970). The digital
difference is a an additional third segment of the revolutionary political dynam-
ics of and during the manifold political campaigns, strikes and new coalitions.
While the surprised responses unmasked a particular bias, the initial assess-
ments seemed confused by the discovery that ‘they’ too use new technologies,
it is these essentialist approaches that created the fantasy that the internet
caused a “tipping point.” it all seemed in any case to be a very new focus.
Conversely, before 2011, foreign-policy and security experts were also very
interested in the use of the internet in the Middle East with regards to counter-
terrorism. In fact, to those following these debates for much longer, Ukraine’s
Orange Revolution, Lebanon’s Cedar Revolution, Moldova’s Twitter-Spring and
Iran’s Green-Twitter Revolution in the 5 years preceding the Arab revolts were
a preview of the popular copy and pasting that were to emanate. They pre-
pared the prominent 2011 markers-fetishized with colourful flora and fauna
labels - of events in which the internet was elevated as a crucial player. Thus
the Arab Spring/Facebook reference were simultaneously a continuation
and a break of this narrative. When the struggles intensified, ‘revolution’
began to mean something else, more than the copy-and-paste demarcations.
The tipping-point moment in actual revolutions hardly depends on the
tools at hand but predominantly on the social-class dynamics. That is why
there are years where nothing happens with the same tools at hand (for
instance, masses of young people were using the internet for over a decade);
and suddenly there are weeks where decades happen, to paraphrase Lenin.15
The digital difference is a. additional segment of the revolutionary political
1
15 This quote can be found in a 1920 text by Lenin and bundled in his Collected Works avail-
able online: <http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1920/oct/20.htm>.
502 Aouragh
dynamics of and during the manifold strikes, political campaigns and new
coalitions. The increasing importance of the internet is certainly not irrele-
vant. Revolutions do offer an important occasion study to understand the
implications of the internet and even may open up a space for bottom-up
analysis.
This space from below is also very welcome because overt fascination with
social media gave the impression that the revolutions were mainly middle
class and secular. In a way, the Arab uprisings evaluated through the lens of
(western) modernity smoothly folded with the idea that social media plays an
important role in developing a sense of modernity or, as this blustering descrip-
tion claims: “Much like Western societies, parts of Egyptian society are trans-
forming away from traditional groups and towards more loosely structured
“networked individualism” (Wellman et al. 2011, 6). The underlying assumption
paradigm of these such modernity-technology paradigms such assumptions is
that digital politics were crucial because they changed nature of mass com-
munication platforms and new forms of organising, the old-fashioned hierar-
chic or class-based formations improved. In such digital worlds, ideologically
‘recalcitrant’ groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood are no longer the way to
organize political opposition16. Obviously, this narrative is possible if firstly, the
Muslim brotherhood is not seen as a legitimate (modern) actor while certain
individuals (e.g. Google rep. Wael Ghonim, also the administrator of the much-
discussed Khaled Said Facebook group) were greatly admired; helping project-
ing a certain wishful thinking about the birth to non-ideological (secular)
generations via social media. This way Western liberal values are being injected
into what are predominantly local ideals and efforts.
This critique notwithstanding, the revolutions uprisings still raise crucial
questions about the role of communication technology in social movements,
such as how political agency is mediated in and through cyberspace. I don’t
share the overtly negative outlook as the initial outburst of the “Facebook
Revolution” commentary tended to but rather consider the internet as an addi-
tional segment that is tactically embedded in a broader political strategy. The
uprisings initially represented an ideological melange of progressive socialists,
liberal Islamists, capitalists, reactionary conservatives; including ‘ideological’
groups such as the active Revolutionary Socialists and huge Muslim
15
16 Philip Howard’s comment “In a digital world, older ideologically recalcitrant political par-
ties may not even be the most effective way to organize effective political opposition.” In
a commentary for Reuters, found at:<http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debate/2011/02/16/
digital-media-and-the-arab-spring/>.
Social Media, Mediation and the Arab Revolutions 503
6 Online-Offline Dialectics
The MENA region at large has the world’s highest internet penetration growth
rates (1600 per cent for 2001–2009) in terms of internet usage; particularly the
increase of social (user-generated) media in 2011 are indicative (asmr 2011).
But instead of isolating ‘the internet’, they are part of new synergies. This was
most clear in the way social networking and satellite broadcasters interacted
such as when Al Jazeera became a temporary megaphone for activists in
Tunisia and Egypt when it aired their YouTube content. According to well-
known blogger Hossam al-Hamalawi, the strength of the internet is seen
when mainstream media re-mediate activist sources or witness accounts.
Such was the case with live-feeds in January and February. Re-dissemination
from big or respected mediums added to the fame of these tools, which at the
same time reminds of the indirect mediation. After this a new paragraph. It is
important to distinguish what impact or effect we mean to address in poten-
tial scenarios where the internet might tip the scales of power. The internet
Social Media, Mediation and the Arab Revolutions 505
Space Space
Revolution Tool Tool
(Tipping Point)
Space Space
Post-Revolution Tool Tool
(Continuation & Escalation)
Space Space
real-time online updates in order to device the safest routes for marches or
locate the most risky one’s and avoid those. Kira Allmann (2012) shows the life
and death significance of a functioning mobile technology in her research
among activists in Cairo. And during the uprisings the internet was relevant
as a vehicle for building global solidarity. The internet also became a parallel
space for political identity formation: where people met other people who
relate to their opposition and shared information about protests, or dissemi-
nate messages that further ignited their anger and determination. In this
sense, social media platforms became more convenient online public spheres
for political deliberation.
Within the social networking spaces of the Shabaab 6 April (April-6 Youth)
and Kuluna Khaled Said (We are all Khaled Said) Facebook groups (the
English and the Arabic one), as well as high-profile individuals (Alaa Abdel
Fatta, 3arabawi, Sandmonkey) were important nodes. These were not only
meeting points for activists themselves, they were also the source of much of
the forwarded mobile text messages and emails, Tweets and Facebook posts,
and as such instrumental in mobilizing a section of the wired-youth. As we
have seen, in revolutionary moments repetition is important; so is agitation
(for a march towards Tahrir); and of course the consolidation of general
political analysis (the need to stay in Tahrir square); finally, the organization
Social Media, Mediation and the Arab Revolutions 507
of the acts themselves. These different engagements echo the inspiring ada-
gio Educate-Agitate-Organize: the trio-characteristic of revolutionary politi-
cal organising.
Those involved in these online realms are a selective segment of the protesters
– and we know that social movements are in themselves a small or selective
portion of society. In extraordinary times, the impact of these sub-scenes can
reach beyond their usual networks marking the digital-revolutionary differ-
ence. In revolutionary moments, when at a ‘tipping point’, emotional or cogni-
tive power is crucial. Without the innumerable video files provided via
Facebook and YouTube by ordinary people, the revolutions would not have
been documented (and therefore: experienced) with the same intensity.
Massive reporting by mainstream sources has political repercussions too, giv-
ing activists the confidence to advance their agendas, reassure people that
they are not alone and thus further influencing the judgements and choices of
activists.
The internet archives bravery and resolve, and these recorded events are in
due course valuable for other activists (Naguib 2011, 17). The most empowering
impact of the internet can be found in this juxtaposition.
During a fieldwork visit in August 2011 several activists recalled how they
experienced the revolutionary upheavals in the early days (January/February).
I was told several times that being cut off didn’t dismantle the revolt at all; that
the disruption of the mobile phone services was far more crucial for on the
ground politics. What I also learned was that the crucial tactics that finally led
to the occupation of Tahrir Square had little to do with Facebook, in fact: false
information was purposely posted to confuse the secret service. The fact that
the protests continued and increased despite the internet black-out is of mon-
umental importance. It turned out that for weeks, activists had met often in
cramped living rooms. Ironically, it is precisely because the organising was
done offline that it was rarely noted by the internet-obsessed reporters. While
the technology was absent the people, and their physical resistance, were very
present. Paradoxically, it reduced distraction and gave focus during the five-
day blackout. Websites like Facebook are not a social networks in and off them-
selves but social-networking-tools. All users, including – those outside the
virtual structures of the ‘nodes’ what Mejias (2011) called the para-nodal – were
the networks. Thus not the technological networks but the people were the
organizational backbone.
Lastly, the impact of agitation and education cannot be underestimated. The
uprising of Egypt was beamed to millions via the now world-famous Kuluna
Khaled Said Facebook groups, Twitter and YouTube. With the verbally-graphic
narratives of Sandmonkey I aim to offer a slice of the (start of the) revolution as
508
25th Jan Shower, Cargo pants, Hoodie, running shoes, 2nd Feb A lot of people talking on the street, saying
Morning phone charged, cash, ID, cigs (for jail) and some that this is good enough, & we shouldn’t forget
} ‘Bloody Wednesday.’ what Mubarak did for us. The irony baffles me.
{ mace just in case. Am ready! Regime taked revenge,
baltajia [thugs] on Camels and Horses used by Pro Mubarak protesters
25th Jan Huge demo going to tahrir#jan25 shit just got camels with whips, many to attack Anti-Mubarak protesters. This is
stay on and face the becoming literally a circus. Mubarak would
Midday real; Security tried to storm protestors. violence.
{ } Failed. Regrouping. rather burn down Egypt than leave it seems.
{ }
country-wide will be massive.
28th Jan { Massive,
demonstrations. {
‘Day of rage’.
Can they bring the 10th Feb We dunno if this is good news yet. If u
necessary numbers to the believe in god, its time to pray.
Announcement of an
streets? Kasr al-Nil important speech by
battle, many wounded I am going to tahrir. It started there and
Mubarak. Vague will end there tonite.
and killed, NDP HQ and promises; confusion
police stations burned amongst some. Mubarak is staying. The bastard is staying.
down. No Internet. Intensification of the
{ } revolution as workers
congregates, calls for
29th Jan My friend Rashid & I were wearing gas masks & gloves so strikes.
Internet-savvy activists like we grabbed cansisters & threw them away. I almost
fainted frm tear gas (cont.)
Sandmonkey find an
{ {
alternative point of access
when my friend tried 2 help me he got shot by rubber
by connecting via the stock bullets. Street war in action. On nuzha street with 200 people 11th Feb Please don’t think people will stop if the army
exchange server. protecting the streets from drive-by shooters. (cont.) joins sides w/the president. We are just hoping
the situation resolves without blood.
{ } Friday of Martyrs
It’s same all over Cairo. There’s no state at the moments
{ { This will be our greatest division yet. I hope
we’re governing ourselves. Ppl in neighborhoods wearing
white bands to identify each other. the people will remain united no matter what.
People jumping up and down. Everyone hugging. We
did it. I wanna cry from happiness.
{ {
510 Aouragh
it unfolded (Figure 15.2). This digital footprint, coming straight from the epicentre
of events, as documented in his own words on Twitter. The Twitter voices included
activists who were very prominent in the physical movements.19
There are nevertheless several caveats about the prospects of the inter-
net as a space or tool of activism. Firstly, the scale between hegemonic and
counter-hegemonic use is not balanced, as demonstrated in the section
about ict and imperialism. Another important prospect is that activists in
online social media spaces are operating in an online community that
increasingly mirrors their own. The implication of a digital world filtered
and dominated by the parasitical Facebook creates unrepresentative bub-
bles is a result of the fact that these platforms derived from corporate prem-
ises and thus marketing algorithms. This means that debating, sharing and
inviting those already largely on your side and actually not reaching out to
wider networks. Pariser (2011) remarked that with the rise of personaliza-
tion (e.g. Google and Facebook customizing search results) internet users
are sent down particular information tunnels and hence controlling-and
limiting-the information we consume based on the motivation to predict
what users are most likely to click, threatening the autonomy of how we
consume or share information. Finally, archiving is important in itself, but
with digital media this happens in real-time and en-masse, the downside
clearly being updates are quickly buried under millions of other updates.
Therefore, I argue that it is the very awareness of these techno-social power
fields, as outlined in this article that will become increasingly crucial. This
social capital has offline repercussions for activists – the difference between
being arrested or intercepted online.
7 Conclusion
Hence at the start of this chapter I referred to the relative importance of the
internet to help counter the difference between absolute and proportional rep-
resentation. One of the signs of the relative importance of ict was the particu-
lar empirical dynamic shared by activists in Cairo. There were interesting
divisions of labour between techno-savvy activists, crackers and hackers; those
able to communicate in different languages; those with well-established inter-
national networks; those who can reach large audiences (unions, football
17
18
18 Selections of Tweets were recited by Idle and Nunns (2011) in their joyful Tweets from
Tahrir.
19 Graph-design made with help of Kira Allmann, Oxford University.
Social Media, Mediation and the Arab Revolutions 511
clubs, and student groups). Activists very consciously use different tools for
different audiences. Two of the tents on Tahrir Square were manned by some
of the most techno-savvy protesters with their laptops, tapping power from
lamp posts while signs on the tent mark the point to gather videos and pic-
tures; mobile phone footage recorded during the blackout was collected and
posted online so as to be used by journalists. Activists who were not in Egypt
would follow tweets from within Egypt, translate and re-tweet to non-Arabic
speakers, and offer online critiques of misrepresentations.
I regard social media as disproportionate and parallel spaces because the
internet is valued less than where/when one can meet face-to-face, such as the
overlapping private-public places in the previous section signify. With regards
to discussions about the importance of democratic centralism, physical meet-
ings are better for political planning and organising and building trust; for con-
scripting personal sacrifice as the hundreds of martyrs testify. Another reason is
that offline protest sites often included those connected to mosques in densely
populated working-class neighbourhoods, and in university campuses.
The ultimate and recurring question for many of us is the following: would
this have happened without the internet? One of the answers is that it would
not have been exactly the same, i.e. we wouldn’t be able to retweet and for-
ward the amazing updates of people like Sandmonkey, or the YouTube foot-
age from the ground and in response to many such mediations assemble at
the Egyptian, Tunisian, Libyan embassies in protest of the complicity of our
western governments and in support and celebration with the people rising
up. And revolutionaries could not have countered many of the government
lies as they came out.
Another answer could be that, of course, the revolution would have hap-
pened because the main conditions were there anyway, maybe it would not
have been January but February or 80 days not 18 for Mubarak to be defeated.
But the real answer is that this is an illogical question to begin with, we need to
apply a historical materialist approach to the whole question. This is the stage
we are at in the production and development of technology and it is a medium
in the conditions we have not ourselves chosen.
That is why i discussed the internet as a tool of protest in the Arab revolutions
as part of larger political-economic landscape in which political activists oper-
ate; they allude to an (orientalist) framing and reflect the deeper ideological
meaning of the Marxist concept of mediation. I evoked the interplay between
technology and Marxist politics and invoked examples from Arab activists.
This multi-levelled investigation allows me to go beyond the dominant Euro-
American focus that prevails in (mainstream) internet studies. I argued, echoing
Rosa Luxemburg, that revolutionary change does not rely on spontaneous
512 Aouragh
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chapter 16
to change in the early 2000s when companies began to recognize the profit
potential in the new global information networks and governments deter-
mined that it would enable them to deepen traditional surveillance networks
and create entire new ones.
This tension between these competing approaches takes many forms
including, for example, policy disputes such as the emergence in 2013 of a con-
flict in the United States over network neutrality. Would the internet remain
based on the principle, admittedly breached more often than its supporters
would like, of equal access, or would the market and the need to deliver audi-
ences to advertisers skew its shape in favor of those eager to build shareholder
value (McChesney 2013)? Network neutrality attracted enormous interest with
the u.s. Federal Communications Commission deluged with a record number
of submissions attempting to sway decision-making on the issue. Important as
it is, the net neutrality debate is merely symptomatic of the much larger issue
of governing the digital world. Specifically, debates about this issue have grown
considerably in importance with the rise of new digital systems including
cloud computing, big data analytics, and the internet of things. Since the latter
is less well developed than the first two, the chapter will address the cloud and
big data and briefly return to the internet of things in the conclusion.
2 Cloud Computing
Even though it is still young, in a pattern consistent with one Marx identified
time and time again, the cloud computing industry is increasingly character-
ized by the concentration of power in a handful of companies and their allies
in the surveillance state. The dominant company is Amazon Web Services, a
subsidiary of the global online retailer. aws uses its dominant position in
online sales to undercut the competition in pricing cloud services. It has been
so successful in this practice of predatory pricing, one that dominant companies
Marx In The Cloud 519
have used since the beginnings of capitalism, that smaller companies have
either been driven out of the marketplace or forced to concentrate on narrow
niche positions. Remaining industry leaders include Google, Microsoft, Apple
and Facebook, old powers in the computer industry such ibm, Cisco, and h-p,
which are scurrying to shift from their traditional practices of supplying corpo-
rate it departments to leading them into the cloud, and companies like
Rackspace and Salesforce that came of age with cloud computing (Mosco 2014,
48–66).
In addition to using its success in the online world to build a dominant posi-
tion in the cloud, Amazon demonstrates another well-worn tendency identi-
fied by Marx: the ability to use its political influence for economic advantage.
aws provided cloud and big data services to the Obama campaign organiza-
tion in 2012 and its success in identifying and delivering voters to the Obama
forces with the same success that it delivers online users to advertisers, is
widely considered one of the most important reasons for the President’s re-
election (Cohen 2012; Hoover 2012). In a pivotal decision that some suggest was
a reward for its campaign success, Amazon was awarded a $600 million con-
tract to provide cloud and big data services to the cia. Whatever the reasons
for the award, which ibm formally challenged unsuccessfully, it brought
together leaders in digital capitalism and the surveillance state to create a mar-
riage that would certainly benefit both parties, but it also created a dangerous
direct connection between anti-democratic forces in the United States. To fur-
ther the role of the surveillance state in the cloud computing power structure,
the National Security Agency is building one of the world’s largest cloud com-
puting facilities deep in a Utah mountain (Bamford 2012).
The us dominates cloud computing but China is rapidly developing its own
industry with strong government support that extends to including the cloud
in its latest five-year development plan. Government and business, with the
investment of some us firms like ibm, have joined to develop entire cloud cit-
ies that feature data centers, research and development facilities, corporate
offices, training facilities as well as the housing, shops and infrastructure that
make up cities of all types. The company Alibaba is a leader in China’s cloud
industry and, along with Baidu, Tencent and a handful of other firms, makes
use of government protection against foreign competition to rise in the global
ranks. In 2014 Alibaba made its debut in the United States by launching the
most lucrative ipo in history (Hardy 2014). Although it controls only three per-
cent of the global cloud industry marketplace, China’s firms are growing and
represent threats to the global political economy that would not surprise Marx.
Moreover, Alibaba is the leading online source of materials essential to pro-
duce fissionable material, a clear threat to global stability. Finally, China’s data
520 MOSCO
centers are subject to rules set by its authoritarian government which raises
questions about what will happen when more of the world’s digital informa-
tion is stored and processed in that country (Clover 2014).
Just as ruthless competition reduces the likelihood that cloud companies will
improve their environmental record without improvements in their bottom
line, it also reduces the probability that companies will moderate their surveil-
lance practices. On one level, the business model of a cloud computing com-
pany involves storing and processing data for individual and organizational
customers who pay for on-demand access to their data and to services, such as
managing and providing insights into sales records based on big data analytics.
But, as Marx explained, companies need to maximize profit by making use of
Marx In The Cloud 521
all available resources. Today, that means engaging in what some might see as
questionable surveillance practices such as those that lead Google to read cus-
tomer email to refine the advertising directed at them or Facebook to manipu-
late the newsfeed of users to increase the amount of time people spend with
the social media site and to improve directed advertising. It is hard to imagine
that Marx would be surprised to learn that Facebook has directed “bucket list”
ads to people who share a cancer diagnosis on the site. Relentless invasion of
privacy and deepening surveillance are essential elements of the basic busi-
ness plans of cloud companies who profit by making the fullest possible use of
the data stored in their servers to package and deliver valuable information on
user identities to their paying clients. Since most legal constraints are minimal,
the only significant way around these practices is to avoid using the cloud or to
pay for extra security through the use of customized “private” cloud services
(Mosco 2014, 137–155).
Similarly, it is fundamental to the missions of state agencies like the nsa,
the cia, and their counterparts throughout the world that they gather,
store, process, and use as much information as possible about online users.
Teaming with Amazon helps the cia to deepen and extend its digital spy
operations as do the accelerated expansion of the nsa’s facilities and the
continuing cooperation of the major cloud and social media firms in their
activities. The military-information complex is strong and growing and the
implications for personal and organizational privacy are profound.
Nevertheless, while the revelations of Edward Snowden, Glenn Greenwald,
and others have prompted some minor reforms, most media attention is
directed at privacy and surveillance violations that emerge from the actions
of criminal hackers who regularly demonstrate the relative ease with which
they can break through the security that cloud companies allege protects
the security of customer data. There is no denying the significance of the
September 2014 attacks on ten financial institutions that affected 83 million
consumer and business customers at JP Morgan Chase alone (Goldstein,
Perlroth, and Sanger 2014). The regularity of such attacks, most of which are
not reported by companies fearful of tarnishing their brand, demonstrates
the porous nature of the cloud. Nevertheless, concentrating attention on
these criminal acts alone detracts attention from the surveillance at the
heart of the everyday business plans of cloud computing companies and
the mission of government agencies. Eliminating or even dampening legal
surveillance would diminish the profits of cloud companies and their busi-
ness customers, as well as limit the ability of governments to gather data on
everyone.
522 MOSCO
Cloud computing and big data pose threats to professional labour in it and
across the knowledge occupations. In fact, one expert consultant prefers to
define cloud computing as “nothing more than the next step in outsourcing
your it operations” (McKendrick 2013). This is in keeping with a general ten-
dency which one researcher for the major consulting firm Gartner Associates
summarizes succinctly: “The long run value proposition of it is not to support
the human workforce – it is to replace it” (Dignan 2011a). This view remark-
ably echoes one that Marx himself and more contemporary neo-Marxists like
Harry Braverman presented, to the effect that capitalism is driven to replace
living labour with dead labor, that is, to replace the human workforce with
machinery.
Cloud computing and big data analytics can advance this process in several
ways. They create immediate opportunities for companies to rationalize their
information technology operations. Again, from Gartner, “cios believe that
their data centers, servers, desktop and business applications are grossly inef-
ficient and must be rationalized over the next ten years. We believe that the
people associated with these inefficient assets will also be rationalized in sig-
nificant numbers along the way” (Dignan 2011a). Cloud computing companies
maintain that their systems can break a pattern in business organization that
began when the first large computers entered the workplace. Every business or
government agency believed it was essential to operate their own it depart-
ment and, for the larger organizations, their own data centers. With the cloud,
companies can move their it and related business processes out of the organi-
zation. Why, they insist, is it necessary to build and operate thousands of orga-
nization-specific facilities when a few large data centers can meet the demand
at lower costs with fewer professional personnel? This process has already
begun and early studies demonstrate that even with limited downsizing of it
departments, organizations are saving between fifteen and twenty percent of
their it budgets (Howlett 2014).
The cloud also makes possible the widespread rationalization of all knowl-
edge and creative labour because the work of these occupations increasingly
involves the production, processing, and distribution of information. According
to one observer, “In the next 40 years analytics systems will replace much of
what the knowledge worker does today” (Dignan 2011b). A 2013 report con-
cluded that 47 percent of the current u.s. workforce is directly threatened
(Frey and Osborne 2013). The timing of this forecast may or may not be accu-
rate but there is no doubt that the current trend is to move increasing amounts
Marx In The Cloud 523
of the work that knowledge workers perform to the cloud, specifically through
intelligent software systems. One study estimates the potential impact of this
move by 2025 will total $5.2 to $6.7 trillion with additional labour productivity
the equivalent of 110 million to 140 million knowledge workers (Manyika 2013,
40). Key applications include “smart learning in education,” pioneered today in
moocs (Massive Open Online Courses) and blended learning systems that
include automated and classroom learning. Analytical systems in the cloud are
also becoming prominent in health care, the law, accounting, finance, sales
and the media. Thanks to the cloud, organizations in the private and public
sectors are encouraged to outsource all but their core business processes to
companies like Salesforce.com which specializes in managing the vast data-
bases of customer information, a function that traditional marketing and cli-
ent service departments within organizations once performed. The expansion
of outsourcing to the cloud raises serious questions for the entire global system
of shifting work outside the corporation or government agency. According to
Gartner, “That outcome will hit all economies – especially emerging ones like
India that now dominate technology outsourcing.”
Cloud computing and big data also expand the range of potential outsourc-
ing practices. It may not be the case that, as Forbes magazine declares, “We are
all outsourcers now, thanks to Cloud,” but it certainly makes feasible more
kinds of outsourcing: “Outsourcing is no longer simply defined by multi-mil-
lion-dollar mega-deals in which it department operations are turned over to a
third party. Rather, bits and pieces of a lot of smaller things are gradually being
turned over to outside entities” (McKendrick 2014). Amazon is a leading force
in this process with its Mechanical Turk service that charges individuals and
organizations to outsource small tasks to an online army of piece workers. In
essence, the cloud and big data make possible the expansion of labour com-
modification throughout the world.
They also make possible greater control over the workplace by expanding
opportunities for surveillance and for the analysis of large data sets that facili-
tate rapid redeployment of workers to meet corporate needs. According to one
leading business publication, “As Big Data becomes a fixture of office life, com-
panies are turning to tracking devices to gather real-time information on how
teams of employees work and interact. Sensors, worn on lanyards or placed on
office furniture, record how often staffers get up from their desks, consult other
teams and hold meetings” (Silverman 2013). Once again, as Simon Head notes,
Amazon is a leader: “Amazon equals Walmart in the use of monitoring tech-
nologies to track the minute-by-minute movements and performance of
employees and in settings that go beyond the assembly line to include their
movement between loading and unloading docks, between packing and
524 MOSCO
unpacking stations, and to and from the miles of shelving at what Amazon
calls its ‘fulfillment centers’ …” (Head 2014). Big data analytics enable compa-
nies to do more than just keep an eye on everything workers do. It provides
new opportunities to actually make use of the data gathered in the course of
monitoring the shop floor and the office. For example, Starbucks uses the data
it gathers on customer flows through its stores to schedule worker shifts on
short notice. This creates havoc for many workers, particularly those whose
lives are tightly scheduled with child care, classes, and other jobs that make
responding to constantly changing work times very difficult. Low-income
workers are especially hard hit by a process that forces them to operate as flex-
ible machines capable of responding to whatever logistical demands the com-
panies that carry out big data analysis require.
7 Digital Positivism
The growing reliance on the cloud and especially on big data analytics raises a
significant epistemological issue. One can observe a narrowing of what consti-
tutes legitimate knowledge to the results of correlational methods applied to
quantitative data. Big data is increasingly the model for examining not only
scientific evidence but social science and humanities evidence as well. Big
data enthusiasts take this to a striking, if not startling, extreme: “This is a world
where massive amounts of data and applied mathematics replace every other
tool that might be brought to bear. Out with every theory of human behavior,
from linguistics to sociology. Forget taxonomy, ontology, and psychology. Who
knows why people do what they do? The point is they do it, and we can track
and measure it with unprecedented fidelity. With enough data, the numbers
speak for themselves” (Anderson 2008). This view, and even considerably less
strident perspectives on big data, embody a digital positivism that singularly
valorizes one way of knowing above all others. It questions knowledge gath-
ered through qualitative research that, for example, through in-depth inter-
views and close observation, seeks to understand subjective experience and
intersubjectivity. It also devalues research grounded in historical, theoretical
and disciplinary understandings of a field. If indeed the numbers speak for
themselves then there is little need for these or for anything resembling the
kind of thinking that has guided social science and humanities research for
centuries. It is an approach congenial with capitalism because there is a close
relationship between the quantification of everything, including the self, and
the commodification of all things. As devices like the iWatch proliferate and
make it possible to gather detailed quantitative data on each and every user, it
Marx In The Cloud 525
is easier for Apple and its clients to profit from its sale. In this case the quanti-
fication of health states advances the commodification of the self.
There is no denying the methodological value of research based on the
quantitative analysis of large data sets. But its usefulness does not justify
sequestering other forms of research to lesser status. This is especially impor-
tant because there is mounting evidence that big data can create big prob-
lems. In some cases, big data research produces remarkable results, as when
Google succeeded in forecasting 2012 flu outbreaks across the United States
by correlating search terms for flu symptoms with the incidence of flu. In
beating the Centers for Disease Control with the speed and accuracy of its
forecast, Google believed that it had the best predictive tool, that is, until
2013 when its model proved remarkably unreliable. It turns out that when
the numbers speak, they often do so unreliably. It is also tempting for com-
panies, most notably Facebook, to manipulate their very large data sets if
such actions might boost ad revenue. Large data sets can also hide many
errors that are not likely to be detected without time-consuming careful
scrutiny. For example, if it were not for a hard-working PhD student, the
critical errors in a paper that used large data sets to justify national economic
austerity policies would not have been discovered. These and other examples
document the problems associated with using big data analytics exclusively
and the related difficulties of drawing conclusions based on correlations
without taking into account theory, history, human subjectivity, and causal-
ity (Mosco 2014, 175–226).
The importance of the cloud and big data for business and the state helps to
explain why they are being promoted so vigorously. So too do the significant
problems. Cloud promoters are using every available outlet and opportunity to
convince individuals and businesses to move to the cloud. Advertising, social
media, corporate and government reports, as well as lobbying and trade fairs
are all used to demonstrate why the cloud and big data are essential. Promoters
either ignore the problems or use this massive promotional space to downplay
their significance. Whereas advertising gives promoters the opportunity to
shout the message in a blunt and direct fashion; more legitimate sources, like
the global public-private partnership of the World Economic Forum make it
more subtle, as when the wef concluded in a report on the cloud that experts
believe “our society must move past the fear of data and privacy breaches”
(World Economic Forum 2012, 99).
526 MOSCO
Cloud computing and big data are vital for building and managing the global
supply chains necessary to sustain the complex networks of transnational
capital. There are enormous risks for business and the state in relying on these
networks in a turbulent world. Private think tanks like Frost & Sullivan make
it clear that the surveillance and analytic capabilities of the cloud and big
data are essential for managing potentially disastrous risks to the many global
chains of accumulation (Frost & Sullivan 2012). But neither promotion nor
risk management can stop the chains of resistance that are also growing
worldwide.
Where are the signs of resistance? First, supply chain disruptions make it
more difficult to deploy cloud systems around the world and organized resis-
tance from workers may alter the potential to profit from the cloud. The labour
force in China, the base of global electronics supply chains, has grown restive
in recent years, prompting tighter workplace controls and a redeployment of
electronics manufacturing sites. It is unlikely these measures will do anything
more than delay the inevitable choice between substantially raising the living
standards, including the wages, working conditions and political freedom of
China’s workforce, or face escalating mass civil unrest. One can deploy suicide
prevention curtains for just so long. The acknowledgment of unrest in China’s
once-placid factories has reached the mainstream Western press where an
account in Time magazine offered this startling set of observations: “‘The way
the rich get money is through exploiting the workers’, says Guan Guohau,
another Shenzhen factory employee. ‘Communism is what we are looking for-
ward to’. Unless the government takes greater action to improve their welfare,
they say, laborers will become more and more willing to take action them-
selves” (Schuman 2013). But this is no more startling than the kinds of protests
that China’s workers are mounting. In order to build data centers, the country
will have to expand it electricity grid and this is especially disruptive in urban
areas such as Wuhan where in the summer of 2014 people protested the devel-
opment of new electrical substations. They did so by slowly parading their cars
through the affected areas with clearly visible signs noting a naked inflatable
doll of a female figure strapped to the back of one of them. The signs read: “we
are giving you this inflatable doll so you don’t have to rape our will” (Personal
correspondence and photograph from a friend in Wuhan). Resistance in China
is matched by similar upheavals in India where expected prosperity from the
development of an information industry has stalled. As a result, the labour
movement has grown with worker organizations like the New Trade Union
Initiative building strong coalitions (Stevens 2014).
Marx In The Cloud 527
It is not only the base of the global supply chains created by major cloud
companies that can create disruptions. Chains of resistance can also form in
the advanced nations of the West where the labour process is certainly more
humane than in Chinese electronic assembly plants, but very far from what
applies in the headquarters of these companies. One hot spot for labour ten-
sions is Germany where Amazon has established eight distribution centers
employing 8,000 workers. Germany is important for the company because it
is the source of 14 percent of its revenues (Wingfield and Eddy 2013). The
country has not received a great deal of attention in struggles over global sup-
ply chains, but it has a long history of battles with Walmart which abandoned
Germany in 2006 rather than bend its worldwide labour standards to meet
the expectations of German workers and especially their union Ver.di which
represents over two million employees in the service sector. German workers
and their unions have considerably greater power than their counterparts in
the United States and the uk. Mobilizing workers across the country, Ver.di’s
actions succeeded in ending Walmart’s presence in the country. In 2013 a new
battle erupted over Amazon which, in the view of German workers, is
attempting to impose “American-style management” by relying on ruthless
labour practices such as hiring thousands of low-wage and mainly foreign
temporary workers and the security police necessary to maintain control.
This has enabled the company to cut prices and drive out competition,
including one German firm. According to a union leader, Amazon applies
rigid controls to its workforce: “Everything is measured, everything is calcu-
lated, everything is geared toward efficiency. People want to be treated with
respect” (Ewing 2013). The company denies these claims, arguing that it hires
foreign temps because there are not enough local workers. But the online
giant, now the largest cloud computing company in the United States, faced
embarrassment when it had to fire a security firm hired to police one of its
plants because some of the firm’s employees, dressed in outfits associated
with neo-Nazi groups, roughed up people trying to film activity outside the
plant. The company maintains that it could not possibly know the back-
grounds of all those it hires and insists that, while it refuses to negotiate with
the union, it does pay workers well.
What will happen in this key node of Amazon’s global supply chain is uncer-
tain. Workers mount regular protests using mass mobilization, guerilla theater,
and online global petition drives (37,000 signatures received by March 2013).
But Amazon has refused to back down. In May 2013, workers at the giant
Amazon distribution center in Leipzig walked off the job, marking the first
reported strike at an Amazon facility (Wilson and Jopson 2013). The story con-
tinues to unfold with Ver.di leading another strike against the company in 2014.
528 MOSCO
It is not only in the material workplace that Amazon labour is restive. The
company operates a global system of piecework in the cloud that critics have
called a “digital sweatshop” (Cushing 2013). The Amazon Mechanical Turk
(amt) employs a large body of “crowdsourced” workers, which Amazon calls
Providers (also known as Turkers), who carry out minute tasks online for
Requesters who pay piece rates for writing descriptions of products, identify-
ing individuals in images, or just producing spam (a 2010 study by nyu
researchers determined that spam constitutes as much as 40 percent of the
jobs) (Ipeirotis 2013). The system was originally set up by Amazon to carry out
work that could be done online but required some human involvement. The
typical job was sorting merchandise into categories based on color or style for
the company’s massive online warehouse. It was so successful that Amazon
decided to become a job broker for corporations needing people to do things
like look up foreign zip codes or transcribe podcasts.
For managing the service, Amazon receives 10 percent of the value of a com-
pleted job or, as it is called, a Human Intelligence Task (hit). Although Turkers
include professionals, the vast majority are semi-skilled workers who provide
their credentials to Requesters, and, once cleared, choose among posted tasks.
Workers in the United States are paid in cash but many foreign workers are
primarily given the option to accept gift certificates. Exact figures are hard to
pin down, but it is estimated that the industry employs over 200,000 workers,
and by 2011 was earning about $375 million annually (Cushing 2013). There is
also growing evidence that workers are less than happy with the system. It did
not take long for them to realize, as one put it, “They make it sound like you can
just do a few tasks in your free time in between other things, but if you worked
like that, I believe you would make about a dollar a day” (Cushing 2013).
Because companies have an enormous workforce to draw from, they can pay
the lowest possible rates, a dollar or two an hour is not unusual, and demand
swift and accurate completion of jobs. Workers who mess up a job are dropped
or banned from applying again. In January 2013 Amazon stopped accepting
new applications from international Turkers because of what the company
concluded were unacceptable levels of fraud and poor worker performance.
Since international workers are more likely to accept the low pay and constant
demands, Requesters have begun to set up their own Turk operations.
Upset about the system, Turkers use their online world to vet Requesters
and contact other Turkers. The result is Turkopticon, a piece of software that
adds functionality to sites that post hits by adding ratings, reviews of employ-
ers, and advice to exploited Turkers (http://turkopticon.differenceengines
.com/). According to one scientist who has worked on amt 28,000 times,
“There’s no sick leave, paid holidays, anything like that on Turk. There is no
Marx In The Cloud 529
arbitration, no appeal if you feel that you have been unfairly treated, apart
from a stinging review on Turkopticon” (Hodson 2013). Furthermore, worker
complaints, fraud, and a host of negative consequences resulting from amt’s
sweatshop in the cloud have encouraged other firms to set up somewhat more
hospitable operations. For example, the firm MobileWorks pays the minimum
wage in effect in the country where the work is being done, assigns each worker
a manager whose job it is to deal with problems, and provides opportunities
for worker mobility (Hodson 2013). It is uncertain whether the emergence of
more worker friendly companies will restore some of the credibility to online
piecework. Much will depend on whether big companies like Amazon respond
to resistance by reforming the labour process in the cloud.
Worker organizations, especially trade unions, are not often discussed
alongside cloud computing. Only a handful of cloud providers, mainly the
older computer and telecommunications firms such as ibm and Verizon, have
to deal with organized labor. But as we have seen in the case of Apple’s experi-
ence with Foxconn in China and Amazon in Germany, cloud companies, as
they become inextricably bound to global supply chains, face the resistance
of organized labor. These are examples of a process at work in the broadly
defined knowledge and cultural industries that brings together workers across
what were once discrete sectors. As a result, unions that once represented
only telecommunications workers, now include creative and technical talent
in the audio-visual, writing, service, and technology sectors. The Communication
Workers of America and its counterpart in Canada, which in 2013 merged its
communications and power workers union with the union representing auto
workers to form Unifor, are good examples of worker organizations that have
followed the path of technological convergence in its organizing efforts. The
2012 merger of the Screen Actors Guild and the American Federation of
Television and Radio Artists brings together the major Hollywood unions for
the first time to face off more effectively against the increasingly integrated
Hollywood media industry. Moreover, individual unions are not only expand-
ing across the converging communication and information industries, they
are forming large transnational organizations like Ver.di and uni Global
Union. These transnational unions are better equipped to deal with powerful
multinational companies because they have enormous membership and
because they are well funded. Furthermore, the scope of their membership
enables them to better represent the convergences in both the labour process
and the working conditions among information, cultural, and service work-
ers. It also makes it possible to build bridges across the divide separating
workers at different spatial and occupational points in the global division of
labor.
530 MOSCO
Ver.di was founded in 2001 and by 2013 reached 2.3 million members, pri-
marily in Germany but in other parts of the world as well. It represents workers
in thirteen sectors, all of which are increasingly affected by the rollout of cloud
computing including financial services, health and social services, education,
science and research, media and culture, telecommunications, information
technology, and data processing, postal, transport and commerce services. Its
members work in government and business at almost every level of occupa-
tional skill and function. Not only can the union mobilize a large and diverse
workforce, it can also draw on the specialized talents of its members who help
the union to tighten and secure its internal communication and carry out gue-
rilla theater protests that attract widespread media attention. uni Global
Union was created in 2000 when three international worker federations in the
information, media, and service sectors came together to form a genuinely
global federation of knowledge workers. Today, it gives voice to 20 million
workers in 150 countries through 900 affiliated unions in a broad range of fields
including information technology and services, media, entertainment and the
arts, gaming and sport, finance, commerce and security, as well as the growing
numbers of workers who toil for temporary employment agencies. Among its
major activities is negotiating global agreements with transnational compa-
nies to address important issues such as child labor, discrimination, and the
right to organize local unions. By early 2013 it had completed 48 such agree-
ments with a wide range of companies, including a number in the communi-
cation and information technology sector. In 2014 it set its sights on negotiating
fresh agreements with major transnational firms including ibm and Disney.
Ver.di and uni are not alone among converging unions and international
labour federations that are having an impact on global supply chains, includ-
ing those central to the growth of cloud computing. But it is uncertain whether
this development is the harbinger of a significant upsurge in global labour
activism or a defensive posture that can at best slow down the inevitable
decline and demise of organized labor. That depends, in part, on how one
defines organized labour because another important trend is the growth of
labour organizations that are not formal trade unions. These worker associa-
tions resemble unions but, either out of choice or necessity, remain outside the
legal and political structures that govern the operation of trade unions. They
operate all over the world and research has documented their importance in
China, India, Europe, and the United States (Mosco, McKercher, and Huws
2010). They are especially active in the information, communication and
cultural sectors where worker associations have represented employees in
occupations ranging from call centers to software engineering. Worker associa-
tions have won major victories for contract employees at Microsoft and for
Marx In The Cloud 531
The cloud and big data are important forces for global capitalism and for the
surveillance state. But their shortcomings and the social problems they create
are also significant. Building and maintaining global chains of accumulation in
the cloud is not easy and certainly far from inherently stable (Huws 2014). The
resistance from social movement and labour organizations adds stress to the
tenuous nature of global networks. But it is far from clear what the challenges
amount to beyond the inevitability of chronic disruptions. They certainly do not
532 MOSCO
the internet to deepen their control over citizens within and outside their bor-
ders. The information revolution has met its counter-revolution. Nevertheless,
the lessons from the ideas and experiences with genuinely public networks,
including their successes and failures, live on and can provide building blocks
for creating genuine alternatives that can help to envision and build a new
General Intellect for the digital world.
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Index
abstraction 173, 174, 178, 223, 224, 238, 241, Apple’s Contract Manufacturers 66, 350,
250–252, 289, 291, 292–294, 417, 351, 360, 363, 370, 376, 379, 380, 382, 383,
425–426 389
abstract labour 85, 239–241, 243, 249–251, production line 371, 377, 379
253, 425 products 351, 369, 381, 389
academic field 69, 70, 71, 74 Profits 354, 372, 384
acceleration 151, 153–155, 157, 159, 161–163, response to labour right violations 351,
165, 167–169, 171, 173 382
capital’s logic of 151, 153, 154, 167, sec-Filings 354, 355, 386, 392
169, 174 supplier factories 366, 367, 369, 371, 377,
Accenture 151, 174, 176 379, 385
accumulation 57, 58, 106–108, 110–111, 113, Supplier Responsibility Reports 384–387
114, 116, 128, 243, 244, 300, 527, 532 Arab revolutions 482, 483, 485–491, 493,
original/primitive 105, 106, 114 501–503, 511, 512–15
accumulation by dispossession 105, 110–114, artefacts 20, 47, 448, 449, 453, 456, 457, 460,
116, 117, 120, 121, 123, 128 466, 471–473, 476, 477
action research 452–453 audience alienation 18, 185
participatory 449, 452, 478, 481 audience commodification 12, 13, 18, 48, 123
activists 5, 121, 482, 483, 492, 501, 503–508, audience commodity x, 11, 38, 61, 85, 90, 102,
510, 511, 513 178, 181, 312, 313, 315, 316, 457, 458
activities, productive 83, 218, 240, 450 audience commodity debate 255, 284,
Adorno, Theodor W. 24, 30, 31, 43, 60, 71, 295
180, 185, 200, 254, 263, 281, 285, 286, audience labour 44, 48, 54, 85, 124, 180, 182,
424, 441 185, 192, 193, 201
advertisers 54, 84, 123, 124, 126, 127, 181, 182, audiences 84, 123, 124, 180–186, 193, 194, 197,
198, 199, 285, 291, 292, 337, 458 199, 282, 283, 285–288, 290–93
advertising spaces 45, 48, 52, 53, 86, 272 audience work 180, 195–197, 199
agency workers 369, 370 Autonomedia 65, 100, 101, 312, 313, 321
alienation 19, 47, 81, 183–187, 195–197, 199, Autonomist Marxism 25, 28, 41, 450, 451
231, 252, 396, 404, 405, 407, 408 autonomists 449, 451, 452, 459–462,
digital 19, 405, 406 465–468, 471, 474–476
political 404, 406
alienation of labour 404, 406 base and superstructure 72, 74, 77, 255, 256,
Alternative Social Media 413, 415, 417, 419, 484, 486, 505, 515
421, 423, 425, 427, 429, 431, 433, 435, 437, being watched, the work of 38, 39, 60
439, 441 Bettig, Ronald 94, 95, 98, 100, 259, 271, 272,
Amazon 56, 194, 334, 409, 520–522, 524–525, 274, 300, 301, 311
528–530, 535 big data 20, 139, 171, 177, 306, 518, 519,
Andrejevic, Mark 25, 30, 39, 43, 44, 60, 83, 523–527, 532, 535
84, 86, 100, 196, 197, 200, 287, 410 big data analytics 518, 519, 521, 523, 525, 526,
antagonisms 23, 29, 34, 37, 96, 228, 254, 255, 532
280 biopolitics ix, 462
Apple 151, 351, 353, 354, 356, 367, 372, 381, Boltanski, Luc 200, 210, 211, 213, 229, 231
382, 384–391 Boltanski, Luc and Eve Chiapello 18, 184,
Apple Pay 151, 152, 166, 174, 177 210–212, 267
538 Index
computing 20, 413, 445, 518–521, 523, 530, communicative capitalism 37, 295, 312
531, 534, 535 communism 2, 4, 6, 16, 17, 32, 36, 41–43, 55,
computing companies 521–523 56, 57, 67, 96, 527
Cognitive Capitalism 103, 317, 318, 515 companies 45, 51, 52, 54, 125, 189, 198, 336,
Collected Works 102, 315, 316 352, 353, 355, 426, 519–526, 528, 529,
commodification 13, 38, 57, 236, 237, 258, 533
261, 262, 264, 273, 282, 299, 300, 302, 303 profitable 354, 355, 372, 373
seeping 236, 295, 303, 304, 307, 309 conceptualisations 234, 238, 252, 282, 297
commodification of labour 184, 185, 261 conflicts 144–146, 249, 254–256, 265, 306,
commodification processes 129, 234, 237, 307, 337, 338, 416, 417, 500
239, 263, 281, 298, 303, 431 consciousness, false 10, 11, 41, 422,
commodify 196, 285, 307, 309 423, 429
commodities 37–39, 51, 52, 54, 92, 163–65, consumer and producer 401, 411, 417
241, 245–249, 251–256, 263–264, 289 consumers 11, 12, 51, 52, 116, 139, 140, 144, 154,
new 236, 357 155, 171, 172, 175, 434, 487
produced 106, 213, 389 consumption 9, 11, 13, 49, 125, 126, 168–170,
commodity-capital 157, 163, 165, 170, 173 181, 182, 197, 198, 218, 219, 406
commodity/commodification 6, 36, 37 consumption capacity 167, 168, 170, 172
commodity exchange 241, 272, 277, 332, 336, contracts 277, 296, 359, 361, 369, 371, 427,
424, 425, 427–432, 439, 440 428, 431, 432, 440, 445, 520, 532
commodity fetishism 18, 58, 221, 235, 239, convergence 13, 152, 154, 155, 170, 331, 343,
241, 242, 252–255, 289, 294, 311, 425 530
commodity form 8, 11, 12, 80, 141, 163, 173, copyleft 311, 416, 436, 437, 438, 440, 441, 444,
234, 235, 239–241, 249, 250, 252–254, 446
256, 257, 259–263, 293, 318, 457 copyleft products 436, 437
commodity production 8, 11, 238, 243, 259, co-research 451–453, 459, 460, 462, 474
308, 352, 424, 425, 430, 441 credit 1, 18, 85, 144, 152, 153, 159, 162, 165–168,
commonalities 5, 6, 30, 31 173, 174, 295
common character 40, 41, 43 credit card companies 151, 152
commoners 244, 311, 445 crises 1, 2, 4, 22, 24, 59, 62, 107, 108, 110, 113,
commons 36, 40, 41, 43, 84, 86, 89, 109, 111, 144, 312, 313, 321
129, 131, 299, 300, 469, 470 systemic 106, 107, 114
communication, political economy of 66, Critical concepts in media and cultural
67, 236, 239, 261, 264, 266, 267, 281–284, studies 25, 60, 66, 67
295, 316, 317 Critical Cyberculture Studies 17, 22, 25, 26,
communication content 190, 191 33–35, 57, 59, 63, 66
communication media 76, 154, 170, 281 Critical Information Systems Research 32,
Communication power 130, 207, 208, 231, 514 33, 59, 61
communication processes 18, 156, 236, 302, Critical Internet Studies 17, 22, 26, 32–35, 37,
309, 491 38, 42, 43, 55, 57–59
communication research 6, 105, 123, 128, Critical Media Studies 29, 30, 60, 177
129, 281, 305 Critical Political Economy xi, 16, 25, 27, 30,
communication studies xi, 5–7, 13, 14, 18, 20, 33, 57, 58, 102, 260, 266
60, 180, 181, 271, 283, 312, 318 Critical Theories of Social Media 20,
critical 1, 5, 202, 239, 255, 259, 282, 284 21, 39
communication systems 105, 119, 120, 128, critical theory 24–26, 30, 32, 33, 63, 64, 67,
129, 236, 275 281, 284, 310, 447, 449, 496
communication technologies 8, 29, 39, critique of political economy xi, 102, 131,
103, 108, 112, 119, 126–129, 169, 326, 149, 178, 232, 233, 239, 244, 282, 283, 286,
350, 391 289, 315, 436, 444
540 Index
cultural imperialism 11, 12, 19, 70, 265, 276, domination 28, 29, 31–33, 57, 59, 248, 325,
280, 302, 322, 325, 326, 328, 346 326, 327, 343, 409, 410, 431
cultural studies 24, 25, 33, 34, 60, 63, 64, 66, critique of 33, 35
67, 70, 101, 102, 180, 201, 202 Dyer-Witheford, Nick 23, 25, 28, 39, 43, 61,
culture, free 68, 91, 95, 96, 98, 102, 445 74, 99, 101, 266, 271, 273, 308, 312, 350
Curran, James 71–73, 77, 101, 275, 312
Cybercultures 60, 66, 67, 148, 319 economic exploitation 37, 115
Cyberculture Studies 25, 26, 57, 66 economic foundation 417, 435–437
cyberspace 25, 26, 29, 30, 34, 38, 40, 136, 138, economy, gift 91, 92
301, 302, 331, 332, 344, 345 education commons 79, 89
Ekman 106, 108, 110, 112, 114–118, 120–124, 130
data Empire 61, 63, 219, 220, 223, 227, 232, 314,
cloud and big 518, 519, 524, 526, 527, 532 346, 347, 349, 448, 479, 480, 515
digital 161–163, 170, 172, 173, 175 enclosures 78, 94, 95, 109, 244, 275, 299, 300
David 60, 63, 65, 66, 101, 102, 131, 176, 177, 202, Engels, Frederick 7, 42, 43, 55, 56, 72, 102,
311, 314, 346, 393, 444 238–241, 246, 248, 289, 315, 316, 362,
de-alienation 184, 185, 187, 188, 195, 196, 198, 404, 422, 423, 444
200 environments 39, 87, 363, 365, 376, 382, 447,
demographic information 189, 190 449, 462, 473, 474, 521
designers 332, 333, 336, 350, 351, 391 equality 4, 42, 245, 251, 277, 427, 428, 431,
development 432
modes of 221, 222, 487 ethics 15, 16, 189, 190, 441, 443
technological 248, 396, 488, 489 evolution 154, 155, 167, 168, 174, 175, 412, 460,
dialectics 15, 17, 36, 186, 192, 193, 233, 238, 470
264, 267, 268, 483, 485, 505, 506 exchange 155, 160, 164, 172, 174, 238, 241, 243,
Diaspora 19, 88, 410, 413–418, 433–442 245–250, 257, 425–428, 496
digital capitalism 4, 17, 20, 37, 68, 88, 150, exchange process 240, 241, 250, 251, 261, 426
176, 301, 319, 331, 519, 520, 532, 533 exchange relations 244, 246, 249, 261, 289
digital commons 17, 68, 79, 84, 88, 89, 91, 92, exchange-value 11, 12, 51, 80, 86, 87, 172, 198,
94, 95, 99, 321 238–241, 243, 247–250, 252, 286, 289,
digital culture 19, 396, 397–399, 403, 404, 299, 301, 308, 309, 425, 427
406, 408, 409 exclusion x, 205, 207–213, 220, 225, 229, 233,
alienation in 396, 408 414, 418, 432, 437, 439
digital labour 17, 20, 22, 39, 44, 46–48, 61, 62, social 208, 210, 211
86, 124, 178, 351, 391 expanded reproduction 107, 108, 110, 114
digital labour debate 44–46, 48 expansion 114, 168, 169, 234–237, 262, 264,
Digital Marx 68, 69, 71, 73, 75, 77, 79, 81, 83, 267, 272, 275, 302, 303, 524
85, 87, 89, 91, 93, 95 exploitation 18, 45, 85, 182–189, 193–197, 199,
digital media xi, xii, 17, 47, 68, 69, 75, 76, 146, 205, 213, 224–231, 451, 452
147, 153, 155, 167, 169–175 intensive 182, 183, 437
contemporary 153, 155, 168 exploitation and alienation 186, 192, 195,
digital technologies 19, 74–77, 142–144, 396, 196, 199
398, 400–403, 405, 408, 409 exploitation of labour 92, 127, 254, 296, 448
opaqueness of 399, 401, 402, 404
dispossession 18, 105, 110–117, 120, 121, 123, Facebook 18, 45, 52, 54, 125, 186, 187–191, 194,
127, 128, 131, 244, 262, 300 200, 201, 203, 335–338, 345, 436, 480
distributed media 17, 74, 75, 77, 99 communication facet of 187, 188
age of 77, 91, 92 economic relationship of 50, 51
political economy of 68, 93 political economy of 189, 201, 344, 478
Index 541
Facebook and Google 332, 337, 413, 415, 418, free time 84, 106, 116, 126, 128, 129, 168–170,
433, 440 285, 302, 359, 361, 369, 378
Facebook’s clients 53, 54 frictionless capitalism 18, 133, 135, 137, 139,
Facebook usage 53, 54, 335 141, 143, 145–147, 149
Facebook users 45, 53, 54, 186, 187, 189, 190, Fuchs, Christian ix, 1, 2, 4, 6, 8,10, 12, 14,
194 16–18, 20–22, 24–30, 32, 43, 44, 60, 62,
factories 197, 295, 355–357, 359, 360, 365, 130, 148, 154, 180, 200, 281, 310, 312, 313,
366, 369, 370, 372, 382, 387, 451, 452 317, 319, 326, 345, 392, 413, 434, 443, 458
social 192, 193, 236, 288, 295
Factory Flickr 460, 461, 470, 476 Garnham, Nicholas 24, 33, 34, 62, 63, 101,
families 9, 365, 366, 369, 371, 385, 473 154, 155, 177, 213, 232
fetishism 6, 39, 102, 240, 252, 253, 289, 315, Germany 1, 143, 528, 530, 531, 534, 535
316, 407, 422, 425, 432, 494, 496 global capitalism 24, 61, 105, 131, 279, 325,
finance capital 62, 119, 173, 324, 329, 331 328, 334, 340, 341, 347, 348, 381, 390, 393
financial sector 112, 116–120 globalization 2, 8–12, 36, 39, 122, 329–331,
financial system 112, 120 343, 344, 347
Finnwatch 355–357, 362, 365, 367, 369–372, globalization of production 10, 11
376, 377, 379, 380, 386, 392 Global Media 102, 129, 320, 344, 345
Fisher, Eran 44, 62, 182, 184, 186, 188, 190, 192, Global Media Industries x, 148, 321
194, 196, 198, 200, 202, 204, 312 Global Sustainable Information Society xii,
Flickr 20, 447, 449, 459–470, 475–477 130, 231, 232, 312, 313, 315, 319, 515
owners of 466, 467, 469, 470 Google 37, 56, 198, 287, 288, 322, 332, 334,
FlickrMail 461, 464, 465 335, 338, 340, 345, 346, 348, 458, 526
Flickr members 461, 463, 465 government 137, 327, 328, 338, 340–342, 348,
Flickr-verse 469, 470, 475 512, 518, 520, 522, 527, 531, 533
flows, international 277, 317, 318 Graeber 92, 101, 482, 483, 495–497
forced labour 380, 383, 384 groups 192, 222, 224, 414, 418, 452, 453, 459,
Fortunati, Leopoldina 177, 243, 245, 246, 461–464, 469, 475, 476
250, 297, 312
Foucault, Michel 19, 209, 212, 231, 397, 399, Hardt, Michael 63, 232, 271, 272, 275, 276,
401–404, 409–412 294, 295, 307–310, 313–314, 479, 515
Foucault’s concept of pastoral power 396, Hardt, Michael and Negri, Antonio 23, 40,
399, 402, 409 41, 43, 205, 209, 219, 220, 223, 227, 229,
Foxconn 46, 47, 355, 356, 364, 367, 370–374, 329, 454, 455, 488, 489
376, 377, 379, 386, 387, 389, 392 Harvey, David 23, 63, 105, 107, 110–114, 131,
campuses 372, 373, 387 252, 300, 314, 346, 352
Labour 350, 351, 353, 355, 357, 359, Hesmondhalgh, David 85–87, 102, 116, 131,
361, 363, 365, 367, 369, 371, 373, 268, 272, 273, 300, 314
375, 389 historical period 112, 265, 270, 271
workers 46, 67, 367, 374, 376, 386, 387, historical processes 108, 109, 115
394 Hobsbawm, Eric 22, 23, 63, 242, 243, 247,
freedom 42, 55, 56, 277, 278, 280, 281, 310, 257, 262, 314
338, 339, 427, 428, 430–432, 440, 441 hours 44, 46, 54, 85, 86, 194, 238, 286, 370,
value of 42, 418 371, 377, 378, 380, 383, 385
free labour 68, 79, 80, 82–90, 95, 98, 192 human beings 235, 241, 242, 254–257, 261,
critique of 86, 87, 89 295, 298, 300, 301, 310, 399, 406
exploitation of 13, 39, 80, 85, 86 human labour 57, 163, 168, 242, 250–252,
free labour concept 68, 80, 85, 88 294, 495–497
free labour debate 82, 84, 86, 89 human relations 93, 213, 407
542 Index
icts 169, 170, 301, 302, 326, 330, 350, 351, 390, information superhighway 135, 136–138, 148,
482, 495, 497, 499, 500, 511 149
new 265, 266, 268, 274, 279, 280, 301, 303, information systems 33, 61, 66, 270
304 information technology 133, 147, 148, 316,
ideological content 10, 180, 181 397, 411, 442, 446, 517, 531
ideologists 423, 424 Institute of Network Cultures 63–65, 103
ideology 11, 18, 24, 25, 39, 58, 180, 195, 254, intellectual property 23, 68, 94–98, 100, 137,
255, 403, 422–424, 429–430, 485 268, 274, 311, 436, 446
ideology critique 11, 24, 25, 116, 414, 422 interests
immaterial labour 82, 83, 192–195, 197, 198, common 277, 428, 429
448, 453–455, 488, 489, 512 economic 69, 90, 275, 276
theory of 454, 514 renewed 3, 4, 22, 23, 185
unwaged 447, 448, 462 internal relations 216, 220–225, 227–229
imperialism 109, 110, 114, 115, 322–326, International Socialism 514, 515
328–331, 342–348, 499 internet 508, 517, 518, 533, 534
notion of 322, 330, 331 commons-based 58, 129
individual control 414, 418, 419, 421, 432, 435, communist 42, 43, 56
440 Internet activism 482, 483, 491, 500, 513
individualisation 241, 242, 256 Internet commons 41, 58
individuality 19, 22, 42, 56, 232, 399, 401, 402, Internet freedom 338–340, 346, 347, 349
405, 406, 409, 439, 440, 489 Internet Platforms 36, 333, 413
individualization 398–400, 402–404, 409 Internet Resistance 506, 507
individuals 55, 56, 197, 218, 221, 222, 241, 256, Internet Studies 22, 24–26, 28, 31, 35, 38, 43,
259, 401, 419, 429, 435, 452, 457 57, 59–61, 483, 484
industrial production 296, 450, 454, 455, critiques of Critical 22, 55
466, 488, 489 Internet technologies 75, 484
information 119, 127, 135, 172, 189–192, 196, Internet users 52, 187, 287, 306, 511
235, 236, 268, 269–275, 278–280, iPhone 66, 67, 151, 152, 322, 354, 355, 366,
319–321, 435 368, 371, 372, 388, 389, 393, 394
financial 119, 120, 203
Information Age 66, 68, 231, 232, 316, 350, Jameson, Frederic 24, 63, 234, 249, 261, 262,
351, 353, 355, 357, 359, 361, 375, 445, 446 268, 289, 294, 301, 314, 315
informational capitalism 37, 60, 62, 130, 148, Jhally, Sut 18, 74, 102, 125, 131, 202, 252, 253,
177, 208, 227, 229, 313, 326, 438, 515 263, 275, 286, 289, 290, 315
informationalism 222, 267, 488 Jhally, Sut and Livant, Bill 182, 183, 193, 196,
information doctrine, free flow of 276, 277, 199, 286
278–280
information flows 78, 129, 278, 280, 418, Kellner, Douglas 24, 25, 33, 35, 37, 39,
492 64, 69, 70, 73, 102, 136, 484, 493,
free 339–341, 345 494
information imperialism 322, 328, 339 Kjøsen, Mikkola 152–154, 156, 158, 160, 162,
information resources 265, 266, 270, 273, 164, 166, 168–172, 174, 176–178
275–277 knowledge 4, 30, 40, 41, 43, 98, 194, 195, 219,
information revolution 206, 264, 265, 268, 222, 225, 263, 351, 402, 489, 517
270, 275, 534 Knowledge Age 136, 137, 148
information society 60, 62, 135, 136, 265, knowledge commons 79, 88, 89
266, 268, 269, 273, 275, 311, 313, 316, 317, knowledge labour 6, 11, 20, 282, 310
405 knowledge production 6, 489
twenty-first-century 396, 403–405 knowledge work 16, 351, 391
Index 543
knowledge workers 8, 9, 16, 178, 202, 219, 311, low wages 46, 356, 369, 373, 377, 378,
317, 391, 395, 519, 523, 524, 531 384–389, 457
Marx’s works 1, 4, 6, 7, 18, 20, 23, 24, 44, 84, media organisations 70, 75, 90, 91, 100
205, 213, 234, 402, 423 media owners 124, 286, 290, 292
mass communication 101, 154, 181, 192, 197, media producers 76, 84, 90, 123
202, 276, 281, 314, 317–319, 348 media production 9, 11, 76, 79, 91, 129
mass media 68, 69, 74–77, 90, 91, 102, 124, media products 70, 90, 181, 192, 288, 326
1811–83, 185, 193, 196, 199 media scholars 325–328
age of 68, 69, 71, 74, 75, 77, 79, 91, 92, 94, media sector 8, 10, 70, 119
99, 198 media studies ix-xi, 71, 84, 102, 104, 146, 200,
mass media technologies 74, 75 201, 206, 283, 326, 516
material production 5, 50, 72, 397, 423 media systems 73, 175, 344
material relationships, dominant 72, 397, media technologies 8–11, 75, 76, 159, 391,
404 486
material veil 240, 242, 249, 253, 255, 256 media theory x, 25
Mattelart, Armand 99, 103, 206, 233, 234, mediation 482–487, 489, 493, 495, 497,
253, 254, 265, 273, 277, 280, 301, 316 505–507, 511–513
Maxwell, Rick 253, 260, 276, 280, 316, 350, mediators 174, 493, 495
351 members xii, 50, 452, 454, 461, 463, 464, 466,
McLuhan, Marshall 21, 142, 149, 161, 162, 178 467, 469, 470, 475, 476, 531, 532
media xi, 4–9, 12–17, 24, 25, 32, 69, 70, 91, 92, membership 211, 458, 462, 467–469, 530
101, 116, 162, 181, 188, 189, 192, 197, 202 metaphors 135, 137, 138, 170, 189, 205, 207,
alternative xi, 6, 8–11, 13, 17, 25, 438 213, 214, 226, 229, 239, 286, 304, 402
capitalist 15, 161, 162 methodology 20, 450–453, 459, 462, 463,
contemporary 14, 29, 89, 155 472, 474, 476
critical 18, 21, 29, 58, 62, 101, 128–130, 280, Middle East 482, 493, 498–502, 514, 515
313, 345 migrant workers 365, 392
political economy of ix, 32, 68–71, 73, 84, Miller, Toby 327, 330, 347, 350, 351, 416
89, 93, 128, 202, 316 model 58, 72–74, 211, 357, 358, 389, 497, 502,
media and communication studies xi, 5, 6, 515, 517, 518, 525, 526
13, 14, 20, 271 modern societies 242, 247, 256, 286, 398,
Media and Cultural Studies 101, 346, 347, 402, 411
412, 446 money 12, 49, 51, 106, 107, 156, 157, 159,
media audiences 84, 85, 90, 123, 283, 317 163–166, 175, 224, 252, 334, 427, 430
media capital 8, 10, 11 money-capital 158, 163
media companies 70, 124, 196 Mosco, Vincent 7, 20, 40, 65, 66, 103, 123, 124,
media concentration 10, 12, 75 149, 181, 265–267, 279, 282, 284, 302, 316,
media content 10, 11, 74–77, 79, 93, 94, 116, 317, 535
180, 181, 282, 284, 285, 288 movements 2, 4, 17, 157, 158, 163–165, 171, 172,
media content capital 10, 11 216, 217, 219, 226, 288
media convergence 10–12 global justice 17, 117, 120–123
media corporations 8, 9, 181, 193, 199, 286, multitude 17, 40, 220, 223, 227, 228, 232, 294,
327 314, 321, 479, 488, 489, 514, 515
Media Economics 59, 67, 313 Murdock, Graham 73, 77, 103, 122, 234, 236,
media environments 239, 244, 253, 257, 259, 260, 262, 303, 317
new 185, 186, 201, 202, 312, 317 MySpace 200, 458, 478, 480
social 448, 473, 474
media imperialism 70, 333, 338, 344, 345, Napoli, Philip 186, 197, 202, 283, 286, 287, 317
348 National Telecommunications and
media industries 8, 10, 15, 69, 70, 72, 76, 79, Information Administration (ntia), 446
80, 100, 155, 182, 274, 285, 290 nation states 114, 277, 288, 323, 325, 329 330,
media institutions 7, 69, 70, 79, 181 338, 342, 343, 493, 495, 498
Index 545
Negri, Antonio 28, 40, 41, 63, 82, 91, 93, 219, Open Access Journal 130, 231, 232, 312, 313,
220, 223, 227, 232, 294, 295, 314, 317, 329, 315, 319, 515
346, 393, 451, 454, 455, 479, 488, 489, 515 organising, political 484, 491, 492, 495, 503,
neoliberalism x, 2–4, 6, 7, 131, 134, 300, 302, 507
340–342, 393, 403 outsourcing 394, 523, 524
Net Critique 25–27, 30 overtime 359, 370, 377, 378, 385
Network Cultures 63–65, 67, 102–104, 203, ownership 73–75, 77, 93, 94, 108, 120, 416,
320, 481, 516 417, 430, 435, 436, 440, 442
network metaphor 18, 205–207, 210, 212, 214, private 113, 247, 256, 279, 283, 305, 362
220, 222, 227, 229, 230 ownership of means of production 74, 75,
networks 28, 205–210, 213–216, 219, 229, 230, 77
232, 233, 267, 331, 495
network society 18, 101, 206, 208, 212, 215, pastoral power 19, 396–403, 405, 407–409,
219, 221–223, 230–233, 344 411
the 206, 208, 219, 229 peer production 68, 76, 79, 416, 437, 438 441
network technologies 195, 223, 224, 266 peer production, commons-based 76,
network theories 206, 213, 220, 229, 231, 495 79, 95
network theorists 205, 213, 215–217, 219, 224, Perelman, Michael 244, 274, 275, 277,
226, 230 299–301, 318
network thinkers 205, 212, 214–216 personal data 48, 167, 170–172, 174, 176, 179,
network thinking 205, 213, 215 304, 421, 424, 425, 431, 432, 434
New Generation Migrant Workers Concern personalization 18, 153–155, 168, 171–173, 175,
Programme 374, 375, 395 511
New Jersey 161, 232, 233, 311, 316, 318, 320 persons 38, 95, 96, 143, 183, 224, 240, 242,
new media ix, 5, 29, 133, 135, 137, 168, 177, 245, 248, 252, 427, 429, 431, 432
197, 202, 206, 232, 233, 514, 515 photos 187, 188, 191, 196, 435, 466
news 98, 116–118, 120–122, 128, 131, 271, 272, platform imperialism 322, 323, 325, 327, 329,
278, 327, 343, 344 331–333, 335, 337–339, 341–343, 345
news media ix, 106, 112, 115–122, 128, 129 platforms 48, 121, 152, 153, 199, 287, 288, 322,
news media systems 105, 128, 129 323, 332–334, 335–338, 340, 343
new technologies 61, 133, 136, 144, 147, 266, political action 91, 121, 294
267, 270, 328, 331, 336, 338, 488, 489, 494 political activism 484, 503, 505, 513
New York 21, 60–67, 101, 102, 130, 200, 202, political domination 423, 424, 430
232, 233, 311, 312–321, 480, 481, 535 political dynamics 449, 453, 459, 461, 468,
New York Times 176, 177, 348, 356, 534, 535 470, 471, 474, 476
nfc-enabled devices 165, 166, 167 Political Economies 148, 317, 321
ntia (National Telecommunications and political economists 24, 74, 75, 77, 91, 94, 99,
Information Administration), 446 275, 458
political economy 20, 27, 29, 32, 76, 78, 102,
objectification 185–188, 195, 218, 261, 357, 131, 178, 181, 232–234, 283, 294, 315, 444
397, 409, 410 political economy of mass communication
objectifies 184, 195, 217, 218 101, 154, 181, 317
objectifying 292, 404, 406, 408 political economy of mass media 68, 69, 71,
objective forms 423, 424, 429, 430 74, 77, 90, 91, 99, 124
objective violence 106, 114, 115, 122, 128, 129 political struggle 123, 502
objects 90, 92, 93, 95, 96, 183, 217, 218, 253, Pomeroy, Anne Fairchild 215–219, 233
254, 273, 368, 405, 425, 426, 495 possessive individualism 429, 444
ontology postmodernism 2, 3, 7, 25, 34, 35, 312, 314
process-relational 205, 214, 217, 225–230 Postone, Moishe 234, 238, 240, 247, 254, 256,
relational 213, 215, 216, 220, 233 296, 297, 318
546 Index
power 93, 207–209, 212, 220, 225, 226, 230, products 47, 81, 125, 144, 246, 247, 355, 359,
325, 337, 338, 399, 400, 403, 408, 410, 498 368, 369, 382, 415, 425, 426, 458, 468
audience 288, 290, 291 produsage 201, 441, 447, 448, 456, 457, 459,
distribution of 337, 398, 399, 408–410 460, 462, 471, 472, 474, 475, 478, 487
network 337, 346, 493 mode of 447–449, 453, 456, 457, 459,
pastoral modalities of 396, 402, 403 460–462, 465, 466, 470, 471, 474, 476,
social 24, 257 477
power relations 32, 207, 246, 283, 327, 396, produsers 123, 125, 448, 449, 456–458,
407, 492 460–462, 466–477
practices, subjectifying 402, 408, 409 proletariat 211, 244, 247, 252, 254, 294, 375
prejudices, common 4, 14 property 81, 93, 94, 96, 97, 99, 277, 419, 420,
Prey, Robert 49, 206, 208, 210, 212, 214, 216, 421, 427–429, 442, 444, 445
218, 220, 222, 224, 226, 228, 230, 232 common 94, 97, 419
primitive accumulation 105, 107–111, 113–117, personal 97, 211
119–121, 127, 128, 131, 244 property relations 96, 98, 247, 416
features of 110, 120 protests 113, 115, 121, 122, 373, 374, 390, 392,
privacy 198, 414, 415, 417–422, 424, 425, 490, 502, 504, 506, 509, 510, 512
429–436, 439–446, 458, 459 public space 118, 126, 339
alternative concept of 434, 439, 443 public sphere 17, 36, 41, 42, 57, 58, 62, 63, 69,
privacy commodification 435, 440, 446 90, 130, 300, 443, 486, 493, 506
privacy on Facebook 436, 443, 515
private property 55, 96–98, 184, 185, 252, Quan-Haase, Anabel 448, 450, 452, 454, 456,
277, 419–422, 427, 431, 432, 439, 441 458, 460, 462, 464, 466, 468, 472–474,
private property owners 420, 427, 428, 430 480
privatization 17, 110, 111, 113, 116–118, 120, 126,
129, 277, 279, 299, 300, 306, 353 rationalization 9–11, 122, 155, 396, 398, 399,
processes of 110–113, 118, 126, 300 402, 523
producers, immediate 81, 108, 246 reception 6, 8, 10, 11, 13, 317
production reification 127, 234, 255, 397, 403, 404,
content 18, 47, 456 407–410
cultural 80, 86, 105, 167, 263, 399, 404, processes of 397, 407, 409, 410
454 relations 115, 116, 122, 123, 128, 213–216, 221,
mental 72, 397, 423 240, 241–243, 249, 358–359, 369, 485
mode of 218, 221, 222, 228, 415–417, 433, exploitative 107, 228, 448, 457, 473–475
437, 438, 448, 450, 486–488 external 221–224, 257
non-market 68, 79 new 109, 195, 196, 433
societal sphere of 414, 422, 433 production-consumption 126, 127
sphere of 156–159, 171, 249, 289, 305, 422, public 11, 12, 52, 189, 192, 201
432 wage 359, 447, 448, 453, 456, 457, 475, 477
production process 82, 218, 219, 243, 245, relationship 40, 43, 72, 74, 119, 120, 238, 241,
246, 261, 262, 292, 297, 358, 359, 361, 402, 404, 455, 457–459, 470
376, 389 asymmetrical 84, 333, 335
production relations 189, 255, 256 dominant 325, 397
production workers 51, 54, 365, 391 exploitative 453, 457, 474
productive forces 5, 37, 56, 57, 141, 143, 145, Relevance of Marx’s Theory of Primitive
147, 357, 358, 361, 362, 365, 383, 389 Accumulation 105, 107, 109, 111, 113, 115,
productive labour 45, 49, 50, 53, 54, 80, 458 117, 119, 121, 123, 125, 127, 129, 131
productivity 49, 80, 124, 143, 144, 160, 219, representation 77, 117, 121, 122, 189, 210, 214,
221–223, 248, 309, 396, 405, 410 215, 493, 498, 504, 513
Index 547
research ix, x, 5, 187, 188, 360, 452, 459, social media 20, 21, 45, 46, 48, 54, 62, 100,
461–463, 465, 477, 526, 531 195, 196, 199, 200, 313, 482–485, 502
researcher ix–xi, 452, 463–465, 523 age of xii, 44, 62, 446
research participants 452, 460, 462, 463, political economy of 27, 106, 196
465, 469, 475, 476 social media contexts 447, 449, 460
research project xi, 459, 462, 463, 465, 466, social media monopolies 27, 64
470, 475 social media platforms 54, 83, 86, 88, 129,
research subjects 462, 464, 465 505, 506
resistance 23, 24, 99, 152, 409, 410, 443, 490, social media prosumers 20, 48
492, 493, 496, 498, 527, 528, 530, 532 social media users 123, 196, 197
resources, natural 108, 110, 111, 114, 424, 501 social mobilization 113, 115, 121, 122, 127, 129
revolutions 20, 142, 143, 270, 314, 315, 482, social networks 125, 129, 190, 194, 195, 336,
483, 500–503, 506, 507, 510 345, 348, 349, 415, 417, 457, 459, 464, 478
ruling class 2, 72, 397, 403, 405, 423 social network sites 180, 185, 200, 322, 335,
344, 346, 441
SACOM (Students & Scholars against social processes 241, 253, 260, 261, 269, 275
Corporate Misbehaviour) 356, 360, social relations 48, 93, 125, 234, 235,
366–370, 372–380, 392, 394, 395 240–242, 244, 253, 254, 256, 257, 307,
sale 1, 38, 51, 119, 163–165, 171, 172, 182, 187, 426
245, 262, 524, 526 society
Sandmonkey 506, 508–510, 512 communist 43, 55, 56, 98
Sandoval, Marisol 304, 306, 319, 352, 354, contemporary 15, 16, 23, 34, 198, 205, 219,
356, 358, 360, 362, 364, 366, 368, 370, 229, 237, 266–268, 295, 296, 298
372, 374 critical theory of 31, 32, 281
Schiller, Dan 140, 150, 181, 219, 234, 259, 260, human 72, 263, 269
265, 266, 269, 271–273, 279, 300, 301, wider 235, 260, 295, 301
305, 331 Sociology ix-xii, 231–233, 283, 315, 441, 525
Schiller, Herbert 24, 70, 181, 259, 260, 263, software, free 41, 414, 416, 417, 438, 445, 446
265, 271, 274–280, 299, 301, 303, 306, Sohn-Rethel, Alfred 234, 238, 244, 250, 251,
326, 333, 337, 340, 341 254, 256, 289, 320
Schröter, Jens 133, 134, 136, 138–140, 142, 144, space 4, 53, 115, 116, 126, 127, 158–160, 162,
146, 148, 150 163, 170, 186, 470, 502, 506, 507
sectors, private 113, 500 spectrum, communicative 167, 168
services 56, 88, 437, 447, 448, 456–458, 460, state redistribution 110, 113
461, 465, 470, 473, 474, 518 strategies 56, 57, 77, 301, 327, 336, 384, 451,
Sevignani, Sebastian 414, 416–418, 420, 422, 453, 532, 533
424, 426, 428, 430, 432, 434, 436, 438, subjectification 397, 400, 403, 404, 408–410
440, 446 subjectivities 77, 82, 87, 93, 104, 248, 288,
Shenzhen 352, 365, 370, 372, 376–378 292–294, 403, 466, 468
sites 181, 182, 192, 336, 337, 447–449, sub-networks 186, 191, 192
457–459, 462, 472–474 suicides 46, 355–357, 379, 383, 386, 387, 392,
sites and services 447, 448, 456–458, 394
460–463, 465, 466, 469–471, 474 superstructure 72–74, 77, 255, 256, 408, 417,
Smythe, Dallas 54, 66, 84, 85, 90, 103, 104, 123, 483–487, 489, 494, 505
169, 181, 182, 284–286, 288, 293, 316, 320 superstructure model 72, 73, 255
sociability 186, 188, 189, 191, 195, 196, 198, surplus capital 107, 108
200, 480 surplus labour 105, 106, 116, 123, 168, 169
social critique 184, 205, 229, 230 surplus-value 25, 26, 36–38, 43, 44, 49, 50,
Socialist International 56, 66 80, 85–87, 92, 97, 106, 107, 159, 164,
548 Index
169, 182, 193, 195, 199, 243, 245, 246, 292, van Dijk, Teun A 215, 216, 222, 233, 384, 394,
357, 512 395, 431, 442
creation of 57, 97, 396 violence 18, 109, 110, 112–115, 120, 122, 127, 130,
extract 234, 288, 298 132, 493, 508
production of 7, 36, 46, 123, 173
surveillance 60, 127, 128, 198, 200, 201, 310, wage labour 78, 79, 81–83, 85–87, 96, 97, 109,
319, 434, 443, 445, 446, 478, 517, 522 227 404
surveillance state 20, 519, 520, 532, 533 wage labourer 8, 9, 38, 49, 107–110 117, 220,
224, 243, 438, 468
technological determinism 40, 76, 77, 222, wages 79, 80, 199, 246, 358, 359, 369–374,
223 383, 448, 457
technological sublime 350, 351 Wallerstein, Immanuel 114, 132, 234, 243,
technology 244, 260–262, 297, 306, 307, 310, 321
industrial 398, 404 watching 60, 88, 124, 182, 184, 185, 193, 194,
platform 322, 342 202, 286, 292
telecommunications 111, 151, 152, 154, 155, wealth 2, 4, 7, 38, 41, 55, 56, 82, 83, 112, 139,
159, 160, 170, 272, 279, 508, 531 142, 294, 297, 300
Thussu, Daya Kishan 265, 272, 277, 279, 280, Web 60, 447–449, 456, 458–460, 462, 465,
320, 321 471–474, 488
time, leisure 192–195, 198, 285, 290, 306, 308 websites 125, 291, 334, 337, 461, 467–470, 473,
time magazine 1, 22, 356, 375, 527 477, 485
tools 41, 42, 390, 485, 497–499, 502, 504–507, Western Marxism 2, 21, 103, 236, 317, 320,
510–512 457, 480
tripleC x, xii, 5, 21, 62, 66, 130, 178, 231, 232, Williams, Raymond 24, 71, 73, 74, 104, 161,
312, 313, 315, 318, 319 179, 255, 263, 270, 272, 274, 275, 285, 321
Wittel, Andreas 70, 72, 74, 76, 78, 80, 82, 84,
unesco 277, 278, 280, 317–319, 326, 349 88, 89, 90, 104, 234, 235, 258
unions 2, 117, 360, 374, 375, 383, 478, 511, 528, work
530, 531 intellectual 94, 95, 310, 359
universal access 136, 138, 139 reproductive 46, 110
unpaid labour 46, 83, 86, 89, 125, 175, 288, unpaid 45, 46, 51, 170
297 work activity 358, 359, 361, 383, 389
users 48, 49, 52, 53, 124–129, 186–191, worker associations 531, 532
194–196, 198, 415, 434, 436, 448, 458, 467 worker organizations 527, 530, 532
exploitation of 45, 435, 440 workers 46–47, 183, 359–361, 365, 366–381,
labour of 54, 86, 169 384, 386–391, 405, 430–342, 449–453,
use value 11, 12, 46, 168, 169, 290, 415, 425, 468, 474, 530–32
427 behaviour of 359, 361, 376, 377, 379
use-value promises 51, 52, 54 large numbers of 385, 452, 455
use-values 47, 49–52, 54, 159, 160, 239–241, productive 45, 46, 49, 50, 53, 54
247, 248, 250, 288–290 Workers Inquiry 20, 449–453, 459–463,
particular 164, 240, 248 465–467, 471–479
workforce 143, 296, 358, 361, 365, 372, 430,
value 44–45, 49, 50–54, 89, 90–93, 98, 156, 457, 477, 523, 528, 529, 531, 534
163–165, 245, 250, 253, 296–298, 332, working class 2, 108, 115, 177, 224, 247, 325,
333, 426, 427 353, 375, 390
symbolic 50–52, 54 working conditions 350–352, 356–362, 367,
value chains 99, 350 368, 375, 377, 382–391, 394, 406, 527
value creation 39, 296, 426, 427 bad 46, 366, 373, 382, 384, 387–389, 391
Index 549