Peer2Politics

Eventbrite - Commons Transition Coalition presents Sharing Value & Ownership for the Common Good: Building the Commons Economy - Friday, June 10, 2016 at Church of All Nations, Carlton, VIC. Find event and ticket information.

"Fuchs (2010, 2012) argues that users of social media produce value and surplus value in the Marxian sense. Arvidsson and Colleoni (2012) critique this hypothesis, claiming that Marx's theory of value is irrelevant to the regime of value production on social media platforms in particular and in informational capitalism in general. They claim that the affective relations and financial speculations that generate value on social media are not dependent on labor time. This article critically engages Fuchs, and Arvidsson and Colleoni, by revisiting Marx's theory of value. Contra Fuchs, we argue that audiences do not produce value and surplus value—neither for social nor for mass media. Contra Arvidsson and Colleoni, we argue that so-called affective relations (philia) do not produce value either. Instead we demonstrate that social media generate revenue from four primary sources—by leasing advertisement space to generate advertisement rent, by selling information, by selling services to advertisers, and by generating profits from fictitious capital and speculative windfalls. All four, we argue, can be adequately explained by Marx's theory of value."

I recently encountered a brilliant new essay by German writer Ina Praetorius that revisits the feminist theme of “care work,” re-casting it onto a much larger philosophical canvas. “The Care-Centered Economy:  Rediscovering what has been taken for granted” suggests how the idea of “care” could be used to imagine new structural terms for the entire economy.