--- schema_version: "library-reader-v1" source_type: "original_book" title: "Digital Capitalism" author: null edition: null publisher: null year: null isbn: "2021022153" library_document_id: "50b7f922-b940-4a05-8eb0-c4dc0d8ec9ed" source_sha256: "746bfc1e2253e11737253daad663d7176077b6b54343c2c35f6f132990452fbc" pdf_physical_page_count: 343 pdf_physical_page_index_base: 0 range_start: 160 range_count: 10 html_url: "https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/50b7f922-b940-4a05-8eb0-c4dc0d8ec9ed?start=160&limit=10" markdown_url: "https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/50b7f922-b940-4a05-8eb0-c4dc0d8ec9ed.md?start=160&limit=10" previous_url: "https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/50b7f922-b940-4a05-8eb0-c4dc0d8ec9ed.md?start=150&limit=10" next_url: "https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/50b7f922-b940-4a05-8eb0-c4dc0d8ec9ed.md?start=170&limit=10" --- # Digital Capitalism > 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=160 | PRINTED_PAGE=146 Lefebvre reminds us of the antagonistic character of technology in an antagonistic society. The question is if and how information technology is shaped in ways and shaping ways that advance capitalism or socialist self-management, where social groups control their “conditions of existence, of living and surviving” (CEL3, 153) Based on Lefebvre’s CEL, the next section deepens the engagement with the notion of ideology 5.5 The Communication of Ideology There are representations of everyday life that take on the form of culture, knowledge, and ideologies (CEL2, 60–61). The critique of everyday life reveals the ideological character of such representations. It studies both the “empirical modality for the organization of human life” and the “representations which disguise this organization” (138). For Lefebvre (CEL1), Marxism is “a critical knowledge of everyday life” (148) that tears away “the veil of ideologies” (147), especially it is a critique of individualism, mystifications, mystified consciousness, money, needs, labour, and bourgeois freedom (148–175). Lukács (1971) argues that “the daily life of bourgeois society” is shaped by “unthinking, mundane reality” (101), where the human being’s existence is “reduced to an isolated particle and fed into an alien system” (90) and where reality “appears to be unmediated” (Schein der Unmittelbarkeit [literally: appearance of immediacy], 163). Lefebvre (CEL1, 152) argues that fetishism and alienation in capitalism create individualism and private consciousness, individuals who are “deprived of truth” and are “separated from […] concrete human social reality, deprived of a consciousness of the practical, historical and social whole. The fetishism of capitalism’s immediacy confronts human beings in everyday life. Everyday life is full of commodities, money, capital, and other things. Class relations and relations of dominations disappear behind the immediacy of things. Capitalist society, exploitation, and domination thereby appear to be normal and natural. Capitalist society makes humans forget their own historicity. The “fetish of the pure objectivity of economic relations obscures the fact that they are really relations between” humans (Lukács 1971, 240). While Merrifield (2006, 150–151) stresses the differences between Lefebvre and Lukács, Gardiner (2000, 79) and Trebitsch (1991, xvii-xix) point out the similarities. Lukács and Lefebvre were both influenced by Hegel’s dialectical philosophy and Marx’s theory of alienation. They are both Hegelian, praxisoriented Marxist philosophers. Denying the parallels that undoubtedly exist between these two thinkers is a disservice to strengthening Hegelian, humanist Marxism today, an approach to which both Lukács and Lefebvre contributed. 146 Theorists ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=161 | PRINTED_PAGE=147 The critique of ideology and fetishism in everyday life is a common feature of the theories of Lefebvre and Lukács. Both established critical analyses of ideology, fetishism, alienation and gave significant attention to praxis and social struggles. Both thinkers have an interest in showing how critique and class struggle can undo fetishistic, reified consciousness and fetishism as such. Lefebvre and Lukács contributed both major insights to the development of Marxist humanism. For Lefebvre, Marxist humanism means to create and struggle for conditions where not simply possession of objects is important but that humans enjoy “the’richest’ relationship of joy or happiness with the ‘object’ – which can be a thing or a living being or a human being or a social reality” (CEL1, 156). Lukács points out that Marxist humanism means the total development of humanity, society, and human potentials, which implies the creation of a socialist democracy: It is therefore the purpose of socialist democracy to penetrate the totality of human existence and to present its social nature as the product of the activity and participation of all men, stretching from everyday life to the most important question of society. (Lukács 1988, 102) Lefebvre and Lukács share Marx’s understanding of socialism and humanism as “the real appropriation of human essence by and for man” (Marx, 1844, 296) so that the human being becomes a total human being that realises its full potentials (Marx, 1844, 299). For Lefebvre (CEL2), ideology is “utilitarian and fetishist practice, which manipulates things” (243). Ideology is empirical consciousness that separates things from “activity and social relations” (243). It takes that which exists for granted and does not recognise its historical character (243). “It champions fetishism as valid consciousness” (243). Ideology is “fetishism in general” (CEL3, 53). Ideologies “are made of understanding and interpretation […] of the world plus a certain amount of illusion, and might bear the name of ‘culture’” (1971, 31). Ideology is part of culture. It is a form of culture. It is illusionary culture and the culture of illusion. Empirical consciousness is Lefebvre’s term for what Lukács characterises as reified consciousness. Reified consciousness disregards “contradiction and antagonism” Chapter Five | Communication in Everyday (Digital) Life 147 The Communication of Ideology ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=162 | PRINTED_PAGE=148 (Lukács 1971, 10) and the totality. It fetishises “quantifiable ‘things’” (Lukács 1971, 90) such as capital, money, and commodities. Lefebvre stresses that commodity logic is “bound up with the general language of quantification” (CEL3, 56) that “quantification has conquered society in its entirety” (131) and that the “qualitative has virtually disappeared” (131) in everyday life. Lukács and Lefebvre are both critics of positivism. They oppose dialectical thought to the positivist ideology. Positivism neglects and denies contradictions and the negative. In digital capitalism, digital positivism has emerged as a new ideology that fetishises big data and computing (Fuchs 2017). In this ideology, the collection of massive amounts of data and computing technology in general are seen and presented as the solutions to economic, political, and cultural problems. Digital positivism abstracts from alienation and the antagonisms of capitalist society. Especially the second volume of Critique of Everyday Life tries to show how everyday life is manipulated by advertising, the capitalist media, and the capitalist press. There are strong parallels between Lefebvre’s critique, Debord’s (1967) critique of the spectacle, Horkheimer and Adorno’s (2002) critique of the culture industry, and Marcuse’s (1964/1991) critique of one-dimensional man (see also Merrifield 2006, 25–26, 30–36; Schmidt 1972). For example, Lefebvre’s insight that the leisure and culture industry create “organized leisure and culture” (CEL3, 82) that is homogeneous, fragmented, and hierarchised (CEL3, part 1, chapter 8) resonates with Horkheimer and Adorno’s (2002, xi, xii) insight that the culture industry creates an “administered world”. For Lefebvre, socialism in contrast to capitalist everyday life means the strengthening of the right to difference, equality in difference, and unity (CEL3, part 1, chapter 8). Taken together, this means he argues for a programme of unity in diversity as opposed to unity without diversity and diversity without unity. Lefebvre speaks of “the manipulation of the consumer and of his needs by advertising and propaganda” (CEL2, 146) and says that new technologies and consumer capitalism have colonised everyday life (11). He extends the notion of alienation from labour to leisure (CEL1, 39) He points out that “‘consumer society’ manipulates needs; the masters of production are also the masters of consumption, and they also produce the demands for which and according to which they are supposed to be producing” (CEL2, 223). There is not a self-regulating market driven by demand and supply but a capitalist system that the capitalist class consciously controls and manipulates in order to accumulate capital. Capitalist leisure is dominated by images and films that promise to distract and “compensate for the difficulties of everyday life” (CEL1, 33), especially those that exist in respect to labour. The culture industry produces illusory reverse images that create a “false world” that presents itself as true and tries to replace “real unhappiness by fictions of happiness” (CEL1, 35). 148 Theorists ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=163 | PRINTED_PAGE=149 In the age of digital capitalism, a significant share of everyday life time is spent on social media platforms such as YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. In 2020, the average Internet user aged between 16 and 64 years spent 6 hours and 43 minutes per day on the Internet, 3 hours and 18 minutes watching television, 2 hours and 24 minutes on social media, 1 hour and 26 minutes listening to music on an online streaming platform, and 1 hour and 10 minutes playing video games (We Are Social 2020, 31). In April 2020, the most-watched YouTube video of all times was Luis Fonsi’s music video “Despacito”4. Social media is primarily about entertainment, advertising, and commerce. The difference to the traditional culture industry is that users actively search, browse, and click for content that is quickly consumed, is very short, and is processed and distributed at very high speed. Compensation and distraction online take place in a more active manner than in the mass media, with a high volume of produced, distributed, and consumed content that is processed at very high speed; with little time spent on a single cultural unit such as a tweet, a Facebook posting, a YouTube video, or an Instagram image than in the traditional mass media; and with interactive possibilities for user-generated content, likes, and comments. Lefebvre criticises capitalist television as a form of ideology. Television in capitalism “allows every household to look at the spectacle of the world” is a form of “noncommunication”, “non-participation”, and “receptive passivity”; it presents everyday life as “unusual or picturesque and overloading it with meaning” (CEL2, 76). Using highly sophisticated techniques, mass communications bring masterpieces of art and culture to everyone; […] Modern techniques make taste more sophisticated, raise the level of culture, instruct, educate, and bring an encyclopaedic culture to the people. At the same time, they make their audience passive. They make them infantile. They “present” the world in a particular mode, the mode of spectacle and the gaze, with all the ambiguity we have already noted and which we continue to emphasize: nonparticipation in a false presence. (223–224) In his discussion of advertising, Lefebvre argues that in capitalism, everyday time becomes “both homogeneous and dispersed. Work time falls into line with family-life time and leisure time, if not vice versa” (CEL2, 79). There are certain parallels here between Lefebvre and Dallas Smythe’s (1977) argument that in advertising, audiences are workers who produce an audience commodity that advertisers sell to clients. The consumption of advertising takes place in everyday life and during all daytime. Everyday spaces such as the home where leisure time and family-life time take place are the factories where advertising capital exploits audiences as workers who create attention to ads. In the age of Facebook, audience labour has taken on a new form. Facebook, YouTube, and other Internet platforms that are based on targeted ads exploit users’ digital labour that creates online content, attention, data, meta-data, social relations, and attention (Fuchs 2021b). Users’ and audiences’ leisure time is labour time that creates advertising companies’ profits. There is today a general tendency that labour time absorbs leisure time so that humans work long hours from a variety of places, including the home, cafés, public spaces, means of transportation, the Internet, the mobile phone, and so forth. The blurring of the boundaries between labour/leisure, the office/the home, production/consumption, labour/play, public/private, and so forth has resulted from the capitalist colonisation of everyday life so that the logic of profit, accumulation, capital, and labour determines ever more spaces and time of human life. Chapter Five | Communication in Everyday (Digital) Life 149 The Communication of Ideology 4 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List\_of\_most-viewed\_YouTube\_videos, accessed on 29 April 2020. ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=164 | PRINTED_PAGE=150 Lefebvre argues that everyday life is the place where exploitation takes place. He argues that consumer capitalism extends alienation and exploitation from the economy into culture: According to this theory, daily life replaces the colonies. Incapable of maintaining the old imperialism, searching for new tools of domination, and having decided to bank on the home market, capitalist leaders treat daily life as they once treated the colonized territories: massive trading posts (supermarkets and shopping centres); absolute predominance of exchange over use; dual exploitation of the dominated in their capacity as producers and consumers. (CEL3, 26) Lefebvre’s argument that consumer capitalism means the exploitation of producers and consumers resonates with the contemporary development in digital capitalism that on the capitalist Internet, consumers of information become producers of information who produce online content and social relations. Google and Facebook exploit consumers of the Internet who are, while consuming targeted-ad based online platforms, producers of these companies’ surplus-value. As examples of how to challenge ideology, Lefebvre (CEL1, 10–28) discusses Charlie Chaplin’s humour, the estrangement effect/distancing effect (Verfremdungseffekt) in 150 Theorists ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=165 | PRINTED_PAGE=151 Brecht’s epic theatre, and Roger Vailland’s writings. These are strategies of making audiences aware of alienation by estranging the estranged aspects of everyday life. Adbusters is an example of dialectical ideology critique from the contemporary age of digital capitalism that Lefbvre would certainly approve of. Adbusters (https:// www.adbusters.org/) is a collective that criticises capital and consumer culture by radically affirming the logic of advertising and commodity consumption. It criticises commodity culture through the language and use of commodity culture. Examples are subvertisements, critiques of advertisements that take on the format of ads and are spread online. Figure 5.2 shows an example subvertisement. It builds on a popular Apple ad that presents consumers of Apple hardware as hip, modern, and futureoriented. The subvertisement uses the same aesthetic but adds an e-waste pile in order to criticise Apple’s complicity in waste production. 5.6 Conclusion This chapter has shown that Henri Lefebvre’s Critique of Everyday Life can inform a critical, dialectical, humanist theory of communication and society in respect to several Chapter Five | Communication in Everyday (Digital) Life 151 Conclusion ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=166 | PRINTED_PAGE=152 aspects: the relationship of the economy and culture, communication in everyday life, communication in capitalism, and the communication of ideology. 5.6.1 The Relationship of the Economy and Culture Lefebvre argues that the rise of information technology undermines the orthodox and Stalinist assumption that there is an economic base and a cultural and political superstructure. The economy operates as the production of ideas in culture. Culture operates as knowledge goods and knowledge work in the economy. Culture is material, economic, and non-economic. Lefebvre partly uses himself the language of base and superstructures and speaks of the immaterial character of culture, which contradicts his criticism of Marxist orthodoxy. 5.6.2 Communication in Everyday Life Lefebvre is a critic of structuralism, who stresses the importance of practices in society. Everyday life refers to social practices within the totality of society. It is a dialectic of structures and practices, of what Lefebvre terms the living (le vivre) and the lived (le vécu). Everyday life is an important category for a dialectical theory of society and communication. What we need to add to Lefebvre’s theory is the role of communication as the process of the production of sociality that mediates the dialectic of the individual and society, individual practices/thought and social structures, the lived and the living. Lefebvre introduces the notion of the semantic field. The semantic field is the space where the dialectic of communicative practices and means of communication takes place. 5.6.3 Communication in Capitalism Lefebvre stresses the dialectical multidimensionality of society and alienation, which allows us to distinguish between the economic, political, and the cultural as dialectically interacting and interpenetrating dimensions of society. He points out that alienation and accumulation extend beyond the economy into society at large. We can identify three types of alienation: exploitation (economic alienation), domination (political alienation), and ideology (cultural alienation). In capitalism, alienation takes on the form of capital accumulation in the economy, the accumulation of decision-power in the political system, and the accumulation of reputation in the cultural system. It creates inequalities and therefore exploited and oppressed groups and classes, of which the working class is the largest and most important one. Based on, among others, Lefebvre, Marx, and Lukács, a critical theory of communication can be grounded in a critical theory of alienation and capitalism. There are economic, political, and cultural dimensions of the alienation of communication. In digital capitalism, alienation takes on the economic form of the antagonism between digital labour and digital capital, the political form of the antagonism between digital dictators and digital citizens, and the cultural form of the antagonism between digital ideologues and digital humans. 152 Theorists ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=167 | PRINTED_PAGE=153 Lefebvre reminds us of the predominantly capitalist character of digital technologies. In digital capitalism, we find ideology that mystifies information and the digital. Computing has potentials to deepen capitalism and class and to advance socialist selfmanagement. It shapes and is shaped by society. 5.6.4 The Communication of Ideology For Lefebvre, the critique of everyday life is also a critique of ideology. Lefebvre’s concept of empirical consciousness parallels Lukács’ notion of reified consciousness. Both are today relevant for the critique of digital positivism. Lefebvre’s critique of consumer capitalism shares many features of the works of Max Horkheimer, Theodor W. Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, and Guy Debord. For Lefebvre, everyday life is a colony of capitalism where uneven development takes place in multiple forms. Lefebvre’s insight that consumer capitalism not just exploits workers in the factory and the office but extends exploitation into leisure time and consumption resonates with Dallas Smythe’s concept of audience labour and the theory of digital labour that sees users of targeted-ad based Internet platforms as digital workers who are exploited by digital capital. Henri Lefebvre’s Critique of Everyday Life is an important influence for the foundations of a critical theory of communication in general and a critical theory of communication in and beyond digital capitalism. References Chapter Five | Communication in Everyday (Digital) Life 153 References ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=168 | PRINTED_PAGE=154 154 Theorists ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=169 | PRINTED_PAGE=155 Chapter Five | Communication in Everyday (Digital) Life 155 References 下一段：[继续读取](https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/50b7f922-b940-4a05-8eb0-c4dc0d8ec9ed.md?start=170&limit=10)