Is the financing of projects by supposedly numerous and unknown donors, in a horizontal community-based fashion, really revolutionary? If we look at the dictionary definition of ‘revolutionary’, applying it to crowdfunding platforms implies that they ‘overturn established principles; transform modes of thinking and action and procedures of fabrication’ by allowing collaboration and forms of horizontal participation. The use of the term is not neutral. In the case of crowdfunding, it refers to a wider conception. Texts such as those of CerPHI (Centre d’Étude et de Recherche sur la Philanthropie) [Cazemajou] 2013), with evocative titles like ‘Crowdfunding as an Innovative Technology for Financing and Promoting Business Projects’, emphasize the revolutionary character of these platforms:
It can be argued that crowdfunding [is] an innovative financial service; the main idea is based on cooperation in the form of the collective funding of diferent kinds of projects to achieve set objectives, implemented through capital formation, which comes in small amounts from a large not previously known number of people on the basis of open competition using Internet technologies. (Hryhoruk and Prystupa 2017)
Berg Grell, Marom and Swart (2015) add that we must embrace this revolutionary character by integrating crowdfunding as a new instrument, whether internal or external, in the service of businesses—an instrument that promotes cohesion, team spirit and competition.
The revolutionary dimension of crowdfunding, then, seems to rest upon the innovative nature of the way in which it generates collective cooperation to finance projects on the basis of open competition. This tells us everything we need to know. All of these terms illustrate the necessity of a ‘permanent revolution’.4 But this is not the revolution of the emancipation of the people and the proletariat, reinventing themselves on an egalitarian basis, which Marx and Engels, and later indeed Trotsky proposed, rather, it is that of capitalist exploitation, an economic, ‘open’, ‘innovative’, ‘competitive’ revolution which occurs in a context of cyclical crises.
Crowdfunding: An Old Story Reinvented
As we have seen, discourses about crowdsourcing and crowdfunding both conceptualize and facilitate the creation of economic models that transform existing relations between the sphere of production and that of consumption5, formerly organized on a ‘top-down’ model. This strategic recuperation of horizontal models of action, creation and sharing is legitimated through references to historical forms, which the players of crowdfunding attach themselves to and rely upon. Two mutually reinforcing stories of crowdfunding are told: one about ideology, described above, which is based on the history of a collaborative Internet; and one that identifies it with older practices like fundraising. Whatever the references and examples used, this historicization of the phenomenon raises challenges for the various players involved. It seeks to secure the legitimacy of these practices through their naturalization, but also and above all to promote the ‘pioneering’ contribution and ‘innovative’ character of these digital platforms.
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Cultural Crowdfunding: Platform Capitalism, Labour and Globalization