Based on participatory democracy theory, we argue that scholars who suggest that today's Internet is participatory advance an ideology that simply celebrates capitalism without taking into account how capitalist interests dominate and shape the Internet. Web 2.0 is not a participatory system, and it would be better understood in terms of class, exploitation, and surplus value.
Class and the Web
In 1994, Dallas W. Smythe called for a "Marxist theory of communication" (Smythe 1994:258). Graham Murdock and PeterGolding (2005: 61) have argued that "Critical Political Economy of Communications" is critical in the sense of being “broadly Marxisant."Given the dominance of the Internet through capitalist structures, Marxist critical political economy and Marxist theory seem to be suitable approaches for the analysis of Internet prosumption in contemporary capitalism.Such an analysis is grounded in Marx's model of the expanded reproduction process of capital accumulation.
In the three volumes of Capital, Marx analyzes the accumulation process of capital. This process, as described by Marx, is visualized in Figure 13.1.
In the accumulation of capital, capitalists buy labor power and means of production such as raw materials and technologies to produce new commodities,
Class and Exploitation on the Internet
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