Final draft version of:

Fuchs, Christian. 2015. Dallas Smythe and digital labor. In Routledge

companion to labor and media, ed. Richard Maxwell, 51-62. New York:
Routledge.

<page 51:>
5

Dallas Smythe and Digital Labor

Christian Fuchs
Introduction
Dallas Smythe1 established the notions of the audience commodity and
audience labor in 1977 for understanding the political economy of
commercial media using advertising as their capital accumulation model. His
article has resulted in a foundational debate of Media and Communication
Studies that involved Smythe2, Graham Murdock3 (1978) and Bill Livant4. In
recent years there has been a very significant rise of references to Smythe’s
concepts of audience labor/commodification in academic works5. This
increasing interest has on the one hand to do with a return of a stronger
interest in Marx’s works and Marxist political economy as well as the rise of
social media platforms such as Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Weibo,
Pinterest, Instagram, Blogspot, VKontakte, LinkedIn, Tumblr etc that use
targeted advertising as their capital accumulation model6.
Explaining how this form of capital accumulation model rises has
resulted in the development of the category of digital labor7.

Audience Labor
The analysis and critique of advertising played a special role in Dallas
Smythe’s works. He conducted studies of advertising time on commercial
television and found that advertising “occupies about one of every five
minutes of big city television program time and about of every four minutes
of smaller-city program time“8.

Smythe criticized critical and administrative scholars for focusing narrowly

on commercial media in terms of messages, information, images, meaning,
entertainment, orientation, education, manipulation and ideology.9

Smythe asked the question who produces the commodity of the commercial,
advertising-financed media. He said that “audiences and readerships”10 are
the workers of the commercial media. They create the “demand for
advertised goods” and by consuming media reproduce “their own labor
power”11.

Dallas Smythe’s notion of audience labor challenged the idea that one can
only be exploited if one earns a wage in a factory. He opened up
the notion of exploitation for the age of consumer culture. His notion also
challenges the idea that the home and the private sphere are insulated against
exploitation, an insight that he shares with Marxist feminism that since the
1970s has stressed the importance of considering reproductive labor as value-
generating and therefore exploited by capital. Mariarosa Dalla Costa <page
52:> and Selma James challenged the orthodox Marxist assumption that
reproductive work is “outside social productivity.”12

Orthodox-Marxist criticisms of Marxist feminism echo the polemical

criticism that Michael Lebowitz and others marshalled against Smythe.
Michael Lebowitz argues that Smythe’s approach is only a “Marxist-
sounding communications theory.”13 Marxism would assume that “surplus
value in capitalism is generated in the direct process of production, the
process where workers (having surrendered the property rights over the
disposition of their labor- power) are compelled to work longer than is
necessary to produce the equivalent of their wage. Perhaps it is for this
reason that there is hesitation in accepting the conception that audiences
work, are exploited, and produce surplus value – in that it is a paradigm quite
different to the Marxist paradigm”14. Media capitalists would compete “for
the expenditures of competing industrial capitalists,” help to “increase the
commodity sales of industrial capitalists” and their profits would be “a share
of the surplus value of industrial capital” 15. Smythe’s audience commodity
approach would advance an “entirely un-Marxian argument with un-Marxian
conclusions”16. In relation to Sut Jhally and Bill Livant’s approach that is
building on the one of Smythe, Richard Maxwell argues that “Jhally and
Livant misapplied certain propositions in the theory of value to a realm
which may be relatively autonomous from the discipline of wage- labor” and
that “wage-labor” is “the necessary element of labor control and exploitation
in the trans-valuation of televiewing.”17 Related approaches have argued that
not the audiences of commercial media are exploited, but the statisticians
working for audience rating companies18.

The immediate theoretical and political consequences Lebowitz’s logic of

argumentation are the following ones:
1) Commercial media are subsumed to industrial capital.
2) Slaves, house workers and other unpaid workers are not exploited.
3) The wage and non-wage work performed under the command of media
capital is unproductive work. Media companies cannot exploit workers
because they create products and services that are part of the circulation
sphere of capitalism.

Graham Murdock19 pointed out in the Blindspot Debate that the audience
commodity is just one of several political economies of the media besides
the sale of content and a strong public service tradition
in Europe. He also stressed that corporate media have an ideological role in
capitalism. In his 2013 reflection on his debate with Dallas Smythe 20,
Murdock argued that the notion of the audience commodity would be of
crucial relevance for understanding exploitation in the digital age. The digital
media landscape would however not just be shaped by commodification, but
have huge potentials for the emergence of digital commons. Graham
Murdock points out the importance of re-considering the notions of the
audience commodity and audience labor in the context of digital media,
which points towards the necessity of the category of digital labor for
understanding the political economy of advertising-financed digital media.

<page 53:> Digital Labor

The digital labor debate has in its first phase focused on understanding the
value creation mechanisms on corporate social media such as Facebook,
YouTube and Twitter. Authors have for example discussed the usefulness of
Karl Marx’s labor theory of value21, how the notion of alienation shall be
used in the context of digital labor22, or if and how Dallas Smythe’s notion of
audience labor can be used for understanding digital labor23. The general task
has been how to best understand and conceptualize that users under real-
time far-reaching conditions of commercial surveillance create a data
commodity that is sold to advertising clients and who exactly creates the
value that manifests itself in social media corporations’ profits.
Studying digital labor is now in a second stage, where it gives
attention to theorizing digital labor in all its forms.

An important question that has arisen within the digital labor debate is if it
suffices to focus on the social media world and to limit the notion of digital
labor to paid or unpaid work in the online realm (or even narrower to limit
the term to users’ unpaid labor on social media). We access social media on
laptops and mobile phones that tend to be assembled in China. Hon Hai
Precision (also known as Foxconn) is a Taiwanese company that was the
139th largest company in the world in 201424. According to the CNN Global
500 2012 list25, Foxconn was the fifth largest corporate employer in the
world in 2012. In 2011, Foxconn had enlarged its Chinese workforce to a
million, with a majority being young migrant workers who come from the
countryside26. Foxconn assembles e.g. the iPad, iMac, iPhone, Kindle,
various consoles (by Sony, Nintendo, Microsoft). When 17 Foxconn workers
attempted to commit suicide between January and August 2010 (most of
them “successfully”), the topic of bad working conditions in the ICT
assemblage industry became widely known.
This circumstance was followed up with a number of academic works that
show that workers’ everyday reality at Foxconn includes low wages, working
long hours, frequent work shift changes, regular working time of over 10
hours per day, a lack of breaks, monotonous
work, physical harm caused by chemicals such as benzene or solder paste,
lack of protective gear and equipment, forced use of students from
vocational schools as interns (in agreement with the school boards) that
conduct regular assembly work that does not help their studies, prison-like
accommodations with 6-22 workers per room, yellow unions that are
managed by company officials and whom the workers do not trust, harsh
management methods, a lack of breaks, prohibitions that workers move, talk
or stretch their bodies, workers that had to stand during production,
punishments, beatings and harassments by security guards, disgusting
food27. The Foxconn example shows that the existence and usage of digital
media not just depends on the labor of software engineers and content
producers. Digital labor covers a broad range of labor working under
different conditions, including slave miners working in African conflict
mines, smelters, hardware assemblers, software engineers, digital media
content producers, eWaste workers, or users of commercial digital media.

Given the complex, networked and transnational reality of labor required for
the existence and usage of digital media, a concept of digital labor is needed
that can reflect these realities. One needs to go beyond cultural-idealist
approaches that only focus on user-generated content and see how content
production is grounded in industrial and agricultural labor and how the
appropriation of nature in this respect interacts with culture. For adequately
studying digital labor and digital media in general, <page 54:> a cultural-
materialist approach is needed28. Given these preliminary assumptions, one
can provide a definition of digital work and digital labor29:
 Digital work is all activity that creates digital media or
uses them for creating use-values that satisfy human
needs.
 Digital labour is alienated digital work: it is alienated from
itself, from the instruments and objects of labor and from
the products of labor. Alienation is alienation of the
subject from itself (labor-power is put to use for and is
controlled by capital), alienation from the object (the
objects of labor and the instruments of labor) and the
subject-object (the products of labor).

The digital labor debate has been accompanied a resurgent interest in Dallas
Smythe’s concept of audience labor and audience commodification for
explaining the role of targeted advertising on social media 30. In this context
notions such as prosumer labor31 have been used.

Prosumer labor on social media differs in a number of respects from

audience labor in broadcasting:
 Creativity and social relations: Broadcasting audiences produce
meanings of programs, whereas social media prosumers not just
produce meanings, but also content, communications with other users
and social relations.
 Surveillance: Broadcasting requires audience measurements, which are
approximations, in order to sell audiences as commodities. Social media
corporations monitor, store and assess all online activities of users on
their platforms and also on other platforms. They have very detailed
profiles of users’ activities, interests, communications and social relations.
Constant real-time surveillance of users is an inherent feature of
prosumers labor on capitalist social media. Personal data is sold as a
commodity. Measuring audiences has in broadcasting and print
traditionally been based on studies with small samples of audience
members. Measuring and monitoring user behavior on social media is
constant, total and algorithmic32.
 Targeted and personalised advertising: Advertising on capitalist social
media can therefore more easily target user interests and personalise
ads, whereas this is more difficult in commercial broadcasting.
 Algorithmic auctions: Algorithms organise the pricing of the user data
commodity in the form of auctions for online advertising spaces on the
screens of a specific number of users. The ad prices on social media vary
depending on the number of auctioneers, whereas the ad prices in
newspapers and on radio and TV are set in a relatively fixed manner and
are publicly advertised. User measurement uses predictive algorithms (if
you like A, you may also like B because 100,000 people who like A also
like B)

Digital Labor and Productive Labor

The digital labor debate has been accompanied by the question how feasible
Karl Marx’s labor theory of value is for understanding digital labor. And
often-overlooked aspect is that this theory is a theory of time in capitalism
and that digital labor needs therefore to be situated in the temporalities of
capitalism33. One criticism brought forward against those who argue that
users of corporate social media platforms that use targeted advertising are
exploited has been that advertising as part of the sphere of circulation that
only realizes,
<page 55:> but does not create value, and that users’ activities are one or
several of the following34: unproductive, no labor at all, less productive, a
consumption of value generated by paid employees in sectors and companies
that advertise on social media, or an expression of a system where what
appears as profits are rents derived from the profits of advertisers. These
opinions are not new, but just a reformulation of Lebowitz’s criticism of
Smythe.

The crucial category used in such discussions is Marx’s notion of

productive labor. There are passages, where Marx argues that only
wageworkers who produce surplus-value and capital that is accumulated
is productive labor. For example:
“Every productive worker is a wage-laborer, but not
every wage-laborer is a productive worker. Whenever
labor is purchased to be consumed as a use-value, as a
service and not to replace the value of variable capital
with its own vitality and be incorporated into the
capitalist process of production - whenever that
happens, labor is not productive and the wage-labourer
is no productive worker”35.
Or:
“Productive labour, therefore, can be so described when
it is directly exchanged for money as capital, or, which is
only a more concise way of putting it, is exchanged
directly for capital, that is, for money which in its
essence is capital, which is destined to function as
capital, or confronts labour-power as capital. The phrase:
labour which is directly exchanged for capital, implies
that labour is exchanged for money as capital and
actually transforms it into capital”36.

Marx’s thoughts on this topic are however inconsistent, so there

cannot be one “true” interpretation of what productive and
unproductive labor is. The interpretation of productive labor
that I follow is one that stresses the notion of the
Gesamtarbeiter (collective worker).

Marx stresses that work is not an individual process. The more co- operative
and networked work becomes, which is the consequence of the technification
of capitalism and the rise of knowledge in production, the more relevant
becomes Marx’s third understanding of productive labor: productive labor as
labor of the collective worker.
The notion of the collective worker becomes ever more important with the
development of fixed constant capital and productivity 37. Marx has set out
this concept both in Capital, Volume 1, and the Results of the Immediate
Production Process. He argues that all work is productive that is “an organ of
the collective labourer, and to perform any one of its subordinate
functions”38 and that with the development of co-operation an “ever
increasing number of types of labour are included in the immediate concept
of productive labour” so that “the aggregate worker” creates “an aggregate
product which is at the same time a quantity of goods”39.

Figure 5.1 visualizes the economic relationships of Facebook (and other

corporate social media platforms using targeted advertising)
and its advertising clients.

<page 56:>

Figure 5.1: The economic relationship of Facebook and its

advertising clients.

A commodity has a use-value, value and symbolic value. A company’s

production workers create the basic use-value that satisfies human needs.
These activities take an average combined number of labor hours. Labor is
the substance of value, labor time its measure and magnitude. In order to sell
its commodity, a company tries to give positive meanings to it and to
communicate these meanings to the public’s members whom it tries to
convince that this goods or service can enhance their lives and that they
should therefore buy this commodity and not a comparable one offered by
another company.
Most commodities have independent from their physical or informational
nature a cultural component that is created by cultural labor. The cultural
dimension of a commodity is necessary ideological: it appeals to
consumers’ imagination and wants to make them connote positive images
and feelings with the idea of consuming this commodity.
The creation of a commodity’s symbolic ideology is a value-creating activity,
but not a use-value generating activity. The use-value of a commodity can be
physical and/or informational: we have cars for satisfying the need of driving
from A to B, we listen to music for satisfying our aesthetic desires, etc. The
exchange-value of a commodity is the relationship in which it is exchanged
with another commodity, normally money: x commodity A = y commodity B
(money). Symbolic value establishes a link and mediates between use- value
and exchange-value, it helps accomplishing the exchange, in which
consumers obtain use-values and capitalists money. Wolfgang Fritz Haug 40
speaks in this context of the commodity’s use-value promise: The sales and
advertising ideology associated with a commodity promises specific positive
life enhancement functions that the commodity brings with it and thereby
conceals the commodity’s exchange-value behind promises. The symbolic
commodity ideology promises a use-value beyond actual consumption, an
imaginary surplus and surplus enjoyment. These promises are detached from
the actual use-value and are therefore a fictitious form of value.

Saying that the cultural labor of branding, public relations and creating
commodity advertisements creates symbolic value is not detached from the
notion of economic value. Rather value here precisely means that for the
creation of this symbolic dimension of the commodity labor time is invested.
It is therefore no wonder that almost all larger companies have their own
public relations departments or outsource public <page 57:> relations and
advertising to other companies. Paying the circulation workers employed in
such departments or companies needs to be planned and calculated into the
price of commodities.

Consumers give specific meanings to the commodities they buy and

consume. They thereby construct consumption meaning and in doing so can
react to use-value promises in different ways:

1) They can share these ideologies and buy the commodities because they
hope the promise is an actual use value;
2) they can deconstruct the use-value promise as ideology and refuse
buying the commodity;
3) they can deconstruct the use-value, but nonetheless buy the
commodity for other reasons.

For communicating commodity ideologies to consumers, companies need to

buy advertisement spaces in commercial media. Commercial media link
commodity ideologies to consumers, they “transport” ideologies to
consumers, although it is unclear and not determined how the latter react and
if the confrontation with commodity ideologies results in actual purchases.
Facebook and other corporate social media are advertising companies that
sell advertising space and
user data as commodities to clients who want to present commodity
ideologies to users and hope that the latter buy their commodities. Facebook
has paid employees that organise the development, maintenance and
provision of its software platform. On December 31, 2012, Facebook had
4619 paid employees.41 But Facebook cannot sell advertising space without
its users. Without them, it would be a dead platform that would immediately
cease to exist. Between March and June 2013, more than a billion people,
roughly 43 percent of all internet users, had accessed Facebook.42 43

But are Facebook users productive workers? They are certainly not less
important for Facebook’s capital accumulation than its paid employees
because without users Facebook would immediately stop making profits and
producing commodities. Facebook’s commodity is not its platform that can
be used without charges. It rather sells advertising space in combination with
access to users. An algorithm selects users and allows individually targeting
ads based on keywords and search criteria that Facebook’s clients identify.
Facebook’s commodity is a portion/space of a user’s screen/profile that is
filled with ad clients’ commodity ideologies. The commodity is presented to
users and sold to ad clients either when the ad is presented (pay-per-view) or
when the ad is clicked (pay-per-click).
The user gives attention to his/her profile, wall and other users’ profiles and
walls. For specific time periods parts of his/her screen are filled with
advertising ideologies that are with the help of algorithms targeted to his/her
interests. The prosumer commodity is an ad space that is highly targeted to
user activities and interests. The users’ constant online activity is necessary
for running the targeting algorithms and for generating viewing possibilities
and attention for ads. The ad space can therefore only exist based on user
activities that are the labor that create the social media prosumer commodity.

Facebook clients run ads based on specific targeting criteria, e.g. 25-35 year
old men in the USA who are interested in literature and reading. What
exactly is the commodity in this example? It is the ad space that is created on
a specific 25-35 year old man’s screen interested in e.g.
Shakespeare while he browses Facebook <page 58:> book pages or other
pages. The ad is potentially presented to all Facebook users who fall into this
category, which amounted to 27,172,420 on June 3 rd, 2013. What is the value
of the single ad presented to a user? It is the average labor=usage time
needed for the production of the ad presentation.
Let’s assume these 27,172,420 million users are on average 60 minutes per
day on Facebook and in these 60 minutes 60 ads are presented to them on
average. All the time they spend online is used for generating targeted ads. It
is labor time that generates targeted ad presentations. We can therefore say
that the value of a single ad presented to a user in this example is one minute
of labor/usage/prosumption time.
So Facebook usage is labor. But is it productive labor? Marx sees
transportation labor that moves a commodity in space-time from
location A to location B, which takes a certain labor time x, as
productive labor: What

“the transport industry sells is the actual change of place

itself….The productive capital invested in this industry thus
adds value to the products transported, partly through the value
carried over from the means of transport, partly through the
value added by the work of transport”44.

The value generated by transporting a commodity from A to B is therefore x

hours. The symbolic ideology of a commodity first needs to be produced by
special ad and public relations employees and is in a second step
communicated to potential buyers. Advertising therefore involves production
and transportation labor. Advertising production does not create a physical
commodity, but an ideological dimension of a commodity – a use-value
promise that is attached to a commodity as meaning. Advertising transport
workers do not transport a commodity in physical space from A to B, they
rather organize a communication space that allows advertisers to
communicate their use-value promises to potential customers. Facebook’s
paid employees and users are therefore 21st century equivalents of what Marx
considered as transport workers in classical industry. <page 59:> They are
productive workers whose activities are necessary for “transporting” use-
value promises from companies to potential customers. Marx associated
transport with communication as comparable forms of work. On Facebook
and other social media platforms, transportation labor is communication
labor.

Dallas W. Smythe argued that it is a specific feature of audience labor that

audiences “work to market […] things to themselves” 45. Facebook users
constantly work and constantly market things to themselves.
Their usage behavior constantly generates data that is used for targeting ads.
All Facebook usage is productive labor, with the exception of those cases,
where users block advertising with the help of ad block software, which
probably only a minority does. Facebook usage labor ads value to the
commodity that is sold by Facebook’s ad clients. Practically this means that a
lot of companies want to advertise on Facebook and calculate social media
advertising costs into their commodity prices. Nielsen46 conducted a survey
among advertisers and advertising agencies. 75 percent of the advertisers and
81 percent of the agencies that participated in the survey indicated that they
buy targeted ads on social media. This shows the importance of social media
for advertising today.

The production workers of Facebook’s clients produce use-value and

value. Their public relations and advertising employees (or the workers in
the companies to which this labor is outsourced) produce value and a use-
value promise as symbolic value. Facebook’s users produce the value and
the communication of this use-value to themselves. They are productive
workers. That they create value means that their labor time objectifies itself
in commodities: the ad clients’ employees objectify their labor in the
commodity that is marketed to Facebook users, whereas Facebook users
objectify their labor in the prosumer commodity that is sold to Facebook’s
clients. User labor is thereby also objectified in the commodity that is
marketed and potentially sold to users themselves.

Conclusion
I have in this chapter revisited Smythe’s notion of the audience commodity
and audience labor in light of the corporate social media industry that uses
targeted advertising. A prevalent criticism is that Facebook users are not paid
and therefore do not create value, but only consume the value created by paid
employees in companies that advertise on Facebook. I have argued against
this idea that Marx has a broader notion of productive labor that is based on
the notion of the Gesamtarbeiter (collective worker). On Facebook, the
boundaries between production and consumption blur and consumption
becomes the production of use-values both for the users (information and
sociality) and advertisers (user data). Facebook users are ideological transport
workers that transport advertising ideologies by their network usage to
themselves.

Conceptualizing somebody as unproductive is not just an analytical term,

it is also a slur and quite emotive. Nobody wants to be called unproductive
as it carries the connotation of being useless and parasitic. Saying that
Facebook users do not create value and that Facebook is a rentier that
consumes the value produced by wageworkers employed by other
companies politically implies that users are unimportant in class struggles
in the digital age.
Wageworkers in the non-digital economy are seen as the true locus of
power. Hence recommended political measures to be taken focus on how to
organize these workers in unions, parties or other organizations and
struggles for higher wages and better wage labor conditions. Users and
Facebook are seen as being outside the locus of class struggle or only as
something that unions and parties can also use in wage labor struggles.

Facebook users are productive transport workers who communicate

advertising ideologies that make use-value promises. Their activities are
productive labor. Politics for the digital age need to consider users as
political subjects. Unions, organizations of the Left and struggles are nothing
that should be left to wageworkers, but need to be extended to digital media
users. Pirate Parties have understood this
circumstance better than the orthodox wage-labor fetishistic parts of the Left,
but they have not well understood that the exploitation of digital labor is
connected to the commodification of the commons that include the
communication commons and that as a consequence internet politics need to
be connected to the critique of the political economy of capitalism as a
whole. So whereas the orthodox part of the Left tends to dismiss users as
politically unimportant and to neglect internet politics, Pirate Parties see
users as the only political subjects.

The only feasible political way forward is to create unions and organizations
of users that are connected and part of a broader political Left. For doing so,
the orthodox part of the Left needs to overcome its ignorance of and
technophobic biases against the internet and users need to perceive
themselves as being ripped off by internet companies. We need social media
unions and a fusion of Pirate Parties and left-wing parties.

<page 60:> That Facebook users are productive workers means that they
have the power to bring corporate social media to a standstill. If users go on
strike, then Facebook immediately looses money. If Facebook’s
wageworkers go on strike, the platform is still online and can be further
operated for exploiting users. Users are economically powerful because they
create economic value. Organizing a collective Facebook strike or shifting to
alternative non-commercial platforms is a refusal of digital labor. Besides
unionization and online strikes, also policy-oriented measures are feasible in
order to strengthen the protection of users from capitalist exploitation. Ad
block software is a tool that deactivates advertisings on the websites a user
visits. It can either be used as add-on to web browsers or is automatically
integrated into a browser. Using ad block software is digital class struggle: it
disables Facebook and others’ monetization of personal data by blocking
targeted ads. Think of a legal requirement that makes ad block the standard
option in all web browsers: users are empowered because commodification
of data is not the standard, but an opt-in chosen by the users if they turn off
the ad blocker. A useful complementary legal measure is to require all
internet platforms to deactivate targeted and other forms of advertising and
to make users opt-in if they want to enable such mechanisms.

Class struggles need to extend from factories and offices to Google,

Facebook and Twitter. The theory of digital labor is an ally of users,
whereas those approaches that want to reassure us that users are
unproductive do not side with the interest of users and denigrates them as
unimportant in class struggles. Representatives of the Old Left want to
have their factory struggles back without realising that Facebook is a new
factory.
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———. Culture and Economy in the Age of Social Media. New York:
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Fuchs, Christian, and Sebastian Sevignani. “What Is Digital Labour?
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———. Theories of Surplus Value. Part 1. London: Lawrence & Wishart,
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———. Capital. Volume I. London: Penguin, 1867.
———. Capital. Volume II. London: Penguin, 1885.
Maxwell, Richard. “The Image is Gold: Value, the Audience Commodity,
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Maxwell, Richard, and Toby Miller. Greening the Media. Oxford:
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———. “Commodities and Commons,” in The Audience Commodity in a
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Pun, Ngai, and Jenny Chan. “Global Capital, the State, and Chinese
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Qiu, Jack Lunchuan. “Network Labor: Beyond the Shadow of Foxconn,”
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Rigi, Jakob, and Robert Prey. “Value, Rent, and the Political Economy of
Social Media.” The Information Society (forthcoming).
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———. “Rejoinder to Graham Murdock.” Canadian Journal of Political
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———. Dependency Road. Norwood, NJ: Ablex, 1981. Smythe,
Dallas W. “Reality as Presented by Television,” in
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Students & Scholars against Corporate Misbehaviour (SACOM). “iSlave
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islave-behind-the-iphone.pdf
Notes

1 Dallas W. Smythe, “Communications: Blindspot of Western

Marxism.” Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory 1, no. 3
(1977): 1-27.
2 Smythe (1977), “Communications: Blindspot of Western Marxism”.

Dallas W. Smythe, “Rejoinder to Graham Murdock.” Canadian

Journal of Political and Social Theory 2, no. 2 (1978): 120-129.
3 Graham Murdock, “Blindspots about Western Marxism. A Reply to
Dallas Smythe.” Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory 2, no. 2
(1978): 465-74.
4 Bill Livant, “The Audience Commodity: On the ‘Blindspot’ Debate.”

Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory 3, no. 1 (1979): 91-106.

5 For a detailed discussion see: Christian Fuchs, “Dallas Smythe Today

– The Audience Commodity, The Digital Labour Debate, Marxist

Political Economy and Critical Theory. Prolegomena to a Digital
Labour Theory of Value.” tripleC: Capitalism, Communication &
Critique 10, no. 2 (2012b): 692-740.
6 Fuchs (2012b), “Dallas Smythe Today”.

Christian Fuchs, Digital Labour and Karl Marx (New York:

Routledge, 2014a).
Christian Fuchs, Social Media: A Critical Introduction (London: Sage,
2014c)
7 For an overview see the contributions in: Trebor Scholz, ed. Digital
Labour: The Internet as Playground and Factory (New York: Routledge,
2013).
8 Dallas W. Smythe, “Reality as Presented by Television,” in
Counterclockwise. Perspectives on Communication (Boulder, CO:
Westview Press, 1994), 66.
9 Smythe (1977), “Communications: Blindspot of Western Marxism”, 1.
10 Ibid., 3.
11 Ibid., 6.
12 Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Selma James. The Power of Women and the Subversion
of Community (Bristol: Falling Wall Press, 1972), 30.
See also: Zillah Eisenstein, “Developing a Theory of Capitalist
Patriarchy and Socialist Feminism,” in Capitalist Patriarchy and the
Case for Socialist Feminism, ed. Zillah R. Eisenstein, 5-40. New York:
Monthly Review Press, 1979.
Maria Mies, Patriarchy & Accumulation on a World Scale. Women in
the International Division of Labour (London: Zed Books, 1986),
13 Michael A. Lebowitz, “Too Many Blindspots on the Media.” Studies in
Political Economy, no. 21 (1986), 165.
14 Ibid., 167.

<page 61:> 15 Ibid., 169.

16 Ibid., 170.
17 Richard Maxwell, “The Image is Gold: Value, the Audience
 Commodity, and Fetishism.” Journal of Film and Video 43, no. 1–2
(1991), 40.
18 Eileen Meehan, “Ratings and the Institutional Approach. A Third Answer
to the Commodity Question.” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 1,
no. 2 (1984): 216-225.
Bolin, Göran. Value and the Media. Cultural Production and
Consumption in Digital Markets (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011).
19 Murdock (1978), “Blindspots about Western Marxism”.
20 Graham Murdock, “Commodities and Commons,” in The Audience
Commodity in a Digital Age. Revisiting a Critical Theory of Commercial
Media, ed. Lee McGuigan and Vincent Manzerolle (New York: Peter
Lang, 2014), 229-44.
21 Christian Fuchs, “Labor in Informational Capitalism and on the
Internet.” The Information Society 26, no. 3 (2010): 179-96.
Adam Arvidsson, and Eleanor Colleoni, “Value in Informational
Capitalism and on the Internet.” The Information Society 28, no. 3
(2012): 135-50.
Christian Fuchs. ”With or Without Marx? With or Without Capitalism? A
Rejoinder to Adam Arvidsson and Eleanor Colleoni.” tripleC:
Communication, Capitalism & Critique: Journal for a Global Sustainable
Information Society 10, no. 2 (2012c): 633-45.
22 Mark Andrejevic, “Exploitation in the data mine,” in Internet and
Surveillance. The Challenges of Web 2.0 and Social Media, ed. Christian
Fuchs, Kees Boersma, Anders Albrechtslund, and Marisol Sandoval, 71-
88. New York: Routledge, 2012.
Eran Fisher, “How Less Alienation Creates More Exploitation.”
tripleC: Communication, Capitalism & Critique 10, no. 2 (2012): 171-83.
23 For an overview discussion see: Fuchs (2012b), “Dallas Smythe
Today”. Fuchs, Social Media: A Critical Introduction, 2014c.
24 Forbes 2000, 2014 list: http://www.forbes.com/global2000/ ,

accessed on August 18, 2014.

25

http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/global500/2012/full_list
/, accessed on October 29, 2013.
26 Students & Scholars against Corporate Misbehaviour (SACOM), “iSlave
Behind the iPhone. Foxconn Workers in Central China.”, SACOM
(website), 2011, http://sacom.hk/wp- content/uploads/2011/09/20110924-
islave-behind-the-iphone.pdf
27 See: Jenny Chan, “A Suicide Survivor: The Life of a Chinese Worker.”
New Technology, Work and Employment 28, no. 2 (2013): 84-
99.
Jenny Chan, Ngai Pun, and Mark Selden, “The Politics of Global
Production: Apple, Foxconn and China’s New Working Class.” New
Technology, Work and Employment 28, no. 2 (2013): 100-115.
Ngai Pun, and Jenny Chan, “Global Capital, the State, and Chinese
Workers: The Foxconn Experience.” Modern China 38, no. 4 (2012):
383-410.
 Jack Lunchuan Qiu, “Network Labor: Beyond the Shadow of Foxconn,”
in Studying Mobile Media: Cultural Technologies, Mobile
Communication, and the iPhone, edited by Larissa Hjorth, Jean Burgess
and Ingrid Richardson (New York: Routledge, 2012), 173- 89.
Marisol Sandoval, “Foxconned Labour as the Dark Side of the
Information Age: Working Conditions at Apple’s Contract
Manufacturers in China.” tripleC: Communication, Capitalism &
Critique 11, no. 2 (2013): 318-47.
Marisol Sandoval, From Corporate to Social Media. Critical
Perspectives on Corporate Social Responsibility in Media and
Communication Industries (London: Routledge, 2014).
28 Christian Fuchs, “Theorising and Analysing Digital Labour: From Global
Value Chains to Modes of Production.” The Political Economy of
Communication 1, no. 2 (2013): 3-27.
Fuchs (2014a), Digital Labour and Karl Marx.
Christian Fuchs and Marisol Sandoval, “Digital Workers of the World
Unite! A Framework for Critically Theorising and Analysing Digital
Labour.” tripleC: Communication, Capitalism & Critique 12, no. 2
(2014).
Maxwell, Richard, and Toby Miller. Greening the Media (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2012). Sandoval (2014), From Corporate to
Social Media.
29 For more details see: Fuchs (2014a), Digital Labour and Karl Marx.

Christian Fuchs, Culture and Economy in the Age of Social Media

(New York: Routledge, 2015).
Fuchs and Sandoval (2014), “Digital Workers of the World Unite!”.
Christian Fuchs and Sebastian Sevignani, “What Is Digital Labour? What
Is Digital Work? What’s Their Difference? And Why Do These
Questions Matter For Understanding Social Media?” tripleC:
Communication, Capitalism & Critique 11, no. 2 (2013): 237-93.
30 For a detailed discussion see: Fuchs (2012b), “Dallas Smythe Today”.
31 See: Fuchs (2010), “Labor in Informational Capitalism and on the
Internet”. Fuchs (2014a), Digital Labour and Karl Marx.
Fuchs (2014c), Social Media: A Critical Introduction.
Fuchs (2015), Culture and Economy in the Age of Social Media.
32 Thomas Allmer, (Dis)like Facebook? Towards A Dialectical and Critical
Theory of Digital and Social Media (London: Routledge, 2014).
Thomas Allmer, Christian Fuchs, Verena Kreilinger and Sebastian
Sevignani, <page 62:> “Social Networking Sites in the Surveillance
Society: Critical Perspectives and Empirical Findings,” in Media,
Surveillance and Identity. Social Perspectives, eds. André Jansson and
Miyase Christensen and André Jansson (New York: Peter Lang, 2014),
49-70.
Christian Fuchs, “Critique of the Political Economy of Web 2.0
Surveillance,” in Internet and Surveillance. The Challenges of Web 2.0
 and Social Media, eds. Christian Fuchs, Kees Boersma, Anders
Albrechtslund and Marisol Sandoval (New York: Routledge, 2012a), 31-
70. Routledge Studies in Science, Technology and Society Series.
Fuchs and Sevignani, “What Is Digital Labour?”, 2013.
33 For a detailed discussion see: Christian Fuchs, “Digital Prosumption
Labour on Social Media in the Context of the Capitalist Regime of Time.”
Time & Society 23, no. 1 (2014b): 97-123.
34 See for example: Edward Comor, “Value, the Audience

Commodity, and Digital Prosumption: A Plea for Precision,” in The

Audience Commodity in a Digital Age. Revisiting A Critical Theory of
Commercial Media, eds. Lee McGuigan and Vincent Manzerolle (New
York: Peter Lang, 2014), 245-65.
Ursula Huws, “The Underpinnings of Class in the Digital Age: Living,
Labour and Value.” Socialist Register, no. 50 (2014) 80-107. James
Reveley, “The Exploitative Web: Misuses of Marx in Critical Social
Media Studies.” Science & Society 77, no. 4 (2013): 512-35.
Jakob Rigi and Robert Prey, “Value, Rent, and the Political Economy of
Social Media.” The Information Society (forthcoming). César R. S.
Bolaño and Eloy S. Vieira. “The Political Economy of the Internet: Social
Networking Sites and a Reply to Fuchs”. Television & New Media
(OnlineFirst, April 2014). doi:10.1177/1527476414527137.
For a reply to these not always original arguments that tend to simply
over and over repeat and re-iterate Michael Lebowitz’s (“Too Many
Blindspots on the Media”, 1986) view, see: Fuchs (2015), Culture
and Economy in the Age of Social Media, Chapter 5: Social Media
and Productive Labour.
35 Karl Marx, Capital. Volume I (London: Penguin, 1867), 1041.
36 Karl Marx, Theories of Surplus Value. Part 1 (London: Lawrence &
Wishart, 1862/63), 396-97.
37 Karl Marx, Grundrisse (London: Penguin, 1857/58), 707.
38 Marx (1867), Capital. Volume I, 644.
39 Ibid., 1040.
40 Wolfgang Fritz Haug, Critique of Commodity Aesthetics (Cambridge:
Polity Press, 1986).
41 Facebook Inc., SEC Filings, Form 10-K 2012,
http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1326801/00013268011
3000003/fb-12312012x10k.htm
42 Data source: http://www.alexa.com
43 According to http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm, the latest
available world population count was 2 405 518 376 on June
3rd, 2013.
44 Karl Marx, Capital. Volume II (London: Penguin, 1885), 135, 226-27. 45
Dallas W. Smythe, Dependency Road (Norwood, NJ: Ablex, 1981), 4. 46
Nielsen, Paid Social Media Advertising. Industry Update and Best
Practices 2013 (New York: Nielsen, 2013).