CHRISTIAN FUCHS - ICT&S - UniversitÃ¤t Salzburg

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Christian Fuchs: Social Networking Sites and the Surveillance Societyreinvested and capitalized in order to produce more profit. Capital is accumulated.Commodities are sold at a price that is higher than the investment costs so that profit isgenerated. For Marx, the decisive quality of capital accumulation is that profit is anemergent property of production that is produced by labour, but owned by thecapitalists. Without labour no profit could be made. Workers are forced to enter classrelations and to produce profit in order to survive, which enables capital to appropriatesurplus. The notion of exploited surplus value is the main concept of Marx’s theory, bywhich he intends to show that capitalism is a class society.The capitalist“wants to produce a commodity greater in value than the sum of the values of thecommodities used to produce it, namely the means of production and the labourpowerhe purchased with his good money on the open market. His aim is toproduce not only a use-value, but a commodity; not only use-value, but acommodity; not only use-value, but value; and not just value, but also surplusvalue.(…) The cotton originally bought for £100 is for example re-sold at £100 +£10, i.e. £110. The complete form of this process is therefore M-C-M', where M' =M + ∆M, i.e. the original sum advanced plus an increment. This increment orexcess over the original value I call ’surplus-value’” (Marx 1867/1990: 293, 251;MEW 23: 201, 165).The immediate effects of surplus-value production in class relations are that the productbelongs to the capitalist and not to the worker and that surplus-value “costs the workerlabour but the capitalist nothing, and (…) becomes the legitimate property of thecapitalist” (Marx 1867/1990: 731, MEW 23: 611). If you do not produce cotton, butknowledge, such as for example the Microsoft Windows Vista operating system, thedecisive quality is that knowledge only needs to be produced once and can beinfinitely reproduced at low costs and distributed at high speed. There is no physicalwear and tear of the product, knowledge is not used up in consumption, can bereworked and built upon. There are high initial production costs, but once knowledgeas for example software is produced, it can be cheaply copied and sold at high prices.The constant and variable capital costs for reproduction are low, which is beneficial forsustained capital accumulation in the knowledge industries (Fuchs 2008).The situation again changes a little if knowledge is produced for new media and carriedand distributed by it. A central characteristic of networked digital media is that theconsumer of knowledge has the potential to become its producer. Alvin Toffler (1980)spoke of the emergence of the prosumer within the information society. Axel Brunsapplied this notion to new media and speaks of produsers – users become producers ofdigital knowledge and technology:“Produsage, then, can be roughly defined as a mode of collaborative contentcreation which is led by users or at least crucially involves users as producers –where, in other words, Produsage, then, can be roughly defined as a mode ofcollaborative content creation which is led by users or at least crucially involvesusers as producers – where, in other words, the user acts as a hybriduser/producer, or produser, virtually throughout the production process” (Bruns29
Christian Fuchs: Social Networking Sites and the Surveillance Society2007: 3f).Philip Graham (2000) argues that hypercapitalism’s immediacy and pervasiveness hasresulted in the entanglement of production, circulation, consumption, material andnon-material production, productive and unproductive labour, base and superstructure,forces and relations of production. Therefore value creation “becomes an immediate,continuous process” (Graham 2000: 137). New media are simultaneously used for theproduction, circulation, and consumption of knowledge. They support cognition(thought, language), communication (one-to-one, one-to-few, one-to-many, few-to-one,few-to-few, few-to-many, many-to-one, many-to-few, many-to-many), and co-operation(peer production, sharing, virtual communities, social networking, cyberlove, onlinecollaboration, etc) by combining the universal digital machine of the computer withnetworking functions as structural principles (Fuchs 2008). In informational capitalism,the brain and its bodily mediations are enabled to engage in organic practices ofeconomic production, surplus-value generation, co-production, communicativecirculation, and productive consumption by new media. The production of knowledgeis based on the prior consumption of the same, in co-production as well oncommunicative interchange as a coordinative mechanism. Consumption of knowledgeproduces individual meaning and incentives for further social production andcommunication. Circulation of knowledge is the consumption of bandwidth andtechnical resources and the production of connections.If the users become productive, then in terms of Marxian class theory this means thatthey also produce surplus value and are exploited by capital as for Marx productivelabour is labour generating surplus. Therefore the exploitation of surplus value in caseslike Google, YouTube, MySpace, or Facebook is not merely accomplished by those whoare employed by these corporations for programming, updating, and maintaining thesoft- and hardware, performing marketing activities, and so on, but by wage labour andthe produsers who engage in the production of user-generated content. New mediacorporations do not (or hardly) pay the users for the production of content. Oneaccumulation strategy is to give them free access to services and platforms, let themproduce content, and to accumulate a large number of produsers that is sold to thirdpartyadvertisers. Not a product is sold to the users, but the users are sold as acommodity to advertisers. The more users a platform has, the higher the advertisingrates can be set. The productive labour time that is exploited by the capital on the onehand involves the labour time of the paid employees and on the other hand all of thetime that is spent online by the users. For the first type of knowledge labour, new mediacorporations pay salaries. The second type of knowledge is produced completely forfree. There are neither variable nor constant investment costs. The formula for the profitrate needs to be transformed for this accumulation strategy:p = s / (c + v1 + v2), s … surplus value, c … constant capital, v1 … wages paid to fixedemployees, v2 … wages paid to usersThe typical situation is that v2 => 0 and that v2 substitutes v1. If the production ofcontent and the time spent online were carried out by paid employees, the variablecosts would rise and profits would therefore decrease. This shows that produsage in acapitalist society can be interpreted as the outsourcing of productive labour to userswho work completely for free and help maximizing the rate of exploitation (e = s / v) so30
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CHRISTIAN FUCHS - ICT&S - UniversitÃ¤t Salzburg

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