4.4.2. Work and Labour
Marcuse stresses the importance of distinguishing between work and labour in capitalism. Work is a social activity that transforms human and social nature (culture) in such a way that new qualities emerge that can satisfy human needs. Human needs don’t just involve food, housing and clothing, but for example also social reproduction through communication, learning and education. Work therefore involves the production of physical use-values (such as food, housing, clothes) and non-physical use-values (such as social relations, communication, happiness) that satisfy human life. In the last instance this means that it is wrong to dualistically separate work and communication as well as the economy and culture. In contrast, a cultural materialistic position assumes that communication is a specific form of work that satisfies the social need of relating to others, being informed, communicating, and forming communities (Fuchs 2015).
Based on these assumptions it becomes evident that social media are tools of digital work – human social activities that enable information, communication, collaboration, and community. In capitalism, however, social media invert their own social essence: Google and Facebook are not predominantly means of communication, but the world’s largest advertising agencies. Social media’s dimension of exchange-value and abstract labour dominates over its dimension of use-value and concrete work. In this context, Dallas Smythe’s (1977) notions of audience commodification and audience labour gain new importance: The users of corporate social media create content, connections, profiles, and behaviour data in order to achieve the social use-values of information, communication and community. Corporate social media commodify this data by selling it to advertisers, who in return can present advertisements targeted to the interest of individual users. Wherever there is a commodity, there is labour producing this commodity and a class relation that organises the exploitation of labour. Therefore corporate social media usage is a form of surplus-value creating and exploited digital labour that yields profits for social media capitalists (Fuchs 2014a, 2014c, 2015).
4.4.3. Labour and Play
Capitalism connects labour and play in a destructive dialectic. Traditionally, play in the form of enjoyment, sex, and entertainment was in capitalism only part of spare time, which was unproductive and separate from labour in time. Sigmund Freud (1961) argued that the structure of drives is characterised by a dialectic of Eros (drive for life, sexuality, lust) and Thanatos (drive for death, destruction, aggression). Humans would strive for the permanent realisation of Eros (pleasure principle), but culture would only become possible by a temporal negation and suspension of Eros and the transformation of erotic energy into culture and labour. Labour would be a productive form of desexualisation – the repression of sexual drives. Freud speaks in this context of the reality principle or sublimation. The reality principle sublates the pleasure principle; human culture sublates human nature and becomes man’s second nature.
Herbert Marcuse and Social Media
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