the measure of control of natural and social productive forces, the level of the organization of labor, the development of needs with respect to possibilities for their fulfilment (especially the relation of what is necessary for the reproduction of life to the ‘free’ needs for gratification and happiness, for the ‘good and the beautiful’), the availability, as material to be appropriated, of a wealth of cultural values in all areas of life (Marcuse 1937a, 72).
The ethico-political is connected to questions of what can and should be because society can be based on the existing preconditions and reduce pain, misery, and injustice (Marcuse 1964b, 106), use existing resources and capacities in ways that satisfy human needs in the best possible way, and minimise hard labour (Marcuse 1964b, 112).
4.6.4. Human Essence and Communications
Media are tools for communication and therefore promise to realise human essence. Capitalist media however subsume this communicative use-value under the logic of exchange-value so that the commodification of content, audiences, users, and access turns them into means for capital accumulation and the difusion of ideologies. Media thereby become individual private property that enhances the wealth of the few by exploiting the labour of the many and reach the masses with ideas often representing particularistic interests and realities. Capitalist social media such as Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube promise a new level of sociality, but at the same time literally commodify sociality, they impose the logic of private property and commodities on online communications.
Non-commercial commons-based and public service online media, such as Wikipedia, non-commercial free software and creative commons projects, sharing platforms that operate on a gift logic, alternative online news media, peer to peer sites, etc. question and transcend the logic of the online commodity and are expressions of human essence and the Internet’s essence. The antagonism between the online commons and the online commodity form is complex because it not just involves users and capitalists, but also artists, whose income partly depends on the profits of media companies who exploit them so that the online freeconomy doesn’t just challenge capitalist profits, but also online wage labour. Radical reforms are the only potential solution to this antagonism, namely radical reforms that make public funds available to alternative projects so that they can employ workers and aford resources. It is a mistake to take an immanent defensive political position that opposes transcendental projects with the argument that they destroy jobs of cultural workers. We need reforms and platforms that strengthen the alternative realities on the Internet so that the latter can increasingly realise its own essence.
Herbert Marcuse and Social Media
141