[iDC] 1. Some notes on value...

[Johan Söderberg]

Hi,

I have been lurking on the list for some time now, and Adam Arvidssons very interesting posting on the brand as a possible new form of value kicked me into writing a reply. I found your ideas about an "ethical economy" challenging when you presented them last autumn at the p2p conference. It certainly changes my kaleidoscope to start thinking of the brand as the rationalised meassurement of the esteem economy, instead of the normative No Logo-approach. However, as a complement to your framing of the question (my interpretation of it) as several different values opposing each other (starting with Marx's definition of a coercive value that is based on commanding labour and proceeding towards increasingly more ethereal, co-produced forms of value-creation, I think the same development could also be traced from within a closer reading of Marx's definition of value. 

Our observations on this start out from the convergence of producer and consumer roles, a fact that for the last two decades have been commented on and invested with hype by a great number of futurists, mainstream economists, innovation researchers etc. (A. Toffler: the procumer, von Hippel: user-centred innovation models, the list goes on). In comparison, Karl Marx noted in Grundrisse:                                                                     

"[...] the product becomes a real product only by being consumed. For example, a
garment becomes a real garment only in the act of being worn; a house where no one lives is in fact not a real house; thus the product, unlike a mere natural object, proves itself to be, becomes, a product only through consumption." 

The newfound emphasis on consumption-as-production is predated by the change of heart in the 1980s wihin academia of where to look for acts of resistance, from industrial labour conflicts to consumer/audience resistance (S. Hall, de Certeau, Fiske...) As was pointed out at the time by the "political economist" camp in the debate that followed (Moscow), the decoding process by audiences does not offer much ground for resistance. However, as a cognitive and emotional investment and a source of surplus value for capital, we might percieve the decoding process as a sizeable factor. 

This idea struck Dallas Smythe in the 1980a when he tried to apply the Marxist law of value-concept to interpret television audiences. He started with a maxim known since the advent of radio, 'the Sarnoff Law', which states that the wealth of a broadcasting network stands in proportion to its number of non-paying listeners. Smythe deduced that the commodity sold by media networks is the attention of audiences. The consumer buying into this product is the advertiser. It follows that the audience has the role of the producer, together with, to a lesser extent, the paid actors making the tv-shows. (from the angle of mainstream economics, the same idea comes across as the so-called attention economy, stating that the scarce resource is not information but attention, thus audiences become more highly priced than the information they are looking at). Smythe, mirroring the term "labour power", introduces the word "audience power" to describe the work performed by audiences. 
Smythe did not expand on the similarity between the reproductive labour of audiences and that of women. Still, the experience of women demonstrates that capitalist exploitation of unwaged, reproductive labour is neither a marginal nor a novel phenomenon. In the 1970s feminist Marxists brought attention to the fact that housewives and children link up to capitalist circulation. Women devote necessary labour and surplus labour time to cleaning, cooking, caring, childrearing etc., out of which the surplus labour is appropriated by the husband. The relationship between the members of the family is feudal while the household relates to capital through the man's employment. The exploitation of the woman's reproductive labour affects the ratio between necessary labour and surplus labour at the workplace. Hence, the man is basically relaying surplus value from his wife to his employer. With women entering the labour market en masse since the 1970s, coupled with expanded commodification of household sevices and products, we may elect to say that some of that reproductive, un-waged labour is now carried out by audiences.

Since so very little is done in the act of decoding a broadcased tv message, computer audiences are better suited for making this argument. A                                                                 remark by Martin Kenney, writing on the economy of the high-tech sector, gives some clues: "But the software requires its users to learn how to use it. This means
that the ability of software companies to capture value is related to our willingness to learn how to use their programs. [...] From this perspective, in the aggregate the users have invested far more time in learning how to use a software program than did the developers." The key strategic asset of computer firms is not their fixed capital, not their employees, but their user base. Increased interactivity in "digital media", hailed as the end of passive media consumption, amounts to increased exploitation of audience power. The desire among capitalists to establish communities (youtube, facebook) in order to amass value comes down to "virtual communities" being the best honey trap for increasing the willingness and the number of volunteer worker-audiences. The number makes up for the relative small contribution of each participant. Seen in terms of aggregated labour time, the time spent by world's Window's users by far outstrips the time spent by Microsoft's in-house developers to write the next version of the OS (which raises the question who's entitled to call whom a freerider/pirate).  

The involvement of users and audiences in the production process answers the question how capitalism can sustain profits despite approaching a state of near total automation. Extensive use of machinery has not abolished the law of value or made it immeasurable (i.e. Negri) but it certainly has changed the terms of its operations. Living labour has been expulsed from inside the production process and the jurisdiction of trade unions. But labour returns from the ashes with a vengeance. The investment of living labour must be made perpetually in order to create the setting in which decontextualised, mass-reproduced, digital use values are to be consumed. The making of the product by employees and the use of the product by users are intertwined into a continuous labour process. The importance of emotional and educational investments made by user communities and audiences is reinforced in proportion to digitalisation and the corresponding downsizing of in-housed workers.

However, the goods produced by user-communities only has value in its relation to the value of waged labour working towards equivalent sollutions somewhere else in the economy. Hence, wage labour need still to be the norm in society (which goes some way explaining the expansion of intellectual property). Just as the invisible, gratis and (re?)productive labour of  women in the feudal household creates value to capital only due to the wage realtion in which the man is entangled. Simplifying a bit, it is the wages of Microsoft's programmers that determine the value of Red Hat's GNU/Linux products. Gratis audience-labour organised in user-communities create value for capital in the same way as Marx described that a product found laying on the street has value to the finder-keeper, i.e. its value exist in relation to the same product being produced for sale elsewhere. 

Then of course it might be that there is a "germ form" of a different meassurement that will only come to the foreground given a different social relation, and that might be the surge of an ethical economy. It is definitly a line of inquiry worthy of investigation. 

sincerely
Johan