This chapter has tried to show that although Herbert Marcuse’s works predated Facebook, Twitter, Google and similar online platforms, his critical theory can today provide an epistemology, method and political impetus for understanding and changing capitalist social media’s antagonisms, class structures and ideologies.
The reality of social media in capitalism shows the ‘the tension between potentiality and actuality, between what man and things could be and what they are in fact’ (Marcuse 1937a, 69). Social media points towards, and forms together with other technologies, a material foundation of a democratic socialist society, in which the means of physical and informational production are collectively controlled. Social media’s reality contradicts this potential and the human essence of co-operation by fostering new forms of exploitation and ideology.
Critical theory is ethical. It has a ‘concern with human happiness’ (Marcuse 1937b, 135). It is a critique of domination and exploitation. It holds that ‘man can be more than a manipulable subject in the production process of class society’ (Marcuse 1937b, 153). Corporate social media fosters human play, sociality, fun and happiness in appearance only because it at the same time hides the reality of exploitation. It inverts the commodity fetishism so that the commodity logic is hidden behind social benefits that foster the exploitation of digital labour. At the same time, the use-value dimension of social media points towards commonist forms of ownership, control, democracy and communication and has anticipatory character. These commonist potentials are however limited by the capitalist reality of social media.
If, for instance, it is said that concepts such as wages, the value of labor, and entrepreneurial profit are only categories of manifestations behind which are hidden the ‘essential relations’ of the second set of concepts, it is also true that these essential relations represent the truth of the manifestations only insofar as the concepts which comprehend them already contain their own negation and transcendence – the image of a social organization without surplus value. All materialist conceptions contain an accusation and an imperative. When the imperative has been fulfilled, when practice has created men’s new social organization, the new essence of man appears in reality (Marcuse 1937a, 86).
The concept of social media is a manifestation of class-based society. It hides its own potential and ideologically presents the reality of the exploitation of digital labour as truth, play, fun, democracy, wealth, revolution, rebellion, and participation. Social media as a concept however also points towards its own unrealised essence – a truly social and co-operative society that can never be attained under capitalist rule and in a class-based society. The capitalist reality of social media contradicts its own essence.
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