Value, Rent, and the Political Economy of Social Media

Fuchs (2010 Fuchs, C. 2010. Labor in information capitalism and on the Internet. The Information Society 26:179–196.Taylor & Francis Online, Web of Science ® , Google Scholar, 2012 Fuchs, C. 2012. With or without Marx? With or without capitalism?: A re-joinder to Adam Arvidsson and Eleanor Colleoni. tripleC 10 (2):633–45. Google Scholar) argues that users of social media produce value and surplus value in the Marxian sense. Arvidsson and Colleoni (2012 Arvidsson, A., and E. Colleoni. 2012. Value in information capitalism and on the Internet. The Information Society 28:135–50.Taylor & Francis Online, Web of Science ® , Google Scholar) 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.