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# Critical Theory of Communication New Readings of Lukács, Adorno, Marcuse, Honneth and Habermas in the Age of the Internet

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Marcuse expresses the dialectical sublation of technology and society also as a reconstruction that helps healing society’s wounds: ‘Perhaps technology is a wound that can only be healed by the weapons that caused it: not the destruction of technology but its re-construction for the reconciliation of nature and society’ (Marcuse 1979a, 224).

This means that a truly free society has to abolish repressive uses of the computer, e.g. as automated killing technology operating drones and warplanes, and to transform specific repressive designs of computer technologies. Social media technologies such as Facebook and Twitter are based on complex terms of use that enable the commodification of personal data and the exploitation of users’ digital labour (Fuchs 2011, 2014a, 2014c, 2015). Commons-based social media in contrast also support and do not abolish social networking. They require a redesign of social media in such a way that they are privacyenhancing, advertising-free, user-controlled, not-for-profit, and allow the users a say in formulating the terms of use. Social media are thereby dialectically sublated: they lose their dominative character and simultaneously retain, realise and expand their liberating potentials.

Herbert Marcuse died in 1979 at the age of 81. He did not live long enough to see the rise of the World Wide Web (WWW). When discussing the computer, he therefore predominantly spoke about automation, which reflected a major issue of his times, namely the question – if the computer in production brings about a more repressive or a more liberated economy. Marcuse’s answer was dialectical: he saw the liberating, democratic and common potentials of the computer that were limited by the repressive realities of capitalism and class. Today computer technology has become a networked and mobile means of information, communication and collaboration (Fuchs 2008). Marcuse could of course not analyse mobile phones, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. His critical thought and concepts are however still well suited to be one of the methodological foundations for a critical theory of the Internet, digital and social media.

4.3. Herbert Marcuse, Hegelian Dialectics and Social Media

4.3.1. Soviet Marxism’s Passive Dialectics

Stalinist, Maoist and negative dialectics underestimate the role of human subjects in dialectical processes (Fuchs 2011, chapter 2). They reduce dialectics to a structuralist-functionalist scheme that dominates the will of humans who, it is argued by dogmatic dialecticians, cannot shape the dialectic. ‘Soviet Marxism subjugates the subjective to the objective factors in a manner which transforms the dialectical into a mechanistic process’ (Marcuse 1955a, 89; see also Marcuse 1958). In order to avoid a deterministic dialectic, a conception is needed that is based on the dialectic of subject and object, human actors and social structures. Such a conception can be found implicitly in the philosophical writings of Marx and was in the twentieth century explicitly formulated against deterministic interpretations of Marx by Marcuse. Marcuse opposed passive dialectics by active dialectics – dialectics as the art of ‘not getting captured by the contradictions, but to translate them possibly into directed moving forces’ (Haug 2007, 12).

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4.3.2. Objective Dialectics

Marcuse pointed out that for Marx capitalist crisis is a negating moment of economic structures, by which capitalism develops itself. Crisis is for him an aspect of objective dialectics:

Capitalist society is a union of contradictions. It gets freedom through exploitation, wealth through impoverishment, advances in production through restriction of consumption. The very structure of capitalism is a dialectical one: every form and institution of the economic process begets its determinate negation, and the crisis is the extreme form in which the contradictions are expressed (Marcuse 1941a, 311–312).

Marcuse considered private property and alienated labour as objective contradictions of capitalism:

Every fact is more than a mere fact; it is a negation and restriction of real possibilities. Wage labor is a fact, but at the same time it is a restraint on free work that might satisfy human needs. Private property is a fact, but at the same time it is a negation of man’s collective appropriation of nature. […] The negativity of capitalist society lies in its alienation of labor (Marcuse 1941a, 282).

4.3.3. Subjective Dialectics

Marcuse wanted to avoid deterministic dialectics and to bring about a transition from a structural-functionalist dialectic towards a human-centred dialectic. Therefore he argued that capitalism is dialectical because of its objective antagonistic structures and that the negation of this negativity can only be achieved by human praxis.

The negativity and its negation are two diferent phases of the same historical process, straddled by man’s historical action. The ‘new’ state is the truth of the old, but that truth does not steadily and automatically grow out of the earlier state; it can be set free only by an autonomous act on the part of men, that will cancel the whole of the existing negative state (Marcuse 1941a, 315).

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Necessity happens

only through societal praxis. [...] In the Marxian dialectic, thought, subjectivity, remains the decisive factor of the dialectical process. [...] The result [of the development of society] depends on the conditions of possibilities for struggle and the consciousness that develops thereby. This includes that its bearers have understood their slavery and its causes, that they want their own liberation and see ways of how to achieve this. [...] The necessity of socialism depends on the societal situation of the proletariat and the development of class consciousness (Marcuse 1966, 224f).

The antagonisms of capitalism necessarily create crises and are founded on class relations. The sublation of capitalism and the realisation of human essence can only be achieved based on necessity and the possibilities conditioned by necessity and created by the free activity of humans that try to transform possibilities into concrete reality. The dialectic of society is shaped by a dialectic of freedom and necessity.

Not the slightest natural necessity or automatic inevitability guarantees the transition from capitalism to socialism. […] The revolution requires the maturity of many forces, but the greatest among them is the subjective force, namely, the revolutionary class itself. The realization of freedom and reason requires the free rationality of those who achieve it. Marxian theory is, then, incompatible with fatalistic determinism (Marcuse 1941a, 318–319).

4.3.4. Determinate Negation

Hegel pointed out with his concept of the determinate negation that the negative is at the same time positive, that contradictions do not dissolve into nothingness, but into the negation of its particular content. Negation is ‘the negation of a specific subject matter’ (Hegel 1812, §62). The new contains the old and more, therefore it is richer in content (Hegel 1812, §62). In order to stress the importance of human subjects in the dialectic of society, Marcuse argued that determined negation is ‘determinate choice’ (Marcuse 1964b, 221). Marcuse did not, as incorrectly argued by Hans Heinz Holz (2005, 109, 499), refuse the notion of determinate negation, but rather embedded this concept into subject-object-dialectics. Also Wolfgang Fritz Haug (1995, 690) mistakes Marcuse when claiming that the latter assumed that the ideology of capitalism surpassed the determinate negation historically. In the passage that Haug criticises – the epilogue to Reason and Revolution – Marcuse does not, as claimed by Haug, say that determinate negation is impossible today, but rather that repressive ideology enables capitalism ‘to absorb its negativity’ (Marcuse 1941a, 437) and that at the same time the ‘total mobilization of society against the ultimate liberation of the individual […] indicates how real is the possibility of this liberation (Marcuse 1941a, 439). The determinate negation of capitalism would be objectively possible, but would be forestalled subjectively, which would be a reality, but no necessity.

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Marcuse later worked out this dialectical hypothesis in more depth in One-Dimensional Man (Marcuse 1964b). It is far from any deterministic logic. The historical reality of fascism and the Second World War curbed Marcuse’s belief that revolution would take place soon, but he was never a pessimist or defeatist. In the late 1960s, the emergence of the student movement convinced Marcuse that there are not only potentials for liberation in late-capitalist society, but actual political forces that aim at and work for liberation.

For Marcuse, only specific contradictions that relate to material and mental resources and the degree of freedom in a societal situation are determined. These are objective aspects of dialectics, based on which alternative possibilities for development result. Humans make their own history based on given conditions. Freedom is comprehended and apprehended necessity. Humans can shape society under given conditions if they have understood necessity, the possibilities that are inherent in society.

[The] determinate negation of capitalism occurs if and when the proletariat has become conscious of itself and of the conditions and processes which make up its society. […] None of the given alternatives is by itself determinate negation unless and until it is consciously seized in order to break the power of intolerable conditions and attain the more rational, more logical conditions rendered possible by the prevailing ones (Marcuse 1964b, 222–223).

4.3.5. The Dialectic of the Objective Dialectic and the Subjective Dialectic

Conscious human activity within existing conditions is as a subjective factor an important aspect of society’s dialectic. Marcuse understood that the concept of human practice is needed for conceiving dialectics in a non-deterministic form and that thereby the notion of freedom can be situated in dialectical philosophy. It is a wrong claim that there is a tendency in Marcuse’s works to ‘dissolve the objective contradiction into subjective disagreement’ and that he neglects immanent contradictions of capitalism (Schiller 1993, 115–116). For Marcuse, objective contradictions condition, constrain, and enable subjective action, and objective reality is the result of human practices’ realisation of possibilities that are constitutive features of objective reality. Dialectics are for Marcuse based on the dialectics of subject/object and freedom/necessity. Dialectics are the unity of the subjective dialectic and the objective dialectic. By having elaborated such a meta-dialectic, Marcuse was able to work against the ideas and political practice of deterministic dialectics. Ideology, structural and direct violence can forestall determinate negation, which means that society tends to become totalitarian and contradictions are suppressed. But no matter how hopeless a situation may seem, there is always still the possibility for determinate negation. If negating forces are forestalled, it becomes the task of political praxis to restore the conditions for change.

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4.3.6. Hegelian Dialectics and Communications

A critical theory of the media, communication, culture, technology, and the Internet requires a dialectical-philosophical foundation and therefore a renewed engagement not just with Marx, Marcuse and Lukács, but also Hegel (Fuchs 2014e). Hegel understands the dialectic in the Science of Logic as a process, in which a posited reflection-in-itself externalises itself into a negative other so that there is what Hegel calls external reflection. The determining reflection is ‘the unity of positing and external reflection’ (Hegel 2010, 351). The sublation of the contradiction between one thing and another thing determines the emergence of what Hegel terms ‘Gesetzsein’ (Hegel 1813– 1816/1969, 32) – the ‘posited’ (Hegel 2010, 351). Positedness is a reflectionin-and-for-itself:

It is positedness – negation which has however deflected the reference to another into itself, and negation which, equal to itself, is the unity of itself and its other, and only through this is an essentiality. It is, therefore, positedness, negation, but as reflection into itself it is at the same time the sublatedness of this positedness, infinite reference to itself.’ (Hegel 2010, 353).

But for Hegel, the sublation that is positedness repels itself in an absolute recoil so that it posits its own presuppositions and starts the dialectical process all over again (Fuchs 2014e). For Hegel, the world is dialectical and therefore dynamic and unfinished.

Marcuse, in his own magnum opus Reason and Revolution, showed how to best dialectically interpret Hegel’s dialectical laws of reflection in order to posit the dialectic of reflection-in-itself, reflection-in-another, and positedness as the dialectic of the subjective dialectic and the objective dialectic, in which the ‘negativity and its negation are two diferent phases of the same historical process, straddled by man’s historical action’ (Marcuse 1941a, 315).

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In a communication process, no matter whether it takes place online or ofline, an individual posits his/her own identity by relating himself/herself in and through a symbolic interaction process to another person, who in return posits his/her identity by communicatively responding. So identity as the individual reflection-in-itself is only possible as the communicative reflectioninto-another. This communicative negation is negated in situations, where the communicative process is sublated, either by a rupture that causes the social relationship’s breakdown (e.g. a quarrel between friends that ends the relationship, death, etc.) or the emergence of a positive new quality (e.g. an occasional acquaintance turns into a friendship). Such a sublation in a social relation is a communicative reflection-in-and-for-itself. It however does not stop, but only exists in and through further communication between humans so that the sublation of a social relation to a new quality in an absolute recoil goes back to the start and is posited as a new dialectic of the communicative reflection-in-itself and the reflection-into-another, etc. The result of communication in an absolute recoil becomes the starting point for further communication. Communication posits its own presuppositions so that the communicative social relation between humans develops in and through communication.

The dialectic is not a teleological process because humans make their own history based on the conditions they are posited in and that they posit. The only teleology in society is that humans have the capacity to set their own goals, which is conditioned, i.e. enabled and constrained, by the sum total of the social relations they are part of. In modern society, these conditioning relations are class and power relations. The Internet in capitalism is an antagonistic dialectical system, in which the individual, property, capital, the commodity, and the market are reflected into the social, the commons, labour, the gift, and the community that in a recoil reflect themselves into their others so that there is an antagonistic recoil of mutual positing of opposites. The resulting antagonisms constitute the Internet’s actuality, development, and potentiality that face power asymmetries. Given these asymmetries, only politics of radical reformism can make a socialist sublation more likely. The common and the capitalist Internet are both realities with asymmetric powers that are contained in each other as the capitalism of the commons-based Internet and the commonism of the capitalist Internet.

4.3.7. Six Dialectics

Marcuse understood Hegelian dialectics as a) the dialectic of the subject and the object, b) the dialectic of the individual and society, c) the dialectic of the subjective and the objective dialectic of capitalism, d) the dialectic of chance and necessity, e) the dialectic of essence and appearance, f) the dialectic of essence and existence. These dialectics can also be found in the realm of contemporary social media.

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a) The Dialectic of the Subject and the Object

Human beings as subjects use social media technologies for creating, sharing and communicating information online and for engaging in collaborative work and the formation of communities. Through these subjective practices, they create and recreate an objective world: they objectify information that is stored on computers, servers, cloud storage devices, etc. and that is communicated to others. It thereby brings about new meanings and joint understandings and misunderstandings of the world. These objective changes of the world condition, i.e. enable and constrain, further human practices that are organised ofline, online and in converging social spaces. Social media are based on a dialectic of human practices and the social structures that these practices create and recreate so that structures condition practices and practices produce structures.

b) The Dialectic of the Individual and Society

In capitalism, individual use-value, i.e. the satisfaction of human needs, can mainly be achieved by purchasing commodities, which necessitates exchangevalue, money and the selling of one’s labour power. Individual satisfaction of needs can only be achieved by entering social relations of exchange and exploitation. Capitalism’s antagonism between use-value and exchange-value is an antagonism between individual needs and the social class relations. On corporate social media, the relationship of the individual and the social is highly antagonistic: social media exist only through social relationships that enable sharing, communication, collaboration, and community. But these social relations are today at the heart of the realisation of neoliberal performance principles that render social media platforms perfect tools for individual selfpresentation, individualistic competition, and the individual accumulation of reputation and contacts. It is no accident that ‘social’ media are called YouTube, MySpace and Facebook and not OurTube, CollectiveSpace and Groupbook. It is all about ‘you’ as an individual and not ‘us’ as a collective. The individualistic private property character of social media – the fact that user data is sold as a commodity to advertisers  – is hidden behind social media’s social appearance: you do not pay for accessing Twitter, Facebook, Google or YouTube. The obtained use-value seems to be the immediate social experience these platforms enable. The commodity character of personal data does not become immediately apparent because there is no exchange of money for use-values that the user experiences. The commodity fetishism thereby becomes inverted (Fuchs 2014a, chapter 11): the social seems the immediate positive experience on social media, whereas the individualistic logic of money and the commodity remains hidden from the users.

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c) The Dialectic of the Subjective and the Objective Dialectic of Capitalism

Social media is embedded into the dialectic of capitalism’s objective and subjective dialectics. It reflects capitalism’s objective contradictions. One of these antagonisms is the one between real and fictitious value. Financialisation can easily result in the divergence of stock market values and profits. Such a divergence was at the heart of the 2000 crisis of the ‘new economy’. Financialisation is a response to contradictions of capitalism that result in capitalists’ attempts to achieve spatial (global outsourcing) and temporal (financialisation) fixes to problems associated with overaccumulation, overproduction, underconsumption, falling profit rates, profit squeezes, and class struggles (Harvey 2003, 89; Harvey 2005, 115). The ideological hype of the emergence of a ‘Web 2.0’ and ‘social media’ that communicated the existence of a radially new Internet was primarily aimed at restoring confidence of venture capital to invest in the Internet economy. The rise of Google, Facebook, Twitter, Weibo and related targeted advertising-based platforms created a new round of financialisation of the Internet economy with its own objective contradiction: in a situation of global capitalist crisis corporate social media attract advertising investments because companies think targeted advertising is more secure and eficient than conventional advertising (Fuchs 2014c). Financial investors share these hopes and believe in social media’s growing profits and dividends, which spurs their investments of financial capital in social media corporations. The clickthrough-rate (the share of ads that users click on in the total number of presented ads) is however on average just 0.1 per cent (Fuchs 2014c), which means that on average only one out of 1,000 targeted ads yields actual profits. And even in these cases it is uncertain if users will buy commodities on the pages the targeted ads direct them to. The social media economy involves high levels of uncertainty and risk. A social media finance bubble is continuously building itself up. If a specific bankruptcy or other event triggers a downfall of the stock market value of an important social media company, the bubble could suddenly explode because investors may lose confidence in the business model and this may quickly spread and intensify. Financial crises involve complex dialectics of objective contradictions and subjective behaviour.

d) The Dialectic of Chance and Necessity

Capitalism’s objective contradictions with necessity bring about crises. The exact causes and times of crises are however contingent and therefore not predetermined. This means for the capitalist Internet economy that its next crisis will come, but that the point of time and users’ reactions to it are not predetermined. Marcuse’s notion of determined negation as determinate choice is of particular importance in this respect: The next crisis of the Internet economy will come and may result in new qualities of the Internet. We do, however, not know how these changes will look like. They depend on the choices that users collectively make in the situation of crisis. The future of the Internet is dependent on the outcomes of class struggles. If users let themselves be fooled by the ideologies advanced by marketing gurus, capitalists, the business press, neoliberal politicians, and scholars celebrating every new capitalist hype, then no alternatives to the capitalist Internet may be in sight in and after the next crisis of the Internet. If they, however, struggle for an alternative, non-commercial, non-capitalist, non-profit, commons-based and therefore truly social Internet, then alternatives may become possible.

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These examples sufice to show the relevance of Marcuse’s Hegel interpretation for a critical-dialectical understanding of the contemporary Internet. I will discuss dimensions e) the dialectic of essence and appearance and f) the dialectic of essence and existence in more detail in sections 5 (ideology) and 6 (essence).

4.4. Herbert Marcuse and Digital Labour on Social Media

4.4.1. Three Dimensions of Work

Marcuse (1933, 123) argues that the modern economic concept of labour as wage labour has influenced the general understanding of work and has resulted in ‘the narrowing of the concept’. He distinguishes between a general form of labour (work) that is an essential and foundational category that describes productive human activities in all societies and the economic concept of labour typical for modern societies.

Work has for Marcuse three dimensions: Arbeiten (working as a process), das Gearbeitete (the object of work) and das zu-Arbeitende (the goal of work). Marcuse argues that work has three important characteristics: duration, permanence and burden. The essential duration of work means that it is never finished, work is an ‘enduring being-at and being-in-work’ (ibid., 129). Work is permanent because an object as the result of production is ‘worked into the “world”’ (ibid., 130). That work involves a burden does not necessarily mean for Marcuse that it is toil, but the abstinence from individual pleasure: in work ‘man is always taken away from his self-being and toward something else: he is always with an other and for an other’ (ibid.). Marcuse stresses that work is not just producing a world of goods, but also organises the ‘economics as life’ (ibid., 134). The ‘first and final purpose’ of work is to ‘bring about the being of Dasein itself, in order to ‘secure’ its duration and permanence (ibid., 135).

Marcuse points out the duality of human activity in capitalism that is founded on an antagonism of use-value and exchange-value so that human needs can only be satisfied via the mediation through the commodity form and class relations. Human activity is therefore in capitalism simultaneously concrete and abstract – work and labour.

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4.4.2. Work and Labour

Marcuse stresses the importance of distinguishing between work and labour in capitalism. Work is a social activity that transforms human and social nature (culture) in such a way that new qualities emerge that can satisfy human needs. Human needs don’t just involve food, housing and clothing, but for example also social reproduction through communication, learning and education. Work therefore involves the production of physical use-values (such as food, housing, clothes) and non-physical use-values (such as social relations, communication, happiness) that satisfy human life. In the last instance this means that it is wrong to dualistically separate work and communication as well as the economy and culture. In contrast, a cultural materialistic position assumes that communication is a specific form of work that satisfies the social need of relating to others, being informed, communicating, and forming communities (Fuchs 2015).

Based on these assumptions it becomes evident that social media are tools of digital work – human social activities that enable information, communication, collaboration, and community. In capitalism, however, social media invert their own social essence: Google and Facebook are not predominantly means of communication, but the world’s largest advertising agencies. Social media’s dimension of exchange-value and abstract labour dominates over its dimension of use-value and concrete work. In this context, Dallas Smythe’s (1977) notions of audience commodification and audience labour gain new importance: The users of corporate social media create content, connections, profiles, and behaviour data in order to achieve the social use-values of information, communication and community. Corporate social media commodify this data by selling it to advertisers, who in return can present advertisements targeted to the interest of individual users. Wherever there is a commodity, there is labour producing this commodity and a class relation that organises the exploitation of labour. Therefore corporate social media usage is a form of surplus-value creating and exploited digital labour that yields profits for social media capitalists (Fuchs 2014a, 2014c, 2015).

4.4.3. Labour and Play

Capitalism connects labour and play in a destructive dialectic. Traditionally, play in the form of enjoyment, sex, and entertainment was in capitalism only part of spare time, which was unproductive and separate from labour in time. Sigmund Freud (1961) argued that the structure of drives is characterised by a dialectic of Eros (drive for life, sexuality, lust) and Thanatos (drive for death, destruction, aggression). Humans would strive for the permanent realisation of Eros (pleasure principle), but culture would only become possible by a temporal negation and suspension of Eros and the transformation of erotic energy into culture and labour. Labour would be a productive form of desexualisation – the repression of sexual drives. Freud speaks in this context of the reality principle or sublimation. The reality principle sublates the pleasure principle; human culture sublates human nature and becomes man’s second nature.

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