Smythe bases his analysis on Karl Marx’s (1867) insight that the commodity is capitalism’s elementary form and that abstract labour produces the commodity’s value. Smythe asks in the Blindspot essay: What is the advertising-based commercial media’s commodity? Who produces the commercial media’s commodity? Given that advertisingbased media tend to provide their content gratis as a gift, the information cannot be the commodity.
Smythe gave the following answer:
I submit that the materialist answer to the question – What is the commodity form of mass-produced, advertiser-supported communications under monopoly capitalism? – is audiences and readerships (hereafter referred to for simplicity as audiences). […] Of the off-the-job work time, the largest single block is time of the audiences which is sold to advertisers. (Smythe 1977, 3)
Audiences would work to create the demand for monopoly capital’s commodities (Smythe 1977, 6).
Audiences produce attention that is sold as audience commodity to advertisers. Therefore, according to Smythe, audiences conduct unpaid audience labour that produces the audience commodity and is exploited by advertisers. Smythe stressed that in capitalism, also unpaid labour is exploited and produces value. This focus was in line with developments in autonomous Marxism and Marxist feminism in the 1970s: Autonomous Marxists such as Antonio Negri (1988) stressed that there is a collective social worker who creates value inside and outside the factory and the office. They argued that society in capitalism is a social factory. Marxist feminists stressed that housework (re)produces labour-power as a commodity and is therefore exploited by capital (see, e.g. Dalla Costa and James 1973). Smythe’s work, autonomous Marxism, and Marxist feminism have in common that they stress the importance of the exploitation of unpaid labour for capitalism’s existence.
Chapter Eight | Big Data and Critical Marketing
195
Key Theoretical Approaches