Towards a New Communism to Fix the World

The second plenary speaker at ECREA 2014 today is Christian Fuchs, who takes us back to Hegel and Marx. He introduces Hegel's relational concept of the world, where everything exists only in relationship with other things, and through this relationship development becomes possible. Marx built on this by examining the interrelationships between societal forces, and used it to explore the internal contradictions of capitalism.

Modern technologies, for example, become tools for improving life, but also for the further domination of workers. The rate of surplus value, and the organic composition of the production process (the technological intensity of production) have both been rising consistently, while wage share has decreased substantially over time as capital share has risen. Further, corporate taxation is virtually inexistent in Western countries.

Schumpeterian (or, as autocorrect would have it, "Schlump eternal") 'long wave' theory of capitalism does not seem to match existing economic indicators, Christian suggests; the Neo-Schumpeterian approach does not appear to work. There is a contradiction between the rate of surplus value and the organic composition of capital. The financialisation of the Internet industry is a result of this, and there may be a social media-driven dot com bubble emerging.

Christian is skeptical of Castells's description of communication power, and suggests that it constitutes a fetishisation of computing concepts. There is no systematic theory, and no clear models of society. Similarly, he says, Jenkins's model of consumer participation through user-generated content is very limited, and lacks a clear theoretical model of participation that connects back to theories of democratic participation. He also notes that a long tail of attention still applies in sites such as YouTube, with genuinely user-generated content rarely rising to the top.

The idea of power is also poorly understood in such discussions of communication power, Christian says. There are multiple forms of power, and we should distinguish economic, political, and cultural forms of media power, which are in contradiction to each other. Examining the role of audience labour is useful to understand advertising logic, for example.

The political economy of social media platforms that are driven by advertising is even more complex, since they do not sell a product to their users, but sell their users' data to commercial partners. This is part of a super-exploitation of non-wage labourers that harks back to the earliest days of capitalism, Christian says. Our own activities are being monitored intensely, while the very companies doing so are evading any public, legal. or financial scrutiny.

What emerges here is a surveillance-industrial complex. Users make their data public, this is monitored and mined by Internet companies, and such data are used by state and commercial surveillance institutions. But again, the underlying processes are not publicly visible, and rarely revealed. We see the social advantages, but not the commodity which is produced from it.

The permanent crisis around terrorism which is used to justify surveillance is leading to quasi-fascist law and order policies, Christian says. Any of this can only be overcome by collective action. What is the role of social media in this struggle? We cannot ignore such technologies, but must also not overemphasise it. Recent protests were online as well as offline, and activists saw both the advantages and disadvantages of mainstream social media platforms. Alternative social media have also emerged.

Perhaps there needs to be a media fee that supports the maintenance of such non-commercial, alternative media platforms. We need a shift towards the logic of the commons in a commons-based Internet – and why stop there: we need a natural commons, a social commons, and a communication commons. The various groups already engaged in this should form one big movement across Europe to pursue this. Another form of communism is possible today, Christian says.

Ok then.