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[...] The privatization and commercialization of the Internet is a form of material deprivation and enclosure insofar as it separates users from the infrastructure that supports their communicative activities. It reinforces and reproduces the structure of social relations wherein a small group controls the productive resources used by the many and allows economic advantages to accrue from this control. The ownership class that includes the founders of Facebook, Google, Yahoo, and so on could not exist without capturing and controlling components of the productive infrastructure. The value that they appropriate stems in large part from their ability to capture aspects of the activity of those who access their resources, and their ability to do so is directly related to their ownership and control of these resources. Bluntly put, the ability to exploit this activity for commercial purposes for the economic benefit of the few would disappear if these resources were commonly owned and controlled.
[...] the privatization and commercialization of much of the digital media infrastructure does not take place by force, but merely reproduces existing property relations by extending them into the digital realm. The background of compulsion is built into the legal structure and regulatory regimes that enable the privatization process. [...]
this is good and important
Privacy-based critiques do not quite capture the element of productive power and control at work in the promise of monitoring-based marketing. If privacy violations constitute an invasion—a loss of control over the process of self-disclosure— market monitoring includes an additional element of control and management: the systematic use of personal information to predict and influence. The critique of exploitation addresses this element of power and control. Defenders of market monitoring will argue that individual consumer behavior remains uncoerced. Critical approaches, however, locate coercion not solely at the level of discrete individual decisions, but also in the social relations that structure them. In this regard, the invocation of the notion of exploitation parallels Jonathan Beller’s claim in his contribution to this volume that, “an interest in labor should force us to rethink the logistics of media platforms and see them as technologies formed in the struggle between labor and capital and thus by and for the expropriation of labor.”
A Marxist theory of communication should "demonstrate how communication and culture are material practices, how labor 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 communication sees communication in relation to capitalism, "placing in the foreground the analysis of capitalism, including the development of the forces and relations of production, commodification and the production of surplus value, social class divisions and struggles, contradictions and oppositional movements" (ibid., 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. [...]
[...] Labour is a necessarily alienated form of work, in which humans do not control and own the means and results of production. It is a historic form of the organization of work in class societies. Work in contrast is a much more general concept common to all societies. It is a process, in which humans make use of technologies for transforming nature and society in such a way that goods and services are created that satisfy human needs. [...] The realm of freedom really begins only where labour, which is a form of work that is determined by necessity and external expediency, ends.
[...] labour faces a dialectic of poverty and wealth: it "is absolute poverty as object" (labour does not own what it produces) and at the same time "the general possibility of wealth" (only labour, not capital, produces and is a necessary condition of wealth) [...]
citing from Grundrisse. need to think about how this will work in the context of automation & robots producing wealth??
[...] Heinrich's basic point is that value does not exist in the individual commodity, but only in exchange, and the all-sided exchange of commodities (in contrast to the exchange of isolated products) exists only as reference of commodities to money" [...] Money is "not simply a formal translation of an immanent magnitude of value that has already measured the quantity of value. It is rather the necessary and above all the only possible form of the appearance of the commodity value, there can be no form of appearance of value that is independent of exchange" [...]
Michael Heinrich in Die Wissenschaft vom Wert
[...] Capital aims at lowering the price of wage labour (wages) and increasing the price of commodities in order to increase profits. Workers can refuse work in the form of strikes and thereby attack the wage mediation and money profit, and they can refuse or eliminate prices by trying to obtain use-values below market prices or for free (e.g., by refusing to buy certain products and producing them together with others). So money is not only a medium of circulation, but also a "mediator between the classes" [...] and an object of class struggle.
citing Harry Cleaver, Reading Capital politically (p156-158)
[...] prices cannot simply be derived and calculated from labour values, but depend on the politics of class struggle. [...]
draws on Jacques Bidet in Exploring Marx's Capital
[...] mentions that social network markets may have hubs and be dominated by elites, but this analysis is not systematically connected to power inequalities in society. It rather seems that Hartley assumes that such markets are nonetheless a realm of democracy because many have communicative tools available that can, if they are lucky and hard-working, enable them to become part of this elite, at least for a short time. This logic is at the heart of neo-liberalism's stress on performance, individualism and personal responsibility for success, failures and downfall. [...]
criticising John Hartley's Digital Futures for Cultural and Media Studies