Digitalization of Society and Socio-political Issues 1

8Capital as Power: Facebook and the Symbolic Monopoly Rent

The purpose of this chapter is to contribute to the debates on the question of economic valorization in the context of digital capitalism. My central argument is that the main approaches dealing with digital labor as a source of value within digital media are not able to propose an adequate critique of capitalism in the digital age. Based on a synthesis between the reexamination of Marx proposed by the value criticism current, the institutionalist political economy of advanced capitalism initiated by Thorstein Veblen as well as the Innisian theory of communication media in the constitution of knowledge monopolies, I will challenge the hypotheses stemming from the theories on digital labor, which postulate that value in digital capitalism would increasingly come from users’ unpaid work (Arvidsson and Colleoni 2012; Fuchs 2010, 2012).

Against these approaches, which are inspired in particular by the theorists of cognitive capitalism, I will first show that Marx does not seek to produce a positive theory of labor value, but that his approach consists rather of a critique of the categories of political economy, including commodities, value, labor and capital. In a second step, I will show the limits of traditional Marxist analysis to capture the institutional changes of advanced capitalism from the Veblenian institutionalist political economy approach. I would argue that the traditional Marxist approaches that digital labor ...