[ICTs-and-Society] Plenary 4: "Karl.Marx at Internet.com: Cybermarxism and the Critique of the Political Economy of the Internet and Social Media” (Nick Dyer-Witheford, Christian Fuchs)

[Christian Fuchs]

Plenary 4: Karl.Marx at Internet.com: Cybermarxism and the Critique of the 
Political Economy of the Internet and Social Media” (Nick 
Dyer-Witheford, Christian Fuchs)
Nick Dyer-Witheford (University of Western Ontario, Canada): 
Cybermarxism Today: Cycles and Circuits of Struggle in 21st Century 
Capitalism
Christian Fuchs (Uppsala University, Sweden): Critique of the Political 
Economy of Social Media and Informational Capitalism

The task of plenary 4 is to discuss the relevance of Marx and Marxist 
theory for critically understanding the Internet and social media.

The plenary talks by Nick Dyer-Witheford and Christian Fuchs will pose 
questions, such as the following ones. Pre-conference discussion inputs 
on these and other questions are welcome.

What is Cybermarxism? Why is Manuel Castells' network 
society/communication power-approach not a theory and why is it flawed? 
Why is Henry Jenkins' participatory culture-approach flawed? Why do we 
need an engagement with Marx's theory, and not with Castells or Jenkins, 
for critically understanding the Internet and "social media" in 
contemporary capitalism? How are critical political economy and 
Frankfurt School Critical Theory connected? Why are commonly held 
prejudices against these approaches false? What is the role of 
Autonomist Marxism for Critical Internet Studies? Do we live in an 
information society or in a capitalist society? What is the legacy of 
Dallas Smythe for studying digital labour?
How do the two approaches of Critical Cyberculture Studies and Critical 
Theory/Critical Political Economy of the Internet differ and how does 
this distinction parallel the controversy between Cultural Studies and 
Political Economy in Media and Communication Studies.
Why is participatory democracy different from participatory culture? 
What is a true public sphere? What is the role of class, exploitation, 
class struggle, and ideology in relation to Google, Facebook, YouTube, 
Twitter, Wikipedia, WikiLeaks, the Arab Spring, the UK riots, the Occupy 
movement, and Anonymous’ hacktivism?
What is the role of technology in the composition of the working class? 
What is role of cycles of class struggles in capitalism in general and 
today? What are aspects of the global worker who is living, being 
exploited and struggling in contemporary capitalism? What is the role of 
digital labour and the Internet in class composition and cycles of 
struggle? What was the role of the Internet in the financial crisis and 
in the new struggles (Occupy movement, Maghreb and Arab revolutions,
How are social media related to capitalism and class? What are commons 
and what is a commons-based Internet?

**
NICK DYER-WITHEFORD
University of Western Ontario, Canada

Cybermarxism Today: Cycles and Circuits of Struggle in 21st Century 
Capi-talism

ABSTRACT: “Cybermarxism” is a contribution to the study of working class 
composition, a composition which changes historically, both 
technologically – in terms of the division of labour and use of 
machinery in the labour process – and politically, in terms of the 
degree of working class subordination or challenge to capital. Such 
changes in class composition occur in cycles of struggle. Capital 
periodically restructures its command by spatial expansion and 
technological innovation, which undo established forms of working class 
power, but can also catalyze the emergence of new struggles. The last 
half century has seen the decline of “the mass worker” – the 
factory-based labour force, concentrated in capital’s core territories 
of the planetary north-west, politically organized through trades unions 
and mass democratic parties. From the 1970s on, a neoliberal offensive 
decomposed the mass workers assembly-line bases by robotization, 
container transportation and electronic communication, relocating 
industrial production to the periphery and, in the core, a shift to 
service and technical work. The result has been a new class composition, 
the global worker – a collective labour organized not along the assembly 
line of the factory, but along planet spanning supply chains; 
inter-nationalized by the world-scale expansion of capital; diversified 
by an increasingly complex division and integration of labour; 
universalized by the subsumption of women; rendered precarious by a 
massive world-scale reserve army of the unemployed; planet-changing in 
the scale of its activity (think global warming) and finally, and 
intercon-nected by digital communications, which now plays as strategic 
role in the composition and decomposition of the global worker as the 
mass media of broadcast radio and television did to the mass worker. In 
this new composition, digitalization touches nearly every aspect of the 
labour process, albeit in sharply differentiated ways. Within this 
overall process there are, however, also sub-cycles of struggle, which 
directly affect the main organ of digital labour – the Internet. The 
main phases of Net history, from its military beginnings to it hacker 
liberation, through the meteoric rise of the dot.coms to the bursting of 
the Internet bubble and up to the consolidation of a for-profit Web 2.0 
can be understood as a cut and thrust, parry and riposte, between 
capitalist command and new quanta of technical labour. Capital has 
sometimes held the advantage, but has as often either had to play catch 
up, trying to capture innovations initiated out-side its orbit, or to 
deal with the unforeseen, catastrophic consequences of its own apparent 
success in deploying digital technologies to evade unrest. This paper 
will focus of the most recent phase in this contestatory process, 
looking at the central role of the Net both in precipitating the 
financial crisis of 2008 and in disseminating a new global cycle of 
struggles running from the hardware factories of China to the squares 
city squares of North Africa and Europe and to the North American Occupy 
movement.

SPEAKER INFO: Nick Dyer-Witheford is Associate Professor and Associate 
Dean at the Faculty of Information and Media Studies at The University 
of Western Ontario, Canada. His research interests include emergent 
forms of counter-power against high technology, globalized capital, the 
political economy of computer and video game in-dustry as well as 
political economic perspective on the transformation of libraries in 
digital capitalism.

***

CHRISTIAN FUCHS
Uppsala University, Sweden

Critique of the Political Economy of Social Media

ABSTRACT: Do contemporary forms of mediated communication, especially 
social media communication, advance participation or new forms of 
exploitation and domination? What is the role of class, crisis, and 
participatory democracy in contemporary informa-tion society and its 
media landscape? Who benefits from the contemporary Internet and who 
loses? What is the role of critical theory and critical studies for 
finding an-swers to these questions? Given the global crisis of 
capitalism, there is a renewed im-portance and return of interest in the 
topics of class and capitalism and the works of Karl Marx. This 
presentation deals with the question of how “social media” are related 
to capitalism and class.
I will first discuss the relationship of the approach of political 
economy of the media and Frankfurt School critical theory and argue for 
a synthesis of both approaches that takes aspects of commodification and 
capital accumulation, ideology critique, and social struggles into 
account. I will also point out why commonly held prejudices against 
these two approaches are false.
Second, I will deal with the question if we live in an information 
society or in a capi-talist society. I point out that in order to answer 
this question, one should draw on Hegel’s dialectical philosophy, Marx’s 
application of dialectical thinking to the capitalist production 
process, and the Marxian concept of the antagonism between the forces of 
production and class relations of production.
Third, I discuss two prominent approaches that have discussed the role 
of social me-dia in contemporary society: Manuel Castells’ concept of 
communication power in the network society and Henry Jenkins’ notion of 
participatory culture. I argue that both approaches are fundamentally 
flawed and that critical alternatives are needed to un-critical theories 
of social media.
Fourth, I discuss foundations of Critical Internet Studies. I argue that 
there is a differ-ence between Critical Cyberculture Studies and 
Critical Theory/Critical Political Econ-omy of the Internet and that 
this distinction parallels the controversy between Cultural Studies and 
Political Economy in Media and Communication Studies. I am not 
support-ing the argument that the dividing line between these two 
approaches is obsolete, but rather that it has been renewed in Internet 
Studies and discussions about the role of class on the Internet.
The importance of the class concept when discussing social media has 
been shown by the digital labour debate. I will fifth discuss the role 
and importance of Dallas Smythe’s work and the Blindspot debate for 
conceptualizing and analyzing digital labour. I will comment on the use 
of Smythe’s works in existing digital labour approaches and intro-duce 
based on Smythe the notion of Internet prosumer commodification. I will 
argue that Marx’s notion of class and Smythe’s foundational work about 
audience commodifi-cation as process of exploitation shall be revisited 
in the light of works such as Rosa Luxemburg’s theory of imperialism, 
socialist feminist works, Autonomous Marxism (espe-cially the work of 
Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt), and Erik Olin Wright’s class theory.
Sixth, the role of class, exploitation, class struggle, and ideology in 
relation to the me-dia in contemporary capitalism will be analyzed with 
the help of the examples of plat-forms like Google, Facebook, YouTube, 
Twitter, Wikipedia, and WikiLeaks, as well as societal contexts like the 
Arab Spring, the UK riots, the Occupy movement, and An-onymous’ 
hacktivism. I maintain that when speaking about participatory Internet 
and a digital public sphere it is important to remember the origins of 
the concept of partici-patory democracy (Crawford Macpherson, Carole 
Pateman) and of Jürgen Habermas’ concept of the public sphere and their 
grounding in Marx’s analysis of capitalism.
I finally will suggest that we need to strengthen the commons and to 
create a com-mons-based Internet in order to democratize prosumption, 
communication, and society.

SPEAKER INFO: Christian Fuchs is Chair Professor in Media and 
Communication Studies at Uppsala University's Department of Informatics 
and Media. His fields of research are critical theory of digital media 
and society and critical media and communication studies.