Crawford Brough Macpherson’s (1973) theory of participatory democracy is also based on the Marxian notion of essence. He considers the essence of humans as developmental power, i.e. ‘the capacity for rational understanding, for moral judgement and action, for aesthetic creation or contemplation, for the emotional activities of friendship and love, and, sometimes, for religious experience’ (Macpherson 1973, 4). Participatory democracy would be the realisation of human essence, which would presuppose the sublation of private property and the technological maximisation of free time.
4.6.7. Social Media’s Essence and Existence
Capitalist social media are founded on an antagonism between essence and existence: they promise to advance human sociality – sharing, communication, collaboration and community – but by doing so in a particular form they advance the exploitation of human labour, the domination of the capitalist class, capital accumulation that spurs inequality in society (Piketty 2014, Fuchs 2014f), and a particularistic one-dimensional ideology that only stresses social media’s potentials and neglects its negative realities. Social media’s capitalist existence thereby comes into contradiction with the very social essence that it promises. At the same time social media is not pure exploitation, domination and ideology. It advances the contradiction between the class relations and the social relations of communication as means of production. Facebook, Google and Twitter have potentials to enhance human life’s sociality by providing new, more intense and extended forms of sharing, communication, collaboration and community. These potentials are however limited by social media’s capitalist and class character. Truly social media require a non-capitalist framework as well as a qualitative redesign. Social media are an expression of how capitalism produces germs of commonism that turn into its own opposite and stabilises and deepen capitalist exploitation and domination. Social media’s essence can therefore only be realised by a user revolution that struggles for truly social media.
4.7. Conclusion
Herbert Marcuse has grounded a critical theory that is dialectical, practical, humanistic, and oriented on structural contradictions. Such a theory focuses on contradiction through class struggle. It takes ideology – just like the potentials for ideology’s sublation – seriously. It connects the dialectics of capitalism to the dialectics of communication and technology.
Herbert Marcuse and Social Media
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