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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 activity 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.
something to remember - as much as I push back on the "Facebook users are doing labour" argument, there is something in there which has to be acknowledged
[...] The symbolic ideology of a commodity first needs to be produced by special ad and public relations employees and is in a second step communicated to potential buyers. Advertising therefore involves production and transportation labour. Advertising production does not create a physical commodity, but an ideological dimension of a commodity – a use-value promise that is attached to a commodity as meaning. Advertising transport workers do not transport a commodity in physical space from A to B, they rather organise a communication space that allows advertisers to communicate their use-value promises to potential customers. Facebook’s paid employees and users are therefore 21st century equivalents of what Marx considered as transport workers in classical industry. They are productive workers whose activities are nec- essary for “transporting” use-value promises from companies to potential customers. Marx associated transport with communication as comparable forms of work. On Facebook and other social media platforms, transportation labour is communication labour.
not entirely sure if the last sentence makes any sense or not but think about this more? in light of Marx talking about advertising being a cost of distribution in the market and not part of production
[...] surveillance becomes a means of commodifying the information that users produce. [...] Such surveillance [...] is rooted in a capitalist desire to commodify information. [...] While capitalism is conditioned by the requirement for privacy (for ex., of bank accounts and holdings) to legitimate wealth inequality, it also promotes surveillance of workers in order to tighten control over them and render the accumulation process more efficient.
not super novel or anything but the last part is intriguing
[...] the most far-reaching and significant of Marx's assumptions concerns the unchallenged power of private property rights in both production and exchange. It is in this context that he also assumes perfect competition in the market place. He accepts Adam Smith's theory of 'the hidden hand' although he insists that the hidden hand is that of labour not that of capital. Monopoly power is assumed away. Why he adopted these assumptions is an interesting question. My guess is that Marx's primary intent in Capital is to deconstruct the utopian vision of free market capitalism that the political economists of the time were promoting. He wishes to show how market freedoms do not produce a result that is beneficial for all, as Smith and others supposed, but that it would produce a dystopia of misery for the masses and immense wealth for the propertied capitalist class.
[...] we know from the analysis of the circulation of capital that a great deal of appropriation of value through predation occurs at the point of realisation. Increasing the minimum wage or creating a basic income will amount to naught if hedge funds buy up foreclosed houses and pharmaceutical patents and raised prices (in some cases astronomically) to line their own pockets out of the increased effective demand exercised by the population. Increasing college tuitions, usurious interest rates on credit cards, all sorts of hidden charges on telephone bills and medical insurance could steal away all the benefits. A population might be better served by strict regulatory intervention to control these living expenses, to limit the vast amount of wealth appropriation occurring at the point of realisation. [...]
he goes on to say that it's not a surprise that VCs support UBI, cus otherwise there'll be no demand for their products etc
which raises a deeper question: in such a world, where you have to jump through hoops to ensure that money circulates as a way of distributing goods, why stick to money? to think about more
[...] What originally appeared as a means to promote production becomes a relation alien to the producers. As the producers become more dependent on exchange, exchange appears to become more independent of them. Money is introduced as the servant of exchange but soon becomes its despotic master. Adam Smith's 'hidden hand' begins to take over. [...]
I like the analogy (aligns with mine for capitalism as a whole)
The irony is that the need to find a physical material representation for social values led to the adoption of an unimpeachable metallic base (gold and silver) for money that was so dysfunctional for daily use that it required symbolic representation of itself (paper and electronic moneys) to be effective. The symbolic moneys gradually became more dominant as trading expanded. Cutting out the metallic base in the early 1970s produced two symbolic systems--value and money--side by side in an awkward dialectical embrace.
can you think of value and money as being like the signified/signifier in a Saussurean view of language? or money as a Wittgensteinian language game
[...] debt is a claim on future value production that can be redeemed only through value production. If future value production is insufficient to redeem the debt then there is a crisis. Collisions between value and anti-value spark periodic monetary and financial crises. In the long run, capital has to confront ever-escalating claims on future values to redeem the anti-value building up within the debt economy and credit system. Instead of an accumulation of values and of wealth, capital produces an accumulation of debts that have to be redeemed. The future of value production is foreclosed.
Marx agreed that workers employed in circulation (e.g., in marketing) do not produce value (otherwise he would have to concede that value could be produced by market exchange). They can, however, be a source of surplus value. They are like machines which cannot produce value but whose use can increase relative surplus value by lowering the costs of wage goods and so diminishing the value of labour power thereby producing more surplus value for the capitalist. Costs entailed in circulation and state administration, Marx argued, should be viewed as deductions out of value and surplus value production. Costs of circulation in the market (other than those of transportation), no matter whether borne by the industrial or merchant capitalist, are considered as necessary deductions from potential value already produced. [...]
[...] If investors seek speculative gains in price-fixing markets for assets which have no value (such as art objects or currency and carbon futures) instead of investing in value and surplus value creation, then this indicates a pathway by which value can be leached out of the general circulation of capital to circulate as money in fictitious markets where no direct value production (as opposed to appropriation) occurs. When price signals betray the values they are supposed to represent then investors are bound to make erroneous decisions. If the money rate of profit is highest in property markets or other forms of asset speculation then a rational capitalist will place their money there rather than in the sphere of productive activity. The rational capitalist behaves irrationally from the standpoint of the reproduction process of capital as an evolving totality. The result could be a deepening tendency towards secular stagnation in the economy as a whole.
a corollary of this which he explains later on: in the presence of an asset bubble, cutting taxes on rich is a bad idea cus they will overwhelmingly invest in that over true production