--- schema_version: "library-reader-v1" source_type: "original_book" title: "Cultural Crowdfunding Platform Capitalism, Labour And Globalization" author: null edition: null publisher: null year: null isbn: null library_document_id: "171eb612-d523-4536-900d-5453dce83960" source_sha256: "f606a5887d9a922652cab2ab9e9a9ca32b5e7986b8e274343285a06aaee0e0ce" pdf_physical_page_count: 128 pdf_physical_page_index_base: 0 range_start: 80 range_count: 10 html_url: "https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/171eb612-d523-4536-900d-5453dce83960?start=80&limit=10" markdown_url: "https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/171eb612-d523-4536-900d-5453dce83960.md?start=80&limit=10" previous_url: "https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/171eb612-d523-4536-900d-5453dce83960.md?start=70&limit=10" next_url: "https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/171eb612-d523-4536-900d-5453dce83960.md?start=90&limit=10" --- # Cultural Crowdfunding Platform Capitalism, Labour And Globalization > 页码规则：PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX 是从 0 开始的权威文件物理页索引；PRINTED_PAGE 是页面中识别出的印刷页码，可能为空，二者不得混用。 ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=80 | PRINTED_PAGE=72 Another example is given in the following exchange between two entrepreneurs, reported by Jouan from one of her observations at an internal seminar for the organization Crowdfunding France: Denis: I really get the feeling that we focus too much on the purely financial side of things, and we forget this whole other aspect of the campaign, and beyond that the project creator of course, and then a community who will contribute a lot of other services apart from funding. It’s not just the financial and budgetary aspect. I know we’re at Bercy [Ministry of the Economy, Finance and Industry], but other arguments need to be heard, just so that we don’t see this as a matter of finance and nothing else […] Lilian: Once again, I would say yes, you’re quite right […]. But at the end of the day, you can say what you want, but crowdfunding is still funding […]. The link between all of this, after all, is that at a some point you get some money. So it’s a diferent way of getting money, but it’s still getting money. No one does all of this for nothing! In the end, how do we measure the success of crowdfunding on a site? Either the funds are released or not, depending on what you’ve put in, and that’s the plain fact of the matter. That’s why people do it. (Jouan 2017: 148) The expression ‘you can say what you want’ refers back to Denis’s comment that the values of mutual aid and the construction of ‘communities’ should be foregrounded, whereas Lilian emphasizes that non-financial support (live capital) and financial support (dead capital) are both ways of obtaining capital. The exchange confirms that the managers of platforms are players, one of whose principal skills consists in being able to ‘say what you want’ (i.e. their propensity for ‘story-telling’). But what is no doubt more interesting is the second part of the quote: ‘Either the funds are released or not, depending on what you’ve put in.’ We might relate this comment to the investment of the platform managers who may or may not make a profit when the funds are released, depending on their work in educating project creators. But we may also, of course, relate it to the project creators themselves, who may or may not obtain the funds they asked for (through direct financial or indirect contributions), depending on what they have ‘put in’, such as labour time in marketing and communication— in short, ideological production as well. Finally, during an interview with the founder of a crowdfunding site for concerts, we asked to what extent he had to encourage artists to keep their social media pages updated. He responded: 72 Cultural Crowdfunding: Platform Capitalism, Labour and Globalization ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=81 | PRINTED_PAGE=73 Very much. Especially social media. I’ve been frustrated at times with the lack of understanding from the music industry of what social media should be […]. I still hammer on constantly when I talk to people about email and I tell them: You’ve got to be on Facebook, you’ve got to do what you can on Facebook. Tag people. Go to the private pages, not to your band pages always. And those […] the people that understand that are usually good […]. And it sort of comes back to a question of coaching people at that. We really had to […]. Because again it brings us back to that idea of most artists just want to be artists. They don’t want to be marketing people or promotion. It seems obvious then that a significant proportion of the activity of managers is dedicated to this managerial and psychological guidance, and therefore to forms of production that are entirely ideological. Consequently we may ask to what extent these players, ultimately, are specialized ideological producers, even if this is not exactly the ‘heart of their job’. And are they producers of cultural and ideological forms in just the same way as the cultural project creators they virtually work with, and whose work they ofer to host and to help them propagate? For we must keep in mind that all of this takes place thanks to means of communication that the managers do not necessarily own—even if they may hold shares in these companies and operate in accordance with the wishes of their financial commissioners. Or is the relation between managers and project creators an asymmetrical one, insofar as the ideological production of the former serves objectively to frame the latter, in the sense defined by Robert Bihr (1989)—to form and to agitate them? We use the latter term advisedly, in reference to Plekhanov’s distinction between propaganda and agitation: the first is the presentation of an important number of generally complex ideas to a small number of people, and the second is the difusion of a few relatively simple ideas to a mass of people (Plekhanov 1892). Conclusion ‘Free your creativity!’ are the words with which KissKissBankBank welcomes every Internet user to arrive on their website. This tagline is aimed primarily at artists, as an invitation to become project creators, but ultimately it can be read as a leitmotif of the managerial and ideological production of such platforms. In an interview with the newspaper L’Humanité on the publication of The New Spirit of Capitalism, Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello declared: ‘We set out from the principle that people are capable by themselves of gauging the gap between what they’re told and what they actually experience, so that capitalism somehow has to provide factual reasons to adhere to its discourse. However, the weakness of capitalism is that it all it has to ofer is the insatiability of its process of accumulation. Since it is profoundly amoral, it must find outside of itself the motives for engagement, and it is critique that often furnishes these motives. Participatory Cultural Platforms and Labour 73 ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=82 | PRINTED_PAGE=74 In efect, the building and the very functioning of platforms of digital intermediation demand that the diferent players who use it, aiming to capture economic value, must silently pass over the reality or the ‘operationality’ of most of the tasks they carry out. The foregrounding of a democratic, innovative, horizontal model (equally prominent in the management discourse of project creators in relation to their ‘communities’ as in the discursive and procedural management of platforms in relation to ‘creative’ workers) is an attempt to mask the logics of predation and competition that emerge more clearly as the number of projects grows. By ‘projects’ here we should understand both the individual fundraising campaigns and the ventures seeking to claim their share from the windfall of digital intermediation. Cultural crowdfunding platforms are obliged to reassure, to motivate and to mobilize by using a judicious mix of digital technology and marketing techniques (more or less innovative depending on configuration and partners), but in this regard they remain dependent on an ideological production that accounts for a significant proportion of the activities of the various managers. We find the counterpart of this intense work of production of cultural forms (Garnham 1990) among the artistic project creators who, with varying degrees of skill and elegance, improvise appeals to persuade their ‘community’ of backers to rally behind their project. The aim of this analysis is not to situate the diferent forms of labour carried out by and on platforms on a single plane. Rather, it is to suggest some elements which let us compare the tasks which the agents connected by these platforms engage in or submit to—whether those players are managers (or employees with diferent degrees of responsibility), project creators, or various external ‘partners’ (primarily funders/donors in the case of crowdfunding campaigns). Each player objectively contributes their time, their capacities and their skills (their live or dead capital) to the general process of production and accumulation. In fact, here it is not just a question of the artist as worker, but also of the mobilization of the artist’s ‘community’. This also has to contribute to the work of production and communication, as well as making a financial contribution. As with individual startups and incubators, this calls for the development of a ‘creative ecosystem’, even while attempting to evacuate the question of labour and its remuneration (and therefore its commercialization). Thus we observe the polymorphism of the entrepreneur, a sort of ‘matchmaker’ at the intersection between players, and between organizations and players, of very disparate origins and influences, whose logics, desires and strategies he must attempt to combine in order to generate economic value. The various facets of their enterprise contribute to the most general development of labour under contemporary capitalism, by participating in what is called, quite incorrectly, the ‘collaborative’ economy, and by sketching out new ‘suggested’ modalities perhaps made possible by even greater flexibility, mobility and insecurity. 74 Cultural Crowdfunding: Platform Capitalism, Labour and Globalization ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=83 | PRINTED_PAGE=75 Notes 1 http://owni.fr/2010/11/24/mymajorcompany-la-fin-de-lhistoire Accessed 24 November 2010. 3 http://financeparticipative.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/Barometre-CrowdFunding-2016.pdf Accessed 5 March 2019. See, for example the article of Stéphane Vromann ‘Les banques et les plateformes de crowdfunding sont-elles compatibles?’, les Echos, 16 December 2016. References Participatory Cultural Platforms and Labour 75 ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=84 | PRINTED_PAGE=76 76 Cultural Crowdfunding: Platform Capitalism, Labour and Globalization ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=85 | PRINTED_PAGE=77 Participatory Cultural Platforms and Labour 77 ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=86 | PRINTED_PAGE=78 78 Cultural Crowdfunding: Platform Capitalism, Labour and Globalization ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=87 | PRINTED_PAGE=NOT_DETECTED Globalization and the Logics of Capitalism Jacob Matthews, Stéphane Costantini and Alix Bénistant This chapter focuses on the development of crowdfunding platforms in sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America, considering this phenomenon from the point of view of a twofold hypothesis: that it participates in the extension towards the South of the market logics that have driven the emergence of digital intermediation platforms in the West, and that it may be an opportunity for hybridisation and fruitful social and cultural alternatives. Indeed, the fundamental question which initially guided our investigations was as follows, two-fold: To what extent is the emergence of crowdfunding in these countries characterized by the replication of the dominant logics which we have analysed in the previous three chapters, and which are characterized as we have seen, on the one hand, by the remanence (and in many respects) an intensification of the capitalist logics at play in the field of communication and culture industries, and on the other hand, by the development of an ideology of collaboration and participation that appears to be particularly efective with regard to relations of production and labour conditions? Or, can we observe specific trends and phenomena pertaining specifically to the local/regional or endogenous economic, social and cultural configurations, which might in turn support the emergence and development of hitherto unseen tools for social development CHAPTER 5 How to cite this book chapter: Matthews, J., Costantini, S. and Bénistant, A. 2019. Globalization and the Logics of Capitalism. In: Rouzé, V. (ed.) Cultural Crowdfunding: Platform Capitalism, Labour and Globalization. Pp. 79–98. London: University of Westminster Press. DOI: https:// doi.org/10.16997/book38.e. License: CC‐BY‐NC‐ND 4.0 ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=88 | PRINTED_PAGE=80 and the authentic diversification of cultural exchanges and flows – in particular platforms inspired either by emancipatory and post-colonial political movements or by vernacular structures of mutual assistance? Introductory Remarks This chapter contains four sections. The first one develops several introductory remarks, taking into account the specificities of the research contexts in comparison with those covered in the previous chapters. The second gives a brief survey of the diferent categories of players present in the field of crowdfunding (and particularly crowdfunding for cultural production), and their distinctive strategies and logics. The third provides a clearer understanding of the discourses produced and/or propagated by the players involved in crowdfunding and its potential development. The last section addresses a specific aspect of the discourse and practice of the players in crowdfunding: eforts at ‘pedagogy’ and ‘education’ aimed at local populations. As a first introductory remark, let us state that, in line with Christiaan de Beukelaer (2015), we have not limited our analysis to cultural productions (contents or services) resulting from the productive activity of the cultural and communications industries. Like de Beukelaer, we have broadened our focus to include cultural expressions that are the product of activities that may not necessarily be understood as a part of the sectors or production cycles associated with these industries. We have also taken into consideration the question of the informal economy: given its importance in sub-Saharan Africa, and in certain Latin American countries, we must understand it not as a problem but as a component of cultural industries as they emerge and develop in the South. A question then arises: does the development of platforms for collaborative production and financing contribute to the formalization of this economy? Or are informal modes of production and value creation instead perpetuated on such platforms, presenting hybrid or even alternative models to Western norms? A second introductory clarification bears upon the problematic of the flows of culture and ideology between North and South. De Beukelaer emphasizes that, when the development of so-called ‘creative’ industries is presented as a vector for the realization of ‘cultural potential’ in the countries of the South, a subliminal neoliberal discourse becomes overt (De Beukelaer 2015: 79). He continues: The discourse of the creative economy is contrarily colonizing the cultural imagery, primarily through the perceived orthodoxy of the conditions for creation and circulation, rather than through the influx of cultural expressions, which is crucial in the cultural imperialism thesis. (De Beukelaer 2015: 129) 80 Cultural Crowdfunding: Platform Capitalism, Labour and Globalization ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=89 | PRINTED_PAGE=81 It seemed important to us to assess this argument. We might ask whether the cultural imperialism of our times resides less in the superficial messages of ‘content’ than in those vaster and simultaneously more efective cultural forms that are the ideological ‘grand discourses’ of collaboration, creativity, sustainable development, diversity, empowerment, and so on. We have therefore tried to verify how far the development of these apparatuses is accompanied by the production or dissemination of ‘grand discourses’. Nevertheless—this is our third point—we set out from the principle that social financing (like other uses of digital intermediation platforms) can also be used within the framework of vernacular or autonomous cultural expressions that self-identify as resistant or alternative—in relation to either authoritarian or semi-authoritarian political regimes, or ideological and socioeconomic logics imported from the Western North, including the discourses and practices of the ‘creative’ economy. In parallel, we should recall that, contrary to the Western configuration, much cultural production in Africa (and in the Andean countries) falls outside of any appropriation through intellectual property rights, which are the cornerstone of the ‘creative’ industries. This historical process of the ‘enclosure’ of culture by intellectual property (Nixon 2014) remains incomplete in the countries of the South, and has met with tenacious resistance movements, which make for interesting cases of the incarnation of the commons within the cultural field (Lobato 2010). These regions may potentially ofer prefigurations of postcapitalist forms of organization, free of the asymmetrical power relations characteristic of Western ‘collaborative’ apparatuses. We have kept this hypothesis in mind in our empirical research. But we have also been attentive to evidence which confirms the inverse hypothesis: that the Global South is ahead of the old Western societies, but this time as the ‘avantgarde of the market epoch’ (Comarof and Comarof 2012)—a distinction due especially to the absence of labour regulations, permitting a wholesale ‘uberization’ of the relations of production. A final introductory observation involves vernacular crowdfunding systems in these regions (including tontine, iquib, pasanku, and susu) and their distant cousin, the international monetary and financial system. In the interview extract below, the co-founder of the South African platform Backabuddy mentions traditional devices of community solidarity and mutual aid, while emphasizing the platform’s dependency on financial flows from the North: In African culture, there has always been a spirit of ubuntu which, while based on mutual aid within the community, has never yet been translated into the form of charitable giving—which leaves us still largely dependent on external sources for fundraising. These statements raise wider issues than that of cultural production in itself. Using cultural crowdfunding as one of his examples, de Beukelaer emphasizes that the expansion of digital technology incontestably brings about possibilities that were previously unimaginable. As he remarks, though, the emergence of intermediation platforms in this domain has taken place mostly within the framework of partnerships with Western economic players (as well as foreign governmental agencies and international organizations), and has generally profited international markets (De Beukelaer 2015: 89). Studying cultural crowdfunding leads us to the question of the presence of Western economic (and political) players in sub-Saharan Africa, in particular, and their control or influence over financial flows, policies (social, cultural and land use planning), and modes of labour organization (cultural or otherwise). On a macroeconomic level, the economist Costas Lapavitsas notes that, ‘during the 2000s, capital has flowed from poor to rich countries on a large scale … Even impoverished Africa contributed to the net flow of capital from poor to rich countries’ (Lapavitsas 2009: 118). Lapavitsas shows how this process was largely driven by the expansion of Western banks into developing countries over the course of the same period: ‘Significant proportions of total banking assets are now foreign-owned even in low income countries, most notably in Africa where foreign ownership constitutes more than two thirds of banking assets in ten countries’ (Lapavitsas 2009: 122). In the context of our research this question became unavoidable, insofar as cultural crowdfunding (and, by extension, the crowdfunding of ‘technological’ and ‘entrepreneurial’ projects) seems in many regards like a Trojan horse for significant developments in fintech. Globalization and the Logics of Capitalism 81 下一段：[继续读取](https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/171eb612-d523-4536-900d-5453dce83960.md?start=90&limit=10)